WHY GOD CREATED WIKIPEDIA™

The Cheese Kurd comes through once again, this time not only suggesting a magnificent link, but also a brand new JohnEats category title as well. Please join me in delightfully thumbing through this fascinating Wikipedia entry:

• List of Unusual Deaths

...and if any of you out there feel like adding this one to the list, feel free (and you don't even have to give me any credit!):

• Roofing Billionaire Dies in Fall Through Roof

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ADVENTURES IN THE DESIGN WORLD™: Star War Market Sign

Fresh from the abandoned storefront of a local bodega mere blocks away from the JohnEats Corporate Command Center (and just a hop skip and a jump from Michael Knight's crimefighter's headquarters) comes this tantalizingly-close-to-copyright-infringement sign. With the audacious move of abandoning the all-too-easy "S" to "T" ligature of the original Star Wars logo, this sign achieves an impressive one-to-three ligature of the "S" to the "W", "M" and lowercase "k"! And it's got stars in it, too!

Pure genius.

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CELEBRITY SCHADENFREUDE FILES™

Who'll pay for the crimes of Paris, you ask? She will!

Friggin' AWESOME.

• Hilton Fortune To Go To Charity [BBC News]

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WHY GOD CREATED YOUTUBE™: Jan Hammer Playing The "Miami Vice" Theme Live!

I'll be damned if this doesn't make me feel like a million bucks...and then make me feel like giving it all back.

Can words even properly describe this spectacle? Hot damn, I love this so much I hate myself. Thanks so much for pointing me in this direction, K-Swiss.

Truly, this is why God created YouTube.

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GRAFFITI MOVIE REVIEWS™

Movie: Beowulf
Graffiti Review: "Ending sucks"
Does JohnEats Agree?: Don't know, haven't seen it, but it sure looks like more than just the ending would suck.
Penmanship of Reviewer: Lousy

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WHY GOD CREATED YOUTUBE™: "Kill The White People"

As Crispinus put it when he emailed this to me: "Remember when...Eddie Murphy was funny?"

Truly, this is why God created YouTube.

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ENTERTAINMENT DROPPINGS: What Will We Tell The Children About The Children?

K-Swiss sent us this screencap he made of CNN.com's top stories yesterday, with a particular one highlighted. If you have astigmatism and can't read it above, try reading it below.



Gee, I don't know, CNN, what WILL we tell them? Maybe, oh, I don't know, like, maybe that -- just like her sister -- she's an ignorant hillbilly with no sense of responsibility? That everyone around her knows she'll only ever be a C-lister and consequently hasn't garnered enough attention or handlers to keep her out of trouble? That when mommy and daddy (or sixteen year-old "celebrity" and boyfriend) love each other very much, the stork shows up, impregnates the woman, and then the press talk about it way too much?

I think a better question for CNN to have asked -- and it's too late, Newsweek already beat them to it -- is W.W.N.D.? (translation: What Will Nickolodeon Do).

Or how about the factor that Anonymous A brought up, and which MTV of all people have decided to discuss: what about the legal stuff? Like, don't they arrest kids for stuff like this, particularly in certain geographical regions?

Anyways, thanks to CNN for encouraging yet another round of awkward and most likely unnecessary family discussions that kids will use as ammunition to alienate themselves from their parents. I mean, it's not like this is nearly as important as when somebody bit it in the last Harry Potter book or anything.

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THE TOP 75 CELEBRITIES WHOSE EXISTENCE SO OFFENDS ME THAT JUST LOOKING AT A PICTURE OF THEM MAKES ME WANT TO COMMIT RANDOM ACTS OF VIOLENCE™

#43: Jimmy Buffet


As an atheist and a vegetarian, can there be any one song in existence more offensive to my personal philosophy than Jimmy Buffet's "Cheeseburger in Paradise"?

I mean really. I heard this song earlier this week while eating a falafel (that's right, all you "patriotic" Buffet fans -- a FALAFEL, bitchez! With NO F@CKING CHEESE!) and I had to leave the restaurant* in order to suppress the almost overwhelming urge to start smearing tahini all over the furniture. Effing Jimmy Buffet! At a middle eastern restaurant!! I felt like gouging my own eardrums out just to take the pain away.

It's enough to make me want to trek up to Milwaukee just to slash the tires of every Lexus in the Summerfest parking lot when all the "wasted away again" white-ass 50-somethings make their annual pilgrimage to see Jimmy in the flesh at the Marcus Amphitheater.

Jesus Christ on a crutch this can't just be me.

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*Actually, I had just finished eating when the song started. But still, it's the principle of the thing. Dammit.

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ADVENTURES IN THE DESIGN WORLD™: GreatBigStuff.com

Courtesy of Anonymous A: Looking for a giant name tag? How about a really big mug that will instantly grant you archetypal office kook status? Does your dad enjoy fishing? Ever got so frustrated with XP locking up that you literally wanted to use your ass to hit CTRL-ALT-DEL? Well, now you can, through the magic of GreatBigStuff.com.

And while you're there, make sure you avail yourself of the most overly-explained website search field known to humans:


Bravissimo! I'm sure Jakob Nielsen would be proud. (Speaking of whom, check out the color scheme on his web site! ACK! It is to puke! It might be usable, but it shore ain't purty.)

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WHY GOD CREATED EMBEDDED FLASH VIDEO™: Pauly Shore on Fox 6 Milwaukee

Dartanjal sends this clip (which you have to click here in order to see) of Pauly Shore giving his all during an interview promoting his upcoming appearance at "Jokerz" comedy club in Milwaukee. And by "his all" I mean "being abso-f*cking-lutely annoying, untalented, and actually kinda grotesque." If you're a big Pauly Shore hater, this clip will get your dander up. If you've ever lived in Milwaukee and watched Mark Concannon struggle to act like a distinguished, cogent adult on Fox 6 news, you'll love to watch him bumble his way through what was undoubtedly one of the most awkward experiences of his life. If you're familiar with the Racine, Wisconsin delicacy known as Kringle and know how weirdly belligerent Midwesterners can get when folks from outside America's Heartland can't get it through their thick f*cking skulls that it's called KRINGLE not STRUDEL you bitches (even though it's really just strudel in the shape of circle), then you're in for a triple treat.

Truly, this is why God created embedded Flash video.

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ENTERTAINMENT DROPPINGS: And The Oscar For Shittiest Fake Hair In An Overblown, Ripped-From-The-Headlines Political Drama Goes To...

Was there a Hollywood Hairdressers strike that nobody told me about? Because seriously, I can not tell which of the three leads in Charlie Wilson's War has the worst fake hair: Is it Tom Hanks, replacing his mullet wig from The DaVinci Code with a ratty Ronald Reagan wig? Or is it Julia Roberts, with her Carmine Infantino-inspired beehive swoop wig? Or, could it possibly be Philip Seymour Hoffman, sporting the absolute worst pornstar-wig-plus-caterpillaresque-synthetic-lip-spinach I've ever fricking seen?

I don't know. dear reader, but I do know who will win when Charlie Wilson's War hits general release: the American Viewing Public, that's who.

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ADVENTURES IN THE DESIGN WORLD™: Indiana Jones and the Typography From Hell

So Gene K. points us to the new teaser poster for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the movie that will almost surely prove to be the Phantom Menace of the last unsoiled LucasFilm franchise, and what do we get? Besides a slightly geriatric-looking, bland-as-oatmeal Indy pose and a big-ass un-be-nose-holed skull, we get what is quite possibly the worst typography in the series' history. Check out the differences in the "Indy font" used for the words "Indiana Jones" between the new poster and the original Temple of Doom poster:



The new typeface has less of an italic slant, the letterforms are clunky as hell (look especially at the "D", "A"s, and "S" in comparison to the Temple version -- it looks like a third grader who overdosed on Children's Nyquil drew them), and the kerning/overlapping choices are cartoony at best, atrocious at worst. I know tight kerning is all the rage ever since everybody got the whole "Illustrator lets me kern this shit out to over 500 now!" out of their system in the mid nineties, but come on, it's not like you've got a narrow column width to deal with -- it's a fricking logo!

Couldn't they just have scanned in the old photostat and traced it?!? Jesus H.

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WHY GOD CREATED YOUTUBE™: Gumby in "My-O-Maya"

Dean In Milwaukee points us to this amazing classic episode of claymation's own Gumby.

But don't take my word for it...Reproduced below, with line breaks exactly as it appeared in my email (the combined text wrangling of Yahoo Mail and Gmail producing a lovely unintentional prose-poem structure), is Dean's own description of this animated morality play:

As Gumby and the gang attempt to
prevent the Block Heads from looting Mayan treasure
they
teach the Mayans 1) human sacrifice is bad 2) Gumby is
the only true
god.

Truly, this is why God created YouTube.

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ARTFARTS™: R.I.P. Stockhausen

Have a good trip back to Sirius, Karlheinz!

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ADVENTURES IN THE DESIGN WORLD™: You Have The Right To Remain Comfortable

This past weekend I went out shopping for new gloves and ended up finding a halfway decent pair of boots. I tried them on, they fit pretty well, and they looked pretty good; at least they weren't offensive or anything. I sat there on the little shoe-trying-on bench hemming and hawing, weighing the pros and cons of dropping $60 on something that would actually replace an old pair of boots with holes in the soles, and then the above tag, attached to the right shoe (which I didn't try on) caught my eye. You Have The Right To Remain Comfortable, it said. I thought about that. "Isn't it time you spoiled yourself?" I thought. "Goldarnit, I do have the right to remain comfortable!!"

So I bought the hell out of them.

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THE TOP 75 CELEBRITIES WHOSE EXISTENCE SO OFFENDS ME THAT JUST LOOKING AT A PICTURE OF THEM MAKES ME WANT TO COMMIT RANDOM ACTS OF VIOLENCE™

#44: Nicolas Cage
Yeah, yeah, yeah, he was in Raising Arizona. That's what everybody says whenever I mention that just seeing a picture of Nicolas Cage makes me want to walk up to the world's biggest shotglass collection with a bb gun and have at it. I mean, for every Raising Arizona, he's got at least one Face/Off. And don't even get me started about the whole Superman thing. And yes, Ivy, I know you think Adaptation was the best thing since sliced bread, but I'm sorry, it was as interesting as watching dust accumulate to me. And just because he did that movie, does that forgive him the entire National Treasure franchise? I think not. And it doesn't stop me from seeing his hair weave on tv and thinking that it would be really cathartic to walk into a shopping mall and methodically take an X-acto knife to every piece of leather furniture I see.

I would imagine I am alone in this. Can it be true?

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WHY GOD CREATED YOUTUBE™: Facial Flex Device on QVC

It takes a little while to get going, but the longer you stick with this video of a "facial exerciser" being pimped on QVC, the more it pays off. My favorite parts, you ask? Well, there's the unnecessary facial touching amongst the three shills, for one. Then there's the facial flexing itself, which looks like something out of a nightmare. And finally, the tendon action on the neck of the woman who claims to "feel it in [her] chest" reminds me of the one lone trip my family took to The Circus World Museum when I was a child, and we got to see some honest-to-gawrsh circus freaks (or was it just photos of circus freaks? I can't really remember, it may have been too traumatic to see so many clowns in one place).

Truly, this is why God created YouTube.

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WHY GOD CREATED YOUTUBE™: Le Tabarnak

From the ever-dilligent Dartanjal comes this French Canadian hip hop video featuring possibly the oddest attempt at creating a dance craze I've ever seen. Put it together with the translation of the dance's name (as discovered by Anonymous A) and my confusion knows no bounds.

Truly, this is why God created YouTube.

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EVEL KNIEVEL R.I.P.

Fresh from settling his lawsuit with Kanye comes word that the inspiration behind my favorite pre-Star Wars toy line has died. Even though it's hard for me to picture him as anything other than a seven inch tall hunk of fully articulated metal, rubber, plastic, polyester and velcro, it's a sad day indeed.

• US Daredevil Evel Knievel Dies [BBC News]

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