No Words

I am too stunned to have anything witty to say about this.



Hat tip to one of FlappyDays' main bros, Baldric the Flatulent.

UPDATE: Welcome Thighs Wide Shut folks! Have a look around and make yourselves at home. We're on a pretty sporadic update schedule here at Flappy Days, so add us to RSS feed.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell, Don't Think

This is absolutely infuriating.

Over 75% of Americans now (actually, as of 10 months ago) believe that gays and lesbians should be able to serve openly in our military. The armies of 13 major countries, including 3 of our closest allies, one of whom is arguably the greatest man-for-man fighting force of the modern age, all allow open service. And our President campaigned on the promise that he would end this ridiculous policy that does nothing but harm our national security and the lives of the brave men and women volunteers who are fired because of it. Since 9/11, the US Army has fired at least 59 Arab linguists because of their sexual orientation - how is this sane military policy? To paraphrase Jon Stewart, you can torture them all you like, but that's not going to make them speak English.

I was a huge supporter of the President during the election, but I am not so partisan that I cannot call it like I see it....

Mr. President, tear down this wall.

Auto-Tune the News (Part Trois)

Auto-Tune - you've heard it even if you don't realize it. It's that vocal manipulation that Cher made famous in her 1998 club banger "Believe" and that T-Pain and Kanye West have determined to cram in our ear holes from every available speaker on Earth. Well, Michael Gregory and his crew have finally put it to good use with their "Auto-Tune the News" series. Parts 1 and 2 are already all over the tubes, Part 3 dropped today. Enoy:

Berlin Street Art

Over the last few years, street art has exploded all over the world. Once the refuge of graffiti taggers, street art has expanded to include all sorts of media including the now-ubiquitous wheat-paste images you see on buildings and other urban surfaces. Which brings me to MentalGassi, a Berlin-based street art collective who redefine and reinterpret all sort of mundane surfaces in and around that city. Enjoy some samples and check out their site for more works.

Album Review: Staff Benda Bilili

This isn't so much an album review as an album recommendation. I never really understood the concept of album reviews. Like Elvis Costello once said, "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture." Anyway, I was up in Rhinebeck, NY last weekend and strolled into Oblong Books & Music (check it out if you're up there - great selection). There was some king of African music playing on the house system, and it immediately got into my head - I asked the guy at the desk what it was and he introduced me to Staff Benda Bilili. I've been listening to the album every day since. Staff Benda Bilili is a group of Congolese street musicians. Loosely translated, the group's name means "the people who look beyond appearances". The band consists of four elder paraplegic singers/guitarists, all of whom zip through Kinshasa on these super tricked-out tricycles, to which they have been confined since their youthful bouts with polio. The rhythm section is comprised of a group of abandoned street kids known as shégués (a term which may or may not have derived from Che Guevara), all of whom have been taken under the protection of the older members. The most distinctive sound on the album comes from a satongé, a one-string lute made from a milk-powder tin, a section of fish basket frame and a single electrical wire, designed and played with virtuosity by 18 year-old Roger Landu.

Evidently, the album was recorded over a period of about three years, with most of the songs recorded out in the open, mainly in the local zoo (!!), using a dozen microphones, a MacBook laptop and a guerrilla electric cable hooked up to a deserted bar nearby. (See below)

The album is infectious and fun - highly recommended. Check out some samples via the youtubes below. The first clip is a trailer for an upcoming documentary on the band.

Really Cool Things: MIT Labs "Sixth Sense" Prototype

No, it's not the ability to see dead people. It's a new device developed by MIT's Fluid Interfaces group, headed by associate professor of Media Technology Patty Maes. According to the group's website:

'SixthSense' is a wearable gestural interface that augments the physical world around us with digital information and lets us use natural hand gestures to interact with that information.

For those of you who don't speak Nerd, it is a prototype cobbled together with a pocket projector, a mirror and a camera that essentially projects information about an object on any surface. For example, don't have a calculator handy? Well, just project one on your hand.

Need to know the time, but don't have a cell phone (no cell phone? who the hell are you, the Unibomber?) and are too shy to ask your fellow citizen?

There are all sorts of possible applications - and many of them are demonstrated in the interesting (albeit somewhat long - 8 minutes) lecture and presentation posted below that Maes and a student in the Fluid Interfaces group gave to the TED (Technology, Education and Design) Conference. Side note: the Fluid Interfaces group has a website that showcases a number of other "really cool things" in development, and the TED website has great library of interesting lectures on a multitude of topics. Without further ado:

More of this: Musical Flash Mobs

Yes, it's an ad, but give credit where it's due (thanks T-Mobile) - I think life is better with musical flash mobs. 13,000 people singing Hey Jude at once? C'mon, that is cool.

Mother Lovers

Justin Timberlake should quit with the guest appearances and just join the cast of SNL already. He's consistently the best thing on it. He and Andy Samberg wreck the joint, again.

Happy Mother's Day!

Today, I am old

I guess it happens to everyone at some point - that moment where you feel like the world has leapfrogged you and all of a sudden you are on the other side of the impregnable wall between youth and adulthood. Now, I don't mean to say that we have to "act" old, or that we can't be youthful all the way into our elderly years. A lot of my friends have recently started complaining about how "old" we are. No, my 102 year-old grandmother is old. We, at most, are middle-aged (my contemporaries and I are in our mid-30s). But the other day I did have to confront the very real fact that popular culture may be passing me by. To wit: I subscribe via my RSS feed to Brosephus' twitter account. I don't have my own Twitter account, as the entire endeavor doesn't appeal to me, but I like knowing what my brother is up to. So, a couple days ago I see this:

much love to @jodaplumber*, the 1st person in the history of my twitterlife to #followfriday me. he will never be #unfollowfriday, not on my watch

To which I replied: "This must be what Dad feels like. Please translate." I had to confront the fact that my reaction to this media phenomenon to which millions upon millions of new people subscribe every day was really no different than the one my grandmother has to my iPhone. It was a bit disconcerting, but then I saw this clip below, and felt much better:



*not his real name

Best Banana Ice Cream....EVER

Last night the Wifey and I went out with my college roommate M. and his wife L. to eat at Fort Greene newcomer The General Greene. The restaurant is a small-plates affair, and the food was decent, but nothing really to write home to blog about. What was noteworthy, however, was dessert (Well, my dessert, at least. The Wifey had a chocolate pudding that she ate slowly in order to "trick myself into thinking that the next bite might actually be delicious").

I ordered the roasted banana ice cream. Now, perhaps my bar is set too low for banana ice cream. I'm often disappointed, as the majority of producers use clearly artificial banana flavoring. But The General Greene (named after THE General Greene of the original Fort Greene) make their ice cream in-house, and use real bananas. It was AMAZING. Delicious. Scrumptious. Literally, I licked the bowl. In public. That kind of good. So good that I asked them if they could pack a to-go bag of ice cream for me. (M. suggested I go to the nearby bodega, buy a gallon of regular ice cream and carve out a carrying case for my booty.)

Well, needless to say, I didn't get my to-go bag. But I can still taste that ice cream, and I will be back for more soon enough. Only this time, I might just skip dinner and get to the good stuff.

Make money, make money, money, money

Man, they really can get away with anything in Germany, can't they? This is a commercial for BonTrust Bank. The agency created an entire 3-D world using banknotes from all over the world and origami techniques. Pretty cool. Also, crazy explicit - I don't think I can wash the image of Lincoln getting a plowchop* out of my brain. Also, Mao is a serious player.




*Imagine Arnold Schwarzenegger. Now imagine his accent. Now imagine him saying "blowjob." As in "Maria, I would like a plowchop tonight." Credit to Flappy Days' friend Tony S for sharing that with us.

R.I.P.: Dom Deluise

Dominick "Dom" DeLuise passed away yesterday, and it makes me sad. Dom played a large (no pun or disrespect intended) role in my formative years as a consumer of pop culture. I remember him most fondly for two movies in particular: 1) his chummy portrayal of Victor Prinzim in Cannonball Run (and it's sequel "II") and as the crow Jeremy in the animated classic The Secret of Nimh.
At the time, the early 80's, he seemed to appear in almost everything that came to the screen (at least in my limited purview): the oft-forgotten, Dudley Moore biblical farce Wholly Moses!, The Muppet Movie, Smokey and the Bandit II (where he further cemented his relationship as Burt Reynold's on-screen best friend), Johnny Dangerously, Spaceballs and the movie for which he got most of his serious accolades, Fatso. Perhaps what I loved most about those movies were the outtakes at the end of the Cannonball Run movies, the first time time the curtain was ever pulled back from the Hollywood wizard for me. Dom always seemed to be having such a great time, I wanted to be a part of the fun.

Like Tim Russert and Scatman Crothers before him, I'll miss Dom DeLuise as if I had actually known him, and the world will be a little less funny without him. Rest in Peace, Mr. DeLuise.