RIP Steve Gilliard

I never met Steve Gilliard, but I used to read his blog all the time, so I sort of felt like I knew him. He died today, too young, at 41. He'll be missed...

Something's Brewing in this Town...

Okay, so, I've told you all to watch Windy City Heat on the blog before. It's the amazingly hysterical prank movie in which several comedians band together to convince an idiot named Perry that he's starring in a new action movie. Of course, there is no movie; the whole thing's a set-up to humiliate this guy, Perry Caravello, who dreams of stardom despite being an unattractive, paunchy middle-aged guy with no discernable talent.

Windy City Heat is one of the funniest films of our present decade. I am not even kidding. A work of fiction could never tell such a ridiculous story - it's nearly impossible to believe that anyone could be this dumb. In fact, many people to whom I have shown the film have insisted to me that it must be fake. Perry falls for such obvious set-ups - bad Charlton Heston impersonators, Japanese investors named Hiroshima Nagasaki, an action movie script with obviously jokey dialogue and no action scenes directed by Bobcat freaking Goldthwait - that it almost has to be an act.

Well...maybe not...From TMZ today:

Perry Caravello, the one-time "star" of a practical joke flick, filed suit today in Los Angeles County Superior Court claiming, among other things, the three funnymen owe him $10.5 million.

For several years, Caravello was duped into believing he was going to play the lead role in the faux action flick "Windy City Heat." Every actor and member of the crew was in on the joke -- except Caravello. The final product, er, joke, aired in 2003 on Comedy Central.

In his suit, Caravello claims the defendants "falsely and fraudulently" represented the project, and promised him, among other things, that he "would be paid 10 million dollars if he placed his penis in a mousetrap." Caravello says he "was severely injured when the trap literally went on his manhood." Ouch. To add insult to injury, Caravello says he's suffered "humiliation and emotional trauma" because the video has circulated the Internet. Talk about viral.

Caravello is suing for the $10.5 million that he says he is owed, plus damages and medical expenses.

First of all, let me just say that I'm deeply upset there was a video of Perry Caravello placing his penis in a mousetrap online and I was uninformed. Now, I've been really looking for a little while now, and haven't turned up anything (perhaps I'll have more success with Bit Torrent), so it's entirely possible that Perry's full of crap on this one and looking for a payday.

But if not...then I think this confirms that he really is stupid enough to fall for anything, up to and including a fake movie called Windy City Heatin which he'd portray Chicago's greatest sports detective Stone Fury.

Yes, Idea Man! Creator! Innovator! Cerebrator! Tycoon!

Yes, the Idea Man! What're his hopes and dreams, his desires and aspirations? Does he think all the time or does he set aside a certain portion of the day? How tall is he and what's his shoe size? Where does he sleep and what does he eat for breakfast? Does he put jam on his toast or doesn't he put jam on his toast, and if not why not and since when?

-- The Hudsucker Proxy, Ethan Coen, Joel Coen, and Sam Raimi

Back in January, I answered a mysterious Craig's List ad for researchers. No information on what would be researched. No office to report to. No company name provided. I responded anyway, if only to find out what the hell was going on.

A few days later, I found myself walking around a stranger's home in Brentwood. I had been told to appear at this address, but there were no signs, no instructions, no people waiting around to guide my way. I walked through a gate and into a backyard. In a guest house next to a pool, a few people were busily working on brand new iMacs, but they were consumed in their work and not looking my way. No one else was around. The thought occurred to me that I should leave, that this could be a scam. An inscrutable scam, one that involved fraudulently luring in job applications, but a scam all the same. ("Okay, where's Ashton? Oh, right, I'm not famous...")

It was not a scam. I soon thereafter met Mark Jeffrey and he pitched to me the basics of Mahalo, what was to be the latest venture from entrepreneur Jason Calacanis. Two thoughts crossed my mind simultaneously:

(1) This sounds like a fun and interesting job!

and

(2) This idea will probably not work!

I assumed, quite naturally, that because the Internet is composed of millions of pages about millions of topics, any one of which could be of interest to anyone at any time, there would be no reasonable way for human beings to neatly organize all available information. This is the reasonable conclusion to reach. Anyone who has spent any amount of time online would understand this point.

After 5 months on the project, I am now quite confident that this is not a major concern. Not because Mahalo will be able to respond to any potential query anyone could have, but because the actual range of commonly-searched queries is quite manageable for a large enough staff of Internet "guides."

Let's take a look at this Donald Trump page. Now, people talk about Donald Trump all the time, everyday, all of the Intra-t00bz. That's his job. He says or does pretty much anything he can think of to ensure that people will talk about him. If I personally have hundreds of Mahalo pages to update, create and oversee, there's no way I could possibly find the time to put a new link on this Donald Trump page every time he insults Rosie O'Donnell. Honestly, even if I was only in charge of updating the Donald Trump page for 8 hours a day, I still wouldn't manage to get all of his Rosie insults on there. The guy's a machine.

If you'll skip down to the Gossip and Blogs section, you'll notice that we have syndicated the 3 most recent Gawker posts. Doing this in both the Gossip and News sections of the page make it, essentially, self-updating.

Naturally, someone will have to check in with the page now and again, to clear out dead links and find new articles and videos of special significance. Say, if Trump gets a new TV show, or starts picking on a different daytime television host. (Might I recommend Rachael Ray?) But even if we don't get to it for a week or two at a time, new news and information from quality sites without spam will always be available on Mahalo, 24/7. (Not to mention the fact that users can suggest their own links, which get immediately e-mailed to the guide who created the page, allowing us to update and incorporate new links at any time quickly.)

I didn't just want to brag about my involvement with Jason's remarkable invention; I'm actually building to a point here. See, the idea itself for Mahalo, no offense meant to Jason...it's not that hard to come up with. You don't have to be some crazy futurist visionary to imagine a version of Google that's compiled by people, so it doesn't suck quite so bad.

A lot of search engines have even come fairly close to the same idea. This one pairs you with a live guide in a chat room, who does your search for you in real time. (It doesn't really work all that well.) This one clusters your searches for you, making them more organized and easier to scan than many Google results. This one organizes sets of sites for you before you search, allowing for more exact, targeted results. (It does appear to limit the number of sources you can search, though, instead of giving you a taste of everything that's out there.) And the guy behind Wikipedia is working on a somewhat similar concept as well, sort of a Search/Wikipedia hybrid allowing individuals to create website-portals about any topic.

But anyway, my point is, what made Jason's Mahalo concept so special wasn't the idea itself but that he's insane enough to actually attempt to make it work. Had I come up with the idea of human-powered search, I would dismiss it out of hand immediately. Couldn't be done. Too many searches. It would take too many people. You'd have to outsource the work and would get crummy results. Spammers would get through.

Of course, Team Mahalo has still found a way to make it work. It wasn't always easy, and not everything we all theoretically want to do with the site is possible, but you can go check it out for yourself. We're off to an amazing start and it's only going to keep getting better as we go.

People have this very strange idea about ideas, as if brilliant innovations just shoot out of the foreheads of geniuses, Athena-style, who and complete. It's nonsense. The great breakthroughs are all assembled slowly over time, building on mistakes and improving gradually, because solving problems is much easier if you're willing to leave them unsolved for a while.

Is this obvious to everyone else, and has only taken me 28 years to figure out?

Because my instinct is the exact polar 180 degree opposite of this philosophy. When I encounter a problem - any kind of problem, really, personal or professional - I want to solve it immediately, right away, or I get all antsy and upset. C.K. has actually called me on this pretty recently; I meet with some difficulty, and I can't stop obsessing about it until it's taken care of, one way or another. This is, to put it simply, not how things work in the real world. Sometimes, things don't work quite right, and you take the time to figure it out, and then you fix it.

When we were first building these Mahalo pages, we had no idea what we were doing. There was no template for a human-designed search results page (or SeRP, to get all insider-y on you). A few of us guides invented it, and then scrapped that design and went with a new one, and then scrapped it again. We had all sorts of ideas that didn't come to fruition: massive cartoon graphics charting celebrity hookups, interactive maps of the "Lost" island and on and on and on. It's been an enlightening experience to make mistakes and keep making them, knowing that you'll figure them out later. It's...I don't know...relaxing.

Anyway, there's a major life lesson in all this somewhere, but damned if I can see my way through to it, exactly. Something about having the courage to actually believe that something might work, that one idea might actually be worth trying. It's not arrogance, exactly, although it can resemble arrogance. More like a particularly aggressive strain of confidence. And I can teach you all about it for the low low low price of only $39.95. Call today.

Mahalo

As attentive readers will recall, this past January, I quit my old job clerking at the Laser Blazer and started a new gig, referred to here as the Shadowy and Mysterious Project Which Can Not Be Named (or SMPWCNBN, for short).

Well, today, I can finally reveal my Forbidden Job of Mystery. I have been working at a guide for the brand new search engine known as Mahalo, which you can check out for your very own self RIGHT NOW here at Mahalo.com. I encourage you to do so at your earliest convenience. If you'd like to see all the pages I have worked on since January, look here.

When I joined in January, I was Guide #3 (the less fortunate Guide #4 entered the room an eventful 12 seconds after me). As of now, I'm working on a team of about 30 guides, with an additional crew of developers, podcast engineers and other various and sundry online Internet-ish types. It has been quite a ride, one that I've wanted to tell you all about, Dear Readers, for months now.

But we were operating in stealthy mode, so I was not at liberty to reveal key details...like meeting PayPal founder and Mahalo investor Elon Musk, pitching the site to bigwigs from NewsCorp. and CAA, winning a $500 Apple Store gift card, which I promptly used to obtain a kickass new 20" iMac with all the trimmings (and, yes, I could a Video iPod as "trimming") or getting my picture on the front page of Valleywag, where some commenter immediately noted my physical similarity to a certain overweight bearded film director.

It has been an eventful couple of months to say the least. And now, after a lot of hard work, free lunches, triple espressos and long conversations on the nature and identifying characteristics of splogs, we're ready to launch a brand-new search engine.

BUT NOT JUST ANY SEARCH ENGINE!

Seriously, Mahalo is going to change the way you all think about search. I swear. Honest.

For those of you who don't already know this, your popular search engines...your Googles, your Yahoos, and to a lesser extent, your Asks, they all function via the same mechanism. You type in a term and a sophisticated computer program sifts through the many millions of web pages out there looking for keyword matches.

Now, some of these programs are extremely clever. In fact, "semantic search" is fast becoming all the rage, which allows computers to read the way humans do, scanning collections of words for meaning rather than strictly keeping to keywords. Over time, Google's results have become more and more accurate, and they still do pretty well if you're looking for pictures of a celebrity or movie times or word definitions.

But, necessarily, humans will always be better at this than machines. I can use my creativity and my knowledge of a topic to deduce what another person would be looking for with more accuracy AND flair than any machine. If you type in "large hog" on the Internet today, all Google knows is that you're looking for a pig and you're looking for a page with the word "large" on it. Maybe it'll be a bit more clever and look for pages which appear to use the word "large" to describe a "hog," but that's a big maybe.

Also, you'll get lots of spam. Cumbersome-porcine-animal-photos.blogspot.com will probably come up. Maybe a few sites that look like they're going to be good but then turn out to have one or two outdated bits of information amidst a sea of Google ads. A bunch of sites that aren't what you're looking for - "Review: Wild Hogs Largely a Waste of Everybody's Valuable Time." Then maybe, maybe, if enough people are also looking for it, a link to the photo you really wanted.

But I'd know right from the start that this is really what you're looking for.

Now, imagine that for every search you'll do all week on the Internet, if there were someone on the other end actively trying to figure out what you wanted and finding it for you without all the legwork and irritation. That's Mahalo - human-powered search. Because humans are better.

Have you seen these Ask.com billboards that talk about "the algorithm"?



They're not kidding. All their results are based on algorithms; very smart computer programs. But, you know...not too smart...

All Mahalo results are based on myself or one of my co-workers ACTUALLY SEARCHING THE INTERNET and finding the things you want for you.

This is a powerful idea when you start to consider the ramifications. If Wikipedia is a way to catalog all of the world's information, this is really a way to curate all the world's information. I don't need to tell you that the Internet has an ridiculously massive amount of stuff on it, but no one is getting the most out of it, because 3/4 of total Internet time is taken up with getting to where you want to go. In the time it takes you to search something on Google, and IN LESS TIME than it takes to search for something on Digg or Del.icio.us, Mahalo can pretty much get you where you want to go.

Okay, so that's the sales pitch. The reality is, just as I said, this is a ridiculously massive job. Mahalo as of now has a bit over 4,000 pages. When we hit 10,000, we'll enter Beta mode. When we get to 25,000, we're officially ready for action. You'd be surprised how far 4,000 pages will get you. We already have every major sports team, most notable politicians, tons of fashion labels, products and gadgets, a bevy of film stars, TV stars, musicians, shows, movies and bands. My brother, who's also on the job, managed an entire section of Food pages, from Brie Cheese to Jack in the Box. (Check out the Tacos page, which helped introduce me to my new neighborhood haunt, Don Felix.) Most hot vacation destinations are done; most popular car models already have pages.

It's not terribly hard to "beat the system." Perhaps the most popular search that leads people to this blog, the centrally-important "albino porn," does not yet possess its own Mahalo page. I'll get to it, maybe next week. But you get the next best thing - Google results - and the chances are, if people start searching for something, we'll get to it soon enough.

I just realized that I've babbled on at you at length already, and haven't yet discussed any of the other amazing, totally blown-out Mahalo features. So I will quickly run down more about teh new search hotness:

• Pages have Fast Facts in case you just needed to know something quickly, like the number of people who listen to Rush Limbaugh each week (20 million) or what day we celebrate National Corn Dog Day (the first Saturday of March Madness)
• Searches that have not yet been completed can be requested, and we'll e-mail you back when they're done
• Users can submit their own recommendations for pages we might have missed
  
• Mahalo pages are easy to e-mail to friends
• Mahalo pages often feature useful add-ons like videos, RSS feeds and stock charts right there on the page

Obviously, after putting in so much work on this thing, I'm anxious to see how people will react. But having said that, I'm fairly confident in the quality of Mahalo itself. The thing is just faster and more useful than any search engine, provided you get a result for your search. (And 10,000 search terms accounts for a full 25% of all Internet searches, so your chances of success are pretty good, even on the first try.) I'll be saying much more about all of this in the days and weeks to come (as well as possibly working on another blog in addition to CBI, all about the world of search), so stay tuned for more. But we're launching even as I post this at the Wall Street Journal's D: All Things Digital conference, so I at least wanted to get the word out. Enjoy.

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End

Like a lot of Jerry Bruckheimer films, all three Pirates of the Caribbean movies feel bloated and overlong. In their enthusiasm to create huge, unprecedented action spectacles, the "movie events of the year," The Bruck and director Gore Verbinski concoct these bladder-pounding sensual assaults. I was tired of swashbuckling by about the halfway point of the first Pirates movie, and though I feel that it's the best of the series, the second film essentially is two hours of set-up with no payoff.

But with Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, the series completely forgets itself. It's difficult, after watching this 2 hour and 45 minute Nonsense Juggernaut, to remember anything that made the first two films enjoyable. Let me put it to you this way...This is a film designed primarily for children, but you'd need a quantum physicist, a Literature professor and a tax attorney to completely follow all of the story's twists and revelations.



So, okay, it's an effects-heavy summer adventure-comedy. Just enjoy it and stop trying to follow the dense, involved machinations of the plot. But this is exactly the problem...that's all this entry has to offer.

The entire film builds up to one immense action sequence, a naval battle between an international Pirate Army and the entire fleet of the East India Trading Company. (All three films have established the tension between the fanciful, mythological world of the pirates and the encroaching corporatism of the Real World, but this one doesn't really develop this theme significantly). This scene is pretty great, definitely on a par with the best action sequences in the whole franchise, though I'd still say the Kraken attack from Dead Man's Chest is the overall best.

Everything that comes before this battle is, essentially, pointless and unnecessary. The first half hour or so of At World's End is excruciatingly dull and nigh on incomprehensible, starting off a movie that's supposed to be a fun, goofy romp on exactly the wrong foot.

As the film opens, the motley crew from the last movie have traveled to the Exotic East looking for a map to Davey Jones' Locker, the Purgatory-ish empty world to which Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) has been banished. There's a long long long long scene in "The Locker", which looks a lot like the plain-white inside of The Matrix, in which Jack Sparrow goes insane and plays around with some CG crabs. This scene is actually painful. Nothing happens, it's not funny, it's not imaginative. I kind of wanted to leave; this just feels like they aren't trying. All of this new film's comedy just falls totally flat. The Sparrow character, which once felt like such a daring and unexpected take on the material, now comes off like a rough assemblage of quirks and affectations. And once Jack starts having visions in which tiny Jack Sparrows hang in his dreadlocks and whisper in his ear, it becomes entirely clear that Depp and Verbinski don't know where to take the character.

Once Jack n' Company return to the Real World, things pick up slightly, but not so much. It's just so plot-heavy and dense, with about 7 different quests going on at once and every character possessing conflicting motives and constantly jumping sides. There are some situations in the film that I think could be fairly described as quadruple crosses. Of course, establishing these complicated relationships requires a lot of new characters and a lot of dialogue, which is just overkill for a movie that's about ghost pirates. Chow Yun-Fat is introduced as pirate Sao Feng, and he looks great in the part, but doesn't get to do anything even remotely pirate-y. He just talks a lot (a lot!) about Calypso and the importance of the caucus of the Pirate Lords and his distaste for Jack Sparrow.

So Sao Feng, Jack, Orlando Bloom, Keira Knightly, the Millionaire and his Wife and the rest try to assemble the the team of Pirate Lords (I think they have another name but don't remember or care to look it up) in the adorably-named Shipwreck Cove in order to release the goddess Calypso, who had been imprisoned in human form. This, we're told, is the only way to defeat the East India Trading Company, which wants to wipe out pirate-dom and control the seas.

And all of this sets up the climactic battle, which as I've said, works swimmingly. But it takes so long to get there, I was almost too worn out to fully enjoy the film's one compelling sequence. (As I said about the second film, I really do think the mutant crew of the Flying Dutchman ranks among the greatest CG creations of all time. A new character with the head of an eel was one of the few bright spots of this third edition.) A lot of time during the film's midsection is just wasted. We spend so much time setting up Calypso, the details of her imprisonment and her connection with Davey Jones, and then she completely disappears from the story. After the massive ordeal to assemble all these Pirate Lords, they wind up entirely sidelined from the final conflict. Even the much-discussed cameo from Keith Richards is a disappointment, a great idea upon which the movie fails to capitalize.

The Pirates series started with a great conceit. All the fun of a pirate movie but without the unpleasant raping/pillaging dynamic that might offset the Disney family-fun quotient. Just replace all the actual piracy with supernatural quests for immortality! Brilliant! But the idea's worn thin. A baroque and quite frankly uninteresting mythology and backstory overwhelms the wacky seafaring shenanigans and swordplay, and the whole movie feels like a complete slog.

San-Genius Malakar

Go watch this video. Then tell me Sanjaya Malakar isn't the greatest entertainer of our times.

You know it's true. Who are you going to put up against him. Tom Hanks? What, is he gonna do one of his patented half-assed accents or drop a couple dozen lb's? I still say the best period of that guy's whole career, the High Tom Hanks Period as I like to call it, was pre-Big, when he would co-star with John Candy and make films about idiots fixing houses or idiots joining the Peace Corps or idiots teaching dogs how to be cops. Oh, and idiots dressing up like ladies and rooming with Peter Scolari.

That's My Girl, Asshole!

Someone's been going into Craig's List "Missed Connections" threads and posting "That's my girl, asshole!" and then blogging the results. Boing Boing linked to it, and now I'm linking to them, thus filling up the dump truck that will drive through the Internet's toobz and keep this entire cybersystem running, as is my understanding...

A sample from the blog:

At the Hotdog Eating Contest??? - m4w - 24
Reply to: pers-178954624@craigslist.org
Date: 2006-07-06, 11:30AM EDT

Lost in the steamy, pushy crowd, trying to get a good view, but couldn't, because the stage was set up terribly, as if to only cater to the TV stations shooting the event.

You: short, reddish/brown shortish hair, a white tanktop, shorts... with two other guys (buyfriend(s)?)

Email me and lets talk if its you. I know this is a long shot, but you were REALLY cute.

Re: At the Hotdog Eating Contest??? - m4w - 24

That was my girlfriend, you asshole.

Re: Re: At the Hotdog Eating Contest??? - m4w - 24
From: pers-178954624@craigslist.org

suuuuuuure it was. tell me what sort of facial piercing(s) she has then...?

Most of them are like this. They write "that was my girlfriend, asshole" or some variation on that, and then the original poster wants to get all "Criminal Intent" and try to crack the case of the alleged random boyfriend.

"So...you say that the girl I have been trying to hit on, via Craiglist, is actually your girlfriend...But Forensics insists your just some anonymous person on the Internet...Answer me this...What song was she listening to on her iPod when I pretended to bump into her in a futile attempt to sniff her hair?"

Mistaken for Strangers

New video from The National off their upcoming album "The Boxer."



I think these guys are coming to LA soon. Have to look into tickets for that...

Great Moments in Conservative Humor

The day Jerry Falwell died, I wrote up a tossed-off little satirical post about how God was punishing him being a sinner. "The wages of sin is death," and all that. I ended up not publishing it because, while scanning around the Net for juicy Falwell quotes about the wages of sin, I found that several other bloggers had already had the same idea.

It was, after all, kind of an obvious joke. Falwell seized on every opportunity to use tragedy or death to make his case for a theocratic America, so it's only natural to point out the silliness of this line of reasoning when the tables are turned and the man himself dies.

That's what makes Bill O'Reilly's shocked and appalled response to Amanda Marcotte so difficult to believe. Can he be so out of touch with reality that he doesn't understand the Pandagon post in question? Jerry Falwell never once held back in mocking the dead or politicizing tragedy. He's the guy that went on TV while the World Trade Center was still smoldering and blamed feminists for terrorism! Why does he then deserve kid gloves when it's his turn to go?



Bill's headline - "Disrespecting the Dead" - could just have easily served as the title of Falwell's autobiography. This was his exact M.O.; wait until Americans were all paying attention to some big story, and then use it to make the case for the evangelical perspective. It's almost a form of homage to turn it around and use it back on him.

But worse yet, Dennis Miller's then appears on "The Factor" to concur with O'Reilly's take on the story. Now, okay, Bill O'Reilly is a half-wit, maybe he couldn't fire the proper neurons in order to comprehend Marcotte's rather simple joke. But Dennis Miller was a successful comedian for years. There's no way he didn't get it. He's just become a desperate wannabe demagogue. Think about that...a guy who once had a lucrative film, television and publishing career is now making a desperate bid to be a second-tier Sean Hannity. That's a considerable fall in just a few short years...I guess it all started with getting fired from "Monday Night Football."

Let's look at the quote that has Bill so upset:

"The gates of hell swing open and Satan welcomes his beloved son. Jerry Falwell's dead. Guess god [sic] liked the ACLU better after all."

Bill throws in that "[sic]" to point out how shocking and horrible it is that Amanda refused to capitalize the "G" in god, a silly complaint. If Marcotte doesn't believe in the Judeo-Christian "God," or even if she does believe but doesn't think the existence of a deity requires fiddling with conventional rules of grammar and written language, she is under no legal mandate to capitalize her G's. Is Bill's audience really so sensitive that a non-believers failure to capitalize their lord will actually matter? I'm afraid so...

Anyway, it's clear that Amanda's joking here. That's exactly the kind of thing Falwell would say, get it? The overheated language, the casual certainty about God's and Satan's motives, the invocation of the ACLU...This is parody.

Bill feels that it "symbolizes the hateful far left in America." Symbolizes? How so? Can one woman's humorous statement on her blog - a blog that gets a good amount of traffic, but is hardly the keystone of some large political movement - really "stand" for an entire large cutout of the American political spectrum? Of course not. What a stupid thing to say. This is just how Amanda Marcotte feels, which probably reflects how a reasonable cross-section of the small, self-contained liberal feminist blogging community feels (though I'm not sure, even, about that).

Bill goes even further to say that "this group deserves no respect." I guess he's saying that it's not worth listening to people on the left (though why he'd devote a segment of his nationally-broadcast television to say so is curious). But this kind of language has some deep implications..."No respect." Don't all of our fellow citizens deserve some measure of respect? Isn't that really the definition of a society?

Miller finds Marcotte's remark "reprehensible." Seriously...You know who else is totally out of line? This guy:



But...but...Jerry Falwell was still alive when Miller insulted him! So no harm, no foul!

I Think We Can All Agree...This Barely Qualifies As News

I'd just like to take a moment out to say that The Internet is awesome and I love it.

So, I was looking something up on Wikipedia and randomly happened to wind up at this page, a List of Phish Covers. Which reminded me of that Halloween show where Phish covered the entire Velvet Underground album "Loaded," which includes my all-time favorite VU song, "Oh! Sweet Nuthin." (Probably one of my all-time favorite songs, period.)

So I head over to YouTube and...what do you know...someone has graciously uploaded the entire show, with each song individually uploaded for maximum convenience. And here it is.



So, yeah...computers are good. That is all...

What a dichotomy!

Apparently, starting failed wars based on fraudulent "evidence," spying on your own citizenry, hiring and firing federal employees because they won't violate their professional code of ethics and punish your political opponents, defending torture, suspending habeas corpus, looking the other way in the face of massive corruption and war profiteering, repeatedly undermining and outright ignoring the actions of Congress and leaking the names of undercover agents...these things are just politics as usual for a President. But permit a handful of brown people to remain in the country if they're willing to participate in a bloated, punitive bureaucracy? IMPEACHMENT!

Wonkette has braved the Pit of Despair and returned with these absolute GEMS from the Free Republic comments. If anyone could intentionally create more hilarious ignorance than what you are about to read, he or she would possess the greatest comic mind of our time. I'll include a few of my favorites, but you should head over to Wonkette and read the whole thing, as they say:

We still have Tancredo, Hunter and Fred Thompson on our side. This bill wont go anywhere when our representatives start receiving our faxes

An angry fax campaign? Are we doing 1985 over again and no one told me?

I’m done with him on this and many other issues. I’ll never vote for him again. Illegal invaders are going to kill us all.

Well, at least they're not going to support that third Bush term I was so worried about...Also, I'd like to just pause for a moment to appreciate the fact that this anonymous person feels the phrase "illegal invaders are going to kill us all" is a worthwhile addition to a serious, sober political discussion. I mean, say what you will about our friends who have entered our border uninvited...Occasionally, they play loud polka music, often following key futbol matches or in the midst of central religious holidays...But I haven't really noticed them plotting any kind of organized campaign of mass murder. Maybe they'll get to that after they've finished providing the rest of us with food, clean homes, child care services and handsomely-manicured lawns at bargain prices.

“BUSH SUCKS” And the leftists blogs are now PROUD of this fool! What a dichotomy.

Awesome.

My husband just recently retired and we where planning on going back to Texas but we are now seriously considering Australia. It looks better and better each minute. Our kids want to leave also !!! And you are right, we have been betrayed.

Far be it from me to DEFEND the Chimp-in-Chief, but I fail to see how this is a betrayal. He has always been relatively open about his feelings towards immigrants, and Spanish-speaking peoples in particular. He has appointed our first Latino Attorney General (however long that lasts...), has delivered speeches in Spanish and has repeatedly stated that he'd like to solve our immigration "problem" (I don't think it's much of a problem, but others seem to) without mass deportation.

So it's not really much of a betrayal. He still wants to kill all the Muslims, after all.

This is what happens when you kill 40 million unborn US citizens.

Of course a compromise on the immigration issue is the direct result of Roe v. Wade. Are you blind?

Look this is what it all boils down to, these people in Washington are no different than the celebrities in hollyweird,they do not respect the rule of law or the ten commandments. These people feel they are above the law and can do as they please. And that means they can turn the United States into a third world country.Right now these Washington jackasses are NOT paying attention to Iran because they are too busy making life easier for the RICH in MEXICO.

This comment really has it all. If it weren't so long, I'd have it put on a T-shirt. (But not this T-shirt...it's perfect just as it is.)

"...these people in Washington are no different than the celebrities in hollyweird..."

This is true in many respects (though I can't believe anyone still thinks it's clever to refer to Hollywood as hollyweird). In fact, you could say that the people in Washington are no different from people anywhere, in that we are all people and act in a fairly predictable manner most of the time.

"...they do not respect the rule of law or the ten commandments..."

These are the same people, recall, that want to let George Bush violate all sorts of laws if it will help us continue not really fighting terror. But we can't break the rules even a tiny bit as part of a political compromise, oh no. That's an impeachable offense! As for the Ten Commandments thing, I would bet $1 million (if I had it) that the author of this comment does not always respect all ten of those bad boys. No one does! You're not allowed to covet anything. You know how hard it is to never covet, ever? And I'm not even talking about "your neighbor's wife, nor his ass" (which always made me laugh back in my Jew School days). Even his stuff you're not allowed to covet. What if he has a Nintendo Wii? That shit's awesome!

Also, I fail to see how providing the hope of a green card several years down the road for Mexican families who don't break the law and contribute to society violates any of the Ten Commandments. To be sporting, I'll even concede that he or she means the Christian version (the Director's Cut, if you will), and not the compromised original version, with all the unnecessary voice-over.

"These people feel they are above the law and can do as they please"

Bear in mind, he or she is talking about the President's immigration policy, not all the times he boldly stated tha the was above the law and can do as he pleases. I mean, this is not a surprise to anyone who isn't a Free Republic regular, but the fact that it took a little bit of understanding and compassion (just a teensy little itty teeny tiny bit) for these people to realize it just demonstrates how upside-down and perverted their view of the world has become. In other words, breaking the law doesn't make someone "above the law"; disagreeing with hardcore Bill-the-Butcher-style nativists does. (By the way, Gangs of New York just gets more powerful, insightful and timely every time I watch it. Modern masterpiece, deal with it.)

"And that means they can turn the United States into a third world country."

Again, we get rare insight, but it's buried under such heaping mounds of bullshit, there's no way it can be accessed. George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and their corporate cronies really do want to shift America to a Third World model. (Ironically, many of the pseudo-theocratic Middle Eastern dictatorships, with their emphasis on centralized power and close collusion between the key industries, religious authorities and political leaders, provide a roadmap for where George and Dick would ideally take America.) Their agenda has been clear from the beginning: continually entrench the upper-upper-upper class in power and wealth, forcing everyone else into a state of desperate, easily-controlled near-poverty. Or, failing that, outright poverty.

But this immigration policy is not some sort of magic bullet designed to explode the heart of the American Dream. There are definite big business interests behind the decision - several influential industries rely on cheap immigrant labor to thrive. But what matters is the cumulative effect of years of Bush administration nightmare-policies, from the upper-class tax cuts and estate tax repeal onward. The GOP plan has been the same for my entire lifetime - eat away at social services from within, then wait for them to fail and use it as an example of "the failure of government."

I saw WSJ hack John Fund make this very case on Bill Maher's show tonight. He was arguing that we should essentially get rid of government services because the government can't do anything right, and then used the postal service and the DMV as examples. This is bad stand-up comedy as political rhetoric. Sure, we've all waited in obnoxious lines at the DMV, but the suggestion that this should guide one's political philosophy is complete ridiculous humiliating nonsense that the guy should be embarrassed to suggest.

America remains one of the world's wealthiest nations and the fact that we have next to no social safety net left, that we are beginning to resemble a Third World country in some significant ways (such as, oh I don't know...disaster preparedness and relief...) is a deeply important observation. But Freepers can't come to this conclusion from any other perspective than Hate. They're just smart enough to recognize George Bush for the villain he is, but they're only angry because he doesn't hate browns enough.

Right now these Washington jackasses are NOT paying attention to Iran because they are too busy making life easier for the RICH in MEXICO.

And there you go...the hate cycle is complete...Bush is bad because he's not mean enough to the Muslims and the Mexicans. One has to wonder how much more attention the Bush administration could possibly pay to Iran in order to satisfy this person. Anything short of personal 24 hour surveillance simply will not do. We gots to put a hurtin' on someone!

Ezra Klein posted a fascinating graph the other day. It depicts the amount of government-mandated vacation time in a variety of countries. Out of 21 depicted countries, including Italy, Japan, Greece, France and Australia, the only one with absolutely no state-mandated vacation time is our country, the United States. What's wrong with us? This is SO OBVIOUSLY IMPORTANT. Why? Because life sucks if you have to work all day, every day, year round. A-duh.

Seriously Creepy Shit

Thanks to Andrew Sullivan for this quite frankly insane bit of business.

TinyPocketPeople produces made to order dolls, based on digital photographs that customers upload to the website. The company was founded by two parents whose youngest daughter was starting day-care. To help make her feel safe and secure, they created mini versions of themselves that she could take with her. The concept spread by word of mouth, and it turned out the dolls weren't just popular with children. Grandparents order pocket versions of their grandchildren and long distance couples order mini-me-and-yous.

Yeah, they'll make you a cheap doll with a photo of a loved one plastered on the head. For real.



If folks all over the Internet weren't swearing that it's real, I'd think this HAD to be an elaborate gag. These things cost $50. And the concept doesn't even make sense! You're supposed to miss this person less because you had their likeness attached to a cheap piece of cloth? How superficial would you have to be for that to work? I mean, don't people miss one another's companionship and personality, as opposed to simply their presence? It's like, I miss my friends who live in far-flung locations...I don't miss having something around that vaguely resembles them.

The website itself is really creepy. Photos of children hugging these dolls, caressing them, even. What a wonderful message to send that special kid in your life. "I'm too busy to spend any actual time with you, little one," the doll seems to say, "but please accept this overpriced trinket made up to resemble me, in a kind of half-assed fashion, to tide you over until some actual human companionship can be arranged by my administrative assistant or, if he is busy rolling calls, someone from the mailroom."

My one remaining question: do they have fat dolls available to resemble portly loved ones? If not, isn't that discriminatory? And if so, are there frequently cases in which the doll company is forced to make a fat person into a slender doll in order to spare someone's feelings? Is this what a tough executive decision is like at the Tiny Pocket People (creeeeeeeepy...) doll company? Because that would be pretty awesome.

I guess Billy Dee Williams was unavailable

I don't keep up with my movie gossip any more. I could have sworn the word was Ryan Phillipe playing Harvey Dent. Apparently, I was wrong...



Eckhart's a good choice. He's usually in shit films, but I like him as an actor, and he'll make a good addition to this cast. According to Ain't It Cool, other newcomers include Maggie Gylenhaal (replacing Bride of Hubbardstein Katie Holmes) are Heath Ledger as The Joker, Eric Roberts as Salvatore "The Boss" Maroni (really?) and and Nestor Carbonell from "Lost" as the Mayor of Gotham City. (Not sure which Mayor they're going to go with...)

Interesting side note...Carbonell previously played "Batmanuel" in the ridiculous live-action version of "The Tick." It's like...you know...coincidental...innit...

Kid Nationalism

When I first read the synopsis of CBS's new reality show "Kid Nation," it sounded like the greatest single idea for a TV show of all time. Abandoning 40 kids in the middle of New Mexico and telling them to construct a new society. You could just call it "Lord of the Flies," but I suppose that might cause some copyright issues, so instead "Kid Nation" would do.

Holy crap, that would be amazing. No adult intervention or supervision whatsoever, just cameramen who promise not to intervene, and let the little bastards loose on one another. It'd be like a weekly Battle Royale only REAL! Forget The Running Man...This is a much better concept.

But, no...It was not to be. I watched the preview over at CBS.com and it's really a wimp-out kiddie version of "Survivor." Kids are divided into four teams and then they compete one another for amenities and candy and blah blah blah. But because it's Kiddie Survivor, none of the kids even get voted off! They can CHOOSE to go home if they get homesick, but otherwise everyone stays. PLUS one kid gets a "gold star" worth $20,000 each episode!

Lame lame lame. Sounds like sleepaway "Double Dare." And for all the "we're letting kids build their own society!" talk, it doesn't seem like the kids really have to do much other than physical competitions to win the prizes each week. They're not exactly raising a barn or irrigating or anything. Disappointing...You came close, CBS. Better luck next year.

Terrorist Supermen Are Our Betters

There is no compelling difference between a low-budget '70s dystopian fantasy film and the Republican debate from last night. Crooks and Liars has video of the "candidates" discussing torture with Brit Hume on Fox News, and it's seriously breathtaking. Fuck those Eurasians!

Okay, so the first thing we have to talk about is Hume's patently ludicrous question. He sets up this whole ticking time bomb scenario. Suicide bombers have already attacked several public centers; hundreds are dead and thousands more are injured. One attack has been averted, and you've got the man responsible holed up in Gitmo. Do you torture him to try to stop a possible next attack?

Is this supposed to be a likely scenario? I assume Brit thinks this may actually happen, because he's taking up valuable debate time laying it out. So it's not just some idea he thought up, a "24" spec he's been working on by night, but something he can genuinely imagine going down on the streets of America during the tenure of our next President.

That's laughable. We don't really have suicide bombings in America. Ever. 9/11 happened approximately once, and those guys weren't bombers; they were suicide hijackers. Big dif. I doubt they'd try that one again, but it at least keeps us somewhat in the realm of the possible. I put it to you that Brit labeled these guys Suicide Bombers to identify them with a certain kind of terrorist (the brown kind) and not another (the hillbilly kind).

As it turns out, torture is pretty much the only issue about which John McCain can speak reasonably and credibly. I hate to put it in such an insensitive manner, but he has a rare insight into this entire controversy, and everything he said pretty much made sense to me. He mocks Brit's ridiculous question by pointing out how improbable it all is, then moves immediately into a plea for sanity. We're Americans, we don't torture people. Exactly.

The other two men in the video, Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney, proceed to make complete and total asses of themselves. It's humiliating. Giuliani does not waste a split-nano-second of time before moving into 9/11.

He's so one-note, it's actually kind of comical. 9/11 is seriously all he's got. (I guess running for President on a "more police brutality/less urine smell" platform didn't get past the focus groups.) It's like Tom Cruise and Scientology; no conversation can go on with Rudolph Giuliani for more than 30 seconds without seguing into 9/11.

"Hey, Rudy, you want to grab a bagel?"

"Sure. You know, there were a few moments there, when I was coordinating rescue efforts to save the lives of small adorable children, when I thought I might never again get to taste a delicious, lightly-toasted-but-still-chewy bagel drenched in cream cheese and, possibly, raspberry jam. That's a day that changed my life forever, and the lives of all New Yorkers, and every person, everywhere."

"Yeah, great. Say, I like that watch. Is that new?"

"I had to get a new watch. My old one stopped working because its tiny gears were encrusted with debris from the Second Tower. I had it on my wrist as I was pulling rare panda and koala bears out of the rubble left by those heartless terrorist maniacs whom I personally will waterboard if it means that even one 90 year old American man, a guy named Hank in Arizona, can live for two extra seconds."

"I'm not sure that's possible."

"Well, I don't have data on that. I'll get back to you."

And so forth.

Then Mitt Romney tries to top Rudy by actually speaking indecipherable nonsense. He says, to start, that he's glad the hypothetical terrorist is in Guantanamo Bay as opposed to here in America, which strikes me as a very odd thing to say. Don't we sort of accept that there are dangerous men here in America, in prisons, without getting all bent out of shape over it? I mean, is Romney really suggesting we're all safer because the fictional terrorist is in Cuba as opposed to Leavenworth? Charlie Manson's here in America, we've managed to keep an eye on him alright. Ditto the Unabomber, Eric Rudolph, the BTK Killer, Sirhan Sirhan and Paris Hilton.

As if this weren't a strange enough starting-off point at a political debate ("I propose we immediately send all made-up bad people away!"), Romney then launches into a diatribe about how we should "Double Guantanamo".

Watch the video! He says, "A lot of people" - Wussocrats - "want to close Guantanamo. I say, double Guantanamo!"

What does that even mean? Is Guantanamo overcrowded? It's a huge naval base and they're only holding a few hundred guys in there. There were three camps, but then they closed Camp X-Ray, so now there are two. Is Romney saying we should re-open X-Ray and then open another one, for good measure? Just to show 'em.

This is politics as Monty Python sketch.

"I say, we send all terrorists to Guantanamo for torture!"

"I say, we send them to...DOUBLE GUANTANAMO!"

[Everyone begins muttering to one another - "Double Guantanamo," "double guantanamo," "double GUANTANAMO?"]



If only a guy in chain mail would come up and clobber these guys over the head with a rubber chicken...

Great Moments in Conservative Humor

And perhaps a new contest? Can any of you actually watch this entire clip? Try. I tried really hard to watch this entire 9 minute sample of Fox's "1/2 Hour News Hour." After about four minutes, I had to shut it off.

"The 1/2 Hour News Hour" is like a David Cronenberg film. You don't just watch it; instead, it becomes a part of you. The bad comedy is in my head! Dear God, grab that power drill and jam it into my eyeball! Anything to rid me of Kurt McNally's sub-SportsCenter post-Kilborn nasally smug-drone!



Seriously, Roger Ailes, I know you think you can get away with showing anything because your audience is made up exclusively of jerks who watch Fox News to pisses off imaginary hippies and 90 year olds Montanans who aren't aware that such a thing as a television has been invented, let alone that they own one and it's tuned to Fox News. But you've got to cancel this show. This thing is a trainwreck by Fox News standards. You guys pay John Gibson and I'm telling you that your decision to air "The 1/2 Hour News Hour" is considerably worse!

You could hire Colin Quinn and Jimmy Fallon to host the real NBC Nightly News and it would reflect a saner managerial philosophy than going forward with this "Daily Show" rip-off experiment one minute longer.

It's not even conservative! That opening sketch has no political perspective, really, other than making light of both the Duke Rape Case and the Imus controversy. (I thought conservatives were still upset about the Duke thing, though, because it's just another example of how white men can't get a break in this society...)

One afternoon, when I was a junior or senior in high school, I got a ride from my mother with my little brother and his friend in the backseat. (I want to say the friend's name was Nate, but it could have been Nick...I'm pretty sure it was either Nick or Nate.) Anyway, they were babbling on about some kind of silly bullshit. They were middle-school students at the time.

I'm sure any adult human being on this planet would have found their conversation inane, but for some reason, the level of inanity really started to piss me off. I was getting visibly upset that they were being so loud and boisterous and nonsensical back there, to the point that my mother had to remind me that they were just kids, and that I too sounded really stupid when I was in middle school with friends in the backseat.

That's the kind of irritation I feel when I view these "1/2 Hour Comedy Hour" clips. It has very little to do with my regular disdain for Fox News. These clips aren't genuinely offensive. That would be interesting. Rush Limbaugh's "Barack the Magic Negro" song was genuinely offensive, which is why I wrote a blog post about how he's a racist asshole. Pretty much everything Glenn Beck has ever said is offensive. (Yes, I know, he's on CNN, but bear with me here...)

Jokes about Mexican protesters enjoying the zesty flavor of pepper spray and female-on-male sexual harassment may not entirely appropriate, but they're not inherently offensive. They're just fucking stupid.

This is 9 minutes of pure pain. I defy you to watch the whole thing.

Netflix Prix

Lately, I've noticed that Netflix seems to be running out of movies. 18 movies of the 66 total in my queue are currently listed as unavailable. Out of those, a full third - six movies - are flagged "Very Long Wait," which usually means I will not get them for at least 3 weeks to a month. If ever. (Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner has been marked "Very Long Wait" since it first came out over a month ago, so I've pretty much given up hope.)

When I first joined back in January, there would occasionally be "Very Long Wait"-listed movies, but it was rare, and if I moved that film into the #1 spot in the Queue, often they'd surprise me with it anyway in spite of the wait-list warning. So I just chalked up my bad luck lately to some kind of Netflix oversight (say, they didn't order enough copies and were slow getting around to beefing up the catalog) or a regrettable confluence with the Netflix zeitgeist, my trying to rent the same movies as everyone else at the same time.

But, no. Today, I found out that Netflix manipulates what films they send to maintain a healthy profit. If you return movies too briskly, you are penalized. Frequently, they will send you the less popular films on your queue and flag popular titles for infrequent or new renters. So I'll get When a Woman Ascends the Stairs and Zizek: The Reality of the Virtual because no one else in LA gives a shit, but have no shot at Deja Vu, Breaking and Entering or Smokin' Aces any time soon because that's what all the other local dipshits want to watch.

(Oddly, the classic Horatio Hornblower has been wait-listed for me for a very long time. Is that really a hotly-desired item? I mean, it stars Gregory Peck, who has his fans, but that's still surprising to me that any non-Casablanca classic film would build up that level of interest.)

Even worse than ginning the system, which I naturally until now assumed was first-come first-serve, sometimes Netflix will apparently put off replacing your movie for an extra day or two if they feel you're renting too much! MSNBC reported on this in February of 2006, but I had no idea:

Los Gatos, Calif.-based Netflix didn't publicly acknowledge it differentiates among customers until revising its "terms of use" in January 2005 — four months after a San Francisco subscriber filed a class-action lawsuit alleging that the company had deceptively promised one-day delivery of most DVDs.

"In determining priority for shipping and inventory allocation, we give priority to those members who receive the fewest DVDs through our service," Netflix's revised policy now reads. The statement specifically warns that heavy renters are more likely to encounter shipping delays and less likely to immediately be sent their top choices.

So there's a good reason to read your Terms of Service when you join Netflix, I guess. I was just anxious to get them to start mailing me movies, because I had recently been banned from a video store.

The thing is, Netflix is still a really good deal, and I wouldn't even mind that much if they charged me an extra few dollars a month to opt out of this system. They have plans under which I could get four or five movies at a time instead of the three I now receive (for about $18 a month), but I'd imagine these optimizing users are just stuck back in the same system. If you exceed Netflix's "suggested rental amount per week" of mystery, you stop getting the movies you want when you want them. I'd have When a Woman Ascends the Stairs, Zizek: The Reality of the Virtual, The Devil Rides Out, Mr. Moto's Gamble AND The Fearless Avenger, but still no Deja Vu or Smokin' Aces, which would go to new users or users with social lives.

Why not a "preferred" program or something? An extra $20 a year, and I get put to the front of the line when there's a rental conflict between me and another user? I'd have fewer movies at a time for the same price, but I'd be guaranteed to get the ones I want.

Anyway, it just sucks that Netflix has found an excuse to mistreat their best customers. High-volume renters aren't the most profitable customers for Netflix, but there wouldn't be a Netflix if there weren't massive nerds like myself who want to watch 10-12 rented movies in a week. There wouldn't even be an Internet without those kinds of people, let alone a way to use it to rent movies.

Really, their shady practices bother me so much because I can't possibly imagine canceling Netflix. It's great. I love managing my queue, spending time on Sundays browsing through the upcoming new releases, and coming home at the end of the day to find movies in my mailbox.

I've been running through the second season of "Twin Peaks" on DVD lately, and I feel that, for TV, the Netflix timing is perfect. I finish a disc, return it, and at nearly the precise moment I'm ready to watch the next four episodes, the replacement disc arrives in the mail.

This is, frankly, one aspect of video rental that has always sucked at Fleshworld stores. You don't want to rent an entire series at once, because you'd have to watch it all in two or three days. So you get maybe the first disc or two, but this is of course a huge gamble. You very well may get sucked into the show, and then return the discs to find that the next sequential episodes have been rented. Frustrating.

I was going to buy The Peaks 2.0 (I have the first-season box), but having watched most of it this past week, I'll most likely hold off. There are some really terrific episodes here, but Season 2 is a pretty sizable step down from the stellar Season 1, and at about the halfway point - when the Laura Palmer story ends - the show runs out of steam completely.

It's weird. You can kind of feel the whole series just come to an abrupt, screeching halt. Every episode occurs on consecutive days (the entire first season happens within the span of a little more than a week) until halfway through Season 2, when we get a sudden 3-day time jump. Even though it's only been about 10 episodes, this feels like the natural end of the show. Palmer's murderer is discovered, Cooper's job in the strange little town is completed and even most of the subplots have been brought to some kind of resolution.

Inexplicably, after a few awkward segue scenes introducing the notion of a shadowy Black Lodge and Cooper's angry former partner Windom Earle, the show presses on for another half-season. David Lynch has admitted that there was no need to keep the thing going after the mystery at its core was solved. It's still interesting, as a fan, to watch these episodes, but I can't see returning to them again and again. Everything turned kind of jokey and pointless after a while. It was brilliant while it lasted, though.

I also have to say, I love the ease with which you can pull up your rental history. It's sometimes difficult to recall everything I've seen lately. Now that I'm actually looking at what I've screened in the last month, I see that I'm terribly backlogged on reviews I meant to write for the site. Thieves Like Us was amazing, I finally saw Dreamgirls, I revisited George Roy Hill's Slaughterhouse Five, the insanely bleak Japanese war film Fires on the Plain, The Naked City, Sydney Pollack's unwatchable and misleadingly-titled The Yakuza...On second thought, never mind...I'm never looking in here again. That's like 2 weeks work if I'm ever going to catch up.

Ottoman Empire

Has everyone on the Internets seen this video by now? If not, prepare to have your ass blown out by 10 tons of sheer hilarity.



Any further comment would be superfluous.

At Midnight He'll Take Your Soul

Neil Gaiman has posted some photos of Alan Moore's wedding. They are somewhat frightening.



On a totally unrelated note, if Vincent Schiavelli had played Gandalf, those Lord of the Rings movies would have been way different.

Friday Night Nostalgia Blogging

Matt Yglesias posted classic '90s video "Bitter Sweet Symphony," and it got me to thinking about other iconic rock songs of that era. Nothing really screams mid-'90s to me more than this Nick Cave classic, which actually popped up on the soundtrack to classic '90s film Scream. I give you, "Red Right Hand":