darryl pandy = #VALUE!

this is patently disturbing and unquestionably brilliant.  ronye would call this foolish, but my friend rose would define this a dream come true if she wasn’t preoccupied with designating numbers and rating systems for her multiple suitors and publishing their progress (or lack thereof) via twitter.  either way, on a morning where there are exactly the amount of moments in the day to complete eighty-percent of the work that needs to be finished three days ago, darryl pandy brings a smile to my face like the day i found out that the wayne hills high school cafeteria was equipped with fountain soda.  and so i’ve taken a deep breath and a moment to share.  enjoy:

thanks to rami dearest for being consistently excellent enough with his video recommendations so that i didn’t dismiss this one like the other fifteen i refused to open this morning or every forwarded email my mother’s sent me since the afternoon she realized that weird modem sound inside her computer wasn’t a sign of something breaking, but a peculiar way of letting her know of an electronic world that would finally facilitate her desire to stay in touch with relatives without actually speaking to or seeing them.  ever.

playlist: rambutan

the rambutan is a fruit that i can’t really describe except to say that the inside is tasty, slimy, lychee-like and delicious and encased in a soft-spiny-acorn-like casing.  my sole rambutan experience took place in a suburb of kuala lumpur, where two malaysian women and five malaysian men took turns plucking the fruit from the trees surrounding a habitat-for-humanity candidate (pictured below) while i tried my best to ignore the ants crawling up my arm towards the most geographically-suspect, papaya-sized mosquito bite i’d ever encountered.

the rambutan playlist is very much like the fruit, except only insofar as it is enjoyable despite seeming a little suspect on the surface.  still, the plainly forced connection really doesn’t speak to the actual reason this playlist is called rambutan.  the actual reason is this: it was the first word to pop into my head after lycheefruit, which i’d used for a playlist a few months ago.  if i was really combining an itunes playlist with rambutan, it might look something like this:

if you’re so inclined, click on the above image for a better view of the actual playlist, which has been thrice road-tested and once gym-tested – and, if you’re even further inclined, download the tracks and put it together yourself.  you might find that you enjoy it.  you might also find that it’ll cost you about sixteen dollars and that the electrolightz song isn’t actually released (but can be listened to on myspace) and that you can’t quite pull the ratatat remixes from your roommate’s laptop while he’s vacationing in bali quite as easily as i can.  but still, all the information is here, there and everywhere…

check out tha boogie here, electrolightz here and get your hands on the jaydiohead remixes here.  after that, you’re on your own.

you. are. welcome.

saadiq + a side of bacon = #VALUE!

i know what you’re thinking: what are raphael saadiq and his guitarist doing trapped behind a tiny desk and is this tiny desk thing something you can soon expect to see at any and/or all of mayor hawthorn’s acoustic sets going forward?  but really, this is just how saadiq and rob roll.  suited.  always.  straight from the plane to the studio for one of npr’s “all things considered” tiny desk concerts.  it’s well worth the watch…unless you’re connected to the internet in the starbucks in the marina.  click the image below and enjoy:

and feel free to check out all things saadiq via his blog and download “the way i see it” here.

love is old, love is new

my father was one of the lucky fifty-five thousand to watch the beatles perform at shea stadium.  which also made him one of the fifty-five thousand at shea stadium that day to attend the concert and not hear a single note or lyric above the screams, shrieks and yells.  and although it would be more than a decade until i would be born, way too late to have a beatles concert of my own ruined for inclusion on an already incredible list of social disappointments – yes, i am referring to the time gene simmons thought it prudent to voluntarily shake my hand, only to subsequently tell me how unimpressive i was – i can finally empathize with my father, sitting here at a starbucks in marina del rey, revolver spilling from the speakers and being completely ruined by a loud, large (both physically and numerically) austrian family trying to get a head count on caramel macchiatos.  okay, that was a horrible and ridiculous comparison.  still…

below is the “cinematic trailer” for the beatles’ rock band game.  a friend had sent this to me a few months back when i had only barely begun justifying my lack of imposium time as a summer hiatus.  i had sent this around to a bunch of friends at the time, probably more than the eight or nine people who still read these posts, but as the actual game has finally made its way into my apartment, courtesy of my friend mark, and the remasters remain an inevitable-and-eventual-but-hopefully-discounted purchase, courtesy of my friend matthew (imposium reader six of eight or nine), i figured now to be as good a time as any to post it.

the trailer represents the first fantastic two-and-a-half minutes of content you’ll see once you put the game in, press power and wait for your way-too-loud xbox to load.  these are also the two-and-a-half minutes you’ll impatiently enjoy before you race into the song menu to discover that there are too many songs missing and it’s going to take some work to find them.  and since you’re not an avid video game player and you would much rather watch your third, identical half-hour of ESPNews than turn on a machine that sounds like it’s moments away from exploding to work your way towards bonus songs after an eleven or twelve hour work day, well, you’re pretty much stuck with the songs you’ve got.  which is still okay.  i mean, really, these are the beatles…and there will be a cheat code.  enjoy:

a delayed thanks to acacia for the heads up, kudos to pete candeland (who is also the artist behind the great gorrilaz) for the animation and a special mention to the music of the beatles for, at the very least, reminding us all of how far we’ve come since the days of starbucks’ speakers lulling us into caffeine want by flooding our ears with iron and wine.  yawn.  even thinking.  yawn.  about that.  yawn.  band makes me want to take a na….

close quarters

it’s been a while since i last watched alice in wonderland, yet i’m wondering now, sitting at this desk, which is basically on my bed, with my laptop pushed back against the shower glass, if this hotel is going to claim some kind of disney–fantastic inspiration for its tetrisized bed-shower-toilet configuration or if this is just a claustrophobic charm that is completely wasted on me.

alas, this room has nothing to do with alice in wonderland.  at least not according to its website, which has also failed to mention that you could very well walk the length of an entire new york city block between the time you leave the elevator and find your room at the end of a long, dark, narrow hallway.  for all the chartreuse-colored splendor that the lobby advertises online, there is nothing of the lincoln log-colored wooden walls that seem to be closing in on me as i type by bathroom light (there are only arms-distance wall sockets for my blackberry charger and laptop, which means that the light-by-lamp strategy has been temporarily disabled).

i don’t know why i’m shocked.  i’ve been here before.  i’ve seen the rooms.  i should have known better.  then again, i’m the same guy who occasionally walks into starbucks and convinces himself that the sandwiches are decent.  even though i know that they taste like cold, hard, giant pieces of bread with some b-minus-quality filling.  even though i know that after the second cold, starchy bite my tongue will ache and my mouth will feel like it’s filled with sawdust and that i’m going to give up on the bread and just finish the sandwich meat in the three bites it takes to consume a toddler’s serving of cold cut.

i know this, but sometimes i forget.  sometimes fact gets fuzzy when it’s a smallish blur in a rear view mirror you barely use because you prefer to actually turn around before switching lanes.  but still, such a memory, even faint and fuzzy, doesn’t eliminate my right to complain about the sandwich nor it does it mean that it’s not entirely ridiculous that i have been essentially, expensively stuffed inside a hotel room designed by neither form nor function, while six floors below me it still costs me twenty-dollars to drink a vodka soda on an assortment of chairs and/or benches and/or trees.  yes, trees.

i’m just saying.

picture this: street sign

somewhere between day four and the end of our summer’s vacation, the dominator and i went on a long drive, circling pretty much the entirety of hawaii’s big island.  it took most of the day, three starbucks stops and about sixteen climate zones, but eventually we made it back to kona in time to grab a quick swim, a less quick dinner and about two episodes from seinfeld’s season nine dvds before falling asleep in front of the teevee at the oh-so-late hour of nine pm.

a lot didn’t happen on this drive.  we didn’t see the turtles on the turtle beach.  we didn’t get max the parrot to say “fat aaron” despite it being advertised on the sign hanging from his cage.  we didn’t swim in any waterfalls and we didn’t spend more than the forty-five minutes it takes to eat some loco moco and pick up fresh strawberry mochi in hilo.  but we did do some serious driving and we did stop to capture a few of the more, um, charming moments on camera.

this is a picture of a street sign not two blocks from the pe’epe’e waterfalls and a subtle reminder of how essential apostrophes are in maintaining the integrity of a street teetering on the brink of elementary school hilarity.  and yes, i understand how immature this is, but i also understand how delightful it is in spite of its immaturity and, frankly, if you expected more from someone who not only writes “poop” to mark his golf balls, but photographs and writes about it, then you deserve to be disappointed.  enjoy!

it’s either a testament to our brotherly bond or a sign of dominator’s utter submission to my ridiculousness, but the kid didn’t so much as flinch when i pointed at the sign, pulled over and subsequently began photographing it just because it said “peepee falls.”  he just leaned back and pulled himself out of frame.

viva la dominator!

ma men

while mad men continues to vacillate between excellently entertaining and snoozefest, this funny-or-die parody wins on so many levels, not the least of which is its most delightful reintroduction of the dana barros jersey.  honorable mention goes to joey mac’s desire to “date rape that ass” and dunkin donuts’ munchkins.  click the image below to watch and enjoy:

many thanks to digital j for the link… and to the yankees for the 7.5 game AL east lead.

davinci notes

the imposium has officially returned from its summer hiatus.  we’re rested and relaxed.  we’re mentally and physically rejuvenated.  we’re even completely caught up on our summer reading.  sorta.  see, although we breezed through steinbeck’s of mice and men during our four-week stint at sleep-away camp and slowly but surely made our way through morrison’s beloved between barista shifts, dan brown’s most popular – cough/barf – novel proved just a little too cerebral for us.  lucky, there are tools out there to turn a literary masterpiece like mr brown’s into a much more pedestrian read.  like this one:

i kid, of course, but reading the davinci code is like submitting your intellect to four-hundred-plus pages of tee-ball, except that you’ll expend a lot more energy trying to understand why the author keeps reminding you that he’s dressed his hero in a tweed blazer than it does to swing a bat at an unmoving object and run on contact.  this book is the nickelback boxed set of novels except most people who’ve bought a nickelback album don’t leave its liner notes on their night and/or coffee table as a gross public declaration of music fandom.

still, you’d have to assume that it’s just a matter of time before the davinci code becomes required reading of some sort.  i mean, depending on who you ask, the davinci code has sold forty or fifty-million copies (which, if you’re keeping track, eclipses sales of the book i began writing in two-thousand-four by, again, depending on who you ask, roughly forty or fifty-million copies) and sheer present-day economics should dictate that schools ask their students to read books that most of their families already own.

i’m just saying.

the quiet before the storm

while the imposium will officially resume posting this coming monday, september fourteen, the mime continues to update the world via twitter.

have a wonderful weekend or, as the mime so eloquently put it…

silence of the lambs + legos = #VALUE!

i’d really love to write something witty to introduce this video, but it’s part childrens toy, part musical, part movie that still kinda of gives me the creeps more than eighteen years after erick gerber and i snuck into the preakness movie theater to see it and there’s really not much i can say that the actual clip wouldn’t say better.  so i’ll simply say that if nerds rope was a youtube clip and also a toy and could sing with the cheeseball splendor of an off-broadway musical, it would be the following:

by the way, this is the only silence-of-the-lambs-related anything that even remotely rivals the dominator’s jame gumb impression, although this clip – unlike the dominator’s impression – does not require you to ask it whether or not it recalls a fredrica bimmel.

thanks to lexi for the video.

and happy friday!