the invention of a new sort of potato scraper
I think the jellybath is kind of creepy.
Love letters in which the writer fantasizes about being murdered by the one he/she loves have kind of fallen out of fashion, darn it. That's the best kind.
Terrible help desk tickets.
Although I am heartily sick (yea, verily) of Queen's “Under Pressure” being used in commercials and movie trailers (wait—that's redundant, they are one and the same), the trailer for Adaptation sucked me in. I liked Being John Malkovich so I will probably be going to see this when it comes out. Plus I've read The Orchid Thief, so I feel all kinds of interested already.
Why do trailers for movies universally suck? Y'all already know about my outlying minority opinion that movies themselves [just about] universally suck, but the trailer for even a good movie will make the movie seem like a piece of shit. They (the trailers) are too long, and they give too much away, and they are always cheesily put together according to the same formula. Similarly with back-of-the-box copy for video releases: never read it! It's so poorly written that I can be dead certain I want to see a particular film, but the box copy will invariably use words like “madcap,” or “romp,” or “hilarious,” or “breathtaking” or any one of a number of other movie-critic clichÉs, and I will change my mind about the whole seeing-a-movie enterprise.
A list of bands that have the word “head” in their name. Yes, it's groan-inducing, but as both a Bartok fan and a Talking Heads fan, I liked the name Bartokking Heads. So many head bands! What would William James say? (“In the first place, the acts of attending, assenting, negating, making an effort, are felt as movements of something in the head….” Come on sing it with me! Follow the bouncing ball! God knows I've linked it nearly to death by now!) And, if he is correct and the self resides in the head, and then there are all these head bands, what does that do to my long-ago (two years, to the week!) caffeine-induced theory about Id bands and Ego bands? AEEEGGGHHAAAGH it's all coming together, a giant jigsaw puzzle synthesis of my Incredibly Wordy Life, I can't stop it, somebody throw a blanket over me and procure warm fluids for me to sip.
Another good name for a band (especially a heavy metal band) would be Grät