Ziltoid the Omniscient

Some of you may be familiar with Devin Townsend. He's a Canadian metal musician that works with a number of different bands, (Strapping Young Lad, Devin Townsend Band, Lamb of God, Zimmer's Hole, and others) and also produces solo material.

I recently got a copy of his latest solo album, "Ziltoid the Omniscient", and I'm loving it. I guess you could say it's a pretty niche genre, because it's halfway serious progressive metal, and it's halfway a comic metal opera.

"Ziltoid the Omniscient" is about a 4th dimensional alien named Ziltoid (who, as you might have guessed, is omniscient). Ziltoid comes to earth and demands earth's "finest cup of coffee" within 5 minutes. Earth presents him with what he considers to be an inferior cup of coffee, and he attacks the planet. In between, there's a 6th dimensional being known as the "planet smasher", references to a place called the benevolent hive-mind 9, the crowning of the ultimate 4th-dimensional guitar hero, and of course the leader of the human resistance, "Captain Spectacular". (Come to think of it...in several ways the Ziltoid album bears more than passing resemblance to Dr. Horrible's Sing-along blog)

If all of that sounds pretty silly, well, it pretty much is. The music all the way through is fantastic, and Devin manages to pull it off and keep it silly...but not stupid. There's a real difference - this is music that can laugh at itself and be fun, but it doesn't come off as dopey to me. My only criticism of the album is the drumming. The one instrument Devin appears not to play is the drum kit, and he used programmed drums throughout the album. As metal drumming goes, it's OK, but unimpressive when compared to what Devin's frequent band mate Gene "The Atomic Clock" Hoglan can do.

If you're looking for something way off the beaten track in music, try Ziltoid the Omniscient. Particularly the tracks "Color your world", "The Greys", and "By Your Command". It's a version of progressive metal that doesn't fall victim to all the cock-rock BS that you sometimes find in metal.

One more for focused comedy blogs

Passive Aggressive Notes - a site dedicated to nasty notes that people write for one another anonymously and leave in shared spaces.

You know how every once in a while when some fool cuts you off in the parking lot, you have the urge to write a nasty note and clip it to their windshield after they park? Well, if you do that sort of thing, your note is probably on this blog somewhere.

Like Cake Wrecks, they're very focused and have piles of material. They have so much material in fact, they can do an entire series devoted to notes left for people who stole cheese.

In the words of JWZ, "Oh Internets, is there anything you can't do?"

The Rorschach Cake Wreck

Cakewrecks is one of my favorite blogs. It has the two most important highlights of a good comedy blog - an intense and very specific focus, and an endless supply of material.

Yesterday, they had a game show where they presented a wretched cake and tried to get people to guess what the cake was supposed to look like. Here are the results.

Oooh, he's good

The latest on the Georgia/Russia conflict is that Putin is now blaming the US for the conflict.

??!!?

It's true. Putin is claiming that the US encouraged Georgia to attack South Ossetia in order to provoke Russia, in order benefit a US presidential candidate.

Of course this is complete nonsense. One big tipoff that it's just a smoke screen is this:

Putin told CNN his defense officials had told him it was done to benefit a presidential candidate -- Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama are competing to succeed George W. Bush -- although he presented no evidence to back it up.

Plausible deniability, should crackpot theory be proven false? Check! My defense officials (inspecific) gave me the information! Of course I trusted them. Evidence? No. Claims that don't contain actual substance are difficult to disprove.

There are a few other aspects of this that are absurd. First, assume what Russia is claiming is true. This is basically the same as Russia admitting that they are easily manipulated and baited into action by the west. Putin is indirectly saying that Russia is dancing to the tunes called by the US. It's safe to say he doesn't actually believe that.

Second, what advantage would this be for a presidential candidate? Barack is in the thick of his convention. I don't buy for a moment that there is any event he'd want pre-empting attention on the convention. As for McCain, I suppose you could make a vague weak argument that it plays to his relatively larger foreign relations experience...but it's quite a stretch. Putin realizes this, so he deftly avoids indicating how or why any of this is an advantage to a presidential candidate.

Also Thursday Putin announced economic measures which he said were unrelated to the fighting with Georgia. Nineteen U.S. poultry meat companies would be banned from exporting their products to Russia because they had failed health and safety tests, and 29 other companies had been warned to improve their standards or face the same ban, Putin said.

Does anybody else notice that when we talk about Russian allegations and actions of this sort, we're not talking about Russia's actions in Georgia? This isn't particularly good sleight of hand. But it's working.

Guy Kawasaki on Entrepreneurship

Guest blog article on Sun's site written by Guy Kawasaki.

There are a few gems in here about small business entrepreneurship that are funny and true. Like this one, complete with excellent proverb:

Try stuff. I also used to believe that it's better to be smart than lucky because if you're smart you can out-think the competition. I don't believe that anymore--this is not to say that you should strive for a high level of stupidity. My point is that luck is a big part of many successes, so (a) don't get too bummed out when you see a bozo succeed; and (b) luck favors the people who try stuff, not simply think and analyze. As the Chinese say, "One must wait for a long time with your mouth open before a Peking duck flies in your mouth."

Choosing between being smart and lucky of course is a false choice. Most successful companies will be both.

Dinosaur Comics and Psychoanalysis

As blogging goes, it's pretty lazy and uninteresting to continually post comics from other sites. I mean, this must be the 5th or 6th dinosaur comic that I've posted. I could just give you enough credit to go check that site periodically on your own if you found any of the earlier ones interesting, but no.

Sometimes these comics just have something in them that grabs me. Take for example today's Dinosaur comics.



There's this element of self-reference. (Talking about analyzing thoughts, leading to the analysis of that thought, looping back on the original exposition) Then there's this element of implicit assumptions about the way people's inner lives work. For example, that your thoughts and actions necessarily have some wider meaning either to others, or as an interpretation of an un-expressed unconscious phenomenon. The last element is the puerile joke (ha-ha, only serious) which answers the question. Some thoughts don't have broader meaning to others. They may not even be expressions of anything subconscious. They might just be for one-off silliness and humor.

Some day, I'll write a rant about the unconscious mind and how the way that we approach it changes the way we think about ourselves, just as T-rex wonders what it says about him that he wants others to find wider meaning in his actions. That's a whole different kettle of fish though, and would compel me to write about cigar-smoking Austrians in a way that's not conducive to including web comics and "boner ahoy" references.

Ce la vie.

Sickening Drive-By Shooting Caught on Tape at Local Park

Tales of the Weird

The scoop:

SALT LAKE CITY -- A woman who made news around the world when she had five pups cloned from her beloved pit bull Booger looked very familiar to some who saw her picture: She may be the same woman who 31 years earlier was accused of abducting a Mormon missionary in England, handcuffing him to a bed and making him her sex slave.

My friend's comment: "Some people just don't know when to stay out of the limelight."

I can see how she was recognized. This is not a mug that I would forget either.

I can't resist another choice quote:

In a 1977 court hearing mobbed by the British press, Joyce McKinney said she'd fallen head-over-heels in love with the Mormon man and acknowledged tracking him to England. "I loved him so much," she told a judge, "that I would ski naked down Mount Everest in the nude with a carnation up my nose if he asked me to."

Common sentiment, that.

Circumlocutory Proverbs

My new favorite brand of nerdiness - circumlocutory proverbs.

A disposition towards inquiry deprived the feline of its vital state (Curiosity killed the cat)

Elementary sartorial techniques initially applied obviate the need for repetitive similar actions to the square of three (A stitch in time saves nine)

Exigency is the matriarch of ingenious contrivance (Necessity is the mother of invention)

The stylus is more potent than the claymore (The pen is mightier than the sword)

There is illumination at the termination of the subterranean excavation (There's a light at the end of the tunnel)

Lame programming joke

/**
 * TODO - robust implementation of this method would really help the program.
 */
public static void ___turingCompleteAI() { 
    while(true) { 
 // Trivial implementation of cognitiveLoop()
 // left as an exercise to the reader.  :)
 // cognitiveLoop(); 
    } // End while
}