The Worst Music Video Of All Time

It's just as if a late-eighties Howard Stern and the former Christian rock band Creed joined forces to create a symphony of jingoistic cheesiness:


And let me get this straight: All angels are Americans? I love the Internets.

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Brain Rage In Academia

For the past few days I've been getting several hits from the same location in the great state of Missouri. It turns out that Brain Rage is now a required part of the curriculum for a Career Development in Psychology course at Southern Missouri State University. Now to be fair the week seven syllabus link is to this post featuring a Daily Show segment about the uselessness of cable news show texting polls but I assume that it's only a matter of time before this little blog of mine fully explodes on the academic scene. SMSU is probably just a few notches below Harvard on the national collegiate rankings, ya?

Mormons Love Their Internet Porn

This is interesting although hardly surprising:

Saturday night in downtown Salt Lake City and many people are talking about porn in Utah. David Clark Jr. of Provo said, ‘I believe that since this is the true church Satan works harder on members.’

Elder Richard G. Scott at General Conference Saturday spoke similar words about pornography. Scott said,’ This potent tool of Lucifer degrades the mind and heart and soul of any who use it.’

Some say people in Utah are vieweing porn more than any other state in the country after a study earlier this year by a Harvard economics professor. Professor Benjamin Edelman tracked subscriptions to online porn sites. He discovered that Utah is number one in the nation in online porn.

Apparently God can't see you when you're surfing the Net alone in your own home. So as I see it there are two explanations for this behavior: 1) There is a supernatural fallen angel who's been trying to take down the Mormon religion with pornography since it was created a century and a half ago, or 2) Human beings are intrinsically sexual creatures and most efforts by religious organizations to dampen this natural sex drive will eventually fail, regardless of what kind of underwear those people are forced to wear. Just saying...

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Picture Of The Day

"Color-Coded Criminals", a Reservoir Dogs tribute by Loy Valera.

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Walled In: Learning About The Berlin Wall

I knew that it had been a daunting obstacle at the time but I actually had no idea that it was quite so intricate a structure:


I visited pieces of this former cold war landmark several years ago but I couldn't really get a feel for just how menacing it really was at the time. In fact, I nonchalantly purchased a replica KGB pocket watch on the East German side of Checkpoint Charlie but viewing this digital recreation has given me a much more sobering look at this monument to communist oppression.

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Your Teeth Evince Your Class Status

One of my little sisters is a dentist and I've never smoked meth amphetamines so perhaps I'm a bit biased on this count, but nonetheless:

In a country in denial about class divisions, a mangled mouth is the clearest indication of second-class citizenship. Missing or rotting teeth are like a scarlet T, declaring their owner to be trash. Sered and Fernandopulle describe the way that a group of well-meaning Idaho women who volunteered at clinics and early childhood development programs judged "those people" who weren't able to get dental care for themselves or for their children. "These middle-class women," they wrote, "identified bad teeth as a sign of poor parenting, low educational achievement, and slow or faulty intellectual development." When Stu Price, Ed Helms' character in The Hangover, wakes up in Las Vegas and discovers he is missing a front tooth, his horrified response is to declare, "I look like a nerd hillbilly." Every lazy screenwriter knows how to label a character as a menacing half-wit: give him gnarly teeth and a sleeveless T-shirt.

I didn't get braces when I was younger because I was afraid of looking like a nerd (which was stupid because I did anyway) so I got laminates to fill in my gaps when my sister was going through dental school later in life. In my opinion, having nice teeth is more important for success in American society than either one's race or income.

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Wonderbra Parodies The Cadbury Gorilla

For those not in the know, here's the original gorilla commercial. And now the breastsacular parody video:


And yes, I'm aware of all of the non-Cadbury parodies as well...

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Picture Of The Day

This is one beautiful photo:

You're looking at the 253.2-foot Delta 4-Heavy lifting off from launch complex 37B at Cape Canaveral, and yes, that's actually a photograph. Good thing the camera was remotely triggered by photographer Ben Cooper, who used sound activation to snap this shot while he was safely ensconced 3 miles away.

We feel sorry for that camera, though, whose lens was destroyed. The good news is, the camera itself somehow survived this hellish inferno as the world's tallest unmanned rocket roared away from its launchpad. This is such a spectacular photo, we thought at first it was an illustration. Nice work, Mr. Cooper.

Now imagine what it must feel like to sit on top of one of these bad boys as you ascend into space. Too cool.

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Something Hyperbolic Someone Else Said

"This is the type of propaganda you would see in Stalin's Russia or Kim Jong Il's North Korea. I never thought the day would come when I'd see it here in America. This is the type of fanaticism Republicans are up against as we fight to stop the Obama Democrats' radical leftist transformation of America." -Michael Steele, in a fundraising letter, referring to a video of schoolchildren singing about President Obama.

These people are absolutely shameless and they obviously don't give a shit about this country or its people.

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Picture Of The Day

A Buddha-shaped pear:

Hao Xianzhang, a local famer, spent six years to perfect the process by growing the pears inside moulds, local media reported. The pears cost around 50 yuan (7.32 USD) each.

I've never really been a big fan of pears but I'd be all about a Zeus-shaped watermelon. The Southern United States and Greece need to collaborate on this one.