What's the new fad in pop music?

Stealing cheesy bass lines from the soundtracks of "Overboard"!

I've been listening to a lot of OMG Radio of late. There's this song called "Tonight Tonight" that's stolen the bassline from the repeated musical theme of "Overboard" (and swapped out banjo for disco guitar, but as the song says, "whatever, it doesn't matter").

I keep saying this whenever it comes on, but I finally looked it up, and the proof is in the YouTube pudding...

This song is terrible except for the fact that listening to it makes me think of awesome mini-golf course drawings, fancy yacht closets, fish guts, pie fights, and the nature of consent.

The sentence above this video goes for both songs.

Also...

for those of you who don't know...

Which one is the famous author?

The answer... might surprise you.

It's both!

What mad scientist obsession is getting real, almost too real?

Controlling the weather! Specifically, inciting precipitation.

The Burger Police Jail in an artificially created Beijing snowstorm

Whoa there Abu Dhabi! The eastern Arab state hired a Swiss company to produce rainstorms for the oil-rich country during the summer. So Meteo Systems International set up what everyone is describing as lampshade shaped (though I can't find a single photo of them) ionizers in the desert. When the humidity reaches above %30, they switch on the ionizers, the ionized air rises and attracts dust, which turns into clouds, and hopefully rain. It worked so well that they made it rain 52 times last summer, sometimes even inciting hail, lightning, and rain. That sounds pretty damn effective. Fat Joe probably doesn't even make it rain so much in one summer.

China also attempts to make it rain with old school cloud seeding technology. The Time article where I found out about all of this claims that China messed up by making it snow in Beijing, but I mean, they just wanted water out of the air and on the ground, so I would call that a success. Shooting model rockets up into the air just isn't as high tech as a bunch of ionizers though.

So, I wrote all the above in January and didn't publish it for some reason. Doing some follow-up, I came across this article that seems to be written by Lyndon Larouche masquerading as an eco-conscious dude. I mean, he claims that this ionic technology could make deserts a thing of the past, which seems ridiculous. I imagine that stealing sky-water would change weather patterns a little bit... inevitably it would be some kind of feedback loop.

Anyway, it would be nice if we could just rent one for Northern New Mexico or Arizona and put out or slow one or two of these fires. Of course, the lightning involved could just start more fires, but I'd risk it once just to give it a shot.

Ian McKellan or Christopher Lee?

Well... though I very much appreciate both Sirs, I have to say that to my knowledge Sir Ian didn't recently record a metal album about the life and times of Charlemagne (You probably saw this in the AVClub Least Essential Albums of 2010, just like me! I would like to point out that with the internet, the frivolous can be enjoyed without paying, which makes it kind of imperative to at least check it out on grooveshark or something. Okay, here's a link to like a minute of it on YouTube ). Nor does he brag about having worked with Man O' War. Oh, and Christopher Lee appears to have stabbed people in WWII.

Then again, Sir Ian claims to have decided to publicly come out by responding to a conservative politician's request for an autograph for his children by signing, "Fuck off, I'm gay," which is pretty awesome.

I think what I'm trying to say is that today I've come to believe that the lives and attitudes of these two actors are eerily similar to those of the wizards they portrayed.

Why oh why did I search for an image of Dick Van Dyke and dolphins?

It sure wasn't to find this image!

But this image, it was found.

What's my favorite Garfield comic strip?

Unfortunately, you'll have to clink this link to find out, but I promise promise promise you that it's a good one.

This strip is mainly linked in my mind with the 2001 D12 hit "Blue and Yellow Purple Pills", I think mostly because the dog in the strip strongly resembles Bizarre, but blue, and in dog form.

I was never sure about this link, but chronologically, it makes sense, as it was published in July of 2001, when the D12 album was quite popular. Thematically, it makes sense because, well, look at the title panel. So what I'm saying is that Jim Davis was at least aware of the drugged-up antics of D12 in 2001.

I'd also like to say that, even though I can't steal images from their site, the Garfield Comic Strip Archive is really amazing at finding what you want... particularly if what you happen to want is a very specific and weird strip from the early 2Ks.

After further investigation, it appears that Bizarre actually wears almost the same hat during his verse. Just go to 3:15. Also, when he finishes the verse by yelling, sorta Hulk-style, "Bizarre here all night!" it's the exact voice that I hear from old "Tree Dog" in the Garfield strip. The proof, as they say, is in the pudding.

There's an ancient temple that I don't have at least cursory knowledge of?

Well, there was.

Behold... Göbekli Tepe.

It's a hill in Turkey with four large stone circle areas and nearby refuse piles filled with game animal bones, kind of like Chaco, but it's 12,000 years old (instead of like 1,600). Just to clear things up, that's before the end of the last ice age.

So when I think of this particular temple I think of the terrible(ish) movie, B.C,. or even maybe Conan movies and think, "Yeah, that might be slightly accurate in some ways."

Even more, I think of my friend Ian, who was prone to saying some crazy things as we drank cupfulls of booze and gingerale and smoked rolling tobacco behind Handlebar; but one of the less crazy things (or at least one of my favorite things) he would bring up was the idea that humans as a species are really smart, and it's quite possible that interesting civilizations and technologies and arts have happened that we haven't found traces of. He would also point out that Ancient Astronauts are not a necessary part of the equation. I whole-heartedly agree with that position, although... I did find out about this archeological wonder from the History Channel show "Ancient Aliens".

Check out the happy, mmm, I'm gonna say albatross (?) and the pretty good scorpion!

That's a pretty cool wild boar too. Also... an admirable attempt at Kurdish dress by a German archeologist.

If you can stand a little tap dancing around speculation, it might be worth reading this Fortean Times article about the whole thing. If you can't, then I'll just say that this temple seems to be near a possible origin of the cultivation of wheat, and it was purposely covered with dirt for some reason or another, which leads some people to believe it is a sort of Garden of Eden which was ruined by deforestation and crop production and then entombed as a forgotten relic of a marshy, foresty, game-stocked Edenic time.

Here's some wild speculation of my own: they built a temple because they discovered how to make beer out of grain, yet they wanted to celebrate the hunt. People came from all around to try beer and it became a vacation/spiritual destination, which meant more need for beer, which meant more grain, which meant more deforestation, which meant destruction of hunting habitat and a hangover without deer guts for proto-menudo and possibly a tea-totaling backlash. It's exactly the same as the other speculation, but with more alcohol.

Anyway, that's my wild speculation, and it completely ignores hallucinogens and aliens, so maybe it isn't even that wild... eh...eh? (Those "eh"s are to be read as verbal elbows to ribs complete with eyebrows being raised, btws.)