Posts from April 2017

Freaky People, comin’ to your neighborhood… Freaky People, never up to any good…

I have two songs for your listening pleasure today. They’re thematically linked! First up is “Shape Shifter” by They Might Be Giants:

“Shape Shifter” is from They Might Be Giants’s most-recent full studio album from 2016, Phone Power:

Such a powerful phone.

“Shape Shifter” goes thematically well with another great song, “Mind Readers” by Electric NoNo:

“Mind Readers” is from Electric NoNo’s most-recent full studio album from 2014, The Zoo at Night. That’s way back when they were still calling themselves The Jesus Rehab!

There you have it. Two songs about weirdo freaks in your everyday life. Enjoy!

O Canada. O Konami. O Canadian Konami. O Konada? Canami?

Hahahahahahaha! Canada is putting out a new $10 bill to mark their 150th birthday. They made a snazzy new web page where you can do a 360-degree view of it (and see that, once again, it is like a million times prettier than any American money).

You can also do something else: if you enter the Konami code on that page, you get a fun li’l surprise. Be sure to have the volume up (but not a lot); there’s an auditory component.

If you don’t want to do it yourself, a couple of people have recorded it and put it on on the YouTubes. Like this one:

If you didn’t do it yourself because you don’t know what the Konami code is, then are you sure this is the right website for you? Ah, just google it or something. It even has its own Wikipedia page.

Basically what this means is that the Bank of Canada’s web development team has some GREAT BIG NERDS in it!

Also, O Canada is a way better song than Star Spangled Banner.

The first episode did not go well…

Just over two years after this song was first released on his A Special Episode Of EP, a very slick and hilarious music video has been released for Open Mike Eagle’s “Dark Comedy Late Show.” It features cameos from comedians Kurt Braunohler and Baron Vaughn (the latter of which will be providing the voice of Crow T. Robot in the new Mystery Science Theater 3000 series coming soon to Netflix). The video is about the inaugural episode of the fictional Dark Comedy Late Show with Mike Eagle that goes horribly awry because Mike just will not stop rapping. Take a look:

Baron Vaughn gets some very funny moments as the camera cuts to his face displaying a gamut of emotions from horrified to embarrassed.

Yeah, we’ve all been there, Baron.

There is also a nice cameo by Mike Eagle’s compatriot Busdriver as a member of the Late Show band (which of course also gets interrupted by Mike’s incessant rapping). He plays some sort of little keyboard/sampler thing!

Get on the bus!

I’m not sure who the two women in the band are, but the woman playing guitar does look familiar. The video’s IMDB page doesn’t have a credit for a singer/guitarist, though weirdly it does have one for a Kimberlee Redman as keybordist (and a guy named Victor Holmes as a musician???). Anybody help me out with them?

Anyhoo, this super-professional video was released on the JASH YouTube channel. JASH is (in their own words)

Founded and featuring original content by partners Sarah Silverman, Michael Cera, Tim and Eric, and Reggie Watts, JASH is the first fully realized network to offer all its comedic partners complete creative autonomy. At Jash we always strive to offer a variety of content with a unique voice: boundaries will be pushed, and disorientation is sure to ensue.

So, yeah, there’s some comedic luminaries putting out this video.

P.S. I swear that this website is not going to become a news site just about Open Mike Eagle. He’s just been doing a lot of really interesting stuff recently!

That’s some dark comedy.

From left to right: Rumble, Arcee, Unicron, Soundwave, Hot Rod, Spike, abd a Quintesson.

Even though this band has apparently been around for three years, I only just heard about them this last weekend. The Cybertronic Spree is a group that dresses up in astonishingly-accurate Transformers costumes and plays the songs from the Transformers: The Movie Soundtrack. Take a look:

Their self-stated premise is:

HOTROD, ARCEE, RUMBLE, UNICRON, SPIKE, SOUNDWAVE, BUMBLEBEE, AND A QUINTESSON HAVE BEEN BROUGHT TOGETHER BY THE POWER OF ROCK. TOGETHER, THEY ARE THE CYBERTRONIC SPREE.

Not only are the costumes astonishingly accurate, but they’re built in such a way that the band members are still able to effectively play all their instruments! It’s a pretty remarkable achievement. Except for the guy dressed up as Spike, that’s an easy costume.

They also pepper their act with non-Transformers songs, and they have a couple of excellent choices, like this super-obscure theme song to the 80s Droids cartoon, which was about the adventures of C-3PO and R2-D2 before Episode IV.

Oddly enough, I can’t find any record of them playing Weird Al’s “Dare to be Stupid” song, which was on the Trasnformers: The Movie Soundtrack. I’m not sure why, maybe there’s a different rights issue involved?

Anyway. So there you have it. That exists.

I noticed late last week that my website traffic was blowin’ up. Take a look here:

March 30th: Daaaaaaaaaaang.

Looking into it, I realized that 99% off that traffic was from my post about Open Mike Eagle declaring himself the new Mayor of Ferndale, WA. I was already aware that Mike had re-tweeted the link to the article, but I quickly discovered that it hadn’t stopped there.

Mello Music Group (who have released some OME musics) tweeted a link to my post as well:

If you missed the story of Open @Mike_Eagle becoming mayor of Ferndale, enjoy https://t.co/pIYsCiwUTq pic.twitter.com/0IYqhSlfXe

— Mello Music Group (@MelloMusicGroup) March 29, 2017

That tweet in itself was re-tweeted 15 times. That would seem to be enough to account for the traffic spike. But then, the very City of Ferndale itself tweeted:

Hey @Mike_Eagle, visit again soon! We'd love to make you "honorary mayor" for a day. #FerndaleWA https://t.co/Na7nS5ykhs

— City of Ferndale (@CityOfFerndale) March 30, 2017

To which Mike succinctly replied:

honorary my foot! https://t.co/iWtp4nJW3b

— Open Mike Eagle (@Mike_Eagle) March 30, 2017

Mike would expand his stance on Instagram:

sorry ferndale. should have appreciated me when you had me. im rapping in san diego tonight and LA tomorrow and none of these transparent attempts to get me back are going to fly. #byefelerndale #toolittletoolate

A post shared by open mike eagle face (@artrapmike) on Mar 30, 2017 at 9:16am PDT

I tweeted about how my website traffic was blowin’ up over all this attention, and the City of Ferndale rather cheekily tweeted a response:

@angrybeef Sorry, not sorry!

— City of Ferndale (@CityOfFerndale) March 31, 2017

Also at one point over the weekend somebody I’d never met posted a link to my post on the Faced Book.

Well, it looks like as of today my site traffic is back to normal (i.e., nobody reading this), but it was a fun little explosion while it lasted.

Video Game of the Month:

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
I mean, come on. This is most likely the game of the year. It’s so good, and I’ve been very good about avoiding as many spoilers as I can, so I won’t spoil anything for you, either. Except just take a look at this:

Daaaaaaaaaaaang.

Album of the Month:

Rain City Blue by Electric NoNo
After almost a decade of stripping-down their sound to the two-man guitar/drums duo of their previous two releases, Drunken Hillbilly Fight Bar (2012) and The Zoo At Night (2014), this latest release sees them re-incorporating more soundscapes for a lusher, spacier feel. Literally spacier; more than half the songs are either directly about space (“Jupiter” and “Blue Planet”) or have spacey themes to them (“Spin Spin” and “Magician’s Dying Wish”). It’s a good set of songs, though some of them run a little long at over four minutes. The best of the EP are “40 Foot Tall” and “Blue Planet,” which are both impeccable masterpieces (and very different from one another). It’s just a little frustrating that it took three years to record only seven songs!

Show of the Month:

Southpaw Regional Wrestling
This is perhaps the greatest thing that the WWE has ever done. A short (4 episode) webseries of “discovered” video from the 1980s about a now-defunct wrestling promotion. Remarkably, it features absolutely no wrestling whatsoever. But it is a spot-on parody of the highest order, and some unbelievably good comedy from all the wrestlers involved, John Cena in particular (I know; I was surprised, too). You can watch them all right here: