As you may have noticed, the era of The Tao appears to be over. Several people have said that the last post was not a fitting way to go out and we agree. And so, we leave you with toilet humor from Icelandic soccer:
Because if there is one thing The Tao always promoted, it was bathroom humor. Until we're bored again, we leave you with a quote from the talisman of this blog, King Hippo:
I have my weakness. But I won't tell you! Ha Ha Ha!
And a quote from the blog's inspiration, Tupac:
It's like if you plant something in the concrete and if it grow and the rose petal got all kinda scratches and marks, you ain't gonna say "damn, look at all the scratches and marks on the rose that grew from the concrete.." you gonna be like "DAMN! a ROSE grew from the CONCRETE?
Xan Brooks had the unenvious task of liveblogging (as the kids like to say) Wimbledon yesterday when the longest match in history between John Isner and Nicolas Mahut was in progress. The tiebreaker for the fifth set was tied at 59-59 (that's games, not points) when it was called for darkness, to resume today. As the match wore on, Brooks himself descended into brilliant lunacy. Some examples:
On and on they go. Soon they will sprout beards and their hair will grow down their backs, and their tennis whites will yellow and then rot off their bodies. And still they will stand out there on Court 18, belting aces and listening as the umpire calls the score. Finally, I suppose, one of them will die.
and
The scoreboard is barely visible through the grass and weeds and trails of Spanish moss. It shows that John Isner and Nicolas Mahut are locked at 37 games each in the final set.
I'm wondering if maybe an angel will come and set them free. Is this too much to ask? Just one slender angel, with white wings and a wise smile, to tell them that's it's all right, they have suffered enough and that they are now being recalled. The angel could hug them and kiss their brows and invite them to lay their rackets gently on the grass. And then they could all ascend to heaven together. John Isner, Nicolas Mahut and the kind angel that saved them.
It's the best piece of spontaneous writing we've seen in a long time. Yesterday's blog appears here, with the fun beginning around 3:45. Check it.
During the opening monologue of this year's Oscars, Steve Martin made a joke about Meryl Streep supposedly being into Hitler memorabilia. The cameras then cut to Meryl Streep laughing and then straight to Sandra Bullock. What seemed random at the time, now seems downright creepy in light of the fact that this came out just a few days after.
Check it out at 3:40 of this video (embedding disabled).
Nothing funny today. To take you into this beautiful weekend, here is a classic Backstreets (likened by Rolling Stone to a musical version of The Iliad) performance by The Boss from the legendary Darkness tour. This performance is particularly noteworthy because it includes the rare "Sad Eyes" portion, which he has not performed since the late 1970s.
Sting hosted a charity concert last night in New York for rainforests or something. We don't know what else happened but there is now documentary (albeit poor quality) evidence that Lady Gaga, Sting, Elton John, Bruce Springsteen, Shirley Bassey, Debbie Harry and a partridge in a pear tree sang Don't Stop Believin' together. In other words, some of the world's top musicians decided to do karaoke. This should never have happened.
Look, the Tao is a fan of every one of the performers individually (yes, even you Shirley), but we also like pizza, steak, bubble gum, Snapple, and hot dogs but we wouldn't suggest eating them all at the same time.
Another gem from Deadspin. Short version: a weird guy calling himself "K-Strass" has tricked at least half a dozen Midwestern TV stations that he is a yo-yo expert who can perform cool tricks. When he gets on the air he does this:
Check out this video highlighting a feature of the new version of Adobe Photoshop called Content-Aware Fill, which is a photo editing program for the unfamiliar. Just start from the 2:45 mark. Does this seem crazy to anyone else?
The studio that made Downfall, the movie from which the Hitler subtitle meme videos all derive, recently started submitting copyright claims on these videos and having Youtube pull them down. Someone had the brilliant idea to make a Hitler video out of it, and did it brilliantly. The part about "realizing the irony" made us laugh out loud:
Backstory: Joakim Noah of the Chicago Bulls previously said that there was nothing to do in Cleveland. The Cleveland fans booed Noah mercilessly when the Bulls came to Cleveland for the playoffs and Noah responded with a big game in Game 2. Then Noah doubled down in the post-game press conference:
Here's a good catch by Deadspin. The Detroit Lions' running back is recovering from surgery to repair a torn ACL. The headline of the Detroit Free Press's article is "Lions' Kevin Smith, on ACL recovery: 'I can do almost everything'." However, the actual quote, which is further along in the article is “I can do almost everything except run."
With March upon us, The Tao will count down to the Madness by featuring a "One Shining Moment" video every day that we aren't too lazy to post one. Lets get things started with last year's rendition. Hit it Luther:
The Howard Stern prank call reminded me of C-Span, which, as you will see in the video below, is pranked often. Beware, some of these are really dirty:
It's early, by we think we have already seen our favorite thing of the day. Yesterday, a fan of Howard Stern prank called ESPN's SportCenter ("SportCentre" for our Canuck readers) while they were live on the air by pretending to be Brian Westbrook, the All Pro running back for the Philadelphia Eagles who was cut by the team.
An old video of Prince rehearsing When Doves Cry from before he was a big deal has surfaced on YouTube here (embedding is disabled for the video). It's an interesting piece of rock memorabilia.
Wow, a real conch shell. If memory serves, In Lord of the Flies the conch is a symbol of civility, which is definitely what comes to mind here. I guess the symbolism was lost on Coach K.
Have you ever watched an Olympic athlete and thought "I could probably do that," knowing full well you can't? Well, here is what a French downhill skier did in yesterday's event:
In this case, we actually could do better. Don't worry young lady, 2014 is right around the corner.
If you want to be depressed, read this article about Roger Ebert. As depressing as it is, it is also a great piece of journalism. We're giving it our second Gold Hippo award.
We here at The Tao recently besmirched the Olympics. We stand by our assessment but we caught some highlights of yesterday's Snowboard Cross (or "SBX" as we youngsters like to refer to it) and we have to say it looks pretty awesome. Here is a link to yesterday's men's SBX finals.
A few things stand out about SBX. First, it gets The Tao's seal of approval as a Real Sport because it consists of an objectively timed race to the bottom. Second, it actually looks like fun, which is more than we can say for, say, figure skating. Third, the American SBX-ers started a controversy by making fun of the host Canadian's tight pants. And finally, we have to admit that the U.S. Snowboarders team uniform is pretty splendid.
Somewhat relatedly, Nate Silver, the math whiz behind Baseball Prospectus and who, based on complex algorithms, predicted every state correctly in the 2008 presidential election, now has the U.S. in a dead heat with the Canucks and Nazis to win the most medals in Vancouver.
We've previously documented Steve Nash's weird commercials. We really like this spoof of the Dos Equis "Most Interesting Man In the World" commercials:
Today, someone told us here at The Tao that the Winter Olympics are starting soon (for readers in warmer climes, it's like the X Games with Metamucil commercials). Sorry, but we find it hard to get excited about sports dominated by countries where half the population is named Sven. However, this does strike us as a perfect time to celebrate the Winter Olympics phenomenon that was Eddie "The Eagle" Edwards.
If you don't know Eddie, he was like the Jamaican bobsled team, only for ski jumping. Eddie was a top ranked British skier -- which means he knew how to make a pizza wedge with his skis -- who realized if he learned to ski jump he would be the only person from England competing for a spot. A few months of training and, voila, Eddie was the British representative in ski jumping, and British ski jumping record holder. There were two problems. First, Eddie was exceptionally near sighted and his coke bottle glasses would fog up while skiing, which meant he had to guess where the jump was. Second, he weighed 180 pounds, which is apparently not ideal for a sport that consists of trying to fly as far as possible. Technically, there was a third problem: he was scared of ski jumping, but we can't really fault him for that because it seems like about the craziest thing a human could try. In any vent, Eddie represented England valiantly, finishing dead last in both ski jumping events at the 1988 Olympics and developing a huge fan following. He got a standing ovation at the closing ceremonies of the games and was considered such a disgrace to the sport that a new rule was passed (known as the "Eddie The Eagle Rule") that made it much harder to qualify for the Olympics.
So Eddie, we salute you and deem you the official The Tao ambassador to this and every Winter Olympics. Your job is to tell us what happened when it's over. Seriously, we don't care.
A profile:
UPDATE: Part of what, in The Tao's view, makes the Olympics stupid is the presence of a large number of "sports" that rely on subjective factors (we're looking at you figure skating and snowboarding). In our view, a sport is something that can be objectively measured. Seeing who can jump the farthest is a sport. Seeing who can get to the bottom of the hill the fastest is a sport. Seeing who, in the Russian and Swedish judge's view, completed the most aesthetically pleasing skating routine -- and by "aesthetically pleasing," we mean "according to arcane scoring rules that only a trained professional can detect" -- is not a sport.
This is kind of random. The National Park Service put together an "eHike" of the famous, and deadly, Angels Landing hiking trail in Zion National Park. Pretty cool.
The Toronot Raptors had a fan vote for who should perform yesterday's halftime show. The winner was Vanilla Ice:
I find this strangely awesome. I don't know who the other nominees were but I probably would have voted for him too. It's also reassuring to know that even in this economy Mr. Ice is still gainfully employed. Hopefully Suge Knight didn't come to his hotel room afterward.
If The Tao ever has some sort of get together or convention for our loyal readers we are totally hiring Ice for entertainment. Him or William Zabka. If anyone knows how to reach William Zabka, send us an email.
UPDATE: Per DanTheMan's comment, and apropos of the recent posts on In Living Color and Vanilla Ice (glace à la vanille, for our French fans), here is Jim Carrey doing Vanilla Ice:
With the Super Bowl -- which is neither super, nor a bowl (discuss) -- this Sunday, it seems an apt time to hearken back to the days when In Living Color ran its own halftime show.
Jim Carrey doing his thing:
And how could we ever forget Men On Football. Three snaps in an I formation:
Are we forgetting any classic alternative half-time shows? If so, let us know in the comments and we will post them. No Lingerie Bowl suggestions, please.
Today is going to be the first day of what could be a very interesting couple of months (years?). JD Salinger has reportedly passed. He was a weird guy, most famously for living a reclusive life in New Hampshire after writing what has basically become known as The Great American Novel. In the short term, we'll have the obits to keep us occupied. The first couple I have seen are here and here.
However, the real intrigue relates to whether new works of his will now be published. Salinger last published in 1965 but his friends have long maintained that he had more than a dozen finished manuscripts in his house. If these texts do exist, the question is whether they will be destroyed or published. In reality, these are the only two options because when an author leaves behind unpublished works with instructions to keep them private, the descendants always end up publishing at some point to make some money (see this fascinating NY Times Magazine article on Jung's unpublished "Red Book," for a good example of how this tends to play out).
Alright, enough highbrow. We will now return to our regularly scheduled programming of people being hit in the crotch by flying objects.
UPDATE: It's a safe bet that The Catcher In The Rye and possibly Franny and Zooey will be making appearances in upcoming bestseller lists.
UPDATE UPDATE: The New Yorker, which published Salinger's short stories, has made all of his short stories available on their website here. If you have to read just one, read A Perfect Day for Bananafish.
For those living under a rock, the Minnesota Vikings were on the outer edge of field goal range yesterday with the clock winding down. A win would have sent them to the Super Bowl. Then Brett Favre, the all time NFL leader in interceptions, did this:
The Vikings' radio announcers did not take things well.
Neither did Vikings fans (WARNING: salty language. Turn your speakers down if you're at work):
If you thought that that massive Russian hockey league fight was an aberration you would be wrong. In Russia, they train them early as proven by this video of a Russian little league hockey match featuring 9 year olds.
Stuff like this is the reason communism always prevails over the evil forces of democracy.
Careerbuilder.com, which is apparently some kind of website that, ummm, builds careers (I guess?), asked people to submit ideas for a Super Bowl commercial. They narrowed the ideas down to the following three finalists.
We here at The Tao have long been fans (nay, followers!) of Justin Halpern's Twitter page, the title of which we cannot write out in polite company. Lets just say it is very much not eponymous. Anyways, we're glad to see that he's hit the big time, thanks to this recent profile in the LA Times. Have a read.
For all those who have seen The Hangover, check out the 13 second mark of this video from the Australian Open, which I'm told is happening now (who cares).
If you haven't seen the movie, here's what you need to know. Also, see the movie.
Yale put out this video for prospective students. I like the production value. I still think it's incredibly unappealing. Also, New Haven is a hole and no amount of singing or choreography can convince me otherwise. Yeah, that's the reason I didn't go to Yale.
We here at the Tao endorse the recent trend of having kids reenact scenes from TV shows and movies. It started with the Miracle speech kid. Now we have the apotheosis of the genre:
Oh, and for those of you who have never seen Jersey Shore, you're really missing out.
With the Tonight Show controversy in the news, I can't help but be reminded of David Letterman's famous trip to meet his new bosses at GE, after GE bought NBC.
Watching this High School band utterly demolish Don't Stop Believin' is one of the best things I've seen in a long time. I've watched it five times and it's still just as funny.
There was a fight in the Russian Hickey League this week. And I think it's fair to say, it got a little bit out of hand. How out of hand? The game was canceled afterward because there weren't enough players left to finish it.
