This may be one of the scariest and creepiest things I have seen in a long, long time. The more I watch it, the more it freaks me out. It combines some novel light tricks and night camera usage as well as some great special effects. It’s less, boo, jump out of the chair scary than it is ponderously skin-crawling.

Watch Rubber Johnny

After watching the short film, you may or may not wish to know more about it and more about the filmmakers. Briefly, the filmmaker is the fellow who did several of the Aphex Twin videos. If you are familiar with those, then you understand the creepiness and wierdness that may ensue. This movie in fact seems to be an extension of the original “drukqs” music video or perhaps the video was part of the film.

Learn more about Rubber Johnny

After watching the film, post back here on your thoughts.

This is what happens when a bunch of literature nerds spend far too much time in a basement pub with cheap pints. Somewhere in this idea is a grain of sincerity and truth. Until one finds it, the sheer cheekiness and stupidity of the effort is worth the price of admission.

Check it out here!

The really horrible thing about CafePress is that bad ideas for T-Shirts can be created so quickly and easily. It’s a pasttime that I have yet to really sink my teeth into, but it could be fun for a laugh or two.

When you have to pick one of two things to do and you want to do both equally, how do you choose?

The Review-Journal reports that a Las Vegas-based white separatist group has filed paperwork with the secretary of state’s office to create a White Peoples Party. According to the chairman of the group, who’s obviously down with WPP, the group’s platform will “require our candidates to consider, in every policy decision we make, whether it is good for our people.”

Apparently, the multitude of Black, Latino, Middle Eastern, Jewish and Asian people currently leading the country aren’t calling the white folks in Las Vegas before making each of their historically ridiculous choices. But it won’t be long now before every politican in this country will pause prior to each decision to ask him or herself, “What would white people want?”

Bloomberg.com reports that President Bush accelerated his search for a Supreme Court nominee partially to give Benedict Rove a “temporary reprieve from public scrutiny of his role in the disclosure of an intelligence operative’s identity.” There’s a big surprise.

Apparently Bush had orignally planned to announce a replacement for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor near the end of July before taking “a month-long vacation at his Crawford, Texas, ranch.” Clearly he has nothing better to do.

I’m now a member of the iPod nation. This weekend my wife graciously purchased a colbalt blue iPod mini as a birthday gift.

I resisted getting one for a single reason: everyone was buying them. Kind of like those yellow Lance Armstrong wristbands, I didn’t want to feel like a lemming.

But now that I have one, I wonder, what took me so long? iPods, simply, are brilliant.

Ergonomically, they are unrivaled. It’s a snap to operate with one hand. iTunes could use more development, but I’m a convert to that as well.

One problem, the instruction manual is spartan. I’m a guy that likes to have lengthy, wordy instruction manuals. The manual literally says, install CD, plug in, play. But what happens when the installation is not that easy, as mine was? There is no place to dig in to find more help. I know they are trying to make it seem simple, but sometimes it’s not. And simplicity, while nice, needs to be second place to information when it comes to instruction manuals.

Another problem are the damn ear buds. The music quality in them is better than I expected, but that’s not my issue. If you set your iPod down, the ear buds get tangled up faster than Karl Rove at a grand jury.

I could buy a different set of headphones to take care of the problem. But while I was fighting iPod purchase to begin with (but now love it), I’m now fighting becoming an iPod person. You know what I mean. I own an iPod, but I’m not an iPod person. iPod people accessorize whereas I use mine to listen to mp3s.

OK, I did get one accessory. I picked up an FM transmitter. It’s very small and clips on the top where the headphone jack is. You tune it to a blank FM station and all the music on your iPod will play on your car stereo. Brilliant. Seriously, with this thing there is no reason to use my 10-disc CD changer anymore. Ever.

Apple is now working on a video version of the iPod. It will play music videos as well. We are one step away from an iPod playing TV shows as easy as they play podcasts. Yes, the screen is small (they could probably make it bigger), but if you want to watch something, especially on a plane for example, it’s a perfect solution.

Now, I just have to find me some good podcasts. Suggestions?

#flickr_badge_source_txt {padding:0; font: 11px Arial, Helvetica, Sans serif; color:#666666;}
#flickr_badge_icon {display:block !important; margin:0 !important; border: 1px solid rgb(0, 0, 0) !important;}
#flickr_icon_td {padding:0 5px 0 0 !important;}
.flickr_badge_image {text-align:center !important;}
.flickr_badge_image img {border: 1px solid black !important;}
#flickr_www {display:block; padding:0 10px 0 10px !important; font: 11px Arial, Helvetica, Sans serif !important; color:#3993ff !important;}
#flickr_badge_uber_wrapper a:hover,
#flickr_badge_uber_wrapper a:link,
#flickr_badge_uber_wrapper a:active,
#flickr_badge_uber_wrapper a:visited {text-decoration:none !important; background:inherit !important;color:#3993ff;}
#flickr_badge_wrapper {background-color:#ffffff;border: solid 1px #000000}
#flickr_badge_source {padding:0 !important; font: 11px Arial, Helvetica, Sans serif !important; color:#666666 !important;}

I’m spending time in Oxford studying for my master’s degree in English. It’s gotten to the point now where the vacation feeling is over and the work is starting to sink in. Right now, I am revising a short paper for Monday and procrastinating by playing with Flickr. Here’s a cool little badge thing that they make for you.

You can click it to see more photos with descriptions of a very few of the things here in Oxford. This is really a fabulous place to study and I would recommend that anyone wanting to do graduate or even higher work look into the various programs here. There is just something in the air that makes you want to learn. Oh, and the beer and pubs are excellent as well.

In an apparent attempt to prove Tom Cruise is not the only celebrity with a chemical imbalance, Mariah Carey has called her 2001 film Glitter “ahead of its time.” Anyone who’s seen even five minutes of this movie knows that it will be hundreds of years before another film comes close to such levels of sheer suckitude and pukessence. Ahead of its time indeed. And don’t get her started on how 9/11 ensured her film made less than 20 percent of what it cost to make.

Proving that stupidity doesn’t end with singers trying to downplay their movie failures, Republican Senator Rick Santorum has decided to compare abortion to slavery. In a new book, Santorum writes, “This was tried once before in America. But unlike abortion today, in most states even the slaveholder did not have the unlimited right to kill his slave.” Apparently, the holder of both an M.B.A. and J.D. was unable to find a history book during his writing. Because if he had found one, he would’ve learned that slaves were considered property and not people, so the only punishment for the killing of a slave, if, of course, it wasn’t your own, was based on destruction of property. If you owned the slave, however, you were free to do anything you wanted.

As if there wasn’t enough craziness already, the original “Crazy Cooter” from television’s “Dukes of Hazzard” is telling fans of the show to stay away from the movie. His advice comes not because the film is bound to make the recent “Starsky & Hutch” movie look like “The Godfather” or because the original itself wasn’t all that good but because, according to Cooter, the sex and profanity make a mockery of the series. Roscoe P. Coltrane, Enis and Flash, however, think it’s an early Oscar contender.

This is an absolutely hilarious column detailing why the Fantastic Four tie-in toys, specifically the Human Torch ATV, don’t live up to their namesake. (Note that there are also those, and by ‘those’ I mean just about everyone in the world who’s actually seen the movie, who say the film itself is equally horrific.)

If you missed Live 8 like I did, you’ll love this page of Quicktime movies. It’s practically every performance from every Live 8 concert, which some believe had a great deal to do with the G8 agreement to cancel the debt of 18 of the world’s poorest countries, 14 of them in Africa, and deliver a $50 billion aid package. Let’s hope part of this aid goes to channelling the money effectively to countries that lack the systems to properly distribute said aid.