Here is Acting With James Franco, the first of what will hopefully be a long series of a retarded, deadpan webseries. Between this and Pineapple Express, I think I'm going to rather enjoy his return to comedy.

Here is the second installment, which is also very good.

How do I dodge a T-Rex?

4/28/2008 11:33:00 AM | Comments (0)

Weezer - Pork and Beans

Enjoy. CD-Rip.

4/25/2008 10:27:00 PM | Comments (0)

Like most other miracles, a proper WAMBAG.COM post requires a mixture of patience, purpose, planning, and also always just a little bit of plain old fashioned luck. You can't just snap your fingers and willy nilly, a post appears in thin air like that. No sir. Sometimes even if you have several threads up in the air ready to go, the bulk of the work is actually in arranging - or more accurately, coaxing - them into the perfect shape, like an orchestra conductor that directs all the different instruments on stage to speak out with a single voice, to sing and work together in beautiful harmony.

I can't just open up the Notes.txt file I have on my Desktop and just senselessly dump it out here on this space. That'd just be like crushing an egg into a handful of flour, cramming it into your mouth, and washing it down with two cups of milk. No, you bake that shit into a cake first, and then you sit down and enjoy it properly at a future point in time that calls for it. With a fork and a plate.

You can't rush genius.

- Probably the best news I've heard in like over 15 years...Golden Axe is back! I've been burned so many times with evil companies exploiting my childhood nostalgias (ie. I bought both covers for every issue of Dreamwave's first Transformers miniseries) but finally this time, it's for real! The original games on the Genesis were as whitebread hack and slash you could get, but therein lay its appeal. One of my Top 15 most cherished childhood activities was throwing my brother's/cousin's character at the enemies and stealing all the magic power-ups, even if I already had a full bar. And now a new installment's been announced, and the Wikipedia page is promising "dismemberments, decapitations and nudity" - this is a happy day for me. At least with Street Fighter 4 there was a chance, however small, that I could just be happy with the arcade port...but now, I have absolutely no choice, I have to get a PS3 now.

- Didn't we come up with this very same joke like three years ago with Sin City? Two ways to look at this - either we are prophetic futurists of comedy and have a reason to be proud of ourselves, or we are lazy s.o.b.'s that will never accomplish any of our life goals due to chronic and inoperable bouts of laziness. I don't know about you, but that's a win-win in my book. (Now that I have mentioned Sin City again, I am legally obligated, as per site policy, to post the link to the trailer.)

- One more Iron Man link. HE IS A DRUNK. IT IS FUNNY.

- Recently, with the baseball season starting up again (and more importantly, the fantasy baseball season as well), I seriously considered dropping $40 for a year long subscription to Baseball Prospectus so that I could check out their PECTOA projections and read their top prospect lists. Eventually, my shame and embarrassment won out, and I decided not to do it. There's no way anyone would ever find out, but if someone actually saw that $40 charge on my credit card statement, I honestly think I'd rather tell them it was for pornography rather than baseball. Especially if it were my parents; then maybe they'll stop thinking I was gay.

- I thought this was an oddly hilarious tragedy - a Brazilian priest was lifted up into the sky with hundreds of helium filled balloons this past Sunday...and has not been seen since. My initial reaction to reading the story was "...wow" and honestly, I'm not sure there's much else I can add on top of that.

- This is a video collage of pretty much every time that Dr. McCoy pronounced someone dead on the original Star Trek series. It's surprisingly even more entertaining than it sounds; apparently a lot of people died on that show. Similarly, here is the corresponding video of his other catchphrase.

- Gibler. I'm not even sure if I've posted this before or not...I need to do a better job of updating and using this Notes.txt file. I love the violent reactions from everyone, just in that "OH COME ON!" type of vein...I can't get enough of it.

"Are you saying that I'm too happy?"
"What - no! No, you - you are fine. Just...maybe...less with the cat stuff. Okay?"

4/23/2008 04:04:00 PM | Comments (0)

Meet Me In Iqaluit

Ready For The Floor - Hot Chip

A quick job update: The National Job Fair & Training Expo was in town a few days ago and I decided it would be wise to drop by and see what it was all about. The trip was both discouraging and productive. It always sucks to see a lot of cool job opportunities that you're not qualified for, but I did manage to pick up a lot of reading material and became aware of several opportunities for someone in my position. My position being that of someone with a decent education at a respected institute with NO practical skills. That always bugged me. I regret that I never picked up a trade of some kind. Like, why couldn't I have taken an interest in roofing when I was a kid? If I could go back in time and change one thing in my life, I'd convince myself to develop an interest in roofing. That would solve a lot of my problems.

I'm tempted to leave Toronto if that's possible. I know that moving would be a big commitment, but taking into account my recent wanderlust and witnessing Torontonians at their crude worst at the last couple of Jays games I've been to, I would really enjoy a change of scenery. Even if that means moving to Nunavut.

If you have even a passing interest in hip-hop, enjoy this Aries Spears' medley of rap impressions (including LL Cool J, Snoop Dogg, DMX and Jay-Z). It's one thing to do the voices, but to mimic their rhythm and phrases as well is just uncanny.

Also for those with a passing interest in hip-hop...about three years ago, William made a passing reference to Vanilla Ice's involvement in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret Of The Ooze without posting an actual link to the classic Robert Van Winkle clip. Since he wrote that before YouTube consumed society, he is excused. With that out of the way, here it is at last, Ninja Rap by Vanilla Ice.

It's a mess, aint it, sheriff?
If it ain't, it'll do 'til the mess gets here.

4/11/2008 03:25:00 PM | Comments (0)

I'm still goofing around with the site, as the new layout has been surprisingly difficult to wrangle down. I think I may have been too ambitious this time around, and I fear that my own hubris has victimized me. But rest assured that whenever it gets up, it will be glorious. The level of self indulgence this time...it's delicious. I guarantee you that you will be ashamed and embarrassed for me.

Here is a funny webcomic that has been amusing me for the last fifteen minutes: lol_comics. Apparently the gig is that they're all based on real events, which honestly doesn't require a significant suspension of disbelief to swallow.

Please, please, please, do not click the Not Safe For Work comic. I'm not even kidding. Not only is it not safe for work, it's not safe for home or anywhere else. It's just not safe, period.

I know you're going to click it anyway, but don't say I never warned you.

Saint Damien's beard!

4/10/2008 11:19:00 PM | Comments (0)

Here are some miscellaneous points of interest, in today's inappropriately named feature we (I) like to call Choking Yak's Provoking Facts.

- I assumed I had just missed it, but there was a reason why the Toronto Blue Jays' No. 1 fan was not shown on the big screen all game during the home opener against the Red Sox. Amersia Thompson passed away last winter, at the age of 38, from "pulmonary thromboembolism caused by deep vein thrombosis." She was at literally every single Blue Jays game I have ever been to, and they always put her up on the jumbotron; the last Friday was the first opener in 18 years without her. Over the last ten plus years, she became as much as a fixture of the team as their lack of a Major League level shortstop or dependable closer, or the inevitable third place finish. As odd as it seems, the first year we seemingly have all those issues solved is the first one without her. Really just a heartbreaking story, and another rare occasion in which I am reminded that I have actual human emotions. Finding and reading that article this morning really bummed me out.

Now I'm kinda worried that I didn't see that crazy black guy with the drumset outside of Gate 6 after the game either.

(Hard to acknowledge John McDonald's .270something OBP as anything near Major League level, but I got no problem if The Prime Minister of Defense starts as Doc's personal shortstop. Did you see that play yesterday in the 8th when he absolutely ROBBED Dustin Pedroia of a hit up the middle? No one else in baseball is making that play. And yes, I play softball, so I can make that statement without fear of contradiction.)

- Yankee Stadium traffic causes man to shoot himself in the head. That's distorting the actual story a bit, but it's still technically all correct. Though I like their headline better. You know, if Aaron Hill caught that Matsui grounder in the 7th on Opening Day to turn two after Posada was intentionally walked, A-Rod wouldn't have scored, and the game would still have been tied, and who knows what would have happened afterwards or when the game would have ended? So you could almost say that Aaron Hill took that gun, pointed it at that man's head, and pulled that trigger himself. So in a very real, literal way, you could say that Aaron Hill murdered a man in cold blood by not getting down quicker on that ball. Don't you ever mess up on another grounder when Doc's on the mound, you heartless butcher of men.

- One more baseball related link...some nerdy math professor has parsed a number of managerial related statistics into Chernoff faces. This is the type of story that's kinda neat so it'll make the rounds, but ultimately meaningless since these are irrelevant stats anyway, and not really subtle enough for Chernoff faces to be of any real use here outside of amusement. Though I am amused. It's fairly simple - for example, the Jays were 27th of 30 teams in total stolen bases and 24th of 30 in sacrifice hits last season, which were arbitrarily graphed as the height of eyes, curve of smile, and size of nose...so John Gibbon's Chernoff face is a neat contrast in Willie Randolph's (the Mets were 1st in stolen bases and 3rd in sacrifice hits). Though if we had Jose Reyes (an insane 78 steals in 2007) on our team and we played in the National League, we would probably have similar numbers too.

I also laughed at how much Ron Washington's face looked like a Gamorrean, and then I felt ashamed for even knowing what a Gamorrean was or how they looked like.

- Here's some quality misogynistic fun for everyone - The Problem With Women In The Workplace. Fairly long read, but good if you're ever really bored. And hate women. So for me...like, all the time.

- This is probably one of the cooler things I've seen lately - although you will only realize the full potential of its coolness if you're familiar with Valve's Portal (here is the relevant Penny Arcade strip for your reference, Jess). A street artist has put up one portal on Bloor, near Euclid...and the other over two kilometres away, on Yonge near Bloor. Check out the portals - you can actually see the stores on Yonge in the portal near Euclid, most notably the sign for Burgundy's Bat & Eatery in the second picture of the first link and the last picture of the second link. The guy responsible also once put up Mario blocks filled with dry leaves around the city, so cool beans to that.

- More Mario...found this off the homesite of the Metal Gear Awesome video that AL posted up recently...Asshole Mario. This is actually the second installment of the series, known in Japanese as Kaizo Mario. Here's the gist - some ass out there hacked the game and created near-impossible levels for Super Mario World, and then another ass downloaded them, played them, recorded the entire thing, and posted it on YouTube. And then the third ass (that would be myself) spends 15 minutes watching the second ass play each stage that the first ass made. This level's my favourite because of the insane stretch of flying fish near the end, but there's a whole bunch of them in the "Related Videos" section if you're so inclined. It picks up a little bit and the cuts are shorter and less annoying as it goes, but it's still absolutely retarded...and I still cannot stop watching. Reminds me of Shinobi - either the early Genesis versions of the game or even the PS2 one. Just excessively, assholeishly difficult...and just playing the levels borders on masochism, nevermind actually beating them. I wouldn't have minded if they had included the audio commentary as he played - it'd just be like a track of exasperated chuckles amid a chorus of "WHAT THE FUCK!" repeated over and over again.

- Ever since I watched The Departed (actually, not even - ever since I watched the trailer for the movie) I've always had this yearning to smash a glass into the side of someone's head. I imagine this whenever I leave my seat at work with my Cereality mug (which I don't remember where I got it from) to get water or coffee, and I'm walking those thirty steps with an empty mug in my hand. These days, I'm just praying for someone to cross my path and ask me if I'm pregnant.

- Every single Monday, on the way to and from basketball, I always pass Mingay Avenue off 16th. And every single time, I imagine if I actually lived on that street, and I imagine giving imaginary visitors directions to get to my imaginary house..."Just remember it's like gay...but like the minimum amount of gay. So like 'Mingay.'" Every single time. It's not even really that funny at all, but I will continue to make this joke endlessly to myself whenever I drive past Minway Avenue without realizing that I've already done it a dozen times before in the past and will continue to do so a dozen more times in the future. Also, I will no doubt forget about this immediately after pressing the "Publish Post" button and I will make the joke to myself again tonight when I pass it. I am doomed to repeat it forever.

There is no way this winter is EVER going to end as long as that groundhog keeps seeing his shadow. I don't see any way out of it. He's got to be stopped. And I have to stop him.

4/07/2008 04:13:00 PM | Comments (0)

Adventures In Solitude IV: The End Has No End

The End Has No End - The Strokes

My parents should be back sometime within the next 48 hours and I guess I should be wrapping things up here. This is the part where I tell you about how much I've learned and about the profound change I've gone through spending so much time on my own and about the eternal struggle between man and his own nature and how it can only end in one's own destruction...but that would all be a load of bullshit. Instead, I offer an amusing yarn.

In the last of my many firsts that I've inflicted upon myself over the last two weeks, I decided to fill up the gas all on my lonesome. It's not like I'd never done it before, I've usually been under some kind of supervision that's all. Now this scenario requires a little bit of visual explanation, so bare with me. As you all know, pumps are arranged in pairs and if you were to go to an empty lane you would pull ahead to the second pump so that someone could use the pump behind you. Simple, right? On this particular day, someone was indeed occupying the second pump so I pulled in behind him and began doing my business. As I finished up and got back in my vehicle, I hear the car behind me honk at me. At this point, the car that was at the pump ahead of me is long gone so I'm thinking that the person behind me thinks that I'm being inconsiderate for not using the second pump. Now I'm mad because I feel like the honker hasn't taken into account the situation that I drove into and is just being a jerk. So I pull ahead to avoid a confrontation and I get honked a second time. The fuck, right? Eventually I drive around to get a look at the person who was honking at me (this old black woman) and I just raise an eyebrow like "What do you want?" She points at me in a semi-accusatory, semi-??? manner. I drive off.

I don't make a habit of getting mad at strangers, but I was telling myself that I should have got out of the car and explained that I couldn't pull ahead and that she was being quite rude. Luckily, I was almost home and by then I'd gotten over the incident. Not worth having a heart attack over, I figured.

Fast forward to the next day. I'm still thinking about the encounter, but something else about it is bothering me. I was done with a desire for confrontation, now I just felt like I was forgetting something and it had something to do with the woman. She was honking...and pointing...but it wasn't malicious and she only began to do it after I'd already got...back...in the vehicle...! I rushed to my garage to check on the van and I realized exactly what the woman was trying to tell me. I had left the fuel cap off and the lid on the side was still open.

It never ends, my friends. It never, ever ends.

To follow up William's excellent April Fool's post yesterday, one of the best sports-related gags ever: The Curious Case Of Sidd Finch.

And just for fun, Charles Schultz' Watchmen. This made me smile.

We're very lucky in the sense that we've got two visionaries in the band.
Right.
David and Nigel are both like, uh, like poets you know like Shelley or Byron, or people like that. The two totally distinct types of visionaries, it's like fire and ice, basically, you see and I feel my role in the band, is to be kind of in the middle of that, kind of like lukewarm water, in a sense.

4/02/2008 11:35:00 PM | Comments (0)

So it turns out that I am not super awesome.

Just kidding, April Fool's! I am super awesome!

In honour of my hilarious joking, here are various April Fool's jokes from around the internet.

Some are clearly for fun, like Gmail's new Custom Time feature which allows you to change the time sent emails are labeled with. Also, YouTube is RickRolling anyone who clicks a featured video on the main page (the user is "YTRickRollsYou"), which is worth checking out because honestly...that song's fucking awesome. Google is also apparently able to search forward into the future...but apparently only in Australia.

ThinkGeek is having some fun too, which a whole bunch of fake merchandise available for purchase, including a Japanese urinating sim for the Wii called Super Pii Pii, complete with strap-on peripheral. My personal favourite is the Betamax to HD-DVD Converter though.

A new World of Warcraft class has been unveiled as well; the Bard, with some totally sweet, yet suspiciously familiar play mechanics. Blizzard's also introducing a new console game based on the popular dungeon raid destination Molten Core, featuring "glorious 192i resolution." High marks all around.

Capcom has also unveiled Sheng Long as a secret character in SFIV which sounds awesome and is completely believable...until you realize what day it is. This new game called 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand features 50 running around and cappin' niggas in the Middle East, which sounds like the funniest April Fool's joke ever...but the more I read about it the more it seems that this is an actual game. Which both horrifies and excites me at the same time.

These new X-Box 360 products kinda suck though, and it just seems like Microsoft's trying a bit too hard to get into this April Fool's thing. Not cool. And this new Pirates vs. Ninjas duel deck thing from Magic is about three years too late, also not cool.

Fun stuff.

We're no strangers to love
You know the rules and so do I

4/01/2008 03:11:00 PM | Comments (0)