The Cretaceous Express

I would once again like to retract my previous statement – the whole Kanye thing once again became completely incapable of soliciting even a mild emotion of joy from me only moments after I had posted those links. The hilarity vanished with the same sudden speed with which it arrived with. Things move much quicker than they used to now in the Internet Age.

– New Zealand’s fourth most popular guitar-based digi-bongo acapella-rap-funk-comedy folk duo dropped this interesting piece of news during a red carpet interview for the Emmys, saying that there were going to be three Flight of the Conchord songs in Rock Band. The problem with big deadpan guys like this is that you can never really tell if they’re serious about anything…who knows whether or not that’s actually true. However this does give you the opportunity now – even hypothetically – to speculate on what the three songs actually are. Also, that video does a great job of reminding you of how vapid, phony, and unfunny entertainment reporters are. LOOK I HAVE TWO MICS LOL LOL – man, go fuck yourself.

I wonder if the prospect of playing Business Time would entice me to go back to Rock Band?

…probably not.

– What great classic does this trailer for Soloman Kane remind you of? Get hype!

– This is the latest bit from a New York Times blog called Abstract City. I don’t know if it’s just this weird graphical flowchart thing I’ve been for the last while, but I find these pretty amusing.

There’s also this bit about his kids’ obsession with the New York subway system, which lends credence to the theory that all kids are either crazy about dinosaurs or trains. I think there’s just something about the left-brained rigidness of the order and logic to trains that appeals to some kids, like how they follow set defined schedules and tracks that they never deviate from. They don’t fly around like rockets and there’s no sense of excitement or discovery with trains – wherever they go, people (Asian railroad workers) have already been there to build the tracks. Some carry coal…some carry wood. Some are blue…some are green. You know exactly where you stand with trains. They represent logic, order, and structure in the minds of children – these kids grow up to be accountants, lawyers, engineers, computer programmers.

This is in stark contrast to dinosaurs, which are considerably more right-brain leaning – no one knows exactly how many different sizes and shapes of dinosaurs there were, no one knows what happened to them, and it takes no small amount of imagination or suspension of disbelief to buy into them as much as some kids do. Some fly, some swim, some run around on two legs, some run around on four. Dinosaurs represent pure imagination in the minds of children – these kids grow up to be artists, hippies, useless liberal arts majors, and computer programmers that hate their jobs.

The thinking was that you were either one or the other, and never the two shall meet.

Or at least that was the world before Dinosaur Train. Part of me cannot help but admire the sheer ambition that drove this wacky idea. I mean in theory, if you somehow manage to make a show that appeals to the train loving demographic and the dinosaur loving demographic, you’ll automatically have 100% of the kids aged three to eight demographic. However, the conservative side of me (the side of me that hates putting fruit in cereal, speeding on the highway, and wants Hollywood to stop turning 80’s cartoon properties into movies) opposes this unholy union. Dinosaurs and trains must remain separate. Who knows how kids who grow up on a steady diet of trains and dinosaurs will turn out? Will they receive equal levels of intellectual stimulation in both hemispheres of their brain, and grow up to be humankind’s next evolutionary step forward, the advanced supermen that will eventually inherit this world from us in blood soaked and semen stained battle? Or will the reverse happen and the next generation of children have their growth stunted by forcing too many conflicting and opposing concepts pushed on them at the same time, too much too quickly? What if man was only meant to grow up liking only one of dinosaurs or trains, and not both? God help us, this world will not survive another Yu-Gi-Oh generation.

– The ending and credits of Saving Private Ryan, as presented by Picnicface.

Can I please have a look at the lyrics?

This is another one of your weird songs, man.