Questlove's remix of 50 years of live music performances on SNL

MUNI Simulation

AWESOME! From Germany: a computer game where you can drive MUNI buses, streetcars, and cable cars. Sadly, it's PC only. (hat tip: the N-Judah Chronicles)

Willkommen in SAN FRANCISCO, einer Metropolregion in Kalifornien an der Westküste der Vereinigten Staaten. Bewirb dich bei den öffentlichen Nahverkehr und nimm Platz hinter dem Steuer eines Omnibusses, Gelenkbusses, Trolleybusses, Cable Car oder ganz und gar der Straßenbahnen. Insgesamt stehen dir 16 hochdetaillierte und animierte Fahrzeuge zur Verfügung. Steuere diese durch die riesige, frei erkundbare Spielwelt. Entdecke dabei hunderte von typischen Straßenzügen mit ihren originalen Steigungen und Gefällen. Stelle dich den Aufgaben des Alltages eines Mitarbeiters des öffentlichen Nahverkehrs und nutze dabei die vielen Funktionen im Cockpit, um den Fahrplan pünktlich zu erfüllen. Achte dabei immer auf Tankanzeige und Zustand deines Busses. Übernimm Sonderaufgaben, um dein Taschengeld aufzufüllen und erwirtschafte dir die eine oder andere Belohnung.

Catalog Living

Photos from home furnishing catalogs.



Recaptioned.

The Most Incredible Miniature Pencil Art [20 pics]

The Most Incredible Miniature Pencil Art [20 pics]

Pixels, by Patrick Jean

Short film imagining what it would be like if the video games of 30 years ago attacked New York City.

San Francisco in Ruins (1906)

(Hat tip: @brainpicker)

Using kites, photographer George Lawrence snapped an aerial photo of San Francisco just six weeks after the 1906 earthquake. (Quite a feat, considering the handbuilt panoramic camera weighed 49 pounds!) The photo, “San Francisco in Ruins” is housed at the Library of Congress.



The USGS has a zoomable high resolution version here.

For comparison, here's a modern day photo of the SF skyline from close to the same location:
Scott Haefner's site.

A tax form for the marginally employed

Designer Sam Potts creates a tax form for freelancers for the NYT, including deductions for "Your food blog", "Your other food blog", and the "David Foster Wallace Memorial Deduction for Writers Who Use Footnotes."

Link

[Via Kottke]

Yatta!

Nine years old, this one.

Japanese parody of a boy band music video, that also managed to climb to #6 on the Japanese pop music charts. [Wikipedia link]



YouTube link

We've got recession these days,

In goverment we've no faith.

Could we hit "reset," that'd be number one!

And since we're all here, it's just so much fun!

For those interested in the English translation of the lyrics.

[Via @EffingBoring.]

Ben Folds Serenades Random Strangers via ChatRoulette

(hat tip to Fratelli Bologna)

ChatRoulette is a web site that randomly pairs people with webcams to each other. Want to chat to a complete stranger? OK!

Ben Folds, at a concert Saturday night in Charlotte, North Carolina, had his laptop and webcam open on his piano (and the screen projected so the audience could see it, so that he could serenade random strangers via ChatRoulette for 30 minutes. This clip is a 5 minute highlight reel.

Note: contains profanity.




Entitled "Ode to Merton," the piece is a tribute to "Merton," a ChatRoulette user who gained fame/notoriety a week ago for doing improv piano on ChatRoulette. (Merton's YouTube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/PianoChatImprov)

Jimmy Kimmel: Handsome Men's Club

I can't say I'm a Jimmy Kimmel fan... but when it comes to calling in favors to pull off a sketch, he's can get exactly who he needs in the room, from Ben Affleck to Lenny Kravitz.

70 Million by Hold Your Horses!

Art History fun: How many paintings can you recognize in this music video from the band Hold Your Horses?

70 Million de Hold Your Horses !
by logreproduction

Late to the Plants Vs. Zombies Party

Videogame composer and sound effects artist Laura Shigihara was wrapping up work on a cartoony tower defense title named Plants Vs. Zombies, in which a garden of plants defend a suburban house from a zombie invasion. She was struck with the idea for a J-Pop-style theme song to go along with the game.

The developer loved the song (because WHO WOULD NOT), and quickly put together a music video, which has garnered 1.7 million views on YouTube since it was posted last spring:



YouTube link

The song (available in both English and Japanese) has been on heavy rotation on my iPod since I discovered it a few weeks ago.

This week Plants Vs. Zombies (originally for Windows and Mac) came to the iPhone, and I decided to download and try it. It could very well be the title that turns me into one of these so-called “casual gamers”.

It. is. awesome.

Craig Ferguson on J.D. Salinger

(via Ken Tucker's TV Blog at EW)
From the January 28 edition of the The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson: host Craig Ferguson riffs on Catcher in the Rye --for pretty much the entire monologue... (starts at 2:30 into the clip)

East Bay snow

IMG_0482
Originally uploaded by EBRPD Public Affairs

I drove the kids past Lawrence Hall of Science on the way to school today... not our usual route. Much of the traffic coming down the hill the opposite direction had a dusting of white, frosty stuff on their roofs and sides of the windshield.

The snow level hit about one thousand feet last night-- LHS had a light dusting on its landscaping and parking lots, and the fairways at the golf course in Tilden park were covered, too.

East Bay Regional Park District's public affairs office has a whole bunch of photos in their Flickr stream showing a different look to their parks-- dusted with snow during last night.

And blogger Rebecca Bond captured some photos of this morning's "snow day" at Sibley Regional Preserve in Oakland: Flickr set link

The Constitution: God's Gift to America

Did not know that Jesus Christ authored the U.S. Constitution himself. That's how it appears, at least, in this painting which was passed around the internet this week.

Hover your mouse over the image to reveal details, including Ronald Reagan, Nathan Hale, a non-Christian immigrant (now seeing the light), a smug college professor holding Darwin's Origin of Species, Satan, and that most pernicious of Supreme Court decisions, Martin vs. Hunter's Lessee (1816).

What's not clear from the painting is whether Jesus is holding a copy of the Constitution that includes the 14th Amendment, or whether his version maintains that whole "three-fifths of a person" bit from Article I.

Of course the internet loves to eat itself, so now there's an alternate version of the painting with alternative captions.

Original:

Farmer
Truly the backbone of America.

Revised:

Farmer
The government pays him not to grow stuff. Is against government handouts.

[via Andrew Sullivan]

Berkeley Empties Its Dungeon

At last, Cardinal Biggles can no longer poke prisoners with the soft cushion. At least not in Berkeley.

(Article from my new favorite local news source, InBerkeley.)

The Genuine Article

I have this brother-in-law and sister-in-law, and the thing is, since they had a kid? They can never focus on the important things anymore. Like, when they lived in San Francisco? and they would watch the home shopping network in the middle of the night? and never buy anything?

God I miss those days.

Stunning San Francisco time-lapse

Photographer Ben Wiggins likes to shoot time-lapse videos of cloud formations with his digital SLR camera. He also likes to photograph the transition from day to night. After dark he likes to shoot the flow of traffic, the glint of moonlight off the fog, and the dance of airplanes landing on and leaving the runway--like tiny fireflies in rhythmic formation.

Here Wiggins stitches together several sequences he shot in and around San Francisco this summer. It's awesome.

Click the four-arrow icon in the lower right corner to watch this fullscreen.

Another Cloud Reel... from Delrious on Vimeo.

Wiggins has other videos from the Fourth of July, the San Mateo County Fair midway at night, and underwater.

[via Laughing Squid]

Guerilla graphic design: Cardon Copy

via Chris Jobs at Curbly

Graphic designer Cardon Webb takes flyers posted in the neighborhood. Re-designs them. Not just re-designs: admittedly, he hijacks the flyer and overwhelms the essential content with design.

Then he puts it back where he found it.

Essential content is lost in the translation.

But, oh, what fun for fans of design.

Cardon Copy

Catching Up With Auto-Tune

I was about to post the link to the latest edition of Auto-Tune the News (#8) to the new Twitter feed when I stopped to consider that many of the current readers of Blognabbit/Twignabbit may be a bit old/white/tired/busy to have much pop-cultural context.

When I confirmed that neither Christa nor Tim were familiar with the seven previous editions I knew I needed to write more than six words about it.

"Auto-Tune" is the brand name of a digital audio processing technology used to correct pitch (on vocals or instruments). Since its creation in the 1990s it's been used to subtly (and unsubtly) modify musical performances both in the studio and live on stage, by pushing tones forcibly into perfectly tuned pitch.

Cher's single "Believe" (1998) was the first American pop hit to use Auto-Tune as a conscious aesthetic effect, with the settings cranked into overdrive. Previous uses of the technology had worked to hide its presence. At its most extreme, Auto-Tune eliminates the voice's natural ability to glide between pitches, creating a synthetic stair-step effect. Cher and her producers took what had been considered a quirk and placed it into the foreground.

While I primarily associate Auto-Tune with the singing of The Backyardigans, anyone listening to Top 40 radio or music videos since 2007 (anyone? anyone?) would have heard and seen the rise of singer-producer T-Pain as the new king* of Auto-Tune, who has been popping up with hyper-processed backing vocals and refrains on hit after hit** on the R&B and hip-hop charts. While the technology was more than a decade old (and available to anyone with a Mac and Garageband), T-Pain brought a particular gift for Auto-Tuned lyrical hooks and melodies that have continued to keep him in high demand. His surge in popularity led to a revival of Auto-Tune among a variety of artists across multiple pop musical genres.

In June 2008 Sasha-Frere Jones was clueing in readers of The New Yorker to the reign of T-Pain. But by the beginning of 2009 T-Pain's ubiquity had started to become a punch line--one the singer was happy to play along with, kicking off Saturday Night Live's (i.e. The Lonely Island's) "I'm On a Boat" (clean or uncensored YouTube links) with his trademark call "Shawt-ay-ay!"***

This past spring saw the debut of "Auto-Tune the News", a loopy series of music videos applying Auto-Tune to political speeches and television talking heads. Ridiculous wigs, a gorilla costume, and low-tech greenscreen effects belie the creators' lyrical and musical dexterity, as they spin the words of Joe Biden, Newt Gingrich, Katie Couric (their favorite muse), and a variety of members of Congress into Auto-Tuned musical gold. (Interspersed with several "Shawt-ay-ays".)

Here's the 6th edition, featuring Anoka's own queen of darkness Michelle Bachman, plus Nancy Pelosi, minority leader John Boehner, Sarah Palin, and Jackson Family attorney Brian Oxman:



In June Jay-Z declared the "Death of Auto-Tune" with the lead single off his new album, criticizing other artists for "T-Painin' too much." But despite his seniority in the rap world (or perhaps because of it), his exhortation won't likely dim the use of the technology any time soon, if a quick listen across the top 40 charts in Pop, R&B, Country, and Hip-Hop offers any indication.

Which brings us to this week, and the release of Auto-Tune the News #8. The latest edition features none other than: T-Pain, who turns his appearance into a commercial for his other new release of the week: the "I Am T-Pain" iPhone app.

The app is a collaboration between T-Pain, Antares (the originators of the technology), and Smule--a top-notch iPhone developer that grew out of Stanford's electronic music performance department, making it no mere novelty. For $2.99 you can download a mobile version of Auto-Tune with which you use your iPhone/iPod for on-demand vocal processing.

And by branding it as a T-Pain experience (with the app's name and icon), the "king" keeps his name synonymous with the technology, even if its only use is to goof off with your buddies while you're waiting in line for a movie (the app also makes it easy to share via MySpace and Facebook).

Within a couple of days the application reached the #1 spot among paid apps in iTunes. Meaning that Jay-Z's proclamation notwithstanding, it remains T-Pain's world. We just sing "Shawt-ay-ay" in it.

Here's a playlist of all of the Auto-Tune the News videos, in sequential order. It'll take a good half hour if you want to watch them straight through. (YouTube link):



And I'm assuming you've seen "I'm On a Boat", right? Because that thing gets funnier every time you watch it. (clean or uncensored)

Here's T-Pain's website, YouTube channel, and Twitter feed.

And if you're not sick of it by now, here's another funny internet video positing the use of Auto-Tune in the workplace.



===========================

*Given the outfits and antics he often displays in music videos, T-Pain could as easily be described by overeducated postgrads as the clown prince--or even mascot--of Auto-Tune.

**"Good Life" with Kanye West (winner of the 2008 Grammy for Best Rap Song), "Kiss Kiss" with Chris Brown (prior to Brown's domestic violence conviction), "Low" with Flo Rida (a favorite on the Ellen show), plus tons more. You can check out iTunes' "Essentials" list of the top T-Pain tracks for sale.

***An Auto-Tuned pronunciation of "Shawty", itself a variant of "Shorty", the 00s alternate for "Girl".