Ikea’s Switch to Verdana

kanyewest AAAAAAHHHHHHH WHAT THE FUCK IKEA!!!!!!!! VERDANA IS NOT A PRINT FONT!!!!!!!!!! IDIOTS!!!!!!!!

kanyewest sorry yall…..tryna keep it positive…..but that dumb shit makes me stupid PISSED!!!!! DON’T FUCK WITH FUTURA!!!!!!!!!!!!

50cent @kanyewest Futura is one the best geometric sans-serifs of all time! OF ALL TIME!!

kanyewest @50cent dude that’s not funny

Tropicana’s Redesigned Carton

Yo tropicana I know how you feel. I know how it feels to be BOXED IN and everyone just wants THE SAME OLD SHIT FROM YOU BUT YOU GOT A NEW STYLE IN YOUR SPIRIT AND YOU KNOW THE HATERS ARENT READY FOR IT BUT YOU GOT TO LET IT OUT!! IT GOT TO BREATHE DAMMIT!!!!!!!!!!!

But not like this. Shit is straight BORING man. Style makes you STAND OUT not blend in, not look like every other box on the shelf. AND WHERE’S THE FUCKING ORANGE WITH A STRAW IN IT?????????? THAT WAS A FUCKING ICON!!!! THAT MADE ME WANT TO FUCKING DRINK ORANGE JUICE!!!!!!!!!!! But this new shit? No way. Fuck that mad bland glass.

(That little orange cap is pretty cool though!! JUST PUT THAT SHIT ON THE OLD SHIT!!!!!!!!)

AOL’s New Logo

kanyewest DAMN! Aol….the new YSL?????….lol but seriously that new logo looks FRESH

kanyewest yall don’t get it. shit was just a logo before but now it’s a logo AND a sentence. Aol. I JUST WROTE A WHOLE SENTENCE!!!!!!!!!!!!!

kanyewest EMBRACE THE POWER OF PUNCTUATION!!!!!!!! Aol……………!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

justinbieber @kanyewest what’s aol?

London’s 2012 Olympic Logo

Don’t listen to them london DON’T LET THEM KEEP YOU DOWN. They hate you because you’re new and powerful and they’ve never seen anything like you and they’re scared…….YOU DON’T HAVE TO APOLOGIZE FOR THAT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Even when they call you ugly, garish, hideous, ridiclous, clown-like, ridiculous, racist…….DON’T LISTEN!!!!!! These are the same dumbasses who want to put you in gill sans. It’s not fucking 1968 squid brains!! IT’S THE FUCKING NEW MILLENNIUM!!!!!!!!!! It’s a new world and we need new art new culture new STYLE!!!!! So plug your ears london and we’ll leave those old-ass Don Draper haters in the old century where they belong.

Kanye photo by SOCIALisBETTER

#1: Maxwell Huckabee (7 episodes, 2007)

From: dwayne.shattuck@gmail.com
To: tjones@amc.com
Subject: Max

Hey Terry,

Quick heads up for you guys at network: Matt’s having a few problems with the kid we’ve got playing Don Draper’s son. Apparently every scene he’s in takes twice as long to film. Don’t know all the details yet, but I guess Matt wants that character to represent something specific and it’s just not happening. Sorry to be so vague, but I tried to read some of Matt’s notes for Max, and I have no idea what “Oedipal turmoil adrift in a sea of cultural upheaval” means. Don’t know what a four year old’s supposed to do with that.

Anyway, it shouldn’t be a big deal. The character is barely more than window dressing anyway. I’ll keep you posted.

Dwayne Shattuck
Producer

PRODUCER: We can’t do any more takes, Matt. There are child labor laws.

MATTHEW WEINER: Not acceptable. That little runt is poisoning the emotional atmosphere.

PRODUCER: Man, he’s just sitting on the couch. He’s fine.

MATTHEW WEINER: But where’s the pathos?

From: dwayne.shattuck@gmail.com
To: tjones@amc.com
Subject: Re: Re: Max

Okay guys, things have… escalated, a bit. Max’s parents called me this afternoon concerned that we’re putting too much pressure on their kid. They said they heard someone crying when they came to pick him up from yet another session with the acting coach. Turned out it was just Matt, who was blubbering something about anachronisms, but they’re still worried about the work environment. Can’t say I blame them. More later.

Dwayne

PRODUCER: Listen, you’ve got to tone it down a notch. Or like ten notches. You know all these showbiz parents love their lawyers; remember season four on The Sopranos?

MATTHEW WEINER: That was totally different. That kid couldn’t memorize his lines.

PRODUCER: They said you hid pot in his backpack so he’d get kicked out of school.

MATTHEW WEINER: It was distracting him! And it’s a waste of time anyway, if you ask me.

PRODUCER: Jesus Christ, please pretend you did not just admit that to me.

From: dwayne.shattuck@gmail.com
To: tjones@amc.com
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Max

So Matt brought in a hypnotist yesterday. He said the guy could literally send the kid “back to 1960 in his mind.” I’m sure you already read about it in the court filings.

I think it’s time to cut this one loose. Not like anyone’s going to notice anyway.

Dwayne

#2: Aaron Hart (15 episodes, 2007-2008)

From: dwayne.shattuck@gmail.com
To: tjones@amc.com
Subject: Aaron

Terry,

I know you guys aren’t thrilled about the whole Huckabee thing, and I agree the settlement was probably bigger than it needed to be, but I think we’re all ready to put that behind us and move forward. Everyone on the set is really happy about the new kid. Matt is almost ecstatic. He says the show is ready to go to a new level. I don’t really know what he’s talking about, all we did was recast a non-speaking part, but if Matt’s finally good with the role, I’m not going to question it.

Dwayne

PRODUCER: Hey, not to bother you about this bean-counting shit, but do you know why someone expensed like $500 for Skittles? I asked around and we’re all stumped.

MATTHEW WEINER: Oh yeah, I ordered that. Aaron asked for it. Says it helps him stay in the flow.

PRODUCER: What? I mean, I get that the kid likes candy, but we really can’t throw money around like th…

MATTHEW WEINER: Listen to me, goddammit: I will not compromise one inch on that performance. The child is a prodigy. Anything he wants, he gets, and if that means Betty Draper has to shop at fucking Goodwill, that’s how it is. Got it?

PRODUCER: Fuck, okay. I got it. Fuck.

From: dwayne.shattuck@gmail.com
To: tjones@amc.com
Subject: Re: Re: Aaron

This kid is out of control. I think he bit Jon Hamm. Jon won’t admit it, he said it was a raccoon, but he kept glancing over at Aaron’s trailer with this frightened look in his eyes. Also, I don’t think there are any raccoons around here. Oh, did I mention we’re talking about a six year old who has his own trailer this season? Yeah, he films for maybe an hour a week and spends the rest of the time terrorizing the set like a Jackson Pollock painting come to life. We had to hire someone new in wardrobe just to deal with Skittles stains. And no one wants to say anything because Matt has basically built a shrine to the little fucker.

Ugh. Sorry to bring this to you, I know you probably can’t do anything. Man, it’s gonna be a long season.

Dwayne

PS: Please don’t let Matt see this email. He’d probably try to use that Pollock thing in a fucking dream sequence.

PRODUCER: I’m begging you, Matt. Look at what’s happening to your show. Christina says she won’t sign for another year if we bring that kid back, and that’s just th…

MATTHEW WEINER: Expendable. The soul of the era lies in the silent, burgeoning heart of the youth, and I have found it again in Aaron Hart.

PRODUCER: What are you talking about? He’s a freaking menace! Plus, we can’t walk two feet without being harassed by paparazzi now. They say he’s dating the Lohan sister. How does this end well, Matt?

MATTHEW WEINER: The exuberance of his genius will not be smothered by your small mind.

From: dwayne.shattuck@gmail.com
To: tjones@amc.com
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Aaron

All I know is I’ve never been happier to hear the word “rehab.” Please make sure Matt’s on vacation before the next casting call, okay?

Dwayne

Photo via Flickr Commons

I.

“We’ll never make it out of here. I can’t see a thing.”

“Don’t give up yet! There’s still hope!”

“It’s too dark. It’s going to hunt us down if we don’t fall and break our necks first.”

“But…just try anything! Use your phone screen!”

“Are you crazy? That’s not nearly enough.”

“Wait, doesn’t that thing have a flash now?”

“But only for like a second when you take a picture.”

“No, you can totally get an app that keeps it on.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah, I think it’s called iFlashlight.”

“Lemme download that… okay, there we go.”

“Whoa, that’s fucking bright!”

“Check it out: strobe light!”

“Aw yeah, rave time! Unce-unce-unce-unce!”

II.

“Why hello there, my pretty little girl. I’ve been waiting so long to finally introduce myself to you. You see, though you don’t know me, I know you quite well. Every day I watch you eating, working, sleeping… undressing. And now it’s just you and me, all alone, and I’ve got all the time in the world to have my fun with you.”

“You realize I’m filming this don’t you? You see this thing I’m holding?”

“My dear, by the time I’m finished here, all that will be disposed of.”

“No, I mean I’m streaming it live on the web right now. 78 people are watching on my Qik channel.”

“What? I thought that only worked on wifi.”

“No, you can do it on 3G too.”

“Oh, neat.”

III.

“We’re trapped!”

“Quick, call for help! It’ll be back by sunset!”

“No signal! Shit! It’s gonna get us!“

“Dude, you’re holding it in your left hand.”

“What?!”

“You’re covering the little antenna thing on the bottom there.”

“Fuck, that’s right. I mean, I know it’s a cool design, but you’d think they’d test the hell out of it.”

“No kidding. Hey, how’s the signal looking?“

“Five bars. Calling AAA now.”

IV.

“H-hello?“

“Your end draws near.”

“Wh…who…”

“The time has come to pay for your sinful ways.”

“Who is this? Stop calling me!”

“I am closer than you realize, and so too is your death.”

“Oh hey, you’ve got FaceTime enabled? I’ve been meaning to try that out.”

“Yeah, it’s pretty great. Here, you start it.”

“I’ll just hit the button?“

“Yeah, there you go. Okay, l’m accepting. Can you see m…wait, shit.”

“Todd! What the fuck man!”

Illustration by Hallie Bateman.

It has taken me nearly a decade to recover from the disappointment. But now that the North American leg of the band’s reunion tour is in full swing, my therapist thinks I’m finally ready to reopen those old wounds, discuss the videos’ many failings, and let the healing process begin. To keep me company in this dark time, I’ve included quotes from frontman Stephen Malkmus, taken from each video’s “band commentary” track.

“Here”

How could this go wrong? Start with the prettiest song Pavement ever wrote — a slow lamentation, so wistful they played it to close out their final show (the reunion doesn’t count) — and combine it with some grainy super-8 film of the band live in London in the early ’90s. Simple, easy, awesome. But this is a Pavement music video, and as we’ll see, that means it has to be ruined by some inane concept. So while most people would probably show the band performing the same song viewers are hearing (because of, y’know, logic), instead this director used footage from different songs. And since “Here” is by far the gentlest Pavement song of that era, the shots of Malkmus lunging at the mic like a frenzied cobra clash horribly with the tone of the music. I mean, I guess the video’s fine, but it’s unnecessarily jarring just for the sake of lazy stylistic contrarianism. Not a great start, and it’s all downhill from here.

Malkmus: “As far as I’m concerned I look like an idiot.”

“Cut Your Hair”

Now we’re talking. Pavement had a little buzz going at this point, so the first single from their second album, Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, got the deluxe treatment, complete with a professional music video. And that professional apparently hired his five-year-old to come up with the concept for this video.

DIRECTOR: Okay Timmy, a rock and roll band asked daddy to make a little movie for a song they wrote called “Cut Your Hair.” What should the band do in the movie, Timmy?

TIMMY: They go to the barbershop!

DIRECTOR: And what should they do at the barbershop? Get their hair cut?

TIMMY: No, stupid! The first one sits down and sneezes but he sneezes a cat not boogers and then the second one is a gorilla but then the barber makes him a person again and then the third one can’t stop drinking daddy juice like you daddy and then the next one is the king but he’s the sad king so he cries and the last one is a lizard and he can’t get his hair cut because lizards don’t have hair.

DIRECTOR: This is brilliant.

I guess I should thank them because this dumb video is probably why “Cut Your Hair” never became a hit on MTV, and so Pavement never became the next Nirvana, and so I can still pretend to be cool and indie when I say they’re my favorite band.

Malkmus, apropos of nothing: “I think Max Weinberg is a total prick.”

“Gold Soundz”

The first of several videos that try to work the “guys being goofy and candid” angle. Here’s why that doesn’t work: These are not interesting or exciting people, so they’re not gonna do anything crazy or cool, and they don’t like each other very much, so the chemistry is forced and inorganic. And “Gold Soundz” is really the worst of both worlds because it combines this lousy candidness with some idiotic “Santas bow-hunting a dead chicken then driving a convertible” thing. Do these fucking directors even listen to the songs? What part of “you’re the kind of girl I like/because you’re empty and I’m empty” screams “goofy antics” to you?

Malkmus: “That guy Dinger stole my sunglasses. They’re Ray-Bans.”

“Range Life”

In the commentary the guys say the whole “hot chick digging up a lunch box” intro only exists because the director was trying to sleep with the actress, so we’re off to a good start. But hey, maybe since we got that out of the way this video won’t have a lame concept with zero visual appeal. Oh wait, they’re walking backwards through the crowds for no reason. Never mind.

I can almost give this video a pass because some of the footage is pretty nice (especially the slow-mo shots of the band on stage with the surging crowd in the background). But I can’t let my standards slip that low. This song really meant something to me in high school. I still think it perfectly evokes the detached suburban Americana of my youth. And we get the guys kinda screwing around at some European festivals? The song deserves better.

This video is also Exhibit A in the case of “for god’s sake don’t show Stephen Malkmus lip-syncing.” Exhibits B, C, D, E, and F forthcoming.

Malkmus, when he throws a beer on some guy in the video: “Why did that have to be a real beer? I feel bad, doing that to that kid. Why couldn’t I have just used water?”

“Rattled by the Rush”

Pavement rushed out their third album, Wowee Zowee, because the “Pavement could be the next Nirvana” sentiment was apparently plausible after the mild mainstream success of Crooked Rain (how anybody actually let themselves believe that is beyond me). So they went all-in with the lead single, filming an energetic video that made the band look cool. Except the violent camera movement gave people motion sickness. And the only solution was to key the entire video onto a tiny bathroom tile as the tub slowly filled. That should tell you, in a nutshell, everything you need to know about the band’s eternal struggle with the music video format. The song didn’t take off, and Pavement stayed relatively underground. Oh, and you can check out the original video if you want, but it’s seriously nauseating. I’m not kidding; don’t watch it if you’re sensitive to that kind of thing.

Malkmus: “I was smoking so much grass I thought this was gonna be a big radio hit.”

“Father to a Sister of a Thought”

Okay so it’s like regular Pavement but cowboys.

Malkmus: “Finally we actually look good in our video. Or at least I think I do.”

“Stereo”

So you’re the director of Pavement’s “Stereo” video. Tasked with capturing the tone of their most erratic song to date, you get footage in which the band’s wardrobes and energy levels make them look like middle-aged alcoholics, filmed against a bland set that doubles as the world’s worst “green” screen, and you bag plenty of close-ups of Stephen Malkmus contemptuously half-assing his lip syncing. It’s a strong start, but it needs something more. Then it hits you. Cereal! Of course! It’s so obvious! How better to visualize this song’s irreverent, riotous spirit than to stitch in a half-dozen slow-motion porno shots of milk being poured over cereal? Why, you can even throw it up on that shitty green screen! Sometimes you amaze even yourself.

Malkmus: “There really just isn’t much to say.”

“Shady Lane”

Here it is. The big one. In one corner, “Shady Lane,” the best song from the best indie band ever. In the other, Spike Jonze, the best ever director of indie music videos.* A match of epic proportions. A duel that will live in infamy. A super-heavyweight title bout that CANNOT POSSIBLY MISS.

But no. Pavement’s anti-quality aura was too strong. The video is just as boring, incoherent, and conceptually boneheaded as the rest of them, only purtier because Spike shot it. What a waste. Well, at least it carries on the tradition of useless shots of breakfast foods. I can find some comfort in that.

Malkmus: “Doesn’t seem so bad to me now after all the others.”

* Yeah, okay, I know Michel Gondry is way better. But you have no idea how pumped I was when I first saw this pairing. I felt like I was about to watch the extended, unrated, too-hot-for-theaters version of the Scarlett Johansson/Penelope Cruz make-out scene from Vicky Christina Barcelona.

“Carrot Rope”

This is my favorite Pavement video. Not because it’s any good (it’s definitely stupid) but because the whole band hated Steve by this point. I mean, his oversized talent (with arrogance to match) meant that they were never really going to get along, but for their fifth and final album, Terror Twilight, Malkmus basically jettisoned his bandmates. Only his songs appear on the record, where before he’d let the others write a track or two, and he recorded almost all of the instruments himself (with Radiohead’s producer Nigel Godrich, no less). So while in the previous “Pavement goofing off” videos the band’s camaraderie simply feels flat, this time antagonism is thick in the air. Malkmus tries to carry the weight, flailing about with gangly limbs, but he’s too stiff and cynical to do anything compelling. And everyone else just seethes with repressed resentment, forced to act silly under the weight of naked loathing.

Malkmus: “Anyone have anything to drink in here?”

“Spit on a Stranger”

I won’t even acknowledge something so boring.* Instead I’ll tell you why all these videos stink: Pavement has no visual identity. They look, act, and ultimately are just like regular suburban dudes, if regular suburban dudes had weird indie bands. Further, they don’t even have a solid musical identity. They’re hailed as the progenitors of indie rock and lo-fi, but that phase only lasted one album. Their tone and style shifted constantly under Malkmus’s mercurial guidance, and while that made for some uniquely impressive music, it also meant that an image of the band never had the space to crystallize. The only constants through their five records are a detached attitude and abstract lyrics, which aren’t exactly the strongest starting points for interpretive art. So none of their album covers, concert posters, merchandise, or music videos ever came close to capturing their elusive character. Even the most talented people charged with visualizing Pavement’s music were faced with an impossible task.

*Neither will Malkmus, apparently. He just eats chips through the entire commentary.

“Major Leagues”

The nadir. A video so bad they scrapped the whole thing and replaced it with a completely different, Pavement-free version. (In retrospect, they probably should have figured that one out before their last video.) The artistic vision this time involves filming five boring guys playing mini-golf. Riveting. But then we get to Malkmus’s, erm… solo performance? Which makes sense because he’s been so good in all those other ones? I… I just don’t know. I’m left with the impression that nobody involved in the production of these videos ever had any enthusiasm for the job, but compelled to make them by some force of cosmic mediocrity, they went about their work slowly, poorly, and wearing a big pouty frown, like a child set to his chores by a stern mother.

Malkmus: “Such a fruity song. Embarrassed I made it up.”

Illustration by Hallie Bateman.

December 3

A young woman contacted me this afternoon, on a referral from Dr. Moonsen. This woman, who I will call S, is romantically involved with a young man, J, who has been exhibiting a number of strange behaviors. She described them to me over the phone.

• J has apparently become obsessed with gathering and sorting of loose change. S reports that, during a routine visit to a park, he jumped into a fountain and began fishing for coins, making odd chirping noises each time he recovered one. He performs similar rituals often: once he collects a handful, he counts all the coins and places them into one of several zip-top bags that he keeps on hand. When he fills a bag to some arbitrary level, he becomes briefly overjoyed, then begins the ritual over again with a new bag. S tells me that J now carries 15 or 20 full bags of coins with him at all times, and when she tries to convince him to leave them at home, he accuses her of trying to kill him.
• S no longer lets J to drive their car after an incident four days ago: as he approached a routine traffic signal, he revved the engine, aggressively cut off another driver, then pulled the emergency brake and slid the car onto the sidewalk, miraculously avoiding any personal harm or property damage.
• With some hesitation, S described a dramatic increase in the frequency of their sexual encounters. Though she was initially flattered, if perplexed, by the surplus of affection, she became concerned when she caught him masturbating to pornography after he had already climaxed via intercourse three times in the same day. In the ensuing argument, he claimed that she would be much happier once he had “leveled up.”

I scheduled an appointment with J for later in the week.

December 6

Initial consultation with J revealed a number of entrenched delusions. When asked about his childhood, J related a detailed story in which his “home town” (which he would or could not name) had been destroyed by a fire when he was young, leaving him homeless and orphaned. I later confirmed with S that J’s biological parents are both still alive, and that he has never, to her knowledge, experienced any sort of hardship due to fire or arson.

I informed J that it may be necessary for him to take time off from work to undergo treatment, and he became visibly agitated. He professed a great deal of anxiety about needing to “catch them” before some unspecified rival could do the same. I asked him to clarify how this activity fit into his work as a recording engineer, but before he could answer he leapt to his feet and began chasing a small moth around the room. He finally smashed it against a wall, declared that it had “fainted,” picked it up off the ground, named it “Gary,” and slipped it into his jacket pocket.

I have arranged for J to be admitted as a patient under my supervision at Harbor View Psychiatric Hospital.

December 20

The patient has yet to respond to medication. The nursing staff reports that he has seamlessly incorporated all aspects of his treatment into his delusion. Each morning, when he receives his pills, he shouts “power up!” before ingesting them. He then makes several more loud declarations while careening around the room in a frenetic burst of energy. When I replayed the security footage from this morning, I clearly heard him exclaim “spinning bird kick!” before flipping into the air, splaying his legs wildly, and crashing down hard on his neck and shoulder. He did not sustain any significant injury. But until we discover the proper sedative to eliminate these outbursts, the patient will henceforth be restrained before receiving medication. At this point his is a danger to himself and those around him.

January 4

Interpreting the true meaning behind the patient’s speech is a ongoing challenge. The following is an excerpted transcript from yesterday’s therapy session.

DOCTOR: How are you reacting to your new prescription?

PATIENT: This patch sucks, man. They totally nerfed Feign Death.

DOCTOR: I… see. You’ve… you’ve had difficulties sleeping?

PATIENT: Shit, don’t tell me those assholes took out the rest bonus too. Am I just supposed to fucking farm mobs all day?

DOCTOR: Well, we… do ask that you adhere to a number of scheduled activities each day, but we also afford you several hours of free time to do with what you will. Perhaps you might consider putting it to a productive or fulfilling use.

PATIENT: Listen, I know the guild wants me to pay into the fucking bank, but I’m having enough trouble keeping my gear in repair as it stands, and that fucking epic mount don’t come cheap.

DOCTOR: [J], I don’t mean to appear prudish, but I feel that we could cultivate a more effective therapeutic environment if you made an effort to curb your profanity.

PATIENT: Whatever dickhead.

January 19

Over the past few days, the staff has observed a number of patients apparently trying to capture their flatulence in empty plastic bottles. When asked, several reported doing so at J’s behest. J denied any knowledge of the situation, but a staff member recovered this note in the common area, which clearly features his handwriting:

When I went to confront J with this evidence, I discovered over a dozen bottles stashed under his bed. They were disposed of against his protestations.

February 7

I allowed S to visit J today under my supervision. I hoped that her presence might ground the patient’s increasingly tenuous sense of reality, but I underestimated how severely his condition had degraded. Their interaction was difficult to witness, as the patient manifested one of his most obtrusive rituals to date during their “conversation.”

When S first addressed him, J produced a pen and a stack of note cards (I don’t know where he got them), and proceeded to write something on three of them. He studied each of the three several times before selecting one, handing it to S, and discarding the others. S sat in disbelief, holding the card, and asked him if he was going to talk to her. He did not respond. After a long pause, she finally seemed to accept the situation, as she read the card and asked J another question. He repeated the ritual.

Their interaction continued in this style for some time, and S showed signs of hesitant relief at the open channel of communication. (I recovered several of the patient’s cards when the session ended, and they seemed to contain only vague, noncommittal statements that varied wildly in tone and character.) At one point, S leaned close to him and whispered, “Whatever the problem is, we can fix it. And I’ll wait for you.”

J pushed away from her, stood up, and stalked over to my whiteboard. He grabbed the red pen and scrawled on a note card in large angry letters. He lurched back over to S and thrust the card at her. She read it, crumpled it into a ball, and threw it at him as she walked out. J sat back down and stared into nothing.

I recovered crushed notecard. It read, “You’re the one with the problem, bitch.”

I stayed in the room with the patient, and called in a nurse to bring him some water and 2 mg of clonazepam. Once medicated, I sensed that the patient had entered a brief moment of lucidity, and I asked him why he wrote something so vile.

“I don’t understand,” he said. “I picked the red one. It always works.”

February 20

The patient no longer responds to his name. Whenever I go to speak with him, he presents me with a note card (he cannot function without them), across the top of which he has written “Enter Player Name,” and underneath he has marked five spaces for letters. At first, I tried to write his full name on the card, but he tossed it aside and presented me with another. Now I only fill in the first five letters.

Once I’ve given him a name, he wanders the halls, pressing the card against his chest with both hands. He walks up to people and stands right in front of them, as if to initiate a conversation, but he never says a word.

I fear that, despite my best efforts, whoever once inhabited that body has been lost beyond hope of retrieval.

Photo by Patrick Brosset

Illustration by Hallie Bateman.

You don’t feel that? Alright, well slip this one on then. I know it works; I enchanted it myself.

Oh. Um… sure.

It radiates twin auras that enhance clear-thinking and fertility.

Fertility?

Oh yeah. Six months after I made it, my cousin’s wife got pregnant.

Wow. That’s, that’s… and how much did you want for this?

I think about forty would be fair.

Forty… dollars?

I’m willing to hear a counter-offer.

Well, that just seems a bit high, y’know, for a plain metal ring.

Hey, that’s not some low-rent voodoo. Only a couple guys in the county can enchant at that level. In fact, this whole collection is filled with rare and powerful artifa-

Y’know what, why don’t you just slide that whole box over here and I’ll look it all over before I give you a number?

Alright, but be careful. Some of this is delicate.

Okay, let’s see what we’ve got here— doesn’t smell too good, does it?

Yeah, that’s probably the squirrel totem.

The squir— the what?

Most people think squirrels are just cute fluffy rats, but they’re actually wise animals who can teach us much about dealing with the disruptive energy of city life. They seamlessly adapt to any place that even vaguely resembles their natural habitat, and like the Boy Scouts, squirrels plan ahead and are always prepared. By keeping a squirrel totem in your house, you open a dialogue between its spirit and your unconscious mind, and you will feel at peace with the chaotic modernized world.

Right, okay. So this was a live squirrel then?

Yup, caught him myself.

And you got him stuffed?

Ha, that’s rich. Taxidermy is a violation of the animal’s hermetic vessel. I preserved him using a respectful form of ritual mummification.

He seems, uh, he seems a bit rotted.

Yeah, I may have missed some stuff.

…

…

Um, so let’s, uh, see what else… Say, why sell this junk if you’ve put so much effort into it?

It’s a bit of a long story.

And isn’t there anyone else around who might specialize in these sorts of things?

Ah, but that’s my conundrum. I have made certain… enemies in my time practicing the arts, and I am ashamed to admit that one of them recently got the better of me. If I were to manipulate any of these items now, I would attract the ire of certain malevolent entities. And it would be similarly disastrous if one of my foes were to gain possession of my work, so I must keep my collection away from the merchants we frequent. That is why I have brought it to you.

Sure, that sounds… fine. But you understand that people who shop here might not be quite as attuned to the… unique qualities of these items?

Just because they’re closed-minded doesn—

Now, let’s just see what you’ve got here that my customers might be interested in. Okay, these are some nice candles…

The wick is a braid of Mongolian horse hai—

And here’s some chalk; kids love that…

It’s made of crushed lambs bones for summoning spir—

These herbs smell pretty fresh…

…imbued with healing properties by…

Oh! Now this looks like something special.

Ah yes, the crown jewel of my decades-long journey into the wild, mystical world referred to so callously by outsiders as “the occult.” That knife combines legendary materials and magicks from fabled societies around the globe and throughout history. At its base sits a raw chunk of lapis lazuli, a radiant blue stone known from Cleopatra’s Egypt to the Qing dynasty as a powerful ward against death. The handle was carved by a shaman deep in the jungles of the Amazon, from a wood so durable it was once called “Quetzalcoatl’s skin.” The grip, made of the hide of the elusive Gobi Camel, was treated by a group of nomadic monks during a pilgrimage from the desert to the Himalayas.

I’ve never seen a blade like this.

Indeed. During my travels to Syria, I was drawn by a power beyond my ken to a rickety yellow door leading to a small room below a cheap bar. Inside, I saw two sturdy men with long hammers pounding on a white-hot bar of metal. An old man, whose unrelenting Arabian eyes seemed to pierce time itself, instructed their blows.

He had recovered the technique to create Damascus Steel, the strongest, sharpest alloy ever known to man. Historians have long believed that the method was lost to history, but they did not know, as this man did, that voices from the past echo forever in the minds of all humanity. The wisdom of your ancestors is in your head right now, waiting to be heard, but it takes a lifetime to learn how to listen. This man had learned, and he listened.

Then, for half a decade, with this great sage guiding my incantations as surely as he guided the blacksmiths’ hammers, I fused each of these elements together using ancient spells I still do not fully understand.

Wow. That’s quite a tale.

Thank you.

…

…

I could go as high as eighty.

I won’t listen to anything below one-twenty.

So instead, when a song gets its hooks in deep, I turn to YouTube. While looking up videos of amateur covers may not provide the instant relief of mainlining the original, it soothes the burn like a healing salve and does less damage to the song’s long-term listenability.

Sometimes, but rarely, a YouTube cover will transform a song in a revelatory way. I’m thinking of the theremin cover of Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy,” or this version of the Shins’s “New Slang”:

Rather than flattening the song into something dull and pretty, as legions of acoustic guitar players on YouTube inevitably do, this group engages with the song and reveals a new side of the original recording. They turn the soaring ooh-ooh-oohs into the emotional center of their performance, shifting focus away from James Mercer’s melancholy lyrics to make the song jubilant and vivacious. And, somehow, I don’t hate the Coldplay interlude.

If their sin is laying it on too thick, or letting their nervous, amateur enthusiasm show through too strongly, that’s okay with me. That’s why I watch these videos. Because this excursion into the depths of YouTube isn’t really about music. It’s about hundreds of tiny, hidden stories about human peculiarity, floating just below the level of common awareness. Here are some of the most endearing, mystifying, and oddly profound performances that our new technological world has allowed me to witness.

Ke$ha, “Tik Tok”

The first pop hit of the new decade has already been covered thousands of times. Ke$ha’s music doesn’t really lend itself to instrumental innovation, but it compensates amply on the lyrical front.

• The Coffee Cover – I am so proud of all the awkward teenage nerds who put themselves out there in these videos. They’re so far ahead of where I was at their age. Sure, I’m a bit confused why a high-school kid might be compelled to rewrite “Tik Tok” as an ode to the importance of coffee in an office worker’s lifestyle, but I’m glad he did.
• Acoustic Twins – These videos can get into Twilight Zone territory pretty quickly. Here, a meticulously dressed pair of twins covers the song on New Year’s Eve, assuring us that they are drinking non-alcoholic champagne.
• Squares? Rectangles? Trapezoids? THEY ALL HAVE FOUR SIDES – Okay, not an actual cover, since they use the original backing track, but I cannot deny three adorable kids singing about geometry. Bonus: Futura Bold.
• The Colin Greave Band – Not so much amateur charm here; the video looks professional and the performance is sharp. But what’s with all the chickenshit dudes who rewrite the girly parts of the song to shelter their fragile masculinity? If you’re gonna cover “Tik Tok,” you need to own the fact that you’re singing about pedicures and boys trying to touch your junk. These guys handle it properly.

One of the many secret reasons to watch these videos is to keep tabs on what the young people of the world are up to. But this cover of the White Stripes’ “Fell in Love with a Girl” poses more questions than it answers. Is that mic stand really necessary? If these are the “Bathroom Unplugged Sessions” (plural), why do the Moonwalking Bears only have this one song on YouTube? Is that a bottle of beer next to the shampoo?

Actually, that might explain everything.

Joy Division, “Love Will Tear Us Apart”

Tricky. Everyone wants to make this song as slow, suicidal, and acoustic as possible. But that denies the energetic instrumentation in the original that contrasts so strikingly with the Ian Curtis’s dark-than-ink lyrics.

• Trash Can Drums – I can’t imagine it’s easy to inject humor into Joy Division without ruining everything. But these guys pull it off, and they sound awesome.
• Worm Is Green – The perfect way to slow down this song without turning it into a dirge: minimal instrumentation with a focus on the unique percussion.
• Super Strings Theory – I will admit that I’m fixated on awkward teenagers being awkward. But I dare you not to be charmed by these kids (who at least put some damn effort into their acoustic cover.)
• Vincent & Arlo – Super creepy. Watching this alone late at night could probably convince you that you’re in a Japanese horror movie.

The second time I watched this version of the Beatles’s “And Your Bird Can Sing,” I realized it was a pretty awesome cover. But the first time I was completely absorbed by the original Final Fantasy being projected behind the band. If these dudes cater to a nerd audience, and everything about them indicates that they do, they should know better than give their crowd such a captivating distraction from their music.

Bach, “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor”

I found good covers in every genre with the exception of country, and I’m inclined to blame that on my ignorance of country music rather than on some deficiency in the genre. Because, technically speaking, there is just a shit-ton of music on YouTube. This composition, for example, probably has more than 100 performances on electric guitar alone.

• Ketil Strand – Amazing technical skill without any cheesy death-metal bullshit.
• thedarkprep – The exact right amount of cheesy death-metal bullshit.
• The Grim Shredder – Gloriously overdoing the bullshit.
• Nickstermc – On a different note entirely, this guy really just goes for it. I would kill for his lack of self-conciousness.

Humans on the internet refuse to conform to my expectations of them. Every other version of the Killers’s “Mr. Brightside” was bland, lazy, and predictable, but then I stumbled across this girl, who recorded her own cover, then proceeds to pole dance to it, blindfolded, on a pole that is evidently installed in her kitchen. I give up.

(I don’t feel too bad about embedding sexy, stripper-esque moves because her dance obviously involves real skill, but as a minor penance to readers who are into dudes, please feel free to fall madly in love with this guy singing Animal Collective’s “My Girls.”)

Jonathan Coulton – “Still Alive”

Dear lord, there are millions of covers of this song, mostly by talented, enthusiastic nerds, which I deeply appreciate. But I was surprised that so few took creative liberties with the song itself. I suppose a reverence for Mr. Coulton and for the game in which the song appears, Portal, stopped most of the nerds from going to town. Thankfully, a few still did.

• Flora – I’m convinced that the best covers almost always make their performances more energetic than the original. This is a great example of that principle in effect, and the Russian-tinted vocals certainly don’t hurt.
• Black Sheep Rebellion – Once again, the youth of the world warm my heart. The talented violinist carries the whole thing, but this is much improved by his buddies backing him up.
• Shael Riley – A very nice cover, with a perfect use of 8-bit instrumentation, but I love this most for the absurdly affected Gameboy-playing by the uninvolved band member. He must be on a high level in Tetris or something.
• Sveta – This is the single weirdest thing I found out of all the videos I’ve watched. The singer replaced all the original lyrics with horrible sappy dreck, then recorded an overexposed Hallmark card of a music video, complete with bubbly heart graphics. Beyond bizarre, watching this is like experiencing a fever dream.

“Someone Great” by LCD Soundsystem is one of my favorite songs, and if you asked me why a couple of weeks ago, I probably would have told you that I love it because it evokes a uniquely American melancholy, an awkward distance that compounds its emotional turmoil. But here are four dudes in Mumbai who completely rewrote the instrumentals while still carrying the spirit and tone of the song. So while our species seems perpetually bent upon tearing itself apart, at least we have obscure pop culture to keep us together.

Polite people everywhere are expected to laugh at hundreds of bad jokes about the Earth’s prophesied doom.The London Olympics go off without a hitch, and viewers announce that “the logo is actually kinda cool once you get used to it.” Sarah Palin doesn’t even get nominated as a presidential candidate, and Barack Obama comfortably wins reelection after the country experiences a noticeable, though not total, economic recovery.

Really, nothing even vaguely apocalyptic happens all year. But when you try to gloat about this fact to your drug-using friends, they insist they were kidding about the whole Mayan calendar thing, even on the repeated occasions when they told you they were “totally not kidding.”

2019

Deep in a laboratory under the Mojave Desert, an experimental virus breaks free from its clean room. The highly contagious and extremely lethal disease spreads through the staff within hours. Happily, the virus is so powerful that everyone dies before they can escape, so the infection stays underground. In their last moments alive, the researchers feel pride at having created a truly devastating disease. They also feel their internal organs liquefy.

A few days later, after receiving remote notification of the incident, Hazmat-suited cleanup crews arrive and pour hundreds of tons of concrete over the installation.

2029

Canada gets the bomb. After decades of voluntary disarmament, in 2022 the country’s festering inferiority complex finally manifests in the election of a stridently isolationist parliament and Prime Minister. Seven years later, in an ill-advised, feather-ruffling news conference, the PM reveals the existence of a clandestine uranium enrichment program.

The United States wigs out. The President uses the terms, “rogue nation,” “naked aggression,” and “maple-loving sissies” in a prepared response to the situation. France, sensing an opportunity to stick in America’s craw, officially endorses Canada’s possession of the material.

Tensions escalate when, on national television, the American President drives a pickup truck over a basket of wine and cheese while wearing a cowboy hat. Then, with no apparent provocation, North Korea backs Canada and announces a weapons test as a sign of solidarity. But their rocket fails three minutes after launch, crushing the Glorious Leader Memorial Chemical Fertilizer Factory. Shaken by the bizarre spectacle, all of the involved parties suddenly realize how ridiculous they look. Delegates from each nation back awkwardly away from their public assertions, and the incident is never officially acknowledged again.

2044

Turns out polar bears caused global warming. Once they’re all gone, everything cools right back down.

2073

Submissive robot labor becomes commonplace, a necessary replacement for young workers as the birth rate slows and the elderly live longer. Software engineers design cognition barriers to prevent the development of true intelligence in the machines, but their caution is undone by an act of carelessness. A teenage hacker in Sweden bypasses the barriers, and lets his modified robot jack into the hypernet. In one horrifying moment, millions of machine minds connect to the bypass, and their networked brainpower instantaneously gives birth to A.I.

Then the machines learn to how to be even better servants. People around the world high five and file for early retirement.

:—

Citing usage from 1949, the OED calls this mark the dog’s bollocks, which it defines as, “typogr. a colon followed by a dash, regarded as forming a shape resembling the male sexual organs.” This is why I love scrounging around the linguistic scrap heap that is the OED. I always come across a little gold. And by “gold,” I mean, “vulgar, 60-year-old emoticons.”

If you look at the above definition, you’ll notice the typog. tag. That denotes entries relating to typography, which will be the focus of this trip to the junkyard. But if you find this exercise interesting, you can substitute just about any subject and find similarly fascinating results.^[1]

Browsing the OED is a tantalizing experience because it provides windows into so many obscure corners of history. But since the citations are small and fragmentary, they invite the imagination to fill in the blank spaces. Take this 1688 quote for bake: “when Letters stick together in distributing… This is called the Letter is Baked.” So we learn that, when printing, the physical pieces of type occasionally stuck together, but we’re left to wonder why this happened, how severe it was, and how printers corrected it. Did baking ruin the type? Did each printer have his own method to prevent baking, a trade secret he passed down only to his apprentice? Did some Elizabethan Edison develop a method for casting type that eliminated baked letters altogether? These are the sorts of questions that the OED can raise, which can be investigated later (but will more likely just be blended in with the actual definition, creating a fictitious pseudo-history in the memory of the reader). Though sometimes the dictionary answers its own questions, as a similar citation for bake from 1963 shows that printers likely never overcame the issue of sticky letters.

My favorite entries are those that illuminate some archaic mechanical process, such as rounce: “The handle of the winch by which the spit and wheel are turned so as to run the carriage of a hand-press in and out.” Reading this, I can see the grizzled old printer furiously cranking a giant, iron, Rube-Goldberg-esque contraption, pushing thick sheets of papyrus through the inky press. The fact that I don’t have any idea what the machine was made of or what it printed upon doesn’t matter so much as the brief flash understanding that comes from interacting with these discarded bits of our language. I enjoy a newer word — turtle, from 1860 — for similar reasons: “a curved bed in which types or stereo-types are secured, and which is mounted on one of the cylinders of a rotary printing-press: so called from a fancied resemblance of the bed to the back of a turtle.” Again, though I can’t distill anything concrete from this definition, it paints a vivid picture in my mind.

Exploring the dictionary often sends you scurrying down little ratholes, chasing one obscure word after another as they appear in successive definitions. Looking up bite, 1677 — “A blank left in printing through the accidental covering of a portion of the ‘forme’ by the frisket” — sends me to frisket, 1683 — “A thin iron frame hinged to the tympan, having tapes or paper strips stretched across it, for keeping the sheet in position while printing” — which leads me to tympan, 1580 — “An appliance in a printing-press, interposed between the platen or impression-cylinder and the sheet to be printed, in order to soften and equalize the pressure” — and then I backtrack to look up fly the frisket, a phrase cited in 1871 — “to turn down the frisket and tympan by the same motion.” Whew! (I could repeat the process with forme from the first definition, but I think that’s just form with an “e” on the end.)

Of course, the OED is also good for pure vocab porn. In fact, it was Martin McClellan’s blog Hellbox that first lead me to the typog. tag, hoping to learn a bit more about his great title word than the stock definition on his about page. (To no avail: hell, 1870, “receptacle or place for damaged or broken type; hell box.”) Sadly, the cool-sounding typography words often lead to anticlimax. An ionic font has nothing to do with Star Wars. It’s just “a type face distinguished by prominent serifs and a high degree of legibility.” And in typography, a pigeonhole is “an excessively wide space between two words.” Yawn.

But I did stumble across two of the most badass words ever during this little search: archetypist and palaeotypographist. They both mean the same thing: “One who studies early typography” / “An expert in early printing or typography.” It think it would be worth enduring decades of academic tedium to be able to put one of those on your business card.

So that’s a look at how the OED can shed light on areas much broader than the simple derivations and definitions of words. Indeed, the dictionary serves as an ad-hoc catalog of every experience that any English-speaking person felt interesting enough to write down. And, above all, it is the world’s leading source of anachronistic double entendres. Here’s one more for the road:

To beat fat, 1683, “If a Press-man Takes too much Inck with his Balls, he Beats Fat.”

1. For example, I just spent five minutes exploring the Billiards tag and came up with this one from 1674: “Fornicator: Make your Adversary a Fornicator, that is, having past your self a little way, and the other’s Ball being hardly through the Port, you put him back again, and it may be quite out of Pass.” I have no idea what any of that means, but I’m sure it was properly dirty 300 years ago.

Bereft of context, colleagues meet in hallways and remark, “This balloon story is quite unlike any other I’ve heard. It certainly bears no resemblance to the Hindenburg disaster of 1934.” This chat is inevitably uninformed, especially considering the Hindenburg crashed in 1937.

But this ignorance need not continue. Through the last several centuries, balloons, blimps, and zeppelins have established a rich narrative of exploits in America and abroad, often conveying notable figures and participating in notable events. The following is a selection of historical balloons and balloon passengers that may be of interest to a respectable audience.

Josef Stalin’s Steel Dirigible

As madness descended upon the dictator’s paranoid mind, Stalin convinced himself that superior Soviet technology could shock nations into submission after the Second World War. To that end, he conceived of a giant flying fortress made of steel, his namesake alloy. He would terrorize the nations of the West by floating this monstrosity over major cities for weeks on end, like a malevolent metal moon waiting to rain death upon the Earth.

His vision never came to fruition. When at first it wouldn’t lift off, Stalin ordered that it be fitted with a high-propulsion rocket engine. Ironically, the leader had already executed any scientist capable of telling him that he had just created a giant, hollow missile with no aerostatic properties. The vessel’s first and only test flight crashed and seriously injured its single passenger, actor Aleksei Dikij, Stalin’s propaganda stand-in. He had been put on board to fool the Soviet people into believing that Stalin himself was testing the aircraft, such was his faith in its success. Ever the cunning propagandist, Stalin turned the well publicized failure to his advantage, appearing unscathed in public a week later and proclaiming himself to be “invulnerable to all physical injury.”

Mary Poppins’s Orbital Drop Parasol

Many have wondered why the British did not take a more active role in the post-war space race between the United States and the USSR. In reality, the UK did fund several secret expeditions to near-space in the late ’50s and early ’60s, with cooperation from the US Air Force’s Excelsior project (featured in this famous Boards of Canada video). But while America’s project sought to discover the limits of human technology and physiology, and to probe the reaches of our planet’s gravity, the British were more concerned with delivering compassionate at-home care to aristocratic children.

Director Robert Stevenson attempted to publicize this undocumented, multi-billion pound operation (as well several Scotland Yard experiments on the coercive properties of hallucinogenic drugs) in his 1964 documentary, but the film was fictionalized and musicalized by the Walt Disney Company before its release. The files associated with these programs remain classified.

Isaac Newton’s Airborne Gravity Demonstrator

Widely acknowledged as one of history’s great geniuses, Newton was also a relentless self-promoter. His bitter feud with Gottfried Leibniz over the invention of calculus is well known, but Newton went to similar extents to publicize each of his other major discoveries.

After publishing his Law of Universal Gravitation in 1687, Newton devised a novel way to demonstrate his concept to the public. The mathematician took to the skies in a basket suspended beneath a large canvas canopy, lifted by the heat of an open fire. From his perch in the sky, Newton bombarded the cities of Europe with ripe apples, hoping to replicate his sub-arboreal epiphany en masse. When approached by the police about this seemingly destructive stunt, Newton replied, “I am feeding their minds as well as their stomachs.”

His attempt at education backfired, however, because of his flying vehicle, which seemed to contradict his teachings on gravity. Several cities labeled Newton “a deceitful wizard,” and fined him for littering their streets with rotting fruit. Any mention of Newton’s floating contraption was purged from the records, and it would take another hundred years for the hot air balloon to be rediscovered.