Gobacken Sidonna

Five unrelated photos.

One: A Complex magazine cover rendered awkward by the fact that it was already sitting on store shelves the day Michael Jackson died. Jonah Hill probably blames himself. I do, anyway.

Two: Newly emptied shelf space — and not the first time such an occurrence has been noted on this blog.

Three: Inexplicable graffiti in a Ventura gas station bathroom.

Four: A co-worker’s vehicle, dust tagged in her honor.

Five: A copy of a Jimmy Buffet record, A White Sport Coat and a Pink Crustacean, deservedly set beside my apartment building’s dumpster.

Radio Jacko

Long story short: I went to Bakersfield for the first time, then went to Kernville for the first time, then went to Tulare County for the first time and finally rafted for the first time. This is what I consider an acceptable effort for my brother's thirtieth birthday.

However, I feel I must note now how I amused myself during my trip from Santa Barbara to Bakersfield. I forgot my iPod at home and had only my iPhone and the twenty or so songs I've loaded onto it to help me get through my work day. They don't make for good car music so I did something even braver than driving to Bakersfield: listening to the radio in Bakersfield. I picked a good day to attempt this, it turns out, because nearly every station was paying tribute to Michael Jackson. I got to play a fun game where I'd scan the dial for the next hit and see how long it would take between one and the other. Over the course of the trip, I heard "Thriller" twice in its entirety. I heard "Smooth Criminal" four times. I even heard "Beat It" in its regular English version but played on a Spanish station.

Very strange. Will never happen again.

And Then Work Stopped

And then all talk about Farrah Fawcett ceased and no one would ever mention her again without noting that, at the end of the story, her death was completely overshadowed by the apparent death of Michael Jackson. And that’s even if MJ turns out to still be alive.

Somewhere in South Carolina, Mike Sanford is fist-pumping and saying “YES! YES!”

Legend of Cloudbush

After years of following video game blogs — sometimes diligently, sometimes hardly at all — I decided to check out for myself the oft-referenced NegGAF, a site from which much breaking game news gets leaked. While there, I found a message board thread dedicated to strange factoids that would “blow your mind.” It’s essentially a list of random bits of information that, had they been posted on Back of the Cereal Box, would have fallen under the “pop culture minutia” post tag, some of them gaming related, some not. What I’m reporting below represents the most interesting of them.

First off, the bushes that appear in the backgrounds in the original Super Mario Bros. are just recolored clouds. I literally played through these game at least a hundred times when I was a kid and never noticed.


In the FedEx logo, there's a perfect right-pointing arrow in the negative space between the "e" and the "x." Never noticed it before. Now I can't not notice it.


In addition of looking like a baseball mitt, the Milwaukee Brewers logo also contains an "m" and a "b."


In the original Legend of Zelda, the eight dungeons fit together in a sort of interlocking puzzle piece- or quilt-like fashion, save for a few blank spots, though this apparently results more from memory constraints than any desire on the part of the programmers to hide something neat.


As explained in this non-embeddable YouTube video, Michael Jackson was allegedly employed by Sega to write music for Sonic the Hedgehog 3, but that eventually fell through. Nonetheless, a lot of the tracks in the game bear strong resemblance to "Jam," "Stranger in Moscow" and "Who Is It?" It's even more remarkable when you consider that Jackson had previously collaborated with Sega for the video game Moonwalker, which itself featured blippy, video game versions of his actual music.

On that subject, someone also pointed out that the beginning too the music from the Elec Man stage in Mega Man sounds suspiciously like the beginning to Journey's "Faithfully." Evidence:

In concept and basic aesthetic, at least, Nintendo's Animal Crossing games are reminiscent of the Lego offshoot Fabuland, sets of which I actually owned as a kid and which I'd entirely forgotten until stumbling onto this thread.



The logo for the 2012 London Olympics, as a few people have already noted, kind of looks like an abstracted, pink Lisa Simpson giving a similar pink and abstracted gentleman a sexual favor. What was passed over in favor of this atrocity was a rather cool ambigram logo shown below.

the bad, chosen logo

what could have been

That’s it, more or less. The rest seems to revolve around bickering over whether the Star Fox character Krystal implies Nintendo’s endorsement of furryism. Alls I know is that foxes shouldn’t sit like that. It’s improper.

Shear His Hair

George has a post up about Harry "Without Me 'The Simpsons' Could Not Exist" Shearer's apppearance last Sunday at Campbell Hall, in which he notes an interesting tidbit Shearer let slip regarding the "John Jay Smith" episode, in which Homer befriends a mental patient Leon Kompowski. I quote:

Then he told about the time Michael Jackson was the guest artist (yes, MJ really did do the voice in that episode about the 300 pound white man from the asylum who thought he was Michael Jackson). When it's time to record the show, Jackson does all the speaking parts, but when it comes time to sing a song ("Happy Birthday, Lisa" a take-off of "Ben"), some white guy at the table sings. Shearer leans over to Yeardley Smith (the voice talent for Lisa) and says, "I guess we paid enough for the talking Michael and not the singing Michael."

And I thought that was cool.