The Baby Toupee

Buyer beware -- These are not toupees. They are wigs.

See, a wig gives you a hairstyle you wouldn't normally have. Toupees on the other hand are a device used to conceal pattern baldness. Of course, once an infant starts to get insecure about their declining youth and looks they're libel to spend any amount of money on all sorts of snake oil type cures.

It's a shame, really.

So until this company wises up and starts making products like "The Burt Reynolds" or "The Shatner", you're probably better off sticking with that spray-on hair that's been um.. working so well for you lately (no really, you can hardly tell).

Cassette Generator

Have a few fictitious band names floating around in your head? Use this to publish their first cassette. Finally, punk geniuses Team Anarchy can go bigtime.

Find the Bands

The images within this picture represent the names of 74 different bands, ranging from classics like The Rolling Stones to more recent fare like the Scissor Sisters (yes, those are both hints).

From what I can tell the original Virgin Records contest has come and gone, but the challenge still exists for music nerds and bored workers everywhere to test their mettle against what might be one of the most fun marketing ideas to come across the pond in recent memory.

Feel free to post your answers in the comments section, but hurry -- I'm already about halfway through it myself!

When Collective Knowledge Isnt Enough

Every wonder what it's like to have Tourettes syndrome?

This cheap gag might help.

Tralala

Girl group from Brooklyn. Boys play the instruments. S'fun.

Bribery (CONTEST)

It looks like this is going to be the biggest month ever for Highly Recommended, with about 700 unique visitors to the blog. Whee!

Comments have been few and far between, however. That may be because the blog sucked, but I'd prefer to think our readership is a shy lot. It's easier on my ego that way.

ANYway, we are not above bribery to get what we want, so the person with the best comments over the next week will win my copy of the new Tom Warnick CD I've been raving about. "Best" will be determined solely by Hex and me, no appeals allowed, we are the law. Given the rate of comments right now, you could win with one zinger or profound statement. Quality counts over quantity, but five good comments could win out over one stellar one. That's for US to decide. Contest runs for one week, to end at 12:01am EST October 2nd. Get crackin', kids!

IMPORTANT: Please note all comments in THIS post, so that we don't have to hunt through 237 posts to find your gem. You can wait 'til the end of the week if you like, just make sure before 10/2 that you post ONE comment here noting where we need to look to find your comments.

Gamma Bros.

Robotron meets Galaxian. Free.

For those of you born after 1980, it's a mad old school shooter.

For the hipsters out there, it's a vintage retro game by an indie publisher. Also worthwhile on the indie tip: Stick Arena. Now for the hipsters: get off my blog.

Least Competent Criminals

This is late night TV show fodder, which is normally beneath us, but it's too good to pass up. Some doofus with a GTA tatt was arrested for attempted GTA. He blew his getaway by putting the car owner's club onto the steering wheel and locking it. Read that last sentence a hundred times and it still will not make sense.

Updates

This site is the zeitgeist, because there have been new developments regarding our three most recent posts.

WTC
Asked about how they feel about being tenants in the Freedom Tower, government employees say "Oh hell no."

Go
Go is apparently more of a challenge for artificial intelligence than chess.

Tom Warnick
Tom Warnick, whose new CD is well worth your $10, has had some serious health problems. He may well address them in detail on his site at some point. It's my understanding that he's mending, slowly, and we wish him the best of luck on a full recovery.

Painting Invisible Targets

Ok, so we're rebuilding the WTC site. Fine. Naming it the Freedom Tower is a bit over the top, but whatever. Thing is, when you announce that the federal government is going to be the anchor tenant, aren't you kinda asking for it--and not just from foreign terrorists, but homegrown nutjobs as well? The only way it could be more of a dare at this point is if they rented the remaining floors to the Society for Taking Away Charleton Heston's Guns and Drawing Cartoons About Islam.

Extra Added Bonus: The gummint has contracted to rent said space at about 50% above market value. F you, taxpayers.

Go

Having discovered Go at the tender age of 36, I'm now annoying all my friends with this ancient Japanese board game. The rules take a little while to learn, but it's playable to infinity. If you can master the little Java tutorial linked in this post's title, then you're ready to go out and get stomped by Go masters from around the world. This server seems a little easier to use than the Yahoo! Games behemoth.

May I See Some ID?

I've Highly Recommended Tom Warnick before, but oddly, he's not yet bigger than American Idol as promoted by a planet-wide integrated mobile gaming/free dental dam giveaway marketing campaign. This, in spite of lyrics on the first album like "In the Duane Reade of Despair, I am the Chief Clerk." For those outside the Mid-Atlantic, Duane Reade is a big pharmaceutical chain like CVS or Walgreen's. C'mon, how can you not love that?

BUT NOW, the band has a new album out. How's this for a description: They Might Be Giants, after three lifetimes of hangovers and gambling debts, forcing them to sell their electronics and kill one of the Johns.

That's a good thing. Go. Listen.

Mel Gibson Newsgame

Dated, wrong, and funny.

Also, sponsored by The Game Show Network?

Astronauts

Say what you will about the space program, but the people who actually fly in the shuttle and get the work done in outer space are awesome. They are low-key, hypercompetent, passionate geeks, like Jack Bauer on quaaludes.

The latest shuttle mission involved undoing about a hundred bolts while wearing spacesuits. One of the bolts was simply stuck, endangering installation of a $372 million truss and solar array. After two spacewalkers completely kept their cool ("Son of a gun" was the worst expletive used), they used a wrench and a cheat bar to get it unscrewed. When it was all over, one of the crew inside Atlantis said:

“Now there was much rejoicing.”


I find it comforting that the best working scientists in the nation are Monty Python fans.

Remembering

Ok, first of all, I probably should just cease posting altogether, seeing as how Hex's find of Shoes is the funniest goddamn thing I've seen in ages.

Be that as it may, back here in the all-too-real world we've been assaulted by flag-waving 9/11 jive nonstop this week. I saw Bush's helicopter arrive Monday on a helipad near work, then had to listen to happy marching bands the rest of the day. Jarring stuff, all.

One of the largely-forgotten tidbits of 9/11 is that Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson came out shortly after the attacks and laid the blame squarely at the feet of New York City. That's right, our godless ways caused the Almighty to send Osama's minions to kill a bunch of us.

It turns out, though, that he was taken out of context. I just discovered this clarification today.

Shoes

What'd you expect, con-dams?

(these cuss words are three hundred dollars -- nsfw, betch)

Justice

There are disadvantages to living in New York City. Worse than the risk of any violent crime, driving, psychotically expensive rents, or having your death be the constant subject of Osama's wet dreams, is the noise. Now, there are hardcore assholes, mostly trust fund party kids, who will tell you that if it's too loud for you to just move out of the city. The rest of us have day jobs, and the constant aural assault makes earplugs one of the first things you buy after moving to Noo Yawk. Some people even wear earplugs on the subway, because the less of your day you spend exposed to jetplane decibel-levels, the better. No foolin', this city is LOUD, and it simply does not stop at any hour, unless it's just snowed on a holiday weekend. Any other time is a pellmell of buses, garbage trucks, car alarms, Mister Softee trucks (fuckers), boom cars, car services ringing the "Brooklyn Doorbell" (car horns), and worst of all: shout-outs in the street. Shout-outs are annoying enough in the middle of the day, but when two people are having a conversation at top volume from different sides of the street at 3am, the most kindly thought you have is calling the cops. The rest of your thoughts involve bloodletting.

Enter this. I'm not suggesting you use stainless steel shot, but frozen blueberries delivered via slingshot and laser sighting are completely appropriate for use on drunkards who don't understand how to leave a bar or club quietly. If you want to party down and make some noise, pay a cover charge and hit the party hiz-ouse of your choice. Otherwise, you are fair game for some blueberry-flavored justice.

I am the law.

The Tetran

Frequently when I watch anime I get the distinct sensation that my life is somehow incomplete because I am unable to spontaneously produce metaphoric droplets of water on my forehead whenever I feel exasperated.

In fact, it seems downright unfair to me that only pixie-voiced, giant-eyed schoolchildren get the opportunity to mingle with the undead, fight aliens, and have sex with tentacle plants.

Not that The Tetran solves any of these problems, mind you -- but there's something positively Miyazaki-an about the prospect having a small, spiny, neon-colored orb hanging somewhere on your body waiting for a chance to fulfill it's life's wish of wrapping itself up in the cord for your iPod earbuds.

My advice is to get yours now before Gwen Stefani
buys them all up and starts writing songs about them.

MySpace for the Granny Games set

This is a social networking site for casual gamers. Having no pictures is a bonus when your target demographic is not quite as comely as the Facebook legions.

Albert Lee

Best Country AND Western you'll hear all day.

Props to N'Drew for the find.

All-Time Top 100 Stars at the Box Office

A while back there was a buzz going on in Hollywood about how the success of The Incredibles was sure to help Samuel L. Jackson finally surpass Harrison Ford as the top grossing box-office star of all-time. And while it's not hard to fathom either of those two men being that successful, I found myself curious as to where these so-called rankings were being kept.

Enter "The Numbers", a movie-industry site that keeps tabs on just about everything connected with the silver screen. Most of the site is dedicated to measuring which film did the best over a given holiday weekend, or who had the biggest opening day -- but if you dig a little deeper you'll find a handful of lists that tell some pretty interesting stories about Hollywood and the people who work in it.

For example, while it's true that Samuel L. Jackson's movies have generated more revenue than Harrison Ford's, that still doesn't make him #1. That honor is held by Frank Welker, whose box office totals over the course of his career cash in at over $4 billon.

For those of you who might not be familiar, Frank Welker is a voice actor who has been working in animation and film since the early 1960's. Probably most recognizable as the voice of Freddy from the Scooby Doo series, Welker has lent his talents to more than 500 television and film projects, making him more like an institution than a star.

Of course, herein lies the basic problem with the list - the idea that anyone associated with a given movie can be given individual credit for it's financial success (which not only accounts for the prominence of voice actors in the list, but also helps to explain the respective statuses of people like John Ratzenburger, Kenny Baker, and Clint Howard).

Bottom line -- next time you catch your kid making funny cartoon voices instead of doing their homework, don't get mad

Get them an agent.

What Right-Wingers See When They Read The New York Times

All the news that's fit to squint at, and then some.