Mouse & the Billionaire

May
200626

Getting Ripped Off

Let's say you bought a computer off of ebay.

And let's say that you payed for it in a timely matter, but the guy you bought it from took more than 2 months to ship it to you.

And let's also say that, when you received the computer, it didn't work.

What would you do?

Well...

It happened to this guy, and he hacked in to the hard drive and posted all of the seller's embarassing photos, passport, etc on the internet.

May
200624

Bad Vibes

Blender features the 50 worst songs ever.

I thought it was interesting that these are some of the most widely-played, catchy and recognizable songs of the last 30 years. I also thought it would be interesting to play a game with them. So here we go.

I'll copy down a line of Blender's commentary on the song, and you try to guess which song it is.

Never has a song about all-consuming love sounded so trivial and been so inescapable.

answer
It sucked the Swing out of New Jack, bleached the Blues out of Rhythm &, and featured white boys calling themselves “funky” despite some very unfunky denim vests.

answer
This epic chunk of histrionics’ worst offense is that it doesn’t make any sense. You wouldn’t do what, exactly? It’s OK for rock songs to be dumb. But not stupid.

answer
The lyrics sound like a vicious parody of a pompous and pretentious mid-’60s folk singer. But it’s no joke - The overall experience is like being lectured on the meaning of life by a jumped-up freshman.

answer
Long before Ricky Martin lived la vida loca, another fleet-footed, sexually ambiguous Latino star crossed over to pop-chart glory by turning an otherwise forgettable dance-pop tune into a ubiquitous and dreaded catchphrase.

answer
Brilliant idea: Take a child’s toy, turn it into a twisted sexual fantasy

answer
His voice is a ludicrously bassy croak as he narrates supposed “slice-of-life” stories that land with a dull thud.

answer
Ohhh,” the women of the world sigh, “why can’t I just find a nice guy — you know, someone who’ll compare my breasts to a theme park?” Yearn no more, ladies!

answer
Bombastic? Lugubrious? Sounds like it was recorded in a large metal shipping container and mixed by drunks? It must be...

answer
With its riff repeated long past endurance, dopey lyrics and abominable vocal scatting, it could only have been the work of scrabbly beared, questionably hatted, red-eyed stoners staggering out of the rehearsal room convinced they have discovered the missing link between grunge, the Grateful Dead and Jamiroquai — blissfully unaware that no one in his right mind was looking for that in the first place.

answer
To grunge what “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing” was to the Woodstock Generation Whenever a new genre comes along, one thing is guaranteed: Sooner or later someone will reduce its values to platitudes, then set them to music so trite you could use it to sell soft drinks.

answer
ike a support group crammed into a pop ditty, this theme song–turned–radio hit is crushingly sunny, cheaply “empathetic” and unsparingly upbeat.

answer
Now, it might seem like a cruel satire: Leather-suited comedian teams up with Jheri-curled Superfreak to craft hit record. But no —.

answer
Just as there are few things more depressing than being told to cheer up, it’s difficult to think of a song more likely to plunge you into suicidal despondency than this.

answer
Less a song than a craven attempt to curry favor from drunken arena crowds trained to roar on cue when they hear their city’s name mentioned.

answer
Making fellow early-’90s pop-rap pioneer MC Hammer look cutting-edge by comparison.

answer
Represented every prejudice non-believers have about country: It was trite, it was inane, it was big in trailer parks and it was thoroughly enjoyed by the obese..

answer
It’s primarily annoying because it’s a four-minute intro with no song attached. When the booming drums finally kick in, they announce the arrival not of a fantastic chorus or an epic finale, but the greatest anticlimax in pop, featuring what can only be described as a synth bass solo.

answer
And you thought the Cubs were the biggest losers in this town? Wrong!

answer
They might as well have just pissed in Brian’s sandbox.

answer

So, how'd you do? How many of the songs can you sing word for word? How many did (or more frightenly, perhaps, do) you own?

May
200619

The Most Akward Conversaton Ever

Moviefone.com is featuring an interview between two of the stars of the new film Over the Hedge, Avril Lavigne and William Shatner

A match made in comedy heaven and inteligence hell.

May
200619

So Many Things About This Confuse Me

May
200618

The Language of Lola

If Lola (once little, and now not so little, black kitty) and Moe Berg (baseball player, lingust, spy, and subject of The Catcher was a Spy) were somehow merged into one being, it would be named Mew Berg and it could speak to kitties in every country of the world.

Here's a cheat sheet for the rest of us via (boingboing)

Danish: miav
Dutch: miauw
English: meow
Finnish: miau
French: miaou
German: miau
Greek: miaou
Hebrew: miyau
Hungarian: miau
Italian: miau
Japanese: nyan nyan/nyaa nyaa
Russian: miyau
Spanish: miao
Swedish: mjan mjan
Turkish: miyav
Urdu: meow

May
200616

Let's Get Tanned

The Slate podcast for May 14th had some interesting facts about tanning. Here are a few, for your reading pleasure:

1 in 4 teenage girls have used an indoor tanning booth at least 3 times
Half of all girls 18 to 19 have used one as many times
Ultraviolet Radiation is a classified carcinogen
The Journel of the American Academy or Dermatology says frequent tanning is driven by an opiate dependente mechanism
Last year, 1 in every 3 salons deny that tanning causes cancer or ages skin

All that to say... I got a wicked cool farmer-style sunburn on Saturday.

May
200616

Radio de Cebolla

The Onion radio reports B52s Singer Fred Schneider Delivers Jarring Commencement Speech

May
200615

Mixers

Last year's backlog of mix tapes are almost all done. Check out February through April, 2005 now.

May
200612

To The Lunch Thief:

Someone posted this on the fridge at my work.

May
200612

O'Brien, Don't Read This

Rumor has it, two weeks from now, Mischa Barton's character on Fox's The O.C will be killed off.

Now, some people have suggested death by drug overdose. Clearly, possibe, but I think it's more likely she just vanishes from lack of eating. Gets thinner and thinner until she becomes two-dimensional. Now there's a brilliant way to write off a character.

Never been done before.

She's still there, but too small to see.

Someone should do some screen tests on crowd reaction to this. Could be big.

As for the future of The O.C., no word yet if she comes back from the dead to visit Haley Joel Osment.

Via

May
200611

This Guy's Got Billy Beat

Believe it or not, Johnny Lechner from Wisconsin has been in college for 12 years. He should have graduated this month but decided that he really wanted to study abroad.

From AOL News.

And so, the 29-year-old perpetual student who was expected to finally graduate from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater withdrew his application for graduation Monday, five days before commencement.

By this spring he had completed 234 college credits, or about 100 more than needed to graduate, and was taking seven more.

Like every aspiring young student, he also has a music career.

Check out all this and more on his official web site

Hmmm.

I wonder if any of the other kids think he's a "bogey?"

"It's getting old," [newspaper editor Michelle Eigenberger] said. "For the sanity of the rest of the campus, we want him to get out of here."

Well, college is fun and all, but he realy needs to get that diploma done. Let's all hope he can buckle down and finish 'er off.

May
200610

Ba-Buh.... Ba-Buh .....Ba-Buh

We talked about this on Sunday night, and on Monday it happened.

24 is now available at the iTunes music store.

Looks like Gloyd just lost his weeknights

May
200609

Somewhere Outisde Yosemite

May
200603

The Mod Squad

Recently, we got involved with modifying old keyboards. We've got a few projects going, but none of them are any where near as cool as Michael Stein's beautiful white hacked SK1.

Interestingly enough, this is somewhat what we've got in store for the lavender PT1 we bought on ebay.... Maybe we'll need to implement some sweet airbrushing or something, to up the ante.

May
200602

New Mixtape

We've been lagging. We've been busy. And we've neglected our mixtape duties. We almost didn't even put the March mixtape up at all, but it's so damn good we couldn't wait to share it with you. We hope you like it.

And, to make up for it, we're hoping to have the new official Mouse & the Mixtape website up soon, featuring streaming mixtapes for your listening pleasure.

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