Friday night infodump of all the links I want to keep out of the papers.

* SciFiWire says the new Prisoner disappoints.
* Salon says it's time to bring back Marx. He went somewhere?
* NASA says that explosion last month turned up quite a bit of water on the Moon.
* Jermaine Clement says Flight of the Conchords was almost completely different—but it seems clear to me he's joking.
* And the RNC says it's not subsidizing abortions—anymore.

Flight of the Conchords decides one season too late to go out on top. (via) (more)

HBO has apparently decided Flight of the Conchords was so great they might as well make it again, this time about the young Rolling Stones.

Can we talk for a second about how awful Flight of the Conchords is this season? I knew they'd used up most of their song catalog, so I figured the quality would dip, but it's much worse than I'd expected. Most of the songs are just the same lyric sung over and over again. Why'd they ever agree to tank their brand like this?

UPDATE: In FotC's defense, it must be acknowledged that they are clearly aware of this problem.



"That's brand new."

Nevertheless, metajokes about sucking don't excuse sucking.

A red-letter day for the entire human race: the second season premiere of Flight of the Conchords is online at Funny or Die.

Season 2 Online Premiere - Flight of the Conchords (US Only) - watch more funny videos

And there was much rejoicing.

Really surprised to see them acknowledging the events of last season's finale...

Random linkfest.

* Coup in Canada! Somehow the Liberals and New Democrats finally managed to pull their heads out of their asses and kick Harper out.

* You had me at Planet of the Apes. Just don't screw it up this time. More at CHUD.

* Matt Yglesias: If you’re not following Shaq’s Twitter feed you’re not really living in the contemporary world. He’s moved us all the way to Web 4.0.

* Flight of the Conchords Season 2 is coming.

* Jon Stewart speaks truth to power MSNBC.

* Life with perfect memory.

I don't like showing up this late on the blog, but due to factors including

* class;
* getting what must be my fourth cold in two months;
* what can only be described as the Unfortunate Incident of the Apple Juice in the Nighttime, which has rendered my space bar completely inoperable;

I'm only getting around to blogging now.

Sorry.

Here's some stuff to look at it:

* Lord of the Rings as Property Law.

* Alternate universe baseball.

* Alan Kirby on the death of postmodernism and the birth of pseudomodernism.

Postmodernism conceived of contemporary culture as a spectacle before which the individual sat powerless, and within which questions of the real were problematised. It therefore emphasised the television or the cinema screen. Its successor, which I will call pseudo-modernism, makes the individual’s action the necessary condition of the cultural product. Pseudo-modernism includes all television or radio programmes or parts of programmes, all ‘texts’, whose content and dynamics are invented or directed by the participating viewer or listener (although these latter terms, with their passivity and emphasis on reception, are obsolete: whatever a telephoning Big Brother voter or a telephoning 6-0-6 football fan are doing, they are not simply viewing or listening).

* The Valve, re: Deadwood, The Wire, and The Sopranos: What interests me is that, whatever their differences, all three of these shows elicit our sympathy and concern for brutal and violent people, mostly male, operating outside the law. What’s that about?

* Infinite Thought announces a new competition: "Down with Existing Society!" These are the terms:

Each and every one should express in a succinct manner his or her rationally hostile feeling about the current state of affairs.

I'm not sure I have the wherewithal to put together an entry right now, but if I did I'm certain it would probably have a lot to do with our sympathy for brutal and violent people, mostly male, operating outside the law.

Or else, you know, this:

The competing moral claims for the Democratic nomination realigned a bit this weekend as we got our first evidence of Obama's coattails: the surprise victory of Bill Foster in a special election for Dennis Hastert's congressional seat. Obama cut an ad for Foster and gave him access to his Illinois organization, and so Foster's victory is a victory for Obama too, providing good evidence for the superdelegates that Obama can do exactly what he says he can do in terms of making the Democrats a 50-state party again.

It's also a nice little irony that the girl in the much-ballyhooed "3 a.m." ad turns out to be 17 now and an Obama precinct captain.

The Wyoming caucus was this weekend, too, and as expected Obama won it by over twenty points—but the major contest continues to be Pennsylvania. If Obama can win there, Clinton drops out. If Obama loses there, even if it's really really close, Clinton probably stays in until the convention, and things start to get really interesting awful.

As I've said, I have every confidence that Obama will be the nominee either way: Clinton can't catch up in pledged delegates, and the superdelegates won't overturn the will of the voters no matter what sort of spin war the Clintons wage in the press.

But it would be so much easier if he just wins Pennsylvania. I'm calling on my vast Pennsylvania fanbase* to make that happen.

--
* I call it a "fanbase" now so you can't tell it's just one person. But seriously, Neil, knock on some doors.

Science!

* 'Runner's high' confirmed by brain scan.

* Seven to thirteen minutes. That's all it takes. I'm a little tempted to throw up the "Business Time" video again, but I'll restrain myself for now.

* A classic study from 196 shows the placebo effect working even when the patient knows it's a placebo. Another study from 2002 shows the efficacy of placebo anti-depressants increasing over time (!), presumably as the idea of an anti-depressant gained more cultural capital. And a study released this week shows that more expensive placebos are more effective than cheap or free placebos.

A new days ago, I brought you news of the G Spotter™, which makes it possible "to determine by a simple, rapid and inexpensive method if a woman has got a G spot or not." We here at Gerry Canavan Industries are following that incredible device up with the CliMax 3000™, which can determine using a brain scan whether or not a woman has really had an orgasm or is just faking. I'll let the device's inventor speak for himself:

Professor Holstege said: "Women can imitate orgasm quite well."

I'll say. But, using science, at last this subterfuge can be exposed.

At left, a genuine orgasm. At right, the "tell-tale brain activity in a fake orgasm."



Remember, if it's not a CliMax™, it's just fake.

Holstege has some additional Science to share with would-be lovemakers:

"When you want to make love to a woman, you must give her the feeling of being protected."

This is precisely why the importance of hooking a woman up to brain-scanning equipment during the physical act of love cannot be overstated.

Also, lest it be said I never did anything for the good of humanity, allow me share another part of the study's results:

One thing that they found was putting the couples off the task was literally cold feet.

When they gave the couples socks to wear, about 80% of the couples were able to achieve orgasm compared with 50% previously in this staged environment.

This backs up earlier findings:

I'm actually still catching up from the weekend, so that "return to full strength" I mentioned will probably have to wait until later this afternoon or Tuesday morning. Still, I have been saving up some links:

* Be warned: delicious Coca-Cola will destroy your kidneys.

* Via Pandagon, Pittsburgh man Tasered in his own home while sleeping on his own couch.

Police Chief Henry Wiehagen said the officers would not comment, but he disputed Hicks' version of events.

Hicks wasn't asleep, Wiehagen said, he was on the couch prone. The officers could not be certain he was unarmed and Hicks "didn't respond to their reasonable commands," he said.

"These policemen are very cautious and I don't blame them for being cautious," Wiehagen said, noting officers in his department have been shot at.

* Via blucarbnpinwheel, Jonathan Lethem interviews Paul Auster. Two of my favorite writers in one place is very nice.

* Mini-Obama Endorsement Watch: Toni Morrison, who famously proclaimed in 1998 that Bill Clinton was "our first black president. Blacker than any actual person who could ever be elected in our children's lifetime," endorses Barack Obama.

* And at Paleo-Future, how experts think we'll live in 2000 A.D. Other experts have a different opinion.

Friday morning links.

* Rest in peace, Bobby Fischer. Here's the traditional MetaFilter obituary with a lot of dots, a lot of stupid chess puns, and a lot of links. And here's a post from the early days of Backwards City on Fischer's 2004 arrest in Japan, which also includes a link to the rules for "Full Chess" that Fischer devised for greater variety and challenge.

* But the link between watching football — specifically college football — and violence may not be a myth. A new study by researchers at the University of Colorado at Denver examines whether assaults and other forms of aggressive behavior increase when major college football teams play home games, and finds that they do. More strikingly, perhaps, incidences surge most when upsets occur — whether the home team wins or loses.

* Bush considering $800 bribe tax rebate to help spur economy. Money can't buy you love, Mr. President.

* In both the Washington Post (link fixed) and New York Times this week are articles pooh-poohing the Air Car, a $2500 high-efficiency vehicle scheduled to go into production in India this year. In addition to the absurd hypocrisy involved in the U.S. lecturing anyone on greenhouse gases or wasteful consumption, the greater point to take away from all this is that the decades-old Big Lie of globalization is again being exposed before our eyes. It has never and will never be the point of globalization to enrich poorer countries and bring them "up" to a Western standard of living; that's just the story we tell ourselves whenever someone reminds us that our sneakers are made by little slave kids. Now that it looks as if nations from the Global South actually could begin to made headway towards a Western standard of living, how does the West react? We recognize this moment not as the happy culmination of sixty years of economic charity and beneficence—finally, our hard work has paid off! the rising tide has lifted all boats!—but instead as a economic, environmental, and geopolitical disaster. We're terrified to be faced with the thing we always claimed we were working towards.

Surely the best new show of 2007, and a very strong contender for greatest show currently on TV, Flight of the Conchords is recently to DVD and nearly perfect. (There's a comedy EP, too, containing six or so tracks of material also used in the show.) My temptation is to link to all the songs YouTube has to link to, but I won't do that in case anyone takes my advice and heads to Netflix—so here's just one, from the first episode:



And oh, hell, here's one more, "Business Time."



As everyone else has probably already told you, watch this show.