Plowing the Internets

I'm going to do something a little bit different this time around. Instead of a big, drawn-out post I'll be linking to some of my recent favourite things from the series of tubes that is not a big truck, complete with some pseudo-witty commentary from yours truly. Let's jump in.

The reliably hilarious Passion of the Weiss provides a heartily welcome send-up of the rapper T.I., in which his prophetic old school calculator dishes the ultimate truth on T.I.'s latest album. While at it, also check out the Aesop Rock "infomercial" for definite proof that The Beastie Boys are not the only white rappers with a penchant for 70s fake 'taches.

Cracked.com has a list of the 5 Most Obviously Drug-Fuelled TV Appearances Ever. These really are worth seeing, from Crispin Glover (you know, the famed eccentric and dad from Back to the Future) trying to jump-kick David Letterman in the head to James Brown, well, being James Brown.

Here's Premiere magazine's rather intriguing article on movies stuck in development hell.

And here are a couple of typically eloquent interviews from Guardian Unlimited, hands down the best newspaper website in the world. The first one, an intie with Pearl Lowe, lets you dip a toe in the mid-90s London of the rocking and perpetually zonked A-list that included such (feel free to apply quotation marks here) luminaries as Jude Law and Liam Gallagher. The other one's on Björk, and it managed the not inconsiderable task of actually endearing the, it seems, genuinely eccentric chanteuse to me.

When NBA stars are crazy, it's simply for the best for all our sakes. Here Slam's Sam Rubenstein explains the New York Knicks' Stephon Marbury's appearance on a talk show. And here's the video itself. To you non-basketball fans out there: it may be nigh impossible to grasp
the nuances of any of this without intimate knowledge of the personalities behind the names, but suffice it to say that, at this point, the Knicks are a bunch of overpaid, overweight, selfish delinquents and nutcases with the biggest egomaniac of all, coach and ex-star player Isiah Thomas, ruling the roost. It's like locking Charlie Manson, P Diddy, Dennis Hopper, Phil Spector and Michael Jackson in a space-shuttle, and hoping they come up with the cure for AIDS.

Ireland's own Nialler9 recounts how those merry conceptual pranksters/pop masterminds, The KLF's Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty, once wrote a manual on how to write a Nr. 1 pop hit. Quite easily, it seems. Klaxons' Jamie Reynolds says the band have stringently applied the manual in their own music. Hmm, interesting, that.

Here the gloriously quirky Wizznutzz unearths a very early basketball-related rap tune. "Shoot. Swoop. Loop Da Loop/Ya take Caldwell Jones to the hoop/I said Slam. Pow. To hear tha sounds/of the swish of the nets from the turnaround/". Great stuff. Also, check out the off-the-wall comparisons that follow in the post.