Month: September 2006

You know how sometimes there are things you encounter in passing that are totally bizarre, but since you’re not really paying attention, they kind of slip by unnoticed for months (or years) before you finally say, “Wait a minute… what the…???”

Well, this is one of those things. I’ve done a fair amount of cross-country driving, but the long-haul trip I’ve made far more than all others put together is that between Minneapolis and Chicago along I-94/90/39 through Wisconsin. And yet, somehow, I went for years before more than a handful of brain cells bothered to notice, on one of those typical blue road signs advertising food/gas/lodging in Janesville, Wisconsin, the oddest business name I have ever encountered: Hhffrrrggh Inn.

Yes, that’s right: Hhffrrrggh Inn.

The name is so weird, it took about 3 or 4 trips past the sign before I even managed to make out enough of the letters to be able to take a reasonable stab at googling it.

And here it is… (I took the exit so I could take a picture of the actual restaurant, but as usual in Wisconsin, I drove a quarter of a mile and saw no sign of it — and scarcely any of civilization at all, for that matter — so I gave up.)

 

As usual (and in perfect form), I seem to be the last person to know about this, but anyway… today I am addicted to “Weird Al” Yankovic’s latest video: “White & Nerdy.”

And of course, to prove my nerdiness, I’ve downloaded it to my iPod — along with another one of my favorite videos.

Shockingly lame, mildly offensive (probably moreso if you’re Native American), yet hilariously ill-conceived and even more hilariously ill-executed, we have this music video for a disco-fied version of the oft-covered surf rock hit “Apache.”

I can’t make out the name of the band written on the bass drum head, and it doesn’t seem to match any listed here.

Although I will never recover the precious minutes of my life wasted watching this, and I may never even know the name of the band (so I can take care to avoid them in the future), at least one good thing came of this: my discovery of the Second Hand Songs site, which is actually a pretty cool idea!

Update (September 29, 2006): I guess I should’ve just checked Google Video… there, we have the song identified as the work of the Tommy Seebach Band.

As I flipped to “Talk of the Town” in the latest issue of the New Yorker, I was immediately taken aback by the full-page ad on the facing page.

The first thing I noticed was John Hodgman, (probably) better known as “The PC” in the recent Apple ads. Here he was not playing the straight man to Justin Long‘s cool, laid-back Mac, but rather hawking his own book, The Areas of My Expertise. But what really got me was the ad itself. It was a perfect send-up of the old George Plimpton ads for Intellivision in the early ’80s, wherein he compared Atari’s Home Run against Mattel’s Major League Baseball.

Here, Hodgman’s spoof pits Intellivision against “Complete World Knowledge.”

It’s a fairly obscure ad to parody, but I’m glad to see that I’m not the only person who caught the reference. John Hodgman’s own blog explains a bit more here and here.

And, since I understand the ephemeral nature of the Internet (better than I understand the definition of “ephemeral,” in fact), I’ve grabbed the two images from Flickr just so this post doesn’t become incomprehensible in a month. (Yes, I think my blog entries have more staying power than Flickr.)

You may (or may not) notice that there’s now a calendar on the left side of all of the blog pages. Go ahead… use it! It works like most blog calendars work. (At least I assume so; I admit that I spend more time looking at my own blog than at all other blogs combined.) I’ve also added a few new “34” photos in the top area. Refresh the page 1,000 times and maybe you’ll see a new one.