Link Banana

A.V. Club has a rundown of their favorite songs so far this year. For someone who hasn’t been paying very close attention to music in the last few years, this isn’t a bad way to catch up.

The A.V. Club has a short interview with Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich. This fascinates me:

RK: We were talking to these kids who work with this bacteria called E. coli that smells like poop. It’s uncomfortable. So as a matter-of-fact solution to their practical problem, they designed a different E. coli. A friend of theirs at Purdue sent them a wintergreen gene, plucked from some other creature, and they plopped in the wintergreen to mask the poop smell, thereby solving the yuck factor of being in the lab by simply creating an E. coli that had never existed in the 70- to 100-million-year history of E. coli. Suddenly, their lab is smelling wintergreeny as opposed to poopy. Then they have another problem: How long do they have to wait to work with it? So they put a trigger onto the E. coli, which when it actually slows down its multiplication rate, it smells like a big, rich, creamy banana. If they smell banana, then they go in and do their work. I sat them down and said, “Did any of you consider the sheer awesomeness of what you just did? You created essentially a creature new to nature.” And this 19-year-old goes, “Uh, yeah?”

The Onion A.V. Club’s taste test of Maxxed Pops is moderately entertaining. The first four paragraphs of the piece, however, are comic gold. Try this one:

Pointless autobiographical aside: When A.V. Club writer Nathan Rabin was in sixth grade he did a science project measuring the effects high doses of caffeine would have on hamsters purchased from Woolworths. Though no reputable science journal would print his revolutionary findings, he learned that giving hamsters crushed-up No Doz in their drinking water makes them really crazy and psychotic. Also, the hamsters tried to tear each other’s limbs off. Then they escaped from their Habitrail prison and mated with the local rodent population.

I feel like Wikipedia has come up a lot in the last few weeks, but “oh well.” The Onion’s A.V. Club compiled a list of surprisingly controversial topics, from k.d. lang to good old-fashioned “truth.”

The Onion’s A.V. Club has a good interview with the inimitable John Cleese of Monty Python fame.

AVC: You turned down the role that eventually went to Bruce Willis in The Bonfire Of The Vanities.

JC: Oh my God, yes, you’re absolutely right. I did.

NR: Beyond common sense and good judgment, what was the thinking behind that?

JC: I liked Brian De Palma’s thrillers. I thought they were fantastic. But I’d never seen any sign of comedy in them. You might love those Bourne movies, but you wouldn’t necessarily want to run off and do a comedy with their director. So I thought that was a bit risky. So I did turn that down. How’d you know that?

AVC: There’s a website called notstarring.com where they list roles actors have passed on.

PS: That website: very cool stuff.

PPS: The second half drags a little. If you only read one page of this, be sure it’s the first.

You’re bound to create something funny and interesting when you set out to try bacon-flavored breath mints, as The Onion’s A.V. Club has.

The smell released when the tin is opened is pervasive and suffocating. It isn’t minty at all; it resembles a blend of rotting bacon and hot plastic, like raw bacon draped across a traffic cone and left outside in Arizona-summer heat for a couple of days. The taste is sour and richly meaty, like jerky gone bad; there’s definitely some mint in there, poking through the overwhelming semi-rotten-bacon taste at odd intervals, but mostly, it’s artificial bacon, and a whole lot of it.