Link Banana

This rerun is a great reason to love The Onion.

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.

Sometimes I can’t avoid it:

A team of Caltech scientists announced Monday that they have discovered a type of conversational detail smaller than minutiae, the class of particulars long thought to be the smallest possible building blocks of mundanity. “These tiny sub-minutiae, or ‘boredons,’ are so insignificant that they contain almost no information, useless or otherwise,” said head researcher Dr. Nathan Yang, adding that the conversationally inconsequential details naturally occur in elevators and other enclosed spaces containing high concentrations of vaguely familiar acquaintances.

From the file labeled “Clever enough to excuse it’s shallowness,” a short audio story. Copious profanity ahead.

(via kottke)

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?”

As someone who tends to use more commas than are needed, I appreciated this brief story:

WASHINGTON—In the midst of a crisis that may have reached a breaking, point Tuesday afternoon, linguists, and grammarians, everywhere say they are baffled, by the sudden and seemingly random, appearance of commas, in our nation’s sentences. The epidemic of errant punctuation has spread, like wildfire, since signs of the epidemic first, appeared in a Washington Post article, on Federal Reserve Chairman, Ben, Bernanke. “This, is an unsettling trend,” columnist William Sa,fire, told reporters. “We’re seeing a collapse of the grammatical rules that have, held, the English language, together for, centuries.” Experts warn, that if this same, phenomenon, should occur with ellipses…

I’ve always wondered why they stopped at “college”…

“We here at Mead understand that as students get older and wiser, they need notebooks with increasingly narrow lines,” Mead CEO John A. Luke told reporters. “In college, people are at a stage in their education where they require 9/32nds of an inch between each line, which is why we make college-ruled notebooks. But I think we can all agree that grad school is a completely different world than college—a world where 9/32nds of an inch is simply too much room.”

(via The Newsroom)

Some of these are undeniably stretching the meaning of “coming true,” but you simply must see Chris Rock’s OJ Simpson joke. The Onion’s prediction of a five bladed razor is also rather impressive.

As someone who’s been yelling at his computer a lot lately (for general age and slowness reasons), I can’t resist sharing this brief story from The Onion:

CAMBRIDGE, MA—After multiple attempts to get the thing to do the thing, 38-year-old freelance writer Joe Garvin gave up Saturday, citing the fact that his stupid computer was too dumb to print something as simple as a travel itinerary. The computer, a PowerBook something with some kind of core that does this every single time, reportedly refused to just tell the printer to print even after Garvin spent a full 10 minutes yelling at it. “Why won’t you just help me out here?” Garvin asked his computer after it started beeping at him just to rub it in. “I checked your nums lock already, and that’s not it. What is the matter with you? I hate you.” Although the computer will likely go on being retarded forever, Garvin refused to call tech support to resolve the problem, claiming they’re all “Wha, wha, wha,” and saying a bunch of stuff he doesn’t even know what.

So says “Wolcott”:

“One hundred years from now, dessert items are made by flash-freezing beads of cream with liquid nitrogen, then storing them in subzero conditions. People enjoy these treats with great regularity, and often remark upon how delicious they taste.”

Also of note: a dispatch from the robot dominated future. (via BB)

No we didn’t stave off a recession, but The Onion does financial news right:

Successfully adding yet another infuriating block of text to an already indecipherable paragraph, some investors said they hoped to stave off bankruptcy for Bear Stearns, which, during last year’s impossible-to-write-about mortgage crisis, saw its value depreciate almost as quickly as readers’ interest in this story.

The Daily Intelligencer has compiled a useful roundup of opinions on yesterday’s speech by the usual suspects. As you could expect, the right generally denigrated it and the left generally praised it. But, if you actually read the list you’ll get the nuances within those positions.

On a lighter note, The Onion reports that no one wants to give that black guy change.

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.”

Vulture brings news that The Onion is unveiling a movie, and though they seem to have no idea what the movie will be about, they’re convinced it will be hilarious. Based on the trailer, I don’t find it terribly hard to agree.

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.

I’ll just leave the introduction to Snarkmarket, who did it better than I can:

Funniest thing ever, five minutes ago: Patton Oswalt doing his riff on KFC Famous Bowls.

Funniest thing ever, now: Patton Oswalt writing about actually eating a KFC Famous Bowl for the first time.