My Two Guiltiest Pop Culture Pleasures...

Together in one amazing user-created vid. Seriously - this rules.

Pour ma jolie Quebeçoise...

Flight of the Conchords. New Zealand's fourth most popular digi-folk paradists. If you don't know - now you know.

This video is obviously the theme song for anyone who's recently moved to Montreal.



Or check out this amazing rap battle between Hiphopopotamus and Rhymenoceros. You might want to say those out loud for maximum effect. Word.


My rhymes are so potent, that in this small segment
I made all of the ladies in the area pregnant

Recent polls have shown...

... a fifty-first of Miss Teen USA 2007 delegates is jawdroppingly stupid.



This is either a moment of nerves taking over a brain, or an amazing insight into the world view of the extreme idiot.

You know, I always found the whole 'pageants are about academic scholarship' angle a bit dubious...

Marina's Stagette

Daaaaamn. Was Marina's stagette on Saturday night some ridiculous good times? Witness the following:


You want to touch the bride? Nobody touches the bride.


Megan and I emit alien light vectors.


Rhy, Rhy, Rhy. How can you be so very awesome?


Meena works the crown. Note the careful placement of capuchin monkey and green pepper. All Beckstar, baby.


If it were anyone but KT, I would be all 'Greatest! Photo! Ever!'. Instead, I'm all 'What's that? Katie took another totally amazing party photo? Cool, now who wants toast?'


Gorgeous D, displayed by gorgeous M.


Lady E and the Bridesmaid Power Squad. represent. whut.


Beckstar and Bridestar. Woot!

August in Vancouver - raining cupcakes

Cupcake addiction? Let's not go there.

My girl Marina is getting married next weekend and, as one of the bridesmaids, my job this weekend was to send her off in a drunken, hedonistic fever. Obviously, to the Beckstar, this means a cupcakestravaganza.

For you, woeful readers... I document it all in a photo essay.


The all-important 'pretend the fructose is a huge pile of cocaine' stage.


The setup for candying edible flowers - lazy variation: use of feather in place of paintbrush. Hey - whatever works, right?


The beautiful end result of project flower candy.


Mixmaster Beckstar.


Tasting of batter is extremely important at regular intervals. This is all entirely standard, and should not be questioned.


Enjoying a fresh warm batch of cupcakes. Is there any finer pleasure?


My signature recipe - cheesecake cupcakes. Drooooooool.



Batch 2 - Pineapple Coconut Cream Cheese Cupcakes. Fuck yeah!


And the gorgeous vanilla sisters. Can I get an amen?

Magical Cats!

A quick disclaimer: I am a dog person. Although I have known the odd cat who seemed a content, affectionate and cute-ish pet, they're just really not my thing.

Still, while there are many extreme examples of dog fanaticism, nobody does it like the cat folk.

You've seen stuffonmycat.com.


Omigod. Like, remember Construx?

You might have even spent some time on Flippy's Cat Page, gleaning such beautiful user-submitted prose as:

Happiness is:
... Sparkplug following me into the bathroom and watching me shave my legs.
... Brahms carefully watching the smaller kittens as they play.
... Walking into my mother’s house and having seventeen cats pounce on me and purr.
... Waking up to find a multitude of meowing fuzz balls sleeping with me.
... Having an "intelligent conversation" with a group of cats.

Did you read that? SEVENTEEN CATS. Daaamn man, maybe crazy cat lady is genetic. Moving right along, if you aaare the kind of person who enjoys the aforementioned, you've probably already seen this. For the others, I present to you: Cats. In. Bowls.



Related: The World's First Website for Cats, which is, in my opinion, of dubious appeal to both cats and humans.

No, I don't get it either...

But this is insanely viral right now, and I thought, out of service to my readers, you should be ahead of the curve on this madness:



If someone says 'Youtube? Isn't that all just autistic kids with keyboards these days?', you'll know to what they refer.

Random Robot Content Hour!

It's the anthem of the summer. It's the video of the year. It's the cutest robot ever.

Lupe Fiasco has been quietly ruling for a while, so stop sleeping and bear witness:


Praise due also to Jill Scott, who brings the vocals.

And this... is the weirdest commercial of the year. It's extremely disturbing and creepy, but hey - when you're trying to sell Slurpee's to kids, you do what you can. Noting, of course, that one of the more successful Slurpee flavours/promos in recent history was the Bloody Zit. Yeah. Maybe this works.


What, exactly, is he supposed to be drinking?

Harry Potter! The end of an epic...

So last night we went to the Harry Potter book seven launch! Woohoo!!

I've just finished the book - Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - and witnessed memorable characters and worlds find their fate written, their destiny sealed. I'm going to discuss it in full, spoiler-y detail right now - but I'll mask the text. Highlight it with your cursor if you're sure you want to read it:

Loved it! The resolution of many of the plotlines happened along the lines I expected, but wasn't sure. Some key points:


1. That Snape betrayed Voldemort out of love for Lily. Plausible. Awesome. As we saw in Book Five, his worst memory may not have been the day he was humiliated by James and the boys, but rather the time he called Lily a mudblood. And this explains why Dumbledore trusted him so deeply. And his death was pretty much a given. Poor, poor Snape. In many ways, I'd consider him the real hero. And the epilogue? When Harry admonishes his son (Albus Severus Potter!) for speaking against Slytherin? So good.


2. That Harry was a horcrux. How you like that? This one was ultra-controversial. The pottercasters were sharply divided over this question, although the scarcrux theory, as it had been called, explained so many things it seemed like the right fit. To whit:

• Harry's psychic connection to Voldy


• Harry being able to open the Chamber of Secrets, when it was restricted only to the Heir of Slytherin; Harry being, of course, the "Gryffindoriest Gryffindor who ever Gryffindored"


• Harry getting some of V's powers - parseltongue for example


• The sorting hat's ambivalence about putting Harry in Gryffindor versus Slytherin

3. Harry Lives! Of course he does. Puffaw. Seriously.


Good book, poor Snape, yay Harry. I also liked it when Neville kicked ass at the end. Woot! I did think it would be cool to know more about their lives at the end - like what jobs they had - but it was pretty awesome overall, most definitely.

The launch party, at Vandusen Gardens, was pretty fun to. A long lineup, but well-organized event with great energy.


The crowd. Evidently something like 4,000 people were expected to show. That's over $125, 000 in book sales from attendees alone.


Here I am! Rock you like a Pottercane!


LJ believes that the movies are as good as the books. I say books win no question.


Marina, almost as excited as I was.


Clau, another old school Potter fan.


LJ examines our key to Grimmauld Place.


When the book tents open, the crowd is suddenly dense, swaying, reeking of teenager.


Eventually we approach book flaps number nine and ten.


Victory! We have the tome!


Victory yes! Sweet victory!

Cupcashimi time!!!

Who rules the cupcake kingdom? I do, and this is the evidence of my mega-dominance.







BOW BEFORE ME AND EAT DELICIOUS CUPCAKES!!!

It all started with Teletubbies...

... like so many great things.

I love the new viral 2.0 paradise in which we find ourselves. Exhibit A:



Like woah. As I said, it all started with a Teletubbies video that did the same thing, and which is only slightly less awesome than the video above.

Good times... good times.

And for those that want to know - the song is by Unk, who is also pretty awesome, in a somewhat ironic sense.

A Confused Vegetation*

So today, the Beckstar turned a Wednesday into Wednfunsday!!!! Let's pretend that wordplay worked nicely and move on.

While in Portland over the weekend, I had the distinct pleasure of visiting Powell's Books, which was just as comprehensive, enormous and treasure-filled as its reputation suggested.

If you get a chance to go, be sure to visit the Technical Books Store around the corner. It's full of scientific/applied/instructional/awesome things of all sorts. Like this Magic Garden I bought. I enjoyed its growth all through my workday!


9:15am - Where it all goes down.


9:25am - Secret solution added. Muah ha ha!


9:55am - Baby crystals are the cutest. Look at their miniature little geometries! Awwwwwwww!


11:40am - If I'm ever fired, I think I will meditate on this photo for a little while.


3:20pm - Or maybe this one.


5:00pm - The view from day's end. Sweet!

If I've learned anything in the years I've walked this Earth - it's that this was totally awesome.

*

I will never forget the sight. The crystallisation vessel in which it (the chemical garden) exhibited itself, was three quarters filled with slightly slimey water, namely dilute water glass, and out of the sandy bottom sprung a grotesque small landscape of differently coloured growths, a confused vegetation composed of blue, green and brown spikes, reminiscent of algae, fungi, sessile polyps, but also mosses, then shells, fruit, treelets or branches of trees, here and there even limbs – the strangest thing I had ever seen: strange, not so much because of the, albeit wonderful and confusing sight, but because of its deeply melancholy nature.

So goes the description of a chemical crystal garden from Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, in a scene which I want to read. According to my coworker, it is a horrifying scene in which the father torments his children by demanding they define the difference between the crystals and a living thing.

Canada Day in the U.S.A!

No real story here. We went to Portland, we had good times.

These pictures are from a fantastic little diner in Olympia. Milkshake for the road? Yes!

Greatest Sport Ever...

Why oh why are the Japanese so good at television?

While we here in the West are giggling our remotes off over such mundane game show fodder as Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader?, they are re-inventing this whole business, making humans into Tetris pieces, and generally making me question why one would watch anything but Japanese television, ever.