Michael Gregory is at it again, and it is wonderful. The new autotune the news is out, and it’s the best since no 2. Let me know in the comments if you’d enjoy more reposts of other folks content.

The social recommendation system Hunch.com, allows you to build expert systems (primitive artificial intelligences really) to suggest products, services or solutions to everyday problems. By entering a series of questions, and suggesting a collection of solutions, users can build miniature problem solvers, answering questions like ‘What martial art should I learn?’ or ‘Which contraceptive is right for me?’, and ‘Where to buy GHB?’.

Over the past month, partly out of boredom, mostly out of geekish whimsy, I’ve be ‘training a topic’ on the site. Training a question about what else, comedy. During this month the usefulness of the topic has grown, as other Hunch users have added additional questions and suggested additional results. Click on the image above to try out Marshmallow Ladyboy Jesus’s quiz – ‘Which British TV comedy should I watch?‘

Ah James Joyce, grandfather of modernism and Ireland’s leading literary figure. He of Ulysses, Dubliners, Finnegan’s Wake, and other books you’ll never read. You are perhaps familiar with Joyce’s literary interest in the rude physicality of the human form, and the voracious lasciviousness of man’s libidinous urges, but were you aware of the tendency towards the perverse and kinky in his personal life?

As a young man, living in Trieste and Zürich, Joyce frequently corresponded with his distant paramour, Samuel Beckett. The ‘The Prick with the Stick’, seeking to “anatomise and reconstitute and crystallize the emotion of love”, became quite graphic in his embrocations. We present our top five Joycean love letters.

No 5 – Like a Hog Riding a Sow

Dearest Becket,
My love for you allows me to pray to the spirit of eternal beauty and tenderness mirrored in your eyes or fling you down under me on that softy belly of yours and fuck you up behind, like a hog riding a sow, glorying in the very stink and sweat that rises from your arse…

Signed,
Joyce

No 4 – Backwards Fucking

Sammy babes,
Now I can remember that night when I fucked you for so long backwards. It was the dirtiest fucking I ever gave you, darling. My prick was stuck in you for hours, fucking in and out under your upturned rump. I felt your fat sweaty buttocks under my belly and saw your flushed face and mad eyes.

Yours,
Double J

No 3 – Costumes

Becks,
Fuck me dressed in your full outdoor costume with your hat and veil on, your face flushed with the cold and wind and rain and your boots muddy, either straddling across my legs when I am sitting in a chair and riding me up and down with the frills of your drawers showing…

Sincerely,
Posh

No 2 – Scatology

Mr Beckett,
Does it give you the horn now to shit? I wonder how you can do it. Do you come in the act of shitting or do you frig yourself off first and then shit?

Yours,
Misses Beckett

No 1 – Your Little Cockey

SB,
Tickle your little cockey while you write to make you say worse and worse. Write the dirty words big and underline them and kiss them and hold them… under your dear little farting bum.

Hope you’re well and the weathers keeping off,
Big Cockey J-Ho

You can read more of Joyce’s letters to Beckett in their graphic entirity, here.

Ah, the genius of IMDB, or to be more specific, the ingenius trolling which goes on on the fora of the world famous film database. Everybody loves a good troll, a subtle, ideally undetectably ironic, undermining of the principles of sanity and civil discourse, for the purposes of cruel entertainment. A good troll does not end the debate with a moronic non sequitur, rather he turns serious commentators against one another, transforming a once eloquent and pointed discussion, inarticulate and inchoate. There can be few websites better suited to this cruel hobby than the Internet Movie Database, with its thousands of committed movie buffs, casually name dropping Bergman and La Nouvelle Vague, bickering the use of the pathetic fallacy in Werner Herzog’s early films.

A couple of years back, a friend sent me a particularly hilarious example. A master troll who had discovered a hotbed of internet dissent in which to plant his seeds of hilarity; the debate over Michael Henickys film ‘Funny Games’. Funny Games is an intricate, brutally dispiriting exploration of the media’s relationship to violence. By making a suburban family the victims of a home invasion – Henicky mirrors the discomforting ‘droogs in the countryside’ section of Kubrick’s ‘Clockwork Orange’; questioning both our Hollywood derived masculine vengeance fantasies, and the pornographic portrayal of violence without consequence.

These considerations were apparently lost of one commentator ‘Pimptaddyone‘, who considered the film an insult to his vigorous machismo.

Seriously, the wife character was a golddigger. She obviously married a rich guy and didn’t seem to care about him being short and scrawny. This cracks me up, because these women deserve this crap. Marry a real man! If I was in the husbands situation and these punks did this stuff……I would kill them. I would break both their necks. I could easily kill both of them at the same time in under one minute with my bare hands. Two little stickboys come over and they do not have any weapons. They don’t have guns or knives. They just walk over and pull this stuff. The second the wife told me to kick them out, they would be out. I would physically push them out of the house and proceed to beat the living sh-t out of them. These kids were stickboys! They were little scrawny punks and they owned this rich snob. He was taken out so easily, and this is why women should stop getting married to these rich little punks. I took pleasure in seeing this game play out, since I thought the rich family deserved it. Her husband needs to hit the gym so he can protect his family.

Needless to say the sly winks riddling this post were lost on the IMDB shoals who immediately took the bait. They should have known better, a quick search on the site reveals oodles of gems from this prankster, including this wonderful comment about Jesus Camp (a documentary about fundamentalist Christians indoctrinating their children en mass), entitled ‘I wonder how many of these girls in the film will later become strippers’.

You know they will hit the pole to show daddy they are not taking anymore of this religious crap. I feel sorry for these kids and this is child abuse. If your religion is correct then brainwashing your child is not needed. They will eventually find the truth later in life on their own. Of course intelligent people know religion is a neurological disorder and simply a means to control mankind. I have no issue if an adult wants to talk to an imaginary friend. They can even choose to worship the easter bunny, santa clause or the cookie monster. However, to subject children to the brainwashing and cult indoctrination depicted in this film is cruel and these parents should not be allowed to reproduce. The level of stupidity and weakness needed to force feed your child this crap is incredible. Like I said before, I would love to follow these girls as they grow up and see how many of them become strippers, prostitutes or little sluts who sleep around. Now the guys will probably become wife beaters, or serial killers. Oh well, just another day in the life of someone so beaten down and abused as a child by religious nuts that they make Bin Laden look a guy who is nice to kids.

P.S. The fat lady at the beginning calling other people lazy and fat was hilarious. Has this fat pig looked in the mirror?

Needless to say, this post was even more successful at disrupting rational debate.

More wonderful tomfoolery can be found in this list of ‘Pimptaddyone‘s marvellously insane posts. This one, where he provides five reasons to hate Jason Statham, “the British Vin Diesel”, is especially fun.

Just in case you still consider it possible that ‘Pimptaddyone’ is serious, check out this entry from Encyclopaedia Dramatica, about how he ruined ‘The Dark Knight’ for thousands

Check back soon for more great moments in internet trollery! And remember…

To answer your second question, it is no longer acceptable not to care about music. If you want to be cool, you have to at least fake an opinion about music. Mostly, a roll of the eyes and a shrug will do. When trapped and forced to provide more detail, “I only really liked their early work” used to suffice. However, since neophillia became de rigueur, most hip bands won’t have been formed long enough for the members to be first name terms let alone put out anything as permanent as an album.

Never the less, here are some who have gotten far enough to actually ‘lay down’ a recording, along with some opinions for you to claim as your own:

Animal Collective

Do say: “I really appreciate their recent efforts, you can really hear Panda Bear asserting his infulence…”

Don’t say: “What’s the big deal, they’re wannabe hippies who sound like they were brought up by parents who owned a single Beach Boys record…”

Girl Talk

Do say: “He’s at the forefront of a movement of mash-up culture and copy-fighters. He’s the first truly 20th Century artist, a post-post-modern hero for our time…”

Don’t say: “He’s a sweaty middle class hipster, getting rich from the hackish exploitation of the work of older, more established artists. Kill him Ulrich!”

Blitzen Trapper

Do Say: “Claiming the folk-rock genre as their own, they’re this years Fleet Foxes…”

Don’t say: “They sound like Travis covering the Fleet Foxes”

Lady Gaga

Do say: “She’s a post-modern Madonna, gleefully subverting pop and pop culture, reinventing it in her own unique image.”

Don’t say: “She’s a trivial shill, gleefully enriching herself and her corporate pimps by promoting a body image so far removed from any basic standard of decency or self respect that it will do untold damage to the very fabric of civilisation.”

Coilhouse Magazine have linked to a fascinating documentary about gay Nazi’s – the German subculture of far right homosexual men. The dichotomy between the repressive politics these men subscribe to (and in many cases fetishize) is a fascinating one.

Psychologist George Lakoff writes about how frames, or world views rooted in models of the family [specifically 'strict father vs 'nuturant parent'], ordinarily shape whole groups of beliefs – which may themselves seem contradictory (as when a ‘liberal’ opposes the death penalty, but favours abortion rights, or when ‘conservative’ does the opposite). Arguably Lakoff’s insights, with their roots in pseudo-scientific practises like ‘Neurolinguistic Programming’, were responsible for the Obama campaigns successful focus on broad, content-free sloganeering and model building around ambiguous concepts like ‘Change’.

What makes subgroups like the gay Nazi’s so interesting, is that their contrarian positions seem hypocritical only in the light of the defacto social consensus over which sets of opinions should and commonly do fit together. The gay Nazi’s, by representing an obviously contradictory position – supporting policies and movements who would see them exterminated; provide an insight into the artificial nature of supposedly naturally aligned political and moral positions.

Seen from a psychdynamic perspective, the extreme right wing politics of the gay Nazi’s could be construed as a sexualisation of the paternal figure – in Freudian parlance literally an ‘inversion’. A host of defence mechanisms like Displacement, and Reaction Formation, leading to a preternaturally strong preference for ‘strict father’ models, and a seduction into fascism.

Seen from a Lacanian perspective, they represent another kind of inversion, a dark reflection of our own innumerable hypocrisies.

Also, they’re hella freaky.

This hunk of shite, however, is just plain dreadful. Low-lights include the begrudging, uncomfortable looks the other members of the band shoot at Brandon Flowers as he wonders by, the sub art-school costumes and sub-human choreography. Brandon himself looks bemused, distractedly drumming on the table, dancing with two stuffed puppies, as if the gross excess and expense of it all has alienated even him. Perhaps the whole video is a parody, a brutal send up of the band, of the music industry, of profit, the dead eyed joyless ‘performances’ intentional. Its hardly likely, though. Hopefully this vulgar little fail will be an albatross, marking the band for disaster and used forever to slap them and their record companies with.

Spaceman

The internerd has shat from its sticky fetid mung goblet many a monument to idiocy, from the comic fonted film whinings of a ginger so fat he’s crippled, to the linguistically challenged thievery of the 419 artiste, that crafty devil lounging in a subtropical cybercafe munching on pineapple stir fry and Kalashnikoving steel jacketed hurrahs into the sheet metal roof each time he scams a pensioner.
But these despicable fucktards are as nothing to that leviathan of web stupidity, that echo chamber of the banal, that Kirsties home video of online pueriletainment, the one, the only, Youtube.
Have you ever watched a neon pink haired homosexual in a tropical bird shirt slurp an ice cream cone at a playboy party with a stripper on his lap? We have.
Have you seen Azian teens lip sync and camwhore to the Backstreet Boys, or cringed watching a fifteen year old bisexual emo kid with ADHD physically cry when his efforts to impress a stalk crush through public piss combat mysteriously fail? We have.

Have you watched open mouthed as bare chested Eastern Europeans furiously battle to consume squirming electric eels from a barrel of gasoline, all for the chance to win an animatronic realdoll with the crude caricatured head of Ashley Olsen? Ok, so we made that last part up. But it’s as nothing to the depravity, ineptitude, and sheer vacuous belligerence of the ‘World O’ Horror’ ™ available mere clicks away, on YouTube.

YouTube, where every comment is a chain, threatening your grandchildren with agonising death from the undead pederastic blueballs of Strom Thurmond should you fail to pass it’s dire portents to a thousand of your closest friends.

YouTube, where anything as simply stupid as real television must be removed to make room for farting babies, fighting grannies, felching furries, singing He-Men, and endless fan made ‘tributes’ starring forty year old Hermione’s with smokers coughs and hairy knuckles and transvestite Harry Potter’s with orthodontic problems so severe they need to pick their noses to brush their teeth.

YouTube, that funhouse mirror of humanity, reflecting the hog bellied stink sacked Otaku in all of us, tweezing his micropenis to a sulfurous puff before his cringing webcam, epically desperate for one brief moment of unlonliness.

YouTube, we hate you.

The horrors of this piece of vintage exploitation almost decry description. In the senselessly disturbing introduction, Ron Jeremy uses some sort of patented come hither motion to lure a loping hippy simpleton toward his small Eastern European car, lovingly tussling her long brown hair like an England fan in a Sao Paulo topless bar. Apparently convinced, the girl takes a ride with the hedgehog; the unavoidable implication being that trained ‘retardates’ may gainfully acquire employment as ladies of the night.

Memorable moments abound, like the stealthy public cunny fiddle one ‘trainable’ attempts during a particularly dull art class. Or the grotesquely patronising ‘date’, awkwardly forced on two hapless salmon minded thirty year olds.

‘No one should use the body of an unwilling partner for their own pleasure’.

In our absolutely favourite scene, one unfortunate trainable is given an unsubtle shoulder rub at a public urinal, while a third man in a full length raincoat continues an unhurried piss, perhaps frustratingly interrupted by a mild hard.

A strange fear arises watching this muck, as few of the many featured ‘trainables’ have visible signs of learning difficulties, meaning it’s well within the realms of possibility that they were played by actors. Dire and frightening throughout. Never again will an Ennio Morricone whistle solo fail to induce a cold sweat.

‘We may not always succeed in reaching the trainable, however me must always try’.

Motown takes on the social issues of the day and wins! well, drugs, racism, violence and the war in Vietnam are no longer a problem- they’re the main inspirations for Hollywood. this is often sited as one of the best albums of all time and I’d say it was really up there. like it matters what the hell i said. still its really really good. insightful, ground breaking and often, well, erotic. What’s Going On, Mercy mercy me etc are all fucking brilliant.