Rob Kutner and the Levinson Brothers (and friends) released It's OK To Do Stuff, an album parodying Free to Be You and Me. Guest vocals include Steven Page from Barenaked Ladies and Jane Wiedlin of The Go-Gos (featured here singing the album's themesong). It's a $6 MP3 download on Amazon.

It's OK To Do Stuff

"A giant planet with a liquid interior full of liquid beef and pork, into which a thousand earths would fit."

Darren Cullen of Spelling Mistakes Cost Lives and friend Mark Tolson edited together this 'lost episode' of Carl Sagan's Cosmos, about a fabled Meat Planet, with details of its famous pork volcano, Mount Sustenance, "well-known to astronomers since the time of Galileo."

If NASA would focus on the important planets, the delicious bacon-y ones like this, perhaps we'd have a real future in space exploration. Astronomy-gastronomy!

Link: bindersfullofwomen.tumblr.com. (Thanks, Tara McGinley!)

Some astute commenters in the Ukelele String Harvest video thread pointed out that this recent video is basically a re-creation/riff on this earlier, classic weird video, from a 1957 BBC show called "Panorama." From the Alexandra Palace Television Society, here's the whole story:

Read the rest

"Baby's First Baby," by Darren Cullen (2012). via BB Flickr Pool.

The Nobel Prize in Quackpottery —

At The Guardian, blogger GrrlScientist is passing out Nobel Prizes for Quackpottery in the fields of physiology, physics, and chemistry. The prizes are awarded to actual Nobel Laureates who have made deep and long-lasting contributions to undermining their own credibility by latching onto hypotheses they can't back up with evidence and then continuing to promote those hypotheses despite the lack of evidence. It's a nice reminder that scientists are human, and that even very, very smart people are not always rational people. — Maggie •

[Video Link, by @mrlaszlototh]

Set theory, Christians, and parody —

Last week, I wrote a piece for BoingBoing about fundamentalist Christian objections to the mathematical idea of set theory. Those objections are, apparently, real—sourced to math textbooks produced by publisher A Beka. And, if you understand the cultural mindset, it even makes a weird sort of sense. But it's also ripe for parody. Read the first comment to this story at The New York Times. At first, it looks like a real world example of the stuff we were talking about last week. But it's not. The commenter is Stephenson Billings, a pseudonymous contributor to the parody site Christwire. I fell for this myself. Thankfully, Twitter user UCSD_Nanomed pointed out what was really going on. — Maggie •

[Video Link]

Comic genius Tim Heidecker, who is roughly 50% of Tim and Eric (also behind "Tim & Eric's Billion Dollar Movie," and "Check it Out! with Dr. Steve Brule"), has yet again created something I find very funny.

"Recently, I read that Bob Dylan’s new album Tempest will feature a 14 minute song about the Titanic," he writes, "So I wrote this song to see if I could beat the Master to it. I can’t wait to see how close I got to the real thing!"

Above, a preview. The entire opus is fifteen minutes long, and you can purchase it here.