Et tu, Shatner?

Proof positive that rap is nothing more and nothing less than verse delivered in a particularly emphatic style. If you read some of the best ancient Greek verse in the original you can see that it would fall naturally into these kinds of rhythms. And here we have a selection from Shakespeare that seems to work pretty darn well. But really, whodathunk that the evidence for this scholarly theory would come from Great Canadian Celebrity the Shat?

Your HandyDandy Rapalong Guide

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones
;
So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answer’d it.
Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest–
For Brutus is an honourable man;
So are they all, all honourable men–
Come I to speak in Caesar’s funeral.
He was my friend, faithful and just to me:
But Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.
He hath brought many captives home to Rome
Whose ransoms did the general coffers fill:
Did this in Caesar seem ambitious?
When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept:
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff:
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.
You all did see that on the Lupercal
I thrice presented him a kingly crown,
Which he did thrice refuse: was this ambition?
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And, sure, he is an honourable man.
I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke,
But here I am to speak what I do know.
You all did love him once, not without cause:
What cause withholds you then, to mourn for him?
O judgment! thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason. Bear with me;
My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar,
And I must pause till it come back to me.

They’re Made out of Meat. Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm, meat…

Another from BoingBoing today. This is the single best thing I've ever seen on YouTube; this is Art. And this is the whole short story by Terry Bisson on which it is based.

“You’re not understanding, are you? You’re refusing to deal with what I’m telling you. The brain does the thinking. The meat.”

“Thinking meat! You’re asking me to believe in thinking meat!”

“Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal! Are you beginning to get the picture or do I have to start all over?”

“Omigod. You’re serious then. They’re made out of meat.”

Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?And by the way, unless my memory very much deceives me, which it does not in cases of esoteric trivia such as this, the diner is exactly the same one used for the Twilight Zone episode Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up, and the backup players correspond more or less directly with the bit players in that ep. Written, as all the best ones were, by Rod Serling.

Narrator: "Wintry February night, the present. Order of events: a phone call from a frightened woman notating the arrival of an unidentified flying object, and the check-out you've just witnessed with two state troopers verifying the event, but with nothing more enlightening to add beyond evidence of some tracks leading across the highway to a diner. You've heard of trying to find a needle in a haystack? Well, stay with us now and you'll be a part of an investigating team whose mission is not to find that proverbial needle, no, their task is even harder. They've got to find a Martian in a diner, and in just a moment you'll search with them, because you've just landed in the Twilight Zone."

Harry Potter and the Titles of Doom

Emo Harry PotterThe Harry Potter that never was…yet.

Cap'n Wacky lists Titles of Harry Potter Fanfics We'd Rather Not Read. Grabbed via the unusually good today BoingBoing.

I think I like the last one best. But, really, replace "Harry Potter" with "Aragorn" and I think I not only read them, I was asked to proof and edit them. Sigh. Good times, good times.

Actually, everyone I know who writes fanfic writes absolutely 18+ V,VNSFW stuff, so perhaps its' best they don't tackle Potter. So to speak.

Harry Potter and the Uneventful Year When No One Tried to Kill Him

Harry Potter and the New Love Interest Who Happens to Have the Same Name as the 15-Year-Old Girl Writing this Fanfic

Harry Potter and the New Love Interest Who Happens to Have the Same Name as the 15-Year-Old Boy Writing this Fanfic

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Sucrets

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Kidney Stone

Harry Potter and the Uncomforatble Oversexualization of Minors

Harry Potter and the Socerer are Stoned

Harry Potter and the Burning Sensation

Harry Potter and the Camping Weekend With Ron That Will Never Be Spoken Of Again

Harry Potter and the Summer Internship

Harry Potter and the E Street Band

Harry Potter and the Things You Have to do to Get By in Prison

Harry Potter and the It Was All Only A Dream

Harry Potter and the Chamber Pot of Secrets

Harry Potter and the Prisoner Detainees of Azerbaijan

Harry Potter and the Wand of Franchise Extension

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood, the Quadroon, and the Octaroon

Harold and His Big Purple Crayon of Adolescent Yearning

Hal Pot and the Intellectuals of Cambodia

Harry Putter's Magic Golf Game in 21 Weeks

Hairy Potter and the Bears of San Francisco

Harry Potter Fanfic Notes

Harry Potter and the shameless Tom Clancy Crossover

Harry Potter and the 2000 Election

Harry Potter and the HufflePuff Orgy

Harry Potter and the Weapons of Magic Destruction

Harry Potter and the Order of the Pizza

Hermione Granger and the Cryptofascist Misogynist Conspiracy of Hogwarts

Harry Potter and the Bizarro Harry Potter

Harry Potter and the Lil Bratz

Harry Potter and the Street Fighter II Tournament

Harry Potter and the King of Pop

Harry Potter and the Birth of Christ

Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stones in His Mouth

Harry Potter and the Jews and Crusaders

Harry Potter the Geopolitical Realities of the Post-Nuclear Age

Harry Potter and Whoever Alan Rickman's Character is are Totally Doing It

Harry Potter and the Cusp of Manhood

Harry Potter and the Gauntlet of Mucous

Harry Potter and Ma$e feat. Lil' Jon and The Ruff Ryders

Harry Potter and the Insidious Compact Disc Root Kit Installation

Harry Potter and the Gargoyle of Reacharounds

Harry Potter and the Sandwich of Crotchmeat

Harry Potter and the Website of Jokes

Harry Potter and the Incredibly Long Run-On Sentence That ALmost Makes It Look As If The First Three Paragraphs Of The Story Are Actually More Like The First Three Sentences And Then Hermione Says Harry That Dragon Is Attacking You and Ron Is In Danger So Harry Potter Reaches Into His Magic Bag And Removes A Magic Card That He Says Makeus Enlargitus and The Creature On The Card Which Is A Griffin With The Body Of A Zebra But Claws Of A Lion Comes Out Of It And When It (The Dragon) s Defeated Harry Says It Was Voldemort and Hermione Says How Do You Know And Harry Says I Just Know and Ron Goes Gulp!

Harry Potter and the Hendersons

Harry Potter and the Titles of Harry Potter Fanfic We'd Rather Not Read

How about ANY OF THEM?

Harry Potter and the Gang Fan art

Today in Artistic Interpretations of the Elder Gods news

Dale Chihuly is world-famous as an artist. The Benvenuto Cellini of blown glass, his mysterious and compelling aquatic forms have mesmerized art lovers on all continents. But these photographs of unearthly beauty from Shelley Powers provide shocking proof that he hides a terrible secret.

Does Dale Chihuly Worship the Great Old Ones?

The Call of Chihuly

In the guise of a foul-tempered, eyepatched, befrizzed and corpulent artiste, Dale Chihuly walks among us. Or is that hops? Could this all be an elaborate disguise? Could that vast body conceal the chitinous shell of the Fungi from Yuggoth? Perhaps when he moves he shows traces of the odd hopping gait of the Deep Ones. Then again; perhaps this is all perfectly normal…

The Onions from Out of Time

Could his art really be a complex plan to seduce the will of the free peoples of the world and bend them to the will of the slavering god Cthulhu?

Gaze upon his creations and resist…if you can. For how many have heard, and responded to, The Call of Chihuly?

They are coming!!! Ia! Ia!

today in Microscopic Octopus news

Baby octopus

So how cool is that? Can't you just imagine it cloned and grown huge, with a frickin' laser beam on its head? Oh fine, be that way. But I can. And there's more microscopic Squid-and-Octo-tacity where that came from:

Clio, don't look at me it's the scientific name!

The BBC reports on new aquatic coolness from the bottom of the ocean.

A three-week voyage of discovery in the Atlantic has returned with tiny animals which appear new to science.

They include waif-like plankton with delicate translucent bodies related to jellyfish, hundreds of microscopic shrimps, and several kinds of fish.

The voyage is part of the ongoing Census of Marine Life (CoML) which aims to map ocean life throughout the world…

"The deep ocean below 1,000m (3,300ft) is rarely sampled," observed Peter Wiebe, from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in the US, lead scientist on the recent voyage…

Salpa Maxima

[finds] include shrimp-like copepods and ostracods, swimming worms, and tiny jellyfish – some of the gooiest and most fragile animals in the sea.

This was one of the first projects to sequence DNA at sea, a process which Dr Wiebe believes will become much more common as scientists seek quick and easy ways to identify species.

See? Cloning comin' up! Tolja!

Salp. Bet you're happy they're microscopic; who wants to see that in their sushi?