Pellets - September 2008

News and views and Tidbits and Weedhits

Music really is therapeutic. Just ask the folks at Psychology of Music (http://pom.sagepub.com/current.dtl) who have explored such topics as “Comparative effects of music and recalled life-events on emotional state.” Volume 36 is now online.

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This just in: Farts rise.

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September is a big month for summer movies. Shia LeBouef will star alongside Billy Bob Thornton in D.J. Caruso’s Eagle Eye. The suspenseful trailer for the flick gives the impression that the action-thriller is a cross between 1984’s Big Brother and SAW…only…without the saw. Hey, if it’s as exciting as the Transformers we’re there. Also arriving is Righteous Kill which, along with Nicolas Cage’s Bangkok Dangerous, is in 2008’s competition for the lamest movie title. ‘Kill’ stars Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino as a pair of retiring police officers tracking someone who killed a pimp and left a four-line poem at the scene. Poetry and pimps? Of course, that’s the perfect recipe for an action movie! And then there is White-Out, the first entry in what we will call Emo Cinema. White-Out is the story of a radio disc-jockey who finds out his girlfriend has been cheating on him and decides to take a stand by doing a reality-based broadcast in which he calls her and confronts her about the infidelity on the air. Sounds like it’s time to change the station.

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Everlast returns on September 23rd with his not-so-much-anticipated LP Love, War & The Ghost of Whitey Ford. Eminem has reason to come out of retirement: Something pathetic to talk trash about.

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The Nightwatchman (aka. Tom Morello)'s The Fabled City hits streets on the 30th, making it a solid end to an otherwise mediocre music month.

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Ever wonder what happened to that band that did that intolerably infectious song from the She’s All That soundtrack? Ya know, the one with, “Swing, swing, beneath the milky twilight?” Yeah, we didn’t really care either. But Six Pence None The Richer are ready for a comeback…Or at least ready to try for a comeback. Their new LP The Dawn of Grace streets on October 14th, two months shy of the holiday the album is constructed around (No, not the Pagan Baby Sacrifice Solstice! Christmas!). Guess they wanna get a head start, in hopes that somebody will actually buy the album as a stocking stuffer.

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Quentin Tarantino must have run out of money for high-priced hookers again. Seems the uber-cool director of Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill is developing a remake of Russ Meyer’s big-juggs-gone-bad flick Faster Pussycat, Kill! Kill!, with pornstar Tera Patrick to take the lead. And this is being planned even while he is in the beginning of production on his decade-in-the-writing World War II epic Inglorious Bastards. Leave it to Tarantino to get overzealous when he has a chubby.

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Scientists recently discovered a bare bones method for converting blood of various Types into the universal Type-O (the blood which anyone can be given). This method should be accessible within the next 3-4 years, sources say. Now if only they could develop a form of cancer that can be converted into a carton of cigarettes.

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On July 17th, Rachel Barge debunked the theory of carbon capping by cleverly comparing it to the myth of the Homunculus, that little sticky gentleman who lives inside my penis. Check out her illuminating blog at: http://breakthroughgen.org/category/psychology/

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Justin Timberlake is an emotional cat. First they caught him crying on Kutcher’s PUNK’D and now he done gone and urinized himself in front of Michael Jordan. Let this be a lesson to you: If you get tickets to a Timberlake concert treat it like a Gallagher performance; bring a raincoat and an umbrella.

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Speaking of which, a group of strangers claim to be part of a reverse flash mob, in which 416 people were recruited for Ruby on Rails jobs due to the letters RoR appearing on their resumes and an accidental hit of the Reply-All button. Learn more at: http://blog.reverberate.org/2008/07/17/416-random-people-with-ror-on-their-resume-reply-all-reverse-flash-mob/

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“What is this? A seahorse party? Who didn’t invite me?!” That’s the question posed by Dan Deacon in a YouTube short entitled Seahorses. Deacon and Tenacious D-director Liam Lynch are burning up YouTube. Check it out before you have to scroll through fifteen pages of awesome videos. Who wants to do something like that? And while you are there peep the newest from “Cannibal Girl” mastermind Richard Taylor—Jack to the Max, a touching tale of a man and his Johnson.

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Back in our print days, we kept you abreast of the developing Apocalypse. God last reported that the street date would be in 2066. Unfortunately fans of Good & Evil will have to wait until 2069, in the very least. After pulling a hamstring during an ecological disaster the Most High postponed his Nations of Islam tour dates and pushed the release of Pestilence and Famine back by a few years. He is recuperating now and looking forward to getting back on his feet. “I can’t wait to get out on the green and knock a couple balls around,” he said in a press release dated tomorrow.

We will all look forward to the wrath and chaos. Here’s hoping it lives up to the hype.

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Boy George is done cleaning up garbage and singing for very uncomfortable sanitation workers. The former-Culture Club lead singer and author of Take it like a Man (Yeah, we know, that’s brutal) has canceled his North American tour dates for August and is swinging to London, to clear up a court case before doing thirty gigs in the UK throughout October and November. Now I ask you: Do you really want to hurt him?

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Sounds like a movie we all need to see in our current plight: My Outsourced Life comes to DVD on September 2nd. The movie revolves around a writer who tries to join the outsourcing boom by hiring Indian-based workers to handle all facets of his life. Silly but true.

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