it goes without saying that whatever shows up on the flickr blog is going to be a good shot, but this one is particularly beautiful.

Sometimes I wonder what makes something funny. Back when I was reading and thinking about cognitive science all the time, I had decided comedy was based on your brain thinking it's figured out a pattern, then experiencing the completion of that pattern occur in an unexpected way. Sounds hilarious, right?

I still think that theory has some merit. But comic strips like this one make me think that the answer might be closer to "pointless cruelty."

Whatever it is, I think this clip from Strangers With Candy distills it pretty well.

I've got no particular reason for sharing this. I just thought of it the other day and felt like playing with video editing on the Mac. Go buy some Strangers With Candy DVDs, why dontcha?

BTW: video editing on the mac? Harder than I expected. Final Cut Pro is nice, and from what I can tell it seems easier than Premiere. But iMovie kind of sucks, and there doesn't seem to be a good, free, mid-level video converting tool like VirtualDub. I shouldn't have to download an entire pro-grade nonlinear editing suite just to extract a clip from a DVD and resize it. Bah!

It's been a while since I paid attention to music, but upcoming shows promise to change that. On the schedule: New Pornographers/Belle & Sebastian (if Matt still has a spare ticket for me); Hold Steady, maybe (sold out?); and Islands/Metric, apparently. The Tegan & Sara/Gogol Bordello show would've been attended but, well, I just learned about it today.

At the moment I'm most excited about Islands, the ex-Unicorns outfit. I loved the Unicorns, and the early Islands mp3s I've heard (particularly "Abominable Snowman" — although the Unicorns wrote that) seem promising. Plus Nick Diamonds did this, my enthusiasm for which you may already know. So I'm prepared to dub him "the good Unicorn" (there can be only one). You can find some Islands mp3s here. Also: I have just learned that the Unicorns' debut release is available for free here. Neat.

Back on track! The other enblogged act coming to town seems to be Stars. I've only started listening to that CD this week. Good songs, but I'm not sure I'm sold on them yet — their rhythm section is pretty weak when they're not using a drum machine. "Reunion" could've been great, but instead it only ends up being good. Maybe I'm projecting my crass predilection for Andrew WK-style cock rock onto the fully rendered craft of a sensitive auteur with no taste for bass. Or maybe they should hire a new drummer. Either way, the prospects for live rocking don't seem that great to me. But hey, I could be and probably am totally wrong. I'll be curious to hear folks' reactions.

Dante from the Black Cat was just on the usually banal Metro Connection outlining a consequence of the coming smoking ban that I hadn't thought about: crowds of smokers spilling onto the street between sets at his club. That seems likely to cause problems with the neighbors, who seem likely to raise a fuss, which seems likely to make DC an even more hostile place for our already scant rock club population. Drat.

It was nice to meet folks at the DCist happy hour last night. New blogger acquaintance A: Mari of In Shaw, who was very pleasant to talk to and whose blog I like a lot. I suspect she thinks I am a nice guy but also the type of person who's the problem with something. If so, she's probably right.

New blogger acquaintance B: Alex, who, at my prompting, explained to me what a NOP sled is. Awesome. If I'm going to have friends giving me irresponsibly large amounts of tech cred (terminologically, anyway), I'd better cultivate some contacts who actually know what the hell they're talking about. So I'm glad to have Alex in my RSS folder.

Also: Jacques newly-of-DCist, Wayan from DCMetblogs, and almost certainly a bunch of other new and charming and wonderful people whose names I can't remember. Plus, some usual suspects. Always nice to see you guys.

The night ended confusingly, as Kriston, the Nabob and I talked about the old drink-a-gallon-of-milk-in-an-hour thing. I know it's impossible. We've all seen that episode of Jackass, and the N had conducted the experimental work himself in college. Kriston seemed to think that we east-coast types just don't know how to drink milk hard enough. And I wondered whether Lactaid could help someone win that bet.

So somehow we're now all supposed to try drinking a gallon of Gatorade in half an hour, some time. It doesn't make much sense to me — I think it's to remove the problematic milk from the equation. Too many independent variables! Remove the lactose! We're testing the effect of volume on drinking stuff. Hypothesis: regret.

It isn't really about competion, except perhaps against the dreary world that gave man such a pathetically weak digestive system. But it must be done. I guess.