The Lucky 10,000: The Venture Bros.

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these segments, but, as the recent and ongoing ‘fake geek girl’ nonsense continues to illustrate, there still seems to be some sort of ‘required reading’ list that you have to complete before you can call yourself a nerd. As a quick refresher, in this series I watch/read/participate in these things for you, and let you know if they’re actually worth your time.

So without further ado, on to The Venture Bros.!

Go Team Venture!

The Venture Bros. has been on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim block on and off again since I was in high school, but it’s not something I ever thought I’d enjoy watching. The commercials seemed to appeal to the lowest common denominator of dick jokes, and although I’ve done my fair share of laughing at dick jokes, I feel like a show needs more than that to survive. Well, it turns out that The Venture Bros. does have more than that after all.

Not new, but worth sharing

A few weeks ago I had the song ‘I Know Him So Well’ from the musical Chess stuck in my head so I went to the good ol’ YouTube to satisfy my need to hear it. In doing so, I found this video parody starring Susan Boyle and Peter Kay:

Can I just say perfect parody is perfect? Everything is spot on in this from the hair, to the sets, to the little bits of visual comedy thrown in. If you’re not familiar with Chess, the music was written by Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus of ABBA so there was plenty of popular interest in the show. As such, several of the songs had music videos created for them and had success on the pop charts. You can view the original video for this song here to compare it to the parody. Seriously, everything is captured and parodied perfectly.

One song in particular from the show can still be heard fairly often on the radio (well, I guess I have no basis to say it’s played often. I very rarely listen to the radio but I’ve heard it played at work at least once):

Oh, eighties.

BTW, the actor performing the song is Murray Head. You know, original Judas in Jesus Christ Superstar and Anthony Stewart Head‘s brother? Damn, that’s a talented family.

Web Crush Wednesdays: Broadway Abridged

This hilarious website sends up some of your favorite Broadway musicals by re-writing them in shorter, more honest ways.

Broadway Abridged writes out scripts with characters given names like “LATINA CHICK” (AKA Mimi Marquez of Rent) and stage directions such as “From the flyspace, enter VAUDEVILLIAN DISTRACTION”.

It’s not necessary to know the shows that are being mocked (though that certainly helps) because the humor is apparent and with just a little imagination one can easily picture what would be happening onstage.

To give you a little glimpse of some of the stuff you can expect from this site I’ve made a couple images to whet your appetite:

Web Crush Wednesdays: The Curiosity Landing Team!

Science is awesome. We don’t post a lot about hard science stuff here a lot, (which may be vaguely related to the fact that most if not all of our writers are or were liberal arts majors) but it nevertheless is really, really cool. And one of the coolest things that science has done lately is to put a new rover/laboratory (the Mars Science Laboratory, aka Curiosity) on Mars!

Please tell me you’ve heard about this.

But obviously ‘Science’ isn’t a concrete entity, capable of building skycranes and calculating trajectories. This awesome sciencing didn’t happen without a metric crapton of human effort, and so that’s why today’s Web Crush is the Curiosity Landing Team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory!

These awesome sciencey ladies and gents have been working on this project for eight years, and in the last week following their tremendous success, they’ve become bona-fide internet celebrities. They get major props from me for several reasons (above and beyond the whole ‘bein really smart and good at science’ thing):

I’m continuing a sensed trend: Another Star Wars parody video!

Here’s another one!  It’s older (1999) but I didn’t discover it until (disturbingly) recently. Enjoy!

I’m sensing a trend: Have another Star Wars parody music video!

This would be funny, but it really just makes me sad. It’s too true, and that hurts.

La Vie Parody

Have I ever mentioned that the Homestuck fandom is really talented? Because they really are, especially with one of the most enjoyable* forms of expression: the parody. As a parody author myself, I know how hard it can be to find the perfect word with the perfect timing to make the song really come together, but these authors really know what they’re doing. These popped up on my tumblr a while ago, but what better day to share them than Cinco de Mayo?! One of the most appropriated holidays by college students everywhere! So enjoy yourselves today however you want, I know I’ll be sitting here doing sing-a-longs (because these songs don’t leave your head).

*(Well, I like them)

[Videos Below Here Are Subject to Spoilers]

Bad Romance: Women’s Suffrage

Awesome. I don’t think I even need to add anything.

Click here for lyrics and more:

http://www.soomopublishing.com/suffrage/#!lyrics