oh dear...

If you are very, very bad, and you're a singer, when you die, you will go to Karaoke Hell...where you are compelled to sing your hits with horrifyingly cheesy rearrangements, courtesy of a demon specializing in such torture. His name is Bill Gates.

Pitchfork has linked to several extraordinary renditions of well-known songs, as "performed" by Microsoft Songsmith, which analyzes a vocal part, then comes up with what it thinks is a suitable instrumental background. The Van Halen track is particularly evil, while the Police...well, as the Pitchfork writer pretty much says, it's all that Sting deserves.

best (if tasteless) t-shirt of the year

Via Decider Milwaukee (a/k/a The Onion's local-edition calendar thingy). I love the way whoever snapped the photo managed to get his or her thumb in the image...

shorts-circuited

According to this article in The New York Times, it's now okay in some places to wear short pants to the office - so long as they're "dress shorts" accompanying a sufficiently formal ensemble. Uh, no.

More proof, as if any were needed, that "fashion" is a sort of large-scale performance art piece involving dares, bets, and provocations to see just how ridiculous and humiliated fashion victims can get.

The Times helpfully accompanies the article with three photos.



Now, the first gentleman is almost acceptable. The shirt is properly unbuttoned, matching the inherently casual character of shorts - although he loses points for nerdishly tucking in the shirt, and the tight fit of the pants makes him look a bit Pee-Wee Hermanesque.



This man looks unaccountably pleased that he's wearing the sartorial equivalent of the mullet: business on the top, party on the bottom. There is absolutely no reason to wear a jacket and tie with shorts. None. Sorry. Go home, put on a pair of pants, or put on a nice casual shirt and enjoy a fun round of golf.



What can I say about this guy? He's not helped by his goofy facial expression and incipient beard; he looks rather if he'd just been awakened, told to put this outfit on, and now is having second thoughts ("are you sure this is what you want me to wear?"). Who can blame him? Let's see...what look like dress shoes, with no socks...pants nicely creased that abruptly cut off an uncomfortable interval above his knobbly knees...a jacket that looks a bit small...and a shirt that, given its slight sheen, open collar, and straight lines at the bottom (obviously I'm no clotheshorse or I'd know the technical term for this...), reinforces the "just woke up" thing by looking rather like a pajama top: I think this isn't a model at all, but a fellow who was very, very hungover, who wandered out the door and was set upon by photographers before he got the chance to realize just how incompetently he'd dressed himself. Go back to bed, sleep it off, and when you wake up, assume it was all a very bad, very silly dream.

sheer genius!

I'm fairly well-persuaded that graphic design in concert promotion and flyers is at a bit of an ebb right now - or at least, the kind of poster designs you see miniaturized in ads in venues like local print editions of The Onion or in alternative weeklies tends toward the dull.

Often, it seems the images are sort of randomly chosen, sometimes with an arbitrary connection to the artist tossed in. A few months back, Iron & Wine came to town, and the poster image promoting the show was a creepy illustration of a barren tree whose branches had sprouted numerous iterations of Sam Beam's bearded face. Uh, okay - I can what that has to do with his music...

On the other hand, while being obscure can be annoying, frustrating, or an easy way out (i.e., can recycle image for other artists with no one the wiser), being literal is also a problem. Witness this image: The sound you just heard was the collapse of that image's designer's brain, sucked into the black hole-like gravitational vortex created by the image's mindbending obviousness. I mean, wow: I can imagine the thought process, the meetings, the endless e-mails that went back and forth until someone finally came up with this one: "Hey, the band's called 'The Walkmen' - let's use...a Walkman! And the opening act is called 'The White Rabbits' - how about...a clip-art rabbit image, and then we can just flip it horizontally so there's two white rabbits...geddit? Huh? Huh? Geddit?" SPLUSHHH! and they had to use a shovel to remove what was left of his brains from the office floor.

I'm only surprised the backdrop isn't a whitewashed denim texture - presumably, the band White Denim didn't have enough clout to get their name illustrated with such ox-stunning literality.

(PS: The Walkmen are still a great band.)

the snow turned into treacle

Dan Fogelberg is dead.

My personal theory is that even he finally got so sick of having to hear "Same Old Lang Syne" a zillion times this season that (a la Oscar Wilde vs. the wallpaper) he decided to go instead.

Fogelberg is also responsible for what I believe is the single worst line from any song, ever (and, not coincidentally, the most unintentionally hilarious line ever) - I refer, of course, to "his blood runs through my instrument," from "Leader of the Band."

Really. That's what the line is.