The Birds Have Landed

Today is a good day.

Those ever-lovable Kiwis, Flight of the Conchords, have a new season starting in January. Some of us have caught glimpses of them filming in the streets and pet shops of Brooklyn. Fortunately all you lucky fans can watch the premiere a month early thanks to Funny Or Die. There isn't much I can add about the Conchords that hasn't been said already, so I'm sure you're as excited as I am. I've even embedded the episode right here on the ever-lovable Better Chatter, because nobody likes unnecessary clicking.

Enjoy.

P.S. There's a preview of HBO's new Will Ferrel / Danny McBride show East Bound and Down at the end. So you can get excited about that too.

Season 2 Online Premiere - Flight of the Conchords (US Only) - watch more funny videos

One More Time

So, I was listening, via shuffle, to my ipod this morning on the subway and Daft Punk's "One More Time" came on. Though I wouldn't even really consider myself a fan of Daft Punk (anything too dance-y has got to be super weird and/or smart and funny, a la Hot Chip, for me to really like it) I've got to admit that this song has held up really well as a single over the years and features one of the all-time best uses of the much-loathed "auto-tune" feature.

More importantly (for anyone reading this), hearing this song reminded me of the supremely entertaining and bizarre video for this song, which features a weird mix of Anime and Voltron-era animation. If you've never seen it, here you go...

Your Perfect Autumn Music

Like many, my introduction to the Vaselines was Nirvana's cover of Jesus Wants Me For A Sunbeam. Listening to Kurt Cobain on that song struck a chord with my young, sad slacker heart. Jesus didn't want ME for a sunbeam either! It's a song about sadness but also about knowing whom you are where you stand. This is exactly what autumn is to me – the cold and dark days get me down but give me a chance to reflect and take stock of myself.

The Vaselines have an oeuvre of 19 songs that blended equal parts twee and punk and paved the way for fellow Glaswegians Belle and Sebastian as well as, of course, Nirvana. Their songs of gleeful kissing and social disillusionment never sounded incongruous no matter if they were strumming or shredding. Which makes sense why Cobain, who named his daughter Frances after their co-founder, and his ear for pop song structure couldn't get enough of them.

Luckily you can get their entire body of work on the extremely pleasing The Way of the Vaselines: A Complete History, which, for $10, is worth investing in if you're looking for a delightful soundtrack to your autumn.

The Vaselines - Dying For It (mp3)

The Vaselines - Jesus Wants Me For A Sunbeam (mp3)

See/Saw

Okay, while this is a truly awful video, it actually, in its dumbness, sort of gets at what makes Jay Reatard so great. There's something Ramones-like in the simplicity and goofy enthusiasm of his music which I find incredibly appealing. There's also just enough of a wink-wink "yeah, I get this is pretty over the top" attitude that it makes palatable the kind of sound that normally I might find a little too abrasive. Anyway, check this video out, if only because "See/Saw" really is a great song:

Super Colon Blow?

I eat breakfast almost every morning these days, which makes me feel much more awake and really just generally helps to get my day going on the right note. Still, I can't imagine how productive I might be in the morning if I could just eat this cereal:

Billups

With all of the election-related craziness I didn't really have time to consider how depressing it was to see Chauncey Billups, easily my favorite basketball player this decade (see this post from last year for some evidence), traded to the Denver Nuggets last week. Beyond his reputation for steadiness and excellence under pressure (and, of course, his brilliant name), Chauncey Billups just seemed like a fundamentally friendly and bright person, the sort of guy that no one had a bad thing to say about and that seemed to be "close, personal friends" with about three quarters of the league.

Michael Rosenberg, (via DBB) has a very revealing and sad story about the moments after the trade went down in the Detroit Free Press today, that serves as a great reminder of how nice it was to have a person like Billups leading the Pistons for the last six years. I'm actually not opposed to the trade taking place for lots of reasons (see TrueHoop for a nice breakdown), but as member of the sappier, "Field of Dreams" school of sports sentimentalists, it would be impossible to not feel, even two weeks later, a lot of sadness about seeing Billups go.

Here's my single favorite Billups-related moment, the buzzer-beater against the Nets in the 2004 NBA playoffs:

"Just Give Me the Ball"

I was just starting to come off my post-election high when I read this amazing paragraph from Ryan Lizza's profile of the Obama campaign in this week's New Yorker:

Obama, who is not without an ego, regarded himself as just as gifted as his top strategists in the art and practice of politics. Patrick Gaspard, the campaign’s political director, said that when, in early 2007, he interviewed for a job with Obama and Plouffe, Obama said that he liked being surrounded by people who expressed strong opinions, but he also said, “I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a better political director than my political director.” After Obama’s first debate with McCain, on September 26th, Gaspard sent him an e-mail. “You are more clutch than Michael Jordan,” he wrote. Obama replied, “Just give me the ball.”