The new episode of Bob Kushell, famed writer/producer from The Simpsons, was released on Crackle.com this week with a new special guest. The pilot program kicked off with a special appearance by John Stamos and Kushell keeps the ball rolling with his 5-minute "Talkfest" with another high profile guest, Neil Patrick Harris. My girlfriend got me Season 2 of How I Met Your Mother on DVD for X-Mas, so I've been watching NPH for a couple days straight now. My friend told me the mark of a good actor is if you can't see them any other way, so I will go ahead and proclaim Harris a tour-de-force for his character of Barney. Who knew a gay man could slay so many fine New York ladies?

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Since the fall of the Roman Empire, the lines between gay and straight have never been so skewed until now. With the support of major media, alternative lifestyles are considered to be hip and trendy. Just ask Lindsay Lohan.

Whether some is gay or straight doesn’t affect me either way, unless of course if I happen to be dating them.  Being a fairly perceptive girl, I have never seen myself as the type of gal who could fall for a gay guy.  But now with the rise of the metro sexual, who closely resembles the homosexual, it might be easier than I would have ever thought possible.

In the past year, two girls I know have dated guys that turned out to be gay. Flora, my bff since high school, had a guy tell her he was “into dudes too” while they cuddled in bed after doing the deed. Barf.  And Jodie, my friend’s friend caught her boyfriend of three months making out with a guy at a nightclub.  When she confronted him (while he was still making out with the guy), he told her to calm down and that he was just really drunk.

Were these girls being really unperceptive, or were these guys hiding their gay-ness very well?

If you live in the city, especially Los Angeles, you have really got to keep your gay-dar at full alert when looking for a boy.  But even supreme intuition can be fooled by guys that are gay but  don’t know it or want to ignore it.  Ladies, here are some clues that will help tip you off to feminine fellas. 

Remember the days when Domino Rally was the proverbial 'shit'. Even if those days were last weekend, there's nothing better than spending hour after agonizing hour for two seconds of utter elation. Well, now you can spend your work day or J-term lecture setting 'em up and knocking 'em down thanks to this site DrawMinos.com. Create a domino set, send it to your friends. Send it to your mom. It'll blow her mind.

While it doesn't have the spring loaded catapults or giant pendulums like the Domino Rallys of Old; it also doesn't accidentally fall when you sneeze in the wrong spot. It's the Monday after New Year's - you aren't doing work anyway. Stop lying.

Last month, Boosh partnered up with EA Sports to figure out what games from last season the public most desperately wanted to see replayed with different outcomes. Thanks to the realism of the EA's new NCAA Basketball '09, we can get as close to a replay of those matches as possible... without Doc and the Delorean. We had a bunch of people submit their two cents, here are the top four. Not surprisingly, Stephen Curry makes up 75% of the commentary:

Doug (Pittsburgh, PA)

"I'll admit it would be nice to see Belmont replay Duke and finally win this time around but the game I would like to see replayed is the Pitt vs Michigan State game in the NCAA tourney, it should have been a showcase of Neitzel vs Fields but ended up a sloppy mess with too many whistles and no flow to the game."

Anthony (Chicago, IL)

"I would love to see that Kansas / Davidson game from the Elite 8 played last year replayed.  I want Davidson to come away with the win, simply because I think Bill Raftery's, Gus Johnson's and Dick Vitale's heads would have exploded with joy on national television.  That just seems like something I'd like to see before I die."

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We are now in the thick of winter.  For those of us in the Midwest, that means frozen pipes, frostbit fingertips and lots of hot beverages.  The sun rises early and sets earlier. Life during these five frigid months equates to a waiting game. Waiting for the sun. 

But even as I freeze my buns off in Chicago, I still prefer it to the other end of the spectrum. Let’s take a look at Dubai, the Las Vegas of the Middle East minus booze, premarital sex and drugs (all of these are outlawed because the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is a Muslim country). The last thing anyone can call Dubai is cold.

Around this time of year the average temperature there is 80 degrees, which isn’t all that terrible. But during high season, meaning June- August, temperatures can get up to 120, 10 degrees hotter than Arizona during July.  That is fry an egg on your car’s front hood hot. 

Talking Head, 12/11/08
Baltimore, MD

    Walking down an alley lit softly by a string of white lights, I always feel like going to Baltimore’s Talking Head is like sneaking in on a club that likes to keep itself a secret. It’s new home is a back room off Sonar’s club room, which saves them the cost of rent and upkeep of a space all their own, and shows in the quality of the sound equipment. I’ve never been in such a small space that has such consistently great sound. The Talking Head has a quiet lineup that features extremely talented bands who seem to constantly fly under my radar, despite their vaults of talent.

    At the urging of a friend of mine, I ventured into the unforgiving winter rain last Thursday to the Talking Head to see Jukebox the Ghost. Jukebox comes in three parts:

Ben Thornewill on keys and lead vocals, Tommy Siegel on guitar and vocals, Jesse Kristin on drums and vocals. With Thornewill’s innate sense of composition at the helm of their songs, Jukebox sounds most like a minimalist Queen with a happily crossed Nick Thorburn (The Unicorns/Islands) and Ben Folds. 

    The band has a great sense of humor and they warmly engaged the small, dedicated, bleary-eyed crowd that awaited their set as they took to the stage around midnight. “This is a song about ghosts,” smirked Siegel at the mic, “and how the affect the foreclosure crisis.” Jukebox displayed impressive degrees of endurance and versatility in their set, bouncing jovially from a three-part song about the Apocalypse on to a “song about my brief, but deeply emotional affair with the Queen of England,” joked Thornewill.

    It can be hard to fully enjoy a band that features delightfully poppy and creative songs that refuses to acknowledge their own irony and engage the crowd on stage. Jukebox is well-aware of themselves and were more than keep us chuckling in between songs. In keeping with their demeanor throughout the set, they closed with an excellent arrangement of Jack Skellington’s infamous “What is This?” from The Nightmare Before Christmas. They are currently touring on their new album Let Live and Let Ghosts.
 

Have you ever been to a concert and checked out the artist’s merchandise?  Have you ever seen an item (or perhaps two or three) that caught your eye?  And has your jaw dropped in utter disbelief (and disgust) at the astronomical prices on these basic items? 

Good, me too.

A couple weeks ago, I attended a Wilco & Neil Young show on a cold, raw night in Worcester, MA.  First, let me just say that if someone were escorted into the venue as a surprise, I probably could have guessed that it was a Neil show just from the people walking around the concourse: lots of folks well into their 40’s & 50’s sporting bandanas, long burns, fu-man chus, wavy hair, beer guts… and, well, you get the point.  The show itself was fantastic; Wilco jammed for about an hour, with a set list that included “Hummingbird,” “Jesus, Etc.,” “Walken,” and “I’m The Man Who Loves You.”  Although it was an older crowd, Wilco was still received well and there were definitely a handful of die-hard Wilco-ers in the building. 

And Neil?  He sported his trademark frizzy, electrical hair with a pronounced bald patch that stared you in the face every time he lowered his head.  He may have missed a few notes here and there, but I couldn’t tell, and I’m pretty sure no one else could either.  But that may have been because everyone – on the floor, anyway – was either piss drunk or flying high.  I think I got an herbal lift just from where I was standing.  The fumes didn’t seem to get to Neil, though: he rocked like it was 1975, playing numbers like “Cinnamon Girl,” “The Needle & the Damage Done,” “Old Man,” “Heart of Gold,” and “Cowgirl in the Sand.”  The icing on the cake, though, was his encore selection: “A Day in the Life” by The Beatles.  A middle-aged guy next to me almost wet himself at the beginning of the song, and asked me, “DOES IT GET ANY BETTER THAN THIS?  NEIL DOING A BEATLES SONG?!”  I don’t think it does.