On the way back from the coast this weekend I stopped by a mom ‘n’ pop gas station bathroom and found this fantastic illustration above the toilet urging you to help these little guys the restroom clean.

I like carving pumpkins for Halloween. It’s usually a great time, although this year I skipped it. What I might find even more entertaining than carving pumpkins is walking around a couple weeks after Halloween and finding the carved pumpkins on the porches of homes that forgot to throw them out. The jack-o-lanterns get that pallid, moldy color and begin to smell and rot and collapse in on themselves and that is when they have reached their full horrific maturity.

I learned from Twitter today that on the internet is a Liquid Television website that features all of the content from the television show. Even though I’m confident that I could have scoured the web and found all of the segments that aired, this certainly makes it easier. Plus, I’m not even sure how many times I was able to catch a full episode. This is part of the reason why I am so excited to watch these.

I remember the first time I saw the show: It was during it’s initial run and I caught the Invisible Hands cartoon. I think Aeon Flux and The Art School Girls of Doom were on that one as well. I thought it was THE coolest thing I had seen on television. For weeks to come, I kept on coming back to MTV on that same night and time hoping to see it again but I had no luck. Eventually I would catch it again but it never seemed to air at the same time twice, so it wasn’t often.

Part of me wondered if what made the show so mysterious and weird was the fact that I could never find it. So I watched the full Aeon Flux pilot and it was still bizarre and ridiculously violent. Invisible Hands is a beautiful noir-ish cartoon that had only improved with age. “Noir” being something that I am finding a lot of joy in after seeing Altman’s The Long Goodbye recently (I had a long post about that film that I deleted because it got too film critic-y).

I’m looking forward to watching the other segments because there are a TON that I haven’t seen.

I could listen to this all day…and I have been. The Ecstasy of Saint Theresa is just another 90′s shoegaze/dream pop also-ran, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t listen to this album more than the rest of the heavy hitters of the era. Free-D (Original Soundtrack) heavily leans towards the kosmische side of things, which I mean as a huge plus. I can’t speak about the rest of their output, but this one is pretty perfect.

Last weekend, my wife and I celebrated our 2nd wedding anniversary by going to Beast for brunch. We noticed this window across the street that said “Best Summer Ever”. We’re not sure what this place was and I never looked it up, but I thought the sign looked pretty interesting, and I appreciated the message. It was a pretty comfortable summer that included a lot of swimming and sweet iced tea vodka.

This year I was invited to be a member of a mix CD club. One of those clubs where every member is assigned a month and when their time comes they are to send out their mix to every other member. I was given August and I was pretty pleased with my cover.

Over the past few years, like nearly everyone I know, I have found that the internet has become a vital resource for just about anything and everything. When I refer to “anything and everything”, I mean any random or obscure item, thought, detail, instruction, photo, or anything else that I cannot bring to mind right now. The scope of it can be nauseating, but in the good way…like a roller coaster. Personally, I don’t care for roller coasters all that much, but I’ll assume that you do.

I came to this realization of the grand scale of the information held on the internet a few years ago when I was first learning how to fix elements of my car. I tracked down the owner’s manual but it had complicated and hard-to-follow instructions for how to make the repairs. So then, out of desperation, I looked my problem up on YouTube and I found a dirty amateur mechanic making a badly-lit video in his garage of how to deal with my exact problem. This blew my mind. It was too perfect and so incredibly specific. This wasn’t some algorithm that presented me with an ad for some shoes based on the previous shoes that I bought. This was an exact solution (or at least step-by-step instructions) to a particular problem that popped up out of the swirling randomness of the universe. This is is the dizzying “grand scale of information” I was referring to, any problem I could think to search for led to someone who had already dealt with it…and filmed a video or built a website or posted a comment where they explained how you can deal with it too. I was immediately reminded of a scene from Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure where Bill and Ted are outside a police station trying to figure out how to free various historical figures from their jail cells and they devise the following plan…

Any problem that Bill and Ted face has already been dealt with previously by their future selves. The “future selves” in my case is the dirty mechanic in his dimly lit garage, but hopefully you get the idea.

Most mornings I spend a couple of minutes wasting time at The Morning News combing through their daily collection of links. This morning I came across a link to a Flickr pool of painted mud-flaps of rickshaws & cycle carts in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India. I find these hand painted portraits endlessly fascinating. They are also pretty reminiscent of the hand painted movie posters from Ghana which were circulated around the web pretty heavily over the past couple of years. These posters featured artwork that seemed to be only inspired from the movie titles alone and didn’t have much to do with the plots. Most of them didn’t, at least.

According to ghanamovieposters.com:

With the arrival of video and video cassettes during 1980s In Ghana (West Africa) a small-scale film distribution mobile Cinema was created.

This small size mobile ” Cinema ” operators were equipped with a television a Video and some times with a small portable generator and were moving from town to town from village to village operating and showing their films! (During the day inside social clubs or houses and during the night in the open air).

In order to attract more customers and in order to advertise their mission and business the need of huge posters was created and born!

Talented artists after viewing the film were creating large size posters using oil paint on canvas!

The artist had the freedom to add or change scenes seen or not seen in the film in order to make the poster more attractive!

The Nightmare on Elm Street poster (shown here as A Nightmare) is particular favorite of mine.

The past couple of months have been quite a doozy: two colds, a thrown-out back and a sore throat that just wouldn’t give up. I don’t normally fall ill that often, but this time I was thrown for a loop. Fortunately for all involved, things are on an upward trajectory now. I finally got back to riding my bike to work and getting to go on some runs. I didn’t really think I was pushing too hard because it felt great…but for the last few days by calves have been howling.

I came across the website of Dylan Jones the other day. Fantastic work. Inspiring stuff. Especially his logo work and he seems to have a lot of it.

Way up at the top of this post is the cover for City Cowboy by the Arthur Gee-Whizz Band. I love the cover, but the album is every bit as strong. I am a real sucker for this cosmic country rock sub-sub-genre.

After a conversation about the patois of the Western Pennsylvania people, a friend of mine pointed me in the direction of a little podcast called “Da Burghcast.” Since we were both born and raised in the thick of Beaver County (a particularly rusty section of Pennsylvania) we were able pick up on the thick accents that most people associate with Pittsburgh. While it certainly does apply to the ‘Burgh, it also applies to a very large swath of the western portion of the state.

I listened to the podcast which is generally structured around the weekly NFL season activities of the Pittsburgh Steelers but the hosts, Herb and Buxy, would very quickly digress into almost anything else. The conversations include a lot of professional wrestling talk and obscure Beaver County (BC) references like the Brighton Hot Dog Shoppe, Flesh Mechanics (a Beaver Falls tattoo and piercing parlor), Charlie No-Face, and so on and so on.

Being an expatriate from Ambridge, PA for almost 10 years, it felt awfully cozy hearing the familiar tones of that accent which immediately made me long for the sweaty, humid summers and the biting cold winters. Plus, I still followed the Steelers…like any Western PA native probably would.

After catching up on three seasons of Da Burghcast and repeatedly staring at the default header on their website, I decided to offer my fellow Beaver County natives a hand and I designed a header for them. I didn’t know if I would be stepping on any toes since I certainly didn’t ask them if they wanted my help, but they were incredibly gracious and thankful and accepted my work and placed it on their website. Then they asked for more work if I was willing to do it, which I was happy to do in exchange for their thick-slices of obnoxious nostalgia that they offered up once every week or so…and thanks again.

I probably can’t recommend Da Burghcast to everyone because—unless you’ve spent your formative years in that area—you would either: not understand it, find it offensive, or, worst of all, not find it very entertaining.