What I Like About …

Cyanide and Happiness is one of the most disgustingly comics I’ve ever seen in my life.  That doesn’t mean I don’t love it, but they cut people’s heads off, engage in salacious acts, and really spend most of their time being not safe for work (NSFW).  Yet there is often something a little innocent, or maybe naive, about their puns and silliness.

And today they went so far into lovely, sincere sweetness that I actually felt a little misty.  Sure, it’s still got conjoined twins, but the message is everyone needs someone, and there’s someone perfect for everyone.  Here ’tis:

Jimmy Fallon has been doing these song parodies (well, not parodies since he keeps the lyrics intact, but …) for a while, but this time he’s really outdone himself.  Dressed as Neil Young he starts off with the classic high-pitched (not-falsetto) Rust Never Sleeps voice as the audience tries to figure out what song he’s doing.  Then he hits the chorus — Sexy and I know it — and the audience goes nuts over LMFAO’s hit.

But that’s not enough for Fallon.  Like any good lunatic, Fallon takes it a step further and brings Bruce Springsteen on stage for a sing-a-long.  Even that’s not enough, so Fallon has to make Springsteen dress up in character, too: as Bruce Springsteen from Born to Run!

It’s a parody inside an honorific inside a wonderful joke.

In a good sign for the Mets, it looks like there’s a pretty loosey-goosey attitude in spring training.  This is sort of odd considering their payroll dropped from $140 million to $90 million in one year — one year!  Their pitchers are either recovering from injuries (click on the pic to the right to see one of them), coming off an awful second half of the season, or are unproven years after they should be proven by now.

But still they are having a great time.  The guy to the right is the team’s ace but hasn’t pitched in more than 18 months.  Their second best pitcher climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro to get as far away from the last few seasons as he could (OK, really for fun and to raise money for charity, but still …), yet says he expects to win in the high double figures.  And their first baseman, who twisted his ankle on May 10 and was out for the whole year, thinks he’s going to have his best season and that the kid in center field is going to crush it.

I love my Mets, and I love seeing them having a good time.  But I really can’t see them winning 81 games, much less making the playoffs.  Just hoping we get a few young guys having a good time and playing hard to give us hope for 2013, 2014, 2015.

42 is the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything , but Error 41 is the answer to computer issues.  Gotta love XKCD.

So yesterday I wrote about my longstanding disdain for the Lorax, especially his undeserved position as an environmental hero.  But that doesn’t mean I don’t like Dr. Suess.  In fact, I love the 98 year old (had he lived) son of a gun.

Mental Floss has 10 of his most memorable quotes, and this set explains why I hold the man in such high esteem:

6. On the inspiration for Horton Hatches the Egg: “I was in my New York studio one day, sketching on transparent tracing paper, and I had the window open. The wind simply took a picture of an elephant that I’d drawn and put it on top of another sheet of paper that had a tree on it. All I had to do was to figure out what the elephant was doing in that tree.”

7. On whether that trick ever worked again: “I’ve left my window open for 30 years since that, but nothing’s happened.”

I closed my window for about 20 years.  It’s open again, and I’m pretty happy about that.

Happy birthday, Theodore Suess Geisel.