FYI

I wanted to post this on numerous Facebook walls, but I figured this would be better.

The Semiotics of Plaster: Bathroom Ruminations

Perched at eye level, and spanning the entire interior walls of our office bathroom, a particular tile molding has slowly etched itself into my consciousness. At first, it seemed innocuous -- a simple, unoffensive pattern meant to add texture to the workplace, and certainly as generic as any other office aesthetic. But after staring directly at this design for about four months now, I've had a revelation: this is the most sexual office bathroom molding I have ever seen.

In retrospect, I'm not sure why it took me so long to realize, but the proof is in the pudding:


Is this sweet?

LOST Message Boards; or, Why You May Have Wasted Your Life

Today, I was on the Lost Season 5 message boards. No, I will not explain myself. I feel it's important to share some of the users' "signature" pictures, however.





The correct reaction: a proper mixture of getting amped about Lost and extreme discomfort at the thought of sharing a common interest with these people.
Extra points if you initially thought the one with Jack read: "WE HAVE TO DO LUNCH"


Also, I'd humbly recommend joining Team Jack, because once those spots are gone, you'll be stuck on Team Ana Lucia.

NO I FUCKING DIDN'T

Ha ha, I forgot about this

News Flash: "Shine" Named Video of the Year

Yes, it's been confirmed.  The New Yorker's Sasha Frere-Jones has declared "Shine" to be the music video of the year.  Not that we needed to hear it from the chumps at The New Yorker, as we've been on this story for months at Epic Mail.  That said, it's always nice to hear some confirmation from the "real" media.  Additionally, his comparison of "Shine" to early ABC is intriguing (anyone who lived in Braxton and remembers all those ABC-fueled dance parties should recall such masterworks as "Poison Arrow"), and not just in terms of guitars, as this photograph of frontman Martin Fry should attest:

Let the conspiracy theorizing begin.

2009 YouTube Roundup

In the new year, let's try not to ask ourselves, "Hey, I wonder how much of my life I've wasted on youtube watching videos of people crashing four-wheelers?" Mostly because I've done the searching for you.

1.) London Police Shoot Crackhead Robber Dead on his Doorstep!!

Before you get ruffled, let me be clear that this video is fiction, and has only a tenuous relationship with any of the words in its title.



In this video, our British auteur creates a chilling vision of a dystopian future populated with unintelligible clones. The narrative begins with the following summary: "It's the year 2020. There are no more prisons. The police no longer take prisoners.....they just kill suspects! The police death squads are controlled by Inspector Lewis. Undercover officer Leroy Stretch Riggs controls the streets!" What ensues is a movie that strives to take itself seriously, but ultimately remains a badly-shot video of one guy's mouth spiced with old stock footage from some police movies. This is the video I imagine DJ Idris (Stringer Bell) making after he got killed on The Wire. I'm going to attribute the majority of the 333,000 views to the hilariously misleading title.

2.) Brokencyde -- Freaxxx (Music Video)


Brokencyde - Freaxxx (Music Video) from Eat Cake Films on Vimeo.

For the sake of brevity, I will not address the concept of "genre" as it relates to this video. What I would like to point out, however, is the hilarity of the pink-shirt guy who single-handedly redeems this song by screaming at all sorts of inappropriate times. Apparently he also loves screaming into the ears of girls who are nonplussed, but also bored. Also he chokes them sometimes, or something? These suburban 19-year-olds are trying to teach me one thing: I have lived my life all wrong.

3.) Creepy Banana Firework Performance Art Guy



All of the nightmares that collected in the recesses of my brain have been instantly erased by the singular vision of this person's banana-clad face. It's something about that mask underneath the bananas -- so melted, so inhuman.

Self-Aware Metablogging: A Content Analysis of the "Epic Touch"

As our blog gains both volume and tenacity, I've found myself wondering if our writing styles have begun to bleed into each other. Convinced that, collectively, we use words like "ridiculous" and "inexplicably" in a far higher proportion than the average population, I set out to do a content analysis of all the adjectives and adverbs that we've used so far on the entire blog. Needless to say, this task proved too gargantuan, and was scrapped in its infancy. The concept remained in my head, however. And so, on a particularly slow day at work, I decided to narrow my search to adverbs, which, while perhaps less interesting than adjectives, were much easier to find and catalog (mostly thanks to a document search of "ly"). Even with a technological crutch, compiling this list took me an embarrassing amount of time, and might end up yielding very little substance. But I'm going to SHINE ON anyway.


With that, here are the most commonly used adverbs on our entire blog archives, in descending order (each must have had at least five mentions to make the cut). It's worth noting that I disqualified "only" and "really" from this list.

25 Totally
22 Actually
15 Probably
12 Entirely
11 Simply
8 Seriously
8 Certainly
7 Ultimately
7 Truly
7 Rarely
7 Possibly
7 Decidedly
7 Clearly
7 Additionally
7 Absolutely
6 Surely
6 Particularly
6 Officially
6 Merely
6 Literally
6 Incredibly
6 Importantly
6 Especially
5 Undeniably
5 Recently
5 Inexplicably
5 Apparently

Aside from confirming my suspicion that we have a prodigious vocabulary, what does this list tell us about ourselves? First, as if it comes as any surprise, we use "totally" a lot. It's unclear how many times these "totally"s were followed by "sweet"s, but we'll disregard that for our current analysis. The word "totally," however, fits into a bigger trend in this list of adverbs. I've bolded the words that fit together into a poignant conceptual theme. This revised list gives us a clearer picture of what I consider the "Epic Touch." All of the bolded words, which comprise the majority of this list, emphasize the veracity, totality, and indisputability of things. We at Epic Mail concern ourselves only with the most epic of matters. And, it seems, we often assert facts as well as opinions with emphatic adverbs that might even flirt with hyperbole. And I wouldn't have it any other way. Clearly, we're definitively and surely the most undeniably total and ultimate blog of all time.

And just for fun, here's some of the more ridiculous, if less often used, adverbs that emerged in this research:

ashamedly; bi-semesterly; boorishly; chivalrously; daintily; enchantingly; heart-meltingly; mind-bogglingly; outlandishly; sedulously; semi-professionally

This is but a brief gloss, so I'm looking forward to any secondary analysis that our mailers can provide.

A Guest Epic 10

As the window for posting these Epic 10 of 2008 lists is fast closing, here is a guest entry, written by James Ryan.

---------------------------------------------------------

10. Titus Andronicus - The Airing of Grievences
If any new musical group of 2008 has epic potential, it is Titus Andronicus. On their debut album they adequately balance bloozy noise rock anthems with lyrics dexterous enough to reference both Bruegel the Elder and Seinfeld without sounding like a complete asshole. Basically if Chris Onstad lead a rock band from New Jersey instead of writing Achewood, his name would be Patrick Stickles.

9. Google - Translator
Me - Crap, that journal article I really needed on the Egyptian response to the Napoleonic invasion only exists on this silly sounding French online journal.
Google - No worries, cuz. I got that.

8. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
This reminded me of what an awful set of films The Mummy franchise is/was and reaffirmed for me how much of an awful poser Brendan Fraser is. Somehow, I think society needs reminders of this every year. Say what you will about this film in the canon of Epic Films or even the Indy series, but nobody knows how to make archaeologists (or scientists in general) into EPIC action stars the way Spielberg does.

7. The Dark Knight
I will probably never enjoy a superhero film as much as this. It is, as they say, the gawdfather of the genre.

6. Giants 17 Patriots 14
I hate the Giants. Everyone hates the Patriots. It takes a lot of courage to say this is the greatest football game I've watched live.

5. The Nightman Cometh
In a series of alternately crude and careful games of oneupmanship, the season finale of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia finally brought us Epic writ large on the small screen. In one episode Charlie's character went from quirky and idosyncratic to portraying the true meaning of neurotic, deep, emotional, EPIC FAIL. Really, anyone who has ever had romantic feelings has thought about doing something like this, realized how embarrasing a failure it would be and not done it. The Nightman Cometh brings all those nightmares to its awkward, stumbling, life.

4. Journals 1952-200 - Arthur Schlesinger Jr.
If I could sum up this man's life in three letters it would be FTW. He wrote history books chronicling the Kennedy white house. He was a major political figure without really ever contributing to policy. He totally had the hots for Lauren Bacall. Nixon was his backdoor neighbor. He totally had the hots for the fax machine. He was acquainted with Castro, but not Jimmy Carter. Bill Clinton treated him like the Godfather. Thankfully he left us with 6000 pages of journal entries, 1000 of them his sons have published for us.

3. The Turkish Constitutional Court (Anayasa Mahkemesi)
I owe them. Had it not been for a super savvy Epic decision not to close the ruling AK Parti, I might not have made it back to the US this summer. Perhaps this is underappreciated but since when has a court of law singlehandedly stopped a coup that would have resulted in much gnashing of teeth, wailing and possibly blood?

2. Cats
It's been another big year for felines. They are all over the internets!

1. Sir Edmund Hillary
An Epic man, and Epic accomplishment, an Epic life.

This is what I do at work...