LOL!!1!

This year celebrates the 25th anniversary of My Little Pony, the classic toy horse for girls.  MLP (as those in the know call it) is still going strong today... so strong, in fact, that its iconic rainbow logo (left) has been lovingly parodied by the people at Off World Designs.  (By the way, there are also Cthulhu stuffed animals and even Cthulhu collectible figures.)

What's a Cthulhu?  Check out the answer here or, to check out a retro 80's My Little Pony commercial, click here. -- ECM

In a bizarre P.T.Barnum-meets-D.B.Cooper advertising stunt, an Indonesian writer marked the release of his latest book by dumping 100 million rupiah (about $10,700) out of an airplane. 

"I want to create a rain of money in Jakarta," author and motivational speaker Tung Desem Waringin said. "It's a little bit crazy, but it's marketing."

No word if this book tour will be expanded to more cities, but I'll be keeping my eye on the Seattle sky this week.

--Dave

I've never understood why the 1990's sketch comedy series, The State, lasted just two seasons on MTV.  According to the good folks at Wikipedia, the show was never canceled, but an ill-advised move to another network doomed the comedic troupe.  Still, if Reno 911 was made into a movie, The State certainly had more left in the tank.  What gives?

*steps off soapbox*

So when I received a galley of cast member Michael Ian Black's upcoming book, My Custom Van, I relished the opportunity to peek inside the dome of the man behind Capt. Monterey Jack.  With a collection of fifty raunchy and hilariously offbeat essays, Black fearlessly probes the questions no one considered to ask with mini-dissertations like A Meditation on Salami, Vampires - Good for the Economy?, and an examination of rodent egotism, A Series of Letters to a Squirrel.   

Akin to Jon Stewart's Naked Pictures of Famous People, the dry wit in My Custom Van will force many unexpected laughs as you'll rarely know where you're going next.  What you can expect is plenty of blue material (leave the kids at home), outrageous observations, and a sweet blueprint on how to truly pimp out a custom van.  (SPOILER ALERT:  It includes naked wizards)

My Custom Van hits bookshelves on July 15th.

--Dave

I could go on about Ian Frazier. Do you know who he is? Do you know him for Great Plains, his travel book from twenty-plus years ago, which first appeared in vast excerpts in the New Yorker where it blew out the doors with the most bravura opening in the magazine's history of bravura openings ("AWAY to the Great Plains of America, to that immense Western short-grass prairie now mostly plowed under!...") and then didn't let up for 200 more pages? Or do you know him for On the Rez, his more recent bestseller about the Pine Ridge Reservation and actual--gulp--heroism? Or maybe for a fantastic New Yorker article you remember from some time ago on Canal Street or fishing or--most likely--plastic bags getting stuck in trees? Or--only if you're a geek like me--for an immortal sentence he wrote in 1974 for an unsigned Talk of the Town bit on Joey Heatherton: "She is a pert engine of destruction." Or perhaps for a piece he had in The Atlantic a few years back whose very long title you can't remember but some of whose lines have stuck in your head ever since, maybe because you had it up on your fridge for a lot of that time?

That last is the reason we're here today: it's called "Laws Concerning Food and Drink; Household Principles; Lamentations of the Father," and it's the title piece (sort of) for his new collection of humorous (how that word chills) essays, Lamentations of the Father. We've been Frazier fans in my family for a long time (my sister, I will confess for her, once actually looked up where he lived in Missoula when she was passing through that town and parked across the street from his house and then was sort of embarrassed and creeped out at herself when he actually pulled up in his truck and parked and went inside the house), but "Lamentations," with its steel-hulled comedy that is never ever ever not hilarious, made him a household god of the stature of Charles Darwin or Juan Dixon. My parents and sister were visiting a few weeks ago when I got to interview Mr. Frazier, and the night before we took turns reading aloud yet again from the text. Everyone has their favorite punch line--mine is "And now behold, even as I have said, it has come to pass"--but happily The Atlantic has just put their last dozen years online for free, so you can read it all yourself.

I'll pause right now while you do that.

Pretty good, huh? Lamentations of the Father has three dozen of his funny pieces, the best of which--"Tomorrow's Bird," "Researchers Say," "Chinese Arithmetic"--can play in the big leagues with the title essay. Here's a bit from my (second) favorite, "The American Persuasion":

Subtle, flirtatious, and amusing (as well as honest and upright), George Washington led the colonists' war against the British with all the wiles at his command. Contemporaries marveled at the flexibility of his methods when pursuing a much desired goal. It was perhaps a lucky accident of history that his cause was aided by patriots nearly as nuanced as he: in Boston were Paul Revere and John Hancock and the Adamses, noted voluptuaries and lovers of pleasure, easily distinguished in a crowd by the rich, ambergris-based New England bath oils in which they drenched themselves.

(You also find out the name of Benjamin Franklin's favorite scent: "Quaker Moonlight.") Despite the fact that talking about comedy is a recipe for disaster, I leapt at the chance to interview Frazier, and you can hear the results below. Please shut your ears or hum while I go all Terry Gross in the introduction--before long we get to these more interesting subjects:

• The history and philosophy of the New Yorker "casual"
• Growing up as a writer in the Shawn era, and the relationship between passive-aggressiveness and magazine greatness
• Why Russia is the funniest country
• Siberia, the Great Plains of Russia (and the subject of his long-awaited next book, Travels in Siberia, out--we hope--next year)

--Tom

Okay, so there's no real way to explain ManBabies.com -- you either love it or you don't.  The basic idea is that people take photos of dads and babies (vacation photos, family portraits, etc.) and, using Photoshop, switch the heads of the babies and the dads.  Ridiculous?  Yes.  Funny?  Absolutely. -- ECM (Special Thanks to Craig Downing.)

Welcome back to Friday Night Videos, where we aim to give you the kind of match-ups you deserve for hanging out here on the weekend. Our first video, in honor of Dmitri Nabokov's decision to release The Original of Laura, is a curious cultural remnant of a time when novelists had more importance than they do today. It's a television re-creation of a Nabokov lecture on Kafka featuring Christopher Plummer as Nabokov. (I couldn't make this stuff up if I tried.) Nabokov's opponent tonight is Diana Holquist's promo video for Sexiest Man Alive from Warner Books. This video features excellent use of a cat. Enjoy!

You could burn your ears several times over reading aloud from Curse + Berate in 69+ Languages, edited by R.V. Branham (and brought to you by the ever-cheeky Soft Skull Press). It's so filthy and rife with controversy, I can't possibly quote from the book itself, except, possibly, from the introduction, in which Branham raises a series of questions, then answered in footnotes so the easily offended won't jump out of their chairs: "What insult has the most time zones, and what is the language of this insult? And what is the most common insult south of the Kush, in south Asia? What was Vladimir Lenin's favorite word?" No, it was not "hushpuppy," "whimsical," or "contented." Instead, it was something that would sear your grandma's eyebrows right off.

I should probably leave it there, though, and let the more adventurous @#&*%! Amazon readers discover more on their own.

             
    (Squidpunk--a new genre? And the cover of William Vollman's new children's book...)

Ah, April. The full flush of spring, fields overburdened with wildflowers, birds singing, trees a thousand shades of green, and, of course, a sudden seasonal outpouring of very creative nonfiction on the internet. Even Information Week is reporting on it this year. So, here's a short selection of the weird and the silly, all of it as true as you want it to be...

Ed Rants reports on a number of fascinating news items, including William Vollman's new children's book and the creation of a new "pretentious fiction" category in the bookstore.

Locus Online gives us an inside look at Bravo TV's new Top Writer series, tells us that Cory Doctorow is releasing himself under Creative Commons, reveals that George R.R. Martin turning in his final manuscript has caused mass suicides at Bantam Books, and much else.

Meanwhile, the BBC reports that scientists have discovered flying penguins:

Elsewhere, J.K. Rowling moves to trademark the words "Harry" and "Potter", Brandon Sanderson's The Way of the Kings stirs controversy, and, finally, some weirdo in a squid hat tries to start a new literary movement from his living room. Enjoy! And feel free to link to more in the comments section.

Thanks to Shaken & Stirred and Antick Musings research assistance.

People like to think that, back in the day, toys were simpler and less complicated.  That may be true, but they weren't all necessarily successes as this commercial from the 1960's demonstrates.  Maybe this is where all those hippies came from...  -- ECM