Zach Galifianakis is the new comedy god

OK, the title is a little bit facetious. But Zach Galifianakis is a really funny guy. Or he's extremely unfunny. It all depends on the person who is watching his act.

I watched Galifianakis' Comedy Central special (video) with my old roommates and a girl when they were over at the house. This is a Comedy Central special where Galiafianakis jumps around in a leotard, has a chorus of his ex-girlfriends sing a song and... well, it's pretty weird.

My roommates didn't get it (for the record, they thought that Dane Cook was hilarious). The girl? She said that Katt Williams is funny and asked if we had any of that.

Yeah.

Anyway, the New York Times magazine ran a feature on Galifianakis (my second favorite Greek comedian behind Demetri Martin).

Here's a portion:

The beard lends him a subtly beatnik air, a link to the first generation of stand-up iconoclasts, like Lord Buckley and Lenny Bruce; at the same time,it gives him a professorial quality — dare I call it a gravitas? — that makes his more meatheaded material jarringly effective. Galifianakis himself put it more succinctly: “I look like a homeless guy now. People seem to appreciate that.”

One of the people who appreciated it was Kanye West, who saw Galifianakis perform at a Hollywood club called Largo in 2007. “I was doing a bit about how much I hate celebrity egos, and that seemed to resonate with him, for some reason,” said Galifianakis, with a barely perceptible grin. “He asked me to do a video for him, and I said yes, with one condition: I just go off by myself and shoot it, and he doesn’t get to look at it until it’s done.” To everyone’s surprise, West agreed. The resulting video, in which Galifianakis and the indie-folk icon Will Oldham drive a tractor around a cornfield while lip-synching West’s hit single “Can’t Tell Me Nothing,” has been viewed nearly half a million times. “I wasn’t sure what Kanye would think of it, to be honest,” Galifianakis said. “But his response was perfect, considering how we’d first met. He said it was the best video he’d ever made.”

Sports and birds just don't mix

On ESPN.com right now, one of the Editor's Choice videos (featured on the front page of the website) is this video of a cricket player throwing the ball and hitting a bird:



Of course, as an American, this reminded me of the Randy Johnson fastball that hit and annihilated a bird back in 2001.



And apparently in England, the bird hitting extends even to soccer, er, football. Michael Ballack, of Chelsea, destroys a bird in similar fashion as Randy Johnson, which you can see here.

If you thought that basketball, being an indoor sport, would be safe from birds interfering with the game. Well, you'd be wrong.

100 great movie lines in 200 seconds

Via NewMexiKen:

You can argue with a few of the lines ("This is Sparta!" doesn't belong on the list for sure), but it's still a cool video. I'd say that I recognize about 95 of the lines, even though there are many movies that I haven't seen.

Penn Jillette juggling broken bottles

There is something strangely disconcerting about this video of magician Penn Jillette juggling broken glass bottles (hat tip to @brianarn for the link).

I'm not sure what it is about the video that creeps me out... maybe it's the a minute and three seconds of total silence. Maybe it's seeing Jillette's mouth moving in super slow motion, obviously saying something. Maybe it's just Jillette.

But, yeah, the video creeps me out.

Oh, and before the video, I saw a commercial featuring Bear Grylls, the star of Man vs. Wild. I always refer to Grylls as the fake survival expert since he's faked numerous scenes. I prefer Les Stroud of Survivorman.

Orlando Magic player to change shoes for NBA Finals

Mickael Pietrus of the NBA Finals has worn the same type of shoes all year long. He has worn this type of shoes while his team reached the playoffs. He wore this type of shoes as the Orlando Magic knocked off the defending champion Boston Celtics and dethroned "King James" (Lebron James) and the Cleveland Cavaliers.

But now, he has to change up.

Because those shoes that Pietrus wore? They are Kobe Bryant brand shoes. And he is playing against Kobe Bryant and the Los Angeles Lakers in the NBA Finals.

"I have [Kobe shoes] at my house, but I'm going to play with Michael Jordan shoes," Pietrus told the Orlando Sentinel (via ESPN).

Well Jordan has six titles and Bryant only has three. So it seems like a no-brainer to me.

The Tank Man of Tiananmen Square

Twenty years ago this Friday, one of the most famous images (or rather four images of the same event) ever taken was caught on film in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China. A man, who became known as "Tank Man" stood in front of a row of tanks. Even to this day, virtually nothing is known about the man, even down to what his name is.

The New York Times tracked down the four photographers whose pictures have been shown over and over and TV and in magazines to get their recollections of the event.

As Arthur Tsang Hin Wah, the man who took the photo for Reuters, said, "I am glad that it still has impact after 20 years. Four different versions but one same focus."

Dave Eggers speaks the myth of print's importance

Best selling author and all-around smart guy Dave Eggers (if you haven't read What is the What you have to -- now).

At a recent speech at the Author's Guild in Manhattan, Eggers said:

The written word—the love of it and the power of the written word—it hasn’t changed. It’s a matter of fostering it, fertilizing it, not giving up on it, and having faith. Don’t get down. I actually have established an e-mail address, deggers@826national.org—if you want to take it down—if you are ever feeling down, if you are ever despairing, if you ever think publishing is dying or print is dying or books are dying or newspapers are dying.

Of course, the writer of a Splice Today article says that Eggers "has his head up his ass with regards to the decline of print media."