I thought this was a brilliant look at Sam Jackson’s many movie roles, and how he is now his own genre.

Here’s an interesting graphic. Notice that his character, Jules, from Pulp Fiction is in the middle:

Credit: The New York Times

How Samuel L. Jackson Became His Own Genre – NYTimes.com.

OK, so yeah, this is a little bit gay (not that there’s anything wrong with that), but here we have Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt singing and playing a New Year’s Eve tune. Zooey is on the lukulule, while Levitt is on the guitar.

The only thing that fascinates me about this is that movie stars are typically so sheltered from the general public that we rarely get to see what they are like as people. Zooey, on YouTube (user name: hellogiggles), breaks this trend, and that’s one reason why I’m a fan:

With or without God, this no doubt has a church atmosphere:

Not that Clinton. Or that one.

Yup. Chelsea. And journalists why the public mistrusts the media, and why journalists themselves are disillusioned about the business. Two commentators in this video rightly called this move “cynical.”

I just found a channel on YouTube called Watch Listen Tell that features up and coming artists and established acts singing their tunes acoustically in apparently random places in the greater London area.

Here are some songs (new to me) that I particularly enjoyed:

Lissie, “Everywhere I Go”

Villagers, “Becoming a Jackal”

Stornoway, “I Saw You Blink”

Guillemots, “I Don’t Feel Amazing Now”

OK, this last one isn’t new to me, but he is new in general. A year ago, one could barely find Ben Howard on Amazon at all, just a couple mp3s. He just released his first album, “Every Kingdom,” in October. Here is

Ben Howard with “Old Pine” and some good acoustic work:

Because I don’t have anything else intelligible left in me today, here’s a song titled “Barely Out of Tuesday” by Counting Crows that never fails to pull me inside out and then back again.

This is apparently the only recording of the song. I have the show at which it was played sitting in a CD case from back in my trading days. The girl that he mentions in the beginning is Courteney Cox I do believe. She appeared in “The Long December” music video.

I woke up Wednesday morning,
Sometime Wednesday evening,
Hoping for a piece of something easy to believe.
When you live out on the border
Of everything and nothing
There’s nothing but waking and dreaming.
I’m barely out of Tuesday.
There’s no one to receive me,
And nothing is changing.
Maybe you could leave a light on (leave a light on) for me.

Superb music video depicting scenes from the almost incomprehensible film, “The Fountain:”

If you watch the full video, you will see that it’s somewhat related to the story of Adam and Eve in the garden. I don’t believe I have written a review of the movie yet, but I should. I would have to watch it about five more times, though, I’m afraid. It’s a mind warp.

Here is a synopsis from Rotten Tomatoes:

Requiem for a Dream director Darren Aronofsky switches gears from drug-induced urban malaise to abstract science fiction with this time-tripping symbolic tale of a man’s thousand-year quest to save the woman he loves. Moving between representational stories and images, this meditation on life and death focuses on the concept of the mythical Tree of Life that is said to bestow immortality to all who drink of its sap. In one of the film’s allegorical timelines, a 16th century Spanish conquistador played by Hugh Jackman sets out to find the tree in order to save his queen (Rachel Weisz) from the Inquisition. Another conceptual story finds Jackman centuries later, struggling with mortality as a modern-day scientist desperately searching for the medical breakthrough that will save the life of his cancer-stricken wife, Izzi. The third and most abstract concept finds Jackman as a different incarnation of the same character-idea, this time questing for eternal life within the confines of a floating sphere transporting the aged Tree of Life through the depths of space. Even more avant-garde than his breakthrough film Pi, The Fountain finds Aronofsky almost completely abandoning conventional story structure in favor of something more cinematically abstract. Though the film was originally slapped with an R by the MPAA, Aronofsky and co. re-edited it to conform to a PG-13 rating. ~ Jason Buchanan, Rovi

An example of brainlessness:

And here is a spoof of said brainlessness:

And another:

Sadly, my IQ has dropped 50 points.

Below are a few videos of Julia Sweeney, formerly with Saturday Night Live, describing her ascent out of Catholicism and a spiritual journey that led her, first, to dismiss Christianity and the Bible and then deism, and finally, Eastern spirituality. Her quest toward the truth was actually punctuated by many of the same questions I asked in my own search, which led, ultimately, to an appreciation of science and reason and a recognition of the culpability of religion.

Here are a few parts from her monologue “Letting Go of God,” in which she investigates the incoherence of the God-son-sacrifice dichotomy, the complexities of the eye and the science behind near death experiences and supposed ghost or angel sightings. If you don’t don’t agree with her, it’s worth watching. She’s a remarkable storyteller.