Raise Hell, Drink Beer

So great. From the Google Blog:

We’re excited to announce the availability of never-before-seen images from the LIFE photo archive. This effort to bring offline images online was inspired by our mission to organize all the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. This collection of newly-digitized images includes photos and etchings produced and owned by LIFE dating all the way back to the 1750s.

In 1969, a 14-year-old Beatle fanatic named Jerry Levitan, armed with a reel-to-reel tape deck, snuck into John Lennon’s hotel room in Toronto and convinced John to do an interview about peace. 38 years later, Jerry has produced a film about it. Using the original interview recording as the soundtrack, director Josh Raskin has woven a visual narrative which tenderly romances Lennon’s every word in a cascading flood of multipronged animation. Raskin marries the terrifyingly genius pen work of James Braithwaite with masterful digital illustration by Alex Kurina, resulting in a spell-binding vessel for Lennon’s boundless wit, and timeless message:

Neighbors seem largely oblivious to the fact that a rock star lives down the street, even after all these years. “It’s not like living next door to Cher,” Mr. Coyne said.

But fans do sometimes search the place out.

One Sunday evening not long ago, he said, “I was taking out the trash, and I saw this suspiciously slow-moving car.” In this neighborhood, it was not unreasonable for him to wonder if he was about to be robbed, or worse.

Instead someone yelled out the window, “Wayne, you rock!”

A child’s piano that Mr. Coyne can play on.

At Home With Wayne Coyne – Not Exactly Domesticated – NYTimes.com

Fucking nuts:

Skip to the 2:25 mark to see the crazy shit.

You’d be surprised what you can find out in the middle of nowhere.

The Flaming Lips rehearse for the upcoming Who tribute:

The Flaming Lips Rehearsing from Irreversibility on Vimeo.

A pint of the black stuff a day may work as well as an aspirin to prevent heart clots that raise the risk of heart attacks.

Since I was a kid I’ve always been a little over sensitive to the glorification and rewarding of dumb. The “salt of the earth, regular, every day folk” (or lowest common denominator) who see the world, and the people like me in it, as on some sort of secular mission to take away their flag lapels and plaster-of-paris jesus television adornments strike me as childishly paranoid.

If multiple partnerships save lives, then monogamy can be deadly. Imagine a country where almost all women are monogamous, while all men demand two female partners per year. Under those circumstances, a few prostitutes end up servicing all the men. Before long, the prostitutes are infected; they pass the disease on to the men; the men bring it home to their monogamous wives. But if each of those monogamous wives were willing to take on one extramarital partner, the market for prostitution would die out, and the virus, unable to spread fast enough to maintain itself, might well die out along with it.