Freestyle Canoeing

I can't do much better than one of the comments on the youtube page:

"First I thought he ran out of tricks but then he pulls that 360 spin and I felt like the lady in red."

There are actually journalists and photographers there. What is going on?

Late Night - The Guy Under the Seats

A compilation of every "The Guy Under the Seats" appearance.

I'm constantly amazed at how Late Night with David Letterman was so completely deconstructing the format - and how early on they were doing it. "Meta" comedy is so big on the internet that we think of it as "current" but here it is in the mid '80s.

Continue? - Lester the Unlikely

You know who likes video games? Nerds. It's 1994 already, so why don't we base a video game character around a nerd? There's no way it can fail.


My favorite Kanye West album is Pablo Honey.

Man Of War

I don't want to spoil it for anyone else but after nearly 20 years, this one feels like a disappointment. It feels like it was left unreleased because it wasn't finished rather than the usual reason Radiohead don't release songs: to torture people. Even with the editing, strange audio and distortion. I'll take the Meeting People is Easy version any day. Maybe that's nostalgia but it's the truth.

Yes - Yours Is No Disgrace

Here's "Yours is no Disgrace" if you have 11 minutes free.

"On a sailing ship to nowhere, leaving any place..."



The interplay between the main theme on keyboards and the guitar in this song is just magical, in my opinion.

The album version is available on youtube so I could have posted that. But then I figured, "Fellas, you're really gonna want that rotating mannequin head on the track."

Steve Howe says in an interview that the intro was rhythmically inspired by a "famous television series" but doesn't say which. There seems to be a lot of different theories. My money would be on the Gideon's Way Theme:

RIP Adam West

This past week I saw a Batman '66 action figure and thought back to how big that show was to me when I was a kid. I can't put into words how exciting and cool it was to me at the time. Some of that excitement survives to this day. If it was available on Netflix, I'd probably still watch it regularly. But don't bother looking for it.

I imagine the Batman tv series had a similar effect on Conan O'Brien. Something that perhaps isn't widely known is that, in his time between writing for SNL and The Simpsons, Conan created a TV series starring Adam West. The series, called Lookwell, was co-created by Robert Smigel who would go on to be Conan's first head writer at Late Night.

West starred as Lookwell, a washed up but self-important actor who was so famous for playing a detective on TV that he begins to believe he can solve crimes in real life. The combination comedy/mystery would presumably see him taking on a new crime every week using the powers of acting.

Although the pilot for Lookwell was produced, it was not picked up. But you can see the series' lone episode on youtube.