They're gonna put you in a trance with a funky song

Some time ago, or so I'm assuming, alert reader Jennifer W. signed up to an e-mail alert system to make sure she'd never miss out on New Kids on the Block news. And after trillions of years, it paid off this week.

New Kids On The Block Stage Comeback

You know what? Screw the war and the recession. I can hear it now:

"The state of the union is strong. My fellow Americans, the New Kids are back."

The things they do, it's forever. I wake up in the morning and I see their face; they're looking so good, everything's in place. I need them - I need them - I guess I always will. Step by step, ooh baby, gonna get to them, girl.

Dude, I can't even finish this post. I have to go write their names on the back of a Trapper Keeper for a couple of hours. *swoon*

Couldn't not say it

Eyewitnesses say police had scattered, smothered and covered the neighborhood within minutes.

Two lessons

1) There are absolutely laws of physics that prevent journalists from passing up "nine lives" ledes when writing about improbable cat adventures.
2) Zombies + kitties = awesome.

There's probably some kind of lesson in there about keeping track of your cat's whereabouts and/or double-checking your luggage, but dispensing practical advice isn't really our gig.

Thanks to alert birthday boy Andy W. Here's the whole story.

Palm pilot.

That bit of bad-assery is... uh... clearly it's some kind of god-like alien magic. Complete with mind-numbing music to make us more confused and docile and thus prepare us for our new lives as host vessels.

By the way, impatient folks should skip to the 2-minute mark for the money shot.

Ephemera

Today's life lesson comes from the headline: Judge Wants More Info on Foxy's Ear Woes. The takeaway? Everything is funnier if your name is Foxy.

On another note, I sometimes take a moment to reflect on humorously worded subject lines to pornographic spam e-mails. Today I got this message: Roger H. Ide Organ Recital on Feb. 10. It turned out to be from my alma mater, trying to get me to come to an actual organ recital, but I got a good half-second giggle in before I realized that.

Son of Creep-You-Out Friday

From Kotaku.

Raddest sentence contest!

Faithful reader Bill R. has a St. Louis Cardinals desk calendar, from which he shows me the interesting pages, 'cause they're my favorite team too. Yesterday's snippet was a quote from four-time All-Star pitcher (and non-Cardinal) Van Lingle Mungo... whose name I just read for the first time.

Little did I know how much better it could be. Quoth Wikipedia:

-----
Stories and anecdotes about Mungo tend to emphasize his reputation for combativeness, including episodes of drinking and fighting. The most widely told story concerns a visit to Cuba where, supposedly, Mungo was caught in a sexually compromising position with a married woman by her husband. The husband was punched in the eye by Mungo, leading the husband to attack Mungo with a butcher knife or machete, requiring Dodgers executive Babe Hamberger to smuggle Mungo in a laundry cart to a seaplane waiting off a wharf in order to escape the country.
-----

To summarize: Once upon a time, a man named Babe Hamberger smuggled a man named Van Lingle Mungo out of Cuba in a laundry cart, in order to save him from certain death at the hands of a machete-wielding cuckold.

Whosoever can find me a radder, ostensibly factual sentence, will win a hand-drawn picture of a 1980s professional wrestler of his or her choice, produced and signed by yours truly, suitable for framing. Enter today!

007 373 5963

Oh, The Onion. How often must you mock me?

Half Of 26-Year-Old's Memories Nintendo-Related

If you're between 25 and 35, and you tally the sentences in the story that make sense to you vs. those that don't, you'll have a ratio you can provide to your neighborhood mental-health specialist to demonstrate exactly how much responsibility your parents shirked. Good stuff.

Cryptic headline Wednesday

Today BBC News confounded me with this headline:

Facebook asked to pull Scrabulous

Basic pop-culture etymology could have deciphered it for me, and would have explained why Hasbro and Mattel are upset (I mean, be cool Facebook - if you're gonna rip off a game, don't rip off its name as well). Sadly that instinct failed me, and my mind instead raced with possible definitions for the word "scrabulous." It sounded like an adjective and thus raised the question: "to pull a scrabulous what?"

I finally decided it should modify a body part you're describing to your doctor, e.g. "I don't know how my thigh got so scrabulous, doc. I was only in Thailand for a two-hour layover."

Anyway, confusionary crisis averted, the Beeb elsewhere yielded this adorable photo:

"Who's the sweetest li'l babies in the whole wide world?" everyone asked the tamarins. "You are," they then instantly reassured the small creatures.

All together now: "D'oh!"

That's the image that greeted me today when I logged into e-mail. Mind you, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't recognize Steve Jobs if he walked up to me and said "Hi, I'm Steve Jobs," but I am reasonably familiar with the gentleman pictured above, and that ain't him.

(Clicking through showed me the entire photo, which indeed captured Jobs in front of a screen with a 20-foot image of Homer on it. Maybe they meant to crop it differently for the splash page.)

In other news, you may have seen last week's story on the Hannah Montana body double. It wasn't particularly noteworthy, except that it gave us the quote of the young year, from Pollstar editor-in-chief Gary Bongiovanni:

"There are absolutely laws of physics that prevent you from doing gee-whiz things without some hocus-pocus."

I'm too lazy to read all of Newton's laws. Can someone check this one for me?

Order now!

That's a screen from As Seen on TV, a hilarious blog post at Cracked's site. It's hard for me to use the words "hilarious" and "Cracked" in the same sentence, given my terrible childhood memories of a magazine that was just like another unfunny magazine, only less funny - but just wait until you see the Tiddy Bear and PowerJet commercials.

Yes, Tiddy Bear.