The pet store was selling them for five cents a piece. I thought that odd since they were normally a couple thousand each. I decided not to look a gift horse in the mouth. I bought 200. I like monkeys.

I took my 200 monkeys home. I have a big car. I let one drive. His name was Sigmund. He was retarded. In fact, none of them were really bright. They kept punching themselves in their genitals. I laughed. Then they punched my genitals. I stopped laughing.

I herded them into my room. They didn’t adapt very well to their new environment. They would screech, hurl themselves off of the couch at high speeds and slam into the wall. Although humorous at first, the spectacle lost its novelty halfway into its third hour.

Two hours later I found out why all the monkeys were so inexpensive: they all died. No apparent reason. They all just sorta’ dropped dead. Kinda’ like when you buy a goldfish and it dies five hours later. Damn cheap monkeys.

I didn’t know what to do. There were 200 dead monkeys lying all over my room, on the bed, in the dresser, hanging from my bookcase. It looked like I had 200 throw rugs.

I tried to flush one down the toilet. It didn’t work. It got stuck. Then I had one dead, wet monkey and 199 dead, dry monkeys.

I tried pretending that they were just stuffed animals. That worked for a while, that is until they began to decompose. It started to smell real
bad.

I had to pee but there was a dead monkey in the toilet and I didn’t want to call the plumber. I was embarrassed.

I tried to slow down the decomposition by freezing them. Unfortunately there was only enough room for two monkeys at a time so I had to change them every 30 seconds. I also had to eat all the food in the freezer so it didn’t all go bad.

I tried burning them. Little did I know my bed was flammable. I had to extinguish the fire.

Then I had one dead, wet monkey in my toilet, two dead, frozen monkeys in my freezer, and 197 dead, charred monkeys in a pile on my bed. The odor wasn’t improving.

I became agitated at my inability to dispose of my monkeys and to use the bathroom. I severely beat one of my monkeys. I felt better.

I tried throwing them way but the garbage man said that the city wasn’t allowed to dispose of charred primates. I told him that I had a wet one. He couldn’t take that one either. I didn’t bother asking about the frozen ones.

I finally arrived at a solution. I gave them out as Christmas gifts. My friends didn’t know quite what to say. They pretended that they like them but I could tell they were lying. Ingrates. So I punched them in the genitals.

I like monkeys

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Over protective parents.

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My big vacation this year that I’m really looking forward to is a headfirst dive into the whirlwind of cinema known as The Toronto International Film Festival. Several titles have already been announced and I’ve already started the “weeding out” process. Out of hundreds (thousands?) of films being shown, I’ll only be seeing thirty, so choosing carefully will be obviously important and difficult.

Right off the bat I usually discount documentaries as a style of film making that isn’t really my cup of tea (in general – Anvil! fucking rocked!). But one film I keep teetering back and forth on whether I want to see or not is called Under Great White Northern Lights, which documents “The White Stripes” tour across Canada. Unfortunately this trailer doesn’t help my decision at all. I like the look of the all black and white seascape, but it doesn’t give me much to go on in terms of “plot” – for lack of a better word.

Thanks to The Documentary Blog for the heads up on the trailer, but dammit, I need more information before I decide to spend 2 of my precious 60 hours of viewing time on Jack White.

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One of my many honorable mentions from last year’s great record was “Visiter” by The Dodos. Looks like they’ve been busy in the studio and have added a musician to the band: 21-year-old Keaton Snyder on vibraphone. The third and newest album is called “Time To Die” and is, previously unbeknownst to me, available now.

Now for the really good news. Thanks to this thing called the internet and labels getting smarter about music distribution, you can listen to the entire album free. Sample the product before you buy; what a novel concept! Check out the tracks over here and buy the album over here.

A friend turned me on to the Brooklyn-based band Elizabeth & the Catapult a few days ago, and I fell for them far faster than I usually fall for new bands. Some combination of Elizabeth’s central vocals, the whimsical musicality, the sorta retro-modern stylings, and the adorableness of their website and promo pics had me hooked immediately. Poking around a bit, I’ve already seen them compared with Feist a lot and Rilo Kiley and Lily Allen a little; I also get a little bit of a Bird & The Bee vibe to them and maybe some She & Him and Lavendar Diamond (their producer has also worked with Rilo Kiley and M. Ward, so a couple of those comparisons may show his influence, as well).

In fact, an easy criticism is probably that they’re too much like other bands rather than being particularly original, but that doesn’t really bother me in the slightest. They’ve tapped so closely into my biases right now that I went straight to AmazonMP3 to download their album. They’re touring through LA next week, sadly the same exact day I’m flying out to Chicago for Lollapalooza. But I’ll definitely be on the lookout for them the next time they come through.

Here are a couple of sample songs; they have most of the rest of the album streaming on their site.

Race You – Elizabeth & The Catapult – Race You
Right Next To You – Elizabeth & The Catapult – Right Next To You

And this is the bonus song on the CD, the playfully-lyricked “Perfectly Perfect,” performed live at a small venue in NYC:

MP3s are provided for sampling purposes only; if you like them, please support the artist by buying their music and going to their shows. If you are or represent the artist and would like the MP3 files removed, please email me at jandy@rowthree.com.

Links:
Official site
Amazon CD
Amazon MP3
Twitter
MySpace
And the video for title song “Taller Children” (it’s not embeddable) is here on Youtube

Too entertaining not to copy and paste. Thanks Wired.

1 Sea mammal blowhole. Any animal that spends appreciable time in the ocean should be able to extract oxygen from water via gills. Enlarging the lungs and moving a nostril to the back of the head is a poor work-around.

2 Hyena clitoris. When engorged, this “pseudopenis,” which doubles as the birth canal, becomes so hard it can crush babies to death during exit.

3 Kangaroo teat. In order to nurse, the just-born joey, a frail and squishy jellybean, must clamber up Mom’s torso and into her pouch for a nipple.

4 Giraffe birth canal. Mama giraffes stand up while giving birth, so baby’s entry into the world is a 5-foot drop. Wheeee! Crack.

5 Goliath bird-eating spider exoskeleton. This giant spider can climb trees to hunt very mobile prey. Yet it has a shell so fragile it practically explodes when it falls? Well, at least it can produce silk to make a sail. Oh, wait — it can’t!

6 Shark-fetus teeth. A few shark species have live births (instead of laying eggs). The Jaws juniors grow teeth in the womb. The first sibling or two to mature sometimes eat their siblings in utero. Mmm … siblings.

7 Human stomach. People can digest a lot — except for cellulose, the primary component of plant matter. Why don’t we have commensal bacteria in our guts to do it? They’re busy helping termites.

8 Slug genitalia. Some hermaphroditic species breed by wrapping their sex organs around each other. If one of said members gets stuck, the slug simply chews it off. What. The. Hell?

9 Quadrupeds. Let’s say you’re a four-footed animal. Now let’s say you get a wound on your back, or an itch, or a bug wandering up there. Tough luck, kid. You probably can’t do much about it. Hope there’s a low branch around.

10 Narwhal tusk. The unicorn-like protuberance on a male narwhal’s head is actually a tooth that erupts through the front of the jaw and keeps on growing, up to 9 feet. Narwhal: “Doc, I have a toothache.” Dentist: “Indeed.”

Rock and roll style. To coincide with Pearl Jam’s latest effort, Backspacer, the band has placed “puzzle piece” images that when brought together complete the entire album cover; designed by political cartoonist Tom Tomorrow.

Apparently if you click on a piece of the puzzle and bring all of them together (hidden around the internet – good luck) you will be rewarded with something that “is better than the usual free MP3.” I personally don’t care too much, nor do I have the time and patience to go hunting for these things. But if you do, I can get you started with one of the first pieces over at Wired.com.

Good luck. And whatever it is you get for free when you win, be sure to cut me in on the deal for starting you out.

Want to make sure you’re well prepped for what could be the final party on the planet? Keep up to date with the impending armageddon with the Asteroid Watch widget from Nasa.gov.

JPL’s Asteroid Watch Widget tracks asteroids and comets that will make relatively close approaches to Earth. The Widget displays the date of closest approach, approximate object diameter, relative size and distance from Earth for each encounter. The object’s name is displayed by hovering over its encounter date. Clicking on the encounter date will display a Web page with details about that object.

The Widget displays the next five Earth approaches to within 4.6 million miles (7.5 million kilometers or 19.5 times the distance to the moon); an object larger than about 150 meters that can approach the Earth to within this distance is termed a potentially hazardous object.

If this is too much for you, you can follow the Twitter which is a bit more selective and doesn’t notify you of every passerby, just the ones that are likely to kill us all.

Tis about time says I. Hope Sandoval and the Warm Inventions will be (finally) releasing a new album in September entitled “Through the Devil Softly.” For those not in the know, Hope was the lead vocalist for her band Mazzy Star which was instrumental in getting me laid several times in college. And their band’s records are quite the nice driving at 3am listening experience as well.

The Warm Inventions’ last album was released in 2001 and since then we’ve seen very little from Ms. Sandoval (aside from side collaborations). Now almost 8 years later we get some more. Nice.

Here’s a taste of the new record. A track entitled “Blanchard.”

http://rowthree.com/audio/Blanchard.mp3

thanks to CyanaTrendLand for the heads up and the .mp3!

As previously opined here on RowThree, Horehound, the debut album from The Dead Weather is quickly becoming one of my favorites of 2009. Track five, “Treat Me Like Your Mother” got the video treatment by director Jonathan Glazer and premiered on Cinemax a few nights ago. Since I don’t have Cinemax and since I missed their performance at the legendary First Ave. on Monday night, I have to settle for the YouTube version – which I gotta say is simplistically awesome.

Watch Jack White and Alison Mosshart duel it out with fully automatic machine guns as they walk towards one another in a “Terminator-esque” sequence. The rhythm of the song mashing with the gun caps is pretty killer – no pun intended. Bloodied and exhausted, the two part ways once the clips have been emptied. It is the definition of cool; admittedly in part because of Glazer’s style and tone of the video. Check it out below. Then go buy the album.

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Nemo!

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Just do it.

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Volcano Choir may not mean much to you yet but come next year, it may well be on everyone’s lips. A recently created project made up of Justin Vernon (AKA Bon Iver) and Chris Rosenau of Collections of Colonies of Bees fame, the duo have created this new project, which Vernon has described as “experimental, textural and landscapey.” The first album, titled “Unmap” is scheduled for release in September and word now is that they’re also working on a film score.

This news would still be great if it was for a new film but it’s even more attention grabbing when the score in question is for a film classic. Volcano Choir is working on a score to Charlie Chaplin’s comedy classic The Gold Rush, a score which will be performed on January 21, 2010 at the New York Guitar Festival. For more details on the event and to purchase tickets, check out the Guitar Festival’s website.

No clips of Volcano Choir in action but I’ll share this instead, one of my favourite songs from “For Emma, Forever Ago”.

Horse.

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