Somewhat Manly Nerd

That trailer alone makes up for the neutered Live Free or Die Hard. While Bruce Willis is starting in a pussified fourth installment of his signature series, Sly Stallone is writing, producing, directing, and – of course – starring in this fourth installment of the Rambo series. Following the formula for his Rocky series, Stallone named this film John Rambo. I just can’t believe how awesomely violent that trailer is. Leave it to Stallone to bring the action of the 80′s back. Rocky Balboa was actually a decent movie, so I have high hopes for this one.

This honestly might be the greatest GIF I’ve ever seen:

Kickass. There is no band today better at creating a disgustingly awesome riff and rocking your face off with it.

The album Era Vulgaris hits U.S. stores in less than a month on June 12, which means it should be leaked in its entirety anytime now.

As for the “songs” I promised, there’s a bunch at this MySpace page. “3′s and 7′s” is going to be the second single off the album, while “Era Vulgaris” is actually not even on the album of the same name, unless you’re in the UK. I’m surprised QOTSA chose “Sick, Sick, Sick” as the first single over “3′s and 7′s”, but they both rock so it really doesn’t matter. The other two I know are on the album, but I’m not sure whether in that form or not. I think they’re from a live performance.

This album is going to rock my balls.

If you want a better quality video… Yahoo trailer page (Exclusive trailer)

Fuck Pirates – Transformers is the blockbuster action movie of this year. It’s not truly summer without Michael Bay blowing everything up. I don’t get all the hate he gets from self-proclaimed internet film critics. The Rock is one of the best action films of the 90s. Armageddon takes itself a bit too seriously at times, but when destruction rains down it’s pretty goddamn awesome (plus it has Bruce Willis). And Bad Boys II upstaged both Terminator 3 and The Matrix Reloaded in the summer of 2003 in the pure entertainment factor. The man just knows how to make an action set-piece. And this looks to the ultimate collection of action set-pieces. Transformers is the movie Michael Bay was born to make.

I’m obviously getting a bit too excited, but how can you not after watching that trailer? The movie will be almost non-stop, building-destroying, vehicle-exploding action. I was never the biggest fan of the Transformers animated series when I was a kid, but of course I thought it was cool enough. Never did I imagine a LIVE-ACTION Transformers movie would be made – and that it would look this phenomenal.

July 4th can’t come soon enough.

Ms. Alba has held a special place in my heart since that horrific TV show Dark Angel, but recently her change to blonde hair coinciding with her declining curvy figure made me kinda forget about her a little bit. Jessica Biel with her amazing ass, Jenna Fischer playing the cutest character on television ever, Scarlett Johansson with her boobs…there were plenty of distractions. But a recent photoshoot has Alba back with her natural hair color and also wearing a bathing suit(?) that only she could make look good.

Damn, she is gorgeous. If you want more, there’s a bunch here.

Guile would approve.

Arctic Monkeys – Favourite Worst Nightmare

This sophomore effort totally blows away their debut album, which I felt was a fun little record not deserving of the lavish praise heaped upon it. The second this new album kicks in, you know you’re in for a ride very different than the first. “Brianstorm” is twice as fast and twice as loud as anything they’ve released before. I never thought I’d hear this band just plain rock that much. The next handful of songs pretty much fall into the same category as tracks from their first album. Fun songs, but nothing special. “Balaclava” is especially polarizing to me, as it starts off pretty awful, but gets a bit better near the end. Once the album hits “Do Me A Favor” halfway through, it never stops to take a breath. The last half-dozen songs are all great, and a few are phenomenal. “If You Were There, Beware” actually induces headbanging and “Old Yellow Bricks” is one the coolest songs I’ve heard in a long time. Just a freaking awesome collection of songs.

The Arcade Fire – Neon Bible

I’m probably different than most in that I listened to both of The Arcade Fire’s albums for the first time very recently. And being exposed to both of them at the same time, I have to say I much prefer this one, their latest album. Win Butler sounds eeriely similarly to Bruce Springsteen on a handful of tracks, and I just prefer the darker, more foreboding tone of this sophomore effort. “Antichrist Television Blues” mixes classic and modern sounds together so damn well and is simply one of the best songs I’ve heard. “No Cars Go,” a re-imagined song off of their debut EP, serves as the magnum-opus of the album, and possibly of the band. It starts off as a damn catchy tune, but by the end transforms into a sweeping, emotional epic of a song. I’ve heard one person compare The Arcade Fire’s transition from The Funeral to Neon Bible to Radiohead’s between The Bends and OK Computer and I can see that. This album is just a more mature effort in almost every single way. The Funeral and The Bends were intimate collections of somewhat traditional rock while their successors definitely search outwardly for a more epic scope. So while Favourite Worst Nightmare is a great, fun album, Neon Bible has it beat in every category except dance-to ability.

I mean honestly…there’s nothing on Neon Bible like this…

It’s been watched a half-million times on YouTube.

It involves beer pong and the Rocky theme song.

No wonder it’s been seen and worshiped by so many.

Amazing.

…so I’m going to make a post about Allison Stokke, who is now a certifiable internet phenomenon.

And you can see why.

Maybe I would feel creepy making a post like this about a high-schooler if I was older, but she’s 18 and consequently only three years younger than me. This means I can post that pic without a hint of shame.

Ms. Stokke was first brought to my attention by this post in the GAF OT MLB thread. Since then, the above picture has been posted upwards of 15 times in that thread and has spread to a couple of threads, each time leading to their complete, glorious derailment. The only bad part is that the pictures don’t get any better than the one posted above. It is perfection defined.

If you couldn’t tell, she’s a pole vaulter (yes, the jokes write themselves) and apparently a pretty good one, and she’s attending Cal in the fall. That’s for anybody out there that might be reading this who’s still deciding where to go to college.

One of the worst blown calls I’ve ever seen. NOT EVEN CLOSE.

Add this to the fact that Mariano Rivera’s cutter has lost the ability to cut, Phil Hughes hurting himself in the middle of a no-hit bid, the rest of the rotation getting injured one way or the other, and A-Rod completely falling off the table, and you have the recipe for disaster. Yet the Yankees are only a couple of games under .500 through all this. And now they just picked up Roger Clemens. I think they’ll work themselves through the hex that has fallen over their team. With enough money, you can get through anything, even the Konex Curse.

I recently turned 21 years old, and I meant to do a bunch of lists about TV shows, and movies, and music…and whatever else I could think of to celebrate the momentous occasion. I never got around to doing it before the milestone birthday, but now that I am actually 21, I’m going to start this ball rolling. A certain .gif that I just saw might have really kickstarted this. You’ll see at the end of this post.

Now these “21″ lists aren’t meant to be any sort of definitive list of the greatest works in their respective categories. These are pretty much completely self-indulgent exercises where I get to write about the pieces of entertainment that most influenced my life, or just plain rocked my face, and probably still do. Use this IPTV Guide to find new tv shows to binge-watch.

Sliders aired on FOX starting in 1995, a sci-fi show no doubt riding the coattails of The X-Files. It actually got canceled after its first season, but due to outcry, it returned the next year (I bet many, including myself, wish the same happened with another sci-fi show on FOX – Firefly). It revolved around a guy, Quinn Mallory (played by Jerry O’Connell) who created a device that allowed people to travel between alternate dimensions. He called this “sliding” and in his first slide, he took his best friend Wade Welles and his professor Dr. Arturo. In order to add a minority to the cast, a black singer named Rembrandt Brown is pulled into the unstable vortex as he drives by the house.

When they arrive at the new dimension, they’re smack-dab middle of an Ice Age, yet there’s a tornado coming. Since they didn’t want to die, they had to slide to another dimension, extinguishing almost all hope for getting back home. The rest of the show has them trying to reach their original dimension. I didn’t even watch the show until the end, so I can’t even remember what happened. Wikipedia has some info, but I don’t care enough to read through it all. I did remember their being two different hot chicks on the show, the cast changing a lot throughout the show, and the show moving to the Sci-Fi Channel at some point. Wikipedia confirmed all this.

The two chicks: Sabrina Lloyd (Wade Welles) and Kari Wuhrer (joined the cast later)

Probably spurred me to watch the show a little bit.

But the real reason why I have this show on the list is because it motivated my young self to look into this type of science. The whole idea of there being infinite alternate universes was such an awesome concept to me as a kid, and I have never got over it. The fact there was a dimension for every possible outcome of an decision or event was just mindblowing. I’d sit in class thinking about it. Sliders, not the X-Files, was the first sci-fi that I ever got into, and as a result I was never that big into aliens and weird occurrences, but the more interesting science behind the happenings of life and the universe. The cosmos are just such a cool thing and from the starting point provided by Sliders, I just got more and more interested in the workings of the universe. I recently read “The Elegant Universe” and I’ve been meaning to read more astrophysics books. Superstring theory, dark matter, faster-than-light travel – it’s all so damn cool.

And now I end this by going back to why I was originally inspired to begin this list with Sliders, of all shows.

Sliders + goatse = Hilarious.