Contains some fairly minor spoilers for the series. via.

1) the gratuitous use of the word “yeah.” (Seriously. Lazy Friday afternoon activity: count the number of times “yeah” occurs in, say, this song.)
2) Nobody else can make their guitars sound like they’re… slouching from riff to riff like that.

And sure enough, it’s Alice in Chains, sans the late Layne Staley. Give it a listen:

I’ll let the critics decide whether they’re jumping the shark or making a killer comeback. As for me, I’ll just kick back and pretend it’s 1992 and I’m hiding my Dirt cassette tape behind my AD&D Dungeon Master’s Guide. (I was never sure exactly what was being depicted on that album cover, but it seemed like something my parents didn’t need to see.) Sing it with me: aww yeah.

Fight about which Jennifer is better begins… now!

Nerds seem to have an affinity for Holmes. Two immediate examples that come to mind: TNG’s Holmes episodes, and Jon Bellairs’ Lewis Barnavelt, who dons his own deerstalker to solve mysteries. Anyone know of more nerdy tie-ins?

Extra credit: this post contains some blatant fanboy-bait; I assume any true Holmes fan is frothing at the mouth to point out my error. Find it!

All that being said, I still have a fascination with some of the things people can convince their bodies to do, sometimes with the aid of equipments (skateboards, bikes, etc.) and sometimes without any assistance but their own agility.

Take, for instance, Parkour, which you could call “extreme urban running”. The idea is to get from point A to point B in as fluid and efficient manner as is possible. The result is the sort of thing you see Jackie Chan doing all the time in his movies:

Some more here. These aren’t Jackass guys running into walls at top speed (amusing as that may be): these are people with a plan, whose goal is to not get hurt.

But there’s more than just Parkour.

Check out Danny MacAskill’s street biking:

What I love is the (appearance of, at least) precision he’s able to achieve with his moves. It’s not enough that he jumped over a wall or did a flip off a tree—he meant to do it exactly the way it happened, and you can tell.

Similarly, Rodney Mullen is a skateboarder who can do some amazing things with the board:

I’m particularly a fan of the move you see around 2:56 (I believe it’s called a “darkslide”)—it’s looks so effortless, but I also can’t imagine what it takes to get your feet into a position to make it happen, let alone being able to flip things back to continue on to the next thing. It’s the continuation of motion, accented by flourishes, that I really like when watching this kind of stuff.

Of course, all of that, cool as it is, is not nearly so jaw-dropping as wingsuit basejumping, something that breaks my brain:

I’m not sure what there is to say about wingsuit basejumping except that the people that do it are insane, and that it makes for some incredible video.

I’m not sure if this counts as pop culture or not, so I’ll bring it back around.

There’s a game for the PS3 that I’ve played (the demo) called “Mirror’s Edge”, which is essentially Parkour in video game form. The parts of it that I’ve played are extremely fun, but I think I need to upgrade the TV to an HD widescreen to get the full effect. Check out the actual gameplay footage:

As I’m sure you’re hoping, there is a point in time where you need to leap from a building and catch a helicopter’s landing skid. Awesome.

Finally, there’s a really good documentary about the origins of skateboarding called Dogtown and Z-Boys. Here’s a trailer:

It’s interesting to see the evolution of current street skateboarding from the surfing-inspired twisting moves the Z-Boys made as their trademark.

Now I must go back to programming computers. wistful sigh

This is probably the best sushi you can get in Grand Rapids, possibly in all of West Michigan. BUT — don’t go here if you’re hungry. Go stuff your face at an OCB instead. You can (read: I did) easily drop $20 for lunch because the first thing you order ends up just not being enough.

The photo above is my first lunch, $7.95. Avacodo rolls at the top, and on the bottom (from left) egg, salmon, tuna, yellow tail (I think?) and snapper. This lasted about five minutes and I was still hungry. I asked for the sushi menu and ordered a scallop roll and squid sushi. One Andrew Jackson later I left, still feeling a mite peckish.

The quality, however, was outstanding. Tops for me were the scallop rolls, which offered a texture and taste so divine I thought I was eating dessert. Except with raw shellfish.

The only real drawback was not having a nice glass of freezing cold sake or an Asahi tallboy to go with the meal. The job doesn’t necessarily like one coming back from lunch with al-kee-haul on one’s breath.

I have not dived in to the 125-page PDF, but I bet it’s fascinating.