MUZIK: Jamiroquai, why hast thou forsaken us?

The new video for “Hot Flashes,” from New York outfit 33Hz is Tron-a-licious, but reminiscent of a certain nu-blu brit whose skills with the funk are, sorry to say, vastly superior. Watch, and wish for better days – specifically, ones in the mid-nineties when Jay Kay ruled the planet.

CHEKIT: Bouncy!

A San Francisco Street + a camera crew + a Sony commercial budget + 10,000 Superballs = AWESOME.

Watch video footage here.

CHEKIT: 125 Questions: What don’t we know?

The journal Science is celebrating 125 years of frightening and fascinating coffee-table reading by asking 125 big-picture questions, the answers to which may be unknowable – but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying. By way of an introduction, author Tim Siegfried talks about what we think we know, and what history tells us we probably don’t:

Science's greatest advances occur on the frontiers, at the interface between ignorance and knowledge, where the most profound questions are posed. There's no better way to assess the current condition of science than listing the questions that science cannot answer. "Science," Gross declares, "is shaped by ignorance."

There have been times, though, when some believed that science had paved over all the gaps, ending the age of ignorance. When Science was born, in 1880, James Clerk Maxwell had died just the year before, after successfully explaining light, electricity, magnetism, and heat. Along with gravity, which Newton had mastered 2 centuries earlier, physics was, to myopic eyes, essentially finished. Darwin, meanwhile, had established the guiding principle of biology, and Mendeleyev's periodic table--only a decade old--allowed chemistry to publish its foundations on a poster board. Maxwell himself mentioned that many physicists believed the trend in their field was merely to measure the values of physical constants "to another place of decimals."

The counterintuitive yet fascinating title of this project is, also counterintuitively, inspiring. The list of top 25 questions make you wanna grab a lab coat and write a grant proposal - or at least read about those that are wearing those coats and spending that grant money already:

Are we alone in the universe?
…Alone, in all that space? Not likely. Just do the numbers: Several hundred billion stars in our galaxy, hundreds of billions of galaxies in the observable universe, and 150 planets spied already in the immediate neighborhood of the sun. That should make for plenty of warm, scummy little ponds where life could come together to begin billions of years of evolution toward technology-wielding creatures like ourselves. No, the really big question is when, if ever, we'll have the technological wherewithal to reach out and touch such intelligence. With a bit of luck, it could be in the next 25 years…

CHEKIT: It's like that old game Cannonball, with nicer graphics and more math.

No matter how badass or how schlumpy the graphics, give a game good gameplay and watch folks from far and wide play the living crap out of it.

This site is chock full of Flash fun that fits the bill. Eagle Eye, especially, has been tossing chunks of my productivity into a blender, and pureeing it into a delicious, creamy smoothie of time-wastingness.

CHOW: There actually is a valley. And a ranch. Which is hidden.

I’m a big a fan of Ranch dressing; in my opinion, no hot wing is complete without a brief dip in the zesty goo. I’m not alone, apparently – Slate reports that “ranch dressing has been the nation's best-selling salad topper since 1992” and shows no sign of giving up the title anytime soon. It wasn’t until the early 80s that Ranch dressing really took off, however, when the scientists over at Clorox – yes, the bleach people – gave us better salad through chemistry:

The packets were problematic: You had to blend the herbs with both mayonnaise and buttermilk to create the dressing, and very few households kept a spare carton of buttermilk in the fridge. But the Hensons' product sold reasonably well, and in 1972, the Clorox Company bought the Hidden Valley Ranch brand for $8 million.

Before ranch could become a national favorite, however, the scientists at Clorox had to reformulate the original recipe and make it easier to use. First, the great minds behind Pine-Sol and Liquid-Plumr added butter flavoring to the seasoning so home chefs could make the dressing with plain milk. But the real breakthrough came in 1983, with the debut of bottled—or, in the lingo of the dressing industry, "shelf stable"—Hidden Valley Ranch. At that time, more and more dressings were being sold in nonrefrigerated bottles; today, according to the market-research firm Mintel, shelf-stable dressings account for 82 percent of sales in the $1.7 billion industry. Ranch presented a serious challenge, because its high dairy content makes it susceptible to quick spoilage. But Clorox managed to add the right blend of preservatives to give the dressing a shelf life of approximately 150 days. (The science behind Clorox's innovation is secret, though it's a safe bet that Steve Henson's original recipe didn't call for calcium disodium ethylenediaminetetraacetate.)

And now, some gratuitous Toothpaste for Dinner:

CHEKIT: Steal my Roommate's cat

Short on cash? Then respond to this craigslist posting and, with a little nerve and a high tolerance to cat puke, you can make yourself a quick $100. A few warnings, though, from the pet owner’s roommate:

…It has a nasty habit of throwing up its Friskies filet and pate all over the apartment. Never on an easily cleanable surface either. No, I always come home from work to find piles of barf on the leather couch, the Oriental rug and the shag rug in the bathroom (that one we had to throw out). Last week was in the nineties. What a joy it was for me to come home to my apartment and enter an abode smelling of hot tuna and stomach bile that had been festering in the 80 degree apartment all day. When I opened the door the fumes it me like a punch in the face.

CHEKIT: He's back! With digitally-rendered oompa-loompas in tow!

I’ve been busy. Real busy. Busy like a bee. Like a bee on deadline, hopped up on methamphetamines and Mountain Dew. I know I’ve been AWOL. But I’ve had work and freelance stuff dropping off the top rope on me. I'm sorry. I know you've been worried. But I'm here now. Dry your tears, little one.

And speaking of little ones...

Once again, technology takes food out of the mouths of hardworking American men and women – and even though I really liked Deep Roy’s performance in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, I sympathize with Mr. Pidgeon and his ilk:

Roy’s multifaceted performance has caused some controversy among his peers. In 2004, in a Los Angeles paper, Eugene Pidgeon, an actor and writer turned labor activist for dwarf performers, published a manifesto entitled “Little People’s Progress.” In it, he addressed two key problems: a dearth of decent roles for little people, and the threat to their livelihoods posed by animation technology. “My argument is that if you’re going to computer-generate us out of roles that we have traditionally taken, you have to provide others,” Pidgeon said over the phone from Hollywood. “Oompas, trolls, elves, cupids are just going to disappear en masse.”