CHEKIT: "The chief export of Chuck Norris is pain."

If Chuck Norris were a vaccine, it would prevent every disease known to man. The only side effect would be an irresistable urge to roundhouse kick everybody. And facial hair.

I know I'm a little late to the party on this, but Ninjaburger just clued me in to the awesomeness that is Chuck Norris:

Chuck Norris doesn't churn butter. He roundhouse kicks the cows and the butter comes straight out.

Chuck Norris is 1/8th Cherokee. This has nothing to do with ancestry, the man ate a fucking Indian.

There is no chin behind Chuck Norris' beard. There is only another fist.

I can't tell if this site or the other one came first. Either way - he's a badass.

MUZIK: A mosquito, a libido, buona sera?

Listen - I know some of you think I listen to some wack-ass shit, but believe me - everything that has come before steps aside and bows its head when Dokaka walks into the room. Ask my man at Said the Gramophone - he knows the deal:

Okay we've all heard those goofy covers by college acapella groups, jazz-hands fellows doing vocal acrobatics 'round "Creep" or, yeah, this one too. But what makes Dokaka special is that he's a Japanese beatbox guy who sounds totally insane. As he loops and loops his voice, it's as if a goblin is ripping its face off, running from the dragonflies, a demon being devoured by the rock'n'roll that Nirvana brought. I do clowning when I can, I really do - a theatrical clown in the tradition of LeCoq and stuff, - and Dokaka reminds me of a clown's reaction to a tune like this. Too much feeling to keep it in - being driven gladly, gladly mad by the whoosh of music, gibberish streaming out of your voice like a cartoon-bubble of epithets and delirious grinning birds. And I swear that in the chorus he's speaking italian, offering a friendly "Bona sera!"

I can't help but thinking that Kurt would've loved this version. And other Dokaka stuff, too.

CHEKIT: Cute Overload

I don't know whether to smile or cry. Possibly both. Now imagine a whole site of stuff like this. Makes you want to hug the WORLD.

LL&CB: Unscheduled Departure.

That’s 'Suckle's nephew Hunter in the lower left corner. Don’t be fooled by his adorableness – he was trying on my jacket earlier, just in case he could peel it off my paralyzed form if I happened to get bucked into a ditch.

POLITIK: Good luck, Sam - you're gonna need it.

Everyone's been chiming in with questions they'd be lobbing (or firing out of a field artillery piece) at the newest Supreme Court Justice nominee, and the strategies to get the most out of those questions. Arlen, in his opening remarks this morning, noted that, aside from approving acts of war, few Senatorial duties are as important as the SCOTUS confirmation process - and with the stakes even higher than usual, the next few days of testimony will likely prove to be nasty going. For the Supreme fans, like my favorite, sexy-yet-sensibly voiced NPR correspondent, the last year must've been like doing color commentary on three (well, two-and-a-half) Super Bowls in one year. And as much as I hate to think of enduring another round of this stuff, I hope we get to a fourth.

CHEKIT: Legos + Pastafarianism = Crazy Delicious

Go through the slide show and realize to what heights those touched by His Noodly Appendage will go to give glory to His name. Praise Be!

MUZIK: I'm cabbage-patching and Roger-Rabbiting to this RIGHT NOW

I'm throwin' it back to a Dispatches favorite - Stereogum - which is posting a link to a mash-up that is throwin' it back, as well. Everybody seems to be makin' sweet old-school remix love to 50 - and who can blame them, with shit like this droppin', yo?

Hello again.

Finally, the renovations to Dispatches International Headquarters' historic Clock Tower are almost complete - how-do, Dispatches-ers?

We hope you haven't missed us too badly - but we hope you stick with us - some exciting things are happening, and we hope you can be a part of it.

Firstly - Lava Lamps & Cheap Beer will return to its original format - a weekly column. Look here for links to it every Tuesday, or catch it at its own blog.

Secondly - a new serialized story project, A Nightmare of Chickens and the Civil War, will begin later this month, and repeat every two weeks, and possibly more often if we get enough time. We'd appreciate your feedback.

Also - we've integrated Google Ads into the mothership blog. Funds collected via AdSense will be donated to the Greater Chicago Food Depository - so click on through, folks!

We really did miss you. We hope to see more of you. Welcome back.

LL&CB: Thanks in advance.

Pressing this button will turn off the music, but will also, one second later, fill this shed with hungry gonorrhea-infected mice, while the free jazz will be replaced by Gilbert Gottfried's audiobook reading of 'The O'Reilly Factor for Kids.'

LL&CB: Bagel.

Louis Pound’s last bagel was a Magnuson’s Onion, toasted and spread with reduced-fat cream cheese. One half lay a few feet from his outstretched hand, underneath a stool, face down; the other half a few feet further away, leaning up against a carton of orange juice that was, like Louis Pound, leaking its contents onto the floor of the deli.

POLITIK: Two Thousand and Eight, Bitches!

I've been busy. What do you want for nothin'?

Sorry.

I'm back now. Who knows for how long, tho. Enjoy me while I last.

That last bit is, in retrospect, is probably not the best phrase to put out there for attribution.

Anyway.

To the 1.5 conservative nutjobs that read this blog because it usually has a non-political bent and makes a nice change from www.iamkarlrovesmanwhore.com:

First of all - JESUS, leave Cindy Sheehan alone. If you lost your kid in a war thousands of miles away, you'd probably go a little batty, too. She's earned the right to make a little noise. I mean, seriously. And if the administration can't handle this woman - an adminstration so adept at spinning everything else that it makes Goebbels look like a guy dressed as a giant hot dog handing out coupons - then she must be striking a chord that the conservatives obviously can't learn the fingering to.

Secondly – look - I’m not gonna argue the point with you - Ann Coulter is HOT. I'm not one of those catty everything-right-is-wrong folks. Indisputably HOT. Hot like a pretzel. Which makes her stances all the more dangerous. I mean, hot AND eloquent? She's a conservative WMD. She could wipe out whole rooms of centrist thinking with just one well-timed flash of a belly chain.

And I gotta agree with MB on this: Rove is a PIMP. And the most cynical man on earth. To deny his aplomb with the conservative base is folly.

But the hole is getting deeper, right-wingers. The daily news from Iraq is, on the whole - as a friend of mine covering the war is fond of saying - "Different numbers, same brown people." Civil war, if not imminent, will likely require an increased commitment of troops and materiel to prevent. And whether or not the tragedy of Katrina's aftermath is wholly the federal government's fault or not, Bush is going to carry some, if not most of the blame. (That Times-Picayne story about a drop-off in federal funding for the Army Corps projects from a few years back is going to TOTALLY screw you guys.)

In November 2004, after the election, I wished, jokingly and somewhat darkly, that the war in Iraq would go south and that the economy would tank, just so the redder portions of the red states could froth and piss and moan for a few years before having to admit that they'd elected a dunderhead AGAIN - because they wanted to elect someone who said he stood up for them, and the well-being of their families - even though much of the previous four years were filled with evidence to the contrary.

I dunno. Bush fucked with the two things that you don’t fuck around with when it comes to preserving goodwill for the midterms, or, for that matter, 2008 – kids (state and local governments are withdrawing from No Child Left Behind) and wallets (deficit spending - as much as I, personally am a fan of it – is no good at the rate it’s compiling.) Not to mention we’ve got a whole bunch of folks who, even though we managed to get rid of the second biggest pain in the ass in their neighborhood, are still super fucking pissed at us for sticking our nose in their business in a way that they couldn’t pretend wasn't happening.

You guys are gonna get your asses moderately spanked in 2006. And then, unless Osama bin Laden shows up on al-Jazeera in a "Savannah is for Lovers" T-shirt and tells his boys to put down their guns and sign up for yoga, 2008 is gonna be NASTY.

Just plain DIRTY.

I wish 41 (Daddy) was still around. Weenie tho he was, he looks positively Clintonian next to his son.

And given how things are going, I think, deep down, even H.W. would consider that a compliment.

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.”

CHEKIT: Bottom 10

It hasn't been this funny in awhile - but the latest Strong Bad E-mail is everything you love about Homestarrunner - with even some booty shakin' thrown in.

CHEKIT: Diagnosis - GAY.

CSOTD directed us over to this important health news update from The Swift Report.

TOPEKA, KS—When Marybeth Witty stumbled upon her husband Dale watching a pornographic video on the internet, she knew something was wrong. Instead of looking at images of nude high school cheerleaders and young shaved lesbians as he often had in the past, the 37-year old auto parts salesman was taking in hot guy-on-guy action. "As soon as I saw what he was looking at I knew something was different," said Marybeth, a part-time manicurist who enjoys scrapbooking. "This was not the same Dale."

This news couldn't have come at a more providential time - my grandfather is about to get a kidney from a Republican.

CHEKIT: "green light no holds barred"

I had no idea this part of Craigslist even existed, but Ninjaburger sent me this post from their Best Of section - reading it, I felt like a seventh grader – a seventh grader about to experience a mother-related, fart-anecdote-induced embolism accompanied by incontinence and abdominal cramping, that is:

You have to understand, the fart is so rotten that you can't even pretend you don't notice it. It's unavoidable. It's like a human stink bomb. So of course everybody is standing in line wanting answers to the same question which is, "Who farted?" Everybody starts looking at each other like they are playing the board game Clue. This is actually my favorite part of going to Costco with my mom. She should get an Academy Award for every time she farts and then plays like she didn't do it. She'll start lookin' around, everybody else is looking at eachother, it's basically like a game of Texas Hold 'Em. Some people even become animated and start pulling their shirts up over their noses. My mom just looks around like, "Oh dear, who farted?" She knows it's her! The least she can do is apologize.

CHEKIT: Orisinal

Ferry Halim designs games that look like watercolor illustrations from children’s books, and have the subdued, hypnotic charm of a musical kaleidoscope. They’re also crazily addictive and fun to play.

CHEKIT: Diner Dash

All the fun of restaurant entrepreneurship without the 16-hour days and bribing health inspectors. Give it a go.

CHEKIT: Neuron Network Goes Awry, and Brain Becomes an IPod

I think this would be disorienting at first, and kind of cool for an hour or two – and then it would drive me absolutely donkey-piss crazy-go-nuts:

Seven years ago Reginald King was lying in a hospital bed recovering from bypass surgery when he first heard the music.

It began with a pop tune, and others followed. Mr. King heard everything from cabaret songs to Christmas carols. "I asked the nurses if they could hear the music, and they said no," said Mr. King, a retired sales manager in Cardiff, Wales.

"I got so frustrated," he said. "They didn't know what I was talking about and said it must be something wrong with my head. And it's been like that ever since."

Whenever I read about an illness as fascinating and freakish as this one, I’m afraid my own body - bored with its pedestrian gastroenterological mishaps - will spontaneously develop a similar malady. Although, with my luck, my brain would play “Hollaback Girl” in a continuous loop until I managed to drive a wooden spoon handle deep enough into my left nostril.

Anyway – Good luck to you, Mr. King.

POLITIK: Worse than Watergate

Frankie makes the case that the current conservative crazy-dog crisis biting the help and digging up the peonies in the Fourth Estate is a bloody damn mess:

When John Dean published his book "Worse Than Watergate" in the spring of 2004, it seemed rank hyperbole: an election-year screed and yet another attempt by a Nixon alumnus to downgrade Watergate crimes by unearthing worse "gates" thereafter. But it's hard to be dismissive now that my colleague Judy Miller has been taken away in shackles for refusing to name the source for a story she never wrote. No reporter went to jail during Watergate. No news organization buckled like Time. No one instigated a war on phony premises. This is worse than Watergate.

He goes on to call Time a bunch of punk-ass chumps. Or words to that effect.

CHEKIT: Hey! It's Ron Howard's Brother!

Fametracker's "Hey! It's That Guy!" feature takes the time to recognize the scrappy character actors leading comfortable, if not US-Weekly-worthy, existences playing wiseguys and cops and two-bit hoods.

Or, as in the case of Clint Howard, oddly menacing man-boys.

Let FT give Opie's brother his due, as MTV did a few years back. And enjoy.

MUZIK: Feast on Feist

Listen. There's nothing wrong with Rachael Yamagata. I bought her album. I like it. It's fine. But lemme tell you: Rachael Yamagata is to Leslie Feist as a Chicken McNugget is to a plate of homemade buttermilk fried chicken.

Tofu-pimp John has an interview with the perfect confluence of Astrud Gilberto, Fiona Apple, and Blossom Dearie over at the Hut. Did I mention she lived with Peaches at one point? Get going.

CHEKIT: Go Fug Yourself.

I don't normally go in for celebrity snarkiness, but how can one resist when the snark's so damn funny? Take the caption for the photo above, for instance:

The thing I like best about Lil' Kim is her delicate grasp of decorum and modesty.

The two women who run and write this blog sound like more clever, more biting Joan and Melissa Riverses. And their posts never fail to address the surreal nature of celebrity worship alongside the oftimes less-than-glamorous nature of celebrity fashion. Lines are crossed on a regular basis - but they seem to argue with their demeanor "haven't outfits like these pushed us over the edge? Don't we have an obligation to humanity to respond?"

"Dear Ben and Girl:

I am writing a note from my very important tour of venues that don't make me sing more than three songs, which Marc says is my limit, because I am filled with glee. Because, aha, lookit here! You will be shocked to learn that, even if you have the Bennifer II, it is I who has the Electric Boogaloo! The flatness of my abs makes fireworks ejaculate! Good luck getting your stretch marks to have that effect on Ben, girlie!

Oh, and have fun wearing caftans, while I am in daring gold lame harness-looking-thingies that I had George Lucas make me so that I would look like a lounge singer in that alien bar from Episode IV: Jedi From The Block, or whatever that thing was that the kids love. Hip! I am hip. I tried to sew cinnamon rolls onto my head for the costume, but they made Marc cry and go binge on peas. Sometimes I don't understand him, but then I realize that's because he is choking on something and I have to Heimlich some embalming fluid out of his chest. I don't know how that keeps getting in there! But that has nothing to do with you and your stupid bloated uterus, nor my super hot capri pants with a big X that marks exactly where you can BITE me, Special Agent Sydney Crisco! Ha ha ha!

Now shut up and let me stop writing. It's time for me to stop doing my Nutcracker ballet -- wait, why does that always make Marc giggle? Ben Assfleck, why does Marc always say how appropriate that is? Ben?..."

Go on over and wish 'em a happy birthday.

BOOK: I'm a Nestle Crunch man, myself.

With the new movie coming out, The New Yorker chimes in with a look back at the man who brought us the Everlasting Gobstopper - and his work:

...the essence of Dahl is his willingness to let children triumph over adults. He is a modern writer of fairy tales, who intuitively understands the sort of argument that Bruno Bettelheim made in his 1976 book, “The Uses of Enchantment.” Children need the dark materials of fairy tales because they need to make sense—in a symbolic, displaced way—of their own feelings of anger, resentment, and powerlessness. Children also benefit from learning about violence and brutishness in fairy tales, Bettelheim writes, for it counters the “widespread refusal to let children know that the source of much that goes wrong in our life is due to our natures—the propensity of all men for acting aggressively, asocially, selfishly.” Many fairy tales—and most of Dahl’s work—are complex narratives of wish fulfillment. They teach the reader, Bettelheim writes, that “a struggle against severe difficulties in life is unavoidable, is an intrinsic part of human existence—but if one does not shy away, but steadfastly meets unexpected and often unjust hardships, one masters all obstacles and at the end emerges victorious.” Or, in any case, this is a hopeful fantasy which sustains us all.

I know some folks will like the lighter, slightly less loony, more musical Gene Wilder take on Willy Wonka. But I'd argue that if the new film is closer to Dahl's work in tone, it will benefit, like chocolate, from being darker.

BOOK: Security measures tighter than the front of Harry's pants when he's thinking about Hermione.

When it comes to JKR's next installment in the Harry Potter series, the publishers aren't taking any chances:

Scholastic has closely policed the companies with which it works to produce and distribute the book. It requires many of them and their customers, including librarians and the managers of individual stores, to sign affidavits promising that they will not release the book prematurely and will undertake all necessary security efforts.

At each of Amazon.com's five order-fulfillment centers, for example, the books are kept in a restricted area that workers need a special pass to enter, where they are watched by security guards and are not allowed to carry anything in or out.

Needless to say, with the way the books have been expanding, there's no need for a cavity search. Though I'm sure some people have thought about it.