Nobody likes a private investigation firm that rats out iffy occupants of rent-controlled/rent-stabilized apartments. But at least these hired snoops are good for the occasional false-identity anecdote:

[Investigator Shane] Williams chimed in about a building where the illegal tenant listed his apartment under the name O. B. Juan KNobi.

Could it be that George Lucas is surreptitiously subletting a pad in some pre-war building downtown? Talk about a disturbance in The Force…

If you’re too much of a wuss to get your entire arm festooned with tattoos, then you’re probably also wussy enough to buy a Kickin’ Ink Temporary Arm Tattoo Sleeve:

And don’t forget that wristband. Not only does this nylon fakery not work unless the lower edge is concealed (thus avoiding the obvious contrast with the wearer’s real skin), but the whole scumbag-poser look just isn’t complete without a faux-heavy metal accessory.

I assume that the $14.95 price point for these things is aimed toward aspiring douchebags who can’t afford similarly-effecting Ed Hardy clothing.

This is too funny to not share: A modest proposal, which I retweeted, for the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing:

yee-heil! RT @typooper: NASCAR should do one really big race every year and call it “The Master Race”. That’d be an excellent image booster.

Hey, white-trash stereotypes aside, the racing circuit is struggling with recession-depleted attendance at most tracks. Might as well appeal to your base…

Only kidding, of course. But I hope you appreciate how I used that 140-character space to meld a pun out of the rebel yell and the Nazi “sieg heil” salute.

This afternoon, while walking down 8th Avenue toward 14th Street, I passed by a too-tall, too-obvious drag queen. S/he locked eye contact with me, and slowly drew out these words:

“You look mahhhhvelous!”

I muttered a quick “thank you”. And with that, we went our separate ways.

I don’t know if this complimenting queen was channeling Billy Crystal or Fernando Lamas, or both. Or more likely, neither. Regardless, this vignette gives me a good enough excuse to showcase one of my favorite vintage “Saturday Night Live” skits, Fernando’s Hideaway:

Despite my newly-enshrined marvelousness, I have never been to a Hollywood party where dildo-like bodybuilding objects were offered as hors d’oeuvres. But I do know one thing: That it is better to look good than to feel good. If you know what I am saying to you.

With just a little HTML and a smidgen of PHP, you too can build a human body in Web-compliant code:

Just in case you want to customize to your own physiological specs, here’s the bracket-by-bracket markup from above:

It’s telling that the PHP comes into play only when defining boobies and private parts. Like you couldn’t already tell this was devised by a guy-geek…

Whenever I’m in public, and this song ticks up on my iPod’s shuffle play…

…I have to skip over it. Not because I’m not a fan of Oran ‘Juice’ Jones and his seminal only hit, “The Rain”; but because the spoken-word rap that takes up the second half is so laugh-out-loud funny:

Hey hey baby how you doin’? Come on in here
Got some hot chocolate on the stove waiting for you
Listen, first things first, let me hang up the coat

Now get on outta here!
Scat!
Don’t touch that coat!

I mean, I don’t know what the funniest snippet is: Jones declaring, “I’m so upset with you”? His threat to “do a Rambo”? His anticlimactic decision to “chill — that’s right, chill”? That he gave her “things you couldn’t even pronounce”?? The parting shot to “don’t touch that coat”, revealing his fixation on his own fur?? “Corn flakes without the milk”???

Actually, the funniest part is that entire rambling chorus. Because it renders the preceding first half of the song as practically pointless. The front end is a generic mid-’80s pop product, with bland lyrics and synthesized soundtrack; if it has a purpose, it’s only to lull you prior to the unexpected crack-up that it leads into. Structurally, it just doesn’t get any funnier.

I’ve heard this song so many times over the past twenty-odd years, and it still cracks me up. I’m looking forward to a few more decades of laughs from The Juice and this time capsule.

While Bill Cosby was disputing yet another premature rumor of his demise, he dropped a most succinct definition of the less-popular afterlife alternative:

“Hell is a place where everybody is laughing, but nothing is funny.”

Leave it to The Cos to come up with the first plausible rebuttal to Jean-Paul Sartre’s argument that “Hell is other people”. For added philosophical impact, I’m hoping the comedian was wearing a signature Cosby Sweater whilst quipping.

The following message was taped to the office refrigerator today, at a client site that will not be named:

To whoever continues to take the boiled egg from my Snack Pack:

This is at least the 3rd time this has happened. I put that pack this morning around 8:30 am, it is now 10:13 am and you have already ruined the entire pack for me. This is NOT your food, this is my food. If you didn’t bring and put the food in the fridge, then IT IS NOT YOURS TO EAT.

[name redacted]

Not to say that the injured party isn’t justified in her outrage, and is well within her rights to air her displeasure thusly. Still, it’s a situation where, since it’s not happening to me, it’s funny. The funniest part being that the theft of the egg results in “ruining the entire pack for me”. Who figures that an egg is so vital to a mid-morning snack?

I guess I have to applaud the symmetrical creativity in the atheistic rite of de-baptism:

In a type of mock ceremony that’s now been performed in at least four states, a robed “priest” used a hairdryer marked “reason” in an apparent bid to blow away the waters of baptism once and for all. Several dozen participants then fed on a “de-sacrament” (crackers with peanut butter) and received certificates assuring they had “freely renounced a previous mistake, and accepted Reason over Superstition.”

Fighting ritual with ritual? It may be cathartic for some, but it’s fundamentally silly. Especially if the ultra-religious, rather than regarding this blasphemousness with outrage, regard it merely as the Biblical baptism by fire carried out by other means…

Many many moons ago, a roommate of mine expressed to me how much he didn’t care for having cats in the house. But he did describe an exception to his rule:

If he were to have feline companionship, he’d keep not one cat, but three of them. He would name the first one “Yabba”, and the second one “Dabba”, and the third one “Doo”. Just so that when he had reason to call for them, he’d be justified in shouting out, “Yabba-Dabba-Doo!”.

No telling how this Modern Stone Age Family naming convention would work if a single cat’s attention were needed. Nor how to handle three meowing furballs once the novelty of the situation wore off. But I guess there are worse reasons for getting a pet.

Not too long after MTV officially disowned its Generation X heritage, the network is now reviving one of its hallmark properties from that bygone era: “Beavis and Butt-head” is joining the 21st Century.

The move to resurrect the hugely popular 1990s animated anti-heroes has been rumored for several days. But yesterday, sources at MTV confirmed that a new batch of “Beavis and Butt-head” episodes are in the works.

The new series would keep Beavis and Butt-head in their perpetual high-school state, but it would be updated so that the pals — who obsessively watch music videos on a battered TV set — could lob their snarky comments at more current targets like Lady Gaga.

Is it too much to hope for the same magic from 20 years ago being re-created? Snark is timeless, and pop music is certainly a treasure trove of target practice. Regardless, a “B and B” reboot will give me a reason to tune into MTV for the first time in several years. Here’s hoping.

It’s been two weeks since I overheard this exchange, and I still can’t get the humor of it out of my head:

“I take the Staten Island Ferry.” “Where does that go?”

To be fair, the Ferry does go to two places: Staten Island, and Manhattan. Roundtrip deal, to be most precise.

More esoterically — but no less true to the Wu — you could say that this boat ferries you to the streets of Shao-Lin and back. And for free, even. Way to represent!

This funny quip has been making the rounds on Twitter this week, and I can’t think of a more apt summation of The Twilight Saga than this:

Dear Confused Teen Girls: Someone who sparkles and won’t have sex with you isn’t a vampire; it’s a gay guy.

Disheartening to realize that that dreamy bloodsucker is really a something-else-sucker. But on the bright side, those teenage girls can emulate their sexless fantasies with the nearest available gayboy.

On another tack, here’s another interpretation of Team Edward versus Team Jacob:

In the war between Team Necrophilia and Team Bestiality, I am Sweden.

Funny how a whole new pop-cultural perspective can be gained in a mere 140 characters.

When I first heard of the iPhone 4’s innovative steel-band outer antenna, I thought it was a fantastic concept. Finally, something to alleviate the inherent lack of cell reception on the clean, uni-body design of Apple’s device.

Then, the pesky users got their hands on the thing:

Bloggers and pundits argued through the weekend about whether the iPhone 4’s “death grip” problem represented a serious design flaw on Apple’s part (the antenna on the new iPhone is integrated into the stainless steel band that rings the outer edge of the handset) or was being overblown.

AntennaSys expert Spencer Webb postulated that at least some the blame might lay with the FCC, which mandates that phone antennas in general be as far from the user’s head as possible, which usually means putting the antenna at the bottom of the handset — where your hand usually goes. In the iPhone 4’s case, just touching a pair of tiny little slots near the bottom corners of the handset could be enough to “short” the antenna and cause interference, Webb wrote.

I like the “death grip” tag, as it’s most apropos for a signal-killing defect. Not that the killer-clutch extends to the balance sheet, as the 1.7 million sold units attest.

My second-favorite moment from this event: Steve Jobs advising iPhone 4 owners to “just don’t hold it that way” in order to avoid the problem. Thus conjuring up the old “it hurts when I do this” doctor joke. A gripping saga all around.

Given the record 11-hour match between John Isner and Nicolas Mahut in this year’s Wimbledon tournament, and the status of host England as the home of the days-long game of cricket, I think this joke fits:

“I went to a tennis match, and a cricket game broke out.”

A play on the old Rodney Dangerfield one-liner about going to the fights, and a hockey game breaking out. Always on the lookout for cross-germination in the sporting world.

You are looking at SkyMall’s exclusive Xlr8 athletic shoe. And yes, you are looking at a sperm-like logo on said sneaker.

I’m guessing the in-flight catalogue just presumes that its target customer is a member of the Mile High Club, and wants to show off that sexual bade of honor via footwear? This certainly beats Nike’s swoosh design, despite the less-than-perfect analogy:

So [sperms'] preferred sport is swimming; it doesn’t make them any less of a workout role model when you’re hitting the streets.

Well, the semen-sprinters might be role models, but I don’t know how much they can teach you about “hitting the streets”. To clear up the confusion, maybe SkyMall should start selling matching Speedos.

Once again, David Letterman nails it. Here, from tonight’s “Late Show”, is his pithy definition of why soccer has never caught on in the United States:

Because in this country, soccer is not a sport. It’s daycare.

Pretty effectively sums it up. Kids take to the game because it’s relatively simple to pick up and develop teamwork around. After you hit puberty, it wears off. The “world’s game” doesn’t grow up with American tykes, and hasn’t since the 1970s.

I see that upcoming new release Grown Ups features Kevin James in the role of The Fat Guy (not really his character’s name, but it might as well be).

Meanwhile, the rest of this comedy’s main-character ensemble is: Adam Sandler, Chris Rock, David Spade, and Rob Schneider. Those four share a common history as former cast-members of “Saturday Night Live” — in fact, they were all on the show at roughly the same time.

That background makes James the odd-man-out. In more ways than one: I can’t look at this movie’s lineup and not think that another “SNL” alum from the same era, the late Chris Farley, would have slotted into this project perfectly. Farley is, in essence, the missing ingredient in this de facto “SNL” reunion.

Not that Farley, had he survived, would have made this flick look any less sucky than it now does. The domestication of former frat-boy comics is predictable enough, but it doesn’t guarantee any laughs. Not even with a substitute fat schlub.

Practically live off the Web: Earlier tonight, someone landed on this blog from a Google search for this quote attributed to David Letterman:

“Sometimes, when you look in his eyes, you get the feeling that someone else is driving.”

The searcher presumably was looking for the object of Letterman’s assessment. And surprisingly, the scads of Web cruft don’t offer a clue as to who that is. Myriad sites reproduce the quote, and credit Letterman — but they offer absolutely no context. Just another example of the online echo chamber diffusing our collective ignorance…

If it helps anyone, I’m pretty sure I know who Letterman was referring to: The late Andy Kaufman. I can’t absolutely verify this at the moment, because, as I said, the Web is proving pretty useless in providing this information. But I recall the quotation pretty well, probably from some long-ago documentary on Kaufman’s life. Letterman would have uttered this sometime in the early ’80s, before Kaufman departed this mortal coil. I’m about 95 percent positive about this.

So, at least this website won’t be yet another dead end in the pursuit of the answer to Letterman’s pithy saying. At least, not anymore. And you’re welcome.

A random tweet from Tara reminded me of this old urban-fashion myth:

In its earlier heyday, rumors about Adidas ran rampant. Most popular was the grinningly-shared tidbit that the appellation stood for “All Day I Dream About Sex.” Whispers had it the shoes’ designers had deliberately chosen the funny-sounding name ‘Adidas’ to convey this teen-centric message in a way that would sail right over unsuspecting parents’ heads. (Then, as now, sneaking a fast one by the ‘rents was all part of the game.)

Such was the appeal of the spurious that few thought to question it. The truth, of course, wasn’t anywhere nearly as exciting. The company was founded in 1924 in Germany and named for its owner, Adi Dassler.

That “earlier heyday” was the 1970s, when I heard this very rumor in grade school. Definitely a good source of pre-adolescent titillation, and in hindsight, quaintly so.

For the record, the company/brand name is officially “adidas”, sans any capitalization. For some reason, that’s part of the corporate history. To perpetuate the acronym-based legend, that all-lower-case preference probably has sexual origins…

This is New York, not Gotham City. But point made — with emphasis.

I took this photo today (Flickrized), but it appears that this “Fuck You, I’m Batman” meme has been around for at least a couple of years. Outdoor spaces seem to be the preferred target for this urban art/expression, as evidenced by this 2009 photo that’s nearly identical to mine.

Someone’s got a good supply of these stickers, so I’m sure we’ve not seen the last of this bad-ass mask-and-cowl messaging. Even superheroes need to set the record straight sometimes.