Zooropa

outside window, 11:30 PM, Monday.

Lately Hollywood's been running out of ideas and has been milking old money-making franchises by "rebooting" them, updating them or changing the mood of the original (ex: Batman, Robocop, Friday the 13th, etc.)
While Hollywood has been running out of ideas, the people in charge of the advertising for these reboots haven't and have created expansive and elaborate viral campaigns that get the audience jazzed about the forthcoming movie. These campaigns can start months or even years before a movie is done. The best example of this has been The Dark Knight's viral campaign that included scavenger hunts, fake political campaigns, clues called into phones baked in cakes, and so on.

Even though I can't find any reference to it anywhere, I get the feeling that studios are trying to reboot the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle franchise and this time the ad wizards have gone a step too far by playing god. Recently an unidentified creature washed up in the Hamptons about the same time a deformed pig was born in China. Why are these two seemingly unrelated events significant? They both bear striking similarity to TMNT II mutant mutant henchmen, Tokka and Rahzar.

I present my evidence HERE:

It really was the year of the Panda.

Now that Pitchfork has named Panda Bear's "Person Pitch" the "Album of the Year," it should be noted that Cosmodrome predicted this SUBCONSCIOUSLY by posting about panda bears a total of five times in the year 2007, making it the most talked about subject this year, besides Daft Punk.

So here they are for you, our retrospective prophesy confirmed!

Scenes from Indiana Jones, set to the music of Panda Bear.

Thai Zoo Hopes Porn Will Get Sluggish Pandas to Mate

A new advertisement from Cadbury's:

More on the song, a previously noted Cosmodrome fave:

-Its use in the Miami Vice pilot

-The music video

-Wikipedia

-Allmusic on the album Face Value, and the song.

We're finally winning the war! Or, well, the British are winning the war for us! Or, well, the honey badgers that the British troops are being blamed for bringing to Iraq are winning the war! (Just ignore the evidence that the badgers existed in the area well before the invasion.)

This surge of Badger troops is seriously freaking out the population around Basra, who think the British forces have unleashed a plague of man-eating monsters ('head-and-body length ranges from 60 to 102 cm') into the area. Residents claim to never have seen anything so ferocious and hideous before-- one witness saying he watched a badger ('head-and-body length ranges from 60 to 102 cm') shred apart a cow. One woman reports she was attacked by one describing it thusly: "It is the size of a dog but his head is like a monkey."

Because of their relation to the wolverine, I imagine the Iraqi version of Red Dawn will have a group of paramilitary high-schoolers who are fighting the good fight and call themselves the RATELS, starring the Iraqi versions of Patrick Swayze, Charlie Sheen, and C. Thomas Howell. If they ask nice they might even get Lea Thompson to reprise her role.

The best new show on TV features, yes, a man who eats animal feces. His name is Bear Grylls and his show Man vs. Wild is on the Discovery Channel pretty much all the time. DSC is trying to one-up a Steve Irwin-less Animal Planet with Grylls (his friends call him Beary -- har har) who, in each episode, is dropped into some new-fangled extreme wilderness condition with nothing but a pocket knife, a flint, and (you guessed it) a camera crew, and is forced to survive in order that we be entertained.

So far I have watched Bear eat a lamb's eyeball that he cooked in a lava-heated mud pool, catch some kind of Icelandic pigeon, snap its head off with his hands, and then peel away its skin and feathers before remarking on "all the dark meat" and eat it, and slide down a glacier on his ass while jabbing a broken ski pole into the ice to slow down his precarious descent. Not in that particular order.

Anyway, here is a video of Bear catching and eating a live snake. Thank god this show exists.

A red-tailed hawk hangs out near Grand Army Plaza. [via Gothamist]

Prison Break: Panda Edition

I'd like to imagine that once that Panda got out, he went on a crime spree, as depicted in my once-and-future tattoo.

... I might have to get this one:

Had to post this incredible video of an afternoon battle between some lions, an army of wildebeasts, and a couple of crocodiles.

The scene doesn't really get going till around the 2:00 mark, and the plot twists enter a few minutes after that.

Really just extraordinary stuff.