Saturday Stand Up--Pete Holmes

Last month old Petey Pants was down under and he did a set for Australian TV.

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Lightning Round--Koch Boycott App, Second Term Jinx, Arrested Development Trailer, Crazy Map, Laura Marling, Cat Opens Doors, More

Forbes: Want to boycott the Koch Brothers, but it's too hard because they own half the shit in the grocery store? Well, now there's an app for that. Until they buy Apple or something. 

TPM: Josh Marshall doesn't think that President Obama is likely to be impeached, but he sees parallels to 1998. 

Rolling Stone: Jillian Mapes breaks down the new Arrested Development trailer that has me more excited than nervous about the return of the show.

i09: This map shows a circle on planet Earth that contains more people than live outside the circle.

Valerie Pieris made this map and noted the following:

There are more Muslims in the circle than outside of it. There are more Hindus in the circle than outside of it. There are more Buddhists in the circle than outside of it... The circle pulls all of this off while being mostly water and including the most sparsely populated country on earth (Mongolia).

Stereogum: Listen to the latest single from Laura Marling. It's out in advance of her next album Once I was an Eagle. 

The Chive: Wingsuited base jumper Alexander Polli flies through a cave on a mountainside. I did not mistype.

AV Club: Is Dan Harmon returning to run Community in its fifth season? No, but that won't stop Deadline from asking. 

NME: Remember when Jay-Z traveled back in time and ran shit in the 1930s? (H/t Commish)

I can Has Cheezburger? This Russian cat is on a mission.

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Ever Wondered What Goes on at the International Space Station?

As if being an astronaut wasn't enough to make Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield (@Cmdr_Hadfield) a rock star, he actually rocks, like with a guitar. While I usually do not recommend reading the comments section of anything, commenter ChickChosenTube sums up my feelings rather precisely: "Chris Hadfield, you are an amazing human being. This is possibly the coolest thing I've seen anyone do ever." When he says, "Planet Earth is blue," you believe him because it is literally outside the window behind him, right over his shoulder, blue as can be.


I wonder if he takes requests? "Gangnam Style" in a meteor shower would be huge!

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From the Annals of Subtle Character Development

At some point during the 90s, I watched a lot of Star Trek: The Next Generation and never once did I notice anything untoward about how Jonathan Frakes, who played Commander Riker (AKA Number One), took a seat. As this montage shows, something quite insidious was in play (H/T website that posts mysterious links).

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Guide to Marc Maron's Publicty Tour 2013

On today's episode of WTF with Marc Maron, Maron (@MarcMaron) disclosed that for the time being he has a publicist. This makes me a little bit jealous because for a handful of friends I act as Maron's publicist. It's an easy role for me because I listen to a ton of comedy podcasts--I even wrote a now completely out of date e-book about them two years ago. So when Maron would show up on a show like Jordan, Jesse Go! or The Majority Report or You Made it Weird or a myriad of others I would spread the word to my friends who have followed Maron since the Air America days via email.

These past couple of weeks, Maron has been everywhere, setting such a blistering pace that even a hardcore Maron fan such as myself can not keep up. When I say Maron is everywhere promoting his TV show Maron and his book Attempting Normal, I am not fucking around. He's even in space! In this post, I'm going to try to catch up and provide the world with a guide to Maron pub tour 2013.

On today's podcast Maron walks us through his appearance on last night's Conan.

Maron was also on Fallon, CBS This Morning and Real Time with Bill Maher last week and has an appearance on The Tonight Show coming up Thursday night (UPDATE: Link).

Maron also hit the internet in a big way, doing a sit down with Huffington Post and an AMA on Reddit, Splitsider has the highlights, which includes Maron briefly giving his take on his classic run in with Gallagher, who ran out of a WTF taping back in January 2011. "He got riled and thought I was sandbagging him with an agenda which maybe I was a bit," Maron wrote, "but he should've been able to take it. He thinks he invented everything and if you argue with him about anything he gets upset." Gallagher, incidentally, recently appeared on a live podcast with the guys from Walking the Room that was nothing short of harrowing. Trust me, Marc got off easy, Gallagher could have stayed.

Maron took the pub tour to radio doing an hour with Howard Stern (video), Maron's first appearance on that show; an hour with Opie and Anthony, a show he appears on frequently; and an appearance on NPR's Fresh Air. I believe that last sentence contained an Oxford semicolon, a feat of grammar which may or may not exist.  

Maron did a bunch of podcasts: Nerdist, Comedy Bang Bang, The Majority Report, and Tom Rhodes. He didn't do You Made it Weird again, at least not yet, but he did get a huge hug from Pete Holmes.  

Maron even narrated a short documentary on DFA records and did an interview with Rolling Stone.

Last, but certainly not least, while he was in New York, Maron stopped by one of my favorite daily podcasts, CNET's tech show The 404. Here's the video of that: 

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I Did Not Know That

Even after a million hours of World War II documentaries I had somehow never heard of the Battle of Engineer Hill until today. The event is in the news because this month marks the 70th anniversary of the struggle for the Alaskan Island of Attu, which represents the last battle between warring nations to be fought in North America. Not a bad run. The warring nations in question were the U.S. and Japan. The Anchorage Daily News looks back at the battle that left over 2,000 Japanese and over 500 Americans dead.

Here's some old school news reel footage:

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You've Been Missing a Lot of Fox News Lately

I wouldn't say I've been missing it Bob.

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Twitter Feed Spoils Popular Website's Vague Headlines

It's @HuffPoSpoilers!

State = Maryland RT @huffpostgay State makes big announcement about employees in same-sex relationships huff.to/16z5jv2

— HuffPo Spoilers (@HuffPoSpoilers) May 3, 2013

HuffPo Spoilers is maintained by Alex Mizrahi and was recently written about in The New York Times.

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Robotic Birds are a Thing Now

This is such a breathtaking design accomplishment that I'm blocking out the paranoia I'm feeling re: national security applications.

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Lightning Round--Flake Popularity Craters, Reaction to Jason Collins, Obamacare is Still a Thing, Tebow Released, Blogs Are Dead

TPM: Several of the Senators who voted against the bill to reform background checks for gun purchases have registered sharp drop offs in support in polling done since the vote. Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona is doing particularly poorly, hitting 32 percent according to PPP. Josh Marshall attributes his poor numbers at least in part to his late decision to vote against the bill, which alienated both sides of the debate.

DKos: Most of the reaction to NBA player Jason Collins's announcement that he is gay has been positive. The next three items are examples of the opposite of this.

Mediaite: Tommy Christopher breaks down ESPN's Chris Broussard's reaction to Jason Collins's announcement that he's gay. Broussard felt the need to refute Collins's assertion that he's a Christian, saying Collins was “walking in open rebellion to God and to Jesus Christ." Open rebellion? Like leading an army up in the mountains? UPDATE: Pat Robertson approves of Broussard's comments.

TProg:  Former New York Knick Larry Johnson weighed in on Collins's announcement via twitter with the "junk exposure" argument against gay players in the locker room. Zack Ford writes, "This same argument was at the core of opposition to repealing the military’s, 'Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell' policy banning openly gay, lesbian, and bisexual servicemembers...[I]f Johnson believes homosexuality does not belong in a men’s locker room, it’s unclear what option is left for gay men." Also on TProg: People do not know Obamacare is still a thing.

NBC Sports: The Miami Dolphins had to distance themselves from new addition, star wide receiver Mike Wallace, who tweeted in response to Collins's announcement, "All these beautiful women in the [world] and guys wanna mess with other guys SMH..." So the parade of morons through the Dolphins' locker-room continues. Wallace deleted the tweet and the Dolphins assure us that he's very sorry. Lex at WWTDD addresses this more succinctly than I.

Kissing Suzy Kolber: Taiwanese animators have made a video explaining Tim Tebow's release from the New York Jets. Nothing lost in translation here.

New Republic: Blogs like this one are dead, man. Dead. Wait what?

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