In the annals of rock history, sometimes it’s what you write on your guitar, rather than with your guitar, that makes a lasting impression. The most famous example of this has to be Woody Guthrie’s famous acoustic, on which he had scrawled “this machine kills fascists.” I got to thinking about this two days ago, while standing amidst 65,000 sweaty Arcade Fire fans in 100 degree heat to watch The Arcade Fire headline the Coachella Valley Arts and Music Festival — it was worth every droplet of sweat — when bandleader Win Butler played several songs wearing a guitar on which he had emblazoned “sak vide pa kanpe.” According to Wikipedia, it’s a Haitian proverb meaning “an empty sack cannot stand” in Creole, apparently a reference to extreme poverty in Haiti, the country of origin of Butler wife and bandmate, Régine.

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“We plan absentee ownership as far as running the Yankees is concerned. We’re not going to pretend we’re something we aren’t. I’ll stick to building ships.”
–George Steinbrenner to The New York Times, 1/4/1973

During his first twenty-three seasons as owner of the New York Yankees, George Steinbrenner changed managers twenty times. Like your classic serial dater, The Boss refused to settle down. He was on-again, off-again with Billy Martin five times. He briefly tied his fortune to guys named Dallas (Green) and Bucky (Dent) and Stump (Merrill). When Steinbrenner jettisoned the popular Buck Showalter after the 1995 season, the New York tabloids were furious (”Clueless Joe,” read the NY Post headline, referring to Buck’s replacement – Joe Torre).

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Are you a shepherd, tired of losing sheep to pesky predators? Sounds like you need a fainting goat! Because of a neuromuscular condition called myotonia congenita, fainting goats go stiff (”faint”) when startled or excited. (”Premium fainters” can even fall over on their backs, legs sticking up in the air.) In the event of an attack on your flock, the fainting goat would be a sort of (excuse the pun) sacrificial lamb for predators — a briefly catatonic goat making an easier meal than a fleeing sheep. Although the condition is not a true “faint” — the goats are conscious the entire time — it’s a strangely endearing trait.

Fainting goats have gotten a lot of play on the web. Here’s a YouTube clip of a news story on fainting goats:

Goat fanciers should consider joining the International Fainting Goat Association (IFGA). See also: Wikipedia page on fainting goats. Check out another fainting goat video after the jump.

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Spring’s here, and if you’re already shooting here-we-go-again looks at your middling liquor cabinet, perhaps it’s time to change things up a bit at your next gathering. True, Trader Joe’s does have the best deals on drinkable sake, but it gets rather old floating your friends’ drinks with lemon wedges and cucumber slices, no? Wouldn’t it be more exhilarating for your guests to hold their drinks up to the light only to find a finely coiled habu snake at the bottom? Habus are pit vipers found throughout Japan’s Ryukyu Islands. They’re rumored to be among the less aggressive venomous snakes–though, if you’re asking for it, they’re game & you’re probably in the ER. Habu sake is made by placing a whole snake into a cask of 95% alcohol in order to embalm it; afterwards, it’s transferred to steep in two successively lower proofs before landing in the comparatively benign distilled rice alcohol. If your frequent flier miles are a little on the anemic side, you can order a bottle of your very own for about $105 here. Anyone ever tried this stuff?

We’ve brought you the best of movie poster-dom, and now we thought you might be ready for the worst. Heck, it’s summer blockbuster season, and more money is being spent on theatrical release advertising than on foreign aid to Africa. (Er, maybe. But the numbers are huge.) What better time to celebrate the film industry’s foibles? A few of these were inspired by a post from filmcynic. The rest, by my nightmares.

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We always knew it would take green to get the green movement afoot. By that I mean, people see money in going green. The latest example? Hearst has a beta version of its Green Magazine online (your one-stop shop for all things good for the environment).

One of the more interesting aspects, once it gets going, will be the eco-tip of the day. Though I’m still not convinced there actually exist  365 different things you can do each year to conserve energy or act more efficiently in the name of the environment, I do applaud the effort. So far the tips are the usual fare: don’t use paper OR plastic (bring your own), change your light bulbs over to compact fluorescents, that sort of thing.

We know you guys must have some more original tips to share, right? So slap ‘em down for all to benefit. I’ll single out the most original in a post later this week.

Susan G. Komen. In 1978, Nancy Brinker promised her dying sister, Susan Komen of Peoria, Illinois, to find a way to speed up breast cancer research. In 1982, Brinker founded the The Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation. The foundation became Susan G. Komen for the Cure in 2007, and is dedicated “to curing breast cancer at every stage — from the causes to the cures, to the pain and anxiety of every moment in between.”

Elizabeth Glaser. The Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation was founded in 1988. Its namesake was married to actor/director Paul Michael Glaser. She contracted HIV in 1981 after receiving an HIV-contaminated blood transfusion while giving birth. The virus was passed to her infant daughter, Ariel, through breastfeeding. The Glasers’ son, Jake, born in 1984, contracted HIV from his mother in utero. At the 1992 Democratic National Convention, she made a moving and memorable speech (text and audio here). Her foundation strives to prevent pediatric AIDS by, for example, attracting top researchers to the field. She passed away in 1994.

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At 7:30 in the evening on May 1 and May 2, select theaters nationwide will be participating in a special 20th anniversary screening of the 1987 motion picture Dirty Dancing. To celebrate, we’ve come up with a 15-question quiz that will assess your status as the Ultimate Dirty Dancing Fan. Will you pass the test? There’s only one way to find out: Dirty Dancing

On this day in 1822, the regal (and rather woeful) face that stares you down from your fifty-dollar bills–Hiram (after his granddad) Ulysses Grant–was born in Point Pleasant, OH. The future Union powerhouse and 18th U.S president suffered the childhood nickname “Useless”–sloughing it off when he enrolled in West Point at seventeen, where he proved a peerless horseman (a skill that earned him some notoriety later in life when he was ticketed $20 for driving his horse too fast). After serving as a lieutenant in the Mexican-American War (1846-48), he remained in the Army until abruptly resigning in 1854…Rumors abounded that Brevet Colonel Robert C. Buchanan was riding him for his heavy drinking–Grant was a purported fan of Old Crow. Grant was also a cigar aficionado who loved to herald a new day by munching on pickles. If you want to spend the weekend reliving Grant’s Vicksburg Campaign, it’s likely there’s a Civil War reenactment event near you, but if that tribute’s too much of a schlep, you can always head up NYC’s Riverside Drive to Grant’s Tomb (admission’s free). And if anyone quizzes you on who’s “buried” there, remember: entombed, not buried, and it’s Grant and his wife.

Playa del Rey is an enormous condo development on Los Angeles’ westside, in a theoretically golden zone between the hip communities of Venice and Santa Monica to the North, the airport close by but out of sight to the South and the beach to the West. But it has two very curious problems. First, it’s sitting on a giant pocket of toxic, potentially explosive methane gas, for which the development has installed extensive gas barriers and venting systems, but given Southern California’s history of earthquakes … you never know. Second, and potentially more troublesome, depending on your point of view, is that PDR is built on top of what has turned out to be one of the largest Native American burial grounds in the country. According to a recent Citybeat article, there’s a trailer on the building site that houses hundreds of 1′ x 1′ wooden boxes, each one containing bone fragments from individual graves. (Now if that’s not a recipe for Poltergeist-style disaster, I don’t know what is.)

A few examples of what can happen when you build on an Indian burial ground, after the jump:
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