Yes, viagra yes. This meme is already everywhere else. It needs to live here, too.

Everybody DANCE!

First, there was Eduard Kihl. Then, there was Trololo Cat. Now, there’s this:

(Via Ariana Osborne. All due love and respect to the incredible Christopher Lee, but I trololol’d.)

One of the more unique looking, and easily one of the most unique sounding musical instruments ever invented, Hans Reichel’s daxophone is sure to put some spring in your step and some giggles in your face this fine morning:

A bowed musical instrument that falls into the category of “friction idiophones“, the daxophone consists of a long, thin wooden blade notched into a wooden block containing one or more contact (piezo) mics, often attached to a tripod. In addition to being bowed, daxophones can be plucked or struck, conducting sounds the same way “a struck ruler halfway off a table does”, with each vibration moving through a “tongue” of wood into the instrument’s wood block base, which acts as a resonator for the contact mics contained inside.

Depending on the shape and grain of each wooden tongue, and how they are manipulated, all manner of uncanny (and often hilarious) warbling, moaning, grumbling, yodeling, spluttering, rasping, growling, yowling sounds can be coaxed from these oddly human-sounding pieces of wood. (The daxophone’s name comes from the use of a stopper block of wood called the “dax”, which is fretted on one side to produce fixed pitches, while the other side is curved and smooth, allowing a performer to shift more fluidly from one note into the next.)

A variety of daxophone tongues. (Via oddmusic.com.)

Generously, Reichel offers extensive downloadable plans for his invention on his website so that other woodworkers can create daxophones of their very own.

Visit oddmusic.com to find out more about this, and countless other experimental instruments and musicians. Also worth checking out:

• Gravikords, Whirlies & Pyrophones
• Orbitones Spoon Harps & Bellowphones
• Bradford Reed
• Interview with musical instrument inventor Dan Rathbun
• INSTRUMENTAL documentary by Gabriel Shalom
• The Vegetable Orchestra

Hey, site kids! Have some extra polyester, drugstore fun fur and mescaline in your cornflakes this morning.

It’s been too long since we featured a badass brvtal bird on BTC!

Song is “Cast Down the Heretic” by Nile. Via Lucille D., thanks!

(Wonder what kind of energy drink that is…)

“We all saw it scrawled across the blackboard the second we stepped into Miss Lovecraft’s class…”

A  disturbing and darkly humorous commentary on burgeoning adolescence and coming to terms with “the other” that is the opposite sex, Craig MacNeill’s short film, “Late Bloomer“, devotes a horrific (and hilarious) thirteen minutes to the obscene revelations that stem from biological discovery.  Written and brilliantly narrated in true Lovecraftian style by Clay McLeod Chapman, this tale of a “7th grade sex-ed class gone horribly wrong”  chronicles the destruction of innocence in pulpy prose worthy of the old gentleman himself.

How to describe these grotesque mockeries of natural law? Clearly hovering at the edge of sanity, both awe-struck and terrified by the frenzied hormonal horrors to which he has become an initiate,  the film’s narrator recounts the events of that eldritch classroom in an eerie, quavering voice while a murky, droning soundtrack by One Ring Zero provides appropriate ambiance.  It is said that MacNeill was inspired to make “Late Bloomer” while shooting a documentary on the film’s writer; one cannot view the result without  imagining the horrors to which that pale, untried youth may have borne witness in the classroom.

An uncharacteristically tranquil good morning to you, comrades. Yet this collection of clips is oddly invigorating– especially if you watch it full screen, and you’ve got a nice pair of headphones:

Via Paige, who also recommends this wonderful auditory rainforest respite.

“These are amazing HD forest ‘outtake’ clips- cruising through Lago Preto Preserve in the Peruvian Amazon in a canoe…which we captured while filming a documentary– Uakari: Secrets of the English Monkey for Animal Planet, BBC and CBC. These clips are intended to just give you a feel for what it’s like to travel through a flooded Amazon rainforest- sights and sounds.”

Sometimes Mondays are an extra special pain-in-the-ass, so here’s an encore installment of BTC. Via the GreatDismals comes this sit-uplifting interaction between a cheeky young prankster, “Robin Cooper“, and an unflappable call-in gluteus maximus-mending spiritual master, Gilbert Deya.

BEHOLD. THE PATOOTIE-SAVING POWAH.

Buy your own giant wearable latex infant head from HYPERFLESH. Three different moods to choose from! (Via BoingBoing.)

Good morning, drugstore good morning, GOOD MOOORRRRRNING.

News vis M. S. le Despencer, thanks!

Best lead to a new article EVER, right?

Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, which will open its doors at in 2015, has acquired Parliament’s Funkadelic Mothership (the second incarnation, that is — the first having long-since departed for other galaxies).

The legendary stage prop will serve as a crucial building block of the museum’s permanent display permanent music exhibition. Via Funk Music News:

When the band lowered the Mothership from the rafters of the Capital Centre in Landover in 1977, the response was rapturous. Not only was it instantly stunning — it felt like a cosmic metaphor for the sense of possibility that followed the civil rights movement.

That symbolism isn’t lost on the Smithsonian.

“With large iconic objects like this, we can tap into . . . themes of movement and liberation that are a constant in African-American culture,” says Dwandalyn R. Reece, curator of music and performing arts for the museum. “The Mothership as this mode of transport really fits into this musical trope in African American culture about travel and transit.”

It will be exhibited alongside other artifacts from American music history — Louis Armstrong’s trumpet, James Brown’s stage costumes, Lena Horne’s evening gowns. But it will be the only spaceship.

YES!! “Free your mind and come fly with me… it’s hip! On the Mothership. Swing down, sweet chariot, stop, and let me ride…”