Will This Ping News Be The Apple Of Your Eye, Or Just A Bad Pun?

Keanu’s sad because he doesn’t like my headline. :(

Apple just unveiled a music-based social network named Ping, which is built into iTunes.  You can follow other music fans and discover new music with it or some such Web 2.0 buzzword linkkake party.  I kinda tuned out, but this is supposed to be bad for MySpace, who are trying to focus on music sharing instead of on 3GB animated .gif backgrounds that render text unreadable.  Facebook is also not enthusiastic about Ping.  They blocked Apple from using their open programming interfaces to help Ping users find their friends.  Facebook says this was to keep Apple from sending too much traffic to them at once, and they’re working with Apple to resolve it.  Meanwhile, there are two Mark Zuckerberg’s signed up at Ping.  The one with Zuckerberg’s picture on it is the fake one.  Man, I don’t know anyone who would do a parody of a well-known person on a social media site.  Nope, nobody I know does that.

Is The East Coast Swimming To Work?

Has Uproxx News decided to just talk about the weather today?  Sure, but with good reason:

1. Earl looks set to kick some major coastline.
2. We promise, we will not resort to any “My Name Is Earl” jokes, which immediately became lame once this hurricane approached U.S. shores and we started actually caring about it.
3. We also promise no TGIF jokes.  That alone should make us your primary news source.

So far, Earl hasn’t done much to make America hate it, since we don’t care about the Caribbean, but it’s already knocked out all the power in Antigua (yes, the entire country), wiped out power and water for the entire British Virgin Islands, and caused about $150 million in damage.  So, yeah, Earl’s not fooling around.

So who are we going to see on the nightly news tomorrow in storm footage that looks exactly the same as all the other storm footage we see every year?

Is It So Hard To Love Microsoft News?

Nobody likes a bragger, but let’s face it – when you do something right, you want the whole world to know. That’s why Microsoft is screaming from every mountaintop that the new Windows Phone 7 operating system is going to blow your consumer minds. The company has been packaging its latest smart phone OS for shipping to all of its cellular partners in order to be ready for the holidays. Microsoft said in a statement that this baby has been tested, double tested, triple tested and tested one last time just to be sure. So basically, it’s ready to go. And it’s good timing, because my MSDOS phone is running a little slow.

History is Just Like Us! Famous Photographs Recast.

It’s sad how ignorant most Americans are of historical events, and how collectively dumb we’re getting as a society.  The other day my friend told me she read somewhere that 112% of Americans couldn’t identify the US on a map of North America.  I’m not sure where she read that and I didn’t look it up because I had some stuff to do, but still, pretty outrageous.  I might even start a Facebook group about it.

Strangely and possibly ironically, even as our knowledge of history declines, we’ve experienced an almost commensurate rise in our desire to see pictures of minor celebrities eating ham sandwiches or cleaning up dog poop.  “If only we could somehow get people as interested in history as they are in Heidi Montag pulling her underwear out of her butt crack,” many a history teacher has thought while looking down some bimbo’s shirt.  And that’s why I have used the magic of Photoshop to incorporate the kind of pictures dumb people enjoy into the kind of historical photographs they should know.  Too long has a knowledge of history been the exclusive domain of the elite, the intellectually curious.  What about the great grunting majority?  The willfully ignorant?  The slack-jawed asswipes?  At long last, historical photographs for all, especially you, asswipe.

And by that I mean yes, this is all just an excuse to make more of my juvenile Photoshops.  Oh, Sad Keanu.  I can’t quit you.

Harry Potter News Is Simply Magical

Now before you get all excited, thinking that I’m going to blow your mind with new exclusive pictures from the set of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, I’ll warn ye muggles to settle down. This is a spoiler-free news blog, so you’re going to have to be a good nerd fan like me and wait until the first part of the epic two-part series finale hits theaters (Ed. – That’s theatres in England). But that doesn’t mean we can’t bask in all of the other news surrounding arguably the most popular book and movie series of all-time.

Adorable Tiny Predator Found In Luggage and Other Animal News

Tigers are a lot of things: predatory, majestic, dangerous. And, like any other species that has fur and is at one point tiny, they are absolutely adorable when they’re young. Still incredibly dangerous, and incredibly illegal to transport across borders, but you just want to pick one up and snuggle it all day long, making cutesy baby noises until it curls up in your lap and goes to sleep. Or maybe rips your throat out. But that wasn’t what a Thai woman was thinking when she sedated one of the adorable flesh-eaters and hid him in a big bag of stuffed animals as she was heading to Iran.

Meme Watch: Prancing Cera

Edgar Wright, the director of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and the writer/director of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, kickstarted a meme this week when he posted the picture of Michael Cera to the right on his Flickr page.

Almost immediately a tumblr page called fyeahprancingcera started, while sites like BuzzFeed started collecting user-submitted photoshops, and comedy tumblr pages like TheFrogman added more lulz.  I’ve collected twenty-one of my favorite Prancing Ceras below, along with a few photoshops of my own.

The next two photographs are the first thing I thought of, and sure enough, someone else had noticed this, too:

Ridin’ Dirty With The News

New Zealander Michael Wiles was riding his motorcycle when he noticed a barbecue grill discarded along the side of the road, so he did the only logical thing: wear it as a shirt and try to ride home at speeds of up to 46 mph on a busy freeway.  He was caught, despite his total inconspicuousness, and his lawyer argued that his client was poor and had a momentary “lack of thought processes”.  No, really?  He was fined ~$719 (A$800, £458) and barred from driving for a month.  And the BBQ grill didn’t work, but at least he can wear it for Halloween and go as “that dumbass on the motorcycle.”