In her brief career, Amy Winehouse became something of a parody of herself. She became the butt of jokes as she oh-so-publicly struggled with her addiction to drugs and alcohol.
She died last week. She was found in her London apartment, dead of an apparent drug overdose.
Which makes the fact that her best-known song is Rehab all the more ironic. It’s sad that she couldn’t overcome her addictions as she really did have a great voice and an electric stage presence.
I’ve made no secret of my love for Glee, the goofy, silly musical sitcom on Fox network about a bunch of outcast losers who try to redeem their high-school social lives by joining the Glee Club. Yeah, it’s fantasy.
I think you dudes also know about my disdain for the horrible, gut-wrenchingly appalling series of (and I hate to call them this because it’s so demeaning to the library) books known as Twilight. It’s abstinence porn at its very worst.
So, let’s say you go ahead and do a little mash up of the two things. Will the awesome of Glee be able to counteract the sheer black-hole-level of badness that is Twilight?
In a word: Of course it will.*
And, herewith, the proof: Gleeclipse.
Well, at least it would be, if I could get the YouTube embed to work. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be working right now with the new WordPress update kicking and and doing so well. I guess you’ll have to do it the old-fashioned way and just click on the link to see it on the YouTube site. So, without further ado, or, really, any ado at all, here it is. No, really. Just click HERE. That’s all you have to do.
*Yes, I know that wasn’t a word. That was the joke. Feeble as it was.
The world is a strange and wonderful place, dudes. It really is. Take, for instance, the network of tunnels running underneath Germany and Austria.
Nobody knows why they were built. We’re a little unsure about when they were built. But they’re there and a group of amateur archeologists are exploring them.
This is the kind of thing that amazes me. Because there’s no mention of these tunnels in any kind of written record. Nobody said nothing about no tunnels. It was kept a secret from, I guess, everyone who didn’t need to know. The thing about secrets is, normally, three people can keep a secret only if one of the three is dead.
What I’m saying is it’s hard for a large group of dudes and dudettes to keep a secret. There’s usually at least one dude who blabs, which is why the whole conspiracy thing always rings false to me. But that’s beside the point.
Let’s talk tunnels and galleries buried beneath the earth for unknown reasons. Radiocarbon dating of wooden doors found in the tunnels say they were dug probably between the 5th and 6th centuries.
All of the radiocarbon dating analyses completed to date indicate that the tunnels were built in the Middle Ages, challenging the validity of the prevailing school of thought. It holds that the tunnels were built during the Migration Period (known as the “Völkerwanderung” in German) in the 5th and 6th centuries, when entire tribes left their homes and abandoned the cemeteries of their ancestors. The assumption was that the tunnels and galleries were created so that the dead could still be venerated.
And then, sometime around the year 1200, the tunnel entrances were filled in with rubble and then abandoned.
At least 700 of these chambers have been found in Bavaria alone, along with about 500 in Austria. In the local vernacular, they have fanciful names such as “Schrazelloch” (“goblin hole”) or “Alraunenhöhle” (“mandrake cave”). They were supposedly built by elves, and legend has it that gnomes lived inside. According to some sagas, they were parts of long escape tunnels from castles.
In reality, the tunnels are often only 20 to 50 meters long. The larger passageways are big enough so that people can walk through them in a hunched position, but some tunnels are so small that explorers have to get down on all fours. The tiniest passageways, known as “Schlupfe” (“slips”), are barely 40 centimeters (16 inches) in diameter.
The ground beneath the southern German state of Bavaria is literally perforated with these underground mazes — and no one knows why.