“Things You Should Be Doing When The Meteor Hits” Dept: OK. Yes, we’re all gonna die from impact with an outsized planet fragment, but in the meantime, there’s Kutiman:

Kutiman is an Israeli musician that had the simple, but utterly genius, idea to sample YouTube. He trolled Lord knows how many music videos to find raw material, sliced and diced it, and formed it into these incredible compositions that he’s pulled together into an online album he calls “ThruYou“.

It’s been a long time since I’ve heard/seen something new that grabbed me by the eye-pits and immersed me in delight, but Kutiman’s compositions left me flabbergasted, floored and completely transported — not only by the album’s concept (which is genius) or how good the songs are (they are excellent), but also in how sensitively and well he handled the video editing which is an integral part of the song’s delights. For instance, consider this gem called “Someday”. It’s like watching a light and satisfying O. Henry-On-YouTube short story with a surprise twist (the singer) and wonderful little ending (the smile):

When I first saw Kutiman’s stuff, what immediately went through my mind is “this must be the delight that God feels in the human experience”, that delight that artists get to experience and share — immersed in and weaving all these disparate and seemingly unrelated shards and fragments of human passion and expression, floating up like incense, into intricate and beautiful tapestries of sound.

Do yourself a favor and spend 40 minutes with this album at www.thruyou.com and I hope you have as joyful a time taking it in as I did.

“Unctious Little Toady Slayer” Dept: Here’s Jon Stewart of the Daily Show bringing the pain to the odious little business-brown-nosers at CNBC. These “financial journalists” and “experts” bowed and scraped to the same captains of industry for the months before our crisis, the same CEOs whose hubris is wreaking so much havoc and personal pain and who are still robbing the taxpayers blind.

One can only hope that this has the same effect as Stewarts infamous “Crossfire” appearance where his very public expose of the show’s vapid and bankrupt premise was so authentic and devastating that the show was cancelled not too long after.

It’s a pity that the Very Serious Media, for the most part, has left the heavy lifting of this kind of obvious truthtelling to late-night comedy hosts like Stewart and Colbert, but at least we’re in capable hands.

More From The “Death Of The Expert” Dept: Brian Appleyard offers up a nice finisher:

…I didn’t mention the findings of Philip Tetlock at Berkeley. He studied pundits and discovered they were, to a rough approximation, always wrong when making predictions. He took 284 pundits and asked them questions about the future. Their performance was worse than chance. With three possible answers, they were right less than 33 per cent of the time. A monkey chucking darts would have done better. This is consoling. More consoling still is Tetlock’s further finding that the more certain a pundit was, the more likely he was to be wrong. Their problem being that they couldn’t self-correct, presumably because they’d invested so much of their personality and self-esteem in a specific view. (That makes me think of so many people, almost everybody, in fact.)

Tetlock said: ‘The dominant danger remains hubris, the vice of closed-mindedness, of dismissing dissonant possibilites too quickly.’

Personally, I am fully aware that I am wrong about everything, a posture which, if applied correctly, would make me right 33 per cent of the time in Tetlock’s tests and, therefore, a better pundit than the pundits.

(via Andrew Sullivan, as always)

“In-Jokes From The ’80s” Dept: A hilarious tribute for we children of the Hairspray Decade…