Ben Folds doing a cover of Such Great Heights using instruments found in the studio at the time of recording. Including a mailbox covered in a towel being banged by a wooden spoon. (via Mack Williams)

My old Improv teacher and mentor Joseph Limbaugh has been writing and recording songs based on the elements from The Periodic Table. He recently featured the song for Zinc on his weblog Overdriod. Where you can also find Overdriod produced improvised cartoons.

With teacher's like Joseph and Omesh it only makes sense that great things have happened at Dad's Garage Theatre.

A friend on ours is going to help me make my Grooms Cake for our Wedding. I wanted to try to make a jumping Mario from Super Mario Bros. out of cupcakes. Where each cupcake represents a pixel. I started counting the pixels and it got up to around 100 very quickly. That means a ton of cupcakes.

I had all but given up when my friend Jackie offered to help me bake all the cupcakes. Together I think we can do it! We only need 3 types of icing!

These people had a whole Mario Themed Wedding Cake made! It's impressive!

Jeez, how did I miss this one.

Our beloved John Hodgman, the charming PC from the Apple Computer ads, has been lecturing monthly in Williamsburg, Brooklyn since 2001. He, along with our favorite online music self-publisher Jonathan Coulton, host Little Grey Book Lectures. Featuring guest contributors nearly every month. If you love The Hodg the way we love the Hodg... you'd be remiss to not listen to their podcast archives now available for download.

The Space Station is hosting a marriage in october... mine... ours : )

So I've started The Clunky Wedding Weblog. I'm going full on internet dork about it. It's looking like it will be a good tool for getting information out to guests coming from out of town as well. If you want to check it out, feel free.

This weekend C-Dub and I spoke on the Adult Swim panel at Dragon*Con the nation's largest sci-fi and fantasy convention. That means you'll see enough elaborate StormTrooper and overweight Slave-girl Leia costumes to last you all winter. The panel was unnecessarily large, even consisting of 4 Harvey Birdman animators... 4? Yeah... 4. We did get to see some of our friends from some of the other shows. The audience, who got to see 2 previously unreleased minutes of our new cartoon Frisky Dingo, were very energetic and excited. And even though they had no idea what or who Frisky Dingo was (we don't premiere until Oct. 15th) they laughed at all the right jokes... so mission accomplished.

Remember Tom Green?
He has a web-only TV show over at tomgreen.com that runs live weekday nights @ 11pm. Tonight he'll be having the Pleaseeasaur guys on to be interviewed by Neil Hamburger in a segment they call "Poolside Chatting with Neil Hamburger." They plan on showing some clips from their upcoming DVD we did the animation for.

Things have finally calmed down since we wrapped up the Pleaseeasaur animation. We had some time to convert side_b of our summertime mixtape into a podcast. Be sure to update your iTunes subscription, or grab the podcast below. Look for more mixtape.podcasts soon.

Strap on your ear goggles:

Plug this RSS Feed into iTunes:

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info: Ahhhh B-Sides. [mix] rocketlabGO side_b is the companion mix to [mix] rocketlabGO! side_a. Summer's sultry heat has boiled us down to a murky goo of internal retrospection. Dig a little deeper with us as we consider our collective greatness, and our collective gross sweatiness.
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I remember the first time I watched a shuttle launch on TV with my Dad. (STS-1) Seeing that space ship sitting on the launch pad was awesome, and it actually looked like a space ship, wings... giant engines, the works. Of course, it looked kinda like the dorky younger cousin of a space fighter, but close enough right?

I loved the shuttle. My Dad built and painted a beautiful shuttle model for me that same year. It hung from the ceiling of my bedroom, complete with robotic arm (Shuttle Remote Manipulator System: SRMS) the Skylab Experimental Science Station in it's cargo bay, and 2 tiny Astronauts wearing MMUs. All I ever wanted to do was play with it, but it was a model... so off limits.

NASA announced that it has awarded Lockheed Martin a contract to build the next generation of NASA spacecraft. The Orion. It's an Apollo style capsule throwback! It looks like it's going to be bad ass, and they're planning on launching it no later than 2014. They plan on going back to the moon by 2020! After that? Mars. Be sure to check the Orion Spacecraft Weblog for ongoing information.

Sadly, this means that the shuttle is officially old. (ok, to be honest, they've been old for a while) Rumors of an early retirement are all but confirmed, and the reusable winged design of "space ships" is becoming a thing of the past. While old school capsules, which began America's manned journey into space are becoming all the rage. What's old is new again.

Maybe there will come a day when we actually build a spacecraft IN SPACE. This will eliminate many of the design limitations placed upon us by gravity and atmosphere. (while probably introducing many more... like lack of air...) It could make for some unEartly design possibilities... literally.