Crimea X is the coming together of two offbeat, disparate characters, DJ Rocca (Ajello, Super Sonic Lovers, Maffia Sound System) and Jukka Reverberi from 90s Italian glam cult rockers, Giardini di Mirò, who have often have been compared with the sound of Mogwai, Arab Strap, and Godspeed You! Black Emperor. We asked them about their favourite music and they started with The Smiths song, Ask [listen below] ‘I saw them playing live on Italian TV. It was during the 80s when I was extremely young, and I’ve never stopped listening to this song’. Read the rest of Crimea X’s Secret Playlist.

SPONSOR

Boasting members of Serena Maneesh, Harry’s Gym and Danielson, revolving around frontman and songwriter Frode Stromstad — with the album’s supporting cast including Sufjan Stephens and Gary Olsen of Lady Bug Transistor — I Was A King are a misty eyed pop-gaze of West Coast harmonies and ringing Rickenbacker. They have just released a new single — Norman Bleik — through Sonic Cathedral and we checked in with Stromstad to get the inside word on the music that inspired it all. He started with the Flaming Lips song, Slow Nerve Action [listen below]: ‘The last song out on one of my favorite Flaming Lips albums, Transmissions From The Satellite Heart. I think Flaming Lips are responsible for creating the coolest drum sound ever’. Read the rest of I Was A King’s Secret Playlist.

I never played Popopop 1, if there is one, but I can’t imagine a game much more simple than this. Just drop detonating balls next to balls of the same color to pop them. I feel like someone out there is getting way to much pleasure playing this game.

In the finest tradition of People of Public Transit and People Of Walmart comes the latest bizarro meme blog, Random Creepy Guy. Spot him? Look a little closer. That’s right. Indeed.

Let them sing it for you is a web widget that allows you to type in a sentence which is then played back using the same words culled from a library of popular songs. For instance if you type the word “I” it will play Chris Isaak singing that word in the song Wicked Games. If a word cannot be found, you can enter a song which contains the missing word and expand the library.

SPONSOR

If you’re a Twitterer, a Tweeter, or a Twit (in the nicest possible way!), then you might like to follow the Lost At E Minor Twitter feed, which is an extension of the things we post about here. We get access to a lot of tips and information that we don’t always post about. But we will Twitter it, ’cause, hey Twitter is so right now. Follow Lost At E Minor on Twitter. [Illustration by Robert Thompson]

Not surprisingly, the Virtual Shoe Museum is a site with lots of shoe designs. This collaborative project flashes rarities and great heroic deeds in architecture for feet, but its most interesting section focuses on unusable shoes. The section is called Extreme Design and it’s an image gallery for lovers of foot aches.

Cubed is a fun little game where you strategically manipulate various cubes to capture a flag posted on each level. It gets hard, don’t let the first couple levels fool you.

Following on from the People of Walmart website, comes People Of Public Transit: ‘The public bus and subway systems are littered with amazing photo opportunities. Many of us have been sitting alone witnessing something amazing and only wishing we could share the experience with our friends. Well now you can!’

SPONSOR

Malcolm Middleton (ex-Arab Strap) has just released his fifth solo album, Waxing Gibbous, composed from years worth of scribbles in notebooks, which were ‘chiseled and connived into being songs’. We checked in with him to get his words n the music that inspired the new recrding. He started with The Auteurs song, Lenny Valentino [listen below]: ‘I must have missed this band the first time around, but since reading Luke Haines’ autobiography, I am hooked. Anyone who can write about their own life and come across so badly gets the thumbs up from me!’ Read the rest of Malcolm Middleton’s Secret Playlist.

I have an unwritten rule by which I live: never, ever wear shorts unless I absolutely, positively need to. Why, you ask? Well, from a lifetime of experience, the only men who should wear shorts are professional athletes and skaters. On everyone else, they just look damn awful. That’s right. Men’s legs are either too scrawny, too hairy, or too disproportionate. Which is why I love this blog so much. It merely affirms what I’ve always suspected. Now, for the life of me, go and put on some jeans and look half respectable again!

Found-image blogs are a dime a dozen, but but does it float is a particularly well-curated one that has an interesting layout, using flash for continuous scrolling without freaking your browser out. The blog focuses on art and design images, many of which you might recognize, but the juxta-positioning of the images draws out certain themes and ideas.

Side-scrolling funage for a rainy, lazy day. I’ve been putzing around on this and sipping nettle tea. Moles are cute.

SPONSOR

Thao and the Get Down Stay Down (Adam Thompson on bass, keys and additional guitar, and Willis Thompson on drums and percussion) return with the follow up to their critically lauded album, We Brave Bee Stings and All, the best-selling record of 2008 for Kill Rock Stars. We checked in with Nguyen to get the inside word on the music that inspired it all. She started with The Avett Brothers song, Will Your Return [listent below]: ‘So catchy, forlorn, provocative and rakishly charming. It reminds me of touring. I love the cutting sincerity and the charisma of the Avett Brothers. And, totally unrelated, they are the nicest band in the world. Seriously. Ask anyone’. Read the rest of Thao Nguyen’s Secret Playlist.

Why don’t dogs like Halloween? This is the title of an article on the Urlesque website, which recently featured the craziest costumes of the canine world for Halloween night. Dogs with manes, a dog being bitten by a crocodile, the All-American football player, the giraffe, the tarantula, and the shrimp are just some of the pseudo-artistic expressions that these poor animals are subjected to.

The Brick Testament is an illustrated version of the King James Bible done with Legos. Though the site is meant to be satirical, it’s a pretty good summary of the Good Book.

Photoshop Disasters posts some of the most atrocious acts of Photoshop ever committed. It’s amazing how many horrible shop jobs make it to print.

SPONSOR

Cake Wrecks is a seriously addictive, mostly hysterical blog that is perfect for those hours of procrastination. From sad to silly to creepy, the site is all about cakes gone wrong and ‘finding the funny in unexpected, sugar filled-places’. Cakes branded with shockingly bad spelling, missing words, absent punctuations, and horrific decorations, cram the blog to create a photo library full of cringing — though hilarious — blunders.

Hands down, my favourites are those where clearly the baker followed the order form a little too closely, icing the cake with the words like “Nothing” rather than simply leaving it blank (of course, there is a “leave it blank” example too). A classic on the site is cake decorated as a USB key, rather than the requested photo on the key itself. Over 100,000 visitors a day, 1 million subscribers, and a massive industry following speak to its viral hilarity. And like all phenomenon blogs, there is book out now, too.

This virtual piano would have been a really useful tool for me when I was learning how to play as well as when I studied music theory. Being able to see all the chords and scales makes everything so much clearer.

With his new album, Goodnight Unknown, Dinosaur Jr and Sebadoh’s Lou Barlow has created a collection of melodic pop songs that he describes as being ‘a cross between my later work with Folk Implosion and my earlier work with Sebadoh. To my ears, anyway’. We checked in with him to get the inside word on the songs that inspired the recording. He talked about Bill Callahan’s brooding All Thoughts Are Prey To Some Beast [listen below]: ‘A simple song beautifully played and masterfully built. An insistent guitar riff with a devastating lyric, this time with delicate strings and growling guitar to punctuate his poetry. His usually unemotional baritone raises as this song grows and it feels revelatory to me’. Read the rest of Lou Barlow’s Secret Playlist.