Mike Essl’s Blog

In Search of Metal

Actual Pain’s Rabies Red shirt.

This all started from Mishka’s bloglin. They sent me to the blog of t-shirt brand Actual Pain. They have some really inspired metal shirts as if their brand was a metal band.

While there I picked up the shirts Rabies Red, Cutter, and Game Over (Green). My more metal readers will notice that the Game Over shirt swipes it’s artwork from Nuclear Assault’s seminal speed metal record of the same name.

This band Necrophagist has a song called “Fermented Offal Discharge.” That song name is just terrible. Gross.

I also found out that Necrophagist falls into the genre known as Technical Death Metal. So if phagist means to eat does their name mean eaters of death? Death eaters?

This story is about the guy that did those “shredding” videos on YouTube. The ones that are overdubbed to make them sound terrible. Wired has the videos featured here post the YouTube yank. The Iron Maiden video below is particularly inspired.

2:22 pm | February 9, 2008 | [2] comments | link | filed under: Music

Pity My Ring

Greg got me this crazy ring! It’s so big I don’t know if I can handle wearing it.

3:12 pm | October 17, 2007 | [4] comments | link | filed under: Mr. T

I Pity The Dolls! San Francisco!

Opening in San Francisco on May 24th from 7-10 pm at the RX Gallery (132 Eddy Street @ Mason). This is the third showing of the collection, with the previous shows being in Toronto and New York City.

I PITY THE DOLLS features the most amazing collection of over 175 vintage Mr. T Dolls, each handmade from the original 1984 pattern, collected and presented by Greg Rivera.

Greg Rivera and his partner in crime Mike Essl have together amassed the largest collection of Mr. T memorabilia in the world. Their site MrTandMe.com has also gained national attention, featured on VH1, NY1, Reuters TV, National Inquirer, and Entertainment Weekly. As no gallery could hold the entire Mr. T collection, I PITY THE DOLLS will feature the most unique part of this amazing collection — Greg’s handmade dolls.

You can download the flyer here. (1 meg pdf link)

Check out these photos of the New York show by Vidalia.

9:50 pm | May 2, 2007 | [44] comments | link | filed under: Mr. T

I Pity Domain Guessing

I put the video that eBay made of Greg and me up on YouTube on June 9, 2006. As of today it has received 1,041,482 views. That is over ONE MILLION VIEWS. Crazy.

At first we had no idea why, and then a comment on YouTube mentioned they got there by typing “yotube” into the “URL bar on top. Soon all the comments mentioned “yotube.”

It turns out that, because of Firefox's Domain Guessing if you type in “yotube” without “www” or without “.com” Firefox will use Google’s “I’m feeling Lucky” service and send you to our YouTube video. You can test this by searching for“yotube” on Google. Our video is the first link.

Weird. What is very strange about this is that everything I’ve read says that this only works if the domain yotube.com doesn't exist, but it does. I'm wondering if it has anything to do with the fact that it is one of those nasty domain squatting sites.

Even stranger is that we never tagged the video “yotube.” After all the views I added the tag, but it’s still a mystery as to how this started happening in the first place.

9:51 am | March 30, 2007 | [7] comments | link | filed under: Mr. T

Slayer in The New York Times!?!?

Up is down. Black is white. Hell has frozen over. Since when does anyone at the New York Times get that Slayer is good? This little review made me feel so sad for not getting tickets to this show. I also love Michael Falco’s photo that ran with the story!

Dear Slayer, I promise to never miss a show again. I’ll even wear my Slayer shoes and t-shirt.