We Recommend: Your Friday Freebies

Each Friday, our contributors send in a bunch of (legally) free stuff they’ve come across this week, to help you waste your weekend. You’re welcome.
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YouTubes: Tim’s Kitchen Tips

Recommended by: Matt Banham (‘The Ten Most Ridiculous Ideas That Somehow Became Movies‘)

Like Tim & Eric? Like food? …Well, sauce? Then you will LOVE Tim’s Kitchen Tips — easily the most upsetting cooking show since Huey’s Cooking Adventures. 

Observe as Tim makes a sauce; listen as he swirls the sauce round and round; and then watch his good friend Eric taste the sauce.

“Tastes like a runny ketchup sauce with a lot of mustard.” I know you are salivating at the thought of that. Four episodes of goodness online now!
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Art Project: Nails Across America

Recommended by: Kate Jinx (‘Ten Films (And A Bit) To Watch At Melbourne International Film Festival‘)

A couple of years ago my sister suddenly announced “Ew! Your fingernails are FREAKY!” as if she’d never noticed before and had not been related to me for a good 29 years already. I prefer to think of them as masculine. Anyway, I don’t go in much for polish because of this, except to dress them up as native animals occasionally, or as an excuse to hang with my girls from NPAA. Or to use as a cheap inhalant.

I’m fine being au naturel while I follow US artist Breanne Trammell’s experiential art project, Nails Across America. This is no quick slip slop slap operation. Instead, Trammell got a NY state nail technician license (that’s a 16 week course, plus exams), renovated a ’68 caravan into a mobile salon, and is currently taking her cute corgi on a massive roadtrip, stopping off to have intimate conversations with the locals one-on-one while she cutifies their cuticles.

Each participant receives a letterpressed certificate and is documented by the artist for everyone following along to see via Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. And these aren’t French tips we’re talking. Trammel prefers themes that reflect the rest of her body of work — such as pizzas, pencils and Cheetos.

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Playlist: GT Tracks Of The Week

Recommended by: Dijana Kumurdian (‘Single? Creative? Lonely? Maybe You Should Date Your Best Friend.‘)

Sometimes when I give a friend or my boyfriend a ride in my car, they catch me listening to the stuff I really listen to when no one’s around (which lately has been Drive Like Jehu and Taylor Swift albums, alternated with Marc Maron podcasts). And against all my Cartman-ly “I’ll do what I want” attitude, I’m embarrassed. They’ve found out the truth: I’m not very cool.

Well, thankfully I just discovered Brooklyn-based blog Gimmetinnitus’ Soundcloud – specifically their GT Tracks of the Week 2013 ­– and it made me feel totally okay with being into the kind of music that a lot of people (the kind who only listen to trap and/or EDM and/or whatever local band is getting hyped right now) would deem outmoded or lame.

There’s nothing cheesy about this playlist, except maybe the band name ‘The Vegans’. But, y’know what? There are so many bent guitar strings and crashes, and so much delicious fuzzy pedal work, that I’m willing to overlook that if you are.
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Article: ‘Have You Heard The One About President Joe Biden?’, by Jeanne Marie Laskas for GQ

Recommended by: Matt Roden (‘What’s Next For Mad Men?‘)

In contrast to the very… measured cadence that is President Obama’s primary delivery, it is little wonder that Joe ‘Veep’ Biden’s off-the-cuffedness could across as clumsy, full of half-hatched thoughts and R-rated folkisms. This recent profile in GQ works hard at showing how hard Biden works — so hard that he shows little effort — but reveals the writer’s own strain do to her subject justice. (A few too many instances of Laskas insisting that “you can tell the Vice President would love to swear right now” for my liking…)

And yet Biden’s journey, from a stuttering kid to a young Senator — struck but not stuck by the loss of his young family — to the man behind the Ray Bans breakfasting with the King of Georgia, is pretty fantastic in any telling. Bonus Biden Fact not in this article: Did you know he had almost all the furniture removed from Air Force 2 because he likes to pace while he thinks?

Meanwhile, for any debate geeks or public speaking swots out there, this Harpers article nostalgically examines the split in high school speaking styles that all too well mirrors the divide between the boring fact-spouters and the ephemeral moralists that we see in politics today. It also maybe explains why Biden is such an important politician, as he is able to speak facts from the heart.

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Swag: The Conjuring

Recommended by: Alasdair Duncan (‘Everything Important That Happened At Comic-Con 2013‘)

The best part of reviewing films is not seeing the films themselves, and it’s not even interviewing glamorous actors in exotic locales. It’s all the free swag that studios send your way.

For instance, check out the parcel of cool stuff that arrived this morning from Roadshow Films, in honour of the smashing success of terrifying horror film The Conjuring.

You may ask how these Friday Freebies relate to you. Well, the answer is that they don’t, sorry. You can’t have everything.

Damn it feels good to be a gangsta.

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Podcast: This Feels Terrible, with Erin McGathy

Recommended by: Madeleine Watts (‘Why Teenage Girls Crush Hard On The Bad Boys‘)

Earlier this year I began listening to podcasts in a serious way, and I’ve become a bit evangelical about them. The other week I found myself in a bar, red wine in hand, talking at a stranger, and using the phrase “revolutionary medium”. Podcasts are amazing. But the podcast which really got me hooked is This Feels Terrible . Hosted by Erin McGathy, comedian and girlfriend to Community‘s Dan Harmon, whose own Harmontown podcast has been featured by Junkee and is equally brilliant, This Feels Terrible is one of my favourite things in the world.

Every week, Erin interviews somebody — usually a comedian from the LA comedy scene. But the other week she convinced her ex-boyfriend, Steve Greene, to come on the podcast, and they spoke, on microphone, for the first time in four years. You hear them re-hash getting together, the problems with their relationship, and the catastrophic ending, wherein she broke into his apartment, called constantly and sent both of them out of their minds. It’s utterly compelling and intimate and heartbreaking, and I listened to it three times in a row.

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Learning: Coursera

Recommended by: Amelia Schmidt

I feel actually reluctant to spread the word about this particular freebie, because I have been diligently using it to learn more stuff and become a more interesting and educated person, which is the sort of thing that isn’t so effective when everyone else is already just as interesting and educated. But never mind.

At the moment I’m doing a Coursera course in The Science of Gastronomy, from The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. I’ve already done a Design Fundamentals course and my partner has completed a course in Machine Learning (teaching computers how to think, ie. Skynet).

Coursera is what I wish university was: it’s free, it’s all online, and it collates some of the best lectures from around the world into a monumental encyclopedia of structured learning. For anyone who wishes they studied this instead of that, or who gets bored with ‘going out’ and ‘having fun’, Coursera is great. I have learnt SO MANY THINGS about food that I am basically Heston Blumenthal now.

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YouTube: ‘Guitar And Nose Harmonica’, by Toby Fehily

Recommended by: Estelle Tang (‘The Four Comedians You’ll Meet On Twitter‘)

My Paper Radio compatriot Toby Fehily has made a couple of music videos. The one where he plays the Game of Thrones theme song on the banjo got a bit of airplay this week, but I personally like the one where he plays a sweet phrase on both guitar and the harmonica. He plays the harmonica with his nose. Happy Friday!