Mandisa’s God Speaking gets a reworking courtesy of Alvin and the Chipmunks. Even when sped up 30 times, Mandisa still sounds spectacular!

Estelle Getty is dead. Goodbye, Sophia. You will always be my favorite Golden Girl.

Over the course of the past three days, I’ve visited these two websites for a barrel of laughs. They come highly recommended.

Odd Fish. A recommendation from my friend Ariel, this online comic strip features an octopus and a puffer fish, and is drawn with ballpoint pen! It is shamelessly corny, relying mostly on really bad puns. Which makes it the perfect comic strip.

Overheard in NY. I bought this book with Cathy titled Overheard in New York, and it’s so funny! It’s quite vulgar, I must admit, because the book - and website - are basically conversations overheard in the Big Apple. There’s also a book titled Overheard in the Office, but it was thinner than the former, and since both were priced similarly, I opted for the thicker book. It’s funny. Here’s a sample:

Girl #1: My worst fear is falling on a picket fence or getting eaten by a shark.
Girl #2: Oh yeah, well my worst fear is someone pushing me forward onto a blackboard and having my teeth scrape down the front. That would be awful.
– Overheard at Grand Central Station

What other funny websites do you like?

Shortly after Elliott’s TriNoma concert, Cathy and I bumped into the sister of one of her friends. That sister was with a friend of her own. The conversation went like this:

CATHY shows off her I *heart* Elliott t-shirt.

CATHY’S FRIEND’S SISTER: Ay, nanood kayo! (Oh, you watched!)

CATHY’S FRIEND’S SISTER’S FRIEND: Nagtataka kami kung bakit andaming tao, tapos naalala ko, andito nga pala si George Eliot! (We were wondering why there were so many people here, then I remembered, George Eliot is here!)

GANNS and CATHY look at each other, stunned.

GANNS: George Eliot??

CATHY: (trying not to laugh, to her friends) George Eliot is the author of Middle March. We were here to watch Elliott Yamin, the American Idol finalist.

Mistaking George Eliot for Elliott Yamin. Sheesh. Who’s next? T.S. Eliot?

No offense to Jeremy Piven, whose work on Entourage I have not had the pleasure of watching just yet, but Neil Patrick Harris wuz robbed two years running for Best Supporting Actor in a Comedy at the Emmys.

Harris’ turn as raving chauvinist Barney Stinson on the CBS sitcom How I Met Your Mother is one of the last few saving graces of traditional sitcoms on American television today. With the exits in recent years of other popular traditional sitcoms like Everybody Loves Raymond, and Will and Grace, looking at HIMYM and Charlie Sheen’s glamour project Two and a Half Men as the top two few traditional sitcoms still broadcasting today paints a grim picture.

Call me a fuddy duddy, but I yearn for the days of traditional sitcoms. Mark my words, the day will come when all the comedy nominees will be from nontrad comedies - The Office, Ugly Betty, even Entourage - and we will no longer have such stellar audience-fueled guilty-pleasure sitcoms like Cheers, Frasier, Friends, The Cosby Show, Perfect Strangers, Murphy Brown, Golden Girls… you get the picture.

Boo to you, Emmys! I mourn the death of traditional sitcoms with this loss! I’ll see you at the funeral in sweatpants and seedy sneakers; mark my words, my eulogy, should ratings for HIMYM not rise significantly this third season, is going to be… wait for it… LEGENDARY.

Carrot Top is one funny comedian. I’ve always thought that he was one of the best prop comedians around. (Would’ve been fun to see him on Whose Line is It Anyway for the Props game.)

Among Carrot Top’s many hysterical props: a Dr. Kevorkian bath toy consisting of a rubber duck with an electric plug; a Whitney Houston microphone with bong; and my personal favorite, a paper-cup-and-string telephone with an extra cup and string for call-waiting. Hahaha!

Imagine, therefore, my shock to see this photo of him at the recent Flavor Flav roast on Comedy Central.

Man, the steroids are just popping all over this bad boy.

His face seems to be the biggest prop of all. I’m not sure I can laugh when the comedian on stage looks like someone ready to beat me up and eat me alive. He plays gigs around the country; maybe he should swing by the nation’s capital and get some plastic surgery in Washington DC so he wouldn’t look so behemoth scary.

Well, regardless, he’s a great comedian. Rock it, Carrot Top!

That’s a catchy line, isn’t it? It’s just awful that it’s a misheard line from Madonna’s Secret.

You know, it goes Happiness lies in your own hands…

Luckily, I didn’t hear it that way. I did hear the following, though:

Nothing’s right, I’m torn, I’m a lettuce-face, this is how I feel. (Natalie Imbruglia’s Torn)

You don’t bring me flowers, you don’t sing me love songs, you hardly talk to me anymore when I kung-fu the door at the end of the day. (Neil Diamond & Barbra Streisand’s You Don’t Bring Me Flowers)

Your breath is just sashimi surrounding my body (The Corrs’ Only When I Sleep)

The worst one for me, though, is this. Sing the bass line of M.C. Hammer’s U Can’t Touch This:

Tan tan tan na nan tan tan… COMPACT DISC! Tan tan tan na nan tan tan… COMPACT DISC!

Click here for a slew of Filipino and international mondegreens (misheard lyrics).

I’m all for a good pun, but this is taking things way too far.

While doing research for work, I learned about the Philippine bulbul, and how Bohol seems to be full of it. Want to see a Philippine bulbul? Click after the jump. Read more

Can you believe it? James Deen is a porn star!

Leave it to my wife to find a 20-year-old adult actor with a big wang, equally big sideburns, and friends named Chico Wang, Johnny B. Goode, and Brian Surewood. The only thing this actor has in common with me is that we share the same name.

But come on! I came first (pun not intended)! I’m 29 years old! I should get dibs on the name James Deen. Just because the guy’s in better shape than I am, and hung like a horse doesn’t mean… doesn’t mean…

Oh what the heck. People know me as Ganns Deen anyway. I am so glad I gave ‘James Deen’ up after leaving the education industry.