You all have seen this commercial, right?

In case you can’t listen to this while you read our blog in your cubicle while you’re supposed to be working (for shame!), I’ll give you a rundown.  A chef is lamenting, in song, the effect that Bertolli brand pasta sauce has had on the restaurant business.

I make-a lasagna
I take all day
My tables are empty anyway…
[a cry of rage and despair] Bertolli!

When I saw this commercial, it immediately reminded me of a similar one from a few years back, advertizing Barilla pasta.  There’s no video of this one, unfortunately, but I remember the lyrics:

Love is grand
and love is good
but to Italians love is food
Barilla!

Both sets of lyrics are sung to the “Habañera” from George Bizet’s Carmen.

What are these commercials trying to do with this music? Click through, dear reader, click through!

Oh my friends, I have wonderful links for you!

Via Slumbering Lungfish, blog of the deeply hilarious Lore Sjoberg, I was directed to Garkov.  Garkov is a site that takes old Garfield strips and cranks the dialogue through a Markov Chain, a stochastic substitution/shuffling process that has been used in chatbots like ELIZA (although not in the code for Eliza specifically, as far as I’m aware).  The results are often gleefully insane.

But Garkov also has a treasure trove of Garfield-related links on its main page, ranging from the Garfield Variations to the Garfield Randomizer, to Nothingfield (which seems to have been directed by Ingmar Bergen).  My personal favorite?  Barfield: the one with the fart jokes.

Also well worth seeing:  a Garfield/President Garfield mashup from the frozen north.  The artist doesn’t seem to have links that lead to individual comics, but you’ll find it if you scroll down the page.

Some of you may already be familiar with the so-called “Death of Garfield” comic strips from 1989. But Pete’s excellent posts on the cat inspired me to look at them again, and they are freaky.

I promise, the comics you are about to read are completely real. To put these strips in context, here’s the Sunday strip that ran before the weirdness…

Sunday, October 22

Perfectly harmless, whimsical fun. Perhaps bit more surreal than normal, with the Seussian menagerie. But no one could have expected what Monday would bring…

I find some things funny by virtue of my singular personality and strange sense of humor. Other things I find funny because they are actually awesome. If you’ve been reading this week, you know that I could Lasagna Cat by Fatal Farm as one of the latter.

Today’s joke that we beat to death comes from Lasagna Cat 04/08/1998 (this is the date the original comic ran). And it’s a visual gag:

The above frame is hilarious. If you don’t get it, that’s a shame, but dont’ despair! You’ll get my full breakdown, and the full video, after the jump.

By now, you may have come across a real gem of a Web site — Garfield Minus Garfield. The premise: show Garfield cartoons without any of the talking animals. The result: A creepy bachelor talking to himself, which is a necessary and oft-ignored background element for the Garfield mythos. As the site puts it:

“Friends, meet Jon Arbuckle. Let’s laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness in a quiet American suburb.”

I’m kind of jazzed that this stuff is sweeping around the Internet — this whole piece is really brilliant, and I don’t have to belabor it so much as just point you in the right direction and ask you to leave a comment in the forums.

But as great as “Garfield Minus Garfield” is, I don’t think it holds a candle to Lasagna Cat, which I dare to say is the best use of the Internet as a medium I’ve seen since homestarrunner.com perfected the flash cartoon. Video after the jump.