Randall Hyde is pioneering a new musical genre called Parodeities, biblical parodies of popular secular songs. The MP3 recordings are rough — Randall has no formal vocal training and he’s accompanied only by downloaded MIDI files — but the results are charming, like outsider art.

Highlights: “God’s Filled Ya” (Blue Oyster Cult’s “Godzilla”), “Welcomed by the Devil” (Guns ‘n Roses’ “Welcome to the Jungle”), and “Takin’ Care of Jesus” (BTO’s “Takin’ Care of Business”). The cover art is cute, too. (via the Yeti)

People who try to download tracks off of the new Madonna album from peer-to-peer networks will likely get an MP3 full of silence, prefixed by this short personal message from Madonna (150Kb MP3). More information from Dotmusic. Thanks to Tpoh.org for the file.

Update: Using the MP3 I posted, several people have created remixes that use the Madonna sample heavily.

You’ve probably seen these adorably amateurish animations featuring kittens lip-syncing White Stripes, Destiny’s Child and the Vines. Created by Rathergood.com’s Joel Veitch, the Flash animations started appearing on weblogs and discussion lists last August.

Well, someone at VH-1 just discovered it. In a short bumper promoting VH-1, the station co-opted the Flash meme for their own purposes. I created an animated GIF composed of six screen grabs from the commercial, which features two kitties and a chameleon performing Culture Club’s “Karma Chameleon.”

This wouldn’t be the first time that TV stations borrowed web-based memes for commercial purposes (see: Dancing Baby), but this might be the most blatant rip-off. The commercial is in the same limited-motion Flash style as the original Flash animations and uses the same kitten images. I hope you got a royalty, Joel.

Update: Um, nevermind. Joel confirmed via e-mail that he created the animations for VH-1.

Rumor of the Day: a little bird told me that Google is planning on integrating Blogger with the Google Appliance, and is courting media companies and portals to implement Blogger for their user communities.

I downloaded the VisualBoyAdvance Gameboy Advance emulator last night and was pleasantly surprised to see near-perfect emulation, even with brand new GBA games like Sonic Advance 2 and Tony Hawk 4. (You can find ROMs in alt.binaries.emulators.gameboy.advance or on the web, if you look hard enough.)

Likewise, I tested out the Nemu Nintendo 64 emulator with Mario 64 and Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Zelda was playable despite display bugs, and Mario looked nearly perfect. (Try alt.binaries.emulators.nintendo-64 for ROMs.) Update: Apparently, Project64 is the most popular and compatible N64 emulator to date, but I haven’t tested it yet. These compatibility lists are very useful.

The NSX2 Playstation 2 emulation project managed to get the loading screens from Mortal Kombat 5 and Blade 2 to display. As far as I know, it’s the first PS2 emulator to partially load a commercial game.

Finally, gCubix is an amazing Gamecube emulator that’s been ported to a number of platforms, including Windows, Mac, BeOS, AmigaOS, Apple II GS, Commodore 64, Atari ST, PDP-1, and Babbage’s analytical engine.