As I’ve pointed out before, The Onion is ultimately always right, so I am scared about how to think about the new Star Trek movie. I want it to be good …. but not good in a commercial, soda-poppy, generic-action-flick sort of way. I want it to be great, intellectual and slightly … just SLIGHTLY innaccessible to the majoriy. If that makes me a bad person, I hope it’s in a Harcourt Fenton Mudd sort of way.
If there are two things I love, it’s Iron Chef (the original from Japan) and Les Miserables.
Well, that’s overstating it a bit, I love them both, but that makes it sound like they are the only things I love. Suffice it to say, I really love them both.
So that’s why I was especially surprised when I found out they were related!
This video, which I have seen several times, originally aired on PBS, and is a production of the music in Les Miserables on its 10 year anniversary. This particular song is “Do You Hear the People Sing?” one of the greatest songs from the musical, and this version is sung by 17 different Jean Valjeans, the performers who made it most famous from different countries.
And then look there — 41 seconds in! The Jean Valjean from Japan — It’s Chairman Kaga from Iron Chef!
Sure, he’s not yelling “Allez cuiscene!” and he’s wearing a much less ostentatious outfit than he normally does, but it’s him!
Let me be up-front about this - the world gets better for the sports fanatic every day, so I’m not really complaining, just amused.
When I was a kid, already a die hard Jays (and Expos) fan, I would get up in the morning, steal the sports section from the paper, and hurriedly skip to the baseball section to see the standings and how my teams did. If they weren’t playing on the west coast, I might see a story about the game (though often as not, given that our paper was the London Free Press the only stories might be about the Detroit Tigers - ew), or maybe all I would see would be a box score. I still love box scores, though all they really showed was the basics of the game (and were poorly formatted for a lot of the stats as well). If the game was on the west coast, all I would see was “Late game” as the report. I would have to wait another day to see the box scores, which would be reported as “Yesterday’s games”.
These days, it’s annoying to have to wait 3 minutes for an update on a game as it’s in progress, oh how times have changed. Sites like Yahoo have portals for each team that show all the information imaginable for them, from stats to blogs to articles and more.
These portals are effectively auto-generated (if they weren’t, the labour required to maintain them would be cost-prohibitive for sure), but although I love them, sometimes the auto-generated nature of them leads to some funny side effects, like the picture shown to the right. Really, they need to add a rule like, “If the leader of a category has the same score as everyone else on the team, how about you show another category instead?”
In the mean time, let’s all keep an eye on Jose Bautista and see if his stolen base leadership stands up!
This is what it’s like when I try to play Rockband at my house. Lance just wants love, and it’s hard to be mad at him for that, but he’s constantly jumping in my lap or nuzzling my bass pedal foot while I’m trying to play. I’m sure I’ll have video at some point.
In the mean time, enjoy this video of a guy playing and petting his cat at the same time. I’ll be honest, the cat looks pretty happy!
It’s rare that someone takes two seemingly unrelated things that you love and combines them so brilliantly.
For people who know and love Star Wars (and if you don’t, honestly, you wouldn’t be here) and Snatch the Guy Ritchie film, you’ll love this - Snatch Wars.
It’s nowhere near as dirty as it sounds, trust me, but the language is NSFW.
At first I was surprised at the choice of Brick Top as the main character for this parody, after all, he wasn’t the main character of Snatch - Jason Statham’s Turkish is - but the more I think about it, the more I realize that it’s a lot like Star Wars. Darth Vader isn’t the main character, but he’s the evil star of the show with all the best lines.
I don’t go around claiming this casually, but I have often mentioned in the past that my cat Ninja eats pineapple. I don’t want to go so far as to say that people don’t believe me, but I would say the general reaction is politeness and nodding of heads. That and a smile that says “I don’t really believe you, but I’m not going to argue with you about your cat.”
So for those people, I offer the video above. You can even to go YouTube and watch it in HD if you like. Then tell your friends. Then go eat some pineapple.
It’s not just that she eats pineapple - it’s how she eats it. Who needs a fork or fingers or thumbs to be civilized?
I was watching The Departed on Showcase - or really I should say I was TRYING to watch The Departed on Showcase, when I realized I couldn’t take it anymore. In the bottom left corner of the screen, as shown in the video, was an ad for Rescue Me. This ad was always there, and it periodically exploded in a flash of flame.
The on-screen chaff was already taking up about 5-10% of the screen between the Rescue Me graphic and the Showcase imprint, but then when you throw in the explosions, it was not only blocking a huge portion of the screen, it was INCREDIBLY distracting.
The Departed is a great movie, but I couldn’t stick with it, the ad was just too much.
Rescue Me is a great show, and its star Dennis Leary had more screen time in The Departed than Nicolson and DiCaprio combined (at least on Showcase), but I can’t watch it anymore either, which is a shame, because Andrea Roth deserves all the world watching her.
While reading a trail of posts related to Shatner Day, 2009, I came across this YouTube clip entitlted “Worst Fight Scene Ever” and I became distracted. Why? Because it really really was the worst fight scene ever.
I mean, look at it, one guy is in a horrible rubber suit and moving slower in a terrible slow motion. The other guy, despite having physical tasks that would really be pushing it to call strenuous is actually a body double / stuntman (who looks nothing like Shatner).
What really gets me though is that when I was a kid and watched this episode, I was tense every time! In fact, if I had to make a list of the BEST fight scenes ever from memory, I would have put this one on it — why was my memory so faulty? I think maybe it’s because as a kid, this fight represents how we see the world, someone stronger than you but who you can outrun, out think and out dodge, but who you’d better not let hit you with a boulder.
