:: OK, this thing is already viral, so you’ve almost certainly seen it. But if you haven’t, witness one of the finer acts of marriage proposing in a long time.
It’s thirty-one years since I last saw Portland, OR, but wow, do I still miss it.
(My favorite thing about this? The punning of ‘dancing juice’ and ‘dancing Jews’.)
:: This photo (stolen from Tumblr) confirms, on several levels, that the Golden Age of Science Fiction is, in fact, 12.
:: Well, I have a new contender for Worst Thing I Have Ever Seen. There was a disturbing black-comedy book some years ago called 101 Uses For a Dead Cat, which was a set of cartoons depicting…exactly that. I have no idea if this (video not in English, but it doesn’t matter) was one of the 101 uses. Nor do I wish to know. I just…you know what, on this one, my descriptive powers are utterly defied. The gob, she is smacked!
More next week. Maybe. That last one has me rethinking this whole enterprise.
:: We all know that Aaron Sorkin’s scripts are basically the same script with the names and settings filed off and replaced with new ones, so it stands to reason that his commencement speeches should be like that, too. Aaron Sorkin is the James Horner of the written word.
:: Apparently Russian teenagers like to climb things, so they can take pictures of…themselves climbing things.
This is a new fad over there called ‘Skywalking’ (!), and it involves teenagers with cameras. And no safety gear. You’re probably thinking, “Well, this is obviously going to wind up with some kid plummeting to his death”, and I wouldn’t bet against you on that score. I’ll say this: it does end up producing some very nifty photos…
…and some white-knuckle inducing video.
I have very little fear of heights, myself, and I would cheerfully climb just about anything I needed to…but with a harness and ropes and chains rated for 1000 pounds.
That’s all for now…more next week! Stay weird, Internet!
:: Dungeons and Dragons was created almost 40 years ago by Gary Gygax and David Arneson. Both men have passed on, but Arneson’s personal collection of materials comprising his creative work on the game was recently found in, of all places, an abandoned storage locker. Now it’s all going to be auctioned. Wow! I’m glad that the new owner of the locker wasn’t a putz like that guy on Storage Wars who is always searching for ‘collectibles’, and just tosses stuff aside if he has no idea what it is.
:: How in God’s name have I gone this long without learning about Blue Milk Special? This is a webcomic that is retelling the Original Trilogy of Star Wars, as a parody. And it is awesome. I spent some time this morning reading it, getting up to the Millennium Falcon blasting its way out of Mos Eisley. I think that this one is my favorite thus far…but it’s got some competition.
:: Some recent stuff pertaining to that goofball fascination of mine, the pie in the face:
I saw this on Tumblr. I guess I’d agree on the first two, but I’m befuddled that a chicken pot pie has a ‘positive’ rating as a potential pie for someone’s face. I don’t think I’d like that at all. Especially if it’s still fairly fresh from the oven.
A reader e-mailed me this helpful bit of advice:
See? Pot pie is not recommended. (I wouldn’t recommend shaving cream either, because it tastes like, well, shaving cream. And meringue doesn’t stick, at all.) As for the delivery techniques, I have zero experience in this regard myself, but I recall from gym classes in school that throwing things isn’t my wheelhouse, as it were. Best stick with the push, I suppose.
Comics readers from the 1970s (on which I was a young one) may recall a DC Comics superheroine named The Mighty Isis, whose powers and mythology was derived from Ancient Egyptian mythology. (Hmmm…I wonder if her creation was inspired by things like the tour of King Tut’s treasures around the US….) She had a teevee show that was paired with the Shazam! show, along with her short-lived comic. In one of the issues of the comic, one of Isis’s fellow Egyptian gods, Set, shows up to try to force humans to worship him, and he works all manner of mischief, which Isis can’t stop because she’s not as powerful as he is. So she hatches a plan to show Set that he doesn’t really want to rule humans anyway, because they’re not sufficiently reverent of the gods. How does Isis demonstrate this? By letting some kid (from her schoolteacher alter-ego’s class) throw a pie in her face.
It’s a weird story (I posted the whole thing on my Tumblr), but kind of funny and even ‘wholesome’ in that “Hey, I can triumph over my foes without resorting to violence!’ way. And as comic-book pies in the face go, this one’s fairly nicely drawn. (Not that I have a huge sample size of such things to meditate upon…I remembered this one from when I was a kid, and I spotted the issue in an ‘Old Comics for Ten Cents Each’ box at a local comics store, and the cover jogged my memory.)
:: Finally, I note the passing last week of Adam Yauch, one of the founding members of the Beastie Boys. In truth, I wasn’t a fan, but that’s more because I just don’t grok rap in general. Not my cup of tea, although I do grant the artistry involved. The Beastie Boys’ popularity and influence can’t be ignored, but for me, their best thing was their famous video that included a pretty spiffy pie fight.
OK, that’s it. More Weirdness and Awesome next week!
:: In writing yesterday’s A-to-Z post, I did a bit of looking up on stuff for the Colossal Cave game, and I found this map of the game. Great stuff (spoilers, if you’re playing or have any intention of playing it).
:: I’ve been reading Carl Sagan of late, so in that spirit, here’s some wonderful astronomy. Lots more where that came from, if you’re not checking it out regularly!
:: Did I link this already? I may have…but if I did, here they are again. I am so building these at the next Casa Jaquandor, whenever such a place comes to pass!
:: Apparently there are characters in The Hunger Games (the book) who are specifically described as being dark-skinned…and some readers who don’t seem to be enamored of black people either didn’t realize this or didn’t notice it, so when those characters showed up onscreen as dark-skinned, well…hilarity ensued. In a pretty depressing way.
That’s all I got for this week. More next, with hope! Stay weird and awesome, Internet!
:: Here in Buffalo, the newest thing going are the food trucks: restaurants on wheels that set up camp on a street someplace downtown and sell food. The trucks are pretty popular, but being Buffalo, we have to endure a whole lot of annoying bickering first, with restaurants complaining that the trucks are too close and sucking off their customers and yada yada yada. So, while we bicker and complain and argue about the food trucks, we don’t even realize that the next step in food delivery is on the way. Behold…the TacoCopter!
That, sadly, is about all I got for this week…but hey, I spent a good amount of time writing, so that’s something! More next week!
:: I’ve seen this in a lot of places, but Jedediah gets the credit. A bunch of these videos have shown up in the last year or two, but this one’s got amazing sound, so turn up the speakers. It’s the ride you’d enjoy were you, say, a spider or something, clinging to the side of one of the space shuttle’s solid rocket boosters, from launch to splash-down. These are just amazing.
Wow!
:: Two links from one of my favorite comics blogs, Slay, Monstrobot of the Deep!. There were all kinds of weird ads in comics back in ‘the day’, and it always tickles me to see them reproduced, because I remember a lot of them, and I remember thinking when I was six or seven, “Hey, I want that!” I can say with a high degree of confidence that I never wanted the Nancy Nonsense doll, however.
:: The other link from Slay Monstrobot: I am increasingly of the belief that I need to read the original Howard the Duck comics one of these years. Sure, the infamous movie was dreck, but…this just seems like gonzo genius to me.
