Tag: Burst of Weirdness

Oddities and Awesome abound!

:: In these times of highly charged rhetoric and deep emotional commitments to our various opinions, it’s not at all uncommon to hear of violent actions in our neighborhood watering holes, where opinionation meets with alcohol to form a heady mix.

Case in point: police had to be called to a Chicago bar after a patron took deep exception to a photograph that was hanging on the wall. The photograph was of a deeply, deeply divisive figure in American life. Such a sad, sad story.

Oh, and the person in the photo?

A.C. Slater. You know, the fictional character from Saved By the Bell played by Mario Lopez. This guy:

Actually, come to think of it, I hate that guy. F*** Slater!

:: Maybe it’s because I never took the Keyboarding/Typing class in high school — I’ve been “typing”, in my own way, for so long that actually learning the correct way to do it would not speed my typing up one bit, and this was the case even when I got to high school, so I figured the class would be a giant waste of time. But anyway, I think that might be why I’ve never heard, until now, about putting two spaces after every period. Not that I’m about to start doing that, because this guy says you shouldn’t.

:: Hot chicks in Star Wars shirts. That is all.

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Oddities and Awesome abound!

:: I really should start making notes as to where I see some of these things. I can’t remember who linked this, amongst all the blogs I follow that tend to aggregate really odd and goofy stuff, but here is Unicorn Being a Jerk.

:: Boston.com’s Big Picture is one of the finest photoblogs out there. Check out their amazing collection of New Year’s celebration photos from around the world.

:: Wow. Now that is a bandsaw.

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Oddities and Awesome abound!

:: I’m usually willing to suspend disbelief with various movies and teevee shows, but one area where they really test my ability to do so is when our heroes are investigating an image or snippet of video that doesn’t show them what they need to see…so they use the Magical Power of Computers to enhance the image!

The worst examples of this I’ve ever seen come from CSI: Miami. In one case, they found a photo of the victims taken moments before their deaths, and discerned that the killer must have been taking the photo. So they blew up one victim’s eyeball and enhanced the reflection of the killer. And in another episode, they discerned again that the killer was the one behind the camera, and they further realized that the blotched-out area in the upper corner was the killer’s finger partially covering the lens, so they were able to enhance and sharpen the image to get the killer’s fingerprint. And Horatio Caine did all this whilst putting on his sunglasses.

(via)

:: I alluded to this in the post immediately preceding this one, but I’ve just gotta share it: Willie Nelson singing “Frosty the Snowman”.

Hooray, Willie!

:: Squarely in the “awesome” category is this post by Sheila O’Malley, in which, referring to the “old” New York City — before it got all cleaned up and saw porn theaters replaced by Disney stores — she says, “I have to say, I miss the smut.” I’ve only been to NYC a couple of times in my life, and when I do go, it’ll be as a tourist rather than as a dweller, so I’ll probably appreciate the cleaner stuff more. But…well, I can’t find the things she displays in her photos totally repellent, either.

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Well, you wouldn’t think that I would have seen so much Weird and/or Awesome what with being offline for most of the last ten days (aside from swiping time here and there at work to check my e-mail and throw up quick blog posts and Facebook status messages), but Boy Howdy, has that turned out to not be the case. I’ve seen plenty! Hooray for the Interweb! Oddities and Awesome, as always, abound!

:: The folks behind Archie comics are experimenting with “Real World Archie“, or something like that.

But as the Archie brand expands, a new monthly magazine series sold in major bookstore chains and Wal-Mart, Life With Archie: The Married Life, has been quietly ripping apart the fabric of life in Riverdale. The recession looms large and disease and infidelity intrude on longtime friendships and young marriages. Life With Archie is a spin-off published by Archie Comics, so it’s not a rogue parody. But within just a few months, Riverdale has turned from a 20th-century middle-American paradise into a 21st-century middle-class hell. Is all this grit really necessary in a universe that has blissfully hummed along for decades without it?

Ooooh! How about a CSI: Riverdale? Maybe one murder can revolve around the wounds matching the spikes from that hat that Jughead always wears. I, for one, hope this trend continues! Let’s see versions of Richie Rich wherein our hero and his impossibly wealthy family are done in by the Great Recession, or by an insider-trading scandal, or stuff like that! Let’s see the real class struggle between Richie and girlfriend Gloria! Let’s not ask how it is that I was able to call up the name of Richie Rich’s girlfriend without having to Google it!

:: I imagine most of you will have seen this already, but it’s too amazing not to share. Since the Minnesota Vikings were to have a home game today, the FOX Sports people had their cameras all set up a few days in advance for the game-day broadcast. So they had the cameras running when, after a major snowstorm pummeled the Upper Midwest, the weight of the snowpack on the Metrodome’s roof finally became too much for the air-supported structure to bear.

That is some amazing stuff!

(And this is the fifth time the roof has collapsed!)

:: A science writer blogs about the Apollo 11 moon mission for NPR, and gets a response…from Neil Armstrong. That is some serious Awesome, I have to tell you. It would be like if George Lucas were to e-mail me in response to, well, anything I write about Star Wars!

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Oddities and Awesome abound!

:: The Galaxy Garden is a garden whose plants are cultivated, grown, and placed in such a way as to represent the Milky Way Galaxy. This is amazing! It reminds me, in a way, of the Carl Sagan “Solar System Walk” in Ithaca, which I see part of every year when The Wife and I go there for the Apple Festival, but whose comprising monuments I can never get pictures of because they’re always crowded with people.

:: The other day I posted a video of a Star Trek: The Next Generation clip, in which Captain Picard joins a woman he’s met in playing the flute he acquired in an earlier episode, one of the more memorable episodes called “The Inner Light”. Here, then, is another video, wherein a guy plays that same melody on the Theremin.

Wondering what a Theremin is? Here’s the basic background. It’s an early electronic musical instrument, invented in the 1920s by a guy named Theremin. (Hence the name!) I’m not sure how it works, but the pitch and such are literally controlled by the position of the performer’s hands in the air around it, so it’s the only musical instrument I know of — save the voice — that can be played without touching anything. It was used a lot in movie filmscores of the mid-20th century, especially in science fiction flicks.

:: Map of Metal — as in, I think, heavy metal, that wonderfully glam music whose heyday was in the late 70s and early to mid 80s. I wasn’t a huge metal-head, relatively speaking, but I enjoyed quite a lot of it at the time. (Never went to a concert, though. In fact, to this day, the closest I’ve come to attending a rock concert is the Beatles tribute band that played with the Buffalo Philharmonic last year.) I’m actually linking this site on an “unvetted” basis, as it appears to be quite heavily graphical in nature, and with my recent connectivity issues, I haven’t been able to load the entire site to see what it’s like. Someone let me know if it’s cool, OK?

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Oddities and Awesome abound!

:: Ken Levine posted this, and it’s absolutely hilarious, one of the funniest bits of product placement in a teevee show ever. (I think it’s unintentionally funny, though.)

My favorite bit of product placement ever comes in Superman: the Movie. After Pa Kent has died and young Clark has found the green crystal, Ma Kent is up at dawn getting breakfast ready in the kitchen, and we see her hand plunk a box of Cheerios down on the table, just so its label catches the sunlight. Hilarious…especially in the end credits, when there is actually a screen credit reading “Cheerios by General Mills”.

In general, I tend to actually prefer it when people on teevee or movies use real products. I always found it more distracting to see cola cans that were obviously Pepsi cans, but with “Pepsi” replaced by the word “Cola”. I find that almost as distracting as any time someone recites a phone number. Hearing “555-xxxx” is glaring on the ears, but after years of hearing “555” prefixes, whenever a more daring movie uses a real-sounding prefix, that stands out too. I now think that movies and teevee shows should never have characters saying phone numbers out loud. At all.

:: My friend Aaron sent me this photo of a business whose building is obviously an old Pizza Hut. I should go around and take photos here of former PH’s that are now something else. There are a lot of former PH’s in Buffalo.

:: I’d love to try a bite of this. But no more than a bite. Wow, my heart stutters when I just look at the pictures.

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Oddities and Awesome abound!

Only one item this week. No, I do not want to eat this sandwich. But you’d better believe I want a bite!

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Oddities and Awesome abound! These are all Halloween related or in honor of Halloween.

:: The kinda-classic early 80s animated movie Heavy Metal strings together an anthology of stories, all loosely connected by the common thread of a glowing green ball that does lots of bad things to people. This is the film’s most effective sequence, from the horror standpoint.

:: SamuraiFrog takes pumpkin carving seriously. Check ’em out.

:: Also check out Sheila O’Malley’s montage of her costumes throughout the years. My reactions went kind of like this: “OK. Nice. Cool. Nifty. Nice. Ha, that’s funny. Nice. OK…wait, what?!”

:: And of course:

More next week, folks!

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