Tag: Burst of Weirdness

A grab-bag this week:

:: OK, this really isn’t weird at all, but it’s interesting and I thought I’d plop the link here. Bill Altreuter has a link to the 25 best movies you’ve never seen. For me, it’s the 23 best movies I’ve never seen, since I’ve actually seen two of the ones on this list. The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension is in my opinion one of the touchstone flicks of geekdom, in that you can’t claim to be an SF geek if you haven’t seen it. I’ll even use one of its lines (“Whoa, don’t tug on that! You never know what it might be attached to.”) in everyday conversation in hopes that someone will recognize it, but so far, no dice. The other one that I’ve seen is the wonderful Time After Time, in which Jack the Ripper flees capture in 1890s London via a time machine that his friend, HG Wells (yes, that HG Wells) has built, and ends up in 1979 San Francisco. This film deserves classic status, in my opinion — it’s a smart, taut thriller.

:: Greg of Delenda Est Carthago links Strange Maps, which is a blog about exactly what it says: strange maps. I’d link a favorite, but they’re all just so cool; I plan to some serious archive-digging over there in the next few days. If there’s a surer way to make me think you’re a complete weirdo than saying “I don’t like maps”, I haven’t found it. (I could go off on a rant here about fantasy novels these days not including maps of their made-up worlds, but I won’t. Nor will I rant about fantasy novels that include maps that don’t have the locations of the novel indicated within them. Grrrr.)

(Obviously this blog is quite graphics-heavy.)

:: Tom the Dog chronicles the thespianic exploits of Neil Flynn, the Janitor from Scrubs, wherein it turns out that he’s played a lot of cops. Curiously, he omits Flynn’s appearance on That 70s Show as the disco bouncer who lets all of Eric’s friends in, but keeps Eric outside because Eric’s…Eric.

:: Via Warren Ellis: Apparently the Pentagon has confirmed that it spent $7.5 million trying to develop a chemical bomb that, when dropped on enemy soldiers, would make those soldiers…gay. And they did this in the 1990s. Seven point five million dollars. I just can’t say anything more than that. How stupid are we, anyway?

:: Finally, in honor of the impending telecast of Bob Barker’s departure from The Price is Right, here are the three of the luckiest people who have ever been on that show. First, check out this finish from a very old show (in the 1970s, probably), remembering that in the Showcase at the end, if you’re the winning bidder and you’re closer than $100 to the actual price without going over, you win both Showcases:

Then there’s this guy, who decided to spice up the Showcase Showdown thing — that’s where you spin the big wheel — with a marriage proposal. (No, not to Bob Barker.) They’ll be telling this tale ’round the Thanksgiving dinner table for many years to come:

And finally, a longer segment that highlights the fact that sometimes pure guessing can actually triumph over complete cluelessness:

Wouldn’t it suck if Barker’s last show were to end in a double overbid?

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My friend and former college room-mate Chris e-mailed me a tip about a minor league baseball manager who had himself a tantrum for the ages. Sure enough, he did. I don’t know what the best part of this is — the part where the Mississippi Braves manager very carefully and with keen attention to detail buries home plate in the dirt, or when he drops to all fours and stalks up behind the pitchers’ mound, or when the home plate umpire nonchalantly pops another stick of gum into his mouth while watching, or when the opposing team’s second baseman is briefly shown grinning ear-to-ear at how surreal the whole thing is. All I know is, this was the greatest baseball manager tantrum I’ve ever seen. It’s even better than George Brett’s pine-tar incident.

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A couple this week:

:: Screw that: I want a LiteBrite ceiling.

(via Jennifer)

:: This isn’t weird in the classic “Burst of Weirdness” sense, but here’s an impressive short-film in the horror genre. It’s very well done, I thought.

(via LGM)

:: Also not weird in the classic “Burst of Weirdness” sense, Kevin Drum links a couple new examples of professional media critics getting angry about the existence of blogs. To see this kind of thing from movie and book critics strikes me as especially funny; the tone is always along the lines of “How dare you draw your own conclusions about what we review, and how dare you deviate from the wisdom we wish you to receive!” Of course, anyone who delves even a tiny bit into the critical work of yesteryear will almost immediately realize that the critics are flat-out wrong an impressive amount of the time.

I’ve cited this book before, but The Lexicon of Musical Invective is an invaluable reminder that critics are only human.

UPDATE: Mrs M-Mv has a similar reaction to this last one.

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I won’t even try to describe it. I think it’s safe for work, but it’s fairly demented.

Here it is.

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Wow, what nice weather we’ve had the last couple of days. That plus The Wife being out of town for a couple of days, leaving me alone with The Daughter, made blogging less of a priority for a bit. In Buffalo, our springs are generally dismal, so we have to take our nice weather as we get it for these few months, and this year the spring has been even more dismal than usual. So this weekend I finally gave the grill its maiden voyage with a couple of steaks. Mmmmm, steak.

So where’s the weirdness? Well, I didn’t really notice a whole lot of outright weirdness this week, because I didn’t spend as much time trolling the Interweb for links. But I did find a few things of varying degrees of weirdness.

:: As a submission for a film class, a film student remade one of the most harrowing scenes from 24, the death of Ryan Chappelle. It’s easy to critique the acting — that’s the filmmaker playing Chappelle — but he indicates that his original Chappelle backed out, leaving him to do it. What’s interesting is how closely he got the background stuff, even going so far as to shoot his scene at the same location as the original.

And here’s the original, for the sake of comparison.

:: This is an older article, but I’m only just seeing it now (via). It’s twenty-five great installments from Calvin and Hobbes. Sadly, my own personal favorite storyline from that strip — when Calvin was paired with Susie for a school project — didn’t make their cut, but hey, Calvin was rarely less than brilliant.

:: Rich Little was the main entertainment at the Correspondents Dinner in Washington this year. Rich Little. The main entertainment. Apparently Soupy Sales was booked?

:: Sometimes I’m willing to wax poetic about how much better stuff was when I was a kid, but not on the subject of playgrounds. Hard steel jungle gyms and slides on hard rubber (or even bare concrete), whose component parts would reach tremendously hellish temperatures in the baking hot sun of summer, such that the sound of kids coming down the slide was more often the screech of agony when inadvertently bare skin contacted metal than the squeal of thrilled delight at attaining speeds of maybe a mile an hour coming down those speed-challenged slides. Yeah, playgrounds back then were pretty bogus affairs.

Not so much anymore. These kids today will never realize how good they got it!

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Probably the weirdest thing ever:

After the Sabbath, at dawn on the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to look at the tomb.

There was a violent earthquake, for an angel of the Lord came down from heaven and, going to the tomb, rolled back the stone and sat on it. His appearance was like lightning, and his clothes were white as snow. The guards were so afraid of him that they shook and became like dead men.

The angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid, for I know that you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified. He is not here; he has risen, just as he said. Come and see the place where he lay. Then go quickly and tell his disciples: ‘He has risen from the dead and is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him.’ Now I have told you.”

So the women hurried away from the tomb, afraid yet filled with joy, and ran to tell his disciples. Suddenly Jesus met them. “Greetings,” he said. They came to him, clasped his feet and worshiped him. Then Jesus said to them, “Do not be afraid. Go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me.”

Whether one believes or not, that whole thing certainly fits the definition of “weirdness”. Either one believes, in which case the Son of God came back from the dead; or one does not, in which case a man claiming to be the Son of God did not come back from the dead but still inspired billions of people over two thousand years to believe that he did.

What do I believe? I just don’t know yet. I may not figure it out in this lifetime.

Anyway, Happy Easter, everyone.

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A couple items:

:: Here in Buffalo, we’re always cautioning ourselves against trying to use “silver bullet” projects to revive our community fortunes. This means that we can’t expect a single giant project to jump-start our economy. But of course, this is total nonsense; all we need is the right single giant project, and then the entire world will be coming to see what we just did.

All this is by way of saying that Buffalo could have been the place to build a thirteen-mile long dragon, but no, they’re doing in in China. Stupid China.

(via)

:: A nifty take on the “Powers of Ten” theme.

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