Oddities and Awesome abound!
:: An artist starts sketches, and lets her four-year-old finish them.
:: Victorian mansion for sale. Keep scrolling.
More next week!
Sunday Burst of Weird and Awesome!
Oddities and Awesome abound!
:: A friend on Facebook shared this video today, and after a bit of looking around, I found on YouTube. If you like “big machines doing impressive jobs”, check this out. Who needs Paul Bunyan!
:: I have to admit a certain amount of amusement at the horror stories of the infrastructure in Sochi during the Olympics. Today’s entry? Push elevator button, wait for doors to open, and…no elevator!
Luckily this did not result in a real-life sports version of one of the worst moments in the history of teevee.
More next week!
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Sunday Burst of Weird and Awesome
Oddities and Awesome abound!
:: I’ve heard of fore-edge paintings on books, but to my knowledge I’ve never seen one and certainly never owned one. What am I talking about? Watch!
(via)
:: Ten terrifying highways. I would cheerfully drive any of these, except one. Guess which one! [shudder]
My personal most nerve-wracking, but also eye-popping, drive of all time is probably US 14 across northern Wyoming. I remember driving that road years ago with The Girlfriend (now The Wife), and at one point I looked up at this giant mountain to our left and noted the presence of cars on this harrowing-looking road way, way, wayyy up there. And then a minute later, I realized that was our road. That was an amazing drive, though.
:: It seems to me that whenever you see a headline that some kind of crazy shit happened someplace, more often than not, you can assume it happened in Russia. I’ll say this for the Soviets: they really seemed to keep a tight lid on the crazy over there. This week’s case in point: two guys get into an argument, over the merits of prose versus poetry. The discussion turned into an argument, fueled by vodka, and ended when the poet stabbed the prose-stylist to death.
Most insane is the linked article’s last graf:
The killing came four months after an argument over the theories of the 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant ended in a man being shot in a grocery store in southern Russia.
Ummm…wow. Note to self: Never discuss, well, anything with anybody in Russia!
More next week!
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Sunday Burst of Weird and Awesome
Oddities and Awesome abound!
:: Someone decided that the signage in the London Underground needed a bit of added weirdness.
:: If you like bad puns about fish, this Twitter exchange is for you.
:: Scared of heights? Don’t watch this.
More next week!
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Sunday Burst of Weird and Awesome!!!
Oddities and Awesome abound!
:: Here’s a terrific post about a key scene in one of my favorite movies, Say Anything.
When people think of Say Anything…, the first thing that pops into their head tends to be the boombox scene. That’s understandable—grand romantic gestures are one of the things the movies do exceptionally well, in part because a movie can just cut away and ignore the less stirring aspects. As a thought experiment, try imagining how Lloyd Dobler’s “In Your Eyes” serenade must have ended. The camera dramatically tracks in on him standing there with the boombox held over his head, then moves on to the next scene. We never see the moment when he concludes Diane isn’t going to rush out and fling her arms around him, decides he’s stood there long enough, turns off the music, gets in his car, and drives back home. Now imagine that same moment from Diane’s perspective. See what editing accomplishes? In a way, though, grand gestures are easy. It’s taking the first step that’s truly difficult, and that difficulty is one of the many things that Say Anything…, in all its adorable awkwardness, gets exactly right.
I still consider Say Anything the finest teen romance film ever made.
And by the way, that post is part of a series called Scenic Routes that examines specific movie scenes. I haven’t read too much into it, but on the basis of the Say Anything post, it looks like there might be some nifty commentary there!
Also by the way: in the scene discussed above, my favorite touch is Lloyd’s ordering of his young nephew into the corner to remain silent while he makes The Most Important Phone Call Of His Life.
:: This looks neat. I won’t be doing this at Casa Jaquandor any time soon, though. I shudder to think what our two fat and dumb lummoxes would do to structures like this. Those of us who live our lives in the presence of cats well know how often the stereotype of cats as “graceful and elegant creatures” turns out to be completely untrue.
:: Last week, FOX Sports — I’m assuming as part of their coverage of the Seattle Seahawks’ playoff game — showed a bit of footage that turns out to be one of those ideas that’s so obvious that I can’t believe nobody ever thought to do it until now. The idea? Well, you know how at public markets and places where they sell really fresh fish, as in “right off the boat”, the workers will through whole fish to one another in a kind-of blue-collar seafood ballet? Well, someone actually attached a camera to the fish itself, so here’s what it’s like to be tossed about by fishmongers!
I first saw this here.
Stay weird and awesome, Internet! More next week!
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Sunday Burst of Weird and Awesome
Oddities and Awesome abound!
:: I’ve probably shared this before, but it made the rounds of Facebook again, so here’s what might be the most jaw-dropping walk up a hill in the entire world.
:: Abandoned subway infrastructure in Cincinnati.
:: And, via Facebook, the best photo on the entire Internet.
More next week!
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Sunday Burst of Weird and Awesome
Oddities and Awesome abound! Only not so much this week, as I wasn’t online much. But here’s one of those things that’ll make you feel old, if you’re of a certain mindset.
When I was nine, there was a teevee show called The Greatest American Hero. In this show, aliens come down and give a schoolteacher a suit like a Superman or Captain Marvel get-up, which gives him superpowers. (Only when wearing the suit.) However, he loses the instructions, and thus our hero is unable to use the suit to its full potential. For instance, when he flies, he doesn’t do so in a Christopher Reeve-like graceful straight line or in elegant swoops as he woos Margot Kidder. No, he caroms about, flailing his arms and crashing into stuff. Fun show, if you were 9 in 1980. As I was.
Anyhow, the show had a theme song that’s pretty familiar to anyone from that time period:
Greatest American Hero went off the air in 1983, and that was that, although you’d still hear the song once in a while, and it later turned up in, among other places, as a parody in an episode of Seinfeld, wherein George Costanza used the song with his own lyrics as his answering machine’s outgoing message.
Now. As I said, Greatest American Hero last aired on February 3, 1983. This episode of Seinfeld aired Fabruary 13, 1997 — a little over fourteen years after Hero ended. And next month, it’ll be seventeen years since the Seinfeld episode aired! There’s something interesting about a pop-culture reference being almost two decades old, especially when the thing the reference was referring was more than a decade passed at the time it was made.
Anyway….
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Sunday Burst of Awesome (and spectacular FAIL)
Oddities and Awesome abound! As do, unfortunately, colossal screwups.
:: In the Awesome department, if you ever wondered what it’s like taping The Price is Right — more specifically, the mechanics of moving all that crap onstage around — this video sums it up nicely.
Somehow, as a kid, I always envisioned that soundstage as being absolutely immense. It always seemed to me like they were taping that show in the Astrodome or something.
Link via.
:: Here’s a wonderful defense of Love Actually, in response to the same loopy-headed article I frothed about last week.
And you know what? Mustering the courage to say “Hey, i have some feelings for you” is not some inconsequential thing. As anyone who’s ever been at the beginning of an affair knows, getting the nerve up to say “Want to take this further?” is a huge deal! It’s hard, it’s terrifying, and when it’s over, you either live to romance another day, or the relationship ends. That’s what Love Actually is about. Those terrifying moments before the proclamation. It isn’t about afterward, where reality lives. It’s about the beginning of the feeling of love.
I said on Twitter the other day that I have come to see the Keira Knightley storyline in that movie as a kind-of Rorschach test. People who hate the movie often seem to completely get that storyline wrong. Mark doesn’t go profess his love to her in hopes that she will leave her husband; he knows she won’t. He goes to get it all out, and admit his feelings as explanation and atonement for his having not been terribly nice to her until then. How people miss this is absolutely beyond me.
:: Finally, the FAIL of the week. I was thoroughly gobsmacked by this. You know those little decals that lots of people put on the back windows of their cars? The ones that depict their family’s composition, with stick-figure parents and kids and dogs and cats and stuff? Well, the fine folks at ThinkGeek came up with Star Trek versions of those. Which is kind of a nifty idea. They even include aliens. Only…well, here’s the set:
Take a close look at Lt. Uhura. Notice anything distinctive about the way they depict her in decal form? I congratulate Nichelle Nichols and Zoe Saldana on their mutual designation by ThinkGeek as Honorary White People!
I can only shake my head at shit like this. It’s maddening. It can’t be any kind of production issue, since they managed to get the skin tones of the aliens right. And they made the tribble brown. But the black human woman? The one who was played by a real life black woman? They whitewashed her, but good.
Unbelievable. Although actually, the sad thing is…it’s not that unbelievable, really.
More next week, maybe.
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Sunday Burst of Weird and Awesome
Oddities and Awesome abound!
:: Why oh why oh why would anyone think to make this a goal of theirs?!
I’m sorry, folks, I can get behind a lot of daredevil stuff, but that’s just batshit crazy.
:: Never liked that Rossini fellow.
More musician-on-musician insult goodness here.
(Oh, and Stravinsky’s insults of Rachmaninov? He can bite me, too!)
All for this week. Maybe more next week — but boy howdy this is a busy month already, and here’s me, with TWO active writing projects….
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Sunday Burst of Weird and Awesome
Oddities and Awesome abound!
:: Check out this period photo:
Guess what! It’s not a period photo — it’s staged, using models. Check it out!
:: I really wish Breaking Bad was my cup of tea, judging by the assurances I’ve seen of how well-written it is. Guy Gavriel Kay weighs in with this fascinating essay:
Breaking Bad has been, correctly, I think, widely cited as a writers’ show. It is held up by many as a television series that can serve as an example to novelists of an engaging, deeply layered story arc. But, for me, for this piece, one moment is what caught me.
In that last episode, Walter White has returned home, heading towards a violent closure, and has (somehow) slipped unseen into his wife’s new home. They have a last conversation. As Walter begins his final words of explanation, his wife interrupts to demand, “Don’t tell me again you did it all for us!” which has been his litany. But this time he replies, in essence, “No. I did it for me. I enjoyed it. I was good at it. I felt alive.”
Having just read the New Yorker piece, I had to grin. It was just too perfect. Who was the lord of emperors here? The gifted, award-winning actor playing the drug kingpin Heisenberg, or the writer who wrote the words the actor was caused to speak—and thereby settled that debate about motivation, forever.
If Breaking Bad, for all its skillful acting and often superb (and witty) visual perspectives, is truly a show about the writing, that exchange seals it. Gilligan [creator and head writer Vince Gilligan] defined his emperor, explicitly and out of Heisenberg’s own mouth.
:: I won’t embed the video here because…well, it’s really gross. But if you like a good gross-out once in a while, especially those created by Mother Nature, this is a really good gross-out. Here’s the scenario: a dead whale washes up on shore. The carcass has to be disposed of. But…it’s bloating on the inside, and that pressure has to be relieved before they can move the dead thing…only sometimes the relief of that pressure is more violent than you might want, especially if you’re the guy whose job it is to jab the dead beast in the belly with a pointy stick. Ewwwwwww!
More next week!
