Link Dump

I’ve had some ideas for longer posts lately, but the problem with that is that they’re longer posts and thus take a while to write. I haven’t really started any of them either, so there’s that too. In the meantime, here’s some links to stuff. Enjoy:

• Roger Ebert’s Letter to a Young Film Critic – Whether you’re a big fan of Roger Ebert or not, you have to admit that he had a huge impact on the appreciation of film in this country. He passed away this past week, so lots of things like this have been popping up. In this case, he went out of his way to give some encouragement to a 14 year old kid who was handing out movie review newsletters at his school (in 1987). Just more evidence of a decent, hard-working, generous guy.
• Siskel & Ebert Outtakes – Perhaps a bit less polished, but this video of outtakes captures that lightning in the bottle chemistry of Siskel and Ebert. For reference, you can also head over to siskelandebert.org to check out archives of old shows. Big timesink, but the shows are a lot of fun!
• That Time Tom Hardy Took a Photo With a Boy Dressed As Bane and We All Died – Tom Hardy is a good sport.
• US ‘hair archaeologist’ recreates coiffures of antiquity – The headline pretty much says it all, but for good measure:
  

  By day, Janet Stephens cuts and colors at a hair salon. By night, she is an amateur archaeologist, meticulously recreating hairstyles dating back to the times of Roman antiquity.

  The Indy Jones of hair? [via MidniteTease]

• Japanese Schoolgirls Perform Superhuman Energy Attacks – A gem from the i’mnotscaredenoughofthejapanese tag I have on Delicious, this is sorta like Planking, but instead of being stupid, it’s girls taking pictures of themselves as if they are actually performing superhuman energy attacks, a la Dragonball Z. Brilliant.

There you have it.

Another lazy Wednesday full of links over here at Kaedrin HQ:

• Coyote Not-So-Ugly – The Blogess has a thing for taxidermy. In this case she’s talking about a bobcat she named Whiskers O’Shaunnesy:
  

  me: I haven’t figured out his back-story, but I suspect he speaks with an English accent and says “biscuits” instead of “cookies”.

  Victor: Huh.

  me: But he’s a passionate lover once the hat come off. Which it does. Mainly because I don’t love it and I’m still looking for a better hat. This is his third hat. Whiskers O’Shaunnesy does not have a face for hats.

  Victor: I’m going to bed.

  me: Someone called earlier but I couldn’t pick up the phone because I was working on Mr. O’Shaunnesy and so I just hit “speaker” with my elbow and yelled “I CAN’T PICK UP THE PHONE BECAUSE I’M SUPERGLUING A MUSTACHE ON MY BOBCAT.”

  Victor: Who was it?

  me: I dunno. They hung up on me.

  Heh.

• Luke’s Change: an Inside Job – Pitch perfect parody of Loose Change, applied to Star Wars. Heh.
• Adventures in Whiskey: The Case of the Strange Fitzgerald – Probably more suited to my beer blog audience, but this is a heroic tale of beverage forensics, like CSI, but for vintage bottles of Old Fitzgerald whiskey. Interesting stuff.
• Call Me Maybe mashed up with NIN’s Head Like a Hole – Presented without comment.
• Battle of the Somm – Also probably better suited to the beer blog, but of general interest anyway, this one is an NY Times article that explains the jargon of the sommelier, for example:
  

  WHALE – PLAYER – BALLER – DEEP OCEAN

  A serious drinker who will regularly DROP more than $1,000 on a single bottle. When on a furious spending spree, a WHALE is said to be DROPPING THE HAMMER. BIG WALES – or EXTRA BIG BALLERS (E.B.B.) – can spend more than $100,000 on wine during a meal.

  Again, would be utterly fascinating to beer nerds, as words have slightly different meanings in the beer world. For instance, Wales in the beer world are short for “White Whales”, those beers that you have to quest hard for, stuff like Midnight Sun M or really old (i.e. 1990s or older) Cantillons. Also of note, the author of the NY Times piece explains more on his blog…

And that’s all for now.

Despite the malaise surrounding the closing of Reader, I’ve managed to find a few interesting things whilst perusing alternatives (incidentally, Feedly is fantastic… but why is the Firefox version different from Chrome? I mean, I get why iOS is different, but FF and Chrome should be closer than they actually are. That’s the one frustration of Feedly – you need to install an extension in order for it to work. I know I’m the only Opera user on the planet, but I don’t get why there can’t be a pure web version of this thing…) Anywho, here some interesting stuff:

• I Explain March Madness – Rob Delany describes March Madness, as he sees it. I loath the sport of Basketball with every fiber of my being, but if March Madness worked this way, I’d totally be into it. A sampling of the exhaustive breakdown for each day’s competition:
  

  MARCH 18: For this game, the standard basketball is replaced with a vaseline basketball. It’s not really a ball, I guess; it’s more of a basketball-sized glop of Vaseline.

  MARCH 22: “Theme Game:” Lord of the Rings vs. Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.

  MARCH 25: For this special game, Larry Bird will sit in a lifeguard chair by one end of the court and Magic Johnson will sit in a lifeguard chair at the opposite end. They’ll take extensive notes throughout the game and then explain to each player and his mother in exhaustive, personalized detail why they will never be as good as them.

  Brilliant.

• Grr. Argh. Martin. – Glorious nerding out here, trying to predict when George RR Martin will complete his Song of Ice and Fire books (precipitated by the notion that HBO’s adaptation, Game of Thrones, will catch up and overtake Martin’s book series before he can complete it). The one question I have is how or if the television series impacts Martin’s process at all. Not in terms of what will happen in the story, per say, but knowing that more is riding on this than just his book may motivate him to work a little harder. No idea how to model that, and I’m not entirely sure what that would mean in terms of quality… but Scepticmiscellanea’s predictions (for the entire series, assumed to be 3 more books) range from the optimistic 2019 to the more sanguine 2032. Incidentally, Martin is 64 years old right now. That might be another precipitating factor. Else we may find ourselves in another Wheel of Time situation (Mark says, as if he’s read any of the books in either series).
• Game of Thrones Season 3 – “Princess Bride Promo” – Speaking of which… The whole mashup trailer thing is overdone, but this is brilliant.
• Spider Bite – I see what they did there. (Note: this is not one of those gross pictures of a spider bite people post all the time, I swears. Really. Totally, completely serious here. Not trying to throw you off the scent. I can’t think of a way to do this that doesn’t make it seem like you’re going to see a gross picture of some unlucky schlub with an infected spider bite, but it really isn’t. It’s a cute little cartoon. For reals.)

And that’s all for now. Stay tuned for some SLIFR Movie Quiz action on Sunday!

Yet more things I’ve found interesting on the internet recently:

• The Lock Pickers by Tom Vanderbilt – Fascinating article about locks and lock picking:
  

  Hobbs produced a few small tools from his pocket-“a description of which, for obvious reasons, we fear to give” a correspondent for the Times wrote—and turned his attention to the vault’s lock. His heavy brows knitted, Hobbs’ hands flitted about the lock with a faint metallic scratching. Twenty-five minutes later, it opened with a sharp click. Amid the excited murmur, the witnesses asked Hobbs to repeat the task. Having relocked the vault, he once again set upon it with deft economy. The vault opened “in the short space of seven minutes,” as the witnesses would testify, “without the slightest injury to the lock or the door.”

  Interesting stuff…

• It was on Wikipedia so it must be true. – Hilarious discussion of McDonalds’ mascots.
  

  me: I can’t understand you when you’re mumbling like the Hamburglar.

  Victor: The Hamburglar didn’t mumble. He said “Robble-Robble.”

  me: Yeah. And that’s incoherent mumbling.

  Victor: No. It’s him saying what he’s doing. He’s robbing you. Of hamburgers.

  me: Oh my God.

  Victor: You just now got that, didn’t you?

  me: I thought he was just saying nonsense words. Why would he use “robble” as a verb? Why wouldn’t he say “burgle, burgle”? That way it makes sense and also the word “burger” is almost in it. That’s just basic marketing.

  Victor: Maybe because he’s not a burglar. A burglar robs you when you’re not home. A robber is more like a mugger. More violent.

  me: Huh. The Hamburglar was made of burgers, wasn’t he? Doesn’t that make him a cannibal?

  Victor: No. You’ve confused the Hamburglar with Mayor McCheese, haven’t you? Classic error. The Hamburglar was the only human in the group.

  me: And Ronald McDonald.

  Victor: No. Clowns aren’t human.

  Hahah. And after you read that, check out this retrospective on McDonalds playlands…

• EA Gaffe – So EA recently launched the most recent version of SimCity with a DRM requirement that you be online at all times… and because of high volume at launch, were not able to support all the people (i.e. legal, paying customers) wanting to play their game. As per usual, consumers are out in full force, poorly rating the game on amazon and generally complaining about not being able to play the game they bought. This screenshot captures a pathetic attempt to counter all the negative comments. Sometimes I wonder why I don’t play video games as much as I used to. Then I see stories like this and I realize that companies like IE don’t really want me as a customer, and I go read a book instead (note: not a justification for piracy or anything, I just want to, you know, make sure that I can play the games that I buy – apparently that’s not possible with SimCity, a series I love, so I won’t buy or play the game. Sad state of affairs.)
• The Professor, the Bikini Model and the Suitcase Full of Trouble – Wacky story:
  

  How Frampton, who holds an endowed chair at the University of North Carolina and has been an adviser to the Department of Energy, ended up in Devoto appears at first to be a classic tale: a brilliant man of science gets into trouble as soon as he tries to navigate the real world. Since his arrest, he has certainly cultivated this notion, burnishing his wacky-scientist profile with lines like “That’s my naivete” and “My mind works in a strange way.”

  Heh.

And crap, I just found out Google Reader is shutting down in a few months. Gotta figure out how to transition off of all Google services from now on. What a clusterfuck.

Time is short, so just a few links to tide you over until Sunday:

• Visual timeline of the One Ring – A thoughtfully composed diagram of the One Ring from LotR, illustrating how the ring passed from owner to owner as well as the location of the ring, over the course of almost 5000 years. Well played.
• Yelping with Cormac – An old one, but any tumblr dedicated to parodying Cormac McCarthy by portraying his reviews on Yelp is worth a look. Sample awesome:
  

  The hacendado whistled through his teeth and shook his head. You Americans, he said. Always the judge. This hotel is very good. That country is very bad. But when it is time for you to be reviewed you are begging please no. Please I can pay money. I will review you now. The hacendado snapped his fingers and a vaquero entered carrying a branding iron in the shape of a star, the whitehot tip sputtering and sparking like some wroughtiron incubus.

  Heh.

• Cudgel of Xanthor – Many moons ago, back in the days of GFW Radio, Jeff Green wrote a spoof video game preview on April fools. Apparently he cut too close to the bone, in that nearly no readers realized it was a joke and continually emailed 1Up, asking when Cudgel of Xanthor would actually hit shelves. A couple years ago, Green built upon the idea for his NaNoWriMo novel, writing a story set in Xanthor, but also set in a video game studio that was tasked with making Cudgel of Xanthor. As the game developers have to compromise and change the game to meet their budget and corporate goals, the setting of Xanthor changes, and the characters living in that setting have to fend for themselves. Green claims he’ll release the book at some point, and heck, I’d read that.
• A Letter To “The Breakfast Club” Explaining Why They All Failed Their Assignment – By Principal Richard Vernon, Shermer High School…
  

  At one point during the essay, the handwriting changes four different times. Brian wrote, “We found out that each of us is a brain,” and then someone else wrote “an athlete,” another wrote “a princess,” another “a basket case…” Why did you guys do this? It’s weird.

  You’re not all of these things. Brian, you have no athletic ability. “Bender” certainly isn’t a brain. “Bender” isn’t an athlete either, because he backed down after I threatened him physically in the supply closet. Your essay doesn’t make sense.

  Heh.

That’s all for now…

It’s been a busy couple weeks here, so here’s some interesting stuff I’ve seen on teh internets recently:

• The Honor System – An excellent look at the Teller half of Penn & Teller, as well as the theft of magic tricks (or illusions or whatever you want to call them). There’s some neat intellectual property twists going on here, notably the fact that it’s difficult to protect this sort of thing because suing might “require the magician to reveal too much about his trick in public, making the very act of protecting magic one of the easiest ways to destroy it.” But the article gets way deep into the weeds of the magic con too, witness this bit:
  

  Among his many works, Steinmeyer wrote Hiding the Elephant, his best-selling history of magic. In it, he writes that the best tricks are a “collection of tiny lies, in words and deeds, that are stacked and arranged ingeniously.” Like jokes, tricks should have little plots with a twist at the end that’s both implausible and yet logical. You shouldn’t see the punchline coming, but when you do see it, it makes sense. The secret to a great trick isn’t really its method; the method behind most tricks is ugly and disappointing, something blunt and mechanical. (When Penn & Teller have famously exposed a trick, they’ve almost always invented a ridiculously poetic method and built the trick around it; by making their art seem more intricate than it is, they force the audience to assume that the rest of their tricks are equally complex. Penn & Teller’s exposures are really part of an elaborate con.)

  Good stuff.

• Here Is What Happens When You Cast Lindsay Lohan in Your Movie – This article chronicles infamous writer/director Paul Schrader’s decision to cast Lohan in his new Kickstarter funded, microbudget film collaboration with Bret Easton Ellis.
  

  Schrader thinks she’s perfect for the role. Not everyone agrees. Schrader wrote “Raging Bull” and “Taxi Driver” and has directed 17 films. Still, some fear Lohan will end him. There have been house arrests, car crashes and ingested white powders. His own daughter begs him not to use her. A casting-director friend stops their conversation whenever he mentions her name. And then there’s the film’s explicit subject matter. Full nudity and lots of sex. Definitely NC-17. His wife, the actress Mary Beth Hurt, didn’t even finish the script, dismissing it as pornography after 50 pages. She couldn’t understand why he wanted it so badly.

  As someone on twitter noted, this article about the film is likely to be more entertaining than the film itself.

• Ryan Gosling Interview – I have to imagine that doing press tours can get to be incredibly monotonous for stars, having to always repeat the talking points of their movie, sell, sell, sell. But every once in a while, an actor or director lets loose and acts goofy and it’s awesome.
• Seal Team 6 Calls ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ Inaccurate; Say They Don’t Pop Collars Or Wear Tapout Gear – Priceless:
  

  An anonymous Public Affairs Officer (PAO) for Seal Team Six says the movie “Zero Dark Thirty” is factually inaccurate, portraying Seal Team Six members like the douchebags from Seal Team Two.

  And there’s more. Just fantastic.

• ?????????????? – It’s an animated gif, but it’s yet another piece of brilliant internet art brought to you by the idontknowwhatthefuckisgoingoninthisvideo tag on my delicious account. Enjoy.

So there you have it. Stay tuned for some Movie Award winners on Sunday!

The usual roundup of things I found interesting on the internets recently:

• The Terrible Tragedy of the Healthy Eater – In the new year, I’ve been trying to eat a little healthier, but healthy eating is a kinda ridiculous racket. Sample awesome:
  

  That really skinny old scientist dude says anything from an animal will give you cancer. But a super-ripped 60 year old with a best-selling diet book says eat more butter with your crispy T-Bone and you’ll be just fine as long as you stay away from grains. Great abs beat out the PhD so you end up hanging out on a forum where everyone eats green apples and red meat and talks about how functional and badass parkour is.

  You learn that basically, if you ignore civilization and Mark Knopfler music, the last 10,000 years of human development has been one big societal and nutritional cock-up and wheat is entirely to blame. What we all need to do is eat like cave-people.

  And it just keeps going… and going…

• Unchained Melody: Two Troublemakin’ Bruvas Take on Tarantino’s Django Unchained – An interesting discussion on the “controversy” surrounding Quentin Tarantino’s new movie, Django Unchained. For the record, as you’ll see in the coming weeks of 2012 movie roundup activities, I loved the movie.
• A Simple Walk Into Mordor – So some nerds realized that the actual, real life, distance between where they filmed the Shire and where they filmed Mordor (particularly Mount Doom) is only about 120 miles, and they thus resolved to fly to New Zealand, get dressed up in capes, put on fake hobbit feet, and actually walk that distance (the title being a play on Boromir’s infamous “One does not simply walk into Mordor” line). Since they’re city-folk, they get up to all sorts of jackassery whilst traversing the countryside and interacting with animals and locals and whatnot. Very entertaining. There’s four videos, and they’re all pretty fun.
• Videology: Dear Loyal DVD Customers – An interesting look at how one independent NY DVD rental store is looking to remain vital and relevant in this day and age of streaming and Netflix and so on:
  

  A couple years ago, it became terribly obvious that a video store in this day and age was not something that could flourish on its own anymore, especially in New York City, let alone Williamsburg. We tried a lot of different things, some that were successful (No Late Fee Plans!), others not so much (delivery… a valiant effort). But in the end it came down to a singular decision: change or close.

  With a collection of over 30,000 movies and many regular customers, shuttering our doors was not an option. So we came up with a plan. It was risky and expensive and we could be running ourselves even further into the ground, but there was nothing left to lose. Times had changed. Netflix and iTunes and Amazon and Redbox… well, they became our direct competition and that was a tough battle. So we decided we’d offer something that they can’t: a movie lover’s paradise, right here in Brooklyn.

  The place sounds pretty cool…

• Wolfenstein 3D Online – The original Wolfenstein 3D is available to play for free online. It’s a classic, though clearly showing its age. I can’t believe that I still remembered all the secrets on the first level… I even managed to get to that purple secret level. Heh.

And that’s all for now. If all goes well, look for the kickoff of 2012 movie recapping with the announcement of the annual Kaedrin Movie Awards nominations next Sunday. Last minute recommendations/category suggestions welcome!

Recent discoveries by Kaedrin’s chain-smoking monkey research squad:

• This is what happened on Facebook today – Mic check day.
• Vincent Clortho’s Inner City Wizarding School – I don’t know how Key and Peele have escaped my attention for so long, but this is brilliant, and you’ve gotta love the Ghostbusters reference.
• Troopers: Holopad – I may have mentioned this before, but it bears repeating: CollegeHumor’s Troopers series of vids parodying Star Wars are well worth watching.
• The Charlie Brown School of Dance – These will complement my regular repertoire of dance moves nicely. Which is to say, I will be even worse at dance than I am now.
• Zappers – I’m surprised there isn’t a tumblr dedicated to this.
• Surprisingly Well Coordinated Tweeting – “This is one of the best things I’ve ever been a part of in my life, and I used to pretend to fly spaceships!” – Will Wheaton

That’s all for now…

I’m rather busy being thankful for things, so for now, just a few linkys to keep things interesting:

• Windows 95 Tips, Tricks, and Tweaks – The tumblr of the week is a rather unnerving mixture of bland Microsoft dialog prompt language and Cronenberg-style body-horror (with the occasional Stephen King variant). Sample awesome:

  

  Lots of funny stuff there, check it out. Hat tip: Badass Digest.

• The scariest video you have ever watched in the name of science – If you’re not scared of heights… you will be. Yeesh.
• The Genre Fiction v. Literature Debate – Yeah, that old saw. Alyssa Rosenberg identifies the core conceit behind the debate, one that is duplicitous but cleverly rigged in favor of “literature”. They’re playing a shell game of sorts. In truth, there are good books and bad books (genre or not).
• Quirky “Wizard of Oz” synopsis is going to follow writer to the grave – You may have seen this bit of inspired capsule writing on the internets before:

  

  But what you haven’t likely seen is the story behind it and it’s author (incidentally, the author is not Lee Winfrey, as the pic above implies (see the original linked post for some context)). It’s nothing dramatic or anything, but I’m glad someone’s gone to the trouble of figuring it out and properly attributing it.

And that’s all for now. Have a happy Thanksgiving!

Time was shorter than expected last night due to unforeseen events at work and yet another Nor’easter. A thousand pardons for not posting. So here are a few things I found interesting on the internets of late:

• Michael Myers on Twitter – James from Cinemassacre (AKA the Angry Videogame Nerd) took it upon himself to create this twitter account and fill it in as if Michael Myers was tweeting during the events of the first two Halloween movies.
• Star Wars Duel of the Fates Sing-Along – Ok, so the video I had saved for this featured pictures as well as words, but was apparently removed by the user. Don’t know why, but it looks like there are a lot of other videos that do similar things. These don’t make me laugh quite so hard for some reason, but hey, give it a shot. It’s still kinda funny without pictures.
• It’s Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers. – I don’t need to really say anything about this, but here’s a pull quote:
  

  I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to get my hands on some fucking gourds and arrange them in a horn-shaped basket on my dining room table. That shit is going to look so seasonal. I’m about to head up to the attic right now to find that wicker fucker, dust it off, and jam it with an insanely ornate assortment of shellacked vegetables. When my guests come over it’s gonna be like, BLAMMO! Check out my shellacked decorative vegetables, assholes. Guess what season it is-fucking fall. There’s a nip in the air and my house is full of mutant fucking squash.

  Heh.

• Of House Belcher – I don’t know how anyone could form the idea for this single-serving niche-site, but apparently someone thought it would be a good idea to put Bob’s Burgers quotes over Game of Thrones screenshots. Result: Brilliance. (Dumbest fancy-pants Tumblr navigation ever though)
• In a Mass Knife Fight to the Death Between Every American President, Who Would Win and Why? – Mildly timely, that’s how we do things here at Kaedrin. For the most part, I agree with this guy’s top tier and my money would be on Andrew Jackson (or Teddy Roosevelt).
• Best Death Scene Ever – No explanation or commentary needed. This is indeed awesome.

That’s all for now. Should be on-target for Sunday.