An Online Commercial I Made

The commercial I just made for the NC State Fair just went live. They wrote the script, and I directed, shot, and edited.

TV Land Haiku Meme

Ok, so I'm reading "TV Land To Go: The Big Book of TV Lists, TV Lore, and TV Bests" by Tom Hill. Good book, lots of tv nostalgia and odd facts. There's also a bunch of original material created for the book. Some of their ideas for tv shows are pretty brilliant, like a detective show called "That's The Man!", where Tony Randall plays "a classically trained artist who has fallen on hard times and taken up work as a police sketch artist.[His] refined sensibility and distaste for mingling with riffraff can't overcome his burning desire to see justice done". Brilliant.

But what I post about today is another one of their genius ideas: the TV Land Haiku. Their theory is that the brief-but-rigid artistic structure of the haiku is the perfect method "for expressing the essential truth in some of our favorite TV shows and characters."

Check out the following examples:

"Dragnet"
Stern morality
Blue squares bust far-out hippies.
The names have been changed.

"Family Affair"
Mom and Dad are gone,
But Uncle Bill is rich, yay!
Who wants pony rides?

"Hogan's Heroes"
Underground allies
What tunnels? I know nothing.
Silly old Germans!

So, inspired by that, I decided to create some of my own:

"Match Game"
In the Land of Blanks
Brett Somers is Match Game king
And Charles is her queen.

"The Love Boat"
Where else could Zsa Zsa
Make sweet love with Van Patten
Exciting and new

"Venture Brothers"
The Monarch will rant,
Hank and Dean will fail again,
And Brock will whoop ass.

"Wrestling Announcers"
Jim Ross reigns today
Lance was a stalwart hand, but
Solie was the Dean.

"Bill McNeill"
The man loved his cane,
And loved women even more.
But Rocket Fuel, DAMN!

"QI"
The Earth has two moons?!?
"Cruithne?" Are you mad, sir?
That's rubbish; prove it.

So that's my contributions. I now ask you to create your own and pass it around the interweb, on blogs and Facebook and Twitter and all those doohickeys. I particularly challenge the pop culture haiku masters: Kit FitzSimons and Jeff Scronce! Go to it, lads! (And link back here.)

Oh, and maybe use the #tvhaiku hashtag, if you feel like it. Now go get famous.

Catching Up On Stuff

Haven't posted in about a month, let's get caught up, shall we kiddies?

Videos I've done recently, with brief remarks:

4DDI vs Shapeshifter - Had a fun time playing around in Motion to do the Dr. Who-y effects. Loved the way the merging of Andy and Kit turned out. Went back to an old trick with the morphing effect, and any excuse to use the remix of the Superfriends theme is a-ok with me.

4DDI vs Average Ducks - Wasn't really sure what to do with a group with the name "Average Ducks", until I thought of the old Warner Brothers cartoon, "A Corny Concerto". So this is an homage to that. Hadn't played in Flash in a long while, so that was fun.

Cohost #1: Nikolai - CageMatch ran for the whole month of July as part of the Summer Slamtacular. As part of the festivities, I featured a different cohost each week. First was Zach Ward as Nikolai. Basically, I just let him rock it in front of the green screen and chopped up his bits into a video mix with illustrations. I was tickled to find that Eastern European song about Nikolai....

4DDI vs PTSIAM - Time to ramp it up. PT is always inspiring, and so we turned it up a few notches for this one. I liked having Pt's "origin story", and then putting him in two different movies and the cartoon. All greenscreened and masked and whatnot. Strangely enough, PT just happens to own a real Maltese Falcon. Hard to edit the movies down to be brief but still make sense and tell the story, but I thought it worked out okay. The South Park sequence was done in Flash, with PT's bits all drawn by hand and animated into the existing footage.

Cohost #2: Jeff'Ray - Bryan Barnes did an awesome job as "The Homosexual Agenda", a character Joe Stanton dreamed up a year ago. We made sure he was a very positive figure, and the comedy came from Scott Sullivan not knowing how to deal with a very "out" gay man.

Verna Applebottom's Big Day Out - Paula Pazderka asked me to produce this for her, a parody of the Chico's clothing stores. I love that song--"It's Chico Time!"

PTSIAM vs Senior PGA - This time I framed the PTSIAM sequence with Zach and Jeremy going to see Star Wars. The idea was that people would wonder where and when PT would crop up. And of course, it was funny to have PT misinterpret instructions and break the X-wing. Whups! Lots of work in Motion, learning how to autotrack movement and make clips match movement. The first sequence worked perfectly; really should've reshot the others to make them look better. Loved Jeremy's visuals at the end.

Cohost #3: Donnie Tucker - Mary Sasson as a guy from Pittsburgh. "Go stillahs!" I got some ideas on typical Pittsburgh photos from some YouTube videos by natives.

DSI Corporate Commercial - Made this one in less than 24 hours, from notification to execution. Basically just used a bunch of transitions in Final Cut and a lot of DSI photos, along with a few simple tricks.

Ignite Raleigh Opener - Got hired to produce a video to open the first meeting of the Ignite Raleigh group. We gathered the organizers together at DSI and did a pretape of them getting frustrated with some old PCs and then taking out their aggressions on the machines, a la Office Space. All the PC screen images and the explosions were done in post with Apple Motion.

And I think that catches us up! See you again soon.

Voice Recognition Star Wars

While doing the photographs for the latest Patton Project, I came up with one of my more brilliant ideas. I had put on my favourite movie, Star Wars: A New Hope, to play in the background while I took pictures. Then I decided to Twitter about it, but in a unique way: I used an iPhone app called "Vlingo" that can translate your voice into text and then post it to Twitter. I figured I'd see how it handled my favourite Star Wars quotes. It's not exactly 100% accurate (especially when doing Darth Vader and Ben Kenobi impressions), but that was the main point: let's see how the text gets mangled.

I actually came up with the voice recognition idea a little way into the movie, and missed a few of the quotes at the beginning, so I've gone back and added a few at the beginning and a few I missed in the middle, but all have been Vlingoed. See how many you can recognize!

1. "Long time ago and galaxy far far west"
2. "We do"
3. "is this a calls lecture where is the am about to go"
4. "There's 1 set to stun"
5. "I'm going to regret this" (score!)
6. "Call die before she tells you anything"
7. "Don't get to the with may"
8. "Call Tuesday to it is you did his you'll"
9. "web search George"
10. "Poser program for etiquette and protocol"
11. "Can you speak bocce" (wow!)
12. "Is going to Austin to pick up some parking burgers"
13. "the start to unit have a bad motivator"
14. "Bank of America, well that is going to feels so good"
15. "hi and see 3 PO Ching side alterations"
16. "You're the 1 Canobie for my only hope"
17. "We are just crazy old Matt"
18. "Is going to check the baby"
19. "It's around us Patrick source pines the galaxy picked up"
20. "Dangers your Starfleet command at not just the Playstation"
21. "The ability to destroy upset insignificant next to the power of the folks"
22. "Send people always ride single file I need the number is"
23. "I find your lack of state and disturbing"
24. "Quantum on the way to the force become a gym I love my father"
25. "Most Isley spaceport you'll never find out more rigid hive of scum and put it in a"
26. "Google need to see if this application"
27. "At the joy joy looking for"
28. "We go serpentine here"
29. "This s*** the bed Kessel run with 12 parts sex" (it put in the asterixes itself...)
30. "traveling to Harbor Stacy like bustin crops bored"
31. "Loof for another topic American retarded than they move systems"
32. "That's no moon it's the space station" (very close!)
33. "Who is more for lish the folk all the fool who doesn't"
34. "What an incredible snow you discovered"
35. "I got a bad feeling about this" (hey! It got another right!)
36. "Mike is that walking carpet on my way"
37. "I love you I was about the monitor now I am the masta"
38. "Your power is all week old Masson"
39. "you call twins or if you strike me dial I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine"
40. "Story show together c'mon very whole together"
41. "Baseballs I will Pratts and mighty 16 back home"
42. "May the force be with you" (another match!)
43. "Google power to front deflector screens switch l power to front deflector strains"
44. "Evacuate dynamo the trials I think you overestimate their chances"
45. "It because like beggars canyon back home"
46. "You suck balls look" (I SWEAR that's what it came up with)
47. "you are a queer can know what day is going to go home"
48. "Call jott kid that was in a million"
49. "Remember the force be with you always" (close!)
50. "Calorie!"

And that's the end of "Voice Recognition Star Wars". I hope you had a lovely time. I'll post the answer key in a few days.

CageMatch and Banana Breakup

I'm woefully behind on my blog/video updates. I did CageMatch a few weeks ago, and then the Banana Breakup Extravaganza last week.

First, CageMatch. Not much to say here, except that I didn't have much of an idea for the video, and didn't get an opportunity to meet with the 4DDI guys, so the whole thing was just based around one of the members not being able to make it. I had the Beer graphic already laying about, basically, so that was easy to throw in.

The Banana Breakup video was a lot more satisfying. Got some time with Kit and Eitan to do shots and video before the show, so there was a lot more raw material to work with (and the BB boys are always so fun to work with as well.) The opening shoutout to Biff Hobgood was Kit's idea, and very funny to us since we knew it would be over most people's heads. (If it's over your head, check out the Biff Hobgood surprise return video.)

I really wanted to do a decent (if quick) overview of Banana Breakup's history, so consulted my files, went through all their past videos, and selected some clips to use. (One bonus: Joe Jones made his return to the theater after several months off, and Kyle Chorpening was there as well, so they both saw the shotout to Panthro.) Then we went into the whole "BB vs BB" bit, which was amusing. By the way, nobody really knew we were presenting the show in a faux CageMatch format, so the whole video thing was a surprise. I loved the way the still of the masked BB turned out, photoshopped with a "photocopy" version of the picture overlaid on itself and tweaked a bit to give it that hyperreal look. The "good" BB reply was hilarious, with Eitan's "honesty and wits" and Kit's "tonight at dawn" ad libs. I was also quite happy with the "flaming faceoff" animation at the end. And was quite pleased with the song I picked for the end, The Donnas covering Billy Idol's "Dancing With Myself." The ersatz Hall of Champions was a surprise for the boys, in an attempt to make 'em laugh.

Stills, as always, are here.

PS: the live show included another surprise: Scott Sullivan performing a Banana Breakup rap live on stage. From a rapping standpoint, it was a humiliating failure, but from a comedy standpoint, it was a decent success, as 40 year old guys fucking up a rap onstage while dressed in a blinged-out t-shirt and hat turns out to be pretty laughworthy.

Another CageMatch

Had another CageMatch extravaganza last night. Here's the video. Come back and we'll chat.

The "multicultural" screen with the city landmarks in the background originally was supposed to be the Sister City identity screen. I was up until 4 am on Friday working on the image, but decided it was far too busy for an identity screen. As I drifted off to sleep, I dreamed up the postcard idea, loosely basing it on the film "Dark City", which Kit and I had watched earlier in the week. I had fun making the image, and was quite pleased with the deco-esque gradients and whatnot. The multicultural screen turned out pretty nice; I was especially pleased with Andy's two halves, and Zannie as a geisha. And that's all there is to it, really.

Stills are here, as usual.

Inspiration From Teddy

So I had a hard time being productive today. (It's been a rough week.) I finally decided to go lie down for a bit to clear my head. Ended up picking up my copy of Don Rosa's "The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck Companion" that my mom had gotten me for Christmas, which had been sitting next to the bed untouched ever since.

Excellent book; ended up spending the bulk of the afternoon consuming every page and panel. Towards the end of the tome, Unca Scrooge meets up with President Teddy Roosevelt and (as part of the tale) Scrooge recalls words that Roosevelt had told him years earlier (which, in reality, is a paraphrase of a real quote of Roosevelt's):

"Don't live by the doctrine of ignoble ease, but by toil and effort, labor, and strife! The highest forms of success comes to the man who shirks not from danger or work, and who therefore wins the ultimate triumph."

Those words seemed to be appropriate for my current situation, and I reproduce them here in hopes that they might touch other people as well. I have several friends who are very successful in their chosen fields, and they got there through dedication and hard work, pushing aside any obstacles in the pursuit of their dream, while always keeping their eyes focused on their goal. I envy these friends of mine. I know they are a different breed of person than I am, and I cannot duplicate their way of living and believing, but I can hope to emulate them in some small way, and sometimes it's through wise words like those in the excerpt above that help drive people like myself who don't have the natural attitudes and abilities of those rare people who truly know how to live life to the fullest. It's even more helpful (for me, anyway) when it comes via a comic book.

Oh, also, "Inoki Bom-Ba-Ye".

Green eyes and big admiration go to Matt, Larry, and Zach. Keep doing great things; in addition to your own success, you inevitably inspire others.

Recent Videos for DSI

Two new videos up now, one on YouTube and one on Facebook.

First is is the new intro for Season Two of our acclaimed DSI High show, a sort of improvised sitcom. I based it on last year's video (which, strangely enough, I don't seem to have blogged about or even posted!) I used Pulpmotion to do the yearbook bit at the beginning; I may recreate that whole thing on my own, so I have a little better control over it. I like the character introductions (it helps that the adult/student ratio was more even than last year); separating them into "teachers" and "students" makes the characters esier to identify. The "running through the halls" scene turned out quite nicely. I just shot that as a hand-held video on my still camera, and then used Quicktime Player to save selected frames into a folder, using Photoshop to format them for Final Cut. The group shot at the end was fun; I just had to pull Spencer's face in from a different shot, do a lot of lighting readjustment, and slap a brick wall behind them. There's a faded, peeling walrus mascot sort of hidden on the wall; you can see a better still of that shot here. Lastly, I re-edited the Bowling For Soup song so it ended with the end of the video, and by accident, the line "here we go again" lined up nicely with the introduction of the DSI High logo. Yippee!

Second is the first draft of the DSI Witness News intro. I meet with Zach tomorrow for revision notes, but was asked to upload the current version as a promo for the next show. You can find it here. I used a new program I bought recently, Kinemac, which is awesome. I tried to make the video as slick and as-like-a-real-newscast as possible. I plan on adding some animated tubes snaking around on the "News/Sports/Entertainment" page; we'll see what else ZW wants for the video. I particularly like the 3D animated logo, with the extruded words appearing as the cube rotates.

Twitter T. Tweet

I'm on Twitter now, much though I have resisted it. You know the name.

CageMatch 3/28/09

Another day, another CageMatch. View the video here.

First off, just a note of how annoying it was that twenty people showed up very late to the show. Like fifteen, twenty minutes after showtime. Incredibly inconsiderate and rude. If we had started the show already, all the commotion from the crowd arriving halfway through the first set would've interfered with the first group's performance. Drives me nuts when people show up late.

Anyway, that was the video. Couldn't really deam up a viable way to present a group called "Finding Emo" without making it depressing, let alone making it uberdramatic. Kit FitzSimons to the rescue! It was his idea to do a sort of Wizard-of-Oz sepia-to-colour thing to show the difference between the two teams. I flipped that around and had it go from colour to b&w, and actually used the Oz footage. The music at the beginning is the opening overture to the movie as well. The music then turns into My Chemical Romance as we go to black and white (also pulled down the gamma at the same time as the dsaturation, for that extra-gloomy look). Then finished it all off with a slapped-together mashup of Elton John's "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" with the opening drums from the Go-Go's "We Got The Beat".

Putting the heads on the characters at the end was amusing. The girls sent me shots taken for this express purpose; I used an old photo of Joe, but spent a long time touching it up with streaked magenta eyeliner, skull earring, lip ring, etc. Then I ended up making it black and white and small, so you don't really see any of that. Hilarious.

Probably the shortest CageMatch video ever. And the assholes who came late talked loudly through most of the video, so nobody heard the text. Ah well.

Zombie Marx Brothers

Here's a little something amusing I made at the prompting of a friend. It's the Marx Brothers, if they were zombies.

CageMatch 2/28/09

Did another CageMatch video for Saturday. I actually did this whole one in about four hours, from creating the identity screen for Baby Pranks, to editing the stills for the video, choosing and editing the audio, performing the voiceover, and editing the video. Whew! I had no time during the week to do the video, as I was busy producing a corporate show for DSI, including a last-minute video shoot and production for a Sham Wow parody (visible here). That one actually got some network news coverage, so that's cool.

Watch the current CageMatch video here.

Back in CageMatch land, I dreamed up the concept while showering that morning. Figuring that working backwards would be the best plan, I started brainstorming what the name "Baby Pranks" made me think of. Baby made me think of Child, so I thought, "what phrases use the word 'child'?" A child shall lead them, child's play, etc. Eventually I ended up with "man, woman, and child", and thought it might be fun to say Senior PGA were bragging about how they could beat anybody, man, woman, or child. That meant the video would have to set up PGa as becoming cocky, and the rest wrote itself.

No real big technical innovations here. I do want to point out that the material in the background of the Baby Pranks identity screen is from the old Johnson Smith novelties ad from comic books of old. And I liked the way I re-edited the Salt N Pepa song to go straight from the "baby baby" part to the "yoyoyoyo" part, fairly seamlessly.

That's it. We now return control to your regularly scheduled program.

Professional Regurgitator

So I have a lot of dvds I haven't watched yet. I'm one of those people that collects things and then never uses them. In the case of dvds, it simply never occurs to me to sit down and watch a movie. It never enters my mind. When I'm on my own, I gravitate to wandering through RSS feeds or YouTube or something, never simply sitting in front of the tv.

So the other day I decided to pop a dvd into the computer and watch it in a little window while I was working on Photoshopping some stuff for a DSI gig. The dvd in question was a documentary on vaudeville hosted by Ben Vereen. It was a good overview of the life of a vaudevillian and the history of the art form itself, with rare clips of footage from various vaudeville stars (and non-stars). I found one particularly intriguing act on YouTube, one of the clips that was on the dvd. This is Hadji Ali, who was what vaudevillians labelled a "professional regurgitator". His act consisted of him swallowing things and bringing them back up.

One of the reasons I'm so fascinated by this act is that it seems, at first blush, to be so ridiculous. Did people in the Depression really spend their hard-earned two bits to see a guy swallow stuff and then bring it back up again? Is that entertainment? The other reason I'm fascinated by this act is that, yes, it is entertainment. Hadji Ali has a great act, unusual though it is, and I kept my eyes glued to his performance, and was rewarded for my virtue with a stunning finale. Go watch Hadji Ali, you'll be glad you did.

The Wrestler, The Game

This is exactly the article I hoped exist. Simple-minded and nostalgic that I am, it answers the first question that popped into my mind after seeing "The Wrestler".

Ted Needs 2

Okay, I did this once before, but saw Jennifer had done it recently, and as an experiment, typed "ted needs" into Google once again, and was amused enough to make this post. I should be editing video right this minute, but I'm giving myself five minutes to write this up.

Type in your name and "needs" into Google and then write down the first 10 coherent things that come up.

1. "Ted needs someone to be there 100% of the time." So true.

2. "Ted needs a 24 hour staffed program which can assist him with taking his medications." Well damn, that might help, actually.

3. "Ted needs a shower." Really? How did I get so filthy in two hours? (Wait, don't answer that.)

4. "Handsome Ted needs a home." I actually have one, but thanks for the complimentary adjective.

5. "Ted needs to step down. And he needs to step down immediately." A compliment followed by an insult. Thanks a lot, internet.

6. "Uncle Ted needs you." Heh. I like pervy roleplaying.

7. "Theodore needs a date!" How did that come up when I searched for "Ted needs"? Google must be psychic about my real needs.

8. "Ted needs a home." I guess I'm no longer handsome.

9. "Ted needs to sleep." Occasionally, yes.

10. "Ted needs some nads." Aww...that's not nice.

Well, that's not a good note to end on. Let's do a bonus one.

11. "Ted needs to be appreciated a little more." Aww, that's sweet. Thanks, Google!

(BTW, the image in this post was on the first page I got on Google Images when searching for "Ted Needs". Back to video editing!)

George & Gracie

You might know I'm a fan of oldtime radio comedy and vaudeville. So a couple of weeks ago, I had been bidding on a hard-to-find book by George Burns, written about his wife Gracie and entitled "I Love Her, That's Why". I forgot that the auction was ending soon, and got sniped by some last-minute bastard. I love the way Burns writes, and particularly love hearing him talk about his wife (the easy-to-find "Gracie: A Love Story" by Burns is the most romantic book ever and will make you cry, guaranteed) so I was a bit irked that I hadn't won the auction for "I Love Her, That's Why".

Well, another one came up for auction, and once AGAIN I forgot to check on the auction as it was ending. But guess what? For some weird reason, nobody else bid on it, and I won! And as a bonus, this copy is autographed by George Burns himself! Hurrah!

Poisoned Frankensteiner & Backdrop Driver

Koji Kanemoto caves in his opponents skull (El Samurai, perhaps?) with the Poisoned Frankensteiner.

Then Steve Williams attempts to give Kenta Kobashi several concussions with his Backdrop Driver (aka Dangerous Backdrop, which is a damn good name for it.)

I have the latter match on VHS somewhere; just about the best wrestling match I've ever seen in my life.

Made With Olive Oy-el

This weekend I made my second hot sauce. Jason likes Jewish food, so I found a recipe in his sauces book that told how to make zehug, a hot sauce favoured by Yemenite Jews. I pan-roasted tomatoes for the first time in my life, a skin removal method that adds flavour to the dish, or so the text read. There's also a bunch of cilantro in there, extra virgin olive oil, jalepneos, garlic, salt, pepper, cumin, and coriander. Oh, and a single lemon's worth of juicings. Turned out pretty good. A little mild, perhaps. I toasted up some pita bread for dipping purposes, not realizing one is supposed to cut the bread into triangles before putting them in the oven. Look at the glory here and here.

Oh, and pardon my filthy thumbnail; that was a bit of burned tomato skin.

BUHNING HAMMAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!

Wristo clutchoski, wristo clutchoski, wristo clutchoski. Hamburger.

CageMatch Report x2

I suddenly realized that I never blogged about the CageMatch from two weeks ago, so you get a twofer here.

Last time, we had Banana Breakup defending against 4DDI. The video is here. Check it out and return for discussion.

Didn't really have a genius idea for this one. Couldn't figure out what to do with a name like "Senior PGA", until I tripped over the "senior vs junior" idea, and then decided to fill space by showing the "experience" of the senior team, and their Photoshopped wins around the world. I did like ending it with the "R-E-S-P-E-C-T" song.

This week had Senior PGA against 4DDI. Watch it here.

Once again, a name that's hard to build a storyline around, so in the Flaneur tradition, I used the name itself as the focus, namely the question of what "4DDI" stood for. It's fairly well-known around the theater that the guys in 4DDI intended it to be "Four Douchebags Doing Improv", but that Zach rightly thought that it wasn't the type of name you could market or advertise, so they were verboten from using "Douchebags", officially changing it to "Dudes". So I spent the bulk of the video playing with that, dreaming up various ways to censor the forbidden word, the punchline being that John Reitz would go ahead and say it anyway (if out of context). The boys of 4DDI were kind enough to participate in the pretaping, with special props to Kyle Chorpening for getting naked for CageMatch...again.

Oh, and the "POJ" thing was just some unexplored sexual maneuver that cropped up in Senior PGA's previous show, and amused me intensely, so I threw it in there as a sort of obscure inside joke.

Stills, as usual, are here.

Join us next time.

The Wrestler Review

Went to see The Wrestler with Tommy Dynamite today. Jennings had told me weeks ago to get in my car and drive however long it took to see it right away, but this was my first opportunity to attend it here in Chapel Hill. MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD.

I liked it. I thought the portrayal of what it's like to be in the world of independent wrestling was amazing--they really did their homework, and were dead-on (except for three minor points that didn't really matter, namely that Marisa Tomei never would've gotten backstage so quickly/easily at a big event, nobody should ever make a gig that big, and I've never heard of anybody getting a solo dressing room at a small event.) They really did capture the thrilling/depressing feel of what it's like to be in front of a crowd at a high school card, and then wandering back to your car past kids' crayon drawings while dragging your rolling suitcase behind you long after the fans have left and the high has left you.

I thought that the Rourke's portrayal of The Ram was amazing. I've met guys like him; former big stars now on their way down, having lost the big bucks and their youth and now ready to sacrifice anything just to please the fans. I can identify with that as well; I think we were supposed to hope The Ram would agree to go with Cassidy at the end and not walk through that curtain, but maybe it's my own wrestling sickness that just made it obvious to me what had to be done at that moment: the crowd were there to see The Ram take on The Ayatollah, and when your music plays, you've got to hit the ring. I was also nodding my head when The Ram was mounting the top rope for his finisher, and looked over to the empty spot in the curtain where Cassidy had fled. She's gone, all you have for sure is the ring and the show, gotta dive off the top and let the heart attacks fall where they may. He had to do it.

The opening sequence with the historical clippings was amazing; somebody put in a lot of effort to replicate the look of Pro Wrestling Illustrated and its ilk. The Nintendo wrestling game moment was perfect. I could've done without the hardcore segment with Necro Butcher. Not that I don't like garbage wrestling, but I didn't think it advanced the plot in a useful fashion. If they had gone the route of showing that the former golden boy of wrestling had no choice but to take whatever booking he could, and was pressured into doing hardcore, that would've been good. Maybe in a director's cut?

I actually don't think I can judge whether this was an Oscar-level movie or not. I think I'm too close to the material myself. As far as replicating the real inner workings and atmosphere of smalltime wrestling, yeah, bang on, that was amazing. The story was touching, but I think I'm too close to that as well. Besides, I'm no movie artisan or supreme critic. But I did enjoy myself, and that's what's important.

Wrestling Moves

Hi there wrestling fans. A clip of Mascarita Dorada has been making the rounds lately. This guy's always been pretty amazing, but that was a really good clip. Lucha Libre generally presents its "minis" better than traditional American "midget wrestling" which tends to be shown as a freak comedy act. (Although ya gotta wonder what Monito was thinking when he agreed to this spot.) I've always been a particular fan of the amazing talents of Mascarita Sagrada. I mean, the guy's about four feet tall, and he dove off a cage, for chrissakes!

Anyway, while midget wrestling in the US has generally been a joke at best and an offensive act at worst, there are some independent presentations that seem to be pretty positive. This looks like an interesting portrayal of one such group.

This post wasn't supposed to be about minis or midget wrestling, actually. I meant to show off some of the amazing moves people are coming up with, so here they are:
The Double 450
Omega Driver
Rollback Driver
An Amazing Counter
The Space Flying Drop
Anything Takuya Sugi does
And, what I think we can all agree is The Greatest Wrestling Sequence Ever

addendum:
After posting this, I discovered a longer video that includes the Double 450 mentioned earlier. Turns out there were a lot of amazing tagteam maneuvers in that match, which make it a must see.

The Green Mist

So when I was a kid, I watched Mid-Atlantic Wrestling whilst living in the middle of North Carolina. One of my favourite wrestlers was a scary guy with his face painted, who went by the now-amusing name "The Great Kabuki". That's the equivalent of calling an American wrestler "The Fabulous Sitcom" or "The Wonderful Ballet" or something, but back then, I though "The Great Kabuki" was a great name for a badguy wrestler from Japan.

Anyway, I liked Kabuki because 1) he wore a cool piece of headgear that his manager would almost nonchalantly pull off slowly to reveal his "hideously scarred" face, 2) he worked them nunchucks somethin' fierce, and most importantly, 3) he could blind and even hospitalize his opponents by blowing a poisonous substance into their eyes, a mysterious weapon of the Orient known as "The Green Mist". To a kid, this was amazingly cool. How I wished I too could learn the secrets of the Japanese warriors and blow the Green Mist!

Years later, an amazingly talented wrestler by the name of Keiji Mutoh came over to America, where he became famous as The Great Muta. Muta was billed as Kabuki's son, and he learned the secrets of The Green Mist from his evil father. I would've loved Muta anyway, with his acrobatic moves and lightning-quick elbow drops, but blowing the mist made him my new favourite.

You can see two fun examples of The Green Mist from Muta here and here. The former has a nice wide spray, and Ric Flair sells it like he's dead. The latter has a nice bit of mist, and then Muta finishes off his opponent with a nice Shining Wizard. (BTW, I'm not sure, but I *think* that the guy who gets misted in the second clip is Kabuki himself!) You can see a nice little interview segment with Kabuki's manager Gary Hart (no, not that Gary Hart) here, followed by a dustup in the ring with Jimmy Valiant. "Get your Asian in the ring!"

And here's a weird little bonus. The Great Kabuki in a music video for a Japanese band???

Spock's Surprised Bread

Long ago when I had cable, I was addicted to the British version of Whose Line Is It Anyway. It was always entertaining, had crazy games, and some wacky talent in the form of people like Paul Merton and Tony Slattery. There was one particular episode that has stuck in my head for all these years, featuring two comedians that *weren't* Whose Line regulars, and thus were hard to track down. Well, I finally found the particular clip I've remembered all these years, and it's right here. Enjoy it with me, won't you?

The segment has two guys being given a suggestion of an object that they have to build the scene around, and then Clive tells them they have to do it as the characters of Kirk and Spock. The guy doing Spock isn't particularly thrilling, but the guy playing Kirk, Jim Meskimen, is hilarious. He really nails the Shatner timing and sound. Ever since I originally saw this ten years ago, I still occasionally find myself wandering about and muttering, "Why Spock, I'm...surprised you eat bread."

Different Perspectives Project

Just after Christmas, Kit sent me an email that read thusly:

Since I know we all love wasting free time, I had an idea while looking at an art exhibit advertisement in South Carolina. The exhibit was somehow pairing the elderly with college kids to do some sort of photography thing (not sure what), and the exhibit was called "Different Perspectives, One Vision."

Oh, hells yeah, I said to myself.

The concept is this:
We pick a group of 4-8 related words, and we all spend the next week taking a photograph to fulfill each word. Then we each put our pictures together in a prearranged layout (for comparison purposes) and compare (post?) the results. I'd say the photos have to be taken by us THAT WEEK (i.e. not last spring). This will get us all looking around for awesome pictures as well as exercise our brains finding interesting ways to show the items.

THE FIRST CHALLENGE (we'll decide what to do with them next, but first, get this done by Sun Jan 4:
PlayStation Controller Buttons
1) Square
2) Triangle
3) Circle
4) X

Take four pictures (or take a lot and choose the best four), each depicting a different one of the four above buttons. Layout of the pictures is just like the side of the controller: in a diamond with square to the left, triangle on top, circle to the right, and X on the bottom.

So here we are on Sunday, Jan 4, and here is my submission.

Edit: Here are the submissions of Mr. FitzSimons and Mr. Scronce.

Good Eats

My buddy Jackson cooked up a particularly delicious meal for me on Friday. Here we have a pork chop in wine sauce, baked beans, mustard, and Potato Cakes a la Jerry Golliher. DEE-licious! Best meal I've had in months.