I Wike Toodos!!

Ladies and gentleman, your real life Ralph Wiggum. It's alright kid, everyone gets a bit of stage fright now and then. The trick is to take a deep breath and don't say the first thing that pops into your head, even if it is a simple proclamation of affection for turtles.

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Mika Brzezinski

Mika Brzezinksi is my new favorite news personality. Its a small step, but at least somebody finally said something.

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The Black Holocaust

On my way to Sheboygan, Wisconsin this weekend I couldn't help but notice a peculiar sign for America's Black Holocaust Museum just outside of Milwaukee on I-94N. I wondered throughout the weekend if there was a chapter of American history I missed out on, and exactly what the story was behind the museum. Today I found that the may have taken some liberties with both the formal and colloquial usage of the word "holocaust":

America's Black Holocaust Museum was founded to educate the general public of the injustices suffered by people of African Heritage in America, and to provide visitors with an opportunity to rethink their assumptions about race and racism.

I suppose the name of the museum works on some level since I clearly noticed and researched it, but I can't help but believe it hurts the museum's cause in the long run. Holocaust is a strong word.

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My Super Sweet 16

I may have already mentioned this once before, but 10-20 years from now I am going to be the second coming of Mark Burnett (the guy that created Survivor). Here is how it will happen:

I am going to hold on to copies of every episode of My Super Sweet 16, track down the subject of each episode and then (hopefully) do a part VH1 Behind The Music, part Real World Cast Reunion show. First off we'll have a what are they up to now segment where we catch up with them and learn about how many times they've been divorced, if they actually do anything for a living yet and most importantly if they have kids of their own. Next we bring in their friends from high school and have them talk about how screwed up that whole thing was and what they learned from it then and now. Lastly we have our primary subject watch their episode and reflect on WTF they were thinking at the time and how they would do things differently. Hopefully this is where they redeem themselves and provide a warm moment where they contritely admit/apologize for being a stupid, spoiled brat and promise not to do this to their own kids.

First up, the girl that claimed a $67,000 Lexus "ruined everything".

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5 Minutes To Kill Yourself

Last night I saw an ad for this neat little flash game over at AdultSwim.com. It's called 5 Minutes To Kill Yourself, but it sounds quite a bit more morbid that it actually is. You play as a generic office worker trying to find ways to use mundane office items to cause self-inflicted injuries. It is up to you to find take your health from 100% to 0% in 5 minutes. Meanwhile your coworkers try to interrupt your efforts by asking about emoticons and company handball teams.You can use canned responses to try to provoke your coworkers into a fight (you'll lose), but more often than not it takes more time than its worth when compared to just bashing your face on the copy machine or wearing the pinata suit and letting people beat you with baseball bats.It is not a bad way to waste half an hour.

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Evan Almighty

I hate the way movie trailers are made these days. After watching this, is there honestly any reason to see the movie? I am sure you miss a few jokes and a 5 minute ending. I am not under the impression this movie is going to be deep or complex, but just a little mystery as to whether or not the flood actually hits would be nice. As it stands I have no incentive to see this movie before it hits DVD. I am sure I'll be wrong, but I don't see Evan Almighty being $175 million well spent.

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Jim Cramer Is Insane

Jim Cramer was on Conan last week, proving that is antics on that ridiculous MSNBC show are absolutely real. It's great to see his logic completely obliterated by a sane, rational person.

As far as those shows and pretty much all of MSNBC are concerned, I can't shake that movie Two For The Money. I know the movie was about sports gambling, but I get the feeling watching those stock market guys sit on their panel and shout their absolute certainties, that they might be a bit closer than you think. I can't stand watching them as a result. They come off as ridiculously phony.

If you've seen the movie you probably know what I mean, if not here is the trailer:

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Phobias

Do you have an irrational fear? Maury Povich knows just how to handle your delicate situation. I've got to wonder what was done to these people with these objects in order to create this fear. Honestly, how does a woman have a fear of cotton? What does she do at that time of the month? Does she use Cherokee Hair?

Peaches


Pickles


Balloons

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Local News: Career Suicide

You gotta love it when the local anchor is willing to throw his career under the bus in order to make a masturbation joke on air.

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Jeopardy Loser

This guy was getting his ass kicked at Jeopardy so badly that he elected to use his Final Jeopardy answer to make an obscure Family Guy reference. How obscure? If this weren't the Internet, I'd buy you a beer if you could give a synopsis of the episode this is from.

Anyhow, here's the clip:

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Wendy's Ads Suck

As great as Wendy's is, their ad campaigns seem to be consistently shitty. If you read this and happen to work for the agency responsible for these abominations please know I wish to kick you in the genitals, but unlike the people in this stupid tree kicking commercial it will actually make sense.

At least Dave Thomas didn't suck.

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Aaron Koblin

Here is a pretty cool video of the daily flight patterns in the US and around the world, put together by Aaron Koblin, a Design/Media Arts graduate from UCLA. I saw a brief clip of this last night on a bump for Adult Swim and decided to look it up on YouTube. If you want to see a larger version with cleaner text and resolution, check out his site.

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The Spelling Bee Champ

Get ready for 3 minutes and 40 seconds of awkward interview. Recent spelling bee champion Evan O'Dorney appeared on CNN's American Morning to discuss himself and his recent success. I understand being 12 (or however old he is) and getting interviewed on national television must be pretty intimidating, but you should probably make an effort to meet them half way. Otherwise you're going to end up looking like a jerk.

In past awkward home-schooled spelling bee champion interview news, here is 1997 champion Rebecca Sealfon. Rebecca is famous for shouting E-U-O-N-Y-M "euonym":

In case you were wondering, Rebecca has gone on to become a PhD Biology student at Duke University.

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Breakin 2: Electric Boogaloo

Yesterday, in a perfect storm of television programming I was able to watch Roadhouse and Breakin 2: Electric Boogaloo over the span of about 3 hours. Its been a long, long time since I had seen this and yesterday's showing did not disappoint. Unfortunately the available clips on YouTube aren't what I really wanted to show (specifically Turbo and Ozone's introduction to the soon to be jeopardized youth center in Breakin' 2), but I did manage to find Turbo's broom dance from Breakin' and his ceiling dance from the sequel.

The Broom Dance

The Ceiling Dance


I have the whole summer to work on my poppin' and lockin' since Breakin' 2 earned instant "save until I delete" status on the DVR.

Here is a approximation of my breakin' skills using Legos. I would be the guy in blue with the suit jacket and tie. That is most definitely the song I would use as well.

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In Jail, Out Of Jail

The Paris Hilton saga had produced a picture worth a thousand words. This photo is from earlier today after a Los Angeles County judge ordered her to appear in court regarding the undisclosed medical condition she used to procure house arrest in lieu of serving the 42 days remaining on her jail sentence.
Listen as a curious onlooker mocks the situation at the press conference following the judge's ruling. I like the off camera reporter yelling "Shut up!" in response.

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Bud Light Swear Jar

This is a Bud Light commercial from Bud.Tv, a viral marketing website from Anheuser-Busch. Its sad we'll never see this commercial on TV, but its a good thing we have YouTube.

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Saved By The Bell

I love Saved By The Bell. I don't care who knows it or what they think of me as a result. So when I stumbled across this today there was no question I was going to share the great news. SBTB is probably the greatest guilty pleasure television I've ever known, and the fact that its run in syndication has dried up these last 8-10 years really disappoints me.

Today my disappointment ends. I found a website where someone has compiled links to every episode of Saved By The Bell. The bad news is that it doesn't contain links to the Good Morning Miss Bliss episodes which most people refer to as SBTB: The Junior High Years. The goods news is that there are also no links to the abortions that were SBTB: The College Years, SBTB: The New Class or the TV movies SBTB: Hawaiian Style and SBTB: Wedding In Las Vegas.

This is just 86 quality episodes of Saved By The Bell in it's prime, including the summer (in the show's timeline) episodes from season three when everyone (except Kelly, contract dispute I think) got a job at Mr. Carosi's Malibu Sands Beach Club and Zach met Stacy Carosi (played by Leah Remini).

As you might imagine from previous posts, I'll be watching "Jessie's Song" and "The Bayside Triangle" just as soon as I get home from work.

I'll understand if this means we're no longer friends. My enthusiasm over this is probably at a 10, when it should realistically be more like a 7. Or a 4, whatever, leave me alone.

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Happy Swedish National Day

June 6th is Swedish National day, Sweden's equivalent to the 4th of July. So in honor of that I present Sweden's contributions to the modern world:

Ace Of Base


ABBA


Also worth mentioning are Elin Nordgren (Tiger Woods' wife), Victoria Silvstedt and Swedish Fish. Here is a fun fact: At one point in history there was such a thing as the Swedish Empire. At its peak in 1648 the Swedish Empire covered some provinces of Denmark and Norway, the countries of Estonia and Livonia and some coastal towns in Germany.

Bork Bork Bork!

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Hubo FX-1 Robot Chair

My dreams of becoming an unnecessarily mechanized super villain are a few steps closer to reality. This is the Hubo FX-1 Robot Chair. It is roughly 6.5 feet tall and weighs 300+ lbs, but it looks awesome. I would certainly prefer this to a wheelchair any day of the week. It cannot walk up and down stairs yet but it has stability sensors for navigating inclines and declines, so the FX-1 can certainly handle wheelchair ramps. The next step in the process should probably be to move the FX-1 off of external power and put it on batteries, but I am no scientist. Their priorities might be slightly different than mine.
The ED-209 is well within our sights.

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Srap Metal Update

Last year I mentioned that because of the Chinese, scrap metal was skyrocketing in value and as a result bars, liquor stores and scrap yards were going to greater lengths to prevent thieves from stealing and scrapping their beer kegs.

Recently our very own Michigan alcohol regulators authorized retailers to triple deposits on all kegs. As of early May stainless steel was trading for $1.75/lb in scrapyards, which means the cost of scrapping a keg was easily exceeding the deposit for returning them.

According to the AP this should raise the standard deposit on a keg from $10 to $30, but they neglected to mention the more expensive tap deposit that most stores charge. That deposit is unregulated and will probably increase as somewhat of a backup plan.

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Toshiba HD-DVD

Another quick Sopranos related item. This Toshiba HD-DVD player ad featuring Michael Imperioli just doesn't feel right to me. Every time I see it all I can think about it is Chris-to-fuh working on the set of and then watching Cleaver on HD-DVD. I know they probably weren't counting on that, but it really drives me insane and makes me think less of the quality of titles available on that format.

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The Sopranos

I haven't posted anything about The Sopranos in quite a while, definitely not since the sixth season resumed. But tonight I got around to watching last night's episode (the second to last one ever) and it was so tense I sort of wanted to vomit. After that, I am genuinely concerned I may cry after next week's series finale, depending on how things shakeout. I don't care what you say about seasons 4 and 5, this is almost certainly the best television series ever made. It is not exactly fair to compare it to stuff on broadcast television like Lost but in terms of how much I care about the well being of the characters, nothing compares to The Sopranos.

If you've ever enjoyed any season of the show, you have to know the sixth season is easily worth the time necessary to watch the entire series.

Next up I'll need to play catch up on The Wire.

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I Saw Knocked Up

I saw Knocked Up last night and I have to say it was an excellent movie. If you've seen The 40 Year-Old Virgin you half know what to expect. But unlike that movie they figured out how to spread the jokes evenly and pace the storyline properly. Like Wedding Crashers, I felt like The 40 Year-Old Virgin was 95 straight minutes of "guy comedy" that ground to a screeching halt to make room for 25 minutes of romantic comedy/chick flick. Knocked Up was far more comparable to There's Something About Mary, albeit quite a bit more serious. There were some shocking scenes involving profanity, euphemisms and nudity, and an abnormal number of scenes where I missed secondary lines of dialog because everyone in the theater was laughing so hard (not just the one crazy guy with exaggerated laugh sitting in front of me). The scene above is one of those scenes. Watch out, the language is very NSFW.

I don't want to say anything more in case anyone reading this decides to see it, but it was a great movie.

Also, if you want to see a bizarre movie trailer check out this new Ben Stiller/Farrelly Brothers movie called The Heartbreak Kid. "A comedy about justifying cheating on your wife". Worst. Idea Ever.

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Sarah Silverman On MTV

I don't normally enjoy Sarah Silverman, I think she's a bit overrated. But last night on the MTV Movie Awards she absolutely crushed Paris Hilton who was just a few hours away from turning herself in to police for her 23 day jail sentence.

Also, does Jack Nicholson go to MTV Movie Awards now? WTF is that?

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Berserker

This AA baseball manager goes off the handle after getting ejected. I have no idea how you wake up and go back to work the next day. I am pretty sure this guy is a Rage-aholic.

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