Just watched an old Hitchcock movie called Sabotage. No Lady Vanishes, but not bad. Curious fact: the movie house that featured prominently was called the “Bijou.” Seem to recall having seen dozens of “Bijou” theaters scattered throughout the country. Anyone have an explanation? Was that the preferred name of a particular distribution chain? A name popularized by an early movie? A name that has some well-established meaning related to theaters that I’m simply not aware of (compare to schools being named “Lyceum” or stages named “The Rose”)?
March 31, 2010
March 29, 2010
She Don’t Use Jelly.
There’s a marvelous moment in the third season of “Friday Night Lights” where “She Don’t Use Jelly” is used as code for “I’m okay with your being a lesbian, and don’t have hard feelings about you rejecting my heterosexual advances.”
March 22, 2010
Skeet skeet skeet.
The old “Chappelle’s Show” sketch about onamonapia intended to confuse whitey came to mind as I went out to the shotgun range yesterday. That, and how I was almost certain to see an awful lot of whole clay pigeons sailing over the horizon. But I had bought a couple of boxes of shells and, garshdabnit, if I wasn’t going to use them.
So with a collection of oddballs, I went to the Evergreen Gun Club, got set up on a range with a couple of hundred clays and two shotguns–a double barrel over-under, and a single-shot pump. Ended up having a slowed down machine, so turned out not to be that bad a shot. Hit about every other clay toward the end. [Or, if you believe my business partner's son, in the direct competition I came out very well. 18 hits, to my competitor's 4, to a smattering of double-misses.] Found the whole thing much more satisfying than target shooting because (1) there’s a moving target involved, and (2) the target explodes when it gets hit. No binoculars or spotting scope necessary to see where you’re at. Lovely.
Also got an idea for a liquid core clay. Could throw some fake blood in there. Or a flammable fluid of some sort that would ignite on impact. Goes down in flames. Cool, no? Just need to find me an engineer.
March 20, 2010
My heart’s as full as a baked potato.
Netflix streaming added Alferd Packer: The Musical recently. Or, at any rate, I noticed a little blue “Play” alongside it. Which of course meant the ridiculously catchy “Shpadoinkle Day” reentered my brain with a vengeance. Anyone have any suggestions on how to remedy the situation?
March 13, 2010
Sabotage vs. Battlestar.
For an impressive bit of editing, and a moderately amusing choice of images and titles for a fabulous song, check out Katamaran78′s “Battlestar Galactica” and “Sabotage” mashup. It helps to be intimately familiar with the Spike Jonze classic original.
[From Pajiba Love.]
March 12, 2010
Closer to Fine.
In this morning’s newspaper, someone mentioned the Indigo Girls. Apparently they’re playing the Puget Sound region in the near future. Or something. Immediately, what popped into my head was “Closer to Fine,” the only Indigo Girls song I can recollect at this point. Only it wasn’t the Indigo Girls version that reared its ugly head. No, it was Lore Sjöberg’s torturous stuttered loop, “Your Roommate Plays the Indigo Girls.” Unfortunately, what with Brunching Shuttlecocks now defunct for so long, “Your Roommate” is no longer available there. And thus I was unable to revisit the pain of watching an animated roommate play the guitar badly, jumping around to various parts of “Closer to Fine,” ad infinitum. Instead, I had to look slightly deeper in the search results to find solace.
March 10, 2010
Generic Oscar bait.
Similar to the amusing formula news, the following is a film trailer for generic Oscar bait. I especially liked the homoerotic undertones in both the superficially straight romantic leads.
[From scanners.]
March 3, 2010
Ke$ha vs. Mick Jagger.
So I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around the following lyrics from Ke$ha’s omnipresent “TiK ToK“:
And now, the dudes are lining up cause they hear we got swagger
But we kick em to the curb unless they look like Mick Jagger.
Mick Jagger? Does Kesha know what Mick Jagger looks like? I suppose he looks pretty good, if a little melty, for a sixty-six-year-old. Indeed, he’s suprisingly well-preserved given what I would imaging touring, recretational drugs, and venereal disease takes out of you. But is he honestly anyone’s idea of a fucking dreamboat exemplar, let alone a twenty-three-year-old pop singer?
Now, perhaps Ke$ha has some sort of time-traveling tale of debauchery in mind when she wrote “TiK ToK.” And, whatever demerits Jagger’s earned, he does have a lyric-worthy last name, not only rhyming with “swagger,” but also sounding pretty badass in general. But if that’s the case, I think I would have preferred some additional lyrical clues to suggest a 60s or 70s setting. Or at least lyrics that don’t contraindicate–e.g. reference to P. Diddy, CDs, junk (as in “ass”), po-po (as in “police”)–such a theory. Something other than ’78 Trans Am the video sports.