I try not to “re-blog” other peoples’ content too much — they work(ed) hard to be funny/crazy/stupid/embarrassing to themselves & their families, and I don’t want to develop a rep as a plagiarist.
If something is worthy, I like to take a pass at it too and contribute my own two cents to [insert witty blogger's name here]‘s scholarly analysis.
But Bobby Finger’s break-down of nouveau Christmas classic Love, Actually is pretty much perfect. You can check it out here at The Hairpin.
A few notes of my own, though:
— My wife isn’t a big rom-com fan. She’s OK with Love, Actually, and thought Crazy Stupid Love was good, but generally she likes to tease me about the fact that I will stop and watch any of the following whenever they pop up on the cable guide:
• When Harry Met Sally
• Four Weddings & A Funeral
• Sleepless In Seattle
• You’ve Got Mail
Essentially, anything with Meg Ryan and/or Tom Hanks circa me no longer thinking girls were icky.
— How weird is it to see Andrew Lincoln butchering zombies on The Walking Dead now after having his role as Mark in Love, Actually be the one that defined him for the rest of the 2000′s?
— Whatever happened to Kiera Knightley?
— Is Bill Nighy contractually-obligated to appear in every single big-budget, ensemble-casted movie out of the UK?
— Colin Firth was awesome in the BBC’s Pride & Prejudice and Bridget Jones’ Diary, but can we all agree that his entire career is built on two roles in which he played the same character (his last name in BJD is even Darcy, for f@#k’s sake!) and that he’s pretty much been coasting since the early 2000′s?
— Hugh Grant IS awesome in everything he’s in, but can we all agree that his entire career is built on playing the same character (himself) and that he’s pretty much been coasting since Four Weddings & A Funeral?
Typically I try to not let my home life bleed into these posts too much — I am boring, Japanese robots are not. But the other night after I was done working, I laid down on the bed and Oliver just made a bee-line for my arm, and well…this happened:
Bliss complete.
Have a great weekend, guys! And for those of you mid-Atlantic folks still trying to shore up your holiday shopping, you could do a lot worse than stopping by my booth at the Punk Rock Flea Market in Philly on Sunday! I’ll have free stuff like comics, candy & stickers waiting for you, plus event-only deals on shirts, belts, bags & more! Not too shabby for a meager $3 entry donation, eh?
THE PUNK ROCK FLEA MARKET-DOME
461 N. 9th St.
Philadelphia, PA 19123
Also, in case you missed it: my very own Whale Trip tee was featured quite prominently all over this week’s episode of ABC’s Modern Family! Alex Dunphy knows what’s up; do you?
Nevermind the fact that I’m playing fast and loose with the rules of space/time by using an NPR ‘Sandwich Monday’ post for content on my ‘WTF Wednesday’ post—this is terrifying.
Quick aside: Sandwich Mondays is just one of many hilarious reasons that NPR is worthy of our tax dollars. Do yourself a favor and click the link above for past installments—you won’t regret it!
The ‘Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me!’ staff decided to take their cardiovascular health into their own hands last month and review Denny’s Mac N’ Cheese Big Daddy Patty Melt. Described on Denny’s menu as “A hand-pressed beef patty topped with our NEW creamy Mac ‘n Cheese, melted Cheddar cheese and zesty Frisco sauce on grilled potato bread,” this is clearly (and literally) not a sandwich for the faint of heart. Also, why is ‘Mac ‘n Cheese’ capitalized here? Pretty sure it’s not a proper noun—unless it’s referring to Mac and C.H.E.E.S.E., aka the third-best Joey-related joke on Friends (#1 being the fact that Joey’s favorite food is “sandwiches”, and #2 being Joey’s ultimate fantasy of scoring with the hot copy store girl while in a tub full of Monica’s home-made jam. Naturally.)
While best described by Robert: “This has everything you need combined in one convenient package. It’s a Swiss Army heart attack,” the final verdict agreed upon by the judges seemed…well, I guess positive, but with a lot of warnings and modifiers tossed in:
“This is really, really tasty. It’s embarrassing to like something this bad so much. If you can get over your embarrassment, and your love of being alive, this is worth a try.”
So Australia was surprisingly like the U.S. in a lot of ways. But every one of those similarities was just a little off for some reason. Here’s a list of ten things that were just weird:
So I thought to myself in the airport newsstand at LAX “I bet Meredith misses American junk food. I’ll bring some Oreos® along!” Good thing, too, because in Australia, they don’t have Oreos®. The have Oreos® Classic.
2. The Royal w/ Cheese (AKA, the f#$king metric system):
They use the same road sign set-up that we do on their highways—kelly green field with white border and text, in the same font. But my ability to determine how soon we would arrive at a destination was thrown by the fact that all of the distances were in kilometers, as was the speedometer in our rental. This confusion extended to filling up at gas stations—sold by the liter, not the gallon, and rather than stating that regular unleaded was $1.45 per liter, it just said “145.8″ on the signs. So the cost of gas (and only gas) was expressed in hundreds of cents.
3. Alcohol Serving and Cost:
If you’re a cocktail and/or beer drinker and you’re in Australia, I hope you’re either loaded or OK with subsisting on wine. It’s easily the cheapest of their adult beverages. The average cost of cocktails in Melbourne is $18. Decent craft beers aren’t much less expensive, selling for between $8 and $12 a pint. Also, beers are served in one of three sizes: pots, pints, and jugs. Pints are like they are throughout the rest of the world (roughly 20 fluid oz.), but pots are half that size, and jugs are roughly equal to two pints (40 fluid oz.) Depending on the strength of the brew, you’ll want to adjust the size of your glass accordingly.
4. “Am I driving drunk, or just in Australia?”
They drive on the left side of the road, and the driver sits on the right side of the car. The toughest aspect of this? Remembering to use the lever on the right side of the steering column to signal turns and lane changes; the left side lever will (naturally) turn on your wipers. It’s very disorienting the first couple of days.
5. There are only white people in Australia.
Not really, but you’d certainly be forgiven for assuming that based on the television programming, especially the commercials. I think there may have been an islander in one of them, but that particular commercial was in black & white—almost as if they were trying to obscure the fact that there was a non-white actor involved. Now, our apartment had VERY basic channel offerings, but it was still noticeable enough that Meredith and I both commented on it.
6. Soccer is football. Football is GRIDIRON!
This was admittedly hilarious and awesome. They were actually airing commercials advertising open tryouts for refs, coaches AND players, and the clips of Australian “gridiron” they were showing throughout were so poorly-attended and sad-looking; you’d probably find more fans at a pee-wee football game for under-10′s here than the number that were watching the games in Australia.
7. They really love art:
Melbourne in particular was just COVERED in cool street art and graffiti, and that’s b/c it’s considered a valid form of artistic expression (as it should be). We walked by a couple of guys working on a mural in an alley off a main street at TWO IN THE AFTERNOON. The U.S. really needs to get on board with this.
8. Pumpkin, pumpkin everywhere, but not a pie to eat:
Basically, every restaurant had a pumpkin-centric item on the menu, but barring one establishment that offered a pumpkin pie ice cream sundae, they don’t seem to use pumpkin for sweet applications. They’re missing out!
9. They have a really vibrant music scene that is surprisingly (and wonderfully) not U.S.-centric.
We heard a lot of great indie-rock and pop music on the radio that just hasn’t broken through stateside, and it was pretty revelatory to find an entire continent with a rich pop musical history that I’ve only as yet scratched the surface of.
10. Wi-Fi = Dial-Up:
Seriously, the most frustrating aspect of being in Australia is the painfully slow internet speed. Even wired “high-speed” connections weren’t much better, with most browser windows freezing if more than two tabs were opened at one time. Maybe Al Gore was telling the truth when he claimed he invented the thing.
Oh, Persian kittens, so adorable. The kind of cute that is so unbearable it makes you feel violent. These guys know what I’m talking about. The problem is that eventually they’re no longer kittens, and you spend the next 15-20 years rooming with Wilford Brimley:
So enjoy your current state of cuteness while it lasts, India.
So DirecTV just started airing a new commercial, and it blows. Actually they first aired the new “Truth” commercial a couple weeks back, and it’s pretty lame, but is saved by the adorable little kid at the end:
The NEW new commercial features some douchey hedge-fund guy on house arrest hinting at insider trading and still living it up in the multi-million dollar “prison” he’s confined to. But you know what each is missing? FREAKING TINY GIRAFFES.
Broken English is hilarious enough, but toss in a petite giraffe and you have comedy gold. Unfortunately, DirecTV must not have received that memo, since they seem to be moving on from the Russian clips. But not before commissioning this amazing bit of viral marketing: the official website of the Sokoblovsky Farm, fake purveyor of petite giraffes, complete with broken English copy, still photos, and looped webcam of the giraffes hanging out around the farm.
So after a quick diversion into the robotic realm last week, I thought I’d wrap up this two-part series about my recent European escapades!
Previously I posted some pics of the cool art to be seen in Oslo, Norway and the choicest selections from Berlin’s East Side Gallery. This week’s focus is a bit more on Berlin’s excellent street art scene.
This awesome Japanese woodcut-style portrait decorated the side of a hotel across the street from the East Side Gallery facing the Spree River. We really loved the economical use of color and elegant contours and just thought in general it was great art AND marketing for the hotel; it’s hard to miss AND hard to forget.
After a couple of mis-steps seeking out the cream of the art scene crop that we’d heard so much about before arriving in Berlin, we asked the proprietor of Big Brobot, a very cool book/toy/comic/t-shirt shop in the Friedrichshain section of the city, if he could recommend any good galleries that exhibited more street art and pop art (as opposed to the truly awful installations we’d seen up to that point.) He kindly pointed us in the direction of the NeuroTitan gallery and shop.
After a couple of missed turns, we finally were pointed in the direction of the correct alley leading to the gallery. Once we stepped into the alley, we were greeted with some really wonderful pieces of street art, from spray can art to traditional media to paste-ups.
The alley then led into a courtyard that featured this very cool steam-powered sculpture of a steampunk bat-creature with flapping wings, roving eyes, and flailing proboscis. I really wish I’d switched on my video camera to catch it in action!
Finally, to get to the NeuroTitan gallery, we had to climb a few flights of stairs to enter the shop area before checking out the exhibit. While the exhibit was pretty “meh”, the trip up the stairs was awesome, with the walls just COVERED in really cool graffiti and street art. One of our favorites was the “Fashion Chimp” ad paste-up, done in the style of a 1930s-40s women’s magazine. Who wouldn’t want a giant, life-sized “fashion chimp” for their home?
That pretty much wraps up our 2011 European adventure. Sad as we were not to be able to make it to Tokyo, it was an excellent diversion none the less, and hopefully the planet is done kicking Japan’s ass for a few years and we can make it over there soon.
In OTHER Ex-Boyfriend news—AT LEAST two new designs are going to be up by the end of this week. If you or someone you know is into vampires, kitties, and/or kawaii-style art, be sure to check back!
ALSO: Be sure to tune into The Daily Show on Comedy Central tonight at 11pm. Our good friend Jackson Galaxy from Animal Planet will be sporting our very own Fuzz Aldrin this evening during Aasif Mandvi’s segment! Woot! Be sure to spread the word!
UPDATE: The Daily Show segment featuring Jackson Galaxy wearing Fuzz Aldrin tonight has been postponed thanks to some big political news today, but I’ll keep you guys updated about when it really airs!
I used to watch Animal Planet a lot. Like, if I were to create an a la carte list of channels I couldn’t live without, it would have been on there.
But a few years ago they took a sharp turn toward some strange programming—a lot of this “when animals attack” type stuff, where survivors talk about how they shouldn’t be alive because they got mauled by a bear or bitten by a spider or a copperhead. And I am completely on board with those of us who prefer reptiles & insects to cats & dogs (and I guess fish & birds). But shows like that aren’t really for pet owners. It’s really sensationalist in tone and hearkens back to the really bottom-of-the-barrel programming Fox used to show in the late 80s / early 90s between airings of Married…With Children and The Simpsons and COPS. I sorta lost interest.
But Animal Planet has officially landed my ass back on the couch with My Cat From Hell featuring feline behaviorist Jackson Galaxy.
I guess if I was forced to draw a comparison, it’s sort of like a cat version of The Dog Whisperer or It’s Me Or The Dog. But the difference between those shows and Jackson’s is down to the fundamental differences between dogs & cats. Cesar Millan and Victoria Stilwel are all about establishing a clear hierarchy between dogs and their owners. Which is necessary with dogs; they’re pack animals, and are wired to respect the authority of the “alpha” in the house, whether it’s another dog or it’s human companion.
Jackson’s approach to cats is more about changing the behavior of the humans and the environment the cats interact with. Which is perfectly fitting for dealing with cats; there is no “forcing” a cat to do anything you want—it’s just about making them think that they’re in control, even though you’re pulling the strings out of sight by adding scratching posts and cat perches and adding more play time to their days. Jackson gets it, and that’s why I love his show. It also doesn’t hurt that his name is awesome, he’s clearly creative (he’s a musician and artist and has some beautiful body art), and what’s more, he’s a fan of Ex-Boyfriend; check out the video below and see who he’s wearing on his shirt at 1:45!
(Thanks to Kate Benjamin at ModernCat.net for the heads up! Catch Jackon’s show on Animal Planet Saturdays at 9pm)
Last week I featured pieces from the recent Quentin vs. Coen show that I liked in particular, but this week I wanted to focus a bit more on artist Dave Perillo, whose “The Dude Abides” I mentioned as one of my favorites from the exhibition.
Perillo operates out of Philadelphia, and his art style is a pop cultural mash-up of influences, but if I had to describe it in a sentence, I’d probably say “Saul Bass goes kawaii.” A longer description would probably be “pop cultural artifacts from the late 70′s and 80′s presented in a late 50′s-mid 60′s design context,” including The Bugaloos, Voltron, and Weird Science.
You can check out more of Dave Perillo’s work on his blog here!
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