Someone should go over and hassle Jessica May – I’ve distinctly heard her strumming unknown songs around the house, and now that she’s done congealing life in her tummy she needs to get back to her real duties: playing music and blogging. Har.
The holidays are upon us like a murder of crows on a heart attack victim at a picnic, which gives me an excuse to crack out my favourite carol:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ftld7Ohojg]
I was watching the the glass teat the other day and was shown a commercial for some Minipops knock off CD for kids. The formula is familiar: take popular music (in this case Top 40 Hits of the ’60s through ’80s), clean up any lyrics that might be off-putting, then have some overly self-possessed children squeal it all into microphones while cousin Eddie and his band play backup.
This isn’t the commercial in question, but a demonstration of the genre:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfpL41Pwj50]
I’ve been unable to locate the original commercial in question, but it contained a remake of a certain hit for Jimmy Soul, a hit re-written to tell children to do whatever makes them happy for the rest of their lives. Great message, and I could see some 5-year-old girl falling in love with those happy tones, tucking that song away as a secret method of brightening a bad day, and then hitting fifteen and suddenly encountering the original:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qh9ZZgDqzAg]
Ugh.
(I found Kris & Scott’s Daily Affirmation ably demolished that festering nugget.)
Not long now before Jeff Dunham’s comedy massacre is just another cancelled-show-rerun to avoid on slow Sundays.
Have you ever heard of Lollyphile? I hadn’t till just now, but their selections look enticing. Pictured above is the Irish Cream Lolly, which I may need to pick up a dozen of, but if that doesn’t grab your attention you might consider Maple-Bacon.
From their site:
The salty chunks of bacon make a delicious and unique counterpoint to the subtle sweetness of the maple…
Indeed.
Their Absinthe Pops sound nice too.
Warren Ellis has posted up some notes on how he tends his notebooks that I found rather interesting – although I admit I’m a bit of a creative process voyeur.
I’ve also moved back to doing the majority of my brain thrushing with pencil on paper, despite my trusty tablet laptop. My notebook travels snuggly, provides an immediately accessible interface for both text and diagrams, and allows for weird spatial change ups that a word doc can’t carry off.
The truth is though, in the end I need to have everything digitized and skimmable, (most of the actual construction work still happens at the keys after all,) so I tag most of my entries: Scrap, Journal, Blog, Idea, Fodder, etc. My handwriting is tremendously unreadable, but by making a little effort in keeping the tags legible I can use my scanner and some OCR software to translate things into a relatively easy-to-search interface.
Anyhow, his post also reminded me that I’d meant to point towards Lovecraft’s Idea Notebook, which is another enlightening stroll through someone else’s noggin.
[googlevideo=http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8653788864462752804&ei=IoYiS9HVCcSXlAfXnNywAQ&q=fog+of+war#]
I don’t often use this platform to push people into illegal activity, but I stand by my statements that Fog Of War is one of the most important, and oddly hypnotic, documentaries produced in the last decade.
This is a scan from the back of an old Green Lantern comic I had kicking around my office.
The game was so lacking in fun they had to make up a bunch of fake reviews, passed off as comedy, to try and sell it – a ploy so lame that it limps home with “The Boston Orb”, which isn’t even trying to be humourous so much as just not lawsuit inducing.
In the end, despite the fact that it was pretty widely advertised, “James Bond As Seen In Octopussy”, (the official title) never made it to market. There’s a bit of conjecture out there as to what happened, but I’m betting that listening to the same 8 bars of the Bond theme while murdering an endless supply of generic bandits atop The Möbius Strip Express is something closer to secret agent hell than a game.
The outside of the place was choked in the scent of stale urine – I was relieved to be smothered in cheap cigar smoke as the door clicked shut behind me.
At the end of a long hall I brushed a bead curtain aside, slid a tentative foot into the room.
Suddenly everyone was sitting at attention.
“We don’t like your kind here.” The hairy one growled, his eyes glittering.
“Uh,” I responded, my tongue having stalled.
“Hey – I said it was time to take a walk.” He leaned forward, his pipe shaking between his teeth.
I quickly considered trying to make friends, but a look around the room made it clear no one wanted to shake.
“I’ll let myself out.”
