Category: junk thought

Anxious Noises

I’ve been wanting to write this relatively quick post since last Friday, so here goes:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bB8fCm1dTOs]

If you’ve been near a television in the last few weeks, you’ve seen an ad for Inception. Despite the overplay of the commercials, I’m quite excited to see it – partially because it seems to have a great Movie Noise, which you can hear above.

(I poked around for a better version, I know I’ve heard it at the end of at least one of the spots, but there are a million ads to check, and my internet is still limping.)

As far as Movie Noises go, it’s pretty fantastic, probably better than the Silent Hill Siren:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uomMX66AKFM]

– although not quite as good as the Jason-noise:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBkdtEkAZhM]

Still, for my money, there’s no single more terrifying or superior Movie Noise than the slamming from The Entity.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVZZJVpRU-A#t=0m47s]

(Starts at 55 seconds.)

Piratania

Where did we pick up The Pirate Accent from, as if Piracy were a nation?

Wikipedia has this to say on the topic:

Stereotypical pirate accents tend to resemble accents either from Cornwall or Bristol in South West England, though they can also be based on Elizabethan era English or other parts of the world. Pirates in film, television and theatre are generally depicted as speaking English in a particular accent and speech pattern that sounds like a cross between a West country accent and an old English accent, patterned on that of Robert Newton’s performance as Long John Silver in 1950 film Treasure Island.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVX5ZfTcGNU]

I ask as I’ve recently been piratically spoiled, by a true master of the pirate tongue, Captain Ignatius Pigheart:

Gaargh, as I sit here with a pot o’ crude coral rum and me peg leg restin’ on the table behind me, I’m minded to recall a day most dear to me black and twisted heart. – more

German Beer

It’s tough to get a decent German beer here in North America, and there’s a good reason for that.

The beer industry in Germany, (or so I’ve read,) is very localized – each region has a preferred brew that they specialize in. This only deepens the kind of inter-area rivalries that develop everywhere in the world, and prevents any one beer from becoming the Miller/Molson/Bud of Germany.

It’s also the reason German beer is so horribly delicious: no one wants to come from the place with shoddy ale.

(I’m looking at you, Leipzig.)

To help keep things that way, there’s a special dictate, The Reinheitsgebot:

The Reinheitsgebot (literally “purity order”), sometimes called the “German Beer Purity Law” or the “Bavarian Purity Law” in English, is a regulation concerning the production of beer in Germany. In the original text, the only ingredients that could be used in the production of beer were water, barley, and hops. After its discovery, yeast became the fourth legal ingredient. For top-fermenting beers the use of sugar is also permitted. – wikipedia

Not only does this mean that brewers are required to be reasonably pure in their brewing, it also means the extra garbage that gets thrown into North American wobbly pops prevents them from being sold in the Bundesrepublik Deutschland – without cheap Coors to crowd it off the market, Dunkler Bock has room to flourish.

Drinking Scene From Inglourious Basterds

Crying Over Spillane'd Milk

I don’t usually quote large portions of articles, but it was tough to know where to stop with this one:

Son of NYC mobster Mickey Spillane falls to death

NEW YORK – The son of murdered Irish mobster Mickey Spillane tumbled out the window of his sixth-floor apartment in a fatal fall Saturday, police and his uncle said.

Robert “Bobby” Spillane, an actor who had roles on television’s “Rescue Me” and “Law & Order,” fell from his Midtown Manhattan apartment in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood near Times Square where his father, not to be confused with the pulp fiction writer of the same name, had run rackets back in the 1960s and 1970s.

No criminality was suspected in Bobby Spillane’s death.

Jim McManus, Spillane’s uncle and a longtime neighborhood power broker, called Spillane’s death a “terribly sad accident.”

“He was the nicest kid in the world,” said McManus, who is a district leader of the McManus Midtown Democratic Association, a political club. “He helped everyone.”

Butting out his cigar, he added: “Nice newspaper you’re running there, be a shame if something happened to it.”

Is “he was leaning against the window screen” the gangster equivalent of “she walked into a door”?

Also, “criminality”? Are we lookin’ at the criminality of this friggin’ mook or what? Let’s stick with “police have no reason to suspect foul play”, or even “the death was an accident.”

A Ghost Question

What if there really were ghosts, and not only that, what if they had a bit of an over-population issue?

What if every chamber you aren’t in is packed wall-to-wall with ethereal phantoms, which simply retreat to the unoccupied spaces as you move from room to room?
A Frame From The Film Stuck On YouI mean, I’m just sayin’.

Hairy

Just a quick thought: I’ve long maintained at least some portion of facial hair, and it’s always been a bit of a fidget source during my deepest thinking periods. Is stroking a beard/goatee reflexively while running your brain over a problem a left over relic from the grooming habits of our primate ancestors?
No, Neither Of These Are Me

Ape Laws Of Physics

Planet Of The Apes

Listen, I understand that questioning the logic of the original Planet Of The Apes is like weeping into the ocean, but there’s something that’s always bugged me. It’s a classic ending, but how exactly did half of the Statue Of Liberty get onto some random beach? Never mind that it’s obvious they crash landed in Utah, which is no little walk from New York – we’re talking about a 60,000 pound copper statue, even getting it from Liberty Island to the mainland would be a ridiculous task.

It didn’t just wash up on shore.

The thing is, I can’t watch that portion of the film without getting the mental image of either:

  • Nuclear explosions tossing the statue into the air and re-depositing it somewhere along the American east coast, like some sort of thermo-nuclear Krazy Kat cartoon, or,
  • The final battle that destroyed humanity being a lot like Ghostbusters 2, and mankind was wiped out after animating giant statues to fight each other.

Krazy Kat