Archives

Mar082008

Stuff White People Like Meme, Part 1

So, there’s this blog called Stuff White People Like, which is just what it sounds like: a list of things that white people supposedly like. I’m assuming it’s meant to be a spoof playing off the usual stereotype of white folks being stuffy and terminally square, like when Eddie Murphy gives the black cop grief for how he says “a banana in the tailpipe” in Beverly Hills Cop. I’m assuming that’s what it’s meant to be because, apparently, I’m one of those stuffy and terminally square white folks who doesn’t quite get the joke. I don’t see how this site is funny, and I don’t think it really represents white people in general. It appears to be addressing a very specific type of white person, i.e., the urban, upper-middle-class, liberal white folks. What we used to call yuppies, back in the day. But I’m just being churlish and running off down a tangent…
Getting to the point, somebody took the full list of entries from this blog and bolded the items that she personally liked, just to see how her preferences corresponded to the generalizations, I suppose. SamuraiFrog in turn has decided this is a good beginning for a meme, so he grabbed the list and did the same. And seeing as how I’m such a sucker for good (and really long) meme-age, now I’m doing the same as well. So, without further ado, the bolded items are the stuff this white person likes. Your mileage may — and probably does — vary…

Continue Reading…

spacer
Mar062008

The Appeal of Carson

A couple years back, I devoted a pretty large chunk of copy to trying to explain what I thought was so cool about the late Johnny Carson.

Larry Aydlette sums it up in a single line:

There was something adult, sophisticated and boyishly wink-wink naughty all at the same time.

And he provides some video evidence of what he’s talking about, too:

An appropriate thing to post at this time of night, no?

spacer
Mar062008

Duncan MacLeod vs. John Amsterdam

During the mid-90s, I was borderline obsessed with a television show called Highlander: The Series. Don’t feel bad if you’re not familiar with it. It was a low-budget syndicated spin-off from a relatively obscure movie, and it aired in the wee hours of the morning in many markets, so about the only regular viewers it ever had were insomniacs, night watchmen, and hardcore fanboys. (Actually there seem to be many more fangirls of this series, fairly unusual in sci-fi and fantasy fandom circles.)

One of these days, I’d like to do a detailed entry in which I attempt to explore why the 1986 Highlander film and the subsequent TV version appealed so strongly to me at that point in my life, but that’s not really important right now. For the purposes of this entry, let me simply lay out a few important facts about the show:

  • The protagonist, Duncan MacLeod, is a 400-year-old immortal man who can only be killed by decapitation. He can recover from any other “fatal” injury.
  • Each episode of the series features a number of historical flashbacks which both flesh out Duncan’s long backstory and have some bearing on the episode’s present-day plotline.
  • A significant portion of Duncan’s backstory involves American Indians. (He lived among them for a time when he was trying to find peace and solace from his troubles.)
  • Above all else, Duncan yearns to have a “normal” life, to have children and grow old with a woman he loves. This may be possible if he wins “The Prize.” (It’d take too long to explain right now; just trust me on this one.)
  • Duncan has a friend and confidante who knows about his secret immortality. This friend is an older man who owns a bar and plays blues guitar.
  • Duncan is not a cop, but he often finds himself in law enforcement-type situations, solving mysteries, helping the helpless, defending the innocent, looking for killers, etc.

Okay, have you got all that? Now let’s consider a few things about a new series I caught for the first time tonight called New Amsterdam:

Continue Reading…

spacer
Mar052008

Ricin in Riverton?

I don’t have the sense that the “ricin-in-a-Vegas-hotel-room” story has captivated the nation — to be honest, I completely missed the initial headlines myself — but my ears certainly pricked up over the weekend when I heard that investigators in the case were searching a house in my hometown of Riverton, Utah.

If you haven’t been following this one, here are the details as I understand them:

Continue Reading…

spacer
spacer
Feb292008

TV Title Sequence: The Fantastic Journey

Today’s title sequence is something of a departure in that I don’t actually remember this one. I remember the show — this is the one I mentioned the other day that I used to think I might have imagined — and there are some familiar elements in the video clip, but the sequence as a whole is a total blank spot. See if it rings a bell for you:

Continue Reading…

spacer
Feb282008

What That Oscar Will Really Get You…

People tend to think that winning an Oscar is evidence that an actor is, in the words of Jon Lovitz, a Master Thespian, i.e., an immense talent who appears only in serious cinema that stretches the minds of all who see it, superior to all those journeyman types who eke out a living doing mere movies. Um, no. The truth is that most Oscar winners get lucky. That’s not to say that they’re not talented — although you can always quibble about some — but rather that they had the good sense or the good fortune to choose the right project at the right time. Acting, like careers in every other industry you can think of, depends as much on factors that the individual cannot control as those he or she can, and most of the time, achieving the pinnacle of an Oscar win is followed by an inevitable decline into “paying the mortgage” roles.

All of which is a rather long and pretentious way of introducing the following amusing video, ganked from AMC-TV‘s SciFi Scanner blog:

For the record, I don’t remember Ray Milland as the star of The Thing with Two Heads. No, in my mind, he will forever be the unscrupulous Sire Uri from the original Battlestar Galactica. He appeared only in the three-hour pilot film and was last seen cravenly running for his life from the attacking Cylon ground forces on Carillon (I like to think he took a laser blast in his smug, puffy face and the Ovions ate what was left over), but he’s always stood out in my mind as an embodiment of the petty evil that so often stems from personal wealth and an overblown sense of entitlement.

spacer
Feb282008

The Return of Este… and Maybe the Great Pizza Challenge, Too

Okay, how lame is this? I got the word from Chenopup yesterday afternoon that Este Pizza, the Salt Lake eatery that inspired the still-unfulfilled Great Simple Tricks Pizza Challenge, has finally reopened, many months after a fire shut the place down. Naturally, I planned to report this happy news here on the blog ASAP, but, as fate would have it, I got busy with other things and, well, I didn’t get around to it.

So what do I find this morning when I log into my feed aggregator? Greenberg has already blogged about the news! I got scooped on the reopening of a Salt Lake restaurant by a guy who lives in New Jersey! Doh. My head has been hanging in shame for hours now…

(Incidentally, Brian is still up for the Pizza Challenge and I know Cheno is, so hopefully we can finally get that going… also, a big congratulations to Dave, Este’s owner, on getting the place back in shape. Everyone reading this who might be in the Salt Lake area needs to drive on over there for lunch and welcome him back to business!)

spacer
Feb272008

Declining Linguistic Standards in the Modern Urban Setting

So, I work on a block of buildings that are roughly a century old, and one of them is currently undergoing extensive renovations. That means the nice, peaceful plaza where I like to sit on pleasantly warm days isn’t very inviting right now, what with the constant beep-beep-beep of delivery vehicle back-up alerts and the crash and boom of broken masonry, wood, and metal being dumped down a ten-story-high disposal chute into a giant dumpster below. I’m frankly eager for the whole thing to be over with.

That said, however, the situation does have its amusing aspects. Like the signs I noticed on the building’s front doors today, the ones that warn passersby of “Undry Paint.”

“Undry.” In my day, we used to call that “wet.” I guess times change.

spacer
Feb262008

More Streaming Classics

Chenopup already let the cat out of the bag in the comments to the previous entry, but in case you don’t read those, here’s a follow-up to the news about CBS.com streaming classic television episodes: NBC.com is doing the same thing with some its old shows, namely The A-Team, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, the original Battlestar Galactica, the disco-rific Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (mmmm, Erin Gray), Emergency!, Miami Vice, and Rod Serling’s Night Gallery. (You trivia hounds may remember that Steven Spielberg’s first job was directing Joan Crawford in an episode of Night Gallery…)

Continue Reading…

spacer