Archive for the 'Humor' Category
(Chronologically Listed)
Advances from Apple: Macworld coverage
Here’s the latest product announcement from Apple:
Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard
Did I mention that this was from The Onion? I suspect this is an older video, but I hadn’t seen it before. ..bruce w..
Video for the New Year
I ran across this some months back and just found a link to it again. Some how appropriate for New Year’s Day (though it might have been more appropriate for New Year’s Eve):
The time it took to put this together is a bit staggering. But impressive. ..bruce w..
Dave Barry’s annual review
Back when Dave Barry still wrote a weekly column, Sandra and I had a Sunday morning tradition where I’d read the column out loud to her while she was getting ready for church. The highlight of each year was Dave’s annual recounting of the events of that year, in his own style. Well, he stopped doing his weekly column a few years back, but he still does the annual review, and 2008 is now officially in the crosshairs:
Speaking of epic performances, in . . .
JULY
. . . Barack Obama, having secured North and South America, flies to Germany without using an airplane and gives a major speech — speaking English and German simultaneously — to 200,000 mesmerized Germans, who immediately elect him chancellor, prompting France to surrender.
Meanwhile John McCain, at a strategy session at a golf resort, tells his top aides to prepare a list of potential running mates, stressing that he wants somebody ”who is completely, brutally honest.” Unfortunately, because of noise from a lawn mower, the aides think McCain said he wants somebody ”who has competed in a beauty contest.” This will lead to trouble down the road.
Speaking of trouble, the economic news continues to worsen with the discovery that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have sent $87 billion to a Nigerian businessman with a compelling e-mail story.
Also troubling is the news from Iran, which test-fires some long-range missiles, although Iranian President Wackjob Lunatic insists that Iran intends to use these missiles “for stump removal.”
In sports, the government of China, in an effort to improve air quality for the Beijing Olympics, bans flatulence.
Be sure to read the whole thing. ..bruce w..
The Star Wars Holiday Special! (1978)
Courtesy of Ace of Spades comes the most reviled, most wretched “holiday special” ever produced. First, here’s the Vanity Fair article to give you the entire ugly background:
In the summer of 1978, Bruce Vilanch had a bad feeling about the Star Wars television special he’d been hired to write. A veteran of the comedy wars who has since written material for 16 Oscar telecasts and starred as the extra-large Edna Turnblad in the Broadway musical adaptation of John Waters’s Hairspray, Vilanch had just finished working on Bette Midler’s 1977 TV special, Ol’ Red Hair Is Back, for producers Gary Smith and Dwight Hemion when they threw him what sounded like a plum assignment: a spot on the writing team that would help George Lucas adapt more of the Star Wars saga for television.
A year had passed since the theatrical release of Lucas’s gee-whiz space epic, and in that time Star Wars had become the highest-grossing movie in history as well as a cultural phenomenon with its very own lexicon and mythology. With a sequel still two years away from theaters, Lucas had been sold on the idea that a Star Wars holiday television special—to be broadcast on CBS the weekend before Thanksgiving, when Nielsen audiences were plentiful—would sustain interest in the franchise, move more toys off the shelves, and maybe even pick up some new fans who hadn’t seen the movie.
Though Lucas would not be involved in the actual shooting of the special—Smith and Hemion would oversee that—he knew the tales he wanted to tell and planned to work with the show’s team of seasoned TV writers to develop his ideas into a viable script. For those who had been summoned, the prospect of collaborating with the father of the Force initially sounded like a sure bet. “We were really excited, because, ‘My God, this is an annuity—Star Wars!’” says Lenny Ripps, another writer who worked on the special. “How could it lose?”
How indeed.
For those of you with the stamina, here a link to the complete Star Wars Holiday Special itself. I suspect most (if not all) of the actors involved wished that no record of this existed. Heh. ..bruce w..
Some seasonal cheer for you
Courtesy of The Daily Bayonet, who got it from Jammie Wearing Fool:
Heh.
UPDATE: And here, courtesy of Dave Barry, is striking scientific proof that white people — particularly Southern white people — are inherently rhythmically challenged:
..bruce w..
Truth set to music
One of the proudest accomplishments of my adult professional life is that I actually supported myself and my family for a few years solely by writing. That was back in the late 1980s, when it wasn’t quite as easy as it had been in the 30s, 40s, and 50s. However, it was much easier to do in the 80s than it is nowadays. Consider that when I left Oasis Systems/FTL Games in the fall of 1984, BYTE Magazine came along and put me on a monthly retainer to write one, maybe two articles each month. That retainer worked out to a 33% raise over my ending full-time salary at Oasis/FTL and nearly double my full-time salary at Monitor Labs prior to coming to Oasis/FTL. Nice work if you can get it.
But, by and large, you can’t anymore. While newspapers have started dying recently, magazines have been dying for decades. By my own count, I have written for fifteen or so different periodicals over the past 30 years, the large majority of which are no longer publishing. That’s what makes this musical tribute to all the magazines that are gone — done by Bill Dyszel at CinemaSolo – both funny and poignant:
And, yes, as the final line says, I have had a magazine “close up shop and owe [me] money.” Hat tip to Gerard Van der Leun at American Digest (one of the best blogs on the entire ‘net). ..bruce w..
The nightmare before Christmas
No, I’m not talking about the current economic meltdown. It turns out that Bavaria has some interesting Christmas customs:
The gallery of Bavarian Christmas photos explains:
The troll-like Perchten or Krampus emerge when it gets dark. The gnarled and gruesome figures stomp through the Christmas markets of Bavaria, scaring children and sometimes even give women a spanking.
Cool! Here are two more comments from the gallery:
Viewed by light the Perchten don’t look all that scary, but some people still think their appearances may scar little children for life.
Is that the point?
The Perchten/Krampus tradition is growing more and more across the country and often is accompanied by a lot of alcohol these days.
Not a surprise, as Dave Barry would say (hat tip to his blog for the link). Be sure to look at the whole gallery; the Perchta above is one of the milder examples. ..bruce w..
Christmas Cookie Blogging
In what has become a holiday tradition at our house, we have once again made several thousand Christmas cookies to send to friends, family and random people serving in far away lands.
I come from a long line of cookie makers, with my mother and grandmother being high practitioners of the art. In years past Mom would load up tins of cookies to give to our elderly realtives a day or two before Christmas in what became known as the “Geriatric Run”.
This year, I have had some problems getting the cookies to come out the way I like them, in part because of the dry, warm weather that persists in Southern California.
I had made several hundred sugar cookies, and had them set aside in the refrigerator. I made a variety of shapes including snowmen, trains and our favorite the “Christmas Cactus”. I went on to making “spritz” cookies, which were suffering some of the same problems that the sugar cookies did, puffing up a bit much and coming out more crunchy than I like. I remarked to Tammi that “The camels are not coming out right!”, meaning the camel die shape on the spritz press.
Well, the next day after work, Tammi has been busy decorating sugar cookies with different color frosting, and there are dozens of them laid out on the table for the frosting to dry a bit. I looked over all the shapes, and they looked really good, but a few of them were quite odd.
I picked one up and looked at it. Tammi had made the outline of two eyes and two legs on the shape. I held it up to here and asked “What is this one?”. She smiled and said “that’s one of those camels you were having such trouble with, didn’t they turn out ok after all?”.
I began laughing and flipped the cookie the other way to show her (frosting side away from her). She exclaimed “Oh damn!” as she recognized that she had drawn camel shapes on my trains.
And so now we have a new Chirstmas cookie shape to enjoy… the “Freight Camel”! Photo below is two of them on the cookie decorating assembly line, ready to pull their first string of cars over the desert.
Selecting The Best Bus For London
Having spent a bit of time in the UK, I can attest that in general the programming on television is just as mindless and annoying as the US has on average.
But like the US, there are some patches of real brilliance. For example the below clip from the car focused show “Top Gear” where the crew work hard to help the City of London determine which is the best bus… by racing them.