Barkerburgh

So, the last three nights Space was running what turned out to be an excellent miniseries, ‘The Lost Room‘. It was kinda spooky and weirdly normal. Based on the discovery of some everyday objects with odd powers; just a pair of scissors, but they rotate objects; an ordinary watch that hardboils an egg. The thing was that these and dozens of other objects with other odd powers came from an strange event at a New Mexico motel in 1961. One religious group thinks that God is dead and these are pieces of God; collecting them all together will bring back God or allow them to talk to God. One man wants to collect all these objects and recreate the event that created them and so bring back his dead son.

The logic and reasoning within the show was remarkably internally consistent for this sort of thing but it also seemed like the paranoid delusions of a madman (one of whom we meet in the last episode). Put these three objects together to open a secret door. But where’s the door? We’ll find it by examining these decades old Polaroids!

Do you remember the wall full of newspaper clippings in ‘A Dangerous Mind’?

Moody, creepy, big fun!

Now A&E’s been advertising ‘Wedding Wars‘. What if the gays went on strike?

During the first episode of The Lost Room I was surfing during a commercial break. I landed on A&E and saw a newsdesk with a female anchor on the left and a male anchor on the right. The male anchor is saying “I’m on strike too, asswipes.” Who wouldn’t laugh?

So when A&E reran the show at 1:00am, I watched it. Here’s the gist: the Maine governor’s daughter’s fiance’s gay brother is hired to plan the Governor’s daughter’s wedding to the gay wedding planner’s brother. The Governor comes out (you should pardon the expression) against gay marriage, which pisses off the gay wedding planner and sparks a strike by gays across the continental United States. The part with the news anchor that I surfed to was just as the strike was spreading; the teleprompter guy was a friend of Dorothy.

Turned out to be a nice little screwballish comedy with some good jokes and a happy ending, but what would you expect?

Now, if you really want a crazzy (sic) Christmas comedy, check out, on A&E (I’m sure they’ll run it a dozen more times in the next week and a half), a comedy based on ‘A Christmas Carol’ called ‘Karroll’s Christmas‘. The twist is that the spirits get the wrong address and start harrassing Mr Rosecog’s neighbour, who it turns out, has Christmas issues of his own. Highlights are Wallace Shawn as Mr Rosecog (anagram it) and Verne Troyer as Christmas Future.

That is to say, anagrams for “Merry Christmas”…which, BTW, in case I don’t see you, Merry Christmas. And thanks for all the fish. I mean friendliness.

CERAMISTS MYRRH
CERAMIST MYRRHS
MATRICES MYRRHS
CHAMMY STIRRERS
MISCARRY THERMS
MARTYRS CHIMERS
MARTYR SMIRCHES

I especially like the last two.

The Internet Anagram Server’s take on “merry christmas anagrams”

A while back Anneli sent me a link to a short story contest the challenge of which was to write a vampire short story with all the cliches in 2500 words.

I tried. I went over the word count and when I tried to edit it down, was not at all satisfied with the results.

Here’s the original.

Last weekend on MuchMusic they showed the Jack Black virtuoso vehicle “‘The School of Rock” couple of times.

I first remember noticing Jack Black in the “X-Files” episode where Giovanni Ribisi played a character who could call lightning strikes. Jack Black was his best friend, so he got fried. I’ve seen him in other things like ‘Shallow Hal’ in which he was quite good and “Mars Attacks” where I hardly noticed him.

I usually don’t like watching theatrical movies on TV, especially on TBS or Spike, because the commercial breaks literally (figuratively speaking, of course) break up the rhythm of the movie. Most such stations also heavily edit the movie, and, of course, silently bleep the profanity (or even just the off-colour language), or overdub it with innocuous phrasing. Leslie told me about seeing ‘Sideways’ and hearing Thomas Hayden Church’s character refer to someone, through innocuo-dubbing, as an ‘ashcroft’.

There have been exceptions where the editing or commercials didn’t harm it too much; “Legally Blonde”, “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”, “Knight’s Tale”, but (okay, sit down, this one is bad) when TBS showed ‘The Matrix”, they cut the scene with the all children potentials in the Oracle’s apartment, so that when Neo and Trinity are zooming up the elevator shaft on the way to rescue Morpheus, and Neo says ‘There is no spoon’, it just doesn’t make any goddam sense.

But I digress. Hoo boy.

Back to “The School of Rock”; it was hilarious. So much so that, despite the commercials (short breaks, oddly for a demographically driven station like MuchMusic - maybe it’s the attention span thing…), I watched it the second time they showed it that day. The awesome Joan Cusack is nearly perfect as the principal of the prep school where Jack Black’s character Dewey underhandedly gets a supply teacher job meant for his friend and roommate.

You may recall that the movie is about a bunch of uniformed (totally apropos in more ways than one) students who Dewey turns into a metal rock band. Well, the kids are great, the plot is delightfully daffy and the denoument is not what you’d expect, although it’s also nearly perfect.

Roger Ebert’s surprising review…

“Music and blasters and old Jedi masters”

The Star Wars Cantina Parody song by Mark Jonathan Davis.

Y’all want to click on the ‘Cantina.wav’ link to hear this song.

If you’re listening to it in Winamp or Windows Media Player or VLan, or anything that has visualizations, turn the lights off and the visualizations on, and like just groove.

1> ‘The Unit’ looks like a good show.

2> So does ‘Boston Legal’.

3> That poor kid in Detroit who the 911 operator told to stop fooling around with the 911 system…

4> I really should have been watching ‘Babylon 5′ years ago.

5> Dean Koontz’es’s book ‘From the Corner of His Eye’ is a good read, nicely constructed, even though hardly anything really plotty happens until about page 600.

6> ‘My Name is Earl’ gets funnier and funnier.

7> Venus Express!

8> I love this weather.

9> The last few episodes of ‘Battlestar Galactica’ have been kickass, except I missed it both times on Space this past weekend through bad TV viewing planning. I guess I need to take a course.

10> ‘Coronation Street’ is getting kinda wacky, but that’s good. It’s a little boring when things are normal.

11> Nancy Grace is a foul human being.

12> If I was taller, I could see farther in a crowd during an emergency.

I just reread the book for the first time in over twenty years; what a blast! (I want to write ‘what a slartibartblast’, but I won’t.)

Then I watched the movie again on the computer. I didn’t see it at the cinema and was pleasantly surprised by it when I first saw it on the small screen.

Same again, but even more so, with the book fresh in my mind.

Take a look at Roger Ebert’s Little Movie Glossary.

What it is is a compendium of movie archetypes, stereotypes, tropes (in a loose sense), and jokes based on all the former, that people have submitted to him over the years.

Some are funny, some are clever, some are interesting, but they’re all fun.

This is the longer archive.

Enjoy yourself, but be safe.

Sometime in 1997 (I think….it was during the first smoking ban and my favourite pub had been empty for two or three weeks) I emailed you from CBC, using the pseudonym ‘Deep Pants’ about the municipal government’s looming ban on fatty foods in eating establishments.

You used it the very next day, and it was about one third of your column. I was reading the Sun on the subway that day and barked out loud when I turned to Page Six.

(I’m not bragging. I mean, hell, I couldn’t have done it without you!)

And to prove it’s really me, Deep Pants, I’ll tell you something only you and I would know; I said there would be no second-hand fat lawsuits, but you changed that part.

And to jog your memory a bit more, I mentioned healthy menu items like ‘60 Year Old Swede & Sour Pork’ and ‘Aerobica Coffee’.

I kept the email and the column for years, but have now found it missing.

Any chance you have an overflowing business box in a storage facility in Scarborough you can dig out and sift through?

That’d be real menschy of you.

Miss your columns; some days they were the best part of the paper.

Just found your blog. Working on the passively humorous curmudgeon, are you? Well, good for you and God love ya.

Please visit Flame Warriors by Mike Reed.

He describes the types who start, engage in, or perpetuate flame wars in discussion groups.

Now, I would never do such a thing [subliminal] under my own name or known alias [/subliminal] but I (like everyone else) have had to face, deal or mock these types and archetypes many times over the years.

The cartoons are delightful. And outside of the intended context, it reminds of nothing more than (principally) American politics and political coverage.

Stephen David Snobelen on Isaac Newton!

From the Galilean Library : “Stephen David Snobelen is Assistant Professor in the History of Science and Technology at University of King’s College, Halifax, Nova Scotia. He is a founder member of the Newton project and author of many fascinating papers on Newton’s alchemy and religious thinking. I was privileged to be able to ask him some questions about his work on Newton.”

And so, here is Stephen David Snobelen: Newton Reconsidered, an interview with Snobelen by Paul Newall about his work on Newton.

Snobelen has put together a website about his own work on Newton, “Theology, Prophecy, Science and Religion”, well worth a long browse.