The funk of forty thousand years (in prison!)

So there’s a video going around of prisoners from Cebu (I’m assuming) performing the “Thriller” video. It’s pretty neat, but considering their circumstances, I think they should have done the gang fight in “Beat It”, or maybe “Smooth Criminal”.

This is the video.

And this is the original.

Uncanny, no?

My parents never told me they held mass dance events in prison. I guess that’s what they get for getting locked up during the Marcos dictatorship – no chance to take part in prisoner reenactments of Michael Jackson videos .

The Shield Comics Interviews

Back in 2004, IDW Publishing came out with a comic book story based on the TV show The Shield. IDW publishes a fair amount of licensed stuff from popular TV shows and movies; I suppose the company thinks licensed materials are easier to market because they have an already established fan base. The quality of the books tends to be decent enough, but the The Shield comic also contained a couple interviews from Shawn Ryan (the “show runner” or person most responsible for the show) and Michael Chiklis (Vic Mackey). What follows are those two interviews, which I got from scans posted on a popular comics torrent site. Enjoy.

Shawn Ryan Interview, page one
Shawn Ryan Interview, page two

Michael Chiklis Interview

Massive spoilers: Harry Potter wins and Voldemort loses!

I probably won’t be able to read the new book for a while as I’m not a big enough fan to buy the expensive hardcover and the paperback probably won’t be out for a while. Truthfully, I don’t even want to buy the book; I just want to read it. Maybe I’ll ask around and see if I can borrow it from somebody, or I’ll wait a few months and get it from the library. Then again, there’s a pdf that’s floating around on the torrent sites. Decisions, decisions.

By the way if anyone’s ashamed of reading the book in public Pointless Waste of Time has a series of fake book covers that can easily be printed and slipped over Deathly Hallows. My favourite is Prisoner of Ass Cabin, but The Phoenix Disarray A Work of Serious Literature is also admirably fake.

Harry Potter Book Disguises

Myself, as drawn by Matt Groening

Over at the Simpsons movie website there’s a Flash thingie that lets you recreate yourself in Simpsons form. Mine is surprisingly close to how I look in real life, down to how the shoes, shirt, and pants don’t match.

You can even put your avatar in areas from the show; so far, however, only Moe’s Tavern is available.

Assholes Abroad

Most journalists are hacks – that’s a fact. They’re lazy, they do little fact-checking when they can get away with it (which is most of the time), they censor themselves from writing what they’re actually seeing (or deliberate refuse to see what’s in front of them), and they like to pat themselves on the back whenever they spell somebody’s name right. People like to believe that there’s more hacks now than there were in the past, but hacks have been around since whenever it was someone first got paid to relate the news. The only difference is that today either the hacks have become better organized or the population at large has gotten dumber. This has led to good journalism either being forced to the fringes or getting so watered down it’s practically a press release. Well, some interesting stuff still gets done in the fringes; my case-in-point is the Moscow-based English-language alt bi-weekly, The eXile.

Started in the ’90s by a bunch of expats, The eXile has covered some of the most important stories coming out of Russia, from the corrupt government ministers (and there are lots of them) to the Western institutions and companies who rapaciously looted the country. They don’t just stick to Moscow either; they’ve run stories on many of the former Soviet republics and the more out of the way areas of Russia. At times they’ve become part of the news themselves, such as when they jokingly took credit for a fax that sparked a diplomatic brouhaha between Washington and Moscow, or when they included in a joke issue an article claiming that Pavel Bure dumped Anna Kournikova after he found out she had two vaginas. Needless to say, they’ve been sued several times, and if they were in the United States they probably would have been shut down by now.

That last sentence makes it sound like they’re a bunch of assholes, and they are, but they’re the most honest bunch of assholes in the business. (For the least honest assholes, see the New York Times and company.) There’s an occasional series about the moderately ugly to moderately attractive hookers they screw, there’s a column by a guy who works in a Russian office and hates it, and there’s a running series of pranks on the biggest hacks out there. One of my favourite columns is by the “War Nerd”, a guy who found the collapse of the World Trade Center a thing of beauty. He talks about the various wars going on right now and the many, many wars that have gone on in the past. This guy really is a war nerd, as he has an almost encyclopedic knowledge of warfare without actually having any firsthand experience. He says he’s a fat office worker in Fresno, but eXile readers have speculated he’s actually a pseudonym for one of the paper’s top guys. I don’t suppose it matters either way.

Let me quote a couple of paragraphs from the latest issue to give you a taste of what the paper is like.

I remember the young couple from whom I rented a spare room when I first came to Moscow. One night, I was going to the toilet, when I noticed that the light was on in the kitchen. Through the glass door, I could see Sasha, a wiry, spotty muzhik, reading a book… and masturbating. On to a plate. In horror, I abandoned my toilet trip, rushed back into the bedroom, pissed into a bottle, and tried to get the image out of my head. In the morning, I found the book on the kitchen table. It was called “Adventures of the Russian Special Forces.” I didn’t eat at home ever again.

Pretty funny, right? The same issue also had this, about a US base in Afghanistan:

The Uzbeks we expected to ambush us may have been mercenaries, or they may have been part of the forced exodus of Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) members from South Waziristan, a lawless tribal region straddling the Afghan-Pakistan border. The expulsion occurred in March, following fierce fighting after a mortar attack by Uzbeks killed several schoolchildren. “The Uzbeks have been kicked out lock, stock and barrel from the Wana Valley,” an Afghan government spokesman said after the fighting. It was third such attempt to drive out the Uzbeks, who had grown increasingly unpopular with the locals. The IMU, the largest of ten such groups active in Central Asia, wants to establish an Islamic state in the Central Asian Republics, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Interesting stuff about the Uzbeks, and not something you usually read about in the Western press. Sure the eXile has an abrasive editorial tone, and they tend to belittle anyone who dares to write in, but it seems obvious to me that they’re really a bunch of idealistic softies at heart. Even if they’re not, it’s still one of the best English-language papers around.

The eXile

BayImg is down

Either my image host is out of order or they got tired of all my Burt Reynolds pictures and banned me. So, unfortunately, no one can see the pretty pictures in my posts. By “no one”, I mean me, since I’m the only one who reads this blog, plus maybe a couple people who were looking for “Audrey Hepburn + decapitations”. If the pics are still gone tomorrow I swear I’ll, uh, wait some more and hope the situation resolves itself.

Update: BayImg is back as of today, July 13. I knew passively waiting and hoping for the best would pay off.

Religion update!

Richard Dawkins is full of shit: David Sloan Wilson calls Dawkins “just another angry atheist, trading on his reputation as an evolutionist and spokesperson for science to vent his personal opinions about religion.” Burn! (via Framing Science)

Pope to Protestants: Drop Dead. Pope Benedict XVI (nee Cardinal Ratface) says other Christian denominations aren’t true churches because they won’t do what he says.

Catholic School Opens Gates to Hell: Better start praying, the Rapture is coming!

Left Behind still sucks. I have no link, it’s just common knowledge.

Stormin’ Normans

There’s a neat little manga I found out about the other day by Makoto Yukimura, called Vinland Saga. What’s it about? Well, have a look:

Robots in disguise

Last year I was living in Southern California and I happened upon the following:

The video isn’t mine, but I’m probably somewhere in that crowd on the sidewalk. The scene I watched isn’t exactly like the one in the video; there was some soldier guys shooting at nothing and there was also a yellow rescue truck and a couple cars involved. That was in downtown LA, about a couple blocks from the Central Library. It was a pretty nice day and I just wandered into this movie shoot. There was this annoying intern who kept trying to get the crowd of onlookers to move back and he kept saying “Grande explosion!” in a horrible Anglo accent. When I asked what movie they were shooting he said it was called “E7”. Later on, a kid asked the same question to another guy, and he said it was Transformers. I kinda figured it out since some of their T-shirts said “Transformers July 2007”. I stayed for a couple takes but it was pretty boring after a while.

Well, I saw the movie on the weekend and it turns out that the scene was the climax to the movie. They didn’t include the whole thing, but I’m pretty sure a couple shots of people running were from that shoot I watched. The part where the soldiers were shooting at the tank robot may well have been part of the scene I watched too. Anyway, it was pretty cool to watch that part.

As for the rest of the movie, it wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t that good either. The original cartoon had a couple human sidekicks but I don’t think anyone cared about them. Well, in this movie it was pretty much all about the human sidekicks. They could have still made a good movie from that, but I don’t think Michael Bay had it in him. The action scenes alone were too confusing – it’s that MTV video style that emphasizes quick cuts of extreme close-ups. My biggest beef was the design of the Transformers. It’s too busy – they’ve got stuff sticking up all over the place and it was kind of hard to tell them apart. The designers should have taken a cue from the cartoon and gone with a simpler, easily distinguished design scheme. The Hater said they looked like walking piles of garbage and she wasn’t exaggerating.

Wouldn’t it be luverly?

So I saw My Fair Lady again recently. Well, “again” sort of implies that I have a familiarity with it, but the last time I saw it was way back in the ’80s. My grandmother is something of an Anglophile and my mother had a love of musicals. This movie was a convergence of interests, so she (my mother, that is) bought the VHS version – remember, this was the ’80s so video tapes cost way more back then. It came in two tapes (the movie was too long to fit on just one) and had a box with a garish cover. I’m quite certain I watched it but I have no idea what I thought of it back then. I was pretty young, so I probably didn’t think about it too much at all, save as another movie to watch on TV.

The next time I encountered the work was in high school when we covered Pygmalion in English class. The only thing I really remembered from the movie was the songs so, apart from the basic plot, the play was largely unfamiliar to me.

Fast forward to last week. My brother had downloaded the movie from a torrent site (Hello, MPAA!). Somewhere in the back of my mind must have been a half-formed memory of ‘Enry ‘Iggins because once the movie got rolling it all started to come back to me. “The Rain in Spain”, “I Could Have Danced All Night”; it all seemed so familiar. Like I said, I don’t remember the movie evoking any response from my younger self, but this time I actually found it funny. The writing and singing was exceptionally clever, and the sets and costumes must have been extremely expensive. The camera work was fairly static – I’m not sure if this was because it was originally a stage work or because the director deliberately didn’t want it moving around. It should also be said that Audrey Hepburn’s Cockney accent sounds especially forced. It’s almost like she had to learn it phonetically, and a more “proper” accent kept struggling to the surface. I suppose that’s not much of a complaint since she’s too clean-cut to be a convincing street girl anyway. Besides, it’s her transformation to the titular “Fair Lady” that’s the point of the story.

I never understood why Shaw kept insisting on keeping Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolitle romantically apart. Pygmalion was a sculptor who fell in love with his creation so why did Eliza end up with Freddy? The audience kept expecting this to happen so the musical adaptation threw a sop to them and put in “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face”. It’s sort of a love song, but in a “it’s nice to have someone who knows how I like my tea” way. If anything, it’s more of a love song to a dutiful servant or family member, rather than to a romantic partner. Still, there’s enough ambiguity that it can be interpreted the other way. How’s that for open-ended?

I liked this movie, and not just for the nostalgia factor. Rex Harrison was funny, Audrey Hepburn was “luverly”, and the songs were quite catchy. Despite the maddeningly ambiguous ending, it’s a nice piece of work and I would recommend it to anyone who has ever wandered in the ‘Classics’ section of their local Blockbuster.

Update: According to Wikipedia, Audrey Hepburn’s Cockney songs and dialogue had to be dubbed, which is probably why it sounds so unnatural. Also, the original title was Fair Lady; Rex Harrison complained because it meant the musical wasn’t about him. Squeaky wheel and all that.