that ring of confidence

Once in a lifetime

i love the Talking Heads, and one of their best songs is "Once In A Lifetime". The first time I heard the song however was not as sung by David Byrne and group but rather one Kermit the Frog as part of the relaunched Muppet Show. The show didn't really last, but the cover of the song by Kermitt was one of the great moments in Muppets history. I was reminded of this last night when Lydia revealled that she had never seen any of the Muppet movies, and only seemed familiar with The Muppet Babies cartoon.

What the heck? At the very least The Muppet Movie is now on our list of things we've got to watch to get her up to speed. The girl has never even seen Jaws.

Yup, there's a lot of work before the wedding.

Stephen Colbert meets Spider-Man and I think I still work at Elfsar

if you watch enough of The Colbert Report you might know that host Stephen Colbert is a big fan of comic books. Not only does he have his own comic series, based on Tek Jansen the science fiction character he developed based on his TV personality and one assumes William Shatner crossed with James Bond, but he's had Marvel's Editor-In-Chief Joe Quesada on the show several times. Most notable was the episode where Quesada gave Colbert Captain America's shield following the character's death. The shield still hangs on the wall of the show's set and can be regularly seen during the interview portions of the show.

Since Colbert's aborted attempt to run for President earlier this year Marvel has been putting Colbert '08 ads in their comics, just as throw away background gags on billboards or car bumper stickers, showing that at least in the Marvel Universe Colbert's still running. Now he's about to be guest staring in an issue of Amazing Spider-Man. What's America's favorite right-wing parody pundit going to be doing with Spider-Man? I have no idea, but I suppose I'll find out when the issue comes out.

Speaking of comics I haven't had a shift at the comic book store since July, and I keep feeling like I should ask if I even work there when I go in. I'm still getting the staff discount, so I guess I can't complain too much but a shift or two would be nice. It feels like that year or so that I worked part-time at The Capitol Theatre in Westbank, I'd work a shift every month or so and enjoy the free movies. Of course before that I'd put in a good five or six years of hard labour under the same manager at Kelowna's Uptown and Paramount Theatres, so it wasn't like this where I'd only had a few one off shifts.

Story found via Newsarama:

Marvel has announced that Stephen Colbert will join with Spider-Man in Amazing Spider-Man #573 by Slott, Wait, Romita and Oliffe [From Stephen Colbert Joins Spider-Man in Amazing #573]

The best merch ever

Radiohead Merch
Originally uploaded by Jeffery Simpson

i am a sucker for a good bit of concert merchandise.  Give me a t-shirt with a cool logo on it and I'll gladly hand over $30 for something that costs ten times less than that to make.  Hand me a poster for $15 and I'll roll it up and stick it in my closet with big plans to use it to decorate the wall in the home office that I don't yet have and may never get.  Hoodies, love them.  I've got Matthew Good soccer jerseys.  I've got backpacks, pins and baseball caps.

My new all-time favorite piece of tour merchandise ever however is now the Radiohead Sigg bottle that I picked up last night at their concert at Thunderbird Stadium [mbv].  I'm a huge fan of Sigg bottles, and I use my two current ones almost constantly.  I took one around as my main source of water in Europe, and I try to avoid using plastic bottles or buy bottle water in stores because of the toxic chemicals that are meant to leak into the water from plastics.  Not only that but cutting back on plastic bottles is good for the enviroment, even if they're recycled.

$25 for a Radiohead Sigg bottle is a no brainer then.  It's metallic so the chemical issue isn't a factor, and its washable so it's not going to end up in a garbage dump anytime soon.

Can you hear me Major Tom?

I've been trying to share my love of The Venture Brothers with people for awhile now, but it's hard to do. The show is so specifically tuned to me, that it's hard to imagine who else even finds it funny since nearly every reference seems as if the show's writers have been living inside my head. In fact for awhile I had assumed that the show was some sort of feverish dream that I had once had, and that it's existance had more to do with some kind of slowly creeping insanity on my part than the word of a television network.

Watch the first thirty seconds of the above episode for a perfect example of what I'm talking about. Recognize the dialouge? Yup that's right, and when David Bowie shows up in a later episode as a character, though sadly its not voiced by Bowie, it was the icing on the cake. Recently the "Firestarter" dancer from the Prodigy video showed up as a character, and that too nearly melted my brain.

Now if only Canada had the new episodes broadcast up here, or if I could find them... cough... floating around online.

How I discovered The Big Bang Theory

Isaac, one of the corporate sales reps at work, suggested that I check out the sitcom The Big Bang Theory [stc], but his description of the cast (featuring one of the kids from Rosanne) wasn't quite enough to get me watching it right away.  However when Andy Ihnatko [twtr] started Twittering that the show was a certain type of people's Sex In The City, I figured I'd better check it out.  I mean the people that Ihnatko was talking about was nerds, and I'm kind of a big nerd.

At first I was worried I was going to be annoyed at the show, at least until I got to the above scene where the science of the first Superman movie was discussed.  Granted I'm not really a science guy, but I've got a book on the science of superheroes, and would love to get into that sort of totally dorky debate.  I mean I do work part-time at a comic book store, though sadly the job has yet to provide me with one "Who could win in a fight" style debate.

The scene is sort of ruined by the weird addition of music over it, as if strings make something funnier.  Still it's a good show, though unlike something like Friday Night Lights, I probably wouldn't recommend it to everyone.  I think maybe you've got to have something of the geek in you to really enjoy it, which I suppose is saying something about Isaac that he might not want spread about the internet.

Your childhood explodes on YouTube

Hey remember cartoons, you know the ones you used to watch on Saturday mornings? Well anyone with a childhood that ran in the '80s and '90s will probably remember at least a few of the cartoons in the show above. It's called Cartoon All-Stars To The Rescue and it was an anti-drug show made using characters from a few of the most popular cartoons at the time. It's weirdly creepy to watch our friends from the 100 Acre Woods hang with the Smurfs, the Muppet Babies, Alf and Michelangelo of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The fact that it's an anti-drug cartoon for children makes it even weirder.

Possibly the weirdest moment is when Simon from the Chipmunks describes to both Alvin and Theodore and the audience what marijuana is.

Holy shit, Rick Webber & Pat Kennedy were once young

I don't even know if they're still on television in Kelowna or not, but check out this CHBC coverage of the 1994 Canucks riot.  Pat Kennedy and Rick Webber were so damn young, and check out taht facial hair, it's pure Anchorman [wp].

Thoughts on HBO's John Adams

I'm watching my second episode of HBO's mini-series John Adams at the moment.  It's the third episode of the show, but I missed the first one, and after last week's I'm extremely excited for this.  It is certainly the best drama on the American Independence that I've seen, and I've seen quite a few.  There are advantages of being able to tell the story in seven hours that one does not have in a typical Hollywood movie.

It's been awhile since my university courses that covered the American Revolution, so my History Sense might be a little off but I've yet to see any glaring mistakes.  I do question whether Jefferson would have spoke out against slavery as he did in last episode, while continuing to own slaves of his own.  However having said that views on slavery at the time were often confused and contradictory, so I'm not going to make a hard and fast claim that it was an error.

Rather than doing a review I thought I'd add in a few random thoughts that occur to me as I'm watching the episode.  Note this is the third episode entitled "Don't Tread On Me" that is meant to cover Adams' time in France trying to gain support from Europe for the Revolution.

- It is very convenient that  everyone addresses everyone else by their names during this time period.  Having missed the first episode I was worried that I'd be a bit lost to start off last week, but found that since everyone was addressed in this manner it was easy to follow.  This technique would fail miserably on a show like The Sopranos, where it would feel so much less natural that everyone talks in this slightly stilted and formal manner.

- I'm very glad that many of even the American characters have English, Irish and other accents.  Often there's a tendency in Hollywood to have all the Revolutionary figures sound as American as possible, forgetting that during the Revolution everyone was actually English.  Here there are English actors in many roles and Ben Franklin is played by Tom Wilkinson.

- On a related note it's nice to see that these people are flawed.  Popular figures in the Revolution tend to get painted larger than life, and almost deified.  These people argue, have flaws and are so much more interesting for it.

- The French were weirder then than they are now.  Hard to believe, but yeah.

- If there was any doubt that Paul Giamatti is a great actor this should put it to rest.  I was not a huge fan of Sideways, but he keeps proving himself again and again and this could be his defining role.  Or would be if it weren't a historical drama on HBO.

- Back then it was easy to invent shit.  Seriously Thomas Jefferson makes a chair that swivels and he's a genius.  Franklin invented pretty much everything else during his life.  Can you imagine President Bush, either one, inventing anything?  Clinton?  Kennedy?

 

How I spent my Easter :: the television holiday

It's rare that I get a day off with nothing to do.  Since my days off sync up with Lydia's it generally means that I have to, you know, do things.  Things that require pants, showers and leaving the apartment.  Our plans never include sleeping in late, moving to the couch for two hours of recorded Smallville followed by about three hours of recorded The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report. 

I'd been stockpiling television for weeks now, never quite having the time to watch the episodes until now.  That meant an episode of The Celebrity Apprentice went before the tales of a young Clark Kent. 

Isn't Piers Morgan the greatest reality contest ever?  He certainly is the most qualified person ever to compete on The Apprentice.  Granted I can't imagine him doing the physical challenges on Survivor, or being America's Next Top Model, but for an outright schemer he's fun.  I'm very glad he's in the final two.

Easter is an odd holiday once you're older than twelve, or whatever the non-egg gathering age is in your house.  If you're not particularly religious and don't have kids it leaves you with nothing but trying to avoid sermons on television.  With Christmas there's still a gift exchange with friends or family, with Easter there's what, parasols? 

I didn't actually shower and get prepared to leave the apartment until about ten at night, when I started to get ready to go and get Lydia who unlike me was working.  On one of her late night shifts she was working the 3 - 11 shift at the hostel and it was my fianceely (not a word) duty to pick her up and bring her back to the apartment for cheese sandwiches and Medium and then a third season episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer on DVD.  It's the prom episode, which isn't exactly the most romantic thing ever.

Still we press on.  Tomorrow is a new day.  A working day.  A day with showers, pants and clean ears.  Tomorrow the PVR machine will record, instead of playback. 

Letterman will be back with writers

Again a link from Daring Fireball [df].

Thank goodness the late night talk shows will be returning to television early in the New Year.  I've been missing my four times a week fix of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report.  Sadly though only David Letterman and Craig Ferguson will be back with writers, since Letterman's production company World Wide Pants has settled with the writers on those two shows.  Since the other shows are owned by networks they can't settle in the same way.

I agree with John Grubber from Daring Fireball [df] when writes, "my gut feeling is that Leno’s writer-less shows are going to be awful." 

Yeah, though Leno is usually awful anyway so nobody is going to notice.  My fear though is that The Daily Show and The Colbert Report might be awful as well.  Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert as far more naturally funny than Jay Leno but it's important to remember that basically everything they say during their half-an-hour slots is written by a team of comedy writers. 

The complete fraud pulls it off

So I did what I feel was a decent job speaking at the Canadian University Press regional conference at The Peak [tp] at Simon Fraser yesterday.  My Airport Basestation was being awesome so I couldn't print my talk out, so once again I had to read it off of my cell phone.  Thankfully the iPhone's screen is decent to read from even when your hands are shaking with presentation nerves.  Nobody from The Phoenix seemed to have gone to the conference, so nobody had any familiarity with any of my written work, given that it's mostly been published in Kelowna.

I did hopefully do some networking... or rather I met a guy who might be an opening to do some Vancouver freelancing which would be nice.  I'm also looking at a reporter's job in Parksville on Vancouver Island, which I mentioned yesterday.  Having said that the idea of moving isn't exactly appealing to me right now, but I do need a career boost.  And I'm willing to sleep with anyone to do it.  Well maybe not sleep with, but certainly flatter or give neck massages to.

I picked the above video up off of Neil Gaimen's blog [ng] and it ammused me a great deal.  The actors in it are also in the British version of the Apple/PC ads that John Hodgeman is in for the North American market.

Lookwell

Someone posted the never aired pilot episode of the never-got-to-be-a-hit TV show Lookwell, which was written by Conan O'Brian. The show's been rumored to have been one of those supposedly brilliant things that Hollywood crushes because they're too beautiful, for years. Now it's on YouTube, we can all see for ourselves.

Strap your Adam West hats on and click play.

The Simpsons' movie and the coming of HD

I was watching some trailers at Apple's Quicktime trailer website [qt] and was impressed by the quality of the HD content. The Simpsons trailers looked incredible, and even the new Fantastic Four movie got me excited when I could watch the Silver Surfer in all its highly defined glory.

Now this won't make the movies any better, but oh my the Simpsons have never looked so good as they do in these trailers. I'm excited for the day that all television is filmed for HD and all television are HD. A few shows, Hockey Night in Canada and the CSIs for instance, are already HD with my Shaw box but not enough is. When it is it's very pretty.

Now all I need is a better television. One of these days.

*Note the Youtube version of The Simpsons' trailer is not nearly as beautiful as the HD one on the Quicktime site. Go watch it if you can.

2 -1 to the Arsenal

A Farewell to Highbury from Thierry Henry
Originally uploaded by atomicShed.

From the Guardian's Minute-by-minute match report for Arsenal versus Manchester United [fg]:

90 mins Four minutes of added-time are signalled for.

90+2 mins No chances of any note in injury-time as the game appears to be petering out for a draw.

90+3 mins GOAL HENRY: Arsenal 2 - 1 Manchester United Petering out, indeed. What a finish to the game! Eboué bursts down the right flank and beats Evra to deliver a curling cross. Ferdinand is caught out, missing his header: Henry makes no mistake with his. Firm and high past Van der Sar's right hand from 12 yards out, his header must surely have won the game.

A last minute goal and Arsenal are back in the title race, though the odds are still of the longish variety, Manchester United lost as did Chelsea yesterday.  This could shape up to be one of the most exciting ends to the Premiership season in years and so I phoned in to get Fox SportsWorld added to my cable.  I thought I had it when I first subscribed, but Shaw never bothered to add it for me, so I had to call in again.

Lydia, myself and my family are trying to plan a trip to Europe sometime this spring.  I'm trying to organize it around seeing at least one Arsenal game.  I want to see them in person while Henry is still playing for them, having missed seeing them at Highbury.  The timing of the end of the football season though is sort of near the end of winter and thus not prime tourism weather time so it's being met with some resistance. 

Hot Rod's big close up scene

Hot Rod's big close up scene
Originally uploaded by goddess_spiral.

I was blogging about the new Transformers live action movie and the dancing CitronC4 ad (both filmed in Vancouver) on Metroblogging Vancouver [mbv] when I found this photo taken by a fellow Metroblogging Vancouver author.

It's Autobot goodness.

The end of Arrested Development

Neal and I are watching the last four episodes of Arrested Development [ad].  The show is amoung the funniest shows on television, and along with The Daily Show, The Simpsons (at its peak) and The Office one of the best shows that has been produced in America in the last decade.  Sadly the show has been canned by Fox since the ratings aren't as high as they'd like.

What sucks is that despite good DVD sales the show isn't getting another chance.  The Family Guy, which is a one note show, managed to pull itself back on the air because of DVDs flying off the shelves but sadly there's not enough people getting hit in the balls on Arrested Development.

tags technorati : television TV ArrestedDevelopment TheSimpsons TheFamilyGuy TheOffice Fox DVD

Star Trek as Canadian politics

This post will also be mirrored at Vancouver's Metroblogging site [mbv] though it will appear here first.

I've been dwelling on the fact that Conservative leader Stephen Harper has come out of the closet, so to speak, and has been revealed as a Star Trek fan [mbv]. Former Canadian University Press President and all around Trek fan Don Iveson finds the revelation surprising given Trek fans' general lefty slant [di]. He points out an article on Salon.com [sal] that argues convincingly that Star Trek is the for egalitarians while it's Star Wars that is the franchise for rugged individualists.

The differences at first seem superficial. One saga has an air force motif (tiny fighters) while the other appears naval. In "Star Trek," the big ship is heroic and the cooperative effort required to maintain it is depicted as honorable. Indeed, "Star Trek" sees technology as useful and essentially friendly -- if at times also dangerous. Education is a great emancipator of the humble (e.g. Starfleet Academy). Futuristic institutions are basically good-natured (the Federation), though of course one must fight outbreaks of incompetence and corruption. Professionalism is respected, lesser characters make a difference and henchmen often become brave whistle-blowers -- as they do in America today.

In "Star Trek," when authorities are defied, it is in order to overcome their mistakes or expose particular villains, not to portray all institutions as inherently hopeless. Good cops sometimes come when you call for help. Ironically, this image fosters useful criticism of authority, because it suggests that any of us can gain access to our flawed institutions, if we are determined enough -- and perhaps even fix them with fierce tools of citizenship.

So Trek sounds more like some kind of left wing NDP show doesn't it?

Well I got to thinking, Harper only likes the original Trek. Maybe that's a clue since the original Star Trek was much less focused on the Federation and Star Fleet as a whole, Kirk and the like didn't become good public servants until the movies and even then they were court-martialed for being too awesome. In reality there are so many Star Trek series and thus faces of Trek that each can relate to a Canadian political party. Thus here it is, the definitve Canadian Election 2006: the Star Trek Edition.

The Liberal Party = Star Trek: the Original Series

Despite the fact that the original is Stephen Harper's favorite it's the show that best fits the Liberals since it's vaugely left leaning without actually being that way. The Liberals might have legalized gay marriage but they certainly didn't seem happy to have done it, similiarly Kirk may have kissed Uhura (in television's first inter-racial kiss) but he had to be mind-controlled into doing it.

Similiarly both the Liberals and the first Trek have mixed up views on war. On one hand we're still in Afghanistan despite the fact that we've got no real plan there other than to be targets in place of American soldiers who had to go in Iraq [cbc]. Our being there is enabling the American occupation of Iraq. In Trek Kirk was always good about avoiding war with the Klingons, but would be happy to whomp on the Romulans if they got uppity. Like the Liberals he might make friends with a planet of Native Americans but he certainly wasn't going to give them warp drive.

Kirk and crew tried to be good enviromentalists, they saved the whales and created a new fertile planet with the Genesis Device, but they generally did it out of only when forced to by aliens probes, Kahn or needing to court the NDP. Speaking of Khan Noonien Singh a Conservative show would have put him to death for his crimes on Earth, an NDP show would have tried to rehabilitate him, only a Liberal show would have taken the useless middle ground of sticking him in a rocket and shooting him into space [st].

As much as Kirk wanted to use time travel to alter the future and save his one true love Edith Keeler's life he had to realize that messing with the past was dangerous and so he watched her die before his eyes [st]. Paul Martin wasn't so smart when he decided to fool with the past and opened the Gomery Equiry which lead us to this election.

Star Trek's first series was meant to be a five year mission, but was cancelled after three years. Martin's government should have had four years, but alas it won't even make three.

More nerd politics after the break. Just click on read more and go to the rest of Canada's political parties.

The Hour hits Vancouver

Note:  this is a cross post with another website,which I can't talk about for a few more days.

Once again the CBC's Hour is being filmed in Vancouver for two nights this month.  The news, chat, features, thing with George Stroumboulopoulos is being taped before a live audiance at the CBC Plaza on Tuesday November 29th and Wednesday November 30th at 4 p.m.  You can get tickets here by sending in an email. I don't watch the Hour as much as I used to when it first hit the air but I've sent in my request for tickets because I think it would be cool to see it filmed. 

If you've never seen the show it's basically a weird sort of informal news cast where former Much Music VJ Stroumboulopoulos sits on a couch and runs through the news in a really personal way. It can be a bit too... well it does like explaining the background to all of its stories to make them more accessible to those who might not have read a newspaper or say ever attended school.  At a certain point you do want to yell at your television, "Alright already you don't have to do a 90 second background piece on how Hitler was a bad man set to a mediocre rock rift, just so you can talk about the Holocaust."

So yeah it's like the real news with training wheels on.  However I'm still checking out a tapping if I can get a ticket.

Oh yes, this is going to be another post about the O.C.

Now by this point I think that most of you are going to be sick of hearing about the show called the O.C. You probably didn't expect my blog to suddenly become an O.C. fansite and rightly so, I don't usually go in for teen dramas and all but this has me hooked.

The reason the O.C. is dominating the blog is because it's dominating my life. Since getting season one on DVD I've watched about twelve hours of the show all since Monday.

This however is not a in depth look at the show, or an airing of my likes and dislike about it. Rather I'm asking myself, and by extension my readers, what my life would have been like had I watched teen drama like Dawson's Creek while in high school. I even avoided watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer until university and thus delayed developing my boy crush on Joss Whedon.

How would life be different? Would I have known more about girls and their ways if I'd watched Dawson make movies and pine away after Joey? Would I have have been more of a well rounded individual if I had learned along with the gang that you too might have a homosexual friend in your midst? Would I be more distraught about Tom Cruise's new choice of brides?

I have gleaned the following facts from my post-high school study of teen television dramas.

• Even the geeks in school look like models. There are no ugly people and if you seen an ugly person in your school since their existence is not reflected by the reality of television it is okay not to acknowledge their existence.
• You know one gay person, and maybe more if they're allowed screen time to deal with their love life. This homosexual might be the jerky jock's dad, he might be the cute blodne's brother or he might be you. It's hard to tell, but his coming out will cause a sensation. You will know no more than one gay person (saving any boyfriends your gay friend might have) unless you're on Showcase in which case pretty much everyone you meet will be gay.
• Your school sucks. Really I mean television high schools are divided into two types, those on gritty dramas and those on teen dramas. Gritty dramas will have inner city schools with kids shooting each other in kindergarten and crack addicts dying in the potato salad. Teen dramas have schools that are better designed than the Microsoft campus. They'll have restaurants, tennis courts, pools and so forth. They'll have movie courses where you can make movies that would normally cost about $60,000 to make. So why is your school neither of those? Because it's lame.
• No nipple shots. I didn't get to see any nipples in high school and I don't get to see them on teen dramas either. Fuck.
• You can be twenty-seven and still in high school. Just like the remedial class at Rutland Secondary teen drama schools are populated by twenty-somethings.
• Chris and Vanessa were a normal couple. Seriously I knew these two people who we're always breaking up and getting back together all through high school. That's totally normal from what I can from the O.C. Ryan and Marissa break up like once and episode over everything from not being able to say "I love you" to crazy rich hotel heirs.
• You will not have a movie career, even if you show your boobs in The Gift. You might have to marry a midget for anyone to pay attention to you in Hollywood.
• If you ever have to give a speech in front of the whole class it will be like totally meaningful and stuff.

What other lessons am I missing out? Do you really think if I had watched teen television back when I was a teen I wouldn't be the sad sack singleton that I am now? Does masturbation count as hetrosexual sex because I'm thinking about girls or homosexual sex because I'm all alone with myself and I'm a dude?

Answers to these questions are what comments on blogs were made for.

[composed and posted with ecto]

Technorati Tags: the O.C.

Day off #1: why can't Seth be happy?

Today was my first of two days off of work and so far I've wasted it gloriously. I've only left the house for a quick trip to the nearby Safeway for a week worth of food. The rest of the day I've spent in front of the television watching the O.C. except for brief breaks to wash my sheets and plug in my old video camera for charging.

I'm selling the camera this week to my mother's friends Julie and Craig who just had a baby and thus would like to video tape the baby for future blackmail purposes. Any sale of a video camera requires time spent in front of the computer as I copy all of the video files to my iMac so I don't lose anything. I'll then erase the tapes and sell the whole bundle.

Currently I'm watching scenes from a movie that Nathan, Jeff and I were working on. We really didn't have any plot or ideas but so far we've got a car chase and some stuff of Nathan dancing and walking around his house.

Also a great deal of extreme filter usage. Next camera I get will have no filters, and if it does I'm going to break them somehow and do any sort of special effects in iMovie as opposed to in camera.

Technorati Tags: Blog, iMac, Powerbook, the O.C.