Maunderlust

I’ve recently been introduced to The Entertainment Beat with Frances Gumm podcast. If you follow the episodes from the beginning, you’ll hear the show evolve from an entertainment review with a very special guest, into an off the wall variety show.

The stable of recurring characters includes such luminaries as Judy Garland, Bernadette Peters, Carol Channing, Gollum D’Smeagol, Katherine Hepburn, Gwen Verdon, and Roger Darling.

What’s nice about the show is that there’s nothing mean-spirited about it. It’s a premise that could easily devolve into cheap and obvious parody, but it doesn’t. Instead you end up with something more like The View if it were co-directed by John Waters and Busby Berkeley.

Episode 16.5 of the podcast opens with a rousing rendition of the Super Mario Brothers theme as interpreted by Judy and Bernadette. Thinking back on the Super Mario Brothers movie, I don’t think that casting either of them would have made it any stranger.

JudyCast: A Judy Garland One-Man Podcast Surreality: The Entertainment Beat with Frances Gumm – #16 – Tony Award/Birthday Special (Part 2)

[tags]The Entertainment Beat with Frances Gumm, Judy Garland, Super Mario Brothers[/tags]

I got an 82% on The Ultimate Game Quiz. Not too shabby. The quiz is a bit biased in favor of Western and PC titles. Not a lot of the cute and fluffy Japanese games on there (the ones I tend to gravitate toward). Still, it’s good fun, and well put together.
[tags]Ultimate Game Quiz, Video Games, Quiz, Meme[/tags]

I was having some trouble getting WordPress to accept YouTube content. But that’s all sorted now.

The forum was very helpful. There are a lot of smarty pants ways to do it, but the easiest one is just turning off the WYSIWYG editor.

Oh Don Piano.

[tags] wordpress, youtube, talking cats, don piano [/tags]

Migration! I was loving RapidWeaver’s simplicity, but I couldn’t think of an easy way to fix the Internet Explorer problem. It turns out my webhost (dreamhost) offers a free WordPress install.

It was pretty easy to copy over all of my old entries from an RSS file. So now I expect I’ll be learning the ins and outs of WordPress for awhile before the site is really functional again.
Hooray for the internets!

[tags]WordPress, RapidWeaver, Internet Explorer, Dreamhost[/tags]

Woe woe woe. It seems that this site doesn’t play nice with Internet Explorer. It’s fine on both Safari and Firefox though. I’m debating what to do about that.

I suspect that the culprit may be the new Amazon scripts… but I’m not certain. I could find out easily enough, but right now I can’t be bothered.

[tags]Internet Explorer, Firefox, Amazon[/tags]

Just saw Sarah Silverman’s DVD Jesus is Magic. Sarah is way cute, for a girl.

Her comedy is primarily rooted in hy-larious topics like rape, AIDS, and the holocaust. One of my favorite jokes, “When God gives you AIDS, (and God does give you AIDS by the way)… make lemon-AIDS.” That should give you a sense of how she mashes up the adorable and the horrifying in her routine.

Unlike a lot of shock comedy, Sarah never comes across as angry. Her persona is always sunny and self-absorbed and ready to follow up a horribly racist comment with something even more awful… or with a song.

Yes, a song. The movie includes several musical numbers. The songs are good for the most part, but best of all is the signature visual direction and musical arrangement of Liam Lynch. Liam is way cute, for a boy.

You may remember him from the Sifl & Olly show on MTV, or from that United States of Whatever song a few years ago.

If you’re looking for a regular Liam Lynch fix, he’s doing an excellent video podcast that you can subscribe to on iTunes. The shows are robust, to say the least. You can also pick up Fake Songs where he does spot on interpretations of the likes of Bjork, David Bowie, and the Pixies.

Oh, but back to Sarah… yes. If you like being offended (and I do), you’ll have a great time with her.

Sarah Silverman – Jesus is Magic

[tags]Sarah Silverman, Liam Lynch, Jesus is Magic, Fake Songs, Lemon-AIDS[/tags]

Oprah’s Debt Diet! (Masticate!)

Step 4: Stop Spending.

Now why didn’t I think of that? Yes. It’s so clear, so simple. Stop spending.

I kid Oprah. This is actually pretty good advice. She has some specific recommendations, like only make one trip to the ATM each week, create specific funds for big expenses, and tell people about what you’re trying to do to rally support.

While this blog isn’t inteded to rally anyone to anything, I do hope that by forcing myself to disclose what I’m up to I will be more motivated to succeed.

Speaking of which… I have already cheated on the debt diet. I bought a Canon Digital Rebel Camera as a gift. This flies in the face of everything Oprah has been trying to teach me. But it had to be done, and thankfully I did it before moving on to step 4. I had no idea that I needed to stop spending in order to start saving. Seriously, no idea at all.

[tags]Oprah, Debt Reduction, Canon Rebel XTI[/tags]

You’ll notice a bunch of Amazon links popping up. Here’s why…

One of my Christmas gifts was the MacHeist bundle thing. It included the excellent RapidWeaver app, which I’m using to bang this site out. Another app was Delicious Library.

Delicious Library makes it a joy to scan and sort pretty much everything that you own into a comprehensive media database. You can use a webcam to scan the barcode on a game, movie, CD, book, or whatever. The app instantly retrieves all the relevant information about that product from the Amazon database. It then creates an image of the item and places it on a virtual shelf.

It may not sound all that exciting, but it’s remarkably fun.

Anyway, I was planning on using Delicious Library not only to organize my stuff, but also to prompt me to write about books, movies, and games on here. As I was writing the Karl Pilkington review, I went to create a link to Amazon.com, but then I remembered the affiliate program that Amazon has. Basically, if someone buys something through one of your links, you get a small percentage of the sale. So I signed up for that.

My thinking is, If I’m talking about something in a blog post and you want to buy it, cool – there it is. For those that aren’t interested, I’ll try to keep the links as unobtrusive as possible. That sounds reasonable, right?
[tag]Amazon Affiliate, MacHeist, Delicious Library, Karl Pilkington[/tag]

One of my Christmas gifts was Ricky Gervais Presents: The World of Karl Pilkington.

If you are unfamiliar with Karl’s singular outlook on the universe, I highly recommend downloading the three latest podcasts from either Guardian Unlimited or iTunes before they disappear on January 6th. Or, you could turn to Wikipedia for a crash course in all things Karl.

Karl’s impresario is Ricky Gervais of The Office and Extras fame. The genius of the Ricky Gervais Show typically comes not from the witty banter between Ricky and Steve Merchant, but rather from Karl’s totally befuddled counterpoint. As a wellspring of misinformation and uninformed conjecture, it is possible that the internet was invented for Karl, or he for it. Not since Cat Macros has their been a finer match of content and medium.

If you caught the first series of 12 podcasts, much of the material in the book will be familiar to you. Some of the stories, like the classic, “I could eat a knob at night” aren’t quite as funny on the page as they were on the pod. But others, like “What d’you mean about eyes facing forward” are just as absurd, if not more so, on paper. Rounding out the book are some genuinely cute illustrations by the man himself, and original excerpts from the now legendary diary.

If you’ve heard the show, you already know the material. If you liked it enough to revisit it, the book is a remarkably analog way to do just that. If you haven’t been introduced to Karl Pilkington yet, the book is an entertaining read and a glimpse into the inner workings of well-meaning madness.

Ricky Gervais Presents: The World of Karl Pilkington

[tags]Karl Pilkington, Ricky Gervais, Stephen Merchant, The Office, Extras[/tags]

Oprah’s Debt Diet! (chomp)

Step 3: Learn to play the credit card game.

This portion of the debt diet begins with a grim admonition for those who have fallen into the trap of revolving credit. Pay the monthly minimum at your own peril!

I’m with you O. I looked into the snowball method of debt reduction, where you pay off the debts in order of smallest to largest irrespective of interest rate. This method sounded appealing because because snowball is a euphemism for a sex act, as well as the name of a well intentioned and much maligned imaginary pig.

Oprah suggests an elaborate calculus for divining the order in which debts should be paid off. The acronym is DOLP, which is not as catchy as Snowball. DOLP stands for Dead on Last Payment, and is gleaned my mixing your Swiss Latte Fund with bird entrails and the menses of an unshorn virgin. I’m going to forgo that and just stick with interest rate as my bellwether. Honestly, I don’t think my debt situation is complex enough to warrant an avian sacrifice.

As part of the debt diet, I’ve made an appointment on my google calendar to call the credit card company about reducing my interest rate. This is very difficult for me. I’m not confrontational by nature, and I hate asking for things. But Oprah commands it. So it must be done.

[tags]Oprah, Debt Reduction, Snowball, Google Calendar[/tags]