Fred Willard, Comic Genius

Ah, A Mighty Wind, the least well received of Christopher Guest's mocumentaries (the others being Waiting for Guffman and, of course, This is Spinal Tap), and I think unjustly so, as the film is a wealth of subtle comedy.

And it has a tremendous performance by Fred Willard, comic genius. He plays Mike LaFontaine, an entertainment manager who was a character on a little remembered show called "Wha' Happened."

For the longest time I scoured the internet for soundfiles of his famous catch-phrases from that show, to no avail. Now, courtesy of my DVD-Burner, I bring to you the Fred Willard A Mighty Wind sound files:

"I don't think so!"

"I got a weal wed wagon!"

"I can't do my work!"

"Wha' Happened?"

"Hey, wha' happened?"

And, for those who care, I'm working on other sound clips that I can't find anywhere (high on my list are the Cocoanut Pete songs from Club Dread). So stay tuned.

Evilhippy.net, your source for obscure and unwanted soundfiles.

Additionally, if anyone out there has any requests that are reasonably small, so as not to eat up all my bandwidth, let me know and I'll see what I can do. I'd post you a list of movies that I have, but it'd be quite long and boring.

Watch What Your Co-Workers Are Doing

By way of Daily Rotten:

Detroiter faces charges in sword slaying of plant co-worker
"A 30-year-old man, who said he'd been bullied for months at the plant where he worked, fashioned a piece of metal into a sword and killed a co-worker, police said... The slaying occurred shortly before 11:50 p.m. Wednesday at Peerless Metal Co., in the 6300 block of West Fort at Livernois. When officers arrived at the plant they found the body of Anthony Williams, 40, lying on the shop floor. He almost had been decapitated in the attack. Police arrested the Detroit man, who was sitting in a chair about 20 feet away from the body smoking a cigarette and drinking a beer. His clothes were blood-splattered and he was the only other person in the building, police said."

That's the true story, here's how I think it went, CSI flashback style:

"Hey stupid, what'cha doin?" Tony asks as Chet presses the thin, two foot bar of metal against the grinder, sending a bright fan of sparks back into his face, singing his skin and clothes.

After a few unanswered seconds Tony asks, "I said, 'Hey stupid, what'cha doin?"

Chet flips the power switch on the grinder and holds the smoking metal up and examines its glowing edge.

"Maybe I should make myself easier to understand...What," Tony starts, punctuating each following word with a sharp poke to Chet's chest, "are (poke), you (poke), doing (poke), shithead (poke-poke)?"

"Making a sword to kill you with." Chet Sighs and holds the metal out straight, staring down its length.

"Right." Tony says and walks off.

The lesson here is if you work in a metal shop and constantly pick on somebody pay attention if they look like they're making a weapon.

More Sounds

Probably not much real posting going to happen since GTA: San Andreas is eating away lots of time. I'm still in the first quarter of the game, but the city is huuuuuge, I spent quite a bit of time just driving around exploring...and you get to play pool in the game.

Here are some more me-created sounds:

"You lookin at my eye?"--from Cannibal: the Musical

"When there's no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth."--from the Dawn of the Dead re-make.

Sounds

Couple of sound files for you here in the early morning when I should be asleep courtesy of my spankin' new dvd-drive:

I suggest this one for your default beep

...and this one for anytime.

Thank you and good morning.

William Shatner Has Been

I mentioned William Shatner's new Album Has Been in an earlier post. I told you to go listen to the song "I Can't Get Behind That," and I still demand that.

I have come to realize after listening to this album many, many times in the last few days that this is one of the best collections of songs produced in the history of mankind.

It's a bit like that first Johnny Cash/Rick Rubin collaboration in that Ben Folds has taken what people would expect and turned it on it's ear.

The William Shatner that we know from the Priceline Commercials is here, but, while some of these songs are intentionally funny, there is also a surprising amount of what I think of as genuine emotion here. You get to hear Billy speak about his former wife's death, fears of growing old, becoming a joke, and even a funny little song about death.

There really aren't enough funny little songs about death out there.


Four Bobs

The Grudge

It's Lost In Translation with Buffy as Scarlett and a creepy Japanese Kid with no genitals as Bill Murray!


Three Babes!

El Mariachi

Look, it's Tony Banderas looking confused at the Wal-Mart Holiday Meeting from Dallas Texas! Why were He and Melanie there? Who knows! Do you think he got to keep the vest, the buttons, both or neither?

Inside Joke

Middle Name Generator v 1.0 (beta)

One of the themes of Kurt Vonnegut's writing is that of the loneliness of modern humans. He posits that the reason for this loneliness is that humans are biologically predisposed to live in large extended communities, which they did for thousands of years in Tribal, or Folk Societies.

Modern Culture has stunted that and thus made people very unhappy, which is the root of most of our problems.

His solution to this, as put forward in Slapstick is for the government to create new, arbitrary families at random, thus giving everyone thousands of potential family members.

Just as in a real family there would be people who you would like or not like, but you would always have a network of people to go to anywhere.

He envisions a world where each family would have its own magazines and embassies in different cities and countries where members could go to socialize, or when they need a little help. Families would be able to take care of themselves.

The method for assigning these families was the random generation of a new middle name for everyone, using the power of the Social Security Administrations computers to assign a random word for everyone that would take the place of their middle name and which would include them in a 'family' composed of all those who share the same name. In Slapstick there is a number as well, but I don't think enough people read this page to need that many variables.

Anyway, the point of this post is that I have created a beta version of this middle name assigning program. It didn't even require much computing power, just a little time.

Remember this is just a beta version, the sampling of words is a bit limited, but I hope to add more as demand requires.

Just click here for your new random middle name.

Publish your results in the comments below and greet your new family members!

My Hero

Free Idea

On the way home from work the other night I had a flash of inspiration and thought of a brilliant way that we could pretty much eliminate drunk driving.

Tiny, tiny keys.

I'd make the ignition very small and indistinct as well. Perhaps give it the ability to move about on the dash independently.

The result of this would be that those who are inebriated on any substance would not be able to start their cars.

Get to work on this Detroit.

Yet More Vonnegut

The Republicans were high as kites at their convention, of course, since victory was a certainty. The enemy candidate was buried up to his neck in Populism, whereas their own candidate was buried up to his neck in God. Nothing remained to be done, so autographing parties starring the President's wife and daughters loomed large on official schedules for every day.

These pleasant, pretty women were modest and shy. They seemed to say with body language: "You should be getting the autographs of the really famous movie stars around."

--Kurt Vonnegut, Wampeter's Foma and Granfalloons

New Mick Foley Book

Look, it's a new Mick Foley Children's Book about WWE Wrestling Characters, and it's drawn by Jill Thompson. The world of Professional Wrestling and Sandman, they're not just linked by Raven anymore.

More Vonnegut

Vonnegut brings up the idea of Folk Societies in the current book that I am reading, which are what are typically viewed as simple societies, mostly tribal in nature that pre-date what we call civilization. What Daniel Quinn would also refer to as tribal societies. He then posits that the problems in our societies arise from our body chemistries being designed to exist in those types of societies.

And I say to you that we are full of chemicals which require us to belong to folk societies, or failing that, to feel lousy all the time. We are chemically engineered to live in folk societies, just as fish are chemically engineered to live in clean water--and there aren't any folk societies anymore.

How lucky for you to be here today, for I can explain everything. Sigmund Freud admitted that he did not know what women wanted. I know what they want. Cosmopolitan magazine says they want orgasms, which can only be a partial answer at best. Here is what women really want: They want lives in folk societies, wherin everyone is a friendly relative, and no act or object is without holiness. Chemicals make them want that. Chemicals make us all want that.

Then he goes on to explain our attemts to form clubs and orginizations to take these societies and extended families place. And he puts his traditional bitter coating on the sweet message.

There are other good clubs. The Loyal Order of the Moose is open to any male who is Christian and white. I myself admire The War Dads of America. In order to become a War Dad, one must have had a friend or a relative who served in the armed forces of the United States sometime during the past 195 years. The friend or relative need not have received an honorable discharge, though that helps, I'm told.

It also helps to be stupid. My father and grandfather were not stupid, so they did not join the Moose or anything. They chose solitude instead. Solitude can be nearly as comforting as drugs or fraternities, since there are no other people to remind a solitary person how little like a folk society his society has become. My father had only his young wife with him on his happiest day. My grandfather had only a friend with him on his happiest day. There was very little talking--because the locomotive made so much noise.

As for my own happiest day: I was happy because I believed that the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago was a small, like-minded family which I was being allowed to join. This was not True.

As I have said before, I can explain everything in terms of this biochemical-anthropological theory of mine. Only two men are less mystified by the human condition than I am today: Billy Graham and Maharishi. If my theory is mistaken, it scarcely matters, since I was told that this need not be a serious speech anyway.

Also, whether I am mistaken or not, we are surely doomed, and so are our artifacts. I have the word of an astronomer on this. Our sun is going to exhaust its fuel eventually. When the heat stops rushing out from its core, our sun will collapse on itself. It will continue to collapse until it is a ball perhaps forty miles in diameter. We could put it between here and Bridgeport.

It will wish to collapse even more, but the atomic nuclei will prevent this. An irresistible force will meet an immovable object, so to speak. There will be a tremendous explosion. Our sun will become a supernova, a flash such as the Star of Bethlehem is thought to have been. Earth Day cannot prevent this.

Somewhere in that flash will be the remains of a 1912 Oldsmobile, a cowcatcher from a locomotive, the University of Chicago, and the paperclip from this year's Blashfield Address.

I thank you.

--Kurt Vonnegut Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons

from The Address to the National Institute of Arts and Letters, 1971

Just thought it was interesting subject matter to bring to your attention and has the double impact of tying in directly to a discussion I had at work with someone the other night.

Online Personality Quizes

Here you go for those who care, my results on an online MBTI/Enneagram test. I was as truthfull as I could be, no trying to skew the results.

Conscious self	Overall self

ENTP - "Inventor". Enthusiastic interest in everything and always sensitive to possibilities. Non-conformist and innovative. 3.2% of the total population.

Take Free Myers-Briggs Personality Test
personality tests by similarminds.com

The Man of Steel?

The story is pretty much everywhere that is interested in it on the net right now, but The Beat is where I saw it first.

Director of the in production Superman film Bryan Singer has been adamant in his desire to cast an unknown in the titular role, and the rumor is that the fellow to the right a mister Brandon Routh is all but locked to play Big Blue.

The Beat says the image to the right came from Routh's website (which as of this writing is down due to--wonder why--bandwidth excess), and is from a costume party. What strikes me about the picture is how damn much he looks like Christopher Reeve there, and if he is the choice it is a good one to invoke the ideas of those films.

Who is young Routh, you ask? He was Seth Anderson #1 on ABC Soap Opera One Life to Live, and was a guy on MTV's teen-sex soap opera Undressed. He's been in a few other tv shows, and just finished wrapping his first feature film.

I hope he can act, but if Singer has faith in him, I'm sure he can.

Harry at AICN thinks this is a very strong possibility, which adds some credence, so I'm betting it's just a short time till Warner Bros makes the announcement.

So, ladies and gentlemen, DC's two oldest icon characters are coming soon to a theater near you played by relatively untested actors based solely on their suitability for the roles! Has Warner Bros finally learned the dreadful lessons of Batman and Robin and Catwoman? Not a chance! They're just completely schizophrenic! But this time their schizophrenia is a boon and not a bust.

Latino Review broke the story.

Quote the Rodriguez

And it's actually better if you learn movies on your own, without formal training--otherwise your movies will be too formal. Now, you may hear all the time that you need to learn the rules to break the rules. Don't bother. I've found it more effective to ignore everything and question everything because it can all be rethought and improved, and in the end the only techniques worth knowing are the ones you invent yourself.

--Robert Rodriguez, Rebel Wtihout a Crew(200)

Movie Time

Team America: World Police

This isn't a laugh a minute movie. There are plenty of laughs there, but this is more of a situational humor movie. More funny strange rather than funny ha-ha.

A kid behind me said to someone else behind me "Do you realize how boring this movie is?"

It isn't really boring, just played very straight for the most part.

This is a big summer action film with puppets and a bit of crude humor thrown in.

Did I laugh? Yes.

As much as at Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle? No.

But this isn't that type of movie.

I agree with Roger Ebert that this movie doesn't really have a point to put forward, other than people should make up their own minds about the war on Terror, and that celebrities don't know any more about things than anyone else does.
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20041014/REVIEWS/40921007

Not as funny as South Park, but neither was There's My Bush.


Three Babes


Dirty Shame

This is a hard movie to define. It reminds me of Troma's Terror Firmer, but with a much bigger budget. It feels like it's going out of its way to offend people, and in doing so comes off as quite a bit less offensive.

Then again, any movie with an extended head-butting scene can't be all bad.

I'm not a big John Waters fan, and this movie isn't going to turn me into one, but it isn't a one star film like Roger Ebert says it is, but it's not a four star either.

To me, Tracy Ullman is the female equivalent of Martin Short. Neither is very funny, but, occasionaly, given the right director and script to reign in their scenery chewing muggery, can be adequate.

Ullman is mostly adequate here.

So is Johnny Knoxville, who seems to be pretty much Johnny Knoxville.

"Let's Go Sexing!"



Two Babes

Listen Up

You will go and listen to I Can't Get Behind That 'sung' by William Shatner and my man Henry Rollins. It's from Billy's new album Has Been.

Quite simply one of the most awesome audio presentations ever put together by mankind. You can listen to the entire album here, but I don't know if I would suggest that or not.

Stop reading this post and go LISTEN TO THE DAMN SONG ALREADY!.

Simply fabulous.

FrankenKerry

[warning, thare be porn at the link]

Two Versions

Since Gunny pointed out that I probably re-posted an image, here are two that I'm pretty sure that I haven't posted before. I didn't even draw either one of them.

First is one by Kung-Fu Soccer Guy, himself, Philipe Jones from back in my Food Lion days, of me having an angry moment in the car.

Next is a portrait of me by Tommy:

I feel he correctly represented my tank treads, pincer-claw hand and Cannon Arm, but I'm unsure where the pumpkin style head came from.

Vonnegut Poetry

We do,
Doodley do, doodley do, doodley do,
What we must,
Muddily must, muddily must, muddily must;
Muddily do,
Muddily do, muddily do, muddily do,
Until we bust,
Bodily bust, bodily bust, bodily bust.

--Kurt Vonnegut, from Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons

Another Picture

Randomness

I Amuse Me

My New Friend

I'd like you all to meet my new friend. I call him Clyde. I suppose he is more of a slave since I bought him at auction for a donation to the Children's Miracle Network.

I'm looking forward to all the zany hijinks that we will get up to.

For the Man Who Has Everything

Superman Annual #11 from 1985 by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons is quite possibly one of the best Superman stories ever written outside of Moore's run on Supreme.

In the comic it's Superman's birthday and Batman and Robin (Jason Todd) and Wonder Woman travel up to the Fortress of Solitude to take him their presents and find him in the clutches of some sort of alien plant that has attached itself to his chest with tentacles running over his body.

Supes is catatonic and unmoving, but the readers discover that in his mind he is living his perfect life on Krypton, where he is married and has a kid and everything is hunky-dory.

Batman, Robin and WonderWoman are confronted by Mongul, one of Superman's crazy powerful alien villans who has sent the plant to ensnare superman. They proceed to the fighting while Supes is in his own little world. Mongul pretty well wipes the floor with the three of them until Batman pulls the plant off of Superman and it attaches itself to him.

Supes wakes up and throws down on Mongul. Severely pissed off Big Blue is. He snaps and is pretty much ready to kill Mongul. And it all comes to a head as he simply says "Burn" and lets loose with the heat-vision.

This is the climax of the story, and is one of the first real times I ever saw a writer really give Superman some balls and have him be really emotional.

I mean, he's Superman, pretty much completely unstoppable, so, really, there's never really any way you can really get to him. Mongul found a way, and Superman really snapped. The only other time I can think of that there is this sort of punch for Supes is in Kingdom Come where the US Government drops nuclear bombs on a giant battle between the superhumans and only a few survive and Superman flies out to the capitol and is pretty much ready to kill everyone there for what they've done.

The point to all this rambling is that on their Justice League Unlimited show, Cartoon Network has adapted this particular story, and it was on tonight.

For the most part it was pretty well done. They dropped Robin from the story and shortened it down a bit, but it was pretty much the same story.

The problem I have is they completely flubbed the climax of the story with the "Burn" line.

In my mind Supes says it with a low growl, that deadly kind of emotion. He's ready to kill.

In the show it's short and punchy "Burn!" Like he's an anime character calling out for a special move, and it just doesn't work. I never really got any of the emotion from the guy doing Superman.

Without that one little bit the whole story just falls apart.

Really dissapointing.

Expos No More

With the Expos moving from Montreal to Washington, D.C. I figure that a new name will be in order before too long. Washington Expos just doesn't have that ring.

One possibility that I think they should entertain is to return to the Senators name vacated in the seventies, but Tommy says that they probably won't do that since there's an NHL team by the same name and they'll want something unique.

I've got a proposal.

They should call them the Washington W's.

Their gimmick could be that midway through the second inning they take control of the pitchers mound, left field and the press box and declare a victory, leaving behind a team of replacement players to continue the game.

Of course their mascot would be a monkey in a business suit and cowboy hat that chain-smokes Marlboros.

Imagine the possibilities.