Not-politics – Page 1185

Movie of the Week: Apollo 13. (Plus, Buzz Aldrin hip-hop link!)

And so we say goodbye to Mars Needs Women, and hello to Apollo 13… which is both a great film, and a vague sorta-kinda shout-out to Buzz Aldrin, who has two of the Greatest Videos Ever featured over here. Only one of which is a Snoop Dogg collaboration.

Swear to God, it’s true.

Dude, indeed.

Via @IMAO_, check out this picture:

Now click on this link to see what’s so interesting about it.

Moe Lane Continue reading Dude, indeed.

“The Son Never Shines (On Closed Doors)”

The Son Never Shines (On Closed Doors), Flogging Molly

It’s not a bad song to go to sleep to, oddly enough.

“Nobody needs shoes that bad.”

No. Nobody does. Next time, Dennis: call somebody. It was like Jimmy Doohan doing Homeboys in Outer Space…

(pause)

Wow. They put They Saved Hitler’s Brain on DVD, but not that. Impressive, in its way.

…anyway: I, personally, would have let you sleep on the spare couch or something, if that’s what it took to keep you from having to do Super Mario Bros. I’m not a cruel man.

No, really.

Moe Lane

‘Mind Flayers.’

‘Why did it have to be mind flayers?’ See also here, here, and here. On the other hand, it was always nice to see one in Nethack; once you killed it, eating it would raise your Intelligence score a point. Of course, hopefully you had on a helmet that would keep it from eating your brain down to Intelligence 3 first.

Why, yes, that link does lead to a download that will likewise eat your brain through the wonders of text-based nostalgia. You want that to happen again? No? Then hit the tip jar for the travel fund, and maybe it won’t.

Moo hoo bwah hah.

Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland.

Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter.

Just what you were expecting, in other words.

More here and here. No website for the movie yet, or at least I can’t find it – but I did find this hat.

Which some of you will want. I’m sure of it.

“Thick as a brick.”

Thick As A Brick (Edit No 1), Jethro Tull

No, it doesn’t actually mean anything. I don’t think that it’s supposed to mean anything. It’s just supposed to be pretty words that rhyme. Either that, or you need to smoke copious amounts of marijuana before listening to it.

Not that I’d know anything about that, of course.

Moe Lane

‘It’s a good life, having idiots hate you.’

Unlike Neil, I will respond:

Yes. Yes, it is.

Speaking of idiots, Perez Hilton supposedly got beat up by Will.I.Am. And you can associate the term ‘idiot’ with the participants in any way that you like.

Moe Lane

PS: RS Gathering. Tip jar for travel fund. Etc, etc, etc.

“Over the Hills and Far Away.”

Over The Hills And Far Away, Led Zeppelin

Is this the greatest Led Zep song ever recorded? I don’t know; but I wouldn’t mock anybody who said that it was, particularly if they were buying the beer.

AoSHQ & TAP do zombie posts.

Which you all know that I can’t resist commenting on. TAP’s Paul Waldman piece is here; Ace of Spades HQ’s Open Blog (Mætenloch) piece is here. Let’s get this out of the way: I agree with AoSHQ that Waldman’s done his homework, but I have to take major exception with his statement:

There are no highbrow zombie movies or novels, and admitting you love them amounts to a declaration that your tastes are unrefined.

It will all depend on how you define ‘highbrow’ – but I think that The Serpent And The Rainbow would qualify, as would 28 Days Later. Admittedly, the first is more Afro-Caribbean than the standard zombie flick, and the second breaks a lot of the conventions, so I may be on thinner ice than I like – but if Waldman can include The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari in his list, then I can use these two*. As to whether zombie films default liberal or conservative: well. They default to satirical, in my opinion; and you don’t want to end up getting too overtly partisan there. If you do, you end up making movies like Homecoming, which I cruelly mocked at the time (without even seeing**) as an inept attempt to use dead soldiers as mouthpieces for the antiwar movement (given that the living ones loudly declined the ‘honor’). There’s a lesson there, really.

That being said: I may pick up Revenge of the Zombies at some point.

Moe Lane

*And, of course, there’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Classic Regency Romance – Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem! … which pushes the definition of ‘highbrow’ almost but not quite to the breaking point. And then there’s World War Z, which was in my opinion very sophisticated. It’s not all that easy to do an authentic-sounding oral history book.

**Still haven’t, in fact.