l-dopa

Mike Nelson, best known for playing “Not Joel Anymore” on cult classic cable show “Mystery Science Theater”*, has a new venture: Riff Trax. For $1.99, you can download an mp3 of Mike’s commentary track which you can then sync-up and play over the movie. As of right now the only movie commentary track is, of course, Roadhouse, but there are promises of more to come.

If the commentary is half as funny as his work on Mystery Science Theater — or his excellent book Mike Nelson’s Movie Megacheese (which if memory serves I believe has an entire chapter on Roadhouse as well) — it’ll be great. I just wish I had a copy of Roadhouse lying around, then we could be going off the rails on a Swayze train. If you know what I mean.

~jeff

* which always struck me as slightly unfair, as Mike was one of the writers for Joel. Sure, he didn’t have the same stoned-out charisma as Joel, but why hold that against him.

Nice work, Mel, we knew you could do it; and the line between reality and “South Park” blurs further and further.

My personal theory is that most people think that Mel Gibson is actually Sergeant Martin Riggs from “Lethal Weapon”, and thus actually believe him to be charmingly “funny-crazy”, instead of the less charming and less funny “actual-crazy”… which is probably more the case.

~jeff

My dream of getting into the Guinness Book of World Records has been crashed. I figured I could break the world record for four leaf clovers in my free time, but at 72,000 clovers (and a what, life sentence?) this guy has more ‘free’ time than I ever will.

Now I’m thinking the human domino record is probably the easiest to break. All we have to do is get 10,000 of our friends…

Zoot allures! It’s a cool new screensaver for Mac OS X, from the folks at the French Macbidouille forum.

~jeff

Excellent list of great movie endings — maybe a little spoiler heavy, though. If reading through it doesn’t make you want to rewatch at least five of these movies, maybe you’re not obsessive enough about your movies.

~jeff

202 liters of Diet Coke and 523 Mentos, to be precise.

Oh, and with great music by Audio Body.

Saddle up, kids. Now you can buck common sense, all logic AND your hips at the same time. Don’t forget to “see it in action” – group scenes of the elderly and out of shape rockin’ and tiltin’ their pelvises always promises to be a good time.

You know, I would actually be interested in this if one minor adjustment were made to it. A well-placed saddle horn, if ya get my drift.

And I think you do.

Really impressive DJ Shadow/Cut Chemist/Kid Koala-style video here (WARNING: shitty quality YouTube video). You have to love the bassist — “gotta go, I think it’s time for lunch or something” — and his dedication to both “flange” and “mullet” is, um, remarkable. See, I just remarked upon it.

Tangentially: I always wonder what kind of software people use to create these kinds of video remixes — I can’t imagine doing this kind of work in Premiere or After Effects.

(thanks, Nick!)

~jeff

They sound like condoms, don’t they? Or some sort of virility boosters? Right? Right?

Wrong. They’re scooters. Motorized scooters. The kind you sit in. The kind made for the somewhat disabled, but mostly used by the fat and lazy who are just tired of walking. Super sized for the “increase in obesity” even.

“Mr. Robles doesn’t have a problem walking — he says he was simply saving up energy for late-night dancing. ‘I’m pretty healthy,’ says the 37-year-old truck driver from Brooklyn, N.Y. ‘Just lazy, I guess.’”

Late night dancing, indeed. Well, clearly. I mean, look at the picture.

Oh, and let’s not forget the ones who use them to dupe ushers into thinking they’re disabled, so they can buy cheap tickets to shows in casinos, but still get great seats.

I don’t close my unordered list tags. And: I never have.

I know because of this abject laziness, it doesn’t validate, but I don’t give a flying fig, and furthermore, it doesn’t matter in the least to any browser I’ve ever seen, back to like, Mosiac Gold.

There, I said it. I feel better.

Post any true confessions of HTML coding you have in the comments below.

~jeff

Great article by Andrew Brown investigating why it’s so easy to be a jerk to other people online:

George Meyer, the most admired writer on the Simpsons – and so one of the funniest men alive today – said in a New Yorker profile some years ago that television comedy has got meaner and nastier because it is now taped in front of a live studio audience. If the laugh isn’t immediate, it goes; and what’s recognised as an immediate laugh is something cruel. The participants in American sitcoms routinely say things to each other which in real life would have the recipient running from the room in tears – and yet, on television, they are greeted with roars of sycophantic laughter. The Internet gives everyone a studio audience in that sense. We are all among Friends when we type.

…George Meyer is also credited with the infamous Simpsons “sandwich gag” (I told that idiot to slice my sandwich!), so I’m inclined to believe him.

~jeff

What I find notable about this clip isn’t how “funny” the hidden pool prank is (WARNING: shitty quality YouTube video), but how casually horrific it is — and the German voiceover and the “Hey Ya” soundtrack only make it worse. I can’t wait for these guys’ next hi-larious “hammer to the kneecaps” or “piranha to the face” pranks.

~jeff

You should never get a Tracfone and I’ll tell you why.

a.) Stupid name. This should have tipped me off instantly. Do they not have the time to put the k in track or spell phone the normal way?

2. Your phone number MUST be fixed to your actual location (they use your zip code to accomplish this) yet it’s frikin long distance no matter where you call from. Even your land line. Which you must have. We’ll get into that later.

iii)YOU LOSE YOUR PHONE NUMBER if you ever run out of minutes, or if the period expires. On your phone, you don’t get to see the actual date. No, you have to stare — for three months or more — at the date they expect your phone number to get the axe.

Fourthly, To renew your minutes you have to either go online or use a phone (not on your trackphone mind you– I mean tracfone –) and receive long codes. No, not like credit card numbers. Longer than that. No, not the longest number the screen on your tr*kF*ker can hold, longer than that. Really long frikin codes. Three of them. And then it gives you codes to write down and enter laboriously into that candybar-sized source of all evil. And guess what? Sometimes they’re on the card you purchased, and, just to keep it really fun, sometimes they’re on the receipt instead. Wooo! But that’s not all. They require you to identify your phone to them with the SIM code every frikin time. So it’s either write it down on something you will never lose, or take the battery out of the thing midway through the process and then start all over. But this is the worst part of part Fourth. Despite the fact that your whole damn phone number expires at midnight, their call center is only open until 8 or something. If you didn’t get to it until 9, you might think, well I’ll just use the website. 2 nightmarish interface hours later, you (I mean I) still can’t get the codes I’ve got to work, and I’ve only got 1 hour to doomsday for the phone number I’ve preciously kept hidden from the whole world since it costs me units every time I pick it up or even imagine glancing at it briefly. I’ve got the cold sweats, I’m jamming in these codes as fast as I can, I feel like Indiana Jones trying to get out of the Temple of Doom.

Finally, and this is what would feel like a kick in the nuts if I had them, they are constantly text messaging my phone with advertisements for their services. I hate the damn thing, so I both already have it and already know I don’t want it. And frankly my friend, neither do you.

From the Dept. of Maybe-This-Will-Help-Someone-Somewhere:

I searched high and low to find instructions on how to print to my trusty AirPort Extreme wireless print server via Ubuntu linux, and came up relatively empty. I found instructions on how to set it up under Windows — obsolete instructions, as Apple actually makes an excellent utility for Windows that uses Bonjour — but nothing specific to linux. So here we go, using Ubuntu/Gnome:

1. Select “Printing” under the Administrative settings menu; authenticate.
2. Select “Network Printer”.
3. Select HP JetDirect printing.
4. Set the Host as the IP of the Airport router (probably 10.0.1.1).
5. Here’s the tricky part — all the instructions I found said to use port 9100, but this didn’t work for me. I port scanned the Airport router and got this:
   

   Port Scan has started ...

   Port Scanning host: 10.0.1.1

   Open TCP Port: 53 domain
Open TCP Port: 5009
Open TCP Port: 9101 bacula-dir
Open TCP Port: 10000 ndmp
Port Scan has completed ...

   …so I instead entered the printer port as 9101*.

6. I continued on to enter the make and model of the USB printer attached to the AirPort and successfully printed an Ubuntu test page — a lovely test page, by the way, puts other printer test pages to shame.

~jeff

* Not sure what Bacula has to do with it, if anything.

I have never even thought to try to take a Dalmatian to McDonalds — not even so he could try the new McSnausage Wraps — but for some reason in 1996 McDonalds was purporting to be your “Dalmatian location”. Still, it’s not nearly as bad as “Pepsi World” was:

We believe in keeping things new, fresh, so that we can claim to move you in unexpected directions which hopefully, rev up the nerve center of your imagination to a degree never before experienced.

The holiday spirit has smacked us on the face with the strength of a snow-charged blow of frigid Nordic air. It’s Pepsi Holiday 96! Peruse our new wonderland and discover a bountiful chest of surprises. Get nifty e-cards, icy-cool screensavers, Microsoft stuff you’ve been wishing for and more prizes than stars up in the cloudless moonlit yonder.

…Pepsi’s 1996 over-cooked promitional copy possibly written by the same ad wizards who came up with “The Hub“, Walmart’s weak stab at a non-union, Mexican MySpace equivalent. Seriously, point at it and laugh, it’s rilly awful.

~jeff