l-dopa

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

fig. 1: hopefully not a love scene
I’ve been a fan of PowerBook/crack cocaine user Aaron Sorkin since “West Wing”, so it’s great to see him back on TV. The script for the first episode of “Studio 60″ is (scurrilously) available online; even in rough form, it looks to be classic Sorkin — incredibly perky women, rapid fire dialog, and rampant corruption around every corner. Plan to hole up in September with some rock, ’shrooms, and cheeb and check it out:

MARTHA
You’re on Vicodin?

MATT
Yeah. I may have exceeded the recommended dosage.

MARTHA
Should you be out of bed?

MATT
(beat)
Am I?

~jeff

Either you enjoy “Tom Goes To The Mayor” or you really, really don’t — I personally don’t “enjoy” it as much as find it calmingly hypnotic, like staring into the swaying eyes of a deadly cobra. So you can imagine my shrill and confused cries of girlish delight when I discovered that Tim and Eric have produced a video podcast (QuickTime format, no iPod actually required to view). Check out the first episode for a look at life in L.A. for Tim and Eric. Also, don’t miss their new “Married News” calendar which you can actually purchase, all the better to creep yourself out all year long.

~jeff

Another oldie but a goodie:

On February 26, 2004, we had a snowstorm here in Raleigh, and all the news channels posted the businesses and schools that would be closed the next day. One of these fine news organizations, Time Warner Cable’s News 14 Carolina, chose the most convenient but least secure method to allow businesses to report closings: the Internet.

~jeff

Ah, Fox News; raising the level of discourse for us all, and proving that any time you invite one of the friendly folks from “God Hates Fags” onto your show, it’s sure to be rousing and intelligent time. God bless America*. Seriously, while screening this clip — and admittedly it’s hard to watch, I actually can’t get all the way through it — it’s like that scene where Darth Vader lifts the Emperor up and throws him down a handy nearby infinite shaft — certainly you’re rooting for Vader, but at the same time you know that he’s still a bad, bad dude.

It’s the kind of awful television that was so effectively described during Jon Stewart in his famous Crossfire appearance, shrill, useless, fake debate which sicks the soul as it weakens the spirit. We all have to rise above this kind of bait — it’s not real, and I can’t believe for a second it’s at all representative of any issues that the vast majority of us would genuinely entertain as relevant. It’s highly-energized gladiator spectacle recast as spirited discussion, and every night the media rolls it out for us, and far worse than that, every two or four years our politicians roll it out for us as well, hand-picking their ludicrously polarizing topics to distract us all with. But it’s not real; flag burning, gay marriage, these are not even related to the issues we need to be talking about. It’s somewhat entertaining to watch the tanned harpy fight the homophobic witch, but keep in mind, it’s not real.

~jeff

*It’s important to note when discussing our country that while you’re considering putting down $250K on that soulless 2 bdrm, 1 bthrm beige condo within a short driving distance to the local mall, farmhouses with 48 acre lots are selling for $140K in Canada. Shop around, is what I’m saying.

If you watch this clip with the sound off, it’s downright hypnotic.

~jeff

This Sunday. Cartoon Network. 10:30 PM.

Return of the Best. Show. Ever.

~jeff

Tivo’s support for the Mac has always been fairly dismal, a unfortunate reality mitigated only by the fact that Tivo’s support for the PC is pretty dismal too. The bad news is that Mac users are still no closer to being able to view TivoToGo (”.tivo”) files on their Macs. The good news is that with a slight hack to the new Mac tivo software, you can at least get video going the other direction, from your Mac to the Tivo. The downside is that the video has to be in MPEG-2 format — you’ve just got tons of that kicking around on your hard drive, right? — so for now, this is only for the hardcore video transcoding fans. Both of you. Perhaps slightly more useful is this nifty widget that lets you check the contents of your Tivo via Mac OS X’s Dashboard, and download the .tivo files*.

~jeff

* …which you can’t do anything on the Mac with because they are DRM encrypted — you can jump through some foolish hoops on the PC to get your .tivo files into unencrypted MPEG-2 video format, but seriously, life is too short. This just goes to show that DRM doesn’t have to be unbreakable, it just has to be a pain in the ass.

Great AMEX ad (cruddy YouTube video quality).

~jeff

Hey! It’s season two (thus far) of “O’Grady” free cheap at $1.99 via iTunes. I absolutely love H. Jon Benjamin and Melissa Bardin Galsky from their work on “Dr. Katz” and “Home Movies”, so I’m really looking forward to watching this. Actually trying to expose people to your show — I mean, free cheap television, what a revolutionary pretty ok idea — I hope other television shows follow this example.

~jeff

I’ve fallen off watching Adult Swim in the past year or so — still lamenting the cancellation of Home Movies and waiting for new episodes of Venture Bros. — but it’s good to see they’re still turning out new shows (clips are in H.264 Quicktime 7/VLC format, thanks Demon!):

• Assy McGee
• Death Clock Metalocalypse
• Frisky Dingo
• Korgoth of Barbaria
• Saul of the Mole People
• That Crook’d Sip

…if I were a betting man, I’d bet here on “Korgoth”, “Death Clock”, and “Frisky Dingo” for the win.

~jeff

The Simpsons’ Comic Book Guy is based on a real man named T.M. Maple, a.k.a. The Mad Maple, who submitted incredibly knowledgeable and obsessive missives to the letters pages of comic books starting in the late 1970’s. A small sample of his letters can be found here.

Sad but officially true; there will be no more episodes of “Arrested Development”, like, ever — but as long as Jason Bateman and Wil Arnett (a.k.a. Mr. Amy Poehler) continue to get work, I’ll be somewhat sated. As a half-assed memorial, please enjoy these borderline incomprehensible quotes from the now belated series.

~jeff

I initially resisted watching “Battlestar Galactica“, dismissing it as yet another opportunistic rehash of a nerd show. Plus, no Moffet? WTF. Then I heard some friends of mine were watching it, friends who I don’t normally associate with rampant and ravenous television watching, so I decided to check it out.

And: it’s great. The actors who play Starbuck and Apollo are merely OK, but what really makes the series pop is the supporting work of Mary McDonnell as terminally ill President Laura Roslin. I just watched the episode last night where they christen and dedicate the newly-constructed “Blackbird” stealth ship to her, and honestly, I choked up a bit. Again: I choked up a bit while watching a show produced by the Sci-Fi network. I didn’t believe it either. She’s just. that. good.

Also, the roiling erotic tension between McDonnell and the also-very-good Edward James Olmos (a.k.a William Adama, a.k.a. “Wrinkle Farm”) is almost too much to bear. You know I’m right!

~jeff

Honda makes nice commercials.