As usual I’m weeks late to the party on one of these, but here’s mine.
The idea behind this meme is that you combine random info from randomized sources to create a CD/Album cover for your fictitious band. Ikinci Qala brings a sort of Ladysmith Black Mambazo vibe to mind and the album title/artwork meshed surprisingly well. I feel like my band is probably loved by hippies everywhere and is often a special guest at folk festivals. Apologies for the shitty graphic quality, stuck with only Paint on this computer.
Here’s how to play along:
1 – Go to “wikipedia.” Hit “random”
or click en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first random wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.
2 – Go to “Random quotations”
or click www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.
3 – Go to flickr and click on “explore the last seven days”
or click www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days
Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.
4 – Use photoshop or similar to put it all together.
5 – Post to Flickr or your website.
For funsies here’s another one I did later on… classic (it’s spooky how often the image/band name or title match well):
A Kwazy Kwanzaa… and a solemn and dignified Ramadan to you.
Sandra Lee… In my American foodie brethren her very name evokes the kind of disgust usually reserved for Rachel Ray’s spouting EVOO (followed by an explanation) or by College_Student_04029812 asking for CHEEP FOOD IDEAZ 4 DORM PLZ for the millionth time! Those of us lucky enough to live north of the 49th have thankfully avoided her frankensteinian cooking methods and trailer park arts and crafts aesthetic thus far so I will explain.
When I asked one of my friends if she’d seen the cake referenced later in this post her response was “those box cakes you used to get at KFC after they stopped using McCain?” As a result, I’ll start out by pointing out that I am not referring to Sara Lee, though I will admit that in my youth I somehow ate a few of those stale angel food and crusted mortal icing bricks that they forced upon us. CANCON rules (I’m guessing anyway) have thus far saved us from Sandra Lee, a “chef” who presents a show called “SEMI-HOMEMADE” where she takes premade products and combines them into meals that, at least in her words, look homemade.
I try not to be a food snob, I certainly have low grade junky foods that I love and won’t give up, but Sandra Lee takes it to a level that is just revolting. While some of her shows feature the occasional recipe that uses some pre-packaged ingredient in a novel and valuable way, most of them involve combining highly processed, very unhealthy foods together into one giant mess. The supposed time savings are often incredibly minimal or simply non-existent. The excessive use of easy store-bought “ingredients” means the end result often has a sodium or sugar level double or even triple what a proper dish would.
A few examples include:
A chicken and dumplings recipe that calls for a store-bought roast chicken (pulled apart), Pillsbury biscuit dough, canned gravy and the addition of 6 cups of broth. It also includes Bags of carrot and celery sticks that are then chopped up for addition to the chicken (yes you read that right… pre sliced carrot sticks, that you then chop… essentially saving yourself one or two knife slices per carrot at a 150% cost markup). I’m sure you can figure out the unnecessary repetition in this recipe from the chicken etc. Really basic dough like a dumpling is one of the easiest things in the world to make using ingredients most people have anyway, hell even using Bisquick is tons healthier than the Pillsbury kind and tons tastier
Mini Chicken Pot Pies using canned chicken…
Six Cheese Tortellini using Cheese Whiz and shredded bag cheese and cheese tortellini. Seriously… why are you not just buying a high quality jarred sauce, it’ll taste better.
For more horrors, simply visit the food network site (US version)…
I’d always thought Sandra was horrible from the odd time I flipped past her show while in the states or from the occasional unbelievable Youtube videos. I’d always meant to write a little rant about Lee, and when Amelie Gilette over at the AVClub posted the following this week, I had the perfect excuse: Sandra Lee’s Kwanzaa cake.
Tony Bourdain (who I love dearly but who often tries a bit too hard to be ornery) had this to say about this concoction:
“The most terrifying thing I’ve seen is her making a Kwanzaa cake. Watch that clip and tell me your eyeballs don’t burst into flames. It’s a war crime on television. You’ll scream”
This cake starts out as a grocery store stale angelfood ring sliced into two layers. She then adds canned icing by the quart.
At this point you’re probably thinking “man he’s overreacting… my mom used to do that…” There’s a reason that Amelie refers to the cake as: “clearly a pile of ridiculousness slathered in despair and sprinkled with nonsense nuggets.”
The next step is to open a can of apple pie filling… and drop it with a plop into the middle of the hole in the middle of the cake. Not content to stop there, she then covers the cake with comically oversized candles and sprinkles it with pumpkin seeds and corn nuts. The nauseating result looks like something you’d find on the table at an elementary school craft fair and is yet more proof that pretty much everyone who watches her show will die of adult onset diabetes.
Kudos to Steve Martin for putting his money where his mouth is. An Oregon high school was forced to cancel a production of Martin’s play “Picasso at the Lapin Agile” due to typical American Christian/conservative idiocy about mature themes. Martin stepped in and helped them stage an off-campus performance at a nearby college
One has to wonder about these parents… Did they attend high school in Mayberry? Having seen the play in question when it was put on at MTC a few years back I have great difficulty seeing what their complaints are about. The so called mature themes are tame compared to a Monday morning discussion of the past weekend, much less other literature that is tackled in high school or (god forbid) a night of television.
If you want to homeschool your kids and turn them into sheltered, useless human being with no social skills… do so… stop forcing everyone else’s children to lower themselves to your level.
As you gather your wits after that stupidity, I’d like to ask… What are your favorite incredibly stupid but really funny as a result death scenes from movies? There’s a fine line between something like the previous which seems (I hope) to be tongue in cheek but still within the plot of the movie over to something that’s totally meant as comedy.
A few personal favorites:
Not truly cinematic, but the return of the helicopter from the television show E.R. A few years after he loses his arm to a helicopter tail rotor, Dr. Robert Romano is killed by another helicopter falling off the roof and onto his head. It’s so incredibly over the top dumb yet awesome.
Troll 2: Almost any death in this movie is incredibly drawn out and stupid, but the ones where they turn into liquified green goo are especially horrid. Staying within the MST3K/Rifftrax genre gives us a bunch of other options of course. Every single railing death in Space Mutiny would be a candidate, Torgo’s “erotic” massage in Manos and so on. They’re almost too easy as targets though… here’s a nice compilation of the ultra cheesy.
Welsey Snipes final passing in demolition man (which was so incredibly telegraphed) …
Bond killing Blofeld in Never Say Never Again by dropping him down the smokestack was so over the top stupid yet undoubtedly entertaining.
My favorite team made a big splash at the deadline yesterday, picking up Olli Jokinen and Jordan Leopold to bolster their talent for a (hopefully deep) playoff run.
Leopold is a reasonably solid defenseman that I was sad to see leave after his first tenure in Calgary. Thankfully Darryl Sutter (flames GM) hadn’t forgotten about him and managed to get him relatively cheap from the Avalanche as they circle the drain. He brings some extra playoff experience back to the defense core and should help to fill the gap left by Giordano’s injury. As for the Avalanche, one has to wonder what exactly their plan for the future is… they didn’t trade Smyth, they’re somewhat short on prospects and I’m not convinced that Paul Stastny is someone you want to be betting the future of your franchise on, barring Sakic playing into his 50’s they’re in trouble. In exchange for Leopold they got Nycholat (who the Flames had just gotten off waivers), less than stellar D prospect Ryan Wilson and a 2nd round pick.
The Jokinen trade was a bit more painful. Olli is a player I have liked for a long time despite his lack of exposure playing in arguably the worst hockey market in the league in Florida. He hasn’t been too great since moving to one of the other horrid hockey markets in Phoenix, but he’ll be back with Keenan, the coach that originally got him going as a premiere player. Here’s hoping the magic returns.
Calgary has needed a true first line center for a long time. The closest we’ve come in recent years was during the last cup run when Craig Conroy had decent magic with Iginla but even in those days the other wing was the question mark. If Jokinen can wake up and be the player he was for the Panthers I’d gladly put a top 3 of Iginla – Jokinen – Cammalieri as one of the best in the league.
I really hope it pays off, because we paid a high price. Losing Matt Lombardi hurts. He’s a player I love for his speed, though he lack of consistent goal scoring hands have kept him from being the center I’d always hoped for. I will miss him and hope Calgary resigns him at some point. Brandon Prust is a hard nosed Sutter kind of guy that plays with a 50-gallon heart and will be missed, but is ultimately replaceable.
Unfortunately we also gave up a 1st round pick, either this year or next (Calgary’s choice.) I honestly think that’s too much… given how Olli has played this year I honestly think he was worth a 1st straight up (though Phoenix probably had a lot of interest) or more realistically a 1st plus Lombardi or Prust, not both. Sutter appears to be betting on this year (who can blame him either, we’re playing great down the stretch and Kipper is having an “on” year after a slow start, just like 04).Losing the 1st either in this incredibly deep year (with our second gone too) or next year will hurt. I’m not exactly sure when we have to decide. Hopefully not until the draft itself when we have a better idea of what we’ll be giving up this year. Personally I think I’d lean towards giving up this year’s… who knows where we’ll finish in the standings next year and what a quite possibly lower salary cap might force us to give up heading into the 2010/2011 season.
I hope it’s the year for another cup run… my bank account does too. I’m not missing catching at least one playoff game for them if we make it past round 1 and my current internship means I have the means to do so without having to rely on Mister Visa Card. A quite possible Detroit-Calgary second round matchup (or Conference Finals) would be ideal since I wouldn’t even have to fly.
Get out tonight to see it in 3D. Neil Gaiman’s twitter reminded me today that the Jonas Bros in 3D is likely to take over all the 3D capable screens at a theatre near you tomorrow.
You owe it to yourself not to miss this in 3D as it’s one of the few movies where it’s used to make the movie better through and through as opposed to just a gimick.
If I have to hear one more newscast or oscar synopsis about how he “turned a comic book character into a psychopathic monster” (and other comments about how he apparently singlehandedly came up with his performance) I’m going to cry.
I’m sorry Mr. or Ms. copywriter or reporter or whatnot that your only experience with the Joker character appears to be from Adam West’s camp-o-rama batstravaganza but perhaps you should do some research. Without even diving into the books we can look at Nicholson’s performance… a very different Joker but with a similar psychotic malevolence. Jack and Heath are doing the same character… albeit as shaded by the very different Gotham’s imagined by Tim Burton and Chris Nolan. (For the record I enjoyed TDK but I despised Batman Begins, but that’s a whole other argument)
If we dive into the books we can find many instances of an even crueler and vicious Joker. I see Ledger’s character as having a slight glimmer of self control left, almost invisible… many of the books have the Joker fast past that point.
I’m glad he won his Oscar as it was a great performance for a fairly good movie that a ton of people saw. Hopefully a few of the people that tuned in to the Oscars to see that moment also saw a few other movies that tempted them. And speaking of Jack… where the hell was he, internet rumour seems divided on whether he snubbed presenting an oscar and was in turn snubbed by the cameras or if he’s sick?
Don’t get me wrong, I love Alan Moore’s work, I love Watchmen in particular but he’s a hypocritical angry old hash addict. In the lead up to the Watchmen release the media have been writing the usual stories about Alan Moore. We all know that Moore doesn’t like the idea of film adaptations of his work… he liked it fine when he took the money to sell the rights to various things in the first place, but that’s a whole other argument. Regardless he can do whatever he want then come screaming back later about how he disavows it and know that the hard-core fanboys will blindly follow his lead and ignore the fortune he’s making.
There’s no question the film will not be a direct representation of the original, that’s simply impossible. I just hope that it’s a great movie that tries to keep the spirit of the original alive while appealing to a broader audience (not LCD, but broader). Comic book zealots who think only a frame by frame translation will do are completely deluding themselves. It’s impossible both in terms of a watchable time frame for the movie (no matter how much I love the subject matter I’d have trouble sitting through a 4 or 5 hour movie :p) and also in terms of content.
Many fans are up in arms about Director Zack Snyder extending fight scenes and pumping up the action in the movie. I hate to say it folks, while I’m also a bit hesitant about his touch (I was not a huge fan of 300) the movie does need to have more action. People who aren’t familiar with Watchmen will expect a certain level of action and if they don’t get it, the movie will not do well. No matter what, if the movie was only tailored towards hard core comic book fans it would crash and crash hard. If a few more action scenes are the price I have to pay to get a think-piece like Watchmen out there and get more people to read the actual book (and that sort of comic in general) I’m all for it. The movie most of these fans want would cost an absolute fortune and make no money (no, book fans alone can not support that kind of budget) and we’d be stuck with “safe” crap like Spidey and xmen 3 as our only superhero flicks while anything with a brain was left to rot in development as “too risky.”
My biggest level of disgust comes with the total wanks who are complaining aboutwhat the marketing machine is doing to Watchmen. They see the book being featured in stores and toys being marketed and they start whining about things being contrary to the spirit blah blah blah… I’m with you on things like coffee tie-ins and fast food (though I don’t think I’ve heard of one, at least not yet) but how the fuck is it a bad thing that I can walk into chapters and see a display of Watchmen. It’s a great book with some great topics and if someone walks in and picks it up because the movie looks cool and really really loves it… how is that a bad thing? Am I missing some fundamental connection where the fact that I can now have a Nite Owl or Doctor Manhattan figure on my desk from Toys-r-us ruins your personal enjoyment of the book? Someone new is being brought into serious graphic novels is a bad thing? Get your head out of your ass and if you don’t want to see the movie, don’t see it.
