It’s online now! You can go see it here. Our musical guests are Martyranny’s Collective Pulse and The Concept, and we also have animation and a puppet show by my brother, Frank. Detailed production notes will be posted tonight, after I finish the magazine article on Spider-man 3 that I’m writing.
Month: January 2007 (Page 2 of 3)
This week’s Monday Morning Art is Tree Fun a digitally-assaulted photograph of my Christmas Tree, which I wrote about last month. I like the way it looks all oil-painty and crap.
Click the image to enlarge. Go here to buy overpriced stuff with this image.
[youtube]921zTC69UR4[/youtube]
I’ve had a few people ask me about Line Rider, my pick for favorite videogame in the Gazz 2006 Best Of The Year poll. How can a free Flash game be better than the ultra-expensive games that you can buy for your even more-ultra-expensive shiny new game consoles? 
Well, for one, it’s free, and I’m cheap. Second, this isn’t really a game. It’s creator, Boštjan Čadež (also known as *fšk) calls it a “toy.” You don’t score points, or beat anybody else. You just draw a line on your computer screen, and a little dude with a scarf rides his sled down them. You can make him do tricks, jumps, or you can just let him cruise. And when you get bored, you can make him wreck, and watch his body slide and bounce around the screen.
It’s addictive. When *fsk posted his creation at Deviant Art in September, it quickly became an internet phenomenon, with over 140,000 short films based on the game being posted on YouTube. Follow the links in this article to play it yourself. You’ll be hooked, and your office productivity will plummet!
Lynn Johnston’s For Better Or For Worse, carried locally by the Daily Mail, is one of those comic strips that doesn’t get much in the way of critical love. Yet it’s one of the comics that people seem to read religiously, and it’s one of only five comic strips carried in more than 2,000 newspapers. That’s why it’s a bit of a surprise that, come September big changes are afoot. The characters will stop aging, as they have throughout the history of the comic. They will remain forever the age that 
they are this year. And the comic strip will go into what Universal Press Syndicate calls a “hybrid” mode, where new strips will primarily be framing sequences that will set up long periods of “re-runs” of earlier strips from the strip’s 28-year run.
The first Monday Morning Art of the new year is a digitally-assaulted photograph that I call “Archway.” It’s not actually a photo of an archway. It’s a photo I took last summer of the levelling of the old Ames store in Dunbar. I had at it with color manipulation, then mirrored it and came up with what you see.
As always, click the picture to enlarge (or follow this link, if that doesn’t work) and go here to buy overpriced merchandise with this image.
This week, for no reason at all, the Song of the Week is The Beatles, singing “Komm Gib Mir Deine Hand”. It’s “I Want To Hold Your Hand” sung in German. Reportedly, it’s a very rough translation, though it appears they got the “Hand” part right. Listen hard for the insane stereo separation!
Ladies and Gentlemen, The Beatles, in German…..
“Komm Gib Mir Deine Hand”
Link courtesy of April Winchell.
As a total non-sequitur, we have a bonus. A couple of weeks ago, we tried to bring you an MP3 of Melanie Larch singing “Ave Maria” from the Christmas episode of Radio Free Charleston. We’re still working out the bugs, but if you want to download a noisy version, taken from one of the cameras, instead of the slick studio-mic rendition heard on the show, go here.
Hey! Speaking of audio glitches…..if you clicked on the Beatle song above and heard something that made you imagine Alvin, Simon, and Theodore goose-stepping down the street in full Nazi regalia with Beatle wigs, then you’ve discovered that our “play the song way too fast” glitch isn’t fixed yet. Go to April Winchell’s page, and then to her “Multimedia” page, scroll down, and you can find her link to “Komm Gib Mir Deine Hand” in the “German Cover Versions” section of her wonderful MP3 collection. Meanwhile, I promise we’ll fix our link as soon as possible…on Monday.
Also, Monday afternoon our first “Comic Of The Week” will be posted, with breaking news about the semi-retirement of a beloved comic strip artist, and the fate of that comic strip.
For our first PopCult edition of Videos Of The Week, we’re going to look at the work of Spike Jones. I’m talking about the legendary comedy bandleader, 
not the music video director who swiped his name, but spells it with a “z.”
There is a wealth of Spike Jones material on YouTube, and reminded of that fact this morning by this post over on Mark Evanier’s excellent blog, I decided to showcase some of these nifty comic masterpieces in PopCult.
First up, in honor of the GoodNight performance by “Slide By Slide,” the trombone ensemble who performed at the Riverside Baptist Church on New Year’s Eve, here’s “Flight Of The Bumblebee,” played on a slide trombone:
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Maybe I pick on WQCW (formerly WHCP) too much. I mean, somebody there got all bent out of shape when I remarked on their general incompetence back in the early days of this blog. And they really weren’t happy with my coverage of their attempt at a local newscast almost a year ago. So I don’t want my readers to think I’m piling on, but last weekend, I witnessed what may have been the most inept example of cheap-o programming ever pulled off by a local television station. And that’s saying something–I lived through the Curtis Butler era at WCHS.
I’m talking about the movies that WQCW showed over the weekend. Now I know that the station operates on the flimsiest of shoestring budgets, and that the merger of UPN and The WB into one network left them with a serious shortage of programming, but last weekend they did something so desperate that I was stunned. It appears that they are now showing public domain movies, purchased on DVDs which retail for a buck apiece at Dollar Tree, and they’re playing them on a consumer-model DVD player.
Our inaugural “Cool Thing Of The Week” is an antique toy store 
I visited a few weeks ago in Canonsburg PA. Where The Toys Are has been a major destination for toy collectors visiting the Pittsburgh area for more than a decade, and it was a real treat to get to stop in for the first time in many years when I was up that way recently. The store is a goldmine, filled to bursting with cool vintage toys from the last one hundred years. Even somebody who doesn’t collect toys will go crazy in this place, spouting out “Oh, I used to have that!” every time they take a peek on another shelf.
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