Excellent work from the Wall Street Journal, and a hat tip to Can’t Stop the Bleeding for the link. Pretty funny interview highlighted by the fact that the guy’s real name is Wiley Wiggins, which seems like it would make a decent enough nickname for Lincecum.
Looking for a way to kill your next half hour or so? Enjoy this game from Gelf Magazine, asking you to determine whether the headline is real or from The Onion.
I know I’ve linked the Tumblr site Album Tacos here before but this installment is, for so many reasons, my favorite ever.
Good writeup from Matthew Callan on Ken Burns’ much-ballyhooed addition to Baseball. I haven’t watched it and don’t really plan to. That might sound ignorant, but I was around to formulate my own opinions on everything covered in the film and I’m not sure I want my memories colored by this interpretation.
I was mapping out my trek to Governors Island for the Vendys tomorrow and thought about this and it cracked me up so I figured I’d share:
My brother Chris was — and I say this not because he was my older brother, but because I’m pretty certain it’s true — probably the smartest person I’ll ever meet. But he had completely arbitrary taste in music.
Not downright awful taste, just haphazard. He introduced me to a lot of music I still enjoy today, like the Beatles and early-period Mighty Mighty Bosstones stuff before their major-label albums, but he also unironically enjoyed some of the worst music I’ve ever heard.
Later in his life, he claimed that he didn’t hear correctly and tried to blame it on an ear infection he had as an infant, an excuse I’m pretty sure stemmed from a combination of his absurd competitive streak and the fact that my sister and I both played and performed an awful lot of music through college.
He said he didn’t understand why notes an octave apart were considered the same note, and when I explained the science behind it — double the frequency, half the length of string, etc. — he thought it interesting but maintained he couldn’t discern any similarity. Maybe he couldn’t. (I should note that he was always supportive regardless; he showed up to just about every concert my sister ever had when they both lived in Boston and bought me my first bass.)
Anyway, one evening during the summer of 1995, on one of our countless trips to Shea Stadium, he announced that he stopped at the music store during his lunch break at the makeup-case factory and found — and he was proud of this, as though he uncovered a real treasure — a Chris De Burgh greatest hits CD.
I was 14, mind you, and blissfully unaware of “Lady in Red” at the time.
Chris didn’t buy the CD because of that anthem, though. He bought it partly because he and the singer shared similar names, understandable I suppose, and mostly because he was certain that Chris De Burgh’s second-biggest hit, “Don’t Pay the Ferryman,” was a downright awesome song.
He put the CD in the discman he had Velcro’d to the dashboard — connected to the tape deck through that amazing CD-to-cassette contraption I still haven’t figured out — and cued up the tune.
“This song’s great; it’s really scary.”
It played a bit. My tastes were still developing but I was getting into punk rock by then, and though I struggled at that time to find fault in almost anything my older brother did, my sense of decency overwhelmed the hero worship, and I spoke up.
“Ahh… dude. This song, ahh… This song kinda sucks.”
“What? ‘Don’t even fix a price!‘ It’s spooky!”
“I’m sorry, I, ahh… It’s not spooky at all.”
“Well, maybe if you saw the video. It had a really cool video. There were, like, ghosts and stuff.”
I think probably in truth he was a bit chagrined, maybe indeed realized that the Chris De Burgh compilation CD was not the world’s wisest purchase, but was unwilling to demonstrate buyer’s remorse.
I never thought to look up the video in all these years of YouTube until I started searching for details on the ferry to Governors Island. To my brother’s credit, though, the video is, well, kind of awesome. It’s not really particularly scary, and the music certainly didn’t age well, but there are, inarguably, ghosts and stuff.
“We’ve been working on it for the past couple of years, honing that idea and getting it into shape,” he continued. “[Screenwriters Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon] are working on it now. The bottom line is that we still all feel like we need to sit down and look at a script and see if it’s everything that it can be before we set about doing anything with it.”
Winter wasn’t able to divulge much about what “Bill & Ted 3” will focus on, though he emphasized that the movie won’t be “cynical.”
“The essence of what we’ve always wanted to do is to make a ‘Bill & Ted’ movie,” he said. “We don’t want to make a cynical ‘here’s Bill and Ted — you guys are our kids, now YOU guys go be Bill and Ted and the franchise can live for another 25 years!’ It’s not that. It’s a straight up, what’s the funniest and most surprising take on where Bill and Ted would be right now if we stopped back in on them? That’s what we’re doing.”
– Josh Wigler, MTV Movies Blog.
The “Winter” being quoted here — just to clarify — is not Edgar, but Alex Winter, as in Bill S. Preston, Esq., he of Wyld Stallyns fame.
Winter, who is apparently a director now and not just still acting under the pseudonym “Barry Pepper,” confirmed that a third Bill and Ted movie is in the works, which is obviously awesome news.
The only complaint I have about the originals is that now every single time I show up anywhere with someone named Bill — and there are a lot of people named Bill, so it happens a lot — people are all like, “oh hey, Bill and Ted! You guys coming from an excellent adventure or a bogus journey? Get it? Bill and Ted!”
Wait, did I say complaint? I actually don’t really mind that at all. I think it’s pretty awesome because it reminds me of those movies and how great they were.
Anyway what concerns me about Winter’s quote above is the part about the “most surprising take on where Bill and Ted would be right now if we stopped back in on them.”
Ahh… hello, Alex Winter? I was under the impression that Bill and Ted would be united the world with their bodacious music by now. That’s why they need Eddie Van Halen, and that’s why they need a triumphant video, etc. Remember?
I guess Rufus came back from the distant future, so perhaps the full impact of Wyld Stallyns’ awesomeness was posthumous, but the end of Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey sure made it seem like they were on their way to creating a utopian future through rock.
So I guess I’m interested in seeing what the hell Alex Winter’s talking about. Also: STAY-SHUN!
I’m told that Stephen Colbert testifies at some point in this C-Span clip, but I’m almost 20 minutes deep and so far it’s all just sucker MCs hogging the mic. They show Stephen Colbert a couple times so I know he’s in the room, and he’s got a smirk on his face that pretty much announces that as soon as he does something it’s going to be awesome, but still, nothing.
This is so boring. If I ever get elected to Congress I’m going to have to appropriate a ton of taxpayer money for notebooks for all my doodling.
Sorry, I’m working on something longer that may or may not get up this evening. Hat tip to Can’t Stop the Bleeding for the link.
Apparently Stephen Colbert is testifying before the house immigration subcommittee this Friday. In character.
His testimony will relate to his experience participating in the Take Our Jobs initiative put on by the United Farm Workers union. The initiative invited people to come and try the jobs that illegal immigrants do now, like farm work, to see if they’re really taking jobs that Americans want. Since Colbert was one of only 4 people who took them up on the offer, he’ll be testifying about it.
Why he’s doing it in character isn’t entirely clear, but I suppose he’s got some fans in Congress who wouldn’t mind spicing up what would surely otherwise be a very boring subcommittee.
– Adam Frucci, SplitSider.com.
Wait, it’s not entirely clear why Stephen Colbert is testifying before a Congressional subcommittee in character? How about because a) that’s just an awesome thing to do and b) Stephen Colbert never breaks character.
During my senior year of college, I co-ran a big fake campaign for a fake candidate for Georgetown’s student-body president against some of the precise sort that end up on house subcommittees, and I can attest that most of them demand to be taken seriously. And Colbert is so good at his role that he’ll be able to impart exactly the information he wants to get across while remaining true to his character and simultaneously mocking the entire process.
Take note, Joaquin Phoenix. This is how performance art is done.
Tedquarters 