Tis the season

Mental Floss brings us "The Definitive History of the Bud Bowl"

In snowy conditions at scale-sized Busch Stadium, Budweiser overcame a gritty performance by Bud Light quarterback Budway Joe and scored the winning touchdown as time expired when an offensive player advanced a fumble, which is illegal by NFL rules. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, Anheuser-Busch received hundreds of telephone calls about the play over the course of the next week, prompting the St. Louis-based brewery to respond thusly:

“In the National Football League, of course, the offensive team cannot advance a fumble in the final two minutes of a game unless the ball is recovered by the same player who fumbled it. However, no such rule exists in the BFL (Budweiser Football League).”

I was unable to get my hands on a copy of the official BFL rulebook, but there are some other subtle hints that the Bud Bowl wasn’t governed by NFL rules. Like, for instance, the fact that its participants didn’t have any hands.

Hello there!

1. Exit, Pursued by a Bear
2. "Transylvania frequently treads the edges of the ridiculous, especially when Zingarina and Tchangalo converse floridly in English, their sole common language. But it also has the courage to be ridiculous, as when the couple spontaneously make love on the hood of his car only to be scared off by a roving bear."
3. On staging the bear
   

Surprise!

I've recently come across a couple of references to the Gleneagles Hotel in Torquay. And following them up came across this site about the hotel:

In the late 1970s, there was much talk in the bars of Torquay's hotels as to whether there was a "real" Basil Fawlty in Torquay. It was known that Monty Python were filming in Torquay in the early seventies and stayed at several hotels. The Links Hotel, St Marychurch was mentioned in one newspaper article, but not the Gleneagles. The BBC at the time refused to divulge this information. In 1979 the then owner of the Gleneagles, Mr Pat Phillips, revealed that John Cleese had stayed there and asked him about real incidents he could use. John Cleese had returned to the Gleneagles hoping to find the original owner, Mr Sinclair, still there, but he had sold the hotel in 1973 and moved to Florida. Mr Phillips told John Cleese about a Spanish waiter he had employed at a hotel in Shropshire and about problems he had had with unmarried couples (this was the early 'seventies!). John Cleese, as Basil Fawlty, returned the compliment by telling elderly residents Miss Tibbs and Miss Gatsby that they could have dinner at the Gleneagles when the builders were in (second episode).

I thought it would be interesting to get the satellite view of the Gleneagles, when I realized that it would be just as interesting (if not more so) to find the site that was used for exterior filming on the series.

Turns out it was destroyed after a fire. Even more disconcerting than that, it seems that there is footage of the fire on the DVD set as an Easter Egg.

I've been meaning to get the DVD for a while. I don't know if this makes me want it more or less.

And in other news...

"A 24-year-old volunteer at community radio station 91.7 FM KOOP took his music so seriously that he set fire to the station when it didn't play the songs on his playlist."

"Feinstein liked jazz, and his program for the Internet was called 'Mellow Down Easy.' "

Currently listening to

The Scotland Yard Gospel Choir. A "chambery folky punky band based in Chicago." The songs that are available on their myspace page are a good representative sample, barring the startlingly anemic cover of "Fairytale of New York" - I suspect that they do a fun job of it live (the one slight lyric change seems like the sort of thing that was improvised in performance and kept), but they treat it with a bit too much respect in studio to make it into their own.

I'm putting this link up entirely for myself, so I don't lose it

On previous trips abroad, I've relied on this method for getting my VAT taxes back:

1. Upon deplaning, find the baggage claim area
2. Collect baggage
3. Kneel down next to the baggage carousel
4. Start pounding head on ground
5. After some blood, my VAT refund money will pour out of my forehead

There is another method, involving filling out forms, but that one has always seemed more difficult.

Here's my link to study up - a necessity if the dollar is going to stay where it's been.

Breaking Down the Nervous Detectives - Nuf Ced McGreevy Shouted "We're Not Here to Mess Around!"

Life on Mars - Series One, Episode Five - February 6, 2006

The final episode of Life on Mars aired on BBCAmerica last week, and I've been alternately anticipating and dreading the BBC's upcoming sequel and the American redo (although the writers strike might have put a stake in the latter's heart by now) One of the joys of Life on Mars is the way it can play with the audience.


We know, as Sam knows, what's coming. There's something about sport(s) that brings in the pack instinct. Next week will see the SuperBowl played between two teams from two cities that hate each other's sports teams. There will be a week of taunting and chest thumping and then, after one of the team wins, there will be still be taunting and chest thumping and one more thing to yell about at the next Yankees/Red Sox game.

There's a moment at the end of this episode - everyone in the city is walking to the game. I love that moment. You start walking with just your friends and family (or even by yourself). Then as you're sitting on the bus or the train, you start noticing people dressed like you. You get off and start walking again and all of a sudden you're in a huge mass of people all walking in the same direction. I love that feeling, and I love how we see it in this scene.

Sam is walking against the tide of people. I love that too.

The future of the city

Regine from We Make Money Not Art reports from the "Cities of the Future" panel at the DLD Conference.

Part one, Part two.

Buying the New Yorker 1976 - page 61

Honest to God, I was looking at this for ages before I realized that it wasn't food.



So anyway.

When you upload an image on Blogger, it ends up in your Picasa account. The wierd thing is that once you have an image in your Picasa account, you can't manipulate it in the layout as well as when you were first uploading it (This is probably due to Blogger and Picasa having started out as seperate companies that were both absorbed by Google)

A while ago, Blogger made a big announcement about how they had migrated all the photos from the Blogger web locker into Picasa. This was excellent, as there was previously no way that I could find to actually get into my Blogger photo locker. This annoyed me.

A while ago, a chunk of the photos from the Blogger photo lockers were loaded into Picasa, but only some, with the announcement that, in time, more images would be transferred. None have. So the earliest photos that were loaded in are still in limbo somewhere.

The reason that I'm agitated is that when you lose a link or an image upload doesn't work (which happened a lot more in old Blogger) the image is just out there filling up space and taunting me.

Anyway I bring this up now as a roundabout way of letting folks know about my new "Buying the New Yorker Picasa Gallery"

Thrill to the sight of old favorites like: The Oxford Scholar Vacationeers! Natural Unplucked Beaver Woman! The Very Touchable Welsh Moleskin Smock! And of course, This Guy:




I love him and wanted to have an excuse to post him again.

I shudder and nod my head in agreement

Steven at the Sneeze takes a look at one of the specific horrors of Candyland. I've seen young children having Candyland meltdowns. It is not pretty.

Some videos

News of the upcoming UK version of Law and Order brings my attention to the Russian version:



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I am quite fond of this video (Remind Me by Royksopp):



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The animated adventures of Syd Barrett:

Seven James Bonds at Casino Royale...

She Blogged by Night takes a look at the 1967 version of Casino Royale.

An open letter to the guy on the subway this morning

I do understand the convenience of using a bluetooth headset with a cellphone and I no longer automatically infer that someone who is seeming to have a conversation with nobody while looking off into space is insane.

Might I nevertheless suggest that a crowded subway car is not the best place to have a phone session with your therapist? Just a thought.

And good luck working that thing out with your father.

Always have a travel plan

Simon Varwell is visiting every place on Earth that has the word "mullet" in the name.

And what is the new hot thing with Japanese high school girls?

Apparently it's ska music.

Meet Oreskaband.

Jim Backus falls in love with a dog that wears false eyelashes

Mark Khaisman makes art with packing tape

Have a look.

I’ve got somewhere to go after all

Judge a Book by its Cover makes poetry by taking the last sentence from every chapter of James Patterson's You've Been Warned.

Here's the first half:

I raise my camera again, and—
The music is inside my head.
“Lord knows you don’t want to piss off that boss of yours.”
I scream at the top of my lungs.
And that’s when someone does.
Whatever.
And he loves it even more when I join him there.
Soon.
So innocent.
See? I’m back in control.
It’s time to hit the darkroom.
And I think that burning smell is back too.
And I know just where to go.
It’s the maître d’ again.
But when he finishes, everyone reaches for a pen.

Status Report!

A quick start of the year update on what you might be able to expect from me in the coming year:

The UK Christmas Single aftermath.

Yes, I know. I saw. Give me a little time.

A Citizen of the Universe

I've been wondering if it really makes sense for me to keep this going. I am not alone in having a main blog and a Doctor Who blog so that I can make a quick point without having to write three paragraphs explaining what I'm on about. On the other hand, I've been pretty infrequent about posting there, so I might as well fold it in. I'll continue to think on this.

This Week in Pod

I'll be revamping this, as I have hit the point where I need to change what I am doing. (I've filled up the iPod and have nowhere near hit the end of my collection. I also have just learned that RIAA has somehow changed their policy and are now suing people who are taking CDs that they own and copying them into their own computers so they can listen to their own music on their own iPods. The next logical step has to be suing people who have songs running over and over in their heads, as that is a method of copying the contents of a CD into your brain.)

The 1912 Project

This one is going slower than I thought it would. If you take a swing over to the blog I'm hosting it on, you will notice that the most recent post is of a brochure that is tied together with a yellow ribbon. After I finished scanning, the ribbon fell apart. I'm a little gunshy about the scanner now. On the whole, I think I can continue the way it's going.

Buying the New Yorker

I think that I've been chugging along quite nicely on this one. I think it will continue as is.

Lyricblogging

One of these days, I'll do another of these.

Reading Hitchcock

The first entry for this was The Birds. This was easy as the source material was a short story and I knew the film backwards. My next choice was Strangers on a Train. I finished the book and enjoyed it enough to feel that the format I had chosen was a little reductive, and I wanted to do it up right. I also felt that I had to sit down and re-watch the film, which I haven't had the best of luck remembering to do. While that was perking, I decided to play through to a third selection, so I read Juno and the Paycock. I thought I had a copy of the film. I do not. I'm figuring that reading another will just tip me over the edge.

Listening to the World

Next country up is Argentina. In an interesting switch, the normal trend of me spending a great deal of time hunting down any station to listen to was replaced with me finding over a hundred stations and spending time looking for one that I could log in to and didn't sound like it was a satellite feed from Miami.

Breaking Down the Nervous Detectives

I decided to focus on Jason King. If you look at the DVD case you will see that each episode is about 52 minutes. This is presuming that you can just sit down and watch an episode straight through. What actually happens is this: You watch two minutes. Then you say "What the hell did I just see happen?" and rewind a minute and a half to see that bit again. After you've gone about seven minutes like this, you need to go back about ten minutes so you can remember what happened in sequence. That cycle goes about twice, meaning you've spent about an hour watching a fifteen minute block. Then you have to do something like eat or go to bed. When you start over, you have to either spend fifteen minutes figuring out where in the episode to start watching from, or just start from the beginning again because you can't remember what the hell is going on anyway. I'm halfway through the second episode. I think. I've been meaning to get to other episodes of other shows as well.

Close Read - Peril Island

I've been sidelined by other, more interesting books, so even though I've read farther than the one chapter I've posted, I've been ignoring this lately. I think I will be tweaking the format, as the whole "go to amazon and purchase something, gol-durnit" was looking a bit more intrusive than I was wanting it to. (As a side note, the real driving reason was to have my Amazon statistics show that I was about more than thermodynamics. While I had a number of friendly readers click through to Amazon, only one person seems to have actually purchased something - and they clicked through the link to purchase a wafflemaker and then ended up snapping up a book on thermodynamics! Even though it was completely not helpful, I find it hilarious. Thank you, thermodynamics of waffles person, whoever you are!)

I'm Reading This

The more observant of you may have noticed that for a little while I had a little Amazon banner on the side where I put a link up to the thing that I was currently reading. I took the link down when I started reading 21 Dog Years by Mike Daisey and for some reason I could not make a referral link to it. Strange.

The Alphabet Song

This is turning into something entirely different from what I was expecting it to. I'm not entirely sure what yet, but I hope that it will be interesting.

Pardon me while I completely nerd out

When I was eight, this was the best comic ever.

Lost links

Psyche Rock by Pierre Henry (Futurama fans will recognize it):



More on Pierre Henry here.

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via Crying all the Way to the Chip Shop, photos of "Thamesmead, Riverside School, 76-78."

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The latest meme - Intensive Classical Music Blogging. Here here and here, for impressive examples.

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From Beyond the Groovy age of Horror, a guy gets shot in the ass with a flare gun.

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A bookstore inside a former Dominican church.