explodingdog

My sister-in-law Anne gave me this awesome Wacky Web Sites Page-A-Day calendar because she knew that I was, um, less than fully challenged at work.



Truth be told it's been a hectic time work-wise of late, so I have yet to check the site that pops up on my calendar every day.

However, I finally checked one out today, and it was a very cool site!

Apparently some guy called Sam Brown at explodingdog will make a drawing based on any title you send him.

There are a lot of them, but one caught my eye:

"The Drugs Didn't Work"





Funny, no?


LINKS

explodingdog
Page-A-Day Wacky Web Sites

Karaoke at Roger's Exciting Tattle Tale Room

Okay, while I do enjoy a bit of karaoke now and then, I know that among the many talents I don't have, singing is high on that list.



I have to admit I was a wee bit skeptical when I first entered the bar known as Roger's Exciting Tattle Tale Room. I mean, when you save "dive bar" in Los Angeles, you don't really mean a dive bar...but this was a dive bar!



The regulars were unfriendly and wary and the bartender was not terribly attentive.

However, people warmed up to us once the evening wore on. The male regulars, especially, were very friendly with The Better Half and her pals Ruthie and Rosemary (a.k.a. The Three Rs). I think I was called an Arab sheikh at some point, and someone offered me a free drink.





Scotty blew us away with an incredible rendition of a Journey song...the girls were very enthusiastic and me...well...I had a lot to drink!

All in all, a fun night.

The Three Rs perform "Love is a Battlefield" by Pat Benatar:







Scotty performs "Lights" by Journey:





And, finally, that's me ripping off a piece of "I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles)" by The Proclaimers:





LINKS

LA Weekly Review

Best Band, Ever...Vampire Weekend!

All right, it's true, I was the oldest one at the El Rey a couple of weeks ag...and if it weren't for The Better Half's troubling obsession with these four very young lads from Columbia University I probably wouldn't have gone.

But, boy was I glad I did.





Vampire Weekend rocked the house! I was a bit skeptical about them transferring their twee sound to a live venue, but they kept the essence of the album intact, and added in a bunch of live variation to keep it really interesting. The four of them are actually really good musicians, and they are a tight, focused unit. I was really surprised by some of the harder-edged stuff they added into the songs.






Here it is, my earth-shattering critical analysis of Vampire Weekend: If a good Wes Anderson movie was a band, it would be Vampire Weekend.

They did 2 - 3 new songs, one of them was about California. The songs were a little bit more experimental than what they have on the current album, so it'll be interesting to see if they go out on a limb with their second CD.



We saw Danny Masterson (Hyde from That 70s Show) with a hot blonde almost 6 inches taller than him.
I also ran into Jonah Hill (the fat kid from Superbad) in the men's room. I shouted out "Hey, it's Lil' Seth Rogen"and he did not seem pleased, at all. If it weren't for the fact that we were in a public restroom, and people were watching, and he outweighed me by a good 100 lbs, I would have taken him...out!

Next time Jonah, you'd better watch it kid!

Here are a couple of videos from the show:

New Song 1






New Song 2





Oxford Comma (My favorite song)







A Very Sweet Shout-Out From the Band






LINKS

Vampire Weekend Website
El Rey Theatre

Britain's Got Talent...For Making You Cry

Hot on the heels of Paul Potts, the mobile-phone-salesman-turned-opera-star, comes 13-year-old Andrew Johnston.

The poor boy had been bullied for his singing but that didn't stop him from getting up on stage and belting it out, bringing everyone to tears.

Sniff...sniff...I...can...relate...I...was...also...persecuted...for...singing...

Here's Andrew:




Here's Paul:





LINKS

News.com.au Story

See, Michael Bay is Awesome!




Say what you will about Michael Bay, at the very least he embraces the very thing he knows people make fun of him for.

Check out the awesome Verizon FiOS commercial he did (courtesy of my USC classmate Dave Marmor, a self-avowed Bay-hater...c'mon Dave, haven't you seen Bad Boys...and The Rock...and Transformers?!).

All Those YouTube Videos from South Park



Okay, so I started watching South Park again and I stumbled upon the episode Canada on Strike.

Thanks to awesome YouTube user xclusivefilms, here is the list of all the YouTube videos featured in the episode.

Enjoy!

''Laughing Baby''
''Chocolate Rain''
''Afro Ninja''
''Star Wars Kid''
''Tron Guy''
''Numa Numa''
"Leave Britney Alone"
''Sneezing Panda''
''Dramatic Gopher''
''Asian Backstreet Boys''
"lonelygirl15"

Ian Bagg is a Funny Man!




The Better Half and I just got back from The Comedy & Magic Club in Hermosa Beach and were very impressed by warm-up act Ian Bagg (much better than the putative headliner).

Great delivery, very sarcastic, dynamic stage presence and fantastic interplay with the audience. If you get the chance you must see him live, you must!

Apparently there was a large group from local employer Raytheon and boy were they a tough bunch. I wouldn't want to work with those guys!

Here is a video of the man in action.




LINKS

Ian Bagg Official Site

A Pulitzer-Winning Photo

Adrees Latif of Reuters took this photo of a fatally wounded Japanese videographer during the crackdown of the protests in Burma.






This stunning photograph justifiably won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography.

Heartbreaking.

LINKS

NYT Article

Not a Pulitzer-Winning Photo

But a cool one nonetheless.





Taken by Omar Sobhani for Reuters, reproduced by The New York Times.

An Afghani woman strolling by the shops in Kabul.


LINKS

NYT Photos

Ooooh, So That Was the Guy




When The Better Half and I went to see Russell Peter at the NOKIA Theatre LA LIVE there was this somewhat familiar chap sitting near us that everyone was taking pictures with (and which eventually lead to a memorable exchange between an exasperated tweenager and her poor mother sitting behind us).

Apparently, the guy was "Iranian comedian" (sorry that's how he's been identified on the net) Maz Jobrani.

So there you go.

Big deal? Well let's just say that one-time Gwen Stefani paramour, and once-and-future No Doubt member Tony Kanal was skulking around, but no one was coming over to get a picture with him. And dude, No Doubt used to be big.

Here's a video of Maz.






LINKS

Maz Jobrani Official Website

Kansas Wins!

Okay, I admit, I didn't really have a strong rooting interest in this game.

I didn't do the ubiquitous bracket, and it's not like growing up in India and Qatar allowed me great insight into American colleges and universities playing professional sports with amateur athletes (I'm still trying to figure that out).

I don't like the Memphis coach John Calipari and I have no strong feelings one way or the other towards the Kansas coach Bill Self .

But I got home with a few seconds remaining in the game, and with Kansas down (though they had almost clawed all the way back from a 9-point deficit with about 2 minutes remaining). At this point I would usually turn the game off, but then Kansas stole the ball, and the next thing you, boom! A 3-pointer with something like 2 seconds left to tie the game, and then overtime and then...

Kansas wins!

Good for them.

LINKS

NYT Story

Good for Torii Hunter

I have always liked Torii Hunter and didn't care that the Anaheim Angels (yup, that's what I will always call them - dude Orange County is not Los Angeles - I know from experience) seemed to overpay for him.

And then tonight, against the Cleveland Indians, he hits a home run in the eight inning to put his team ahead by one run.

And, then, he hits a grand slam at the bottom of the ninth to win the game once and for all.

Good for him!

I'm still calling them them the Anaheim Angels.

LINKS

MLB.com Story

Great Director Jules Dassin Dies

This happened a few days ago, great director Jules Dassin passed away at the grand old age of 96.

I had once thought that Dassin was French given that his most famous films were made in France. He was, in fact, American and had been blacklisted during the McCarthy era.

Unable to find work anywhere (in Hollywood and Europe - he was stopped twice from making movies in Europe after he left the US) he was finally given a last chance to make a movie of the novel Du rififi chez les hommes in France.

This, of course, turned into Rififi, the greatest heist film, ever!

My old USC colleague Dave Marmor turned me on to this film a while ago, and I totally loved it (even though it had been so hyped up over the years).

Coincidentally, The Better Half added this to her Netflix queue after I sent her an article talking about heist movies in the wake of the surprising quasi-success of The Bank Job (fun movie - a must for Jason Statham fans everywhere!). We ended up watching it the other day, and it was even better the second time around.

The most famous thing about the movie is that 40-some-minute wordless heist itself. In spite of the obvious dated-ness (is that a word?) of the movie (it was 1954 after all) that sequence was as nerve-wracking and realistic as anything you are apt to see these days.

Dassin made other well-regarded movies (coincidentally, one of them was Night and the City with the recently-deceased Richard Widmark) that cemented his place in the pantheon, adding to his legacy is the courage he showed in the face of the abhorrent blacklist.

Rest in peace.

Essential Movies

Brute Force [1947]
Naked City [1948]
Night and the City [1950]
Rififi [1954]
He Who Must Die [1958]
Never on Sunday [1960]
Topkapi [1964]


LINKS

NYT Obituary
LAT Obituary

Charlton Heston Dies




The great movie star Charlton Heston died a couple of days ago.

Heston was never a great actor, but he was a great star.

He will always be remembered for the epics that made him a star in the first place, the late-career resurgence he experienced with his series of sci-fi films in the 1970s, and then finally, his role as a committed advocate of the NRA.

He was derided for his conservative politics towards the end of his life, and some of the things he did as an NRA president did raise some eyebrows, but forgotten in all this were the facts that he marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. before it was fashionable to do so and stood by the embattled great directors Orson Welles and Sam Peckinpah when the studios strongly encouraged him not to.

I remember the first time I saw Ben-Hur. They were having a revival screening in Calcutta and Dadu (my grandfather) made my uncle Abhijit Mama take me to it. It was great fun. Abhijit Mama drove fast on his motorcycle through the congested streets of Calcutta (he made sure I had a helmet), we went to one of those grand, old fashioned movie theatres (the kind they just don't make any more), enjoyed the movie (with a much-needed intermission in the middle, but no legendary little red car during that famous chariot race scene), grabbed some street food and went home. It was a grand movie, enjoyed in some truly grand settings. I will always remember that evening.

Heston became a bit of a caricature later in life, and apparently he had some fun with that himself. Good for him, you can never take yourself too seriously.

He leaves with some indelible performances in some of the best/best-remembered movies of our time.

Rest in peace.

Essential Movies

The Greatest Show on Earth [1952]
The Naked Jungle [1954]
The Ten Commandments [1956]
Touch of Evil [1958]
Ben-Hur [1959]
El Cid [1961]
55 Days at Peking [1963]
The Agony and the Ecstasy [1965]
Major Dundee [1965]
Khartoum [1966]
Planet of the Apes [1968]
The Omega Man [1971]
Soylent Green [1973]
The Three Musketeers [1973]
Airport ‘75 [1974]
Earthquake [1974]
Town and Country [2001]

LINKS

NYT Appreciation
Variety Obituary

Democracy in Action!

The Olympic torch relay ran into a bit of bother in Paris yesterday. Looks like the Chinese government may not be able to white-wash the recent crackdown in Tibet.

Of course, as evidenced by what happened in Burma recently, nothing long-term is going to come of it, but it's always good to see the Common Man having an effect on the government forces much bigger than us...I mean them...bigger than them...

LINKS

NYT Story

West Indian Cricket

Don't look now, but West Indies, yes I said West Indies, emphatically defeated Sri Lanka in the second Test to level the series.

What made this even more impressive was how thorough a hiding they had received in the first Test and how everyone, and I mean everyone, had given them up for dead.

This is the kind of fighting spirit India should learn from.

LINKS

Cricinfo Match Bulletin

Indian Cricket: ...Then the Agony

So, after the glorious records set by the Indian batsmen in the first Test against South Africa what did India go and do in the second Test?

Why, score all of 76 runs in the first innings of course.

76...the whole team...76!

And India suffered a humiliating innings-and-90-run defeat as a result.

So it goes my friend, so it goes...

LINKS

Cricinfo Match Bulletin

Indian Cricket: First the Ecstasy...

Okay, so it was the kind of boring, monotonous, ultimately inconsequential home Test that the Indians have long been accused of using to pad their allegedly inflated stats (as much as I like to trash the Aussies, their individual statistics are usually meaningful, and lead to winning matches; not too many Brian Lara type 400-runs in hopelessly drawn Tests on their resume), but since it was two people I like, I will choose to believe they meant something.

First, there was Virender Sehwag back in glorious form, blasting the fastest triple century in Test history against South Africa on a flat, dusty pitch in Chennai. Perhaps even more impressive was his unprecedented feat of having turned 10 successive Test centuries into scores of 150+!

Then, there was Rahul Dravid becoming only the sixth person in history to cross the 10,000 Test run barrier (three of the six are Indian - yay!).

Good things to have happened to two of my favorite Indian cricketers.




LINKS

Cricinfo Sehwag Story
Cricinfo Dravid Story

Paul Scofield...Rebel?



Apparently the legendary actor Paul Scofield turned down a knighthood (so eagerly gobbled up lesser artists) not just once, but thrice.

In explanation, he had the great quote: "If you want a title, what's wrong with Mr.?"

Yup, the just don't make 'em like they used to.

LINKS

NY Post Obit

The Prototype for the Joker?



This is a still of the late, great Richard Widmark from his sensational film debut Kiss of Death. Can't you just see the beginnings of the Joker in there somewhere?

Here is a list of essential Widmark DVDs courtesy of The New York Times' David Kehr:

Kiss of Death [1947]
Night and Day [1950]
Panic in the Streets [1950]
Don't Bother to Knock [1952]
Pickup on South Street [1953]
Cheyenne Autumn [1964]
Madigan [1969]

LINKS

David Kehr Appraisal
David Kehr DVD List

The Modern Corporate American Worker...Remixed Gangsta Style

That's right, you'd better not be messing with Bon "Big Daddy" Mercado.

The State of Mind of a Modern Day Corporate American Worker

They say a desk reflects its occupant's state of mind.

Wonder what mine says about me?

Big Daddy and the Ex-Virgin

That's my colleague Bon "Big Daddy" Mercado and the once-celibate AC Green.

How to Stalk a Sleeping Cat


Step 1:



Step 2:



Step 3:

India indahouse




That's right Orange County, the next time you ask me to go through the back because that's where the deliveries go through, or ask me to park your car because I'm standing next to the valet stand, or ask me where the oranges are because I am standing next to the produce section in the grocery store, or ask me to take you to your seats because I'm waiting in the aisles, or ask me...

...well, you get the picture.

Anyways, Orange County, the next time you ask me to do any of these things, just remember that the fancy Land Rover (it has to be a Land Rover, right, a Range Rover is just a tad too cheap right?) slash Jaguar (either/both de rigueur for every Orange County denizen yearning to belong) you're driving is now an Indian car!

That's right baby, Indian...as in brown-skinned, funny-accented, third world, Indian.

Suck on that Orange County!

LINKS

NYT Story: Tata Motors Buys Jag/Land Rover

Finally, Some Rational Analysis...

...of that whole Pastor Wright - Barack Obama (fake) controversey.

Courtesy of my favorite movie blog, Jeff Wells's Hollywood Elsewhere.

The cartoon is by Steve Sack of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.





LINKS

Hollywood Elsewhere

Richard Widmark Dies

Richard Widmark (R) and the late Victor Mature (R) in Kiss of Death

The great actor Richard Widmark died today.

Widmark's most memorable role, that of the giggling psychopath Tommy Udo in the original Kiss of Death (not the 1995 David Caruso star-making remake that wasn't so star-making...it's hard to remember a time when David Caruso's name on the marquee was higher than both Nicolas Cage and Samuel L. Jackson) was in his first movie.

I don't think he ever came closing to matching the notoriety from that role, but he worked steadily over the next 50-odd years, churning out one good performance after another in movies like Pickup on South Street, Judgment at Nuremberg, and Cheyenne Autumn (among many, many others).

Amazingly enough, Autumn was based on research Widmark performed himself at Yale and he was the one who got the great John Ford involved.

A long and varied career. He will be missed.

LINKS

NYT Obituary
IMDB Entry

Paul Scofield Dies


The greater British actor Paul Scofield died a few days ago.

I remember him from his roles in Quiz Show and The Crucible, but he will probably be best remembered for his Oscar-winning role in A Man for All Seasons (a movie even my father is well aware of).

His King Lear was voted the best, ever!

All in all a great career, he will be missed.

LINKS

NYT Obituary
IMDB Entry

David Cook...Whatever!




All right, so I don't like David Cook at all.

He's a smug, arrogant ba*tard, whose "hard" rock shtick has begun to take on a little too much of a self-congratulatory air on American Idol.

But I was very impressed by "his" re-imagining of "Billie Jean" (yes, the Michael Jackson "Billie Jean"), even though, you know, I didn't want to be.

And then Ryan Seacrest tells us all that it was, in fact, Chris Cornell's version.

Now I hate David Cook even more.

Enjoy the real re-imagining of this great song.

Deltalina




Here it is, that airline safety video (that's right, I said airline safety video) by Delta, featuring one Ms. Katherine "Deltalina" Lee that's creating all the ruckus on the web.

And fellas, she's still single.

Awww...Cute Dog!

Sent to me by my colleague Bon "Big Daddy" Mercado.


Cute Dog Plays Fetch With Himself - Watch more free videos

Ken Leee

Sent to me by the nicest guy, ever, Mark "The Natural" Contreras.

Ah, Ken Leee...

How the Beijing Olympics Got its Logo





This is courtesy of my favorite movie blog Hollywood Elsewhere.

I believe Jeff Wells got it from someone called Vincent Chow, but I can't be positive.






LINKS

Hollywood Elsewhere Post
Vincent Chow Post

Mark Contreras is the Nicest Guy, Ever!




My colleague Mark "The Natural" Contreras is the nicest guy in the world, ever!

We had an event at the Honda Center yesterday for the first round of the NCAA Big West Conference. And wouldn't you know it AC Green (Mr. Celibate himself) showed up to say hello. (PS. Apparently they don't sell alcohol at NCAA basketball events...you would not have known it looking at the rambunctious Marquette and Kentucky fans. Stanford/Cornell fans, on the other hands, were much more sedate.)

Even though it was a mad rush, and people were swarming all over AC, Mark was nice enough to get him to sign a basketball for me.




Nice, no?

Of course, I am sure that Mark didn't tell AC about the time that I was sitting down in the locker room of the Sports Club/LA in Irvine and looked up to see...AC Green.

And by see, I mean see...

And, yup, he was still in great shape.