Vader being a smart ass

This is officially my favourite you tube video this week!

Wii Fit Update 2

Well its been three weeks now so I thought I would provide an update on how the Wii Fit is going.

Today provided the perfect opportunity for an independent opinion, as our office personal trainer, Mish, came in for her regular 'weigh in'.

So here we go, after three whole weeks and 12 hours of playing - I have lost 4.5 kilos and 3 BMI points. Pretty good, pretty, pretty, pretty good. Mish is back in another 3 weeks - will update then.

Learning to spell

I thought I'd share a lesson in spelling from one of my favourite you tube vloggers - Frezned. He's teaching viewers how to spell 'ukulele'. Very funny.

Go Speed Racer!

I had been intrigued by something I saw about Speed Racer on the E! channel but after I read this review in the Dominion - I just had to see it.

So I went and saw it this afternoon - and my only regret was that I wasn't high at the time, cause I think that would pretty much blow your fuckin socks off.

This is arguably one of the best cartoon/comic book adaptions because it unashamedly doesn't try to be 'gritty', 'dark', or at all worthy - this is just kick ass action and entertainment. Its like one big sugar rush, and if you were a fan of Speed Racer back in the day - you will dig this.

The Dominion captured it perfectly -

After weeks of sitting through cartoon and comic-book adaptations that have strived - hilariously - to be realistic, or even meaningful, it's a relief to see a film that takes itself seriously for not one nanosecond, and yet is still more inventive, ambitious, and impressive than Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, or any other load of po-faced twaddle that Hollywood has foisted on the nippers lately.

... Speed Racer is a hermetically sealed, candy-coated wonderland of a film.
This is a migraine of a movie - raucous, delirious, hyperkinetic, terminally daft, and very often stone-cold brilliant.
Try to picture directors Terry Gilliam and Tim Burton fighting to the death inside a pack of M&M's.

When good u choobing goes bad

I was watching that episode of Seinfeld where George had done his answer phone message to the theme of the Greatest American Hero...



And so then I searched for the actual theme music... and from there it got out of hand (as you can see). I give you 80s and 90s theme songs!

Greatest American Hero


MacGyver, The A-Team, Miami Vice, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Magnum PI, Knight Rider, Love Boat, Hawaii 5-0, Bay Watch and last but not least CHiPs

Film Festival

The film festival programme is out and its looking pretty good. Of course the political nerds like myself will be off to see The Hollow Men movie (in fact I already have tickets to that one) but there are a lot of other gems.

This year I'm going to try and avoid the more 'worthy' films and I'm focussing on sheer entertainment!

So here's the rest of my list:

The Wave - story of a teacher who starts acting like a fascist dictator to better demonstrate how bad Hitler was (chaos ensues).
Let the Right One In - Scandanavian film about a 12 year old vampire - the quote did it for me - "Very smart, very sweet, very sick".
Somers Town - Shane Meadows' follow up to his acclaimed 'This is England'
Be Kind Rewind - looks like a cross between Clerks and Hercules Returns. Its about a video store where they remake all their old stolen/lost movies on home video.
The Savages - Philip Seymour Hoffman stars (say no more)
Bigger, Stronger, Faster* - looks kind of like Super Size Me - but with steroids!
Gonzo: The Life and Work of Hunter S. Thompson - title kind of captures it
Annimation Now - the short annimated film spectacular
Romero's Diary of the Dead - Zombie films rule
I Think We're Alone Now - film about stalkers of 80s pop icon Tiffany (can it possibly get better?)
The King of Kong - doco about a dude who kicks ass at Donkey Kong.

Rock n Roll!

How to pretend you're interested in the election!

Bloody euro-trash

As many of you are aware, one of the idiosyncrasies of my car is that it kind of loses acceleration at times - mid journey. You can have your foot to the floor and its not having a bar of it - slowly decelerating.

Now this is of course fixed by turning the car off - and then starting it again. I used to pull over to do this (arguably safely), but I worked out that if you have enough momentum built up, you can flick it into neutral, turn the key off, and then start it again, flick it back in drive and you're good as gold. Well unless its a cold morning, and then you're good as gold for about 500m - when in all likelihood, you'll have to repeat the exercise. And even then its been known to do it as many as four times in a row - but after that - you're good as gold.

This usually leads to a mixture of reactions from passengers. Either they've been in the car before and are blase about the whole thing, they find it funny, or they're reaching for the door handle - preparing to commando roll outta there.

But the other night, a colleague from Auckland came down and we were taking my car to a function. Predictably, after sitting all day the car did its thing not 200m down the road from her hotel. But instead of carrying on like previous passengers, she said - "Oh! Your car does that too?!? I used to have a Peugeot 306 - it did the same thing!"

Finally, someone who understood. So we had a great yarn talking about the pitfalls of buying European cars (unsurprisingly, she drives a Toyota now). What worried me though, was that she said spending the $2000 to fix it was a waste of time, as it made no difference. Her advice - drive it into the ground and sell it on to some other un-knowing schmuck!

Look, Listen and take heed

Kicking ass seemed so much better

I dont know what it is - but there is something about ass kicking 80s films that I dig. For sheer entertainment you cannot beat films Commando - hilarious for all the wrong reasons (editing, lame special effects, camp villains) and Arnie owns.

Films these days seem a little too hi-tech to pull off the kitsch elements of the great 80s films.

Naturally I greeted the ad on C4 tonight for their Sunday night feature - Bloodsport - with great excitement!

If you are unfamiliar with Bloodsport - it was the film that launched the career of Jean-Claude Van Damme, who played Frank Dux. The 'story' is about Dux taking part in an underground competition involving the World's greatest "warriors" in a battle to the death. Yus! (you will note the poster said it was based on a true story... right)

So yeah basically its a fantastic piece of martial arts tat. Can't wait!

Bloodsport - 8.30pm Sunday on C4.

Religulous the movie

Just got sent this great trailer for Religulous. Looks fantastic - like a more tongue in cheek version of Richard Dawkins' The Root of all Evil (which you should get out from Aro Video if you havent seen it).

Anyway enjoy

A case of the Monday's

Here's another for the "never again" file. Last night I had Nando's for dinner... while I'll spare you the details, it's fair to say I've been up since 2.30am doing my interpretation of this Sony TV ad.

So yeah I'm having a case of the Monday's



UPDATE: I just did a Wii Fit Body Test - I've lost 1.4kg in the last 24 hours! Woot! So you know - every cloud and all that.

Jasper!

Last night son of One Moment Caller arrived up in the Naki and his name is Jasper.

Jasper is apparently the Dutch/German version of Casper and the first one was one of the kings that gave Christ gifts at his birth - he gave gold (quietly showing up the other lot - I wonder what that Mary and Joseph did with the gold?).

So anyway, I thought I would mark the occasion by finding other Jasper's!

Like Jasper Engines and Transmissions!


Or Jasper National Park in Alberta, Canada - It has a glacier! Plus there's a town.


Then there is the University of Victoria's JasPer Project - an open-source initiative to provide a free software-based reference implementation of the codec specified in the JPEG-2000 Part-1 standard (i.e., ISO/IEC 15444-1). Of course it is. Doesn't really lend itself to a pic unfortunately.

Jasper, Texas looks like a gas...


... and Jasper, Indiana, claims to be one of the 25 best small towns in the US! Meanwhile, Jasper, Alabama's Special Olympic swim team is called the Aquanauts! The mayor has a great name too - Sonny Posey. You will also find US Jasper's in Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Minnesota, Missouri, New York, Ohio, Oregon and Tennessee.

Meanwhile, Sunday brunch at Jasper's Restaurants "in the spirit of fun!" looks like something out of the Naki too!


Jasper (on the right below) was also the name of one of Cruella de Vil's henchmen in 101 Dalmatians.


It also turns out that "Jasperware" is a type of pottery, and you can find this fine example at the V&A in London.


There have also been quite a few other famous people named Jasper.

But my favourite one has to be Jasper Vinall - the first recorded Cricket fatality in 1624. He was fielding and was about to catch the ball, but the batsmen tried to hit the ball a second time (away from Vinall) but instead smacked his head in! Stranger still - it happened again in 1647!

So there you have it - at the very least he has quite a road trip of US towns ahead of him!

Wii Fit Update

Well I've now clocked up over 3 hours on the Wii Fit and its still kicking ass. I have achieved Champion (probably of the world) status on Football heading (top score of 454) and Ski Slalom (29 seconds on the downhill run). Oh yeah.

As you go along you open up more games, yoga poses and activities - which are basically new ways for you to look ridiculous. Snowboarding is clearly some sort of astrophysical science as I managed to cock up almost every go at it. It is kinda cool turning the board length ways though... look like a tool though.

I've unlocked the boxing aerobic game also, which is a hell of a lot of fun once you get going. The yoga is kicking ass - my Sun Salutation rules, as does my Warrior pose - the Tree pose is bollocks though!

While I'm the Wii though - this was a bit unfortunate - it really should note that the measurements it takes are for adults. But please - "she could have ended up with an eating disorder" - so she didnt? Get a grip, surely she could see that its measurement was a bit off? Lighten up and have some fun.

Bus driver Ray

Well normally the bus isnt a very pleasant experience, but it turns out that Infratil have at least one decent driver - Ray!

After witnessing a cyclist getting knocked off last week and the road rage debacle earlier in the year, I had a fairly dim view of the customer experience on our public transport. But that all changed tonight when Ray (he had a name tag!) pulled up to the stop tonight. Ray took kind old man to a new level - greeting all passengers with a "Good evening, welcome aboard" and crouching the bus for the ladies. The best bit had to be his public information announcement halfway through the journey - "Hello passengers, I just want to make sure you're all aware that there is a slight delay between the fore-door and rear door opening, but don't be concerned, I will open it at every stop. Thank you."

Clearly he was a tad crazy - but I much prefer pleasant/friendly crazy to insane threats of gun violence. Go Ray!

Some links

Some links from my lazy surfing today:

Why own a car - when you can borrow one? This was in the weekend papers - City Hop, you pay $75 registration for the year and then $13.50 per hour (including petrol) to borrow a car. Great idea and apparently its coming to Wellington soon - site here

At least I was able to keep together when Beckham was in Wellington. Lovestruck fan goes crazy - site here

The 50 best pun store names here. Unfortunately they missed the hair salon cracker in Levin - Hair Say - although Merchant of Tennis does rule huh?

Down Syndrome Dolls. Not a lot else to say really is there? site here

PC Gone Mad?? Darth Sussudio himself, Phil Collins, apparently retired from making his earth shattering music a month or so ago - who noticed? This followed his 2003 announcement when he came out as boring, ending years of speculation.

And to finish, Skunk Anansie's kick ass video from the excellent mid 90s sci-fi flick Strange Days. Directed by Point Break's Kathryn Bigelow, Strange Days was all about people in the future kinda getting high off virtual reality vids - check it out if you haven't seen it, but in the meantime have a watch of Skin's badass performance in their anti-church epic, Selling Jesus.

Pain

What was I thinking? I shocked a few people when I bought the Wii roughly a year ago and shocked myself when I completed.. sorry I think the correct lingo is 'clocked' Lego Star Wars. But it still something of a stretch for me to grasp why I bought Wii Fit

Ok im being a little melodramatic - its not that bad - in fact its pretty good fun, but I am feeling it in my legs especially.

You look like a prick doing the stuff - more so than Wii Sports, but you also feel like you're getting a work out. You stand on a pad thing which measures your BMI and weight etc (you're out of your mind if you think I'm going there) - and it monitors your balance during the exercises and games. Useful bit of humiliation though - once its done your BMI it changes your Mii character so it reflects your (ok my) tubby bitch frame - yeah I kinda know what the situation is already, I'm not sure I need a cartoon to reinforce it.

There are four types of exercises - strength training, Yoga, balance games (ski slalom etc) and aerobics. Most of the aerobic stuff seemed a bit rubbish - like jogging with the Wii-mote in your hand - but the Hoola Hoop was great fun (ranks highly on the makes you look like a tool scale). Ski Jump and Ski Slalom are great - you have to get your balance right and then either rise from a squat position to a full (balanced) extension on the jump or shift your weight from side to side to move through the slalom course.

So anyway I guess I'll give it a whirl and see how we get on - but so far it does seem to have stuck a good balance between fun/games and getting a work out of it.

Environmental heresy?

The very excellent Wired Magazine is likely to cause a storm with its incendiary article on approaches to climate change in the latest issue.

It talks about how if we are serious about addressing global warming, then only one thing really matters - cutting carbon emissions. Wired argues that if we are to do that then we are going to have to make some big calls, cut out the bullshit basically and address the ‘inconvenient truths’ and possibly swallow some dead rats.

“Just one problem. Winning the war on global warming requires slaughtering some of environmentalism's sacred cows. We can afford to ignore neither the carbon-free electricity supplied by nuclear energy nor the transformational potential of genetic engineering. We need to take advantage of the energy efficiencies offered by urban density. We must accept that the world's fastest-growing economies won't forgo a higher standard of living in the name of climate science — and that, on the way up, countries like India and China might actually help devise the solutions the planet so desperately needs.”

“The planet is already heating up, and the point of no return may be only decades away. So combating greenhouse gases must be our top priority, even if that means embracing the unthinkable.”

The article lists 10 ‘heresies’ that would deliver cuts in global carbon emissions and make a real impact on climate change as follows:

1. Live in cities – Urban living is kinder to the planet than the suburban lifestyle. (Totally agree!)
2. Air conditioning is ok - Live in warmer places - Air-conditioning actually emits less C02 than heating. (Difficult in NZ and hard to ask people to up and move out of the South Island – but a good idea)
3. Organics are not the answer -Surprise! Conventional agriculture can be easier on the planet. (Agree! Organics are bollocks)
4. Farm the forests - Treat forests like crops - old-growth forests can actually contribute to global warming.
5. China is the solution, not the problem - The People's Republic leads the way in alternative-energy hardware – China is actually the number 1 manufacturer of solar panels. (Very good point)
6. Carbon Trading Doesn’t Work - Carbon Credits were a great idea, but the benefits are illusory – Kyoto will reduce the impact of Climate Change by 6.5 days. (I think we kind of knew this was window-dressing)
7. Accept Genetic Engineering - Superefficient Frankencrops could put a real dent in Greenhouse Gas emissions. (Totally agree! Science shouldn’t be something we fear)
8. Embrace Nuclear Power - Face it. Nukes are the most Climate-friendly industrial-scale form of energy. (Agree this is a good idea for large countries – but a country the size of NZ could never afford to build one – better off with other renewable sources)
9. Used cars – Not hybrids - Don't buy that new Prius! Test-drive a used car instead. (Totally agree!)
10. Prepare for the worst - Climate Change is inevitable. Get used to it.

I guess that famous Kennedy quote - if the price of peace is Nuclear war, then we'll be left with the taste of ashes in our mouths - comes to mind. But the article is right - if we leave the response up to the hand-wringers and do-gooders then little impact will be achieved on the actual goal of cutting carbon emissions. I suppose we have to ask ourselves - what price we are prepared to pay as a society to fight global warming?

One from the old school

Pulp's Common People from their cracking mid-90s album A Different Class. I always think this sums the Tories up quite nicely - they might think they can relate to people - but fundamentally they'll never know what its like to fall on hard times. Mind you I think you could argue some other parties are just as guilty of losing touch with the common people. But oh well - at the very least its a chance to watch one of my other all time favourite videos (watch out for Sadie Frost) and a reminder of how cool Jarvis Cocker is. Remember when he interrupted Michael Jackson's 1996 wannabe messiah performance at the Brit Awards? How cool was that?

Are you sure you want to live like common people,
you want to see whatever common people see,
you want to sleep with common people,
you want to sleep with common people, like me."
But she didn't understand,
she just smiled and held my hand.

Rent a flat above a shop,
cut your hair and get a job.
Smoke some fags and play some pool,
pretend you never went to school.
But still you'll never get it right,
cos when you're laid in bed at night,
watching roaches climb the wall,
if you call your Dad he could stop it all.

You'll never live like common people,
you'll never do what common people do,
you'll never fail like common people,
you'll never watch your life slide out of view,
and dance and drink and screw,
because there's nothing else to do.

Strange Film Festival coming back

Good news people! The Incredibly Strange Film Festival is back and will be in Wellington from 18 July through to August 3.

I really hope they bring back the overnight film marathon too - a whole night of back-to-back crazy fucked up films - there is nothing better!

The full programme hasn't been announced yet - but this disturbing look at Tiffany stalkers is going to be in it apparently.

Check out the trailer below for I Think We're Alone Now

The Gods Must Be Crazy

In case you hadn't see this - an un-contacted Brazilian tribe was discovered the other day. Imagine that, they've never had contact with any outsiders - they must have shit themselves - some huge object flies over with flashing lights.

This Boston paper has really big images of them so you can have a good gawk (nobody says Gawk anymore do they? - note to self use gawk more - bring it back). I wonder what the significance is of the different pigments... kind of reminds me of that bit in King Kong at the start (well by start I mean an hour in when they actually get to the island).

I do hope we leave them to it and don't try to bring democracy or TV to them. Mind you as one hillarious commenter said - throw them an empty Coke bottle! Classic.

Summer Heights High

I recently got put on to Summer Heights High, its the new series by Chris Lilley, the dude that brought us the very excellent We Can Be Heroes. This time the show follows the lives of two students - Ja'mie from We Can be Heroes and a new character Jonah Takalua as well as a Drama Teacher, Mr Gregson.

Unfortunately I havent seen it on our screens yet - but the DVD is around or you could be naughty and download it.

In the meantime, below is one of my favourite scenes - Mr Gregson using his drama skills to liven up the evacuation drills. Enjoy.

Look in your heart

In hindsight 1990 was actually a great year for cinema, but more so because of the films that were largely overlooked by the great unwashed... or should I say washed?

That year, the Coen Brothers released one of the greatest Gangster films of all time, Miller's Crossing. After Blood Simple, this was their first major noir piece and its as good today as it ever was. Gabriel Byrne stars as Ted Reagan a former lieutenant in Albert Finney's Irish mob who is playing both the major crime families in a non-descript prohibition era northern US city, off against each other. Like all good film noir films there are twists and turns for Africa and like all Coen films - the script is outstanding. But its the acting that really does it for me - Byrne and Finney are great but the man himself, John Turturro, steals the show.

Below is Turturro's show stopping scene where he begs for his life - so dark yet comic at the same time. I just love the line "Look in your heart. I'm praying to you! Look in your heart". Have a watch - and don't worry there are enough twists following this one that it doesnt give the game away!

500 Shake baby Shake

Well the FIAT 500 Bambina has just been re-released and much like the original - I think it looks really cool. But it also reminded me of one of my all time favourite videos and not to mention happy song - 500 shake baby shake by british band, Lush, from the glorious mid 90s. You wont be able to resist its power to make you smile. Enjoy.