Frisky Dingo is another show I’ve been enjoying lately. It’s about a supervillain’s attempts to market his plan for global destruction. At least that’s where it starts. I’ve been watching it legally on Adult Swim Fix (well, as a Mac user I have to watch it in Windows running on Parallels). Whoever was putting episodes on mininova has stopped for some reason.

RjB recommended The Lost Room to me. It’s a SciFi miniseries that premiered last week. I don’t have cable so I got it off of mininova: part 1, part 2, part 3. I really enjoyed it; far better than Radioactive Spider Island or whatever SciFi normally shows. A detective discovers a key that makes any door open into the same hotel room. They end up collecting a lot of objects along the course of the show and using them together like an adventure game. SciFi will be showing the entire series as a marathon. I definitely recommend it and hopefully they’ll roll it into a series.

I know I just posted Nathan Barley in the links, but this is really good stuff and should not be missed. Chris Morris was one of the writers; he’s also responsible for The IT Crowd (meh). Similarly, it’s also only 6 episodes. I think the series was ahead of its time since it premiered February 2005, the same month as YouTube. I found the entire series on TorrentSpy.

http://tv.netscape.com/embed/480/LEJCVTRRLZCGMHVQHUZW
My friend Brigitte is going to be vlogging daily at TV Squad. This is the first episode. Unfortunately some users complained about the download time so the rest of us don’t get to see this in high quality. If you subscribe to this link in iTunes you’ll get all future episodes automatically.

Lane pinged me earlier asking “In the last Venture Bros who is the guy with Iggy Pop and David Bowie?” That’s easy: Klaus Nomi. Of course, it’s only easy because I asked that question at one-point and did the natural thing: hit Wikipedia. There they were in the episode guide, David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Klaus Nomi, all linked to their respective pages. I looked at David Bowie and Klaus Nomi’s pages and found it kind of disturbing that so much space in their “Pop culture references” and “Trivia” sections were dedicated to their appearance in Venture Bros. At one point Nomi’s page included this:

Though Nomi had been dead for 23 years at the time these episodes aired, no explanation for his being alive in 2006 is given in the episodes, or why he has superpowers. The series does parody super-science/superhero adventures, and ressurection of the dead is shown in at least two different methods, so this is not out of question for its settings. Tragically, in the setting, AIDS has not yet been cured, which is explicitly mentioned in one episode (Fallen Arches).

I pointed out to Lane that I thought these references were excessive and he had this to say:

“Someday Wikipedia will contain all knowledge and it will be as useful as a 1:1 scale map.”

I enjoyed Shorties Watchin’ Shorties when it was on Comedy Central. It was animated versions of stand-up comedy routines. I like animation and the writing was already known to be funny. Unfortunately Comedy Central felt the need to tie the shorts together with animated segments that really weren’t funny. Lucky for us YouTube just has the good parts. I got on this tangent by looking for this particular clip of Mike Birbiglia: Continue reading →

This masthead from the local Lincoln Journal Star was apparently featured during Jay Leno’s headlines last night. I thought it was funny when it arrived on my doorstep in July and had the presence of mind to scan it back then.

Update: It was apparently an entirely different masthead from August. How do they keep doing this? Shouldn’t the layout editor have a checklist that starts with “1. Make sure name doesn’t look like Urinal Star”?

I wanted to post my Sept 11th story before tomorrow’s media blitz and so that I don’t forget it.

I was at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln at the time. I lived in Pound Hall in a single room. I woke up at 9:20CST and quickly threw on some clothes. I rushed through CPN, but I noticed that there were tons of people standing in the TV lounges. When I got to the Walter Scott Engineering complex I hopped on the elevator with 3 other people since it was there. They were already talking and I asked what was going on. They said a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. I assumed they meant something small like a Cessna. I got to MECH200 Thermodynamics I (that class was kick-ass) at 9:30. Dr. John P. Barton came in and said something along the lines of “in light of recent events, class is canceled today”. I don’t remember anything else from that day.

Sweet, I just found the Muppet Wiki. All the information you ever needed to know on each and every muppet and muppet show ever created. Of course the one thing I did learn was that I’m not clever; Sprocket is the name of the dog on Fraggle Rock which I admittedly have seen in the last year.