Meet Kumail's film blog

Hi. I want to take a quick moment to single out a recent addition to my blog links in that right-hand column. It's a movie blog written by my friend and Grinnell College roommate Kumail Nanjiani (pictured). It's very funny, and has gotten some fun discussions/arguments going about films.

The blog is entitled The Wilhelm Scream, and is named after a long-used Hollywood sound effect of the same name. First used in the film Distant Drums in 1951, and likely voiced by actor/musician Sheb Wooley of "Purple People Eater" fame, it was resurrected and popularized by sound designer Ben Burtt for Star Wars in 1977. Since then, it's been used in six Star Wars films, four Indiana Jones films, at least two Tarantino films, and countless others. You've heard it, trust me.

Anyway, if you like movies and/or words that are placed together in humorous combination, do check out Kumail's blog. And if you're in NYC, seek out Kumail's stand-up comedy performances.

Weeklypedia 10/11: Double-shot

Before my job/work moves, I printed out my browsers' Wikipedia histories. That list is somewhere in my messenger bag (aka man-purse). Someday I'll get around to plumbing the depths of that list for quality nuggets of trivia [I really should have used the participle "mining" instead of "plumbing," given the unpleasant combination of words "plumbing" and "nuggets" - ed.]. But for now, there's more recent Wiki-research afoot! I'm going to make this week's quiz double-long, to start making up for the month-long gap in May.

As always, the answers to the previous quiz are now up.

Weeklypedia Nos. 10 & 11

1. The Compromise of 1877 gave this US Presidential candidate an electoral victory in exchange for moving Federal troops out of the South, a move that effectively ended Reconstruction and allowed "Redeemer" Democrats to enact Jim Crow.

2. Batman's criminally insane foes, when not at large, are incarcerated in this facility, named after the fictional Massachusetts setting of much of H.P. Lovecraft's horror writing.

3. Explorer Roald Amundsen was the first to reach this.

4. This NY group was the first hip-hop act to get the message that they'd be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

5. When a politician says "if nominated, I will not run, and if elected I will not serve," he or she is said to be making this kind of statement, named for its originator.

6. This author's crime and western novels have been adapted into movies starring John Travolta, Pam Grier, George Clooney, and Russel Crowe.

7. In the final scene of the final episode of the TV show "The Sopranos," a suspicious character is seen wearing one of this exclusive brand of jackets, popular nationwide in the 1980s.*

8. The separate mafia organizations in New York City are collectively known by this numerical name, and were referenced as such (with fictionalized individual names) in such works as The Godfather, The Sopranos, and Grand Theft Auto.

9. This wife of a presidential candidate was hospitalized approximately a year after her husband lost the election for having drank (drunk?) rubbing alcohol.

10. This one-time vice presidential candidate visibly injured his own face, rather than be used as a propaganda tool by his North Vietnamese captors.

11. Alan Greenspan and David Rockefeller were among the founding members of this group in 1973. The group was designed to foster relations between the three collective powers of Europe, Japan, and the United States, and figures into many right-wing conspiracy theories.

12. This comet passed close to Earth in 1997, and was cited by the Heaven's Gate cult as the signal for their mass suicide.

13. New Horizons, launched by NASA in 2005, will in 2015 be the first ever probe to fly by this.

14. From the Latin root meaning "game," and suggested by Herman Hesse's novel "The Glass Bead Game," it is a word meaning the study and theory of games.

15. Tay Zonday, composer and performer of this song, is one of many web celebrities appearing in the music video for Weezer's single "Pork and Beans."

16. This Iowan Representative to the US Congress, who Horace Greeley famously instructed to "go west, young man," was beaten with a cane about the head and shoulders by a fellow Congressman in 1866.

Here's a fun tidbit that I decided not to question-ize: each of the Voyager space probes carry a golden record as a sort of time capsule, or, in case of extraterrestrial salvage, message of identification & peace. The discs include greetings in many languages and a selection of music from around the world. There's some Bach and some Beethoven, some Stravinsky (terrifying for aliens, I imagine), some Chuck Berry and some Louis Armstrong, pygmy music, gamelan, etc. Anyway, apparently Carl Sagan, who chaired the group that put this together, wanted to include "Here Comes the Sun" by the Beatles. The Beatles loved the idea but those killjoys at EMI nixed the idea. I like to think that EMI was actually concerned that the title of the song would be read as a threat, the equivalent of a statement to pre-Columbian tribes in the western hemisphere reading "Here Comes Spain." Could've been a terrific diplomatic faux pas. Or maybe it was sensible on the company's part, when you consider that aliens probably already had mp3 and internet technology in the 1970s -- it was too much of a copyright infringement risk.

* PS: [Spoiler Alert] I rewatched the last couple episodes of The Sopranos last night and the finale seemed MUCH less ambiguous this time around -- Tony totally got shot and killed at the blackout. [End Spoiler Alert]

Too Many Schwas

At my new job I am surrounded by people with one-syllable first names containing a soft vowel sound following an R. All of these sound like "Fred" if spoken by a Minnesotan and heard through iPod earphones in an open-office environment. Here is a sampling of the names in my vicinity:

• Brian
• Brett
• Brent
• Brad
• Brad
• Greg
• Greg
  
• Kraig
• Craig
• Chris
• Chris
  

Note that Brian, Brett, and one of the Brads are all also structural engineers sitting within three cubicles of mine. Thank goodness for having a Troy and a Dave immediately nearby, otherwise I'd just spend all day reacting to names being spoken. I can only imagine the hell for people whose names these are, especially the Brads/Bretts/Brents.

Weeklypedia 9: Don't Call It a Comeback...

...because who knows if it will stick. Last week's month's time's quiz has had answers up since early May.

This week's quiz is dominated by presidential trivia, driven by my digging around matters of the election. Enjoy.

Weeklypedia Quiz #9

1. A traditional Christmas meal in this country consists of fried chicken from Kentucky Fried Chicken, eaten at home.


2. Their creator named these humanoid monsters by borrowing a word from Beowulf but also acknowledged a similarity in their name to "various sea-beasts of the dolphin order."


3. Winners of this multinational competition have included Abba's "Waterloo" and Lulu's "Boom Bang-a-Bang."


4. This former civil engineer is the earliest US President with a presidential library in the National Archives and Records Administration system.


5. He is the US President whose presidential library was built first.


6. He was the first US Vice President to utilize One Observatory Circle in the US Naval Observatory as his residence.


7. He was the first Catholic to be one of the two major political parties' nominee for US President.


8. This former Georgia Congresswoman is a Green Party candidate for US President in 2008.

Just Look Around You

"The brain is basically a wrinkled bag of skin filled with warm water, veins, and thought muscles. Think of it as a kind of modified heart, only with a mind, or brain."

If you found that sentence as brilliantly funny as I did, you're in for a treat. I'm a nerd with a dry sense of humor, so when I found out about BBC 2's "Look Around You" about a year ago, I was delighted.

It's a parody of late-70s / early-80s British educational films, and is done in period style, down to the cheerful, warbly electronic music and instructions for writing certain information in your copy book in each episode. I'm not British, and was barely cognizant in the era this show seems to take place in, but it reminds me of old episodes of "3-2-1 Contact" and "Nova." (Speaking of which, 3-2-1 Contact had an awesome opening song. As did "Voyage of the Mimi," in my memory anyway.)

The first series of the show is comprised of eight ten-minute "modules." Each is full of plausible-sounding nonsense delivered by a knowledgeable-enough-sounding British voice and demonstrated by series co-creator Peter Serafinowicz, pictured, right. Actually, that picture isn't accurate, since in the show, he's almost exclusively seen from the upper lip down.

"Why," you may ask, "should I give a rip about Peter Serafinowicz?" Well, you liked Shawn of the Dead, didn't you? "Of course." Well, he played Pete, the ill-fated roommate of our protagonists. "Neat. Did he also play a role in Shawn creators Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright's previous sitcom, 'Spaced?'" Yes; he played lead character Tim's nemesis Duane Benzie, and in that role he got to repeat a line or two from his most famous role, that of the voice of Darth Maul in the Phantom goddamned Menace. Incidentally, my dear interlocutor, "Spaced" is finally being released on DVD in the United States this July, and you should buy yourself a copy, and then get me one for my birthday.

And to get yourself ready for some of the best recent British comedy around, you can watch all of the first series of modules from Look Around You on YouTube. Please, enjoy:

1. Maths
2. Water
3. Germs
4. Ghosts
5. Sulphur
6. Music
7. Iron
   
8. Brain

In the second series, they changed up the format to include more presenter characters, and seemingly shoved the setting a few years into the eighties. A few chunks of those episodes can also be found on Your Tube. Enjoy them if you encounter them, as well.

Next time we speak of British comedy on this blog, we will speak of Alan Partridge. Aha!

I'm with the band

I've just added an excellent blog to my links below. "Back of the Cereal Box," also on Blogger, is written by one Mr. Drew Mackie. I don't know Mr. Mackie at all, and I'm unsure how I originally came across his blog, but I suspect it had something to do with Kill Bill. Anyway, his interests overlap significantly with my own, and his writing is entertaining. Do check his stuff out.

This week he posted a current internet meme that tickled my fancy:

1. Click on this link. The title of the page is the name of your band.
2. Click on this link. The last four words of the final quotation on the page are the title of your album.
3. Click on this link this link. The third picture is your album cover.
4. Take the pic, add your band name and album title.

Here are my first results, which filled me with delight:

I'd listen to that album. I'm thinking that Propriá (that wouldn't actually be him in the photo, of course) is a second-generation descendant of Brazilian immigrants, and worked his way up to prominence in Manhattan around 2002. He does wry, confessional acoustic guitar songs with samba flourishes, as if lifted from Seu Jorge. Self-deprecation plus cuíca equals frequent play on 89.3 The Current!

Spiders... Why did it have to be... spiders?

Well, I haven't been blogging for a couple weeks now, given how busy the tandem moves have been, job and house. I started work at the new firm on Wednesday, and so far, so good. I'm excited about the downtown environment and the types of work I'll be doing.

The big move into the house is tomorrow, and we're very excited for that as well, although my excitement was tonight suddenly tempered. Melissa and friends Alison and Lacey went to take a load of stuff over, and discovered we have a spider problem in the new house. As in, there are a lot of spiders in the house, and it's a problem. We had seen one in the kitchen the other day, but that was just one, and no biggie. But they saw a bunch tonight, and they're roughly the same pale tan color as the carpet and the walls; peachy. Also, egg sacs in the basement; gross.

Spiders are my thing, my problem. For some people, like my dad and Indiana Jones, it's snakes. For others it might be rats or ants or cockroaches or worms or some combination thereof. I knew a girl in college who was terrified of birds, especially chickens (she had never seen the Hitchcock movie, so don't go blaming the problem on that). Spiders have kept me up nights in the past with the mere suggestion that they're there, they've made me fast forward through part of one of my favorite movies, and they've stopped me from playing through awesome video games.

So this spider business is a mental setback. It means we're going to have to keep some stuff and the cats out of the basement for a time, and that hiring an exterminator is in order, ASAP.

In the meantime, I plan to do what I did when I found egg sacs in my summer storage space at Grinnell in 2000: liberally administer a dose of great power and great responsibility.

This brings me to a question. I've noticed that all the products you can buy to kill things like insects, spiders, and so on, have pictures of the creatures in question on them. The can of Spider Killer I bought tonight has a particularly nasty customer on it. Anyway, my question is this: I want to kill these things because they frighten me; why put a big scary picture of the thing on the product? The product should ideally exhibit an absence of spiders, that being the desired effect.