mrshl | blog

I only thought I knew compliance. Thanks to Jacob.

The University of California at Berkeley has begun putting their course lectures online. Of course, lots of Universities are moving in this direction, but UC Berkeley is doing things a little differently: they’re putting their content on YouTube. Check out this sample lecture on Nukes from the course Physics for Presidents. Hmmm, I wonder if the professor covers pronunciation.

Andy Samburg has become the primary reason SNL remains a must watch for me. I saw this on last night’s season premiere, and today it’s blowing up the Internet. Samburg might never translate to the big screen the way Adam Sandler did, but his work on Saturday Night Live beats the hell outta Opera Man.

And because I love it when SNL hires people who can hit more than one note, I’ve included a couple other infamous shorts from the Lonely Island veteran.

Tonight, I updated the blog to Wordpress 2.3. What does this mean for you, our loyal readers? Well, for starters, let me know if you notice any glitches. These things don’t always run so smoothly.

I’m sure you’ve probably noticed the new layout, including the welcome return of our beloved, if poorly designed, cassette-tape logo. I think it’s prettier, and a bit more in line with the purpose and goals of this site. Which is to say the design isn’t quite so “pro blogger” style.

Now, you should also notice a couple of new features. First, I’ve converted our unwieldy categories to tags. For you readers, that probably won’t make much difference, excepting the obvious tag “cloud” in the right-hand column. For the writers, it’s now a bit easier to tag our posts. Basically, adding tags works just like posting to LiveJournal now.

The bigger news is that I think the upgrade finally solved a problem that’s been bugging the hell out of me. Since I started the blog, I hadn’t been able to publish the full RSS feed. It was only publishing the truncated feed. This means that people accessing our blog through a feed reader weren’t able to see the full post without clicking through to our site. Since I personally hate sites that don’t have full feeds, this annoyed me to no end.

Well, problem solved (I think). Wordpress 2.3 supports Atom feeds. So long as you’re accessing our feedburner feed you should be getting the full feed now! You should even get pictures and video! If, for some reason, you aren’t accessing our feed, click on one of the new icons to your right to add our feed and try one of our recommended feed readers. I personally use Google Reader, but the other options ain’t bad.

Anyhoo, most of the other technical stuff is pretty boring. Just tell me if you see anything funky. Especially tell me if you start getting our old, busted feed. Either leave me a comment or post something in our message board.

Thanks!

In one episode where they are showing “Creature from the Black Lagoon” there are these two guys clowning around a backyard kiddy pool that looks like it was shot in the Heights. And they even recreated the “Baby Ruth bar in the pool” gag from CADDYSHACK. (That was the “revenge of the creature.”) When they feature a puppet, you can see the arm, and the mic boom drops in all the time. I have no doubt it’s intentional, at least most of the time.

They are sponsored by Party Boy warehouse, and apparently get all their (rather crappy) costumes and props there.

And right now they’re showing several classic Universal monster movies.

And they have a website, a MySpace page and videos on YouTube.

http://www.countpelicula.com/

10:30 Saturday nights, Channel 55.

It’s not really very good, but I just love the fact that someone is still doing this kind of thing.

Huh. A Schoolhouse Rock I’ve never seen. Via videosift.com

I had remembered Beetlejuice fondly as one of the weirder, more awesome cartoons based on a film. Along with The Real Ghostbusters, Beetlejuice actually seemed to preserve much of its weirdness in the transition to Saturday morning.

Sure there were the acid-soaked visuals and the parade of zombies and demons, but there was also something slightly off about the show’s central friendship between the debauched, clearly middle-aged Han Solo of the underworld and Lydia, the sarcastic, but pragmatic teen who tried to keep Beetlejuice out of trouble. Lydia was a pre-Daria goth-nerd, upon whom I had an unhealthy cartoon crush. So, to me it never seemed right how the two of them would travel together between realms and dimensions without some kind of oversight from child welfare.

I’ve been watching some clips this morning and I have to say the show isn’t nearly as good as I remember. Part of the appeal is that the animators did a great job drawing Beetlejuice and Lydia; they look an awful lot like their counterparts in the film, Michael Keaton and Winona Ryder. Unfortunately, as this clip reveals, the dialogue and voice acting could be really, really bad.

Be sure, in this clip, to look for one of my pet peeves: the dude is running away from a beastie, shouting “Look out!” but there is no one else around. No one to heed this senseless, idiotic warning. At least when Shaggy said it, Scoob was around. Ugh.

At Ty’s birthday party last weekend, one of the songs blasted from the party boat speakers was a forgotten favorite of mine from the 90s and one of the most genuinely creepy hit songs I’ve ever heard. I was again reminded when I saw the video on a Tumblr site devoted to MTV’s 120 minutes.

Faith No More - Midlife Crisis

For some reason, I’ve never checked out the lyrics to this song. I’m sure I must have seen them printed in the insert for my copy of Angel Dust, but I’ve got no memory of it. So as I’m printing them for you in this post, it’s basically the first time I’m seeing them as well. The full lyric is here, so I’m just giving you the first verse and bridge and the chorus:

Go on and wring my neck
Like when a rag gets wet
A little discipline
For my pet genius
My head is like lettuce
Go on and dig your thumbs in
I cannot stop giving in
I’m thirty-something

Sense of security
Like pockets jingling
Midlife crisis
Suck ingenuity
Down through the family tree

You’re perfect, yes, it’s true
But without me you’re only you (you’re only you)
Your menstruating heart
It ain’t bleeding enough for two

Now that I’m reading, and singing it back to myself, I think that line in bold might be one of my all-time faves. No wonder I don’t remember reading these lyrics when I was a kid. I wouldn’t have understood them. Not the way I read them now.