Never let it be said that 1990s heartthrob Luke Perry (Dylan from “90210”) doesn’t have a sense of humor about himself:
Luke Perry thinks his house is haunted in "Paranormal Factivity" (c) NBC/Universal
[Note: I had previously embedded the episode in question here, but thanks to NBC and its penchant for creating pop-ups when you embed their videos, I’ve decided against it. Please click the image above if you’d like to view the video on their own site.]
Based on an original short from 2008, “FCU: Fact Checkers Unit” stars Brian Sacca and Peter Karinen as fact-checkers for a fictional magazine. The series got a second life on the NBC Internet portal as an advertorial for the Samsung Galaxy S, but please… don’t let that put you off from enjoying it. What I like about FCU is that it seems to take itself seriously and not-seriously at the same time. I really appreciate how in the videos, it establishes the personalities of some of the magazine staff as well as lets the guest star shine in an extended bit.
The part about the Galaxy S being able to record a whole night’s worth of video and audio? That could probably be something for the gang at “Mythbusters” to investigate.
“Guess What’s on the Curator’s Desk?” comes to us courtesy of The Mütter Museum at The College of Physicians of Philadelphia, who would like to remind you that ever since humanity has sought to cure what ails it, the instruments we use to do so and the results of that science are truly, truly frightening.
Find out exactly what this and other fascinating finds from this museum are every Thursday.
Joseph Rakofsky has a problem with the Internet...
Too lengthy for Failblog.org and perhaps too technical for the Phailhaüs, I bring to you the story of one Joseph Rakofsky, a 33-year old lawyer who made a huge series of mistakes:
1. Having never tried a case in court before, Rakofsky accepted the job of being the primary trial lawyer for one Dontrell Dean, a 21-year old who was accused of murder in 2008.
2. Rakofsky botched up the trial so badly that a mistrial had to be declared.
And here’s where Rakofsky erred the most:
3. Rather than lick his wounds and attempt to become a better trial lawyer, Rakofsky decides to sue the Internet for defamation, specifically the journalists and bloggers who wrote about or referenced to the mistrial.
In the amended 82-page lawsuit (embedded below), Rakofsky and his attorney Richard D. Borzouye, Esq. name such entities as the Washington Post (who first reported on the mistrial), AbovetheLaw.com (a prominent law blog), Carolyn Elefant (a small-firm law blogger), and even some email addresses and screen names of people who publicly spoke ill of Rakofsky’s competence to try the case, thus defaming him.
What is surprising to me is that many of the writers and bloggers named in the suit didn’t specifically make Joseph Rakofsky the target of their ire. Most of the blog entries about the case center around the ethics of the case, the problems with attorneys advertising their services, or even the law school where Rakofsky got his J.D. It’s only in using the mistrial as an example that Rakofsky’s involvement and comments on his competency as a lawyer get called into question.
And I am definitely not a lawyer, but one of my friends who is one is already eagerly awaiting what will happen during the first day of court when Rakofsky and Borzouye find themselves up against the legal teams picked to represent “the Rakofsky 74.”
One of the demands Rakofsky made is that the defendants not mention his name. Or use his picture. Which is truly bizarre. He seems desperate to scrub the Internet of his follies.
I am tempted to write, in response to the suit, “Go shit in a hat and pull it down over your ears.” But that doesn’t sound very lawyerly. So I’ll say it in Latin. Vado shit in a hat quod traho is down super vestri ears.*
OK, maybe I used a translating website for that. You don’t really think I write Latin, do you? I suppose, for future reference, we can just call it the GSIAH defense. Or VSIAH if you like the pseudo-Latin that came out of the translator and you want to wow your friends with your knowledge of the Internet’s hottest new acronym.
The [Firmware] game features a robust moral choice system, where your actions really do affect the world. Do you accept the User Agreement, or don’t you? This was an agonizing decision, since you never know what could happen later. I remember that unbelievable moment in Firmware 2.0, where I accepted the User Agreement and the Kaz Hirai was harvested for delicious ADAM. Is that right? It’s been so long since I did anything but download Firmware on the PS3 that my memory is a little hazy.
I don’t know about you, but with both Sarah Jane and an Academy Award-nominated director dying in the same week plus perhaps one of the most depressing Catholic and Christian holidays being today, perhaps you might need a little pick-up. And what better way than with being introduced to a little new animation?
Simon Tofield is a British animation director who started putting up little Flash videos on the ‘net, and his success on the web lead to a book deal and a daily cartoon in the Mirror, a popular British newspaper.
What I like about this short is that it reminds me that hand-drawn animation will always have a place in the great animation lexicon and that there’s great value in the love of simple, classic silent-movies.
Richard [Hammond] has his tongue so far down the back of Jeremy [Clarkson’s] trousers he could forge a career as the back end of a pantomime horse. His attempt to foster some Clarkson-like maverick status with his “edgy” humour is truly tragic. He reminds you of the squirt at school as he hangs round Clarkson the bully, as if to say, “I’m with him”. Meanwhile, James May stands at the back holding their coats as they beat up the boy with the stutter.
Back when I was in elementary school, the one book I had a love/hate relationship with was A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle. We read it in our GATE class because it was a Newbery Award winner and one of the first science fiction books aimed at children.
I thought the plot of the book was rather cool, but I wasn’t great at sticking to the same chapters as the rest of the class or turning in the vocabulary homework. As a result, the D- I got that semester was the lowest I ever received and I got into trouble with my parents.
If I’d made a video like this when I was a kid, I wonder if my teacher would have raised my grade?
Created by children’s book author James Kennedy (The Order of Odd-Fish), this hilarious video was made in order to promote the 90 Second Newbery contest which he is holding jointly with the New York Public Library.
The challenge is to take either an award winner or a Newbery Honor winner and to recap the story in 90 seconds. Submissions in link form are due on September 15, 2011 and even fanfic crossover videos could even be considered, according to Kennedy who added:
If the film is sufficiently ingenious, we might even bend the rules. Okay, I admit it: for years I’ve wanted to see the rodents of Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh (1972) fight their counterparts in The Tale of Despereaux (2004). Rat-fights make for gripping cinema!
I really can’t argue with the man on that point. So, round up your kids, the neighbor’s kids, your nieces and/or nephews, cousins… basically grab as many child actors as you can, and you too could have your video screened at the film festival this fall.
Normally, I’d be posting this from either Manhattan or Brooklyn in New York City. However, thanks to this year’s December Snowpocalypse (or my other favorite, Snowmygod), I’m typing from my parent’s kitchen table where I will be mostly stationed for the next two days until my re-booked flight takes off on Thursday morning.
Call me crazy, but despite the awesomeness of being with my family, I really wish I were back on the East Coast experiencing the blizzard and its aftermath with the rest of my co-residents. Luckily, at least one New Yorker was inspired to make art from the storm:
According to movie critic Roger Ebert, filmmaker Jamie Stuart shot, edited, compiled, and uploaded the film in less than 48 hours and is an homage to a 1929 classic silent film called “Man With a Movie Camera” by Dziga Vertov (which you can view at Ebert’s site).
Whenever I see shorts like these, disseminated and distributed for everyone to see, I can’t help but think that we live in an awesome and amazing time for people who want to be creative because the tools and equipment is no longer such a daunting barrier to entry.
Even though I’m not specifically a Star Wars fan, I do know what it’s like to be bullied or teased for looking and sounding or just being different from the other kids I grew up with. When I was younger, I lived in a pretty suburban area in Orange County, California. From when I was in kindergarten to when I was in the sixth grade, I had quite a few strikes against me: a) I’m Asian, b) I was smart, and c) I had (and still do have) a bit of a speech impediment.
Even now, as a grown woman working in a somewhat posh office in downtown Manhattan, I often feel awkward because I don’t dress like the other women who work in the office, and almost all of my geeky pop culture references go completely over the heads of the other people I work with. To throw in some more pop culture references, in an office full of Joan Holloways, I am a Peggy Olsen.
As I tried to coax her into putting on the patch [to help control her amblyopia], I remembered that one of the comments to Katie in the Anti-Bullying article was from a man who called himself the One-Eyed Jedi, because he was born with only one eye. I told Katie about him, and she immediately stopped crying. She began asking me questions about him, and as her focus shifted from herself to him, she was able to calm down and put on her patch.
The next morning, when she protested wearing the patch, I told her about a woman who had written about how she had suffered from scoliosis as a child and needed to wear a brace. Again, Katie was able to move outside of her unhappiness and put on her patch.
and
Katie is learning how to reach out to help other children in the same way that she has been helped. A mother named Emily called to tell me that her first grade son was recently teased for bringing My Little Pony for show and tell. She said he was terribly upset by the incident, and when I told Katie about it, she called to leave a message for the child.
She said, “I am Katie. I like Star Wars, and you like My Little Pony. I know other boys who like to play with My Little Pony, and it’s great, and umm, May the Pony Be With You!” she finished proudly.
Today in Evanston, Illinois at Katie’s school, they will be holding a Proud To Be Me Day where they will be “encouraging all students to wear something that represents their special interests regardless of gender (i.e. a girl in a Star Wars shirt or a boy in a princess shirt).” And over 28,000 geeks on Facebook have pledged to wear their own Star Wars shirts today as well, to support the idea that it’s perfectly okay to be a geek.
But even better than that, Goldman asked in a different follow-up article that “each person who decides to wear a Star Wars item also make a donation of a single Star Wars/science fiction toy to a shelter or hospital on December 10th. (And please specify that the toy can go to a girl OR a boy, not just a boy).” I personally believe a great way to honor that request would be to check out the children’s hospital wishlists over at Child’s Play or to see if there’s an organization like the New York City-based Winter Wishes in your area, and donate.
And no matter what flavor of geek you are, I think that’s something we can all get behind.
I am not an ardent fan of hip hop by any stretch of the imagination, but I do appreciate it when something a hip hop artist does is neat, cool, or utterly mad.
I’d say that this maxi-music video from Kanye West, featuring “Runaway” and other tracks from his new album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy qualifies as being utterly, utterly mad.
The short film/long music video debuted on October 23 in a massive publicity campaign which spanned MTV, MTV2 and BET; luckily, it has also been uploaded to the Internets in a commercial-free version:
As a liberal-minded geek, I try and donate to charity whenever I can because I believe that helping other people and being altruistic is a pretty cool thing. Also as a kid, I spent almost an entire week strapped to a bed at the Childrens Hospital of Orange County in California after a kidney surgery.
As a result, every year since Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik from Penny Arcade started their annual toy drive called Child’s Play, I’ve tried to buy a toy from the list that I know will be used to help a kid just like the one I was. Whole groups of people have created satellite organizations to help raise more money for the charity, and my favorite out of all of them is Desert Bus.
0400 – The crew is dancing along to an instrumental section of a song from the Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World soundtrack, to which they’ve been challenged to sing.
0408 – Jeremy “Jer” Petter narrates as everyone in the room comes up with their own very personalized types of dinosaur and walks across the room.
0411 – The chat room has been challenged to take the total from $15,839 to $16,000 in the next 10 minutes. If that happens, they will sing a Barry White song.
0421 – Matt Wiggins sings “Soft Kitty” from “The Big Bang Theory” while stroking the head of James Turner, who is driving the bus. Also, since the total is now only $15,914, the chat challenge failed.
0427 – Alex Steacy makes an appearance while dressed from head to toe in orange rain gear and a Flavor Flav-style clock around his neck. I do not immediately recall why. Afterwards, the group sings “Little Lion Man” by Mumford and Sons.
0433 – The official total is now $16,010, which they’ve confirmed took too long to get to in order for them to sing a Barry White song. However, they are now singing “Polka Power” by Weird Al because someone paid $50 for them to do so. Someone who is only being identified in the accompanying chatroom as “Red Bandana Man” is the most energetic. Afterwards, he identifies himself as Andre, he’s a member of the Loading Ready Run forums, and he decided to stop by and hang out.
0446 – Tally Heilke tortures Turner by hiding in their costume rack and pretending to be a monster in exchange for a donation. Afterward, in response to another $50 donation, the entire room chants “Hail C’thulu!” in a rising monotone crescendo, while reacting in terror as the Old One (played by Andre) rises. However, as the tentacled one rampages across the room, the controller gets unplugged from the Sega CD, resulting in a bus crash and the need to restart the game (and their point total) and start their run from Tucson to Las Vegas again. As a result, they update the overlay to read 1 point, 1 crash, and 6 Bothan spies who died to bring us this information.
0457 – Petter, Wiggins, and Turner re-enact the scene from Clerks 2 where Randall goes off on the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
As seen in the screen shot above, as of this writing $17,000 has been raised for Child’s Play, which brings their four-year total to $233,677. Judging from the aforementioned graph, the group is well on their way to being responsible for raising a quarter of a million dollars during year’s event.
Katie and Catherine Taber are proud that they love Star Wars (c) Carrie Goldman and Dana Patrick
No matter what kind of geek you are, there’s something that all of us share in common which makes us different from aficionados, hobbyists, and dabblers.
When we were younger, we got teased and bullied. A lot.
In his book The Happiest Days of Our Lives, writer/actor Wil Wheaton wrote extensively of how being a little smarter and a little more shy than other kids in his elementary school classes lead to his taking one in the face during an “innocent” game of dodgeball. The fact that Wheaton went on to star as an actor in such geek-centric TV series like “Star Trek: The Next Generation” and “Eureka” doesn’t completely obscure the fact that he still feels and remembers that pain from over 25 years ago.
Katie, a first-grader in the metro Chicago area, had her own “dodgeball moment” recently. See, Katie really loves the Star Wars franchise. In fact, she loves it so much that according to her mother Carrie Goldman, a blogger at ChicagoNow.com, she asked for a Star Wars water bottle to go with her backpack when they went shopping for school supplies at the beginning of this school year. However, four days ago, Katie changed her mind about her special find:
Katie loves Star Wars, and she was very excited about her new items. For the first few months of school, she proudly filled her water bottle herself and helped me pack her lunch each morning.
But a week ago, as we were packing her lunch, Katie said, “My Star Wars water bottle is too small. It doesn’t hold enough water. Can I take a different one?” She searched through the cupboard until she found a pink water bottle and said, “I’ll bring this.”
I was perplexed. “Katie, that water bottle is no bigger than your Star Wars one. I think it is actually smaller.”
“It’s fine, I’ll just take it,” she insisted.
I kept pushing the issue, because it didn’t make sense to me. Suddenly, Katie burst into tears.
She wailed, “The first grade boys are teasing me at lunch because I have a Star Wars water bottle. They say it’s only for boys. Every day they make fun of me for drinking out of it. I want them to stop, so I’ll just bring a pink water bottle.”
And that’s how it begins.
The feeling that you’re different, and that if you want to be liked by the other kids in your class, you have to step in line with what they think you should do and who they think you should be. It’s the kind of feeling which, if left unchecked or unacknowledged, could cause a lot of damage to a growing kid’s psyche.
When faced with this kind of bullying, Goldman did what any caring parent should do. She spoke to her daughter about how it was okay to be a little different, and encouraged her to be brave enough to continue bringing the water bottle to school. She then went a step further and asked her readers—and especially her female Star Wars-loving readers—to chime in to let Katie know that it was okay to be female and to like Star Wars
The response was overwhelming, and tons of female Star Wars fans braved the login requirements to write to Katie about how much they like the franchise and—more importantly, that she shouldn’t be ashamed of liking it, too.
Just yesterday, it went viral, thanks to Twitter updates from folks like Alyssa Milano and Felicia Day. In the 30 minutes it took me to take the subway home from downtown Manhattan to my apartment in Brooklyn, the number of people who commented on the original story went from about 150 to 584 (and counting). Earlier in the day, Cake Wrecks and Epbot blogger Jen re-broadcast the story and invited those who didn’t want to subscribe to leave comments in her blog post, and there are currently over 1,700 over there as well, up from the 600 or so I saw earlier.
My favorite response on the original post, though, comes from another “Katie” — Catherine Taber, the voice of Padme Amidala in the CG-animated “Star Wars: The Clone Wars”:
I am an actress who has the great honor of being Padme Amidala on “Star Wars: the Clone Wars”! I just wanted to tell Katie that she is in VERY good company being a female Star Wars fan! I get to meet the coolest girls from all over the WORLD who love Star Wars — and they are the smartest, most creative, beautiful and nicest people you will ever meet!
Not to mention I am a big Star Wars fan myself and have quite a nice collection — including 2 water bottles that I proudly carry!
I am so sorry you had a bad experience with some of the boys at school. They are truthfully probably jealous of your cool water bottle, but there is no excuse for not being kind and it is not a good representation of a Star Wars fan!!
I know that Padme would tell you to be proud of who YOU are and know that you are not ALONE!
Please have your mom get in touch with me so I can send you something for YOUR Star Wars collection!
Much Love and Admiration — and THE FORCE is with you Katie!
Catherine, Padme
When I reached out to Goldman last night, she and her husband were still amazed by the overwhelming response from the Star Wars fans all over the world as well as from other people associated with the franchise.
“Katie has not yet reacted because she goes to bed at 7 pm, and we had not yet read the comment by Catherine! But when my husband and I found out, we were amazed,” she wrote in an email. “We kept looking at each other and laughing and saying, ‘Oh My God!’ We were also contacted by Tom Kane, who voices Yoda, and Katie does not know about that yet either! He invited us to be his guests at a Clone Wars movie premiere in Chicago. Scott Zirkel, who is an artist for Star Wars sketch cards, drew Katie her own card tonight with a picture of her holding a light saber.”
Goldman added, “Many people have offered to send Katie Star Wars toys. Since it is the holiday season, please suggest that they donate toys in her honor to local shelters and hospitals instead of sending them to us. The positive comments are gift enough.”
Taber found out about Katie from the Epbot.com post, and immediately took action. “I felt I had to comment and try to reach out to the family,” she wrote by email. “The story really touched me for a lot of reasons. I felt for Katie’s mom and wanted to make sure she had support in teaching Katie it is okay to be a little different. And the thought of this lovely little Star Wars fan having the wind and the joy taken out of her sails, just made me mad! If I had lived in her area, I probably would have tried to show up and give her a hug—dressed as Padme no less.”
Taber’s responsible for having reached out to Kane and other “Clone Wars” cast and crew members, and she did it for a very important reason. “Maybe it’s because I play one of the good guys,” she said, “but to me Star Wars is about good conquering out over evil in the end, and the inherent power of good in general. The fact that so many people from all over, immediately came together to support Katie is proof of that power and just made me so happy.”
I felt it was a weird thing that every time you ask for a strong female role, it’s written in this strange way where it uses sexuality far too much. Or it’s all about being a woman and beating a man. So it wasn’t a surprise to me that the only way to do a strong female role properly was to not have originally written for a woman.
—The agent-and-publicist-less Angelina Jolie on why she decided to star in Salt, courtesy of the December issue of Vogue.
(Many thanks to indie blogger Anne Thompson for the link.)
Let me also point out that the Phantom sounds like a petulant child. Let’s compare some of his lines from the original: “Floating, falling, sweet intoxication/Touch me, trust me, savor each sensation.” Yeah, it’s a bit Chester the Molester, but at least he’s trying to be sexy. (And he could be pretty funny, too, especially at the expense of the managers and Piangi.) His new verbal pyrotechnics? “I don’t see the problem/This is ancient history!” I mean, I can hear a cheating husband say that on Springer any day of the week, though possibly not in song.
When I was a nascent comics fan in the mid-1990s, one of the most important things I learned about the art was that Rob Liefeld can’t draw feet.
Since then, I’ve learned that the former Marvel Comics wunderkind who created X-Force and one of the founding members of Image Comics also can’t draw women, men, guns, pouches, and quite a few other things. In addition, by not fixing these kinds of errors, I always got the impression that he didn’t seem to care that he was a bad artist; one family friend of his told me back then that he was “laughing all the way to the bank.”
Even now, after all these years, my impression of Liefeld and his work has never been a positive one… until now.
Last week, the lads at Penny Arcade revealed that they’d been asked (or even possibly hired) to produce two pieces of art to promote a new Xbox game called Comic Jumper: The Adventures of Captain Smiley from indie game studio Twisted Pixel. The premise of the game is that you play a comic book character who has to battle villains through different genres and comic book styles.
The part that caught PA artist Mike Krahulik’s eye is that as the character jumps into another genre, the art style of the game changes as well. He agreed to do the artwork provided that he could choose the style he would illustrate and he chose the Modern era.
Krahulik has said before at PAX panels and elsewhere that he loved comic books when he was younger and wanted to create his own work. In the news post announcing the debut of the artwork and a subsequent contest to win the Xbox pictured at left, he wrote:
The result [of my work for Twisted Pixel] was a project heavily inspired by one Mr. Rob Liefeld. Obviously you can look back on that stuff now and it’s pretty silly but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to being heavily inspired by it at the time. Rob may not have had the best grasp of anatomy, storytelling, perspective, or composition but his shit was fucking dynamic and as a young man I ate it up.
This isn’t the first time the guys have picked on Liefeld, either, as you can see from this comic from 2004, posted right after they’d returned from that year’s San Diego Comic Con.
Krahulik has said before at PAX panels and elsewhere that he loved comic books when he was younger and wanted to create his own work. In 