Angry Robot

Action Balding

There’s a gentleman I see around whose hair is vanishing at a breathtaking pace. It’s thrilling to watch. I’m seeing a “Balding Channel” complete with Bald Alerts sent to your inbox – BREAKING NEWS: Left Temple Now Completely Visible, Witnesses Say – up-to-the-minute pics, drama-lite soundtrack, the whole deal. As much as it must suck to have your hair abandon you (it will happen to me soon enough, if my mother’s brothers have anything to do with it, which I hear they do), it’s better in its way than the inverse: rampant spreading of the hairline. Would you rather be shaving your forehead n’ cheeks? If we did indeed live in a world of runaway de-balding, no doubt baldness would connote virility, we’d get younger with age, pigs would fly, the blind would see, and Dick Cheney would be volunteering amongst the lepers. So thank god for balding, and that’s my thunderously astute musing of the day, thank-you-all sirs and mesdames, just trying to make the world a better place, now I must bid you adieu, into hidden lapel mic get me out of here! out! out! EXIT Sankey, hanging from helicopter.

Spock n' Roll

No Kill I, a punk rock Star Trek tribute band. (via SignalStation)

Gaming Notes

**Did Joss Whedon base Firefly on Space Trader? It’s one of the ship names in that game. Or is there some other sci-fi reference I’m missing?

Giant Robots

Speaking of giant robots (thanks, dong), I just got the first issue in my Giant Robot subscription (and I was charmed/alarmed to see it was hand-addressed). “I have a thing for giant robots,” so the magazine’s non-stop excellence fits in perfectly with my world view, and their site even links to such things of beauty as the robot suit. That’s hot jazz, everyone!

GI Joe PSAs

More for archival purposes now, since this was going around a couple weeks ago, but: GI Joe PSAs, remixed. There are a heap of them in one video here, courtesy NadaBlog. My personal fave is this one, but the kitchen fire and the reggae one are pretty shithot too. See the MeFi thread for a couple more linxx.

Cheney Watch

Haliburton gets at least $1.7-billion out of Iraq (and private companies are getting as much as one-third of the $3.9-bil spent by the US per month in Iraq), Cheney’s secret energy policy group (aka Enron et al.) under fire, little press for a quiet Haliburton scheme to oil-rape the Amazon. Everywhere you look, Cheney’s getting paid. “Operation God-Emperor With Bionic Cardiopulmonary System” is going to be damn expensive, after all. BONUS FUN GAME! Do a google image search for “cheney” and try to pick out the most evil-looking portrait. In some he simply looks like a normal man forcing a smile as he struggles to supress the massive seething urge to slaughter everyone in the room, in others, well… it looks like he’s finally announcing his plan to make dessert cakes and tuxedoes out of the world’s poorest children.

Hubble Sees Mars

Hubble takes pictures of Mars. During its most recent visit I got a couple good views of The Red Planet – or as I like to call it, The Yellowish Star-Looking Thing. Hopefully you did too.

The Power

On thursday, even, our power was restored. Unfortunately power to my web-logging urge is still down, and I have no idea when it will go back up. It may be next week.

The TLJ Act

Let’s say my passion in life is watchmaking, and I’m sent to the most elite watchmaking academy in the world, and then I am sent off to make watches. I make watch after watch after watch, and I see many other watches getting made, and my head’s spinning and everything’s great, but then they tell me because of the great number of excellent watches I made, there is no longer a need for watches, and I should just go home to my family and forget about watches, and in fact deny that I was ever a watchmaker, and if I ever did mention I made watches I would be, er, turned into a watch. That’s why I’m not ashamed to admit that I feel sorry for killing machines.

Sorry for, but not about to take one home with me and nurse him back to health. I mean, what did you expect, Shadow Government? Shouldn’t you have a contingency plan for blowback this predictable? So as we speak my labs are drawing up plans for a Killing Machine Retirement Home. All the strung-out spooks can go there and spend the morning playing violent videogames and then after naptime they can garotte dolls to their hearts’ content. We’ll even give them cow blood so they can put on their makeup for dinner, at which we’ll serve the most violent, anthropomorphic meals imaginable, like Turkey Pogrom or Massacre Salad, and for dessert – Little Chocolate Innocent Victims.

Because, let’s face it, Tommy Lee Jones isn’t going to last forever. Everything’s great now, sure. You could shrink a man down to microscopic size and fire him into the ionosphere, and Tommy would come back a few days later, hobbling and sweaty, with the man between his teeth. You could turn a man into a concept, and not tell Tommy what concept you picked, and he’d come back after a series of hair-raising pursuits with happiness in handcuffs, and sure enough once happiness was thrown in jail all those brutal killings of innocent hunters would cease. There’s no doubt he’s a top-class manhunter – and if there were any justice in the world someone would drag George Lucas away from the wholesale butchery of all of our childhood memories and get him to digitally insert Tommy Lee Jones into that movie actually called Manhunter – but for Chrissakes he’s pushing sixty.

At the end of this last one – what was it, Fugivite 6? – I was kinda worried he’d drop the ball. Yeah, he hunted the shit out of that dude for a while, but he looked pretty tired, and I swear I saw him getting a little confused here and there, and I thought he was gonna just grab a seat at one point while dude’s escaping via the sewers and maybe just rest his eyes a second, and then then when he woke up dude had escaped and killed the entire country of Mexico – if he woke up at all. Well, I guess that didn’t happen and Tommy tracked the man down, but then he’s got to do the ol’ one-on-one knife fight to the death, with a guy half his age? At the very least he should be training a young Hollywood star to do the job when he’s gone. If they did on-the-job training you’d get a buddy flick out of it, and as an added plus all those scenes of Tommy panting alone in the woods could be spiced up by a few hot wisecracks, with all the words the kids are using like “holla” and “jimmy hat”, ‘cause kids see a lot of movies these days and they like ones that have words that they use in them. We need to look to the future, Shadow Government and Hollywood, and that is why you should approve my new bill and film, entitled The Tommy Lee Jones Killing Machine Retirement Home Act and Fugitive 12: Lick a Pum Pum, respectively. Thank-you for your time.

The Law of Chaos

If a butterfly flaps its wings in Japan, and it causes a storm in Streetsville, which destroys my butter-repair business, can I sue the butterfly? (thanks Filion)

Neighbourhoodies

Hell damn – old-fashioned civic pride irony-marketed at hipsters. Should mine say “Annex,” “T-Dot”, or just plain “Sankey”? (via the modern age)

That Wacky Emancipator

Via an excellent MeFi post: a postcard reveals that Lincoln offered command of the Union forces to an Italian revolutionary, who refused since Lincoln wouldn’t declare abolition to be the purpose of the war. Further evidence that the Civil War was only about slavery after the fact, which has been mentioned as an historical precedent to the shifting justifications for war in Iraq. But as the Mefi post mentions, it’s also one of those examples of how history would be radically different save for one apparently minor decision. If Cato hadn’t stonewalled Caesar, say, we’d have a pretty shitty calendar right now.

Vampire Eye for the Straight Guy

I was disappointed with the vampires in Bigelow’s Near Dark. Not only does the film feel like a filthy southern ripoff of her one-time hubby’s Aliens, sharing as it does two cast members in Paxton and Henriksen, but the vampires take absolutely no pride in their appearance. They tool around rural America in an RV, dressed like shitbags, screechin’ and cussin’, rarely botherin’ to change their filthy clothes. Take some pride in your appearance, vampires! You’re the top of the horror food chain. At the very least you can go Goth, with the makeup and frilly shirts and such, or classic, like Dracula, Blacula, and others. Not having seen Vampire in Brookyln, I’m not sure if any smart tracksuits were worn by vampires in that film, but that might be a ‘look’ to explore, as long as the tracksuits are velour or terrycloth and aren’t stained with pizza grease or the dust of cheezies – but unless Chester Cheetah makes a blood-flavoured Cheeto that seems unlikely. Business Vampire, Lawyer Vampire or even Judge Vampire – in the UK at least, think of the wig opportunities! You should try, try, try to improve your appearance, but try as you might you can’t beat the 60s sci-fi Italian-leather space vampires of Bava’s Planet of the Vampires. They just had that shit down, and it’s good for the rest of you they never made it back to earth.

Vampires at least have the ability to select their wardrobe, unlike most of the horror races. Werewolves don’t get to wear any clothes at all, nor do they even remember what happened, which makes them the horror equivalent of binge-drinking streakers. Zombies are too fucking dumb to think about clothes, and I can assume ghosts perpetually sport the outfit they wore to their unjust demise, which is a shame, and they must pine for a good pair of hauntin’ slacks – something that doesn’t chafe the gut. Ghouls, ghasts, wraiths, etc.: too small-market to matter. They should wear uniforms so we can tell them apart. Demons go buff to show off their wings n’ horns n’ suchlike, as would I, or they take human form for the purposes of tempting so-and-so with the ability to really shred that axe, or the obscure-yet-still-evil real estate deal, and in those cases their attire is dictated by the job (which is a shame since velour tracksuits would probably look great on demons, too, but there are only so many Puffys to tempt). Serial killers – do they even count as a horror race? If so, we know they’re stuck in the gutter with the trenchcoats and sweatpant / boot combo, everything wrinkled from sleeping in the van or the basement, exception being dude from American Psycho, but he’s a one-off type deal. You’re really in your own class, vampires, so dress accordingly. If that damn movie had said “Filthy Southern Vampires” on the cover I never would have rented it.

Ass'd Lnks 9: Roveinator vs. Bikinikorea

Bush as Terminator: Pax Schwartzenegger, Rove behind Arnie coup, the Karl Rove profile to end all Karl Rove profiles, our friend oil again, plans for Korean War II, Korean diplomacy sabotaged by “human scum”, of photoshop and the myth of human beauty, Rockstar online media awards.

Donkey Clip

Just in case things were getting too highbrow around here, a video clip that many of you may have seen years ago but had just recently been brought to my attention – it involves a pantsless man and an excited donkey. (RealVideo stream)

A Scene

that should have taken place today. (24K PDF file)

Kung Faux

Via Ed – Kung Faux, kung fu films edited to TV length and dubbed hiphop style. (You can watch an episode on Heavy, click on the bottom icon when the damn interface loads.)

The Following Quote

may be from the Lou Ferrigno Hercules film, or it may be something I dreamt, or maybe a combination of both: “With this magic sword, science will defeat religion once and for all.”

Oooh! Santa!

Unfortunately, a search for Santa’s wedding sperm brings up 265 results, and this charming story is at the top. You may be better off not reading it, or wondering about my motivations for that particular search. Wow have I said too much. Where’s that damn amnesia gun?