Sunday, October 12, 2008
The Night The Teenagers Ruled The World!
I just found this great fansite for 80s B-Rated Zombie movie "Night Of The Comet". It's got everything; trivia, quotes, memoramblia, bios of the cast... Above is the trailer, voiced by Optimus Prime himself. Below is a fun vid by Pirated Video where they whittled the whole movie down to 10 minutes. It's full of spoilers, so don't watch it if ya wanna check out the movie for more than just nostalgia.
Oh, and of course DMK has 23 cars.
The Conet Project, And Why You May Wanna Hold Onto Your Old TV.
We pretty much all know by now that television is switching over to a digital signal next year, and without a converter box, we will no longer be able to receive our favorite shows. That's hardly news.
But what's gonna happen to that huge bandwidth of broadcast signal? It's not going to simply dissappear... There is plenty of speculation as to who is going to be using those signals, from cell phones to emergency broadcasts to homeland security.
What about those of us curious enough to hold on to our regular tvs, or happen to have some of those old-school radios that pick up TV signals? What do you think we may be able to find scanning those "unused" frequencies?
Have you ever heard of a Numbers Station?
Scanning the shortwave dial, occasionally you will come across a funny little robotic voice (usually female) reading off a series of seemingly random letters and numbers. Reports of accidentally finding such stations date back to World War I, which could make them among the earliest radio broadcasts. References to them have been used as plot points in films since Jean Cocteau's 1950 film Orphee, appearing in Red Dawn, Toy Soldiers, Vanilla Sky and the television series Lost.
Funny thing is, nobody (at least nobody you or I are likely to know in our lifetime) has any idea where these signals are really coming from, or what their purpose is.
In 1997, Iridial Disks released a 4-CD collection called The Conet Project a found-sound project based on the work of numbers station enthusiast Akin Fernandez. The collection has been circulating around the underground since. As of recently, Iridial has released the collection as a series of free downloads from their site.
It's highly unlikely that anything broadcast along these newly acquired frequencies would be broadcast unencrypted. Without delving any further into speculation, all we can do is hold onto our rabbit ears and see for ourselves.
Reactable Improvisation Demo
Excellent improvisational video by the guys that created the Reactable Demo video previously posted by Chad. Actually, it looks like all these videos are on the Youtube profile of one of the guys who made the thing.
Enjoy.
Atari 2600 Rarity Guide
Provided by the excellent source of everything Atari (vintage and homebrew), AtariAge, here is an excellent rarity guide for collectors. It's a great source to roughly estimate how much you might have to pay to replace your childhood collection (HINT: usually not very much)
Or for someone such as myself to find that of my personal collection of about 140 games, only one rates even a 5 on a scale of 1 to 10 for rarity. Meh.
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
5 Most Brutal Deaths In The "Funny" Pages
Considering the impending death of Opus (previously known from "Bloom County" and "Outland"), I've deceided to chronicle the 5 most gruesome deaths in syndicated comic strip history.
Even in the "safe" confines of the "funny" pages, death is no stranger. Usually such tragedies are meant to humanize the series, and are usually played out with well-though out empathy (who didn't cry over the dead bird or the baby raccoon in Calvin and Hobbes?).
I'm not documenting any of those.
I found the five most cruel, senseless, or downright bizarre deaths in the history of comic strips. Here we go:
5. ABOUT 3% OF DICK TRACY'S VILLAINS.
Chester Gould (Dick Tracy's creator) had little qualms about killing off bad guys. Legend states he actually maintained a miniature cemetary in his back yard, erecting a gravestone for every Dick Tracy villain that ever met his fate (and later adding gravestones for real life villains like Adolf Hitler and Mussolini). Within this top five, I want to submit the top 5 most brutal deaths in the Dick Tracy strip-
5) Queenie - Plunging into a steamboat's smokestack.
4) Gargles - Completely dismembered by falling panes of glass.
3) Jerome Trohs - Scalded to death in an outdoor shower by his mom.
4) Laffy - Bled to death by wounds suffered from a broken ether bottle, but he was laughing so hard he couldn't seek help.
1) Heels Beels - Hid in a prop soda bottle to evade capture. The soda bottle was lifted to a billboard sign 200 feet above the ground. With noone to hear his cries for help, he died of exposure and thirst.
4) ALDO KELRAST (FROM THE MARY WORTH COMIC STRIP)
This mustachioed, Chef Boyardee-looking individual pestered Mary Worth with his devotion, until after an intevention by Mary's friends (apparently so sick of her meddling in their lives, they wanted to meddle in hers), poor lonely Aldo got wasted and drove his car off a cliff. While at his funeral, Mary was asked if she was thinking of Aldo. Knowing the story arc was indeed at a close, Mary replied that her thoughts were actually on the handsome young doctor she met.
Aldo got served at his own funeral!
3) JOHN DARLING
This beloved character spin-off of Tom Batuik's popular "Funky Winkerbean" comic strip met his end when Tom, as he was enduring licensing issues with syndication, took things into his own hands and drew in a gunman to blow the main character to pieces in front of thousands of funny pages readers.
2) GARFIELD
Yeah, even Garfield himself. Even if it was an exploration by Jim Davis, you couldn't possibly make a list like this without mentioning a week of probably what might just about the most jarring, disturbing series of strips to appear in the funnies, especially in the mind of the average comic strip reader, besides...
1) DOUG MARLETTE ACCIDENTALLY EULOGIZING HIMSELF.
Pulitzer Prize winning Doug Marlette was known for his syndicated comic strip "Kudzu", which ran for 26 years before the author's fatal car crash. A prominent gag in the strip was preacher Will B Dunn, whose strips had him eulogizing unnamed bereaved, while having a hard time actually saying anything good about them. As most professional comic strip artists turn in art nearly a month before it is published, the comic strip ran for nearly a month after his death, including a comic stip shortly after which portrayed Will B. Dunn presiding over the funeral of a man who had passed in a car wreck.
Even in the "safe" confines of the "funny" pages, death is no stranger. Usually such tragedies are meant to humanize the series, and are usually played out with well-though out empathy (who didn't cry over the dead bird or the baby raccoon in Calvin and Hobbes?).
I'm not documenting any of those.
I found the five most cruel, senseless, or downright bizarre deaths in the history of comic strips. Here we go:
5. ABOUT 3% OF DICK TRACY'S VILLAINS.
Chester Gould (Dick Tracy's creator) had little qualms about killing off bad guys. Legend states he actually maintained a miniature cemetary in his back yard, erecting a gravestone for every Dick Tracy villain that ever met his fate (and later adding gravestones for real life villains like Adolf Hitler and Mussolini). Within this top five, I want to submit the top 5 most brutal deaths in the Dick Tracy strip-
5) Queenie - Plunging into a steamboat's smokestack.
4) Gargles - Completely dismembered by falling panes of glass.
3) Jerome Trohs - Scalded to death in an outdoor shower by his mom.
4) Laffy - Bled to death by wounds suffered from a broken ether bottle, but he was laughing so hard he couldn't seek help.
1) Heels Beels - Hid in a prop soda bottle to evade capture. The soda bottle was lifted to a billboard sign 200 feet above the ground. With noone to hear his cries for help, he died of exposure and thirst.
4) ALDO KELRAST (FROM THE MARY WORTH COMIC STRIP)
This mustachioed, Chef Boyardee-looking individual pestered Mary Worth with his devotion, until after an intevention by Mary's friends (apparently so sick of her meddling in their lives, they wanted to meddle in hers), poor lonely Aldo got wasted and drove his car off a cliff. While at his funeral, Mary was asked if she was thinking of Aldo. Knowing the story arc was indeed at a close, Mary replied that her thoughts were actually on the handsome young doctor she met.
Aldo got served at his own funeral!
3) JOHN DARLING
This beloved character spin-off of Tom Batuik's popular "Funky Winkerbean" comic strip met his end when Tom, as he was enduring licensing issues with syndication, took things into his own hands and drew in a gunman to blow the main character to pieces in front of thousands of funny pages readers.
2) GARFIELD
Yeah, even Garfield himself. Even if it was an exploration by Jim Davis, you couldn't possibly make a list like this without mentioning a week of probably what might just about the most jarring, disturbing series of strips to appear in the funnies, especially in the mind of the average comic strip reader, besides...
1) DOUG MARLETTE ACCIDENTALLY EULOGIZING HIMSELF.
Pulitzer Prize winning Doug Marlette was known for his syndicated comic strip "Kudzu", which ran for 26 years before the author's fatal car crash. A prominent gag in the strip was preacher Will B Dunn, whose strips had him eulogizing unnamed bereaved, while having a hard time actually saying anything good about them. As most professional comic strip artists turn in art nearly a month before it is published, the comic strip ran for nearly a month after his death, including a comic stip shortly after which portrayed Will B. Dunn presiding over the funeral of a man who had passed in a car wreck.
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