Fun Stuff

Better Book Titles

/ Shane / 3 Comments

Okay, I have spent entirely too much time on Better Book Titles. The formula is simple: re-title a book with something a little more descriptive or appropriate, and photoshop the new title onto the cover of the book.

The best ones are when they take a title from one book or movie and put it on the book it should have titled in the first place. I have literally spent hours looking at these, but for some reason Sara does not enjoy them. I don’t know how many I called her over to see. “Check out this one!” I would say, pointing and chuckling, only to have her shrug uninterestedly and say, “I don’t know, it’s just not for me I guess.”

Don’t be like her, go enjoy these. Here are some of my favorites:

Shite Food

/ Shane / Leave a comment

In the complete opposite of yesterday’s post, I’d like to introduce you to Shite Food.

This is such a great idea for a blog. Basically, he tries all the worst food the supermarket has to offer so you don’t have to. He’s a connoisseur of the unsavory, and practically a hero if you want my opinion.

Kind of like my “10 things I used to eat that disgust me” post, except if I was still eating it today. And then if I didn’t stop at 10, but continued to keep finding things that disgust me and eat them, in fact seeking out the most disgusting things I could find.

The only downside is that the site is British (if you couldn’t tell by the title), so they have weird things that aren’t available here in the U.S. A quick survey seems to indicate their shite food is much worse than our shite food (well, it’s British, so to be fair nobody’s exactly arguing that good food is their strong suite).

In particular, I would like to call out a product called “Mr. Brain’s Pork Faggots“. People in the U.K. eat something called Mr. Brain’s Pork Faggots. Enough people, that they mass produce them and stock shelves in a super market with them. This is not a joke.

(In case you’re wondering, it’s probably worse than you think:  “A faggot is traditionally made from pig’s heart, liver and fatty belly meat or bacon minced together, with herbs added for flavouring and sometimes bread crumbs”)

So if you actually want to try some of this stuff out (because you hate yourself and want to die?), you’re probably going to be out of luck. However, it’s much better to read about someone else’s trials and tribulations, rather than experience them yourself.

ThinkGeek, my love for you knows no bounds

/ Shane / 1 Comment

Most catalogs or emails from companies are an annoyance. Maybe you bought one item one time, and now you are forever cursed to receive correspondence from this company. Page after page of crap you don’t want. But every once in awhile, you have a company that is just totally on your wavelength. Every single item is awesome, and receiving a catalog or email from them puts a smile on your face. For me, ThinkGeek is that company (Probably less useful than Sara’s company, which is Boden, and actually sells useful clothes and stuff). Just when I think they’ve exhausted the total list of possible cool items, here’s two totally new items that are totally awesome.

Item 1 – The Panic Button Light Switch

Basically, it’s just a kit to replace a standard light switch with a mad-scientist-laboratory-emergency-cutoff-style giant red button.

It seems so obvious when you see it, doesn’t it? How much more dramatic would turning lights on and off become if you could slap a big red emergency button to perform the task? And you can even turn the button like a dial for a dimmer switch. A little too expensive to actually replace all the switches in your house maybe, but still a great idea.

Item 2 – Scizza Pizza Cutter

Okay, you can’t improve on something as simple and straightforward as the pizza cutter, right? Wrong.

Okay, at first it seems crazy, but bear with me on this one. If you think about a regular pizza cutter, it’s not exactly perfect. First off, we often bake our pizza in a cookie sheet, so I can never cut through the very edge of the crust because the wheel hits the lip of the pan. Then, I have to run the cutter back and forth to get all the way through, but I never quite hit the same line, so I just end up making multiple shallow cuts. So there is some room for improvement, and this design would probably handle those issues. Also, once the pizza finally is cut, I usually turn the pizza cutter sideways and use that as a spatula. So it was particularly brilliant to include a built in spatula on the bottom. Besides, with a regular cutting wheel, cutting on the pan must wear out the blade, right? Another problem solved. Brilliant, top to bottom.

(Side note, literally as I was writing this post, ThinkGeek just emailed me to tell me they had deposited bonus Geek Points into my account. Coincidence? Maybe. Creepy? For sure. I told you they were in my head, they even know what I’m typing!)

Dancin’ Kim

/ Shane / 1 Comment

Oooh, my friends. Have I got something for you. Allow me to introduce you to Totally Rad Dances with Dancin’ Kim. Prepare to learn the Thriller dance:

“So how completely awesome is the Thriller video? My friends and I are like totally obsessed. We’re all, ‘he totally topped the moonwalk’! It’s super cool.”

Oh. Em. Gee.

I was introduced to Dancin’ Kim through some unorthodox methods. It was actually linked to from a friend of mine’s website for his upcoming wedding. It was love at first sight, and I immediately went out and watched every Dancin’ Kim video I could find.

“Everybody at Danceteria is doing it. And you know who hangs out there. Madonna. So you know it’s super cool!”

I’m not really sure that Dancin’ Kim is really the right person to teach you how to pop and lock. Never more so than when she says the phrase, “This is the beat of the street with the freshest moves going down!” Yeeeah.

Oh, don’t stop there. By all means, learn how to dance like the Go Gos, how to do the Robot, and how to do the running man. You know you want to.

I think what my life is missing are Rad Friends. I mean, I have friends, but are they Rad Friends? Would I be able to call on them at a moment’s notice and have them submit to video taping some of the worst, most listless dancing the world has ever seen?

Okay, I know everybody in every decade always thinks this, but when we look back on today 30 years from now, it can’t look this ridiculous, right?

Battlestar Galactica, Part II

/ Shane / 8 Comments

Well, we finally finished up watching Battlestar Galactica (you can see the first half review, here). Major spoilers to follow, so if you haven’t seen it and you think you might want to some day, I wouldn’t read any farther.

What a great show. I’m not saying every episode set the world on fire, but, top to bottom, one of the most consistently interesting and exciting shows I’ve ever had the privilege of watching.

The gimmick of not revealing the “final five” Cylons (the bad guys – robots who want to destroy the human race, but can be indistinguishable from people) until the end was great. Not only did it really keep us guessing, it also gave us endless hours of conversation ala LOST.

I thought they did a really good job with the Cylons. They seemed realistic to me. It was like they didn’t quite get it or understand what it was to be human. Close, but not quite, the way you you could mimic something and have all the appearance of getting it, but not actually getting it. I liked how they didn’t quite understand what love was, or the way they’d be so cruel but then if a human did one bad thing the’d be like, “You see! You see how awful and brutal you are!” I don’t know, it just seemed believable to me, like that’s the way super intelligent killer robots would act.

There were so many great characters. Boomer/Athena was (were) a great character(s). (Side note, as an actor you totally want to be a Cylon. You can’t die (a new copy of the robot comes online with all of your memories) and you can be in multiple places at the same time (more than one copy of the robot can be active at once). Never ending paycheck!) The “Eights” were sort of the most human, and were therefore the most caught between the two worlds and thus had the most interesting storylines. The three gentlemen I talked about last time (Admiral Adama, Colonel Tigh, and Brother Cavil) were all fantastic characters who were fantastically acted, right up until the end. Even some of the side characters got to have a story line or two.

You know who didn’t get to have a story line or two? The black Cylon! Seriously! Early on in the show, they introduced one non-Caucasian Cylon, and the he just disappeared. Every single other Cylon model had a major role to play in the series, but not the black one. No sir. He never even appeared in the background of the ship. I guess it was the back of the starship for that one.

I thought the end was pretty decent. It is comforting to know that, no matter how many times the cycle of humanity repeats itself, our crowning achievement is always “All Along the Watchtower”. I thought Roslin’s death was handled pretty well, which was probably tough, given that it had been building up basically since season 1.

However, I was deeply disappointed that Starbuck 2.0, as well as Baltar and Caprica 6’s hallucinations, turned out to be angels. I don’t know why this upset me so much, but I thought that part was really stupid. I also never really liked the character of Gaius Baltar. I felt like he could have been cool, a genius who unwittingly nearly destroyed the human race, but he never really made it for me. At the beginning he was too goofy to seem like a genius, and at the end, the whole sex-cult leader thing didn’t do it for me. We never once saw any evidence of the fact that he was a genius; whenever he did something smart it was completely by accident. He was also apparently irresistible to women, though I couldn’t give you a single reason why.

Anyway, as good as everybody predicted, and now we have to find something else to do with our time. Any suggestions?