Friday, December 31, 2010

Year in Review: Best films of 2010

Best films of 2010, by default.

  • Kick-Ass
  • Iron Man 2
  • Robin Hood
  • Toy Story 3
  • Inception
  • Dinner for Schmucks
  • Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Previous Year's Film lists

Wednesday, December 01, 2010

Lost Doctor Who song from Craig Ferguson



Craig Ferguson prepared this Doctor Who song with lyrics and dancing for the cold open of his episode with Matt Smith. CBS could not air the performance because they couldn't secure rights to the song. It has now been leaked, so you know what to do, internet.

Wednesday, November 10, 2010

JourneyQuest: A fan supported film



From Dead Gentlemen Productions, comes JourneyQuest, a fantasy comedy web series about a reluctant Wizard. This is the team that made the films "The Gamers" and "The Gamers: Dorkness Rising", both of which are compulsory viewing for all pen-and-paper role-playing gamers.

Sunday, November 07, 2010

The Maltese Falcon in Calgary

Chrononauts assemble! As part of the Cineplex classic film series, The Maltese Falcon will be shown this November at the Scotiabank Theatre Chinook.

Those not familiar with the adventures of  Sam Spade can watch the trailer here:



I'm so in for this, anyone with me?

Showtimes for The Maltese Falcon
  • Wednesday, November 17, 7:00pm
  • Sunday, November 28, 1:00pm
I have posted the rest of the film series here to pique your interests, while the complete showtimes & schedule can be found on the Classic Film Series website.

December: "It's a Wonderful Life"
January: "A Star Is Born" (1954)
February: "Doctor Zhivago"
March: "The Wizard Of Oz"
April: "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest"
May: "The Sound of Music"
June: "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid"
July: "Spartacus"
August: "M*A*S*H"

Sunday, October 17, 2010

Mad Men theme, with a twist



A fantastic mash-up of the Mad Men theme song (A Beautiful Mine) by RJD2 and "Nature Boy" made famous by Nat King Cole. The song is performed live, in one continuous take.

Saturday, September 18, 2010

This week on Twitter

Has it been a week already? Another collection of my tweets are presented here.

  • "Sissy Spacek" is a common astronaut insult.
  • A red shirt in a Browncoat is a losing fight waiting to happen.
  • A man, a plan, a canal: Palindrome!
  • Hava nagila monster
  • I call my cat "precious little" as it answers the question "what are you good for?"
  • If I was the Tzar, I would read the qur'an. However, if I was the Czar I would probably choose the koran.

Saturday, September 11, 2010

Twitter: Best of the week

Since forwarding tweets to my livejournal is now unavailable and unpopular, I thought I would try something different. I will post a collection of my "best-of" tweets from the past week here on Slashboing. I will choose only the timeless bon-mots of my own crafting, for your reading pleasure.

Like what you see? Consider following me on Twitter: @drhaggis

  • Drugstores should be shaped like the human body, with the product located at the corresponding region.
  • I like shopping from other people's carts. However no one wants to hear that I'm only breaking the mores and not the morals of our culture.
  • Idea: Plexiglas shield with your watermark etched in it. When people take pictures of you, the image will be pre-branded.
  • Sneer: The thing you see on a person's face when you mispronounce words like molybdenum, Alsatian, or mulligatawny.
  • A local store has upgraded me to "double VIP" status. Should I hold out for triple?
  • Science fiction writers need to look up "regulated power supply". Giving electronics "more power' doesn't make it go faster/better. duh.
  • First person shooters have plots? That's so cute.
  • The funniest things a fat person can do is dance, fart and fall down. I'm looking at you Farley, Mike & Molly, Jiminy Glick, Fat Bastard
  • Funny Fat dancing is a nice break from all the accusations of crushing people and committing cannibalism.
  • TV Show Idea: Lawn Order: Landscape division. CHUNK CHUNK.
  • Used fictional Kiefer in 24 to promote torture debate. Should have used Kiefer's grandfather Tommy Douglas during health care debate.

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Spacetime's Finest


From etsy retailer deantrippe, comes this print of "Spacetime's Finest", described as a "reproduction of the best comics team-up that never happened, between The Doctor [...] and Batman & Robin...".

Make this story happen internet.

Monday, August 16, 2010

Jamaican Club Sandwich

I laugh at your KFC double down. Friendly's Grilled Cheese burger is but a crude reflection of what could be. Behold the Jamaican club sandwich. A traditional club with turkey, bacon, cheddar and tomato but with Jamaican beef patties replacing the bread.

I would also like to see a club sandwich baked into a Jamaican patty.

This and more like it are from Insanewiches.com

Thursday, August 12, 2010

Matrix Warranty Shirt

In an attempt to make a cool Matrix styled t-shirt, a clever graphic designer grabbed some readily available Japanese text and arranged it as the familiar "falling code".

But what, ultimately, does it say? Enter Tian, editor of the "Hanzi Smatter" website. While Engrish is the mistranslation of English by those in the far East, Hanzi Smatter is dedicated to Western misuse of Chinese characters. Readers send in suspicious tattoos and Asian-themed products, and Tian attempts to make sense of it all.

Among the many entries of regrettable body art, was this spiffy looking shirt. What does it really say? It says that the graphic designer grabbed the warranty information for an IBM computer. It adds a level of irony to an already cool shirt if you know it says things like "In the case that a malfunction should occur, only repair service will be offered." or "We do not accept orders by FAX."

Unfortunately, we don't know where you can buy such a shirt, but if you find on,e feel free to sound clever about what the shirt actually says.

[Hanzi Smatter: IBM Support Tee]

Saturday, August 07, 2010

5 things about Inception you probably already know

  1. The musical cue used to warn the dreamers of an upcoming kick is "Non, Je ne regrette rien" by Edith Piaf. In English thats "No, I regret nothing," a fitting theme for the film, and Marion Cotillard who played Cobb's wife Mal won the Best Actress Oscar for her portrayal of Piaf in "The Passionate Life of Edith Piaf".
  2. Hans Zimmer uses the Edith Piaf song, and the time distortion from the dream state as a key to the films musical score.
  3. The Ellen Page character is named Ariadne, after he daughter of King Minos of Crete in Greek mythology. In the story, she gives a sword and a ball of red fleece thread to Theseus so he can find his way out of the maze of the minotaur. In Inception, she wears a lot of red, in addition to her maze making and hero leading.



  4. Christopher Nolan reuses imagery from his Batman movies. Posters from both Inception and The Dark Knight are painfully similar.



    Also Cillian Murphy does seem to spend a lot of time in the back of vans with a bag over his head.


  5. The stolen kiss between Arthur and Ariadne is the kernel of a thousand works of fanfiction.


    INCEPTION - Tilt by *YoukaiYume on deviantART

Thursday, August 05, 2010

Wednesday, August 04, 2010

Ultimate relaxation

Source: http://heypais.livejournal.com/69475.html
In our house the dangle paw position is called "longpaws" after the Jeff Goldblum episode of Friends.

Tuesday, August 03, 2010

Wybie mask from Coraline film

A year ago I made a replica Wybie mask from the film version of Coraline. While I believe the original prop was designed from a 1950's welding mask, I started with a very similarly shaped industrial face shield, with the clear plastic replaced with thick black sintra. The side crank is a replica replacement Porsche window crank.

Test fit of crank on Wybie mask

I stenciled the skull pattern on the front then painted it in, leaving the welding mask rectangle gap. The original prop was designed to look like a camera three lens turret, which I could not afford to pillage, even from the depths of ebay. I created a replica turret with more sintra, PVC fittings and paint. I wanted the crank to spin the turret, but I realized that since the original prop was from a stop motion film, it didn't have to spin, so neither did mine.

Painted Wybie Mask

With it all assembled I wired in some green ultra bright LEDs and it looked great. I made plastic lens diffusers out of some packaging plastic, sanded to turn the LED dots into glowing lights.

Finished Mask, lights on

One year I will actually wear this for Halloween. I have used it as part of the 52 Weeks of Video project, when I featured it in a short, surreal film.

Monday, August 02, 2010

Cheap photography tricks

Last week I took some pictures in downtown Calgary. This one looked good on the camera preview, a nice contrast between the landmark Calgary Tower being dwarfed by newer office buildings. But still being a noob camera owner, I didn't really get the exposure right.

Towering

So I opened the picture in Picnik and tweaked the saturation and contrast until it looked interesting.
Towering

Then, employing the cheapest design trick of them all. I added some text in the most acceptable font of them all: Helvetica.
Helvetica

Now you know a dirty, cheap photography trick: don't be a hack like me, be original.

Friday, July 30, 2010

The ABCs of Google search bar

The Google Search bar in Firefox has an "auto complete" function. Start typing and Google will guess where your search will go. Given that is probably based on the frequency and prevalence of these terms, it is another cool way to feel out the zeitgeist of the web. This was another draft post from a few years ago, so some of the autocomplete words changed since then. Now I have an ABC timecapsule of 2008.
20082010
A is for Amazon
B is for bebo
C is for craigslist
D is for dictionary
E is for ebay
F is for facebook
G is for gmail
H is for hotmail
I is for imdb
J is for jobs
K is for Kelly blue book
L is for Lowes
M is for myspace
N is for next
O is for orkut
P is for photobucket
Q is for qvc
R is for runescape
S is for Sears
T is for Target
U is for utube
V is for verizon wireless
W is for weather
X is for xbox
Y is for youtube
Z is for zip codes
A is for Amazon
B is for Best Buy
C is for craigslist
D is for dictionary
E is for ebay
F is for facebook
G is for gmail
H is for Hotmail
I is for Ikea
J is for Jet Blue
K is for Kohls
L is for Lowes
M is for myspace
N is for netflix
O is for orbitz
P is for Pandora
Q is for quotes
R is for realtor.com
S is for Sears
T is for Target
U is for usps
V is for verizon wireless
W is for weather
X is for xbox
Y is for youtube
Z is for zillow

Thursday, July 29, 2010

Rachel Ray montage

Cleaning out the "draft" folder has yielded another treasure. I'm not sure what sparkling commentary I was planning on writing for this montage of Rachel Ray enjoying food, so I'll present it now with no futher explanation.

Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Dystopian Future Shirt

I'm not sure why this post was sitting in my draft folder for two years. It contains link to buy a perfectly cromulent t-shirt, one lamenting the current state of affairs.


Dystopian Future Shirt

Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Diagram of my online presence

To keep straight the details of all my wheeling and dealing on the internet, I have created this little chart. At first glance it's a mind-numbing mess. Subsequent looks confirm this.
The Slashboing Empire

What it all means to me:

I post to each Flickr, Blogger, Twitter, and Livejournal by logging into each, or via email (which I seldom do). To read all the comments made on my posts, I only have to check Hotmail and Flickr.

What it all means to you:

To read everything that I contribute to the internet, you only have to check my LJ account: drhaggis.livejournal.com and my flickr account: flickr.com/photos/drhaggis. Everything I post to Blogger gets posted to Twitter, which gets bundled with its own content to be fed to Livejournal.

However this has recently changed. The "Loudtwitter" service I was using to bundle twitter missives to livejournal is down, and is unlikely to come back. Meaning I need to find a safe and suitable replacement.

I have also updated the format of Slashboing.ca, in an attempt to keep looking up to date. Let me know what you think!

A case of the Mondays, Keyboard Cat style

Ron Livingston (Office Space, Defying Gravity) was born to play keyboards in cat parody videos.

Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Current Fixations: New York City

One of my current fixations is the city that never sleeps. Despite growing up in Canada, thousands of kilometres away from New York City, parts of that city have ingrained into my psyche. We receive a lot of US television in Canada, and the amount of NYC imagery and culture that comes with it is surprising, and detailed! Should a Canadian kid know how hard it is to get a table at "Sardi's?" How many restaurants can you name from cities where you've never been? Few cities form such a cultural substrate.

Being in the “raised-by-TV” generation, I practically grew up on Sesame Street, not just the show, but somehow on that street itself. The street was clearly representing New York, with its distinctive brownstone buildings, a stop on the subway line and proximity to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I learned at a young age not to eat the pictures at the museum, long before I realized the Met was an actual place.



I knew muppets were puppets with hands up their backsides, so why would their environment be any more tangible? It's this kind of blurring of the real and the fantastic that makes New York magical.

I know NYC neighbourhood names such as Morningside Heights, Tribeca, SoHo and the Bowery, but I couldn't tell you what the neighbourhood I currently live in is supposed to be called. The streets and villages within NYC each have their own stories and culture, and the post-war tract housing of my youth can't compete for the same passions that “Wall Street” “Madison Ave” and “Broadway” do. Those aren't just addresses, they are Ideas. No movie worth watching was filmed in my hometown, and no one ever wrote a song about any of the streets there.

I know that much of the information that I have soaked up is dated and wrong. Sitcoms and movies set in New York are often written by people living in Hollywood. “The Brooklyn Dodgers,” is a phrase that falls from my mouth too readily for a team that hasn't existed since 1957. Tavern on the Green and the Rainbow Room are closed, Sardi's and The Russian Tea Room are well past their prime. The Cotton Club currently on west 125th street has no historical connection to the great jazz club of the past.

New York is simultaneously the present, the past, and the fictional.

In an effort to track the parts of New York that I could actually visit so I don't sound like Frank Sinatra in “On the Town”, I started keeping track with a simple map on Google. Whenever a travel show talks about the best bagels in the lower east side, or a website talks about an art installation at the Museum of Modern Art, I open up the map and drop a pin. I started including major landmarks and interesting stores, so over time the map became more pins than page.

Tuesday, June 15, 2010

A seemingly empty room of ninjas

Twitter is a great venue for quick wit and wordplay. One of the fun projects that utilizes this crowd-source of wit is the All Sorts Collective noun collection. A bot parses Twitter, cataloging creative terms of venery such as "a sneer of critics" or "a sic of editors".

I have posted many such collections to my twitter feed including such gems as "a scum of bounty hunters" and "a quibble of geeks". However my most popular submission is "a seemingly empty room of ninjas", being re-tweeted several times over the past year.

In March, All-sorts.org teamed up with the Owl and Lion gallery in Edinburgh, starting a contest to illustrate collective nouns from the index. Illustrator Parko Polo created a fantastic representation of my ninja collection which will be on display at the Owl & Lion Gallery from 15-27th June, 2010. An artists’ book featuring all 15 illustrations as well as individual prints will be for sale soon.

Friday, May 28, 2010

Cliche film dialog

Some film setups and dialog are so common, we don't notice them - until someone puts them all together in one clip.











Bonus Video: What? on Lost.


Wednesday, May 05, 2010

The Tragedy of Hamlet

I've been watching, of late, the BBC version of Hamlet with David Tennant and Patric Stewart. I don't know if my bias toward Tennant-as-Doctor-Who has coloured my affections,or if this is a genuinely unique and expert performance. I would have liked to see the original stage production with this cast, that delayed and made sparse Tennant's last turn as the Doctor, but it was not to be. I'm joyed that they adapted their performance for film and I managed to catch most of it on PBS.

Several clips can be found on Youtube, and this part of Act 2, Scene 2, is my overwhelming favourite.



I would write that they "make the text come alive" or that they "breathe life into the words" if it wasn't for the army of cliched hacks that would beat me 'round the head and shoulders for crimes both real and apparent.

Saturday, April 17, 2010

Saturday, April 10, 2010

Parallel Worlds


Parallel Worlds
Originally uploaded by Drhaggis.

J.J. Abrams likes stories with parallel worlds, alternate dimensions created by all the choices we do, and do not make. I made this mashup of the key men of science from different Abrams shows: Walter Bishop from Fringe and Daniel Faraday from Lost. One is a half mad, half insane man who's tinkering with the walls between worlds has lead to deaths and hardship. Actually that's both of them. Faraday has the beard.

Friday, March 26, 2010

8 Mile mashup with Ni Hao Kai-lan

On a dare, I made this mash up "Tolee's Rhyme Time" episode of the kids show "Ni Hao Kai-lan" and the trailer for the Eminem movie "8 Mile". It works so well because when the Rhyming Koala gets upset he flips up the hood of his Panda bear hoodie, just like any good struggling rapper does.

Monday, March 08, 2010

Hitchock' cameos

It feels like some sort of cosmic penance that Alfred Hitchcock has to walk endlessly through the background of his, and perhaps every, film.



(The previous link in the blog/tweet chain was Larry Blamire)

Sunday, March 07, 2010

Self-referential Trailer

Introduction that is short enough to show up on twitter, yet descriptive enough to entice you to view this post. Establishment that I enjoy the kind of thing I'm presenting in this post.

(via the person who posted it and I'm crediting for letting me know about it)

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Happy in Paraquay

NSFW video dub



For best results, watch this between two and three in the morning.

Wednesday, February 03, 2010

Sonic Obama Potter fans rejoice

Don't ever change Japan. We need your crazy mashups now more than ever.



(via various re-tweets on twitter)

Tuesday, February 02, 2010

Judge a book by its cover

This video explores the common elements of of urban fantasy book covers.

Community Rap by DJ Steve Porter

A great remix of scenes from "Community" by DJ Steve Porter, who brought us the Slap Chop rap and Henry Rollins vs The Techo Viking.


Community usually has a short scene during the closing credits featuring Abed and Troy riffing off each other, which are funny in their own right, and this song remixes them well. [Spanish Rap][
Krumping]

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

I look like Justin Timberlake (62%)



In 2006 I ran a celebrity look-alike program and got Russell Crow and Tom Cruise. I ran it again today and got Ben Affleck, Justin Tinberlake and Barack Obama. Not too shabby.

Source: Celebrity Collage.

Friday, January 01, 2010

Year in Review: 2009 in Films

Once again I must list all the films I saw in the theaters this year, call them the "best of the year," have a laugh at my own expense, then lament that I haven't seen more films. Notable films I missed this year include Inglourious Basterds, District 9, and G-Force. Every year I try to see more films, but still average about one a month.
  • Coraline
  • Fanboys
  • Watchmen
  • Monsters vs. Aliens
  • Star Trek
  • Terminator Salvation
  • Up
  • Transformers 2
  • Public Enemies
  • X-Men Origins: Wolverine
  • Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
  • G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra
  • Where the Wild Things Are
  • Avatar
Notable this year is that I saw Up, Star Trek and Watchmen multiple times in the theater.

What does 2010 hold? How about Footloose, The A Team and The Karate Kid? [Joke about 80's Nostalgia]

Previous Year's Film lists