Category Archives: Culture

Pixar Visual In-Jokes

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Here’s a great and exhaustive look at the jokes and references that Pixar seemingly stuffs all of their movies full of.  Some of these I have noticed, but the attention to detail here is amazing.  Check it out.  I was particularly surprised by the Pizza Planet truck thing.  Apparently the pizza truck from Toy Story appears in every Pixar feature movie produced to date.  Way cool.  Of course this only makes sense or is interesting to you if you have kids and have watched these things over and over.  Or if you just like animated movies, which I do.

 Enjoy.

 I saw the link on Metafilter first.

Zombie folk song for the holidays

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Ok, so it has nothing to do with the holiday season, but how else can I have a reason to post a song I really meant to have up here weeks ago?

Re: Your Brains is a hilarious nerd folk song by Jonathon Coulton, an ode to the workplace zombie with note-perfect sarcasm:

All we want to do is eat your brains
We’re not unreasonable, I mean, no one’s gonna eat your eyes
All we want to do is eat your brains
We’re at an impasse here, maybe we should compromise:
If you open up the doors
We’ll all come inside and eat your brains

Gotta love that. The video is a mash up of silly zombie movies so expect to be nauseated by kitschy violence and gore, but otherwise, enjoy. The actual zombie part of the song is how it takes up residence inside your head and won’t leave. I was shoveling snow off the laneway, muttering it. Passersby ran away.

Lego

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As the boys get older, I have been trying to insinuate Lego into their lives because that’s what parents do, they want to force their kids into liking everything they liked when they were young.  Never mind that it hardly ever works, it’s a parent thing and there’s just no reasoning with parents.  Anyway, to that end I have been trying to subtly play up how totally cool Lego can be to play with.  I think it’s starting to take with Quinn, and Cael loves getting Quinn to make him a Lego truck and plays with that (it’s Cael’s largest handicap that he has an older, capable brother since Cael never really has to try very hard for anything before Quinn will just do it for him).  Anyway, now that I have been helping the guys build a few things, we have already almost reached the limit of what we can build with the bricks we have.  Off to the Lego website (did I forget to mention how awesome this Internet thing is?)  and have a look at what I can find up there.  The bulk brick bags of one colour aren’t that cheap, but then again, how cool would it be to have a whole bucket of just one colour?  Anyway, the really cool stuff is in the kits anyway, such as this unbelievably geeky Star Destroyer kit costing $400. 

 Lego Star Destroyer

But look at it, holy crap.  This would certainly make a statement, wouldn’t it?  Something like “I am a huge nerd.”  or “The fact that I am married with kids is a statistic anomaly.”  I mean I wouldn’t want to have it in my house, but it would be a blast to build once.

And finally, I almost forgot to put the finishing touch on this post, which is the following impressive Halloween costume.  See above comment about the statistic unlikelihood that the wearer will actually procreate.

Lego Costume

I saw the costume on the excellent Neatorama.

Yay Cricket! AAAH Bees! Yay Cricket!

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A swarm of bees interrupted a cricket game in Sri Lanka, forcing the players to all lie motionless on the ground until the bees moved on.  In other news, cricket is still stupid, and even bees can’t be bothered to watch more than a few minutes of it at a time.

I wonder how that looked to anyone watching the game?  I mean, if I saw all of the players suddenly laying down one at a time, I would just assume that there was a halftime nap or something.  It’s kind of hard to follow for a poor Canuck such as myself, given that the score was apparently 442 to 9 to 6 x Pi.  Clear as a bell.  Nevermind that there were only two teams playing.  And that there’s apparently no time limit to the game, you just play until you can’t see anymore in the dark.  I’m not kidding.  If the whole point of the game was to scare the guy with the bat into flinching so you can throw the wooden ball into the surveyor’s stake, wouldn’t it be VERY effective if the guy with the bat couldn’t see the ball coming?  I bet he would flinch everytime.  Anyway, apparently Sri Lanka kicked England’s wiffle this time around.  Or I think they did anyway.  Does this make sense to anyone?

“Sri Lanka declared at 442 runs for eight wickets in its second innings to set England a 350-run target with one day left. England was 9-1 when bad light stopped play. “

 What the heck does that mean? 

Disclaimer:  I freely admit that I know absolutely nothing at all about cricket, and so I am unfairly calling it stupid.  It’s one of the most popular games in the world, there must be something to it, right?  There’s a ton of info here, but I’m thinking it’s probably one of those things best experienced with a cold beer on one hand, and a seasoned cricket fan giving you the play by play as you watch a test, or match, or joust, or whatever cricket games are called.

Cats are Dumb

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I don’t really have any time to blog anything of worth, except that I noticed a news article today that sums up exactly how I feel about most cats.  This cat apparently got it’s head stuck in an empty jar of peanut butter, which incidentally is something I really need to see on YouTube at some point before I die.  Who am I kidding, it’s probably there already, I just can’t get to YouTube from work.  If you can, please enrich us all by posting the link to the video in the comments. Anyway, not only did the cat get his (probably freakishly huge head) somehow stuck in a jar, he was stuck that way for 19 days without dying because he was so fat.  Once he thinned out a bit on his “peanut butter diet” he was caught and freed, never to be able to stand the smell of peanut butter again.  It’s right out of a Winnie the Pooh story folks, and I know that first hand because I have watched that very movie several times.  Many times.  Many several separate viewings, at different times, over the past decade or so.  You could say I know it well.

So, uh, there you go, cats are dumb.

Save the Music Industry

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Canoe.ca is running a bit of a series of articles on the music industry, downloading, sales, torrents, and the whole ball of wax.  I’ve been following it for a few days in the Ottawa Sun and online, it’s not a bad series generally.  Most of the ideas aren’t new, or even novel, but it does seem to be taking absolutely forever for the industry to figure things out.  One particularly good article that summarizes things pretty well is here.

It covers the basics: compete with free or lose everything, our loyalty doesn’t come free or cheap, piracy will always exist if you don’t give us what we want and how we want it, and my favourite: stop making sucky music.

Anyway, have a read, it’s pretty good stuff.