by Rodney Eric Griffith | Armour of Rod | |
Matt says Tony claims a striking resemblance between Johnny Depp’s Willy Wonka from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and our own Brian Alter.
Depp:
Alter:
I’m not sure I see it.
At last, it looks like January.
Rodney | 8:42:00 AM [permalink]This week I’ve been rereading The Confessions of a Hoaxer—my local library had it when I was very young, and by courtesy of interlibrary loan I am reading it again for the first time in years. Alan Abel is one of the few people I’ve ever envied for his choice of career. His daughter Jenny has produced and directed a documentary, Abel Raises Cain, premiering at the Slamdance Film Festival in a few weeks.
Rodney | 8:01:00 PM [permalink]The weekend before Christmas we screened the new DVD edition of The Night Stalker/The Night Strangler. I was too young to have seen the films when they originally aired on ABC, which is just as well considering how timeless they both seem now… I have to note, like everyone else does when mentioning The Night Stalker, that Kolchak’s DNA is synced with Fox Mulder’s.
Rodney | 7:04:00 PM [permalink]The oldest item in my record collection that I had originally purchased is Great White North by Bob and Doug McKenzie. I was a great fan of SCTV in my teens and was desperate to get a copy as soon as it came out. I remember the LP had sold out, so I purchased one of the store’s remaining cassette copies.
I listened to it this morning, but the tape is very wobbly in places. The bits are still funny, although Thomas and Moranis both miscalculated badly when it came to following through.
The news on the tsunamis is still numbing me.
I meant to mention this before Christmas: the Candlewick Press Yellow Submarine book encapsulates the 1968 film beautifully, and Fiona Andreanelli’s design is up to her usual standards of attention to detail (to both Heinz Edelmann’s artwork and Apple’s house style). I didn’t check, but I’ve long wondered if Apple used the genuine version of Amelia for its Yellow Submarine projects; I hope that someone did get in touch with the typeface’s creator, Stan Davis, considering Apple’s defence of the Beatles’ creative autonomy.
Rodney | 7:31:00 PM [permalink]Normally, I would never be caught watching the GoodLife TV Network but I noticed that they’d started running The Man From U.N.C.L.E. in chronological order. (I had never seen the series apart from five of the movies made from either extended versions of episodes or conflated versions of two-part episodes. The DVD box of the movie versions was a Christmas gift from Mum last year. The actual series is still unavailable on DVD.) Caroline was pretty excited at this development. GoodLife is also running the spinoff series The Girl From U.N.C.L.E., which is billed as “adventure comedy” or somesuch (without really being either), which Caroline hadn’t previously seen, but we couldn’t take more than two episodes of Stefanie Powers’ inability to hold onto the same accent for more than eight words at a time. The whole affair was embarrassing.
One good thing did come out of viewing one of those Girl episodes (“The Romany Lie Affair”), however: the idea of whisky in tea. Cheers!
Another useful phrase in my everyday life:
“Muggles? They don’t see nothing, do they?”
A few days back I received an advance copy of a new glossy consumer electronics magazine, ce Lifestyles or, as Caroline called it, Things Unnecessary Magazine. Much of the advertising is cleverly set in the magazine’s own style, making it somehow covert and blatant at the same time. I think the least expensive item advertised was a $69 Philips DVP642 DVD player, but much of the content is geared toward widescreen TVs in the very high 4 figures and lots of digital cameras. There is a nice article on the origin of stereo headphones (developed in 1958 by John Koss) but I’m not sure the target audience for the magazine is going to care.
Rodney | 2:10:00 PM [permalink]This bears repeating for 2005:
“Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless—like water. Now, you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash! Be water, my friend.” —Bruce Lee
