So I guess there really is no excuse anymore for not having a review up already, is there? :-)
Think I finally "get" this film now. Write-up coming later today.
And no, there is not an extra "0" in that number.The New York Post reports on the special diet that has Michael Phelps breaking swimming records like nobody's business at the Olympics. The guy is on a staggering twelve thousand calories a day eating regimen. A typical person usually takes in around 6000 calories every day. Phelps has been nearing that amount with each meal! Mostly lots of carbohydrate-rich fare like pasta.
The boy better figure in some Wheaties too if he wants to have his picture on the front of their cereal box :-P
If he goes on winning gold in the rest of his events, Phelps will not only make his own record all the more unreachable but he'll break Mark Spitz's record of having earned seven gold medals in a single Olympiad.
Do it, dude!
Butterfly is perhaps the most strenuous stroke of competitive swimming. And Michael Phelps won the 200 meter butterfly with a time of 1:52:03 early Wednesday morning at the Beijing Olympics.Phelps is now the most-winning Olympic athlete in history: ten gold medals so far in his career, with four in Beijing alone. And he's got a chance to bring home four more.
Go Michael! :-)
The Burger King in Xenia, Ohio is minus a bunch of employees and one manager tonight because this guy decided to cleanse himself with a bubble bath in the restaurant's dish sink! The location's operators have thrown out all the utensils that came in contact with "Mr. Unstable", and have said that the sink has been sanitized twice. I've heard at least one person suggest that perhaps the entire Burger King be razed and burned and the ground sown with salt.
If you must (and you probably must) here's the complete video showing the now-unemployed Mr. Unstable taking his bath in the sink...
The Amazon.com exclusive Gears of War 2 Lancer. Full-sized replica of the workhorse weapon used by Marcus Fenix and the Delta Squad, right down to the bloodied chainsaw bayonet. Squeeze the trigger to activate the chainsaw sound effects and vibrating action. It also features a removable clip.
Retail price: $139.99 and that isn't stopping it from currently being the #1 video game item at Amazon.
Think I'll just get the game instead :-)
That's how I'm always going to remember him as. The very first time that I heard of him: when he played the Duke in Escape from New York.
Hayes also wrote and performed the theme song from Shaft. And of course he was Chef on South Park, before that very odd dispute with the producers.
Adding him to the list of people for whom to keep their families in our thoughts and prayers.
EDIT 3:49 p.m. EST: Here's the first real news story that I've found about Hayes's death.
"WOLVERINES!"(Look, somebody had to say it... :-)
In a very wonky case of mistaken identity, Google News has been reporting that the Russian Army is invading Georgia... as in, Georgia in the southeastern United States! The mix-up stems from the trouble going on with Russia and Georgia, the country in the Caucasus between the Black Sea and the Caspian.
Don't worry folks. Even if the Russians take Savannah, there'll be hell to pay when they get to Athens. GO DAWGS!
First there's Jenna Olwin, who over the past few years has not only become a very dear friend to Lisa and I but also a wonderful sister in the Lord, who will tie the knot with her boyfriend and soul-mate Lou tomorrow. Here's her blog post about getting engaged from back in March. There might be pictures that I can post soon afterward of the wonderful event.
And then in the wee hours of this morning my friend Chris Rash and his wife celebrated the birth of Reagan, their first child and a beautiful baby girl!
Congratulations to Jenna and Lou, and to Chris and Ashley and Reagan! Y'all are definitely in our prayers this weekend :-)
That's one bit of news that I sure wasn't anticipating.
A very funny and talented person. And seemed like way too nice a guy to leave us at a pretty young age.
I thought his television show was pretty good and always had a good moral at the end. His work in Ocean's Eleven and its sequels was terrific. And there was Transformers of course: his portrayal of used-car dealer Bobby Bolivia was uproariosly funny!
Thoughts and prayers going out to his family today.
I'm hearing mixed word on what started this: the Georgians claim the Russians invaded and the Russians are stating that missiles from Georgia attacked their military positions. It's almost like a repeat of Fort Sumter.
The U.S. aligned itself with Georgia awhile back. A lot of people are saying that Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili was counting on that support when he tried to retake the breakaway region of South Ossetia. Which pretty much means that because of this damnable Gordian Knot of entangling alliances, that the United States might soon find itself at extreme odds with Russia and Cold War II will have officially begun.
Oh yeah, I'm hearing that there are currently about twelve hundred American military personnel - ironically, many from our own state of Georgia (and lots from around Atlanta) - that are in Georgia (the country in the Caucasus in Europe) for joint exercises with the Georgian army.
Meanwhile, most Americans are either (a) watching the Olympics, (b) listening to John Edwards confess his dalliances, or (c) seriously considering that Paris Hilton should run for Congress. Oblivious to the fact that for all intents and purpose, this is darn nearly an identical scenario to that which began World War I.
Pat Buchanan was right: "We are an unserious people in a serious time."
Asheville High School is not just a great school, it's a beautiful building. I know 'cuz some years ago I did a lot of substitute teaching there. So I'm pretty familiar with the layout of the place and the kind of people there. Which makes this story all the more interesting for me personally...A video surveillance camera at Asheville High has purportedly captured the moving image of a ghost. Some are saying that it looks to be the size and shape of a child as it darts around the atrium in the early morning hours of August 1st.
Could it be? When I heard about a "haunted" high school in Asheville, the first thing that popped into my mind was Erwin High School, which you would expect to be haunted since they build the place on top of Buncombe County's old "potter's field" (you can still see pits in the ground from where they removed the coffins, and sometimes bits of bone and nail wind up on the surface after a heavy rain). I heard plenty of ghost stories about Erwin, but this is the first that I'm hearing about Asheville High being spooked. It is rather old for a school building: dating back to 1929. Doubtless a building with such a long history has seen its share of haunting experiences, spectral or no.
But I think in this case, judging by the video I'm seeing here, we need not be alarmed. It seems very much to be nothing more than a moth that alighted on the protective dome covering of the camera. You can even pick out its silhouette against the more well-lit parts of the footage.
So I don't think there's any ghost here. But students at Asheville High need not be disappointed: between Helen's Bridge and Battle Mansion and of course the Pink Lady of Grove Park Inn, there's plenty of supernatural delight to be found around Asheville!
I've talked about Rock Band a lot on this blog ('cuz Lisa and I play it together all the time) and we're eager for Rock Band 2 next month, but I'm also a big fan of the Guitar Hero games. Lisa got me Guitar Hero III for my birthday a few months ago. Now if only I can get past Slash...Well, the next few months are going to be pure crazy on the rhythm gaming front, with Rock Band 2 and then Guitar Hero World Tour fighting for the coveted space under the Christmas tree. Today Activision released gobs of new info about Guitar Hero World Tour, including how Ozzy Osbourne will be a playable avatar in the game.
Activision should program an "Easter egg" that lets you bite the head off a live chicken on stage while playing Ozzy. It would triple sales of Guitar Hero World Tour!
Now, that is some seriously sweet innovation. I'm beginning to see why Apple devotees are so loyal to the House of Jobs :-)
In related news, there's been considerable buzz about a possible "iPhone nano" coming out later this year, said to be a "pay as you go" iPhone. Personally, I think an iPhone shuffle would be more fun: no display, and it dials random numbers whenever you use it :-P
Even if this specific project never gets made, I don't care. I'm just glad to hear that there is some movement afoot to bring V back to the screen.
Hopefully as a re-imagined and updated story, but maintaining the same basic premise. With Kenneth Johnson given complete control over it. I've said it before and I'll say it again: if NBC had let him run V the way he intended, it would have become something truly monumental. V, the original 1983 miniseries, is still considered one of the most memorable achievements of that decade's television.
And there's been no better time to resurrect V than now. If the new Battlestar Galactica can soar, a new V would practically become a license to print money for whatever studio produces it.
I just have one request to Johnson and the other powers-that-be. If and when V gets relaunched, please, please include an adaptation of the final scene from Part 1 of the original V miniseries. 'Cuz a quarter-century later I still feel a lump in my throat when I see Abraham, the elderly Jewish man wonderfully played by Leonard Cimino, admonishing those kids...
"No! If you're going to do it, do it right. I'll show you."
(Abraham guides the teen's hand as he spray-paints a blood-red "V" on the Visitor poster)
"You understand? For VICTORY! Go tell your friends."
So Dr. Coulthard built a dialysis machine that would do the job, using scrounged-up parts and literally working out of his garage.
Hit the link above for the rest of this neat story. Although as at least one smart-alec has remarked on Slashdot, unless Coulthard used chewing gum he's still got nothing on MacGyver :-P
One of my all-time favorite movies, The Fugitive, came out fifteen years ago today, on August 6th, 1993.(How much is it one of my favorites? Well, it's on my iPod, for one thing...)
Starring Harrison Ford and Tommy Lee Jones, The Fugitive was based on the 1960s television series about Dr. Richard Kimble, a physician who is wrongly convicted of murdering his wife, then escapes and goes on a cross-country search for the real killer: a one-armed man. Complicating matters is Phillip Gerard, a law enforcement agent obsessed with recapturing Kimble.
The movie took a number of liberties with the story from the television show. But it also benefited from enormous production values and a very strong cast which also included Sela Ward, Joe Pantoliano, and Julianne Moore in one of her first film roles. Also among the cast, playing Frederick Sykes (AKA "the one-armed man") was Andreas Katsulas, who soon afterward gained international acclaim for his portrayal of G'Kar on Babylon 5. The Fugitive became one of the biggest hits of 1993 and a defining motion picture for the next decade and beyond.
Wanna know something really cool? I have, in my possession, some pieces of the prison bus that gets hit by the train!
How'd that happen? Not many people know this but The Fugitive, although it takes place in the state of Illinois, had a lot of filming done for it in the mountains of North Carolina. Especially in and around Sylva. Some years ago I was visiting my sister when she was a student at Western Carolina. While I was waiting for her to get off work I went around town and took pictures of the various sites used in The Fugitive. I got to visit Taylor Auto (where Kimble steals the clothes) and found the street that he's walking along when he sees the hospital sign. A short distance away in Dillsboro is the Great Smoky Mountains Railroad. If you know where to look, you can see the train and bus wreckage from the main road. Well, I just asked, and the nice folks said that I could go spend a few minutes getting a close-up peek at the bus and train. There were two buses they used to make that scene, and there was busted-out glass all over. I picked up a few shards and wrapped them in some Kleenex that I happened to have on me. Maybe someday I'll figure out a good way to display 'em...
(Yeah I have pictures to back all this up too, but don't have 'em handy at the moment.)
Harris Regional Hospital in Sylva was used extensively in the movie. That's the place where Kimble treats his wound and shaves off his beard and mustache. I've heard that the hospital made a lot of nice improvements to the place for the dough they got from the producers in exchange for it being used as a filming location. The very famous dam sequence was shot at Cheoah Dam in Graham County (although some internal scenes were filmed back in Chicago in some abandoned freight tunnels).
Think I'll honor the occasion later tonight by watching this awesome movie again. After I finally finish my review of The Dark Knight 'course... :-)
