The Brunch Table

I happened across two procedurally-generated social gaffes today.

No one knows for sure who he was, that Middle Eastern man in an American flag shirt and a cowboy hat who was supposed to sing the national anthem at a rodeo Friday night in the Salem Civic Center…

In the course of trying to prove that the rodeo scene in Borat takes place in Virginia, not Texas, I found this–an apparently authentic report on “Boraq’s” appearance by the Roanoke Times. You’ve got to respect the integrity of the folks who left this up on the website long after the truth came out.

Precious.

(Klootzak = jerk, asshole; lit. scrotum)

[ This was left in "drafts" too long, and got scooped. ]

Now you can learn the grim truth about everybody’s favorite bucket-loving seal. Non-fiction, I swear.

Minazo was forced to perform various stunts before audience at each mealtime, such as holding a bucket with one flipper, bending back like a prawn, and standing still while a keeper jumped and clung on him. The hard work made him exhausted and might have caused his early death.

The Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel sounds like a cheap joke, but it’s really a brilliant short story.

Celeste says there is, in fact, a tasty place called Mission Burrito somewhere in Alphabet City. Unfortunately, it seems to be what around here they call ongooglebare.

It starts off gently, but stick with this Dora the Explorer parody for about a minute. Things get weird fast after she starts speaking in garbled German.

( direct link)

…remains Cosmic Star’s “Honest and Hard.”

Seriously, take a look.

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(The caption was Celeste’s idea.)

A few Mystery Science Theater 3000 alums have finally figured out the perfect way to capitalize on the skills that they honed in their years on the show. They’ve launched RiffTrax, a site that sells MST3K-style audio commentary tracks to modern movies for three bucks a pop. Justina and I tried their commentary for The Matrix tonight, and I’m happy to report that it was fully up to snuff. In fact, it was good enough to make me willing to rent some of the other movies that they’ve riffed on. (Fortunately, they’ve provided a sample video clip for each movie that they’ve covered.)

The strength of their approach is that you’re buying a vanilla MP3, which means it works with everything, and which allows them to lampoon any movie they want without rights hassles. The downside is that you have to sync up the movie and the soundtrack yourself, Wizard of Oz/Dark Side of the Moon style. Fortunately, they’ve worked hard to make this easy—they tell you exactly when to start playing the commentary track. They also have a “robot” that exactly mimics the on-screen dialogue every once in a while, so that you can verify that you’re still in sync. Finally, the commentary track (at least the one we bought) comes with text file telling you where in the commentary each DVD chapter starts, in case you want to pick up from the middle.

All in all, I’m overjoyed to be able to hear the guys back doing what they do best, for movies that we know and love (to hate), without having to wade through any of the skits that were getting increasingly grating in MST3K’s final days. Here’s hoping that it proves to be a rewarding business model for them!

Incidentally, the guys will be performing a live riff of a movie during the San Francisco Sketchfest next month—and we’ll be there!

As we were walking home from brunch today, Justina noted that Bernal Heights was turning green again (now that the rainy season is starting). I wondered aloud whether there had been more trees on the hill in the past. Justina said, “If you look at 1946 in Google Earth, it looks like there were even less trees back then.” “Does Google Earth have pictures from 1900 for that area?”, I asked. Then I realized what I was saying.

Dream fragment. 7:30 am.

It’s the final act of Return of the Jedi. The Emperor laughs an evil laugh and says:

“My fully-operational milkshake will bring all the boys to the yard…where they will be destroyed.“

And then I woke up.

Since the 21 age, your body sluggishly stops makes a important hormone known as Somebody Increment Internal Secretion. The decrease of it, that regulates levels of other hormones in the organic structure is straight answerable for all of the greatest frequent designations of geezerhood, such as crinkles, gray hair, dwindled power, and diminished intimate purpose.

Can anybody reverse-engineer this passage and figure out what language it was originally written in, before it was babelfished?

An Onion article just gave me a revelatory analogy, and I thought I’d share it: Classical physics is the list of ingredients; quantum physics is the warning that there may be peanuts. I don’t think I really understood the difference till today.

Here’s an Evangelical minister with, I suspect, a natural gift for good dramatic writing. The Writers Guild’s loss is the Church’s gain.