20 posts from August 2008

I just got this email from Barack Obama's campaign that said you could get this shirt ...

if you donated $30 or more. That's not bad. Anyway, you can go to this link if you want to donate money and get the shirt ...

https://donate.barackobama.com/08tshirt

or you can donate money to Obama's campaign using my fundraising page ...

http://my.barackobama.com/page/outreach/view/main/markinaustin

Every dollar counts!

Here is Obama's speech from the Democrat National Convention (last Thursday night) ...

 

I can honestly say that I have never watched an entire episode of "Gossip Girl". There is just something about the show that turns me off. It's probably the same reason I don't want to watch the new version of 90210. The CW in general comes off as cheap and superficial. However, I do like to watch "America's Next Top Model" so it's not like I consider my tastes to be highbrow or anything like that.

Anyway, "Gossip Girl" has a new commercial that is very well done. The song, "Ça plane pour moi" by Plastic Bertrand is played during the commercial, and images are shown very quickly to go with the pace of the song. It's all executed very well, I must say. I will still not watch the show, though.

Here is the song ...

Here is the Gossip Girl commercial ...

Here is Plastic Bertrand performing the song ...

Here is a very colorful tribute to the lyrics of the song ...

Here is a cover of the song by Sonic Youth ...

Here is a cover of the song by The Presidents of the United States of America ...

Here is "Jet Boy Jet Girl" by Elton Motello, which "Ça plane pour moi" borrows the music from ...

 
The above song is the same age as me. ;)

Here is the scene in "National Lampoon's European Vacation", where the Griswold's look at artwork in the Louvre while "Ca Plane Pour Moi" plays ...

Here is "Blitzkrieg Bop" (Hey! Ho! Let's Go!) by The Ramones simply because I think of it when I listen to these other songs .

 

I was watching a rerun of Friends on the CW (it was the WB in the old days), and the episode was on where Ross makes a pros and cons list of dating Julie and Rachel. Anyway, at the beginning of the episode (after the credits), there is a scene where Chandler talks about his new laptop. The technology of his laptop is obsolete by today's standards so it's really funny to see how excited he is about a machine that would be like a calculator today. Here is the scene ...

I uploaded that scene today. The really funny thing is that this scene is all over YouTube. Here are the other versions of it that were uploaded way before my video ...

You can find other scenes involving Chandler and his interactions with computers on YouTube. It's funny how there are people as nerdy as me out there who want to share these clips.

Santogold songs have been in just about every commercial I have seen on TV lately. This song, "Lights Out", is in a beer commercial, I think. The video is neat to look at ...

Every once in a while a memory of a movie will resurface, and I will do my best to research it through YouTube, IMDB, Netflix, torrents, etc. Well, this happened recently with the 80s movie, "T.A.G. - The Assassination Game". This is the only video I could find on YouTube about this movie ...

 
I remember watching this movie as a kid, and I also remember getting it mixed up with "Gotcha!", starring Anthony Edwards and Linda Fiorentino. I think "Gotcha!" did a lot better at the box office, and there are tons of videos and information on the internet about it.

 

There is hardly any information on T.A.G., and I think it is a much better movie. It definitely has tons of pop culture embedded in it. Linda Hamilton, Robert Carradine, Michael Winslow, and Xander Berkeley (brief role) star in it. Everyone knows who Linda Hamilton is. Robert Carradine was a nerd with, coincidentally enough, Anthony Edwards, in "Revenge of the Nerds". Michael Winslow was the cop who made all the cool sound effects with his mouth in the Police Academy movies (he was also in Spaceballs, and a recent GEICO commercial). Xander Berkeley is only in the beginning of the movie. He was Virginia Madsen's character's cheating husband in "Candyman". He gets his comeuppance at the end of that movie. He also starred in "Terminator 2: Judgment Day" (small role), which could be described as Linda Hamilton's biggest movie ever (especially since she got all that press for developing her arm muscles). 

The director of T.A.G.-The Assassination Game is Nick Catle (his famous father's name is Nick Castle, too). Nick Castle worked a lot with John Carpernter (who wrote the movie, "Black Moon Rising", starring Linda Hamilton). Nick Castle has directed a lot of well known movies, such as "The Last Starfighter", which is being remade for 2010. However, the most interesting fact about Nick Castle's career is that he is "The Shape" in Halloween, meaning he is the one in the William Shatner/Captain Kirk mask, walking around killing people in the movie. He is not the guy playing Michael Myers when Jamie Lee Curtis pulls off the mask ... that is Tony Moran.

OK, with all that history, here is the beginning of T.A.G. - The Assassination Game (the beginning is good, but the title sequence is so cheesy, like a TV movie) ...

I will probably post another scene later today. This is another cool movie that is not available on DVD. I always find that very annoying.

Edit ... here is another scene where the killer in the movie takes the game way too far ...

 

It is way too hot in Austin so I thought I would post some songs that either mention "rain" in their lyrics or sound like water/rain. I may have posted some of these before. Here is the current forecast for Austin, TX ...

Here is a song that I could play over and over again if I had to. It has a sort of submarine sound to it ...

This next song actually mentions "rain" ...

"It's raining all over the world" (yeah, right) ...

This song has always sounded kind of underwater to me ...

This last song takes place when a storm is coming in Bram Stoker's Dracula ...

Also, here is a video from last summer in Austin, when it rained so much that they had to open up the floodgates at Mansfield Dam.

 

This video is not that funny, but it's interesting that this guy wanted to spend so much time doing a spoof of her "Paper Planes" video ...

Also, I am making a YouTube playlist for Piracy Funds Terrorism, vol. 1. I have only have 6 of the 21 songs on it right now, but I will keep adding to it.

edit ... now I have 16 of the 21 songs on the playlist.

First, the song in the video is not the album version, but it's not bad, either. I like the album version better, though. Second, the special effect they use is pretty cool, but I wish she would have broken out of it at the end and the video would have become a normal video. It's still pretty cool.

This is pretty significant. M.I.A.'s single, "Paper Planes", has reached #5 in Billboard's Hot 100 chart, which takes into account sales, radio airplay, downloads, etc., of singles. The song has been steadily rising (due to the "Pineapple Express" trailer, among many other reasons), but what is amazing is that the album, "Kala", which the song is on has been out for almost a year.

 

"Kala" has re-entered the Billboard Top 200 albums chart, which is even more impressive in my opinion. I am glad people are buying the album, too. "Paper Planes" is a great song, but people should listen to "Bamboo Banga" and "20 Dollar", too.

If you want to continue the rise of the album and the song, you can buy Kala at the following links ...

Buy Kala on Amazon's MP3 Downloads site (very easy, better quality and cheaper than iTunes)

Buy Kala on iTunes

Buy Paper Planes on Amazon's MP3 Downloads site

Buy Bamboo Banga on Amazon's MP3 Downloads site

Buy 20 Dollar on Amazon's MP3 Downloads site

Here are the three songs, again, if you want to listen to them ...

 

In other news, I started searching for all of my favorite video games on YouTube today. I wanted to go as far back as the days of a Texas Instruments keyboard/CPU that I would hook up to the back of an old TV to play games like "Hangman" and "Parsec". I found a video for Parsec, but I couldn't find a video for Hangman. The great thing about Hangman is that its theme song was the same theme song as Alfred Hitchcock Presents (the old black and white TV show ... there was an 80s version, too).

Here is the playlist (it is short right now, and I am only including games that I actually played ... I only solved a handful of them) ...

I have another playlist that I have posted before of M.I.A.'s concert at the Hogg Auditorium at the University of Texas in Austin, TX on November 3, 2007 ...

Here is another playlist I am going to be working on to provide an easy way to see all of M.I.A.'s videos ...

Another item I have been reading about is Yahoo!'s new "Fire Eagle" (Firefox's cousin?), which allows advertisers to know where you are. It kind of reminds me of the advertising in "Minority Report" ...

It sounds a little scary and Big Brother-ish, but I think something really cool will come out of it, and I think Google will take it and make it into something a lot better. I just want to be able to play with it on my Blackberry Pearl 8110. ;)