For those folks who were Falcons fans in the late 1970s:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0a9ErSXS-s
GRITS BLITZ, BABY! 🙂
Gosh, I love those old 70s uniforms!
Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-12-05
- Whew! GO STEELERS!! #
- Reason #7 Your Car Smells: Grandma’s “quilt collection”. Enter Conan's #20PinetreeAirFresheners Sweepstacular @ http://bit.ly/an50kt #
- RIP Irvin Kershner… director of the best Star Wars film (by far!) #
- Reason #8 Your Car Smells: Tuna breath. Enter Conan's #20PinetreeAirFresheners Sweepstacular @ http://bit.ly/an50kt #
- Home from Chattanooga. Total drive time: 8h 16m. Avg. speed 42.8 mph. I HATE torrential downpours… on curvy mountain roads.. in the dark! #
- Reason #9 Your Car Smells: Jack-o-lanterns don’t keep. Enter Conan's #20PinetreeAirFresheners Sweepstacular @ http://bit.ly/an50kt #
- Belatedly hanging the Advent calendar… yum! #
- Her name is Rio, she don't need to understand… #
- Last night's #psych was AWESOME! Loved the "Twin Peaks" homage! #
- @wicketsteve I think you missed the joke about the #psych intro music #
- Reason #10 Your Car Smells: Yes, it’s your feet. Enter the Chevy Cruze #20PinetreeAirFresheners Sweepstacular @ http://bit.ly/an50kt #
- The Panthers are going through QBs like Spinal Tap goes through drummers! #
- Kids in bars… awesome! Sarcasm. Thanks a hell of a lot, NC smoking ban! #
- OMG! Sir Ed's new jukebox has Saint Etienne! #
- Reason #10 Your Car Smells: Yes, it’s your feet. Enter the Chevy Cruze #20PinetreeAirFresheners Sweepstacular @ http://bit.ly/an50kt #
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A Damn Fine Homage
One of my guilty pleasures is the USA Network show Psych. It’s about a late-20s slacker named Shawn Spencer (James Roday) who was taught to be hyper-observant by his police officer father (Corbin Bernsen). After Shawn solves a series of crimes in his native Santa Barbara by finding overlooked clues in newspaper photos and TV news reports, the police suspect him of committing the crimes. Under questioning, he pretends to be psychic to get the police off his back. After he solves yet another crime, he forms a “psychic detective agency” with his best friend, Burton “Gus” Guster (DulĂ© Hill), and the two work as police consultants.
If it sounds like The Mentalist… well, that’s because the two shows are quite similar, although Psych was on the air first, a fact that’s occasionally joked about on the show. But what makes them different is that Psych is much funnier and is aimed at a younger audience. Almost every episode is packed with 80s and 90s pop culture jokes. Even better, there are theme episodes: Psych has spoofed everything from Alfred Hitchcock and John Hughes films to Mexican telenovelas.
But one of their best homages aired two days ago, when Psych played tribute to the great early 90s show Twin Peaks. There were a references aplenty throughout the episode, and I thought I’d write up a quick post summarizing them.
Entrada
Holy crap… this looks awesome!
Be sure to tune in to Fringe to night to see how it all plays out!
Quote of the Day
“For you to be here now trillions of drifting atoms had somehow to assemble in an intricate and intriguingly obliging manner to create you. It’s an arrangement so specialized and particular that it has never been tried before and will only exist this once. For the next many years (we hope) these tiny particles will uncomplainingly engage in all the billions of deft, cooperative efforts necessary to keep you intact and let you experience the supremely agreeable but generally underappreciated state known as existence.
Why atoms take this trouble is a bit of a puzzle. Being you is not a gratifying experience at the atomic level. For all their devoted attention, your atoms don’t actually care about you – indeed, don’t even know that you are there. They don’t even know that they are there. They are mindless particles, after all, and not even themselves alive. (It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive but all of which had once been you.) Yet somehow for the period of your existence they will answer to a single overarching impulse: to keep you you.
The bad news is that atoms are fickle and their time of devotion is fleeting – fleeting indeed. Even a long human life adds up to only about 650,000 hours. And when that modest milestone flashes past, or at some other point thereabouts, for reasons unknown your atoms will shut you down, silently disassemble, and go off to be other things. And that’s it for you.
Still, you may rejoice that it happens at all. Generally speaking in the universe it doesn’t, so far as we can tell. This is decidedly odd because the atoms that so liberally and congenially flock together to form living things on Earth are exactly the same atoms that decline to do it elsewhere. Whatever else it may be, at the level of chemistry life is curiously mundane: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, a little calcium, a dash of sulfur, a light dusting of other very ordinary elements – nothing you wouldn’t find in any ordinary drugstore – and that’s all you need. The only thing special about the atoms that make you is that they make you. That is of course the miracle of life.”
– Bill Bryson
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-11-28
- had a lot of fun with his peeps last night! #
- Feels better now that he’s washed the Milestone off him! #
- Congratulations #CarolinaPanthers .. you have the worst record in #NFL #
- Reason #3 Your Car Smells: That banana you “saved for later”. Enter Conan’s #20PinetreeAirFresheners Sweepstacular @ http://bit.ly/an50kt #
- Pittsburgh Steelers done wrong by NFL – NFL News | FOX Sports on MSN: http://soc.li/6PvnruO #
- Reason #4 Your Car Smells: It’s haunted by pig farmer poltergeists. Conan’s #20PinetreeAirFresheners Sweepstacular @ http://bit.ly/an50kt #
- Mystery of song from Mad Men “The Beautiful Girls” SOLVED! “Lonely Girl” by Jay Ramsey! THANK YOU Robert Earle! #
- NOT A SCAM: $3 free credit for Amazon MP3 store. Expires 11/29, one per Amazon account. More here: http://tinyurl.com/3926a5w #
- Sir Edmond Halley’s is back! Wooo-hoooooo! #
- has been busy raping the “free music” section at Amazon MP3. #
- TFLN: “His drunk text included an attempt at quoting a Nyquil bottle in MLA format.” #
- Reason #5 Your Car Smells: That clam juice smoothie spill. Enter Conan’s #20PinetreeAirFresheners Sweeps @ http://bit.ly/an50kt #
- Fox to cancel “Fringe”, “Lie to Me” and “Human Target”? There goes any reason for me to watch Fox! #
- Love @JohnCleese but why are 95% of his tweets about leaving or returning to Twitter? #
- TODAY ONLY: Amazon MP3 has “Contra” by Vampire Weekend for only $1.99! It’s a damn fine album! http://tinyurl.com/2v8sl9w #
- Happy Thanksgiving, everybody! #
- “Can you look at my PC? My IT guy worked on it for 2 hours and couldn’t fix it.” “I can fix it in less than 15 minutes”. Total time: 11 min. #
- #MSFT just ruined a great product, for stupid reasons. http://tinyurl.com/3254pee #
- Reason #6 Your Car Smells: Who knew loneliness had a smell? Enter the Chevy Cruze #20PinetreeAirFresheners Sweeps @ http://bit.ly/an50kt #
- Great dinner with an old friend! #
- “All the way, turtle!” #
- Reason #6 Your Car Smells: Who knew loneliness had a smell? Enter the Chevy Cruze #20PinetreeAirFresheners Sweeps @ http://bit.ly/an50kt #
- Album88 was hitting them out of the park last night!!! #
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APPLE FAIL: iTunes Edition
All I wanted to do was take some XviD rips of some TV show DVDs and put them on my iPod Nano.
I knew the files would need to be re-encoded, so I downloaded the latest version of Handbrake, since I hadn’t reinstalled it since I reformatted my computer. I installed it, queued up the files with the “iPod” preset, and let it do its thing. Within 20 minutes, the conversion was done. Hooray!
I went to iTunes and clicked File > Add File to Library and added the shiny new mp4 files to my library. Hooray!
I then clicked on “Movies”, highlighted the new files, right-clicked and chose “Get Info”. I clicked the “Options” tab and changed the “Media Kind:” to “TV Show”. iTunes moved the files from”Movies” to “TV Shows” Hooray!
Since the files had no metadata (and were just sitting there in the main “TV Shows” window), I clicked on each one and added the name of the show, episode title and season\episode numbers to each one. Hooray!
A Mad Men Mystery Solved!
This season’s Mad Men had an episode called “The Beautiful Girls”. As I do in all my Mad Men recaps, I tried to get the names of all the songs used in this episode. However, I just couldn’t seem to get any information about one song in particular (for those in the know, it was in the second scene with Peggy and Abe at the bar, after the Swedish girls showed up at Joan’s apartment).
I wasn’t alone, either. As you can see from the comments section of the recap, folks were interested in finding out what the name of the song was. I emailed the Lipp Sisters, who didn’t know. They forwarded my question to Karl, their music expert, who also didn’t know. Other Mad Men fan sites were mystified too.
Well, thanks to a jimcofer.com reader, I can now say that the mystery has been solved! Reader Robert Earle was somehow able to contact the producers of the show, who told him that the song is called “Lonely Girl”, by obscure 60s artist Jay Ramsey. The song appears on an album called Cult Hits of the 1960’s, Vol. 2, which is available as a download from iTunes here and Amazon here.
THANK YOU for solving the mystery, Robert!
Art News
A couple of interesting stories from the art world today:
– Henry VIII owned at least 55 houses that we know of. They range from modest hunting lodges to gigantic palaces like Hampton Court. But Henry’s grandest property – by far – was Nonsuch Palace (even the name, “none such”, tells you that there was no other property like it anywhere in England). Amazingly, the palace no longer stands; Charles II gave it to his mistress, the Countess of Castlemaine, who had it torn down in 1682 so she could sell the building materials to pay off gambling debts. More amazingly, although the building was considered the greatest house in England, only one known image of it exists:
This watercolor, painted by Georg Hoefnagel in 1568, is not only one of the first watercolors ever painted in England, historians consider it the only reputable likeness of the palace. And it can be yours! It’s going up for auction next month, where it’s expected to fetch ÂŁ1.2 million. The palace itself was said to “only” cost around ÂŁ24,000… although that’s around $165,501,000 when adjusted for inflation and converted to dollars!
– Can you spot Chinese artist Liu Bolin in this picture?
What you’re seeing isn’t a camera or photoshop trick. Bolin studies a scene, then carefully paints his own body and has an assistant photograph him. Bolin got the idea for this because he’s often felt like an outsider in Chinese society. His art allows him to “blend in” with whatever’s around. Check out this article for several more amazing shots!
Happy Thanksgiving!
Have a hip, awesome, and safe Thanksgiving, America!
