Surely you can't be serious?

Bad news, everyone. Leslie Nielson died earlier this week.

“Surely,” you say. “Surely you can’t be serious?”

Well, I am serious. Shirley is dead. Long live Shirley. Anyway, do you all have any idea what this means? It means Steve Martin now has a monopoly on the Silver-Haired-Comedian-Who-Is-Actually-Kind-Of-Funny-But-Who-Appears-Almost-Exclusively-In-Awful-Movies business. I’m considering starting an anti-trust suit that would break up Steve Martin into two or three different comedians. Competition drives the market and all.


Also, for the last month or so I’ve been seeing this “Xtranormal” text-to-movie thing all over the place. Well, I’m nothing if not late to, and then dismissive of “the party.” So I looked them up. Apparently they’ve been named November’s Meme of the month. Well, if it’s good enough for a comparison to Chocolate Rain or the Battle Toads it’s good enough for me. Well, actually, it’s pretty crappy but I made a sample movie and enjoyed it a lot anyway. It has a lot to do with my nostalgia for Spider-Man Cartoon Maker. I may be the only person who ever liked that worthless program. And I felt they extreme limitations imposed by crummy software actually made it even more fun. What I wouldn’t give to show you guys “And Now for Something Completely You Suck,” but I haven’t got a clue how to export Spiderman Movies and besides, on my now 8 year old laptop the animations ran at triple speed because the program had specs that low. Still pondering whether or not I should spend money on doing Xtranormal. What do all’s y’all think? My demo movie was inspired by a real professor I had, the only Jesuit in four years at a Jesuit school. I had him give a sermon on Erin Brokovich. My only problem with the movie is that the robot voice sounded a little too human for the good Father. Anyway, would you lot like to see my mad ramblings in the form of robot-voiced-anthropomorphic-animals?


Finally, a news aggregator brought me this great article/editorial about why Men’s Magazines are failing. It’s got a lot of funny bits in there about the disconnect between covers and content, how the magazines can be described as “cars, tits, danger, six-packs, tits, booze, football, tits, and tits” And some keen observations of male consumers and how we really feel about this stuff. It’s rare that I identify as strongly with some random article written by someone I’ve never heard of as I did this one. Now, it came to me as an e-mail in plain text. So it wasn’t until after I read it, I realized from the linked source that it’s from the Independent in England. You guys thought I was joking about becoming British in my old age. Joke’s on you it would seem.