House o Groove

Music Video Horror, the Trauma of Care Bear Cartoons, and Other Randomness - 2008-05-01 19:39:01

Actually the video itself is not exactly horrifying - unless of course you were paying for the expenses required to shoot this thing:

It's a classic pops as Anna remembers Guns N' Roses, November Rain
Anna Pickard, The Guardian
"Last week, we put out a call for big-haired classic videos, and were lucky enough to receive this as a suggestion; a true classic from the days when hair was big and ballads were bigger; when videos cost millions but were nine sodding minutes long. Therefore, as a reminder service for those who have not seen it in the 16 years since it was first released, and as a primer for those who have never seen it at all (is that possible?) we will dissect November Rain minute by mindblowing minute.
...and, in The Best Moment In The Entire Video (officially. Well I say so), someone tries to escape the sudden shower by - I can barely say it out loud, it's so great - leaping face forward through the cake.
...We have no time to enjoy it, however, as, coming into minute eight we find ourselves at a funeral. It is the bride! She's dead! Sweet child o' mine, was it the rain that did it? Was she, in fact, soluble? Apparently not."

I had completely forgotten November Rain, and yes, it was soooo over the top. Link to video at the end of that page.

Via Boing Boing, we have a plethora of bad music videos on YouTube from Bolus: Hell's iPod

"Over the years the music industry has provided the listening public a treasure trove of musical excrescence, but only an elite few deserve recognition as instruments of torture. I humbly offer a few examples of these Olympian earwigs. Please feel free to offer your own suggestions in comments. Caution: not safe for work. Not safe for home. Not safe for anywhere.
UPDATE CAUTION: NOW CONTAINS 27% RUPERT HOLMES ADDITIVES"

Also contains Muskrat Love. And don't forget to check out the great yet terrible suggestions/links in the comments.

Which I then follow up with this equally frightening Mefi thread: Not available in any store, at any price!

"Starting in 1979, late night TV viewers had their ears assaulted by hard-sell ads for musicians they had never heard of (or didn't know sang), such as Roger Whittaker (bio), Jim Nabors, Boxcar Willie (bio), Zamfir (master of the pan flute - bio), and yodeller Slim Whitman (bio), whose voice literally causes heads to explode. The ads made astonishing claims -- "sold more albums in Britain than the Beatles and Elvis combined!" And a lot of viewers -- some perhaps stoned -- called now. (Roger Whitaker -- 4 million albums. Slim Whitman - 4 million albums. Boxcar Willie - 3 million. Zamfir - 1.1 million). Others just watched, dumbfounded.
Heads go boom at 6:45 in this video clip. The ad clips are from a large collection of 70s/80s TV ads, promos, and demos posted on YouTube by "eyeh8cbs"."

Go to that MeFi thread for all the links to those, and enjoy. Or writhe in torment, whichever. I'm totally remembering the Zamphir ads btw, as I used to watch way too much late night tv. Not pretty.
And speaking of horror, let's continue on to...

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Elevators and the News from Austria - 2008-05-01 17:42:43

Nicholas White was trapped 41 hrs in an elevator before someone noticed. And there was a video feed - which no one was apparently watching. This is one of those "gradually you learn the story after reading through the eight pages of text. I admit it, I skipped a bit, I wanted to know how Nicolas came out at the end, poor guy. Also I learned more about elevators than I wanted to know.

Up and Then Down: The lives of elevators.
by Nick Paumgarten, New Yorker, April 21, 2008
"...The elevator industry likes to insist that, short of airplane rammings, most accidents are the result of human error, of passengers or workers doing things they should not. Trying to run in through closing doors is asking for trouble; so is climbing up into an elevator car, or down out of one, when it is stuck between floors, or letting a piece of equipment get lodged in the brake, as happened to a service elevator at 5 Times Square, in Manhattan, four years ago, causing the counterweight to plummet (the counterweight, which aids an elevator’s rise and slows its descent, is typically forty per cent heavier than an empty car) and the elevator to shoot up, at sixty miles an hour, into the beams at the top of the shaft, killing the attendant inside."

Yeek. I probably shouldn't have read that, huh.
Link via MeMo.
Which had another link that led me to this story:

'House of Horror' children never saw daylight
CNN, April 29, 2008
Amstetten, Austria: "Police spokesman Franz Polzer told CNN that 73-year-old Josef Fritzl admitted holding his daughter, Elisabeth Fritzl, 42, hostage in the windowless cell and fathering seven children by her.
...Fritzl lived upstairs with his wife, Rosemarie, who police said had no idea about her husband's other family living in the cellar. The couple adopted three of the children that Fritzl had with his daughter, according to police. He told his wife that his missing daughter had dropped the unwanted children off at the house because she could not take care of them, police said."

And of course, I couldn't leave it at that, because this seemed just too horrible and tragic to be true. But unfortunately it is. And already has a Wikipedia page.

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Wikipedia Calendar Fun, Safari Annoyance, Fine Lines and The Secret Garden - 2008-04-28 17:49:12

While I'm not about to go through all the steps to make this - mostly because of the time and equipment needed - I'm still fascinated by:
How to Make A Green Lantern Ring - Including Glow
Link via Solonar, who also had this 3-2-1 Wiki Meme that I liked:

This is what you do:
Go to Wikipedia and type in your birthday.
Find 3 events that happened on that day.
Find 2 other people who were born that day.
Find 1 holiday that is celebrated on that day.

Of course I love any excuse to spend time reading Wikipedia - but I didn't find anything too terribly interesting going on on my birthday. Meanwhile I had no idea how much interesting information you could find via typing in a date this way. Talk about random blog fodder for the future, look out! And on today's date...

...April 28...

Events:
1789 - Mutiny on the Bounty, Captain William Bligh and 18 sailors are set adrift and the rebel crew returns to Tahiti briefly and then sets sail for Pitcairn Island.
1930 - The first night game in organized baseball history takes place in Independence, Kansas.
1988 - Near Maui, Hawaii, flight attendant Clarabelle "C.B." Lansing is blown out of Aloha Flight 243, a Boeing 737, and falls to her death when part of the plane's fuselage rips open in mid-flight.
(That last one is kind of grim - but I remember watching it on the news and being really scared by the idea of a plane's exterior ripping up like that - a small section of the roof "ruptured", decompression did the rest.)

Birthdays:
1878 - Lionel Barrymore, American actor (d. 1954)
1930 - Carolyn Jones, American actress (d. 1983)
1948 - Terry Pratchett, English author
(I'm cheating and adding three instead of two, as I couldn't choose between these. I've always thought that Jones was lovely.)

Holiday:
Roman Empire - Floralia in honor of Flora: "It was held on April 27 to May 3 and symbolized the renewal of the cycle of life, marked with dancing, drinking, and flowers. ...Dedicated to Flora, the goddess of flowers and vegetation, this day was considered by the prostitutes of Rome to be their own. While flowers decked the temples, Roman citizens wore colorful clothing instead of the usual white, and offerings were made of milk and honey to Flora."

Oh and if you click the link on today's date and then scroll to the end of the page - you'll find a nice grid with links to all the dates on the calendar. And then you can quickly check your own birthday. Let me know if you discover any unusual holidays.

Randomly, out of curiousity, let's see what this Technorati Profile link does to post...just seeing if it does make spiders come bounce around the place...

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New Television Love, Local Seafood Love, and Out and About in Balboa Park - 2008-04-26 23:04:27

First, I've learned my lesson - huge post written, not saved, and I close the tab on my browser by accident and bam, everything gone. MUCH cursing to follow. So this is the shorthand version. Be thrilled that you are getting the less wordy post - shortened babble is always better. I'm mostly pissed because I had looked up all sorts of linkage and the html is a pain to recreate. But lesson learned - from now on I write things in a saved text file, as usual. None of this "oh I'll just whap something up quickly" - that never happens. Sigh. So much for the past hour.

Second, I have to say a few words about Jon and his grocery shopping prowess. He's always bringing home tasty things to cook up, both fresh and frozen. But every now and then he'll bring home something I will immediately say "yuck!" and laugh at. Thus the corn dog photo. Boy, was I wrong. The last corn dog I had was at a street fair and it was very greasy and very questionable (as in "what IS this, meatwise?). I should quickly add that this is nowhere near something REALLY good, like Alton Brown's corn dogs - but for food you just pop in the microwave it was actually quite yummy. I'm still kind of in shock about that. So note to self, try not to doubt Jon in his weird food purchases.

First, for those wondering why Jon isn't blogging as much of late - here is the reason why, he got this baby for his birthday:

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Fun with Vitamin D, and some xkcd - 2008-04-21 22:59:44

So I'm having more than my usual amount of aches this month and one of my lab tests comes in from the yearly blood check - and wouldn't ya know, turns out I have a very abnormal level of Vitamin D (25 Hydroxy, if that means anything special, I'm always relearning how to read these lab results). Just like my mother - and I need to stop doubting her when she tells me "you know, you should have your doctor check X and Y" - because she's so often completely right. Not to mention how freaky it is when our health problems mirror each other exactly like this. Now this doesn't mean I need to play more in the sun or just drink more milk or take more vitamins. (Mom has had skin cancer and I have really fair skin - so avoiding a lot of sun is still a good thing.) Well, yes take more vitamins, but I'll have to get a prescription for the amount of vitamin D I'm going to need, if my doc is anything like my mom's doc as far as prescriptions go. The D isn't being used in my system - and the normal amounts wouldn't do any good - this is a Serious Heavy Dosage situation. (Example - in a multivitamin you get 400 I.U. of D, in the doses mom takes she has 50,000 I.U. Only takes it once a week however.) There's tons of info on the net I'm still culling through (and not going to link, as it's not really that interesting unless you care about the D) - would be nice if much of the pain issues I'm having would go away, and that does seem to be a nice side effect - my mother has had great results with her vitamin D treatment. So we'll see how it goes. It won't mean I'll get to toss out all my other medication - but it might mean that I'd actually start feeling better. And it's been a long time since that happened, so there will be major rejoicing. And less putting on a happy face and pretending I feel ok. Which would make us all happy.

Meanwhile because I'm still feeling like a big pile of blah (and the doc appt isn't til Friday) here's a few of my favorite xkcd comics. I'm linking them with the sentence that you see when you mouseover - one of my favorite things about the comic, a little added humor once you figure out that it's there. And that first link'd comic - I admit I spend way too much time thinking things like that when I start looking at the clock too long and it's the wee hours of the morning.

Insomnia: Crap I have levitation class at 25:131. Better set the alarm to 'cinnamon.' (I relate too closely with this comic, and I'm afraid.)
America: The younger folk in the audience think this is a joke. (It's not! One of my favorite moments of weird history.)
Words that end in GRY: The fifth panel also applies to postmodernists. (Both smugness and postmodernism annoy me as well.)

I admit, many of the xkcd math and code jokes are lost on me.

Meanwhile if one feels queasy one should NOT be watching the following:

Dirty Jobs: Floating Fish Factory
In this special Dirty Jobs episode, Mike travels to the great state of Alaska for an epic adventure aboard a fish processing ship. He gains a new appreciation for the men and women who get dirty to put fresh fish on our dinner table.

Verminators: A Night at the Races
Mike and the team take on a massive rat infestation at a race track, tackle an apartment swarming with roaches, bring in K-9 reinforcement for suspected bed bugs and discover one frightened homeowner's rat problem is much worse than she ever imagined.

I think I have to go lie down now. Seriously, the vomiting and the fish entrails in the Dirty Jobs episode has me thinking that our hi def tv is NOT a good thing for some shows. And randomly reading things on a computer screen is making me dizzy too. Hmm. No idea what's up with that.

Oh and if anyone knows where Jen Stewart is blogging now, please let me know - I'm getting nothing from her old link of jenstewart.com (formerly Jenny Said Quoi).

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