Cut to the left, I'll take the leader

OK, I'll be damned if I'll be hassled by Dave about not posting enough without some kind of reply. So here it is. I've sort of been saving up for a while hoping to accumulate enough sufficiently arresting things to write about, but sadly life has continued in a generally uninteresting manner lately, so this will have to be an assembly of waffle with no particular interest value to anyone, really. You know, as opposed to the, er, usual sort of entry. Ahem.

So anyway, I've gone a bit Star Wars mad lately. Every so often my normal background Star Wars appreciation level, which is generally set to the still (barely) socially acceptable level of 'Quietly Crazed Fanboy' goes up a couple of notches, (it may be something to do with solar flares) and I take a slide along on the scale towards the people with Boba Fett tattoos; people who name their son Lando, and do this sort of thing to their cars (thanks Tim).

So I seem to be in one of these phases at the moment, where I rediscover my unreasonable excitement at the fact that Star Wars actually exists, and do things like rush to the internet looking up really obscure facts and announcing them to the room, forgetting that other people have lives, and may not actually care. (Kyle Katarn apparently made it into the New Jedi Order novels, everyone. Isn't that COOL? Shut up, it is.) So in the likely event that any or all of the following is of no interest to you, I apologise in advance. Now that only Michelle is left, we can proceed.

Firstly, anyone who doesn't know about this already (i.e not Nic or Tim) should click on that link, (I'm looking at you here especially Tark and Torsh) make the download (about 16 megs) and play one of the cooler freeware games that probably exists, in this man's heavily biased opinion.

Secondly, holy crap, news galore at theforce.net. The Original Trilogy is to come out on DVD in November, probably in a box set. A Star Wars television series is in the works, potentially set between Episodes 3 and 4 and basically centred on Darth Vader zipping about the place and handing people their arse. Ewan McGregor is interviewed somewhere saying that Episode 3 will be great (he was pretty candid about not liking the first one so much). And in Episode 3, the climactic lightsaber duel between Anakin and Obi Wan is set to be twelve minutes long, making it the longest fight scene in cinematic history. And - oh yes - and if you look around the internet (although Lucasfilm seem to be clamping down on it) you can go watch some 'leaked' (poor quality) footage of some of that duel with Ewan McGregor and Hayden Christiansen going at it in front of the green screen, including at one point just smacking each other over without lightsabers. (Why?)

Release date: May 2005. Goddamnit. Oh well. In the meantime, did I mention that Kyle Katarn made the novels? I did? The implications for the Extended Universe are pretty cool, you know. What do you mean you don't know he is? You must suck.

In an almost related thing, Mark Hamill has apparently written, directed and starred in a film which is basically to comic books what This Is Spinal Tap was to rock music, featuring Kevin Smith, Stan Lee, Hugh Hefner (A big comics fan, apparently!) and Bruce Campbell as themselves, all taking the piss, and with all the acting parts being done by voice actors like Billy West (Fry in 'Futurama') and the guys from 'Troops' and stuff. They filmed it at an actual Comic Convention and had a little bit of difficulty in stopping comic geeks from running up going 'Luke! Luke! Sign my small child!' kind of thing, a problem as in the movie he is meant to be playing some un-SW or Mark Hamill related character. Talk about in-jokey. Apparently it's pretty funny though, eyes on the video stores.

Last weekend I took another opportunity to unleash the inner nerd, or perhaps more accurately give further reign to the outer, clearly apparent nerd, by watching great chunks of Sky 1's Simpsons marathon. It was great. I watched The Simpsons, I played cricket, I watched The Simpsons, I went out to dinner and a movie, I came home and watched The Simpsons for some 3 and a half hours, went to bed, filling a 6 hour tape with The Simpsons as I slumbered. Then I got up Sunday afternoon, and watched it some more. Played soccer, came back, watched The Simpsons. And you know what? The Simpsons is funny. Yes. At around 3am Monday morning I was still laughing, but then they started repeating episodes (the bastards) so I went to bed. But it raised an interesting possibility for me - channels based entirely on one particular programme. If we think of the Chch polytech station becoming The Beatles station one year - a good plan that proved pretty popular, what with the Beatles being so good and all, and liked by everyone - why can't we have an innovative television network say 'Right, we show the repeats all the time anyway, let's just make this empty bit of bandwidth the 24 hour Simpsons channel'. Then whenever there was dead air on all the other channels (which seems to happen quite a lot), people could just flick to whatever episode was currently on The Simpsons channel, and if they'd happened to see that episode a few times before, they could flick to, er, the M*A*S*H channel. That way, there would always be something on TV! We would never need to turn it off, or use those stupid 'leg' things. Think of the savings people would make on trousers alone when they could safely sit around in their underwear in the lounge all day and night being entertained, instead of being forced to festoon themselves with pants and flee in horror when confronted with a choice between Coronation Street, Profilers, Joan of Aracdia and Burke's Backyard (Tuesday 8 to 8:30). THINK OF THE SAVINGS, PEOPLE!

On to only slightly more sane matters, I promised an explanation of that previous entry title. Therefore behold these guys. Having gone slightly mad not only on Star Wars recently, but also a bit on listening to some modern swing music a la the Cherry Poppin' Daddies (a less regular occurrence. Perhaps in conjunction they are a sign of the End Times, or possibly that I should get out more. Or maybe less) I happened across an outfit with the unlikely moniker of the Squirrel Nut Zippers (I also discovered a band called Lavay Smith and Her Red Hot Skillet Lickers, but for now, that piece of information is neither here nor there). The Squirrel Nut Zippers appear to be a weird bunch. They play strange but cool sort of Dixie / Bluegrass swing stuff with some odd lyrics. Fan as I am of They Might Be Giants, I am no stranger to weird lyrics, but you can (normally) pick out an underlying idea in TMBG songs, whereas the Squirrel Nut Zippers, with songs such as 'Prince Nez' and 'Flight of the Passing Fancy' (actually, TMBG still probably win the weirdness contest: witness 'Cowtown', 'Metal Detector' and 'Birdhouse in Your Soul') - well anyway, I offer for inspection the lyrics of one of the Squirrel Nut Zippers songs, which is entitled 'The Ghost of Stephen Foster':

Met the Ghost of Stephen Foster at the Hotel Paradise
This is what I told him as I gazed into his eyes:
Rooms were made for carpets,
Towers made for spires,
Ships were made for cannonade to fire off from inside them

Goin' to run all night
Goin' to run all day
Camptown ladies never sang
All the doo dah day (no no no)

Met the Ghost of Stephen Foster at the Hotel Paradise
This is what I told him as I gazed into his eyes:
Ships were made for sinking,
Whiskey made for drinking,
If we were made of cellophane, we'd all get stinking drunk much faster (aha ha ha)

Goin' to run all night
Goin' to run all day
Camptown ladies never sang
All the doo dah day (no no no)

OKaaaaayy. As every fool knows (after they do a google search on him), Stephen Foster was the legendary American composer of 'Mr and Mrs Brown'. Ah yes, that old chestnut. But no, he was some pre- American Civil War folk song writer who came up with 'Oh Susanna" (don't you cry for him. Argentina) and "Camptown Ladies" as well I presume. So, sure. But, er, his connection with cellophane I am not quite able to establish. Interesting theory, perhaps if made of cellophane we would in fact all get stinking drunk much faster. But I'm pretty sure we'd all be a lot more concerned with the problems of high winds, and making a pair of friends through whom we could hope to view 3D movies properly.

Anyway, it's a pretty cool song, which I was sure I had heard before - because, as it eventuates, it also acts as a soundtrack to an award winning cool slightly creepy animated short, which (serindipity alert) Dan had already downloaded before he left the country, and I had alredy watched. Robert Armstrong, random IMDB user, person with perhaps even more spare time than me, and probable pillock, rants:

"...a derivative yet thoughtfully made sendup of the dark, surreal Max Fleischer cartoon shorts of the early Thirties. The models used for "Stephen Foster" are undoubtedly Minnie the Moocher and Snow White (both starring Betty Boop), and probably Bimbo's Initiation (introducing Ms. Boop in a brief yet pivotal walk-on). In pre-Code Hollywood the suggestions of sex and perhaps even drug-induced sensibilities in such protean fantasies were allowed to find their audience -- including adult, although most of what an audience of that time would have found objectionable likely traveled right over the heads of children. Left alone, and minus the intervention of the Depression era's new-found conservatism, such classic shorts would, at worst, have been appreciated as innocent fun."

Is there a point to all this? No. The point is taken, the beast is dead. But it was time for a blog. Actually, the point was I was going to seek out the film itself on the internet somewhere for all to take a look at, but the download links I found all seem to be broken, and I can't even find it on Kazaa. But it's OK everyone, don't panic.

I know there was some potentially interesting information I planned to include at the start of this entry. But its 5:45am, this is becoming increasingly unhinged, and I'm not the only dust my mother raised. Must dash off and get killed in a tavern brawl.

Right then.