Superstar of the Week is Kelsey Grammar

Normally there is no rational explanation for the Superstar of the Week, but today, I pretty much had Kelsey Grammar on my subconscious as I was thinking of a video idea which included a Kelsey Grammar/Sideshow Bob-esque character.

85 Posts

As of this post, I officially have more posts for the year of 2007 than I did for 2006. weeee

The Good ol' Days

Earlier this evening, a memory came back to me of a cartoon I saw a couple times when I was a kid about a boy who was raised by a duck. The kids at school made fun of him and called him "Ducky". I was curious to see if I could find anything out about this cartoon on the internet, but cyber space seems to carry no records of this occurrence. I did, however, run across this site, where a bunch of people reminisce about being a child in the 80's. So I thought I'd post my own, "I remember" 80's blog post...

I remember having an E.T. themed birthday, yet strangely, I barely remember watching E.T. prior to that.

I remember listening to the Ghostbusters song for the first time ever on headphones that were as big as my head, and then watching the movie shortly thereafter.

I remember how the cartoon for the Ghost Busters had to be called The Real Ghostbusters, because there was already a Ghostbusters cartoon that had nothing to do with the movie. The song for that one was, "Let's go Ghostbusters, Let's go" and then an echoing voice... "Let's go! Let's go!"

I remember watching the pilot episode of the Transformers.

And I remember how cool the toys looked in the commercials for Transformers and Voltron. I used to drool over those posters that came with the Transformers toys that showed all the other Transformers and hope my parents would get me every single one. The marketing was so effective that now as an adult I want to collect all the ones I never had. Anybody out there selling a Starscream?

I remember learning that Sgt. Slaughter from GI Joe was a real person.

I remember being disappointed when all the characters and plotlines were changed in Robotech, and again the second time.

I remember when Teddy Ruxpin, the cassette playing bear was the coolest thing since sliced Garbagepail Kids.

I remember my brown 80's shorts that my mom attached fur to so I could pretend I was He-Man.

I remember sitting there bored, stretching my socks to see how far up I could get them to go and they'd cover my knees.

I remember wanting a red mohawk so I could be a punker.

I remember seeing Back to the Future in the theater.

I remember my older sister listening to the Petshop Boys and the Bangles.

I remember my sister pinning buttons all over her denim jacket.

I remember when Michael Jackson was cool.

I remember laughing at school singing, "because I'm fat, I'm fat, you know it I'm fat"

And then talking like Pee-wee Herman.

I remember My friends mom picking us up after school and telling us that a spaceship blew up. (the Challenger).

I remember when saying "man" after a sentence was something cool that surfers did, as opposed to something that everyone does.

As well, I remember when "cool" as synonymous to "good", was teenage lingo instead of an everyday word.

And of course the words "rad" and "tubular".

I remember when Tony Hawk was a punk kid instead of a guy in his forties that EA Sports is trying to market as a punk kid.

I remember Mr. Miyagi teaching Danielson how to kick ass.

And I remember Johnny Five declaring himself to be alive.

I remember watching the Macellis followed by the Seavers, and then the Huxtables on another night.

And I remember not wanting ALF to eat my cats.

I remember loading up my toothbrush from the Aquafresh pump.

I remember wanting to see the spot jump off of my 7up can and dance around.

And wishing my clay California Raisins would animate themselves.

Oh yeah, and the reason the Noid couldn't destroy the Domino's pizza is because it was made of cardboard to begin with.

I remember getting a VCR with a remote control.

And I remember wanting a TV that had one.

I remember when rich people had carphones, which looked just like housephones only in a car. And I remember wondering why someone would want to talk on a phone in the car.

I remember climbing inside a giant metal Grimace on the playground behind McDonald's.

And when, "It's a good time for a great taste" was replaced with, "Good time, great taste, that's why this is our place."

I remember when Coke had the bright idea to change it's formula. I never even realized they changed it back until a future decade.

And then there's ol' Max Hedroom.

And finally, I remember Karate Kid 3 coming out in 1990, and laughing when Danielson declares to Mr. Miyagi, "Come on, it's the 80's!"

Superstar of the Week is The Todd

SLAP "Face five!"

Personality Test

Superstar of the Week is Jack Black Mii

The above me was created by Brandon Erickson. You can find some of his other Mii designs on his celebrity Mii page: http://www.flickr.com/photos/brandonerickson/

See comment for more information.

Legend of the Week

Jenkem - Drug Warning
Forwarded bulletin from Collier County Sheriff's Office in Naples, Florida warns that a new homemade intoxicant called Jenkem, consisting of the gases emitted by fermenting human feces, is now 'a popular drug in American schools'

-False

source: urbanlegends.about.com

Un-Factoid of the Week

So, you may remember a little ways back, I posted a Factoid of the Week, taken from snopes.com, claiming that a nursery rhyme was once used to recruit pirates. This story was marked as "True", on the site.

For those who don't know, Snopes is a website, whose operators take urban legends and research them in order to debunk them, or prove them true. A green dot indicates a true legend, a red indicates a false one, and then there's indeterminable and half-truths and what not.

Well, I recently ran into these two headlines, also marked true one Snopes:

Urban legends TV show falls for joke about Blackbeard's using a nursery rhyme to recruit fellow pirates.

and,

Urban Myth board game falls for joke about Blackbeard's using a nursery rhyme to recruit fellow pirates.

These two articles basically explain how that story is BS, manufactured by Snopes themselves, in order to catch people falling for "false authority syndrome". So they created several stories, intended to be so absurd as to raise suspicion and have the reader doubt it. In my defense, however, I just picked one involving pirates that had a green dot next to it.

At the time that I found this story, it was in a "pirates" category, which is now non-existent. It now resides in a section marked, "The Repository of Lost Legends", or TRoLL. In this section, I found another story; this one involving the Titanic and a silent version of the film, The Poseidon Adventure. This particular story was also featured in a Factoid of the Week.

That one did raise some flags in my mind as to the validity of an onboard movie on the Titanic. The immersion of information surrounding it, however, created the illusion of research and fact, such as the showing times of the film, how it was fifteen minutes in length, and only showed to the middle class, etc.

I just did some research while writing the above paragraph, and found that it is possible that they showed couple minute silent films aboard the Titanic, as this type of film has been available since the late 1800's, however, no information concerning whether they did infact show these films onboard.

Anyways, I've decided that Factoid of the Week, from now on, will be an urban legend segment, as opposed to a true fact segment. I'll do further research than Snopes and deem the legend true or false.

OTube?

So, yesterday, while browsing YouTube videos, I began to wonder if YouTube hired graphic designers for their YouTube partners. So I decided to click on the partner channels link and take a look at different partner channels. Well, after weeding through page after page of network-sponsored partner channels, which would have their own designers, I finally found the regular YouTube-user partners. After looking at a few of these channels, I decided that they must design their own stuff. During this search, however, I found something else kind of interesting.

Apparently, Oprah has her own YouTube partner channel now. It had been up for 5 days, at the time I found it, and was already a partner channel with 19,000 subscribers and two videos featured on the home page. Many people are angry about this, that this mega-celebrity with constant media attention would encroach on the common folks territory, including YouTube's infamous "pot-stirrer", Renetto, who's video on the subject has received 39 video responses.

Interestingly, the videos have been taken off of the featured videos list, perhaps in response to irate YouTubers.

As for myself, I'm not particularly angry, like I get when I look at pictures of clowns. Infact, I'm pretty much emotionally impartial to this situation. I am, however, interested in the moral implications. Here we've got the "broadcast yourself" site, where the common person can seek attention. People even labor and compete to find a spot on the coveted most subscribed list, the homepage featured list, and nowadays, to have partnership offered to them by YouTube. Some people have been at this for a couple years. Then, somebody who's name demands attention signs up and receives instant partnership, most subscribed list placement, and two featured videos.

Other people feel that she isn't being a real participant in the YouTube community. This video expresses several users opinions on that issue.


I guess I can't really blame people for being uncomfortable with this. Then again, it's not exactly the same situation as Paris Hilton. Oprah's fame came from actual effort, for one.

KCCI-TV BLOOPERS

Silly Sprint

So, I went to pay my phone bill over the phone, as usual. I dialed *3 and started to put in the barrage of security information, when suddenly, they asked me to enter my passcode. This was a first. Not only had the automated system never asked this of me before, but I had never received any information regarding even having a passcode. I went through old bills, making sure I hadn't overlooked any notices that might have mentioned this. Nothing. So I called up customer service to find out what my passcode is, or how to get one. When the lady on the other end asked how she could help me, I explained to her that I was trying to pay my bill over the phone, and they asked me for a passcode, which has never happened before. Her response was to inform me that they added this function for security, blah blah blah. She then asked:

"Have you tried putting in your passcode?"

Another interesting thing, as I was shuffling through my old bills, I found a notice informing me that, whatever information that was normally in my bills would now be found online, instead of in my statement, for my convenience, so that "I wouldn't have to deal with all that paper." Wait a tic, more convenient for who now? Why not just say, "We decided to put this information online to save on paper costs."

I once had a similar, yet more frustrating situation with a Sports Illustrated subscription. I went to Best Buy, where the cashier offered me a free trial subscription. I specifically asked if it would be an automatic renewal at the end of the free 30 days, which I would have to stop before they began charging me. After the cashier assured me that I'd receive a statement asking me to renew, I signed up for the subscription (which I never even read). Shortly after, I got a notice in the mail saying:

"Guess what, you don't have to log on to renew your subscription. We'll renew it automatically at the end of the 30 days."

Well, I learned a lesson from that.

Seriously though, do these people realize that they're insulting their customers by placating us like to their children?

We know you're reducing the paper costs for the company, not for our convenience. Most of us don't care.

We know you're automatically renewing so that lazy people won't log on to unsubscribe. That is not convenient to us. If you just say, "You're subscription will be renewed automatically", without all the "for your convenience" bullshit, it will annoy us, but it won't insult us. Insulting us just assures that we will go the extra mile to log on and unsubscribe.

Off topic; interesting thing I realized, while looking for images to make that photoshopped picture at the top of this post, looking at pictures of clowns pisses me off.

Superstar of the Week is Molly Shannon

Factoid of the Week

A 'Dear Abby' advice column was pulled because it included a letter taken from an episode of The Simpsons.

Source: www.snopes.com