That’s one determined music star.
Or else one weird music/horror crossover film. (But then, is there any other kind?)
Category: Entertainment
Songs with a Twist
Recently, I was reminded of a conversation about songs with twist endings. Like a Twilight Zone episode, they’ll set up one situation and then in the final verse, switch things around to a completely different perspective.
One example would be Vertical Horizon’s breakthrough hit, “Everything You Want.” The chorus repeats:
He’s everything you want,
He’s everything you need.
He’s everything inside of you that you wish you could be.
He says all the right things at exactly the right times,
But he means nothing to you and you don’t know why.
Most of the song presents this sort of detached, third-party view of someone who perhaps is concerned for a friend, but that’s all. Then the bridge hits, with lines like, “It’s only what you’re asking for,” and the intensity builds, until you get to the final chorus:
I am everything you want,
I am everything you need.
I am everything inside of you that you wish you could be.
I say all the right things at exactly the right times,
But I mean nothing to you and I don’t know why.
It suddenly becomes clear that the speaker is himself right in the middle of things, and the woman’s affections are in fact extremely important to him.
Another one would be the Jim Steinman song “Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad,” made famous by Meat Loaf. The speaker keeps pleading with a woman that…
I want you
I need you
But there ain’t no way I’m ever gonna love you
Now don’t be sad
‘Cause two out of three ain’t bad
At the end of the song, he explains “There’s only one girl that I will ever love” and that, when she left him, “She kept on telling me…” at which point he launches into the refrain. Suddenly, this guy who sounded unreasonable throughout the entire song turns out to have been on the receiving end of the same dysfunction in a previous relationship—and he’s still messed up by it.
What other songs can you think of that do this?
Links, from the Astronomical to the Surreal
The Value of Space Exploration, via Phil Plait.
Neil Gaiman on The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke, a painting by a madman that’s inspired its share of stories.
And from Comics Worth Reading, our WTF entry for the day: Paradise by the GoPhone Light. It’s a commercial done in the style of a music video, featuring Meat Loaf and Tiffany as the parents of a kid who wants a GoPhone. Completely surreal, especially once the random explosions start.
It’s just occurred to me that, aside from it being some sort of cell phone, I have no idea what a GoPhone is. [/me types “gophone” into Google] Ah, OK. Pre-paid cellphone. Meh. (And now I’m imagining how much spam is going to get posted to this thread. *sigh* )
Affluent Flowers
When I first spotted this sign, I just couldn’t believe the name of the florist at the bottom.
Okay, I’m sure people with more money send more flowers, but it seems a little tactless to point it out in the shop’s name.
Of course, it is Irvine…
Conventions and Distance
You may have noticed I’ve been thinking about fan conventions lately. 🙂
It started after last year’s Comic-Con, when I decided I wanted to go to something a bit less…intense. 😯 Last year’s Wizard World LA was nice, but a bit sparse, so I went looking for more comic and general sci-fi/fantasy cons within driving distance of the LA/OC area. Surprisingly, I didn’t find much. Gaming conventions, costuming conventions, Anime Expo, sure, but sci-fi? Pretty much just Loscon, which we both gave up on after 2002 (and from what I’ve heard, hasn’t picked up again). I asked around a bit on some forums, and someone on either the Comic Bloc or Newsarama forums suggested WonderCon, and suggested considering the city as a vacation destination, not just a place to find a hotel for the con.
Since WonderCon worked out so well, I’m looking at what else might be fun. That’s part of why I did my price comparison last month, and Kevin Standlee’s comments got me looking at WorldCons and the like again. Not for this year, but maybe a few years out.
Looking at all these cons, I realized that beyond a certain threshold, distance doesn’t matter. Only the destination. If it’s far enough away that you have to fly, the only thing that distance impacts is the cost of your plane ticket. Whether your flight is 5 hours or 10 hours*, it’s still going to take up most of a day or night when you factor in dealing with the airports. Everything else, from hotel prices to whether you need a passport, a phrasebook, or currency exchange, is a factor of the destination.
WonderCon, I think, was at the boundary of driving distance from here. We could make the trip out in one day, but it was a lot more fun to break it into stages and make it a road trip. San Diego is at the boundary of commuting distance. We could drive out there in the morning and drive back at night (and I did that with my parents for over a decade), but it’s not practical to do for more than one day. Whereas if I wanted to, I could easily commute to Wizard World Los Angeles 2 or even 3 days. (As it was, we only went for Saturday.)
With two cons in Q1, and San Diego coming up in July, any traveling we do later this year is probably not going to be convention-related. As it is, we’ve talked seriously about three possible non-con vacation spots. But it might be worth casting a wider net for cons in 2009 or 2010.
*Katie and I were talking about this, and realized that it’s probably different if you have kids. In that case, a 5-hour flight probably would be significantly harder to manage than a 3-hour flight.
Silliest. Image Spam. Ever.
I don’t think I’ve seen this one in the wild, but variations pop up on Spam Or Not from time to time.
I’ve obscured the website address, though I’m sure it’s been replaced by now.
Seriously, how can you look at the combination of poorly-drawn not-quite stick figures (probably done with a mouse in Microsoft Paint) with the visual equation demonstrating the supposed effects of a diet supplement and not laugh?
Edit: I’ve realized why I haven’t seen these in the wild: We use the MSRBL-Images signatures in our spam filter, and that list is built using ratings from Spam Or Not.
Edit 2: Both the filter signatures and the rating site seem to be gone now, so a little background: MSRBL-Images was a list of hashes that could be used to identify images that were repeatedly used in spam. Spam or Not, inspired by the infamous Hot or Not site, was their way of crowdsourcing the data. The site would show an image that had been collected, and you could mark it as spam or not, and some threshold or percentage of spam ratings would cause the hash to go into their signature list.
Three Kinds of Time
I was thinking about the timeline of DC Comics’ Earth-51 (home to the Great Disaster in Countdown to Final Crisis) and trying to wrap my head around what the past and present might mean for a world that’s been created and destroyed twice in as many years, and realized that some of the time paradoxes make much more sense if you consider that there’s more than one kind of time.
Real-world time is, as you’d expect, the time that passes between when two stories are published. For example, it’s been 45 years since Spider-Man first appeared in Amazing Fantasy #15 (Aug. 1962).
In-story time is the time that passes within a story. So even though it’s been 70 years since Superman first appeared on the newsstand, it’s only been 10–15 years since his debut within the DC Universe.
The tension between these two leads to a strange, fluid take on time, which has its own issues.
But then you get into time travel and cosmic retcons, and in-story time can’t quite explain things. Continue reading