Did a Google search just for the heck of it. I wonder how quickly those numbers will climb…
Category: Entertainment
Snow More!
Oh the crowds outside are frightful,
But the music’s so delightful…
’Cept for ev’ry darn place we go,
It’s “Let it Snow!” “Let it Snow!” “Let it Snow!”
Seriously. It seems like this song has somehow become the most popular Christmas song this year. I normally don’t mind it, but come on!
It doesn’t help that it’s about as likely to snow here as it is for a meteor to strike Times Square at exactly midnight on New Year’s Eve. But that’s worth its own post.
(Incidentally, the parody’s original. We made it up together in the grocery store on Sunday. Katie has more, but I can’t remember it.)
Star of Damocles
For various reasons, braved the crowds at South Coast Plaza yesterday. Oddly, it’s the easiest mall I’ve parked at all weekend. Getting to the Marketplace was a disaster, but that’s just because the streets are wholly inadequate to get cars in and out of the parking lot, and the Village (formerly the Mall of Orange) was just plain full.
At South Coast, as part of their Christmas decorations, they had these giant, shiny, 14-pointed stars hanging from the ceiling in several places.
Classic Christmas, but when you go down to the first floor and look up, there are all these giant, gleaming spikes hanging over your head.
It’s a little disconcerting. “Death from above!” is not something I want my holiday decorations to invoke.
DC’s Missed Opportunity
As of two weeks ago, DC was still talking about its upcoming Infinite Christmas special. Yesterday, the book came out, complete with a logo based on the Infinite Crisis logo.
Only it had been renamed the Infinite Holiday special, ruining the joke.
No word on why they changed it, but someone on the Newsarama forums suggested “Christmas on Infinite Earths” would have been even funnier.
Note to those who are likely to cite this as more evidence for the non-existent “War on Christmas:” Most of the stories in the book are Christmas stories. Many of them with the word in the title. And in a country where atheists are the most distrusted minority, the idea that Christians are being persecuted is laughable. (Why do I think this footnote is going to get more comments than the actual post?)
Insert code name here
Been watching Heroes and loving it. Recently we read a list of names for the characters’ alter-egos. Inspired by this, I bring you my inventions:
Charlie – Flashdrive
Claire – Rebound (or, if you want silly, Anti-Maim)
D.L. – Fade
Eden – Hpnotiq (because somebody’s got to have a cool alternate spelling)
Isaac – Visionary
Micah – Wiretap (because I think Spark would get me in copyright trouble)
Nathan – Rocketman (I’m not the man they think I am at home . . . )
Niki – Evil Twin
Peter – Tabula Rasa (because anything with Mirror sounds too much like Mirror Master)
Sanjog – Dreamtime
I can’t think of anything for Mysterious Haitian Dude, and I just can’t bring myself to use Thought Police for Matt or Mr. Fusion for Ted. And I agree with the OP that Hiro is just Hiro because he rules.
Not quite botanical
Attended a friend’s wedding last weekend, held at the Quail Botanical Gardens in Encinitas (north of San Diego).
One constant feature of botanical gardens the world over is the collection of placards identifying each type of tree, shrub, or other plant. In the walled garden where the ceremony was held, they took it a step further:
Nightmare Before Christmas: 3-D Edition
This weekend we went out to see The Prestige, which was quite good. The next theater over was running The Nightmare Before Christmas in 3-D, and we figured, what the heck? After the first movie, we got tickets for another.
The Nightmare Before Christmas is one of my favorite movies, but for some reason the 3D release didn’t really interest me when I first heard about it. It felt too gimmicky, like when they project a regular movie on an IMAX screen even though the movie itself isn’t really made for that format.
I got a little more interested when I read an article about how they did it. ILM essentially re-did the entire movie as a computer-animated film, matching each frame exactly, then shifted the virtual camera over a bit. One eye gets the original film, and the other eye gets the CGI copy.
I was astonished at how seamlessly they matched. I couldn’t remember which eye got the original, and I honestly couldn’t tell. Most CGI-animated films have a cartoony, sort of vinyl look to them, which would not blend at all, but ILM is used to matching their CGI to photographed actors and sets, which I suppose makes them the ideal animation studio for this sort of thing. It had to be the most effective reformatting of a film that I’ve ever seen—compare it to colorizing movies, or the Star Wars special editions (which were done by the same effects house, but with older technology)—because it didn’t detract (or distract) from what was there in the first place.
Of course, it wasn’t long before I stopped looking at the technical merits and just settled into watching the movie.
Having re-watched it, I’m now very interested to see what director Henry Selick does with the movie adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s book, Coraline