I married Flipper!

"I made a dream come true, and I am not a pervert."

A British lady has married a dolphin.

Memo to my mother: Craig Ferguson is going to make fun of this for sure. ;)

Where am I going to get my "Man with the 1985 B.C. Lions hat" updates?"

Well, I can't force Jordan Bateman to continue his personal blog if he no longer wishes to do so. Yes, we still have Langley Politics, but I thought that what he was writing about, regarding the rest of his life, was interesting too.

I had wanted to buy the book that he is writing. As a writer emeritus, I found his writing projects to be interesting. But, alas, those are not the sort of things that he would be posting about in Langley Politics.

Even if I did write a lot more for The Shotgun, I don't think I would stop blogging here. You need to have a place to mess around on the net, and posts about The Singing Dogs don't cater to the Western Standard's demographic. (Although, reading all those allusions to Star Trek in the National Review Online blog The Corner, I can't be too sure about that :))

His blog was fun to read. Thanks, Jordan.

(I would post items, as he did, about "The Guy With A 1985 B.C. Lions hat, but I write entirely too much about myself here already ;) )

The kind of webcam that I would wind up getting

Here's an item on the first videophone, after it was invented in Japan.

"And that's what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown."

Arf arf arf, arf arf arf, arf arf arf arf arf!

Nothing says "Christmas?!?" like the The Singing Dogs rendition of Jingle Bells. Lee Hartsfeld has helpfully posted a MP3 of it for us.

No Deal

I wonder if any TV citics have noticed that the new, and fascinating, TV show Deal Or No Deal is merely Treasure Hunt with a few new bells and whistles?

Deal or No Deal is still fun to watch, however.

(And why yes, I do need a life :) )

A Tale of Two Hieberts, internet edition

I see that articles from the other Rick Hiebert are making their way online. I write "the other Rick Hiebert", because this fellow who was editor of the Pentecostal Assembles Of Canada magazine, the Testimony, used to be confused with me.

One day when I was working at B.C. Report, I got a letter from the other Rick Hiebert asking, in effect, "Who are you? People keep on saying that they like my articles in these magazines that I never see." I called him, and I turned our chat into an amusing paragraph for my own magazine.

So, it should be noted that the Reverend Rick Hiebert, who has become an Ontario minister is not me. Bags of steer manure, dead fish, letter bombs and such should be mailed to yours truly. :)

"RUDOLPH THE RED NOSED REINDEER: Tiny Tim
I know you aren't supposed to speak ill of the dead.
Man, I really wish he was alive."

The inimitmable April Winchell posts some "so bad they are good" Christmas songs by celebrities.

National Osographic, and other joys

A neat tribute page about Wacky Packages might inspire me to dig out my own Wacky Packages cards, which I bought as a kid from the Wigwam store just down the road from my grandmother's house--and still have!

Did you know that if you eat Pop Rocks, while drinking a Coke, your head will explode? :)

Kathy must not have liked Wacky Packages as a kid, I guess.

"Sur une plage il y avait une belle fille
Qui avait peur d'aller prendre son bain
Elle craignait de quitter sa cabine
Elle tremblait de montrer au voisin

Un deux trois elle tremblait de montrer quoi?

Son petit itsi bitsi tennie weenie tout petit petit bikini!
Qu'elle mettait pour la première fois
Un itsi bitsi teenie weenie tout petit petit bikini
Un bikini rouge et jaune à p'tits pois!"

Johnny Hallyday also was one of about four million French pop singers to try his hand at covering Brian Hyland's immortal Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka-Dot Bikini. (Dalida and Richard Anthony appear to have had the hits with the French version of the song.)

But, Hallyday's producers seem to have recordedhis version with tongues planted firmly in cheeks. The backup chorus in the Hallyday version of the song (which in the Hyland original is sung by a breathy female with a come-hither voice) is crooned by a man in a nasal monotone!

Did he even stop smoking his Gauloise while he was in the studio?

Hilarious!

"Pourquoi cet amour
Qui m'a fait chanter
Pourquoi s'amusait-il
A me faire pleurer?"

Listening to French pop singer Johnny Hallyday's 1960 song Pourquoi cet amour, I wonder why it wasn't a bigger hit at the time, as it's a nice song. I am also wondering if Hallyday had a cold on the day of the recording session, because it sounds to me as if Hallyday's mike might have caught the singer sniffling or breathing through a stuffed-up nose. Listen to the instrumental intro, before Hallyday starts singing.

Nice song, even if he was sniffling. :)

"Spinning Head Tapes TV At Home"

Popular Science reports on the first video tape recorder in January 1965

Old Grandma Hardcore

The Washington Post has a story about a 69 year old Cleveland grandmother who plays video games with her grandson. Her grandson has started a weblog about his grandmother's adventures too.

Although I am now going to get dismaying hits from search engines, I though this story was neat enough to post on. My mother used to play Nintendo during her down time at her job, and she got quite good at it.

I'd go over to my parents house and we would play video games together (I should point out that at the tine I didn't have my own Nintendo. Either that, or I didn't have a lot of time to play. That's my story, and I am sticking to it.).

We'd play Super Mario together. She would rack up a zillion points, and be on level 28,000, while I would be trying to get through level three.

"Do you want me to win you some extra men?"

"No Mom, it's okay."

:)

"They told me I was going to have the tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood. Naturally, I thought of Clark Gable."

In honour of the release of the latest version of King Kong, here's a link to a tribute site for Fay Wray, who starred in the original film.

"The Boz’s film career is like a rollout triple option, executed perfectly, right before every player on the team is hit by a meteor and the mascots forget years of obedience training and charge the field."

Seanbaby looks at the film careers of N.F.L. stars.

How to make grilled cheese sandwiches in 1.7 seconds

Boing Boing reports that "Albert Swank Jr., a 55-year-old civil engineer in Anchorage, Alaska, is a man with a mission. He wants to install a nuclear particle accelerator in his home..."

Used cyclotrons, cars hoisted up on bricks in one's front yard...it's all bad.

Galloping Gertie!

Courtesy the Internet Archive's collection of public domain films, here's a link to some neat movie footage of the 1940 collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.

If this is a flying outhouse, I want one for Christmas!

Like the folks at the Modern Mechanix blog, I also think that this 1930s "movable testing stand for airplane engines" looks like a flying outhouse.

One more

I see that my old Report friend and colleague Kevin Steel is tring to get his personal blog started again. Drop by and have a peek.

Yesterday's future, today!

Here's a link to Modern Mechanix, an interesting blog that reprints predictions of the future (and other neat stuff) from old science and technology magazines.

Featured are:

How to raise hamsters for profit!
Drive-in waitresses who use walkie talkies!
How carnies take your money with games that you can't win!

Hat tip: Boing Boing.

He does sit-ups under the team bus, and other weisenheimer comments

Covered in Oil, an Oiler loving blog, has posted its picks for the ugliest National Hockey League player.

The Jewish Cowboy

Hippocampus, a neat looking music weblog has a post about a tribute to The Jewish Cowboy. More Helen Shapiro posts than most weblogs too.

Fun!

In Nancy Drew: Bad Girl, one of the lesser known films in the Nancy Drew series, Nancy goes undercover as a cigarette girl in a cheap waterfront dive, and...

This afternoon, Turner Classic Movies will be broadcasting the Nancy Drew movies from the late 1930s. I was curious to learn a little more about the films, in which a young Bonita Granville played the teenaged crime solver, so I ran "Bonita Granville" and "Drew" through Google's image search.

After doing the search, I found that a very nice lady with an interesting site on acting had captioned a photo of an adult Bonita Granville, who is dressed in a low-cut blouse and smoking a cigarette (scroll down to the last of the pictures on the page), as "Bonita Granville aka Nancy Drew".

"Yeah, I'll look at your $%#$% clues. Just let me finish my &%*$%* cigarette first!"

( ;) )