Beware of the Masked Pooper!

Finally, a website that asks the question "Who is the mystery pooper annoying the custodians at a small Eastern U.S. college?" I think that The Diarrhea Bandit! is probably a put-on, but you may be amused enough by the idea to check it out yourself.

Chuck Norris lost his virginity before his father did

Sam Kirk has posted some amusing "facts" about Chuck Norris.

"Top Secret"? No, "moderately secret" will do.

Recently, I read a potboiler on the End of the World. I was intrigued to find, however, that it was the second novel that I had read in the space of a year to mention Mount Weather as part of the plot.

Mount Weather, as the link about will tell you, is a small bomb shelter facility near Washington D.C. deigned to help U.S. government officials survive a nuclear attack. Its status as secret notwithstanding, we do know that Mount Weather is relatively small and spartan. However, according to the novels that I read, Mount Weather is the space of a small city with its own subway and even a manmade lake.

Let's hope that Mount Weather becomes obsolete, shall we?

The MST3K before MST3K

It seems that there was an early ancestor of Mystery Science Theatre 3000, the show which featured a man and his robot friends in silhouette, adding wiseacre comments to a film as it was shown on your TV.

On Sunday night, Turner Classic Movies will be airing The Movie Album, a Vitaphone short from 1931. Warner Brothers collected some snippets of old silent movies and had a narrator comment and joke on the soundtrack. It's nowhere near as funny as MST3K. Yet, it is interesting to see that the latter idea for the TV show may have been so smart that a diiferent version of it had been tried before. (Not to mention the Fractured Flickers TV show.)

Was there an ur-MST3K?

I wonder if the MST3K writers ever heard of or saw any of the Movie Album shorts. Probably not, as only a handful of the Vitaphone shorts appear to have been made.

Merci, Charles

Those who remember Charles de Gaulle's
1967 announcement of "Vive Le Quebec Libre!" at Montreal's City Hall may be dismayed to learn that it is a T-shirt slogan now.

At Bang On, a hip clothing and accessories store in Burnaby's Metrotown Mall, I spotted a T-shirt graphic of le grand Charles, with arms upraised. It includes the slogan Vive Le Quebec Libre!

The evil that men do lives after them...on the fronts of T-shirts anyways. I am sure that it will sell well to the thousands of local teenagers who happen to be Quebec nationalists. :)

Don't mention the war

Blinkit has a series of very interesting posts about his recent trip to Bavaria. He's posted some photos as well.