Little bastards update

Those liking bloopers might be interested to read this explanation of an urban legend: Did children's radio show host Uncle Don say "There, that oughta hold the little bastards!" while on the air?

Oh, %*&%$@#, we forgot the editorial!

Once a Ubyssey old hack, always a Ubyssey old hack. I suspect that this Ubyssey editorial about the Vancouver Canucks was written late on production night because they had nothing else to write on.

I've seen a few of those kinds of editorials happen back in the day. Yes, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and ate people hanging out on the balcony of SUB241K.

I wonder if they ever found the slice of pizza hidden above the ceiling tiles where The Ubyssey's office used to be?

I wonder what happened to the "Sex Couch"?

Filling your Turkish ET needs since some time recently

I see that the inimitable Seanbaby has finally updated his website

His alibi for the Black Dahlia murder is pretty airtight because the diner where he works is in Bournemouth, England

I see that someone else who has seen Brian de Palma's The Black Dalhia also noticed that the diner where the victim's father works in Los Angeles has a cash register that reads "4D". That would mean that the blue plate special was only...fourpence?!?

However, no one seems to have yet noticed that a 1940s prisoner would have been unlikely to have been "talking trash" while in the stir!

Mein Kampf: The Movie!

I've been reading an intestng book lately. It's The 50 Greatest Movies Never Made", by Chris Gore.

Author Chris Gore has found some fascinating examples of movies that never made it to the screen. However, I find it hard to believe that David O. Selznick saved the rights to the words "Mein Kampf" in case he decided to make a movie based on Hitler's book.

Aparrently, Selznick went so far as to consider using Ben Hecht and Alfred Hitchcock to make the film. Wow.

MST3K goes digital

Mike Nelson of MST3K fame is now doing Rifftrax, which provides weisenheimer commentary that you can play along to all sorts of movies. Like the authors of Satellite News, however, I'm suprised that Dave Watson of The Georgia Straight can discuss Mystery Science Theater 3000 without apparently knowing that it aired on the Comedy Channel and the Sci-Fi Channel in the U.S..

(I wonder if the fact that I found MST3K on Comedy Central, via my parents' satellite dish one Saturday morning while my parents were sleeping, before Mr. Watson discovered it makes me hipper than he is. :) Probably not.)

Watch animals live!

This link will take you to a live webcam showing animals at an African watering hole. I'm told that you should try to time your watching for sunrise and sunset times there.

Watch animals live!

This link will take you to a live webcam showing animals at an African watering hole. I'm told that you should try to time your watching for sunrise and sunset times there.

I'm cutting prices to the bone!

Australia's Nine Channel has posted a photo set about the history of shopping in Australia, which includes a photo of the Jack the Slasher Food Barn.

Hat tip: Tim Blair

Australian rednecks

Tim Blair has found a website devoted to the Australian version of the redneck, the bogan.

Run! It's the Flannelgraph Antichrist!

What could be a cuddlier way to explain the end of the world? Try Stories in Revelation for Tots to Teens--in flannelgraph form!

Update: I think that "The Flannelgraph AntiChrist" would be an usual name for a blog, now that I think about it. I wonder if someone is already using it.

When going with the lowest bidders may not be the best idea

Now it can be revealed--1950s footage of ICBMs exploding when they are not supposed to, namely during top secret tests.

I missed the great energy crisis of 1996. I guess that I was off the planet at the time

Here's Superkids, a 1975 propaganda comic by the Canadian federal government which explains that if we don't save energy there will be a huge energy crisis in 1996.

Hat tip: Colby Cosh.

What's really sad is that I remember reading that comic in elementary school!

Show us your bullets!

Here's a series of pictures of pretty soldiers in the Israeli Defense Forces. (Who knows, maybe this will result in search engine hits for me other than "Is Ben Mulroney gay?)

Hat tip: Tim Blair.

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.