Hey, My Friend's a Good Person

Zach and the rest of the Good Works Tour appeared on NBC 29 tonight. You can watch the video here. I was going to embed the thing but it's set on this horrible auto launch function which would have made my blog like a bad Myspace page.



If watching this makes you feel lazy, selfish, or lame, you're in good company. It made me feel all of the above! Here is one of my good friends being championed on network news for his selfless actions; being pointed to as a shining example of something good and pure amidst all the detritus that is our modern society.
Meanwhile, I'm sitting in my pyjamas, watching it on an internet video, and thinking about how the reporter's kind of cute (even though she seems to struggle with the teleprompter).
Sigh.

Heavy Video Fun

Yesterday, half of the cast of America 20XX got together and did some filming. First we made a video sketch in which I play a crazed plumber fighting a killer toilet plant (There's an explanation. I'll give it when the thing's finished) and then we filmed a trailer for the play. Both were a ton of fun (except when I had to get back in my crazy plumber costume to re-film scenes we accidentally taped over) and made us kick ourselves that we'd been too lazy to ever really make us before.
As Dave reversed the shot of a plastic bag being pulled off my head so that it looked like the bag was both sentient and vicious, Greg looked back and said, "Man, this is much more fun than putting these damn things on stage."

The best part about it is people are actually going to see them. With Dave's plum job at Heavy.com, these videos could be seen by tens of thousands of people in a day. Dave's first video (the one I posted a few days ago) did and that can't all be the famous Rothstadt marketing (see: Zipperface).

One video that I worked on is already up. This thing was already in rough cut form in about an hour (from conception to .avi). It was after rehearsal and we were all getting drunk at Dave and Greg's and Dave and I sat down during everyone else's smoke break and popped this out.

More videos from the "Contagious" channel at Heavy.com

Cheap joke? Very much so. But again: made in an hour (just look at that ultra quick photoshopping!)
Anyway, like it or not, you all better vote five stars on this shit and link it to you friends. Give us a lot of comments too! Or I'll hate you.

Same goes for Dave's second video list on the site (with a cameo by Greg!):

More videos from the "Contagious" channel at Heavy.com

You Can Plug for Your Friends, They Can Plug for You, But You Can't Plug Your Friends

Hey, a bunch of my friends have done cool things on the interweb recently. Let's check in!

1. Good Works Tour - My friend Zach (you may know him from all the posts I wrote about how ridiculously talented Zach is) is going on a road trip with some friends. Cool enough but they decided to go one step cooler. In their words:

Three childhood friends, James Introcaso, Zach Wiseley and Tim Urian, are setting out to make a documentary – a documentary about people who help people. Fresh out of college, these three idealistic young men want to see who volunteers in America and why, while getting a chance to experience what our country is like first hand. From Habitat for Humanity to intercity soup kitchens, they will interview the dedicated souls who donate their time to help in their communities, and will provide vignettes of extraordinary unsung heroes. However, they don’t want to just observe. At every site they visit, they will get their hands dirty volunteering, as well as actively pursuing random acts of kindness while on the road.

Right on. The site I linked to above is their homepage which is mostly for donations. All video clips and updates can be found at their blog here.

2. Getting Super - This has been in my Blog Roll forever but I don't think I've ever officially mentioned it, so here goes. A bunch of my friends created this site as an exercise blog. However, since exercising is inherently boring, they spiced it up by making it a superhero themed challenge. Each month they will try to fix their college-addled bodies through exercises focussed around a certain superhero. The first month's hero was Captain America and the month's winner on the blog was Matt (who goes by Captain Dangerous). If you head over there now you can see my cameo as I help Matt reenact Cap's first cover.

Why'd they choose me? Because I was the only one willing to put on a Hitler moustache, of course.

3. Dave got himself a plum job over at humor site Heavy.com editing together videos of a humorous variety. For his first job, his boss had two words for him: Chuck Norris. In return, Dave gave him the following video. Now I'm giving it to you and in return, you can pass it to your friends and you can vote 5 Stars like 3000 times.

So, that's some fun stuff. Click away and make my friends (and by default, me) very happy!

I Have Seen the Future and It is Adorable

God bless this tiny little robot!


I just got back from seeing WALL-E and it is absolutely amazing. It's everything you could possibly want in a movie. It's a dark satire. It's a eye-popping sci-fi extravaganza. It's a silent comedy. Hell, it's even the best date movie of the year and I'm saying that partly because it's a terrific love story and partly because you should instantly ditch any girl who doesn't like it (I already told the girlfriend she lost major points by refusing to see the opening midnight show with me. Fortunately she gained them back by being so gung ho to see The Dark Knight that she's already looking up IMAX ticket prices.)

I knew it was gonna be great. I mean, Pixar has yet to disappoint me (granted, I never saw Cars due to the Larry the Cable Guy involvement). Really, when one of their movies comes out, it's not a question of whether it will be good but rather how high it will fall on their veritable hall of fame. Now that I've seen it, I have to say, WALL-E makes its way pretty high up there.
Of course, the number one spot still belongs to Monsters Inc.

I really love Monsters Inc. I always will. I've got a book n the art behind it. I've got a talking Sully action figure I picked up at a garage sale (that really doesn't sound like John Goodman, by the way). It is so damn good that I feel no shame admitting (in a public online forum, no less) that it marks the closest I've ever come to crying in a movie theater. I mean, if this ending scene doesn't make you tear up, you are heartless:
(Spoiler Warning, obviously)

Seriously, it bums me out people don't talk about this movie more. However, when you make so many good movies like Pixar has, some are bound to get lost in the shuffle.

ps. You have to check out this great site Pixar created for the movie. It's a fake homepage for the ubiquitous corporation that runs humanity in WALL-E and it's absolutely hilarious. There's good stuff everywhere, all the way down to the Privacy Policy at the bottom.

It all (as well as a few images in the film) kind of reminds me of Mike Judge's great movie Idiocracy. However good that movie was though, Luke Wilson will never be as fun to watch as that tiny robot. And I don't even mean that as an insult!

Another Random Appearance on the Internet!

I've got a lot to write about (blogs about Sorrow Hill filming and strip clubs are forthcoming) but I'm in New Brunswick right now and I don't think the girlfriend wants to watch me type for half an hour. However, I can put a fun link in here because it's time once again for one of my Random Appearances on the Internet!


The A.V. Club (the nonfictional entertainment section of The Onion) is probably my favorite website. I'm there everyday and I've linked to articles from it here on the blog a few times. So I was excited to see my name on the site.
A few weeks ago, I was incredibly bored and sent a question in to the Ask the A.V. Club feature and was happily surprised to have it answered on Friday's article. It's a really stupid question but one of those things that always bugged me. you can read it here.
I enjoy the fact that, since I wrote in with my school e-mail, my name appears in full instead of the simple "Jon" I signed with.

In other A.V. Club news, all the music reviewers on the site wrote a great article listing their favorite new songs of this year. The best part is, you can listen to all of them. I have to admit, I'm not cool enough to have heard of 75% of these bands but that meant it was realy great to check in on music that flies way under my music radar. Plus, they threw in a shout out to that amazing Frightened Rabbit song I've posted here a few times.
Here's another cool song from the list by British Sea Power:



A few of the songs they posted videos for instead of just the track. I loved seeing that great Kate Nash video again because potty mouthed British girls singing cute pop songs are adorable. Even better though, this video for Flight of the Conchords:



It's funny that they're making videos for the album since their TV show was mostly videos for the same songs.


And finally, another music tidbit. I've never been as huge a Girl Talk fan as a bunch of my friends. It's mostly because I'm a little hot and cold on the whole sampling thing. However, he released his new album with the same "pay whatever you want to download" thing as Radiohead and I think it's a fascinating idea. You can pay (or not) here.
Also, the first track is rocking:

"Put in my mixtape, it's right on the dash! It's the one that says 'Chillin with my peeps and my main man, the Monarch'."

I was checking out the music and movies blog The Playlist and they had a link to a pretty cool site called Mixwit which is home to another playlist application like the one I use on this blog. However, the hook here is that you can make your playlist look like an old-school mixtape which kind of rocks hard.
The appear to just be in their beta stage and the program has a few problems (you can't upload songs, the searching interface kind of sucks, etc.) but I had to try it. So here is my mixtape which I named "CRUISING FOR PUSSY and/or BEER!":

My idea was that it would be a the kind of mixtape that a group of totally rocking dudes would play when they were out looking for action. I open it with the perennial classic of "hanging-out-rock" Big Star's In the Street (just try to forget that a certain piece of shit TV show sullied it) and then I have ten more rocking track, I'm pretty sure none of which were recorded post-80s. And to round it out, I have two songs perfect for backseat loving in case anyone in the joy-ride scored.

PS. The site has a place where you can give them feedback and I sent them a message with a few ideas. I told them it would be cool to be able to see all the songs in the mix without flipping through them and also (I'm really proud of this one) how awesome it would be to have the option to put the sound of a tape being inserted into a tape deck at the beginning when someone loads up your mix.
I'm sorry but that would just plain rule.

PPS. My official June Playlist will be coming shortly.

I Oughta be in Pictures

I still haven't gotten to my Hijinks post (it's gonna take me forever to go through all the pictures that were saved) but here's something cool in the mean time:

Does anyone remember those photo mosaics that used to be everywhere in the 90s? You know, the big picture made up of a ton of little pictures that they used for movie ads and stuff (The Truman Show poster is a good example). Well, for a while now I've been wondering if anyone would put up a program to download and do it yourself and, at some point (I don't know how long it's been around) someone did.

It's a freeware program called AndreaMosaic and it works pretty darn well. I haven't had much time to mess around with it, but here are a couple I made:

Here's Greg and I in Hijinks made from all the pictures I have from CAP shows. The clothes came out well but there wasn't enough pictures or detail to make the faces. A nice first attempt though.


I then tried to test out the program's abilities and just loaded in every picture I had on my computer and made this. The details are much clearer but the colors are kind of diluted.

When I have more time, I'll try to perfect my photo mosaic-ing talents. Until then, and in honor of the new movie which was flawed but still more entertaining than it had any right to be, here's an awesome cover of Black Sabbath's "Iron Man" by The Cardigans. I know, remember them?

How to Make "I Hate Mondays" Jokes Funny!

Garfield the comic strip is not funny. The fact that it has run for three decades (this year is its 30th anniversary!) using only four repeated jokes is mildly funny, but the strip itself is not. It has an endearingly cartoony art style and I've always enjoyed that I share a name (spelling and all) and a hairstyle with the main human character but...yeah...that's all it's got going for it.

Recently though, the absolutely wonderful Comics Curmudgeon blog, which brings me so much joy every day, has posted links to a few sites that attempt to mine real humor out of Garfield's bloated, cavernous, lasagna-reeking gut.

The first is this message board where people have taken all of Garfield's thought balloons out of the strips to create a vague surrealist comic. My favorite is definitely this one:


Even better is the blog Garfield Minus Garfield where the creater uses a similar idea but takes Garfield himself wholly out of the comic to make it just a strip about Jon Arbuckle, lonely (and possibly mentally disturbed) young man. Here's a taste:

My favorite of the group, however, has to be the absolutely brilliant Lasagna Cat. This one's kind of hard to explain and you either love it or hate it, but I'll try. Lasagna Cat films Garfield comic strips starring people in creepy costumes and set in a tone which is like a mixture of a bad sitcom and a nightmare. Then every video follows with an intrepretive music video with a song that may or may not relate in some strange way with the topic of the comic. Oh, and each video somehow incorporates a picture of Jim Davis (actual Garfield creator) at the end.
You really have to watch a couple to get the hang of it (drugs help to) but they begin to take on a deranged genius after a while. They're very existence is just so absurd. Here's a couple:

Goddamn, it's about time someone made comic strips entertaining again. Now, if only someone did the same for Mary Worth...