September 1, 2010

            Remember a few weeks ago when for an entire week, the Mystery Track was the same song?  For a whole week, the Mystery Track every day was a different cover of the Steppenwolf classic Born to Be Wild.

            Well, I’m getting ready to do it again.

            I found another song that’s been covered many, many times.  I supposed if I wanted to, I could drag out this particular Mystery Track theme for two weeks.  But I won’t do that; I’m in the process of selecting my favorite five.  Coming up in just a few short weeks, I’ll have a whole week devoted to one song.

            Stay tuned!

August 24, 2010

            I found some funny stuff on the inter-webs this week.  If you’ve got some time to waste, next time you’re on youtube.com, search Simpsons Goodfellas. 

            Someone took the time to painstakingly mash up video from The Simpsons with audio from the “Get Your Shine box” scene in Goodfellas, my all time favorite movie.  The whole thing is set in Moe’s Tavern, and Barney Gumble plays the Joe Pesci character.

            If you have a little more time to waste, there are some other videos in the same vein that are worth a look.  There’s one with the Peanuts gang synced to the “Funny how, like a clown” scene from Goodfellas, and if you watch that, you tube will suggest Bert and Ernie from Sesame Street doing a Pesci/DeNiro scene from Casino.

            I’d post the links, but they are decidedly NSFW.  I mean, what did you expect; they're from Joe Pesci gangster movies.

August 17, 2010

            Yesterday, I was signing the certificate for our latest Professor in the Bus’s Kollege of Musical Knowledge, and I swear I had to look at the calendar three times before I filled in the date.  It just doesn’t seem possible that August is more than half over, and that summer is nearly gone.

            And yet there’s evidence everywhere.  PSU football starts in just a few weeks, and the Stealers already have a pre-season game under their belts.  I can cool the house at night by opening a window and turning on a fan, instead of running the air conditioner.  Pretty soon, it will be time to take the A/C out of the window and close the storm windows.  I won’t be too much longer until I start working on this year’s batch of Boilo.  After that, it will be time for picking a Halloween costume, then Christmas shopping.

            I love the fall.  I love those warm, sunny days and the cool, crisp nights.  I love a bright blue cloudless autumn sky.  I think it’s great when I don’t start to sweat while I’m just sitting around.  Some people dig the smell of newly mown grass, but I prefer the scent of freshly fallen leaves.  And when you look across a valley when the foliage is at its peak, I think that’s what heaven must look like.

            But still, what happened to the summer? 

August 9, 2010

            My sister Stacy, who lives in Oregon, called me over the weekend with a little story.

            She has this friend who said she would be working backstage at a Who show at a fair near where they live.  So Stacy asked her friend if she could get autographs for my brother and me, both rabid Who-ligans.

            Now this story sounded a little hinky to me.  As far as I know, The Who isn’t on tour right now.  There’s been talk of them hitting the road again, maybe playing Quadrophenia next time out, but I never heard anything definite.  And I certainly didn’t see any dates.  Believe me, I look. 

It also sounded very wrong to us that The Who would be playing at some county fair; they still fill the big arenas.  Plus, she hadn’t heard anything about a Who show in her neck of the woods.   Maybe I’m showing my bias, but I would think that a nearby Who concert would be big news. Nonetheless, this friend assured my sister that she would be backstage at a Who Show, and would, if possible, get some autographs.

Well, my sister continued, this friend never made it to the show.  On the way there, she got into a car accident.  Everyone was OK, but they spent the night in the ER, rather than seeing a show.  So no autographs for me.

The punch line:  A few hours later, my sister sent me an email.  Her friend, who’s all of 21 years old, wasn’t going to a Who show to work backstage—it was The Guess Who playing that night. She got them confused.

The Who

Guess Who

August 3, 2010

            Someone hacked into my email account. 

            Everyone in my address book got an email from me with a link for on-line prescription meds.  I didn't send it, honest, and I apologize for wasting your time.

            To prevent this from happening again, or to at least reduce the likelihood of another hack, I changed the password which I’ve been using since the mid 90s.  Now, I have a new password, containing both upper and lower case letters, plus a few random numbers thrown in for good measure.  It’s like the cast of Sesame Street puked it out for me.  Sure, it will be tougher for the hackers to get in, but it will also be a lot harder for me to remember.  So far today, I've entered the old code twice.

            On the bright side though, I received emails from people I haven’t heard from in awhile, kindly telling me I had been hacked. 

July 27, 2010

            I’m so grateful we’re getting this break from the heat and humidity, though it’s supposed to return again tomorrow.  But at least the heat wave made it worthwhile to fire up the grill over the weekend.  It was just too hot to cook inside, so we grabbed a couple of nice NY strip steaks and cooked them up medium rare.  Along with that I served some foil-wrapped potatoes topped with a little butter and some peppers and onions.  I also grilled a few ears of corn.  That was the first time I ever tried grilling corn on the cob, and it came out pretty well.

            We topped that off with a little ice cream, then I enjoyed a couple of cold beers while I scrapped then covered the grill.  Man, that’s what summer should always taste like.

            Summer usually means lots of crap and reruns on TV, but there are a few things worth watching.  Mad Men’s season premiere was Sunday, and if the first episode is any indication, season 4 is going to be fantastic.  Rescue Me’s 6th season has been great so far too, and Louie, another FX comedy that airs Tuesday is outrageously funny.

            Then come September, Sons of Anarchy is back, and so is It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.  If Louie just reset the bar for what they can get away with on FX, I can’t wait to see how over-the-top Sunny will be this season.

  July 16, 2010

     If you were a fan of the show Arrested Development, as I was, you might enjoy this video.  Someone with way too much time on their hands took scenes from the show to create an Arrested Development action movie trailer.  Enjoy.

July 12, 2010

            First off, I want to say “congratulations” to everyone involved in 4th fest this year.  Nice Job!  What a spectacular event.  And to all the volunteers who helped make it happen, thanks for all your hard work and dedication.

            I went to see Grown-Ups, the new Adam Sandler movie recently.  If could only use one word to review it, that word would be “Ehh.”  But since this is my blog, and I can use as many words as I want, I’ll say more.  There were some funny moments, especially the ball-busting among the main characters, but overall, it wasn’t that great, and it was pretty predictable.  But I suppose it was worth the matinee price to sit in a dark, air conditioned theatre for a few hours during the heat wave.  I think the thing that bothered me most about it was that every time I saw Kevin James on screen, I kept thinking that Chris Farley should have played the fat guy role.

            Over the weekend, I called my sister.  She lives in Oregon, but this fall, she’ll be moving back to Pennsylvania.  Her future employer put her in touch with a moving company in State College, and while she was talking with somebody there, the guy asked if she was familiar with the area.  She said that she grew up in PA, graduated from Penn State, and that her brother lives in Bellefonte.  So the guy said, “What’s his name, maybe I know him.”

            She told him, and he immediately replied, “The guy on the radio?”  How flattering, and thank you for listening. 

June 28, 2010

            Every day, it seems I read nothing but bad news.  The Oil Spill, the war, the economy, and the list goes on.  But this week, I came across some good news that I thought was worth sharing.

David S. Ward, the man that wrote and directed Major League and Major League 2, says there's a good chance that Charlie Sheen, Wesley Snipes and Tom Berenger may all return for a new sequel.  Ward says the plot would involve Sheen’s character, Wild Thing Rick Vaughn, coming out of retirement to help a young ballplayer.  Apparently, Sheen’s excited for the project, but can’t shoot it until next year, when 2 and ½ Men is on hiatus. 

I love baseball movies, yet I don’t really follow the game.  I haven’t been into baseball since the players strike in 1994.  When they came back, I didn’t, yet I’ll watch movies like Bull Durham and Field of Dreams over and over.  When I read about a possible sequel to Major League, I was thrilled, since it’s one of my favorites.  Sure, the sequel was just OK, and the 3rd one sucked out loud, but this time it will be different, right?

            It’s great that Berenger, Sheen, and Snipes are all supposedly on board, but I hope they find a way to bring back characters like Harris, Cerrano, Dorn, and especially Manager Lou Brown.  Oh, and if you can’t get Bob Uecker to get behind the microphone as announcer Harry Doyle, then forget it.  It just won’t work without him.  His play-by-play is what made the movie. 

 I don’t really care about World Cup Soccer, but man do I love the Vuvuzela.

     When we were kids, my brother and I actually had one, though we didn’t know its proper name.  I think we got it at a Hershey Bears game.  To us, it was just that loud horn that scared the dog and annoyed Mom, so she hid it behind the piano.