Stray Hawkeye

Fun fact – the Sealy Corporation, makers of mattresses, have a stock ticker symbol of ZZ.

Strangely, no one seems to have ZZZ, which kind of makes me want to start my own publicly trade mattress manufacturing company – Kearn’s Mattress Makers – with the tagline “Making 50% more Z’s than the competition”.

Walking back from a run tonight, I saw a group of blind people walking down the sidewalk on one side of the street, I would assume from the local school for the blind, white canes tapping away.  Almost perfectly straight across the street from them, going the same way down the other sidewalk was a girl fiddling with her iPod, punching away at buttons and scroll wheel, white ear buds in.  Three guesses for which of these two was having more trouble with drifting off the sidewalk into the grass and the street…

Joe Mauer is off the disabled list and started for the Twins again over the weekend.

Back, with all his distinctive facial hair

Image via Graphics Hut

You have no idea how long I've been waiting to post this pun.

Image via Radiowaves

Have I mentioned lately that I’d like to start a hard rock / heavy metal band that exclusively does covers of Tegan and Sara? Just crank up the drums, replace the awesome, adorable vocals with a growling bass / baritone, get a little guitar reverb in there. Imagine it with me, won’t you?

And I imagine this one at about 2/3 of the tempo so it grates just a bit, and throw in a few more voice cracks on the long held out notes, with the word “nineteen” breaking into an all out vocal chord spraining scream roughly every other time it occurs:

Note that said metal band would include some awesome special sound effect reverb thing that would make me sound like twins.

Now I just need to learn to sing, or play a normal rock band instrument. Somehow I don’t think tuba would fit in the average metal band. Though I do think it would be great for doing a solo cover of The Cave by Mumford and Sons, or perhaps a tuba / banjo duet with percussion played on the bell of the tuba:

(Previous Tegan and Sara here.)

I’m not sure if it’s awesome or terrible that I get pretty much all of these:

14, 24, and 27 made me laugh hard enough I had to pause the video for about 10 seconds to go back and hear the rest.

Via a friend who sent it to me on Facebook

What do you call a group of ducks floating close together on a pond?

A cluster duck.

Over the weekend I participated in the 48 Hour Film Project.  Basically, it’s a competition where teams get a genre, a character name / occupation, a line of dialogue, and a prop, and 48 hours later have to come back with a 4 to 7 minute film (plus 60 seconds for credits).  A couple of my friends have a production company, so I auditioned to be on their team and ended up with a part with a couple of lines (which in a 7 minute film I’m claiming is major role :) ).  Plus I made a website as a prop that also gets some screen time.  So, what I’m really saying here is you should come to the premier screening, because I’m going to be totally famous and on the big screen and stuff.  Also there’s about a 5 second shot of me and two other guys just shaking our butts in a musical number. Did I it’s a musical? And a Western? Because for genre we got “Musical or Western”, and decided that “and” is far better than “or”, so we did both. Confused yet? Good, more reason to come see the finished product.

Due to the number of teams, they break up the screening into groups.  We’re in Group D, which shows Wednesday, June 15th, 9:00 – 11:00pm at the Riverview Theater. Admission is $10, and you get to see about 10-15 movies made as part of this chaos.  If you have a large amount of faith in us, there’s a best of show a week later on the 23rd. I’ve seen our film and I think it’s pretty good, but having not seen others from this year, I have no idea where we’ll fall in the pack, or, for that matter, what categories / criteria they use to pick the best of, so, you may want to come to the premier screening just in case. Besides, the best of is $15, and you’ll have no idea what people are talking about for the week in between when everyone is saying how awesome ours is.

You may have seen the trailer for the upcoming movie Super 8. If not, here it is:

Let’s see, main character appears to be a giant alien monster thing from space.  It loves to eat metal and all things electric, especially high voltage power lines.  It’s super strong and leaves large trails of wreckage wherever it goes.  A somewhat anti-social young boy seems to be central to the plot, especially in the creature’s initial release, and tracking it down.  Officials are kept in the dark about what’s really happening.  The military is mobilized to try to deal with it, but seems outgunned.  And, the whole thing is noticeably stylized to a few decades back.

I don’t want to ruin the ending for you, but I’m pretty sure I know what our giant monster alien thing looks like:

The Iron Giant 2 - Hogarth's revenge -or- The Iron Giant 2 - Rise of the Beatniks

Just don’t tell Spielberg I let the cat out of the bag.  He seems like the type who would sue.

Also, fun fact – The Iron Giant‘s voice was done by Vin Diesel. Now you know.

Also, from reading Rob’s post on attribution (related to my Tumblr rant), this graphic by Olly Moss of two angry Batmans / Wolverine is awesome.  I rather like this one on kerning too.