Christmas decor photos on Retrofication

At Scott's suggestion, I've posted some photos of the Christmas decorating that Angie has done this year on my other blog Retrofication. Nice stuff that will be hard to take down. *sigh*

Here comes the embarassing photos...

Don't worry, I'm the one getting embarassed with these...mostly. ;) Watch out Richmond. Hee hee hee.

Me and my Mom on the Mark Twain with Tom Sawyer Island in the background. If I'm feeling up to the abuse, I'll post the pic that shows my full outfit. Truly horrific. But I digress. I've got to check with Mom, but I'm thinking this is either the summer of 1979 or 1980. 

All right...let the fun begin. This from my seventh birthday party. It's 1978, so where else would we be, but SKATE KING! Who's that tall kid in the back? What the hell happened to my teeth? Did the boy in the middle just poop his pants? Answers to all this and more in our next thrilling installment (well, not really). 

Loompaland found?

Pretty interesting little article from Wired today about a lost tribe of little people on a remote Indonesian island. The remains of a 30 year old femal was barely a meter tall with a skull the size of a grapefruit.

Could this be the homeland of the Oompa Loompas? You be the judge. ;)

My latest weird purchases

Today I finally got around to spending a Amazon gift certificate I got for helping out someone with graphics stuff. Some good stuff:

CD - William Shatner - Has Been
I love Shatner. If you haven't listened to his class album "The Transformed Man", I...highly...recommend...it. The track I'm most interested in is his take on Pulp's "Common People". It should be quite entertaining.

DVD - Tron (20th Anniversary Collector's Edition)
It's just silly that I don't already own a copy of this one. Plus, Angie's never seen it and I've got to remedy that. :)

Book - Welcome, Foolish Mortals...The Life and Voices of Paul Frees
You may not be familiar with the name, but I GUARANTEE you've heard his voice dozens of times through your life. Been to Disneyland? Then you've heard him on the Haunted Mansion, Pirates of the Carribean, and the original version of Great Moments with Mister Lincoln. Watched cartoons or commercials? He was the voice of Boris Badenov, Professor Ludwig von Drake, Squiddly Diddly, Morocco Mole, The Pillsbury Doughboy, and Toucan Sam (among others). Enjoyed classic Rankin/Bass holiday specials? He's all over them: Burgermeister Meisterburger in "Santa Claus is Coming to Town", Santa Claus in "Frosty the Snowman", Jack Frost in "Frosty's Winter Wonderland".

Anyways...I digress. This should be pretty damn cool. I've always wanted to know more about the man behind all those voices.

Sky Cries Mary returns!

I just ran across this in the Seattle Times. After a six year hiatus, the band is being resurrected and will be playing tonight and tomorrow at the Fenix. It seems that they've been in a legal battle for five years to get back the rights to the masters of their seven studio albums. They recently won and will be rereleasing all of them. Yay!

But will the half-naked dancing guy still be part of the act?

Buh-Bye FastPass

Some interesting info just in from MiceAge.com (note, you'll have to scroll down a bit to get to this piece)

It seems that Disneyland President Matt Ouimet is rethinking the way Disneyland and DCA offer FastPass. The increases in customer spending and satisfaction that the Pressler regime promised the system would bring are not materializing. On top of that there are rising customer complaints stemming from the overburdened infrastucture issues FastPass is causing. Why? Because Pressler's team threw FastPass at every ride they could and ignored the objections from operations management.

DisneyWorld has a strategy that has been more successful with FastPass where it's operation is much more limited, and it seems that's where we're heading. It sounds like the main push is for FastPass to only run when it's needed on weekends and during the busy season.

So for now they're conducting a test by not offereing FastPass at Pirates of the Caribbean and the Haunted Mansion. Two rides that are each able to soak up well over 2000 riders per hour don't really need FastPass.

While I'll miss the benefits I was able to gain by knowing the ins and outs of the system and being able to get the most out of it, I'm glad to see that Matt is ready to take on the hard problems that will benefit the guests. It's high time someone is!

Wonderfalls in December?

From http://www.tvshowsondvd.com/ today:

"At a special Wonderfalls screening, Bryan Fuller and Todd Holland spoke about the planed release of all 13 episodes on DVD. They said Fox is aiming for a December 7th release, although this hasn't been announced by the studio yet, and may change."

And so begins a new age

Whoo hoo! They did it!

This morning Scaled Composites SpaceShipOne carried pilot Mike Melvill more than 62 miles above the Earth's surface. Making it the first privately funded manned craft to fly in space!

Take that NASA!

A Rocky Horror era tidbit: The worst peanut butter and jelly sandwich ever

After reading all of the great stories from Rich's blog about our shared days in Tacoma's Rocky Horror Picture Show cast, I felt it was finally time I contribute something. So of course it's going to be something that makes Rich look like a tit.

One weekend my parents were out of town. A perfect opportunity for late night shenanigans in a better location than one of the local Denny's. So I had some of the core group of the cast over for the evening. As I remember, we played a few rounds of the theatersports game "party guest" which ended up giving Gannon some great comedy to perform and another entry for the dyslexicon when he drew the description "afraid of shoes". But I digress. This was supposed to be about Rich.

Let's see who all was there. Gannon, Rich & Katy (who were an item at the time), myself...and beyond that I can't seem to remember...but that's all the people who pop up in the important part of all this. The part where Rich looks like a great tit (He's my best friend, dontcha know. And wonderfully patient with my need to embarrass him. Don't worry he's got plenty other stuff he can slam me with on his blog). Wait a minute; was this during my brief period with Jeni (who would later be known as Gyeni)? Oh nevermind. Back to the important stuff.

The sleeping arrangements. I was upstairs in my bedroom, Gannon was downstairs in my parent’s bedroom, and Rich & Katy were on the hideabed in the living room. Why the couple ended up stuck with the least private place to sleep is beyond me. Probably me being worried about what sorts of things they would get up to in my parents bed that could end up leaving evidence and get me in trouble with the parental units.

I have no idea what went on in the evening. In fact, I wasn't present for most of the rest of the story. Rich relayed this whole thing to me of his own free will. I think he secretly likes looking like a tit. Anyways, he and Katy woke up the next morning and were getting quite amorous...probably on the way to scoring a home run, when Gannon poked his head out of the bedroom. He poked a little fun at them and then politely went back to the bedroom. But the mood had been sufficiently killed, so they decided that some food was in order. Rich took to the kitchen and proceeded to make Katy a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

He served this sandwich to Katy, who dove into it appreciatively. But something seemed a little odd. She took another bite. There was definitely something wrong. Her mouth was on fire. A three alarm tongue scorcher. Rich scrambled to get her water to extinguish the damage done by the sandwich. In all of the commotion, I finally come into the story to deliver the punchline. After getting all the details, I discovered that Rich had picked up an unlabeled jar of jelly from the fridge. My father's homemade jalapeño pepper jelly. I just about peed myself I laughed so hard. Rich didn't think it was so funny. He wanted to know why in the hell someone would keep a jar of mouth melting jelly in the fridge without having the common decency to label it. Knowing my Dad better now, I'd say it was on purpose...he's a mischievous old coot.

Oddly enough, it was shortly after this that Katy made the jump from big loveable loudmouthed geek #1 to big loveable loudmouthed geek #2. Rich insists that the peanut butter and jalapeño jelly sandwich directly contributed to the transition. Personally, I'd hate to think that such an innocent mistake was what led us to that fun little triangle. But I guess worse things have started over less.

The Clone Wars Micro-Series Continues!

Straight from the official site:

Star Wars: Clone Wars | The Clone Wars Micro-Series Continues!

The new series will continue where chapter 20 left off, but in a new format. This time around we get 5 new installments at 12 minutes each.

Can a regular half hour series be far behind?

Some cool TV stuff coming to DVD

http://www.tvshowsondvd.com/ this week:

• Pee-wee's Playhouse - All 45 episodes (including 6 "lost" episodes never released to home video) will be split between two box set collections, and the "Pee-wee's Playhouse Christmas special will all release this fall!

• The Greatest American Hero - Coming either late this year or early next year. No details yet. I wonder if "The Greatest American Heroine" pilot will be included. Hmm.

It's nice to see some stuff being released that isn't in constant rotation. Don't get me wrong, I love shows like MASH, The Cosby Show, Roseanne, etc...but they're showing multiple times a day on several networks. I can just Tivo those shows.

Here's hoping that stuff like Voyagers and Misfits of Science see the light of day. Yeah...I know it's unlikely. And I know that these shows probably won't be as good as they are in my memories. But what the hell. :)

My name on the big screen!

This weekend I attended the premiere of "Big City Dick: Richard Peterson's First Movie" at the Seattle International Film Festival. I went to show my support for the film (which sold out 3 days before the screening!) and because I wanted to see Richard in person. But I got a big suprise when the credits rolled.

The first screen was the director/producer credits for Ken, Todd and Scott. The second was for Richard. The third was about the artwork. Who designed the logo, who did the animated bits, the artwork Richard provided for the film...and Website design by Chris Mowrer. My name on the big screen! And not just scrolling by with dozens of other names. Right up there with the people who made the film! It made me feel rather special. :)

An interesting Star Wars story I heard today

My co-worker John used to work in Hollywood in the late 80s. He had a friend that was a model maker and told him about a particular gig he did at Lucasfilm. They were putting together a variety of creatures for George to pick from for the scene at Jabba's palace. They were running out of time and decided to slap some stuff together that George would never go for so they'd get a couple extra days to come up with something better. The day comes, they put out the full spread of options...and to their surprise George picks three of their substandard designs to be Jabba's house band. That's why Max Rebo is a blue elephant.

First attempt at private manned space flight set for June 21

The other night I was watching the new Disney Tomorrowland DVD at Christian's place. While a damn cool show, it made me a bit mad when I realized how far we should really be in space exploration at this point. But once we got to the moon, the public's enthusiam was lost and NASA has been limping along ever since. Hell, our current program is based around a reusable craft that was designed in the early 70s. The private sector getting into space is what's really going to make things happen. Space tourism here we come!

C'mon get happy?

I just picked this up on Fark. According to this article, The Partridge Family is returning to TV, with David Cassidy at least. The rest of the family is still considering if they're desperate enough to whore themselves out like this.

GHOST TOWN

A photo journey of a girl riding her motorcycle through the ghost towns around Chernobyl. These places are frozen in late April 1986 when they were evacuated after the meltdown. Family photos and other personal possesions, the city's decorations for the May 1st Labor Day parade, Communist messages, a carnival, a kindergarten classroom full of toys...all abandoned by those escaping the radiation. It will be upwards of 600 years before the area could be habitable again. The pictures are spooky, but being there must be downright frightening.

Happy Easter

We received this Easter Card from Angie's parents this week and this was Angie's interpretation:

"He was the first to see it. The freshly boiled and dyed corpses of the unborn...as the other marched blindly forward."

I love my wife. She's crazy just like me. :)

Factoid about me #2: I designed a t-shirt for my favorite band, the Posies

Surfing on Ebay today I ran across an auction for a Posies t-shirt that I designed back in 1995. It's done in the style of the Archies/Josie and the Pussycats. I'm still quite proud of it. :)

Being a big fan, it was a fantastic experience for me. I took headshots of each of them for reference at the recording studio where they were working on Amazing Disgrace. I took some concert shots at the Velvet Elvis to nail down how they stood, held their instruments, etc. I went backstage at a few shows to talk with them about the project. But the coolest was going to Ken's house one afternoon and spending a couple hours listening to some gems from his record collection.

I got paid about $200 for the design and Jon later thanked me, because the shirt made them a lot of money. A job well done! :)

Another good show bites the dust. Farewell "Wonderfalls"

I'm beginning to think I'm a pop culture assassin like my pal Rich. I get excited and vested in a show and it goes off the air. Dave convinced me to Tivo "Wonderfalls" and check it out, and I was really glad I did. A weird little show populated with fresh faces. I'd tell you more about it, but last week's episode was the last they'll show, leaving 9 of the 13 episodes unaired! How in the world is a show expected to find it's audience in four airings? Auuugh!

Maybe Dave should be glad that I never got around to checking out "24".

All sorts of stuff about the Posies.

About a week ago, I ran across the following Posies CDs that I wasn't really aware of:

• Failure 15th Anniversary
  Houston Party Records brings more Posies love in the form of a reissue of Failure. All the tracks have been remastered and it includes 8 unreleased demos/alternate versions! Ok...I already have copies of 7 of them from my tape trading days, but it's still damn cool. The site has the full track listing...but the whole site is in flash, so you'll have to navigate your way to it.

• Jon Auer - The Birthday Party
  A little live set for someone's birthday. Jon, an acoustic guitar, 4 people, and a microphone. How cool would that be? Nice mix of Posies & solo material, but the downside is that his vocals aren't miked very well. But I frequently listen to Posies material of much worse quality. :P

Then today, I talked with my friend Ken and he gave me a few details I hadn't heard of...like The Posies Join the Ryko Family. A new Posies album tentatively scheduled for summer 2004!

This lead me to another article Posies Re-Teaming With Big Star. While quite cool in itself, it also mentions solo albums coming from both Jon & Ken. While I've known about Jon's "Songs From the Year of Our Demise" (if that's even still the title) for quite some time, this is the first I've heard of Ken's.

I popped over to Yep Rock Records and got the details. Soft Commands has a street date of 7/13! Whoo hoo! The aforementioned Ken said he picked up a Yep Rock sampler with a track from the new album at Silver Platters for 50 cents. It also had a Minus 5 track, so it definately sounds worth the price.

More Super Mario Brothers!

Another gem from Jason. :)

This time, the Super Mario music played on electric guitar...and I must say it's even better than the piano version...at least I think so. And really, that's what it's all about here. :)

Akira! Tetsuo! Akira! Kaneda! Motorbike! Vroom!

Jack just sent me these links:

http://www.motorcycleshow.org/info/akira.html
http://www.neo-fukuoka.com/

Who's up for a ride around Neo-Tokyo?

Factoid about me #1: I once sold Evan Dorkin a vintage BBQ grill cover on Ebay

From time to time, Angie and I have sold some of the cool stuff we pick up on Ebay. In this case, one of our items was a vintage barbecue grill cover from Sears that we scored at a garage sale for 50 cents. It was pretty cool. It had a yellow background with artwork of little barbecue related items (tongs, grill aprons, hamburgers, hot dogs, etc) all over it in black, red and blue.

We ran into problems with the winning bidder responding to us. It had been over two weeks since the auction closed. I was getting pretty pissed and was close to filing a non-paying bidder alert with Ebay. They finally contacted us and apologized profusely for the delay. It seems there had been a severe illness in the family and they had to leave town suddenly to take care of the person. I expressed my sympathies (and felt like a bit of an ass over the tone of my previous emails). So we exchanged addresses to complete the transactions.

Wait a minute. Sarah Dyer? The Sarah Dyer? Creator of Action Girl Comics and the significant other of Evan Dorkin? Yes, indeed it was. So I went into fanboy mode and gushed about how I loved the scripts they'd co-wrote for Space Ghost: Coast to Coast and Superman: The Animated Series, especially the character Livewire they created for the Superman series. Because of course I couldn't just gush about Evan's stuff...though I really wanted to. A few days later I got a nice letter from Sarah (which of course I held on to) along with the $25 or so for the grill cover.

Yes, I know. I kinda mislead you. I never had any contact with Evan in all of this. But the grill cover is in his possession. Who knows...maybe the happy little hamburgers inspired something in the background of an issue of Dork! comics. Yes, I know I'm really stretching. The next factoid will be better. I promise.

A three-headed frog!

Not many details here, because it got away...but at least someone had the sense to take a picture first! All hail the three-headed frog!

Blue Man Group at Disneyland?

Actually it would be next door at Disney's California Adventure if the following from MiceAge comes to pass:

Longer term, Anne Hamburger has her eye on the Hyperion Theater again. But instead of another Disney Character musical show, Disneyland's entertainment department is courting The Blue Man Group organization that is so popular in Las Vegas. With the new Snow White show packing them in over in Fantasyland, and with the Guest Research statistics coming back as very favorable for the new show, Anne would like to return the Hyperion venue to a contemporary yet family-friendly non-Disney offering.

The wild success "Blast!" had in the Hyperion didn't go unnoticed, and Anne Hamburger is looking to repeat that experience. We'll see how far they get with The Blue Man Group, but some people are already taking bets on whether or not Aladdin makes it through its originally planned three year run.

That would just rock. Two of my favorites things in the same place. :)

Super Mario Brothers

Jason sent me this the other day. It's a guy playing all of the music and sound effects from the classic Nintendo game Super Mario Brothers on the piano. It's pretty impressive...if you're a geek like me.

What a wonderful wife...

I have the best wife in the world. Angie made me a 3d R2-D2 birthday cake for my birthday. This wasn't a store bought pan job either. She made 3 round cakes, 1 dome cake and 1 sheet cake to be assembled into the final product. It was so exciting watching her make it...I felt like I was 6 years old. Thanks honey!

Disney buys the Muppets and Bear in the Big Blue House

So it's been announced that the Jim Henson Company has sold the classic Muppets and Bear in the Big Blue House (along with all of the associated rights and film catalogs) to the Walt Disney Company. The link goes to Jim Hill Media, where he discusses several aspects of the sale and what this means for both companies. Basically, it looks very much like Eisner bought the Muppets to cover his ass after lousing up the Pixar deal.

They can't do this to me again!

Last year my favorite TV show, Buffy the Vampire Slayer ended. Thankfully there was the spinoff Angel to help fill the void. Then I find out this weekend that WB has cancelled it. Bastards. Apparently they respect the show enough to give them this much advance notice to be able to wrap things up properly. Most shows don't find out until April or May that they've been cancelled. But that really doesn't help much. Now I've got to find a new show to obsess about.

Instead of continuing to rant on this, I'll just defer to Joss Whedon's thoughts on this heinous crime.

Comcast proposes to buy Disney

This is really getting good. Eisner is against the merger, so if Comcast succeeds then Eisner is gone. If they don't succeed, then Disney's stock price is likely to drop and make Eisner's current position even weaker. At least from their statement, they are interested in maintaining the Disney legacy.

Another interesting tidbit today is that Disney's board is planning for Eisner's succession. They've admitted publicly that discussions are in progress, and this comes just one day after their letter to shareholders showing their support for Eisner.

'Peanut Butter' finally free from 'Jelly'

I love medical oddities...and this one is so darned cute. It's a pair of cojoined tortoises connected at the side of the belly near the tail end, so one of them was always upside down. But their owners kept careful track to ensure that each would get equal time right side up. They've now been seperated and seem to be doing well. Yay!

24 Hour Comics Day

Some of you may have heard of the creative experiment pioneered by Scott McCloud called "The 24-Hour Comic". The dare is to create a 24 page comic in 24 consecutive hours. It's become quite a popular task in the comics community with some great work coming from big names like Neil Gaiman and Steve Bissette. Now they've tied it down to a day, April 24th. Lots of comic book stores are going to be hosting events on the day. I've entertained the idea of this in the past, and I'm going to see if I can talk some friends into joining me.

Vanishing twin

Angie and I watched this show on the Discovery Health channel called "Vanishing Twin". It seems that 1 in 8 pregnancies starts off as twins, but only 1 in 70 leads to the birth of twins. Most often, one of the fetuses fails to develop properly in the first trimester and is absorbed by either it's twin, the placenta, or the mother. But in some rare cases, the underdeveloped fetus ends up being engulfed by the healthy fetus and becomes a parasite. Almost like the baby having a baby inside it. The really creepy case they showed was in a third world country where a boy had his parasitic twin removed from his abdomen after 7 years! The twin was a fleshy ball with flipper-like appendages, no internal organs, an empty brain cavity, and a thick head of black hair about a foot long.

Disturbing? Hell yeah. But God do I love science shows.

The ghost in my underpants

Ok, I know there's no way I can keep myself from looking like a freak on this one. But it's too weird not to share. Just after the holidays I went to take a shower and left my clothes on the floor. I got out of the shower and saw something strange in that pile of clothes. Before I called Angie in, I put on my glasses to make sure my eyes weren't playing a trick on me. No trick, it was even weirder with my glasses on. Angie came in and we had a really good laugh...though both of us were afraid to move the haunted underpants and left them alone for the rest of the day.

New pic from Spirit rover

Things are looking better for the troubled Spirit rover on Mars. It sent back it's first picture since it developed problems on 1/22. It's still not out of the woods, but at least it's moving in the right direction. Yay!

It looks like Eisner's blown it again

Talks between Pixar and Disney have been killed after 10 months of trying to strike a deal. Disney is too greedy to stray far from the current deal that gives them over half the profits of Pixar's highly successful films. Pixar does have a long laundry list (only paying for distribution with no sharing in the profits, full ownership of the titles, etc), but considering their stellar track record, they deserve it and more. Pixar is going to continue to do great things wherever they end up...but unfortunately the rights to all of their existing characters stay with the Mouse. So the only way we're ever going to see the version of Toy Story 3 that Pixar has come up with (and I hear it's supposed to be REALLY great) is if the Mouse wises up and realizes that a small piece of the pie is better than none at all.

Oh well. At least this is some really strong ammo for Roy Disney and his attempt to get Eisner out of the company. (for more on that, check out his site at Save Disney.com)

"Destino"?! Oh No!

This one thrills me to no end. The Disney company is now caught in a situation where they're damned if they do and damned if they don't. You see, the animated short "Destino" (a collaboration between Walt Disney and Salvador Dali that started 58 years ago) has just received an Oscar nomination. The bad news is that it was all due to the effort of executive producer Roy Disney. If they win, Roy might have the opportunity to bring his anti-Eisner message to 200 million viewers and on Disney's ABC network to boot! If they don't do the standard publicity push to try and win the Oscar, then Roy has some fabulous ammuntion to add to his arguments of Disney's creative bankruptcy.

And the winner is...Big City Dick!

I found out this weekend that Big City Dick: Richard Peterson's First Movie won the Audience Award for Best Feature at the Slamdance Film Festival! Why am I excited about this? Well, I designed the website! Check out BigCityDick.com and watch the trailer. Y'know I really should be updating the site instead of posting about it on my blog. Bad Chris. :P

Moog

Jack sent me a link to this today. It's a documentary being made about Bob Moog, creator of the Moog synthesizer. The soundtrack also looks to be pretty fantastic. Stereolab, Jean-Jacques Perrey, Devo, The Cure, and Dave Gahan...just to name a few. Make sure and download the preview!

NASA - Postcard from a Martian Crater

I've been quite fascinated by the images from the rovers on Mars. The first images from the Opportunity are in and quite different from the terrain Spirit has shown us. Ok, there's not much to see right now because they've landed in a crater. It should make for quite an impressive shot as they roll out of it onto the surface.

Speaking of Spirit, the news seems to be good for getting it back online. The NASA scientists say they should be able to resolve the issues in a couple of weeks and that they've recovered from worse problems on other missions.