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.