Friday, September 14, 2007

A sign

Look, I don't know much about the entertainment media or show business—oh wait, actually, I do—but when the 72-point headline above your photo on the cover of Entertainment Weekly is "Oh, the horror!", chances are your "comeback" isn't going very well.

Sunday, July 15, 2007

Why you shouldn’t use your phone at a concert

Tuesday, July 10, 2007

Made of awesome

I am skeptical of hyperbole, but when Joe posts about something titled "The Greatest Entrance In Drag History", I'm gonna have to look. And so are you, by gum. Don't blink around the 30 second mark.

Thursday, June 14, 2007

Now and forev--oops!

Cat Destroys Lloyd Webber's Phantom Sequel Score. Insert your own joke here.

Wednesday, October 11, 2006

On the Swift boat

New York magazine has a lengthy profile of satirist Stephen Colbert (who's beginning to grow on me), which includes this observation about his rabid-clueless-conservative schtick:

Colbert's on-air personality, so distinct from Stewart's, leads to a peculiar comedic alchemy on the show. During one taping I attended, Colbert did a bit about eating disorders that ended with his addressing the camera and saying flatly, "Girls, if we can't see your ribs, you're ugly." The audience laughed. I laughed. The line was obviously, purposefully outrageous. But it was weird to think that this no-doubt self-identified progressive-liberal crowd was howling at a line that, if it had been delivered verbatim by Ann Coulter on Today, would have them sputtering with rage.

The difference, of course, is that Colbert can be likened to Jonathan Swift, whereas Ann Coulter has probably actually eaten a baby.

Thursday, August 11, 2005

Pitfalls

The Intermission Escape Artist
Or, How One Lifelong Theater Devotee Learned to Stop Worrying and Hate the Form.

Theater has openly flirted with suckiness since Thespis sassed back from the chorus line. The possibility of disaster is inherent in the form: Every great theatrical event requires harmonious excellence from an array of people, from playwright and director to the various designers; with actors and technicians, the requisite proficiency must also be simultaneous, and produced anew night after night after night. But the risk amps the reward: Yes, nothing sucks like bad theater, but nothing thrills like good theater, and the threat of the former only compounds the joy of the latter.

But beyond the suck potential brought by the high-wire aspect of the form, live theater faces other deadly risks�threats far more insidious than a dumbstruck actor, or a director whose vision consists of transposing The Two Gentlemen of Verona to the antebellum American South. The worst of these threats can abort even the possibility of real theater in utero, and the name of this most heinous threat is romance�specifically, the romanticization of the theatrical form.

Monday, June 25, 2001

June 25, 2001

Var'aq is an open-source Klingon programming language. Today is a good day to code.

It's really something of a Klingon Basic, a simple, loosely-typed programming language designed mostly just to be used for programming things like command displays and high-level control systems. In its eventual final incarnation, we're looking at concurrency, advanced mathematics, and even native support for distributed programs (try finding that in the C++ standard library).

Unhip: The Socks-Shorts Combo: Ugly at Any Speed. Hey, I just spent a weekend in the park with several thousand homosexuals. You won't get any argument here from me.

The Official Rube Goldberg Website.

(WEB)LOG-ROLLING: I've really been groovin' on Wood s lot — a lot — these past couple of months. Go there. It'll grow on ya.

I'M SO GLAD WE HAD THIS TIME TOGETHER: A brief history of The Carol Burnett Show(s) — now available on video from Columbia House — at TV Party.

JUST MY "TYPE": OK, so maybe the Big Trouble trailer wasn't the only good thing about seeing Swordfish. After all, Hugh Jackman spent at least 10 minutes in the movie with his shirt off, so I suppose that's gotta count for something. Not nearly so naughty is Hugh Jackman in ASCII. (More at ASCII Babes.)