RIP Leonard Nimoy

Leonard Nimoy passed away today after fighting a years-long battle with COPD.  He had many great acting roles over the years, but his role as Spock is the one he'll undoubtedly be most remembered for.  My favorite Spock moment comes at the end of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, the final Star Trek film to feature the entire cast from the original series.  Here's a clip:

Merry Christmas!

The first official teaser trailer for The Force Awakens

I'm not quite sure how to feel about this.  I'm a bit eager to put the awful prequels behind us and see what a continuation of the original trilogy without George Lucas' meddling might look like, but I'm not sure I can really form an opinion until we get past the teaser stage and start to see some real trailers.

The black stormtrooper seemed a bit out of place.  Not that I have a problem with the idea of black stormtroopers, but I thought the prequels clearly established that all stormtroopers were clones of Jango Fett, who is not black.  I suppose it's always possible that someone was wearing a stormtrooper's outfit as a disguise, much like Luke and Han did in the first film.

The villain's lightsaber has crossguards like a longsword, which may look sort of silly but probably comes in quite handy in a fight against someone with a normal lightsaber.

That speeder looks interesting, and Daisy Ridley looks pretty adorable riding it.  ( She's rumored to play Han and Leia's daughter, but I guess we won't know for sure until sometime in 2015. )

It sure was nice to see the Millenium Falcon again and to hear John Williams' wonderful score, which is probably the best thing I can say about the teaser so far.

I got nothing...

There's plenty of awful shit I could be blogging about, but I just don't have a real post in me right now, so here's one of my favorite scenes from Barton Fink instead.  ( Warning: this scene is from near the end of the movie... if you haven't seen it yet, it's kinda spoiler-y.  )

Weird Al is a national treasure

Weird Al Yankovic has a new album called Mandatory Fun that he's been promoting the hell out of, and I have to say it's pretty damn awesome.  The first video released was for his song Word Crimes, which is a hilarious parody of Blurred Lines.  He also made a very funny parody of Royals called Foil.

Not all the songs on the album have videos yet, but I think my favorite of all the videos I've seen so far is Lame Claim to Fame, which is a completely original song that parodies the musical style of the band Southern Culture on the Skids:

I also enjoyed Mission Statement, which cleverly pokes fun at corporate speak while parodying the style of Crosby, Stills & Nash at the same time.  My Own Eyes (which doesn't have a video yet) is a wonderfully nonsensical song meant to mimic the sound of The Foo Fighters.  Lots of great stuff here.  There's a reason it's already a number one album.

A new year, a new season of Justified

Happy New Year!  Happy as it can be anyway, considering how awful last year was and how much worse things seem to be getting for us every single day.  Sigh.

At least there's one small part of 2014 that I know I can count on being really awesome:

Season 5 of Justified sure is off to a great start.  It somehow seems to get better every single year.  It's a rare thing to see a show that consistently clicks on all cylinders the way this show does.  In a world where so many awful shows seem to limp along forever, long past the time when they should have been canceled, it's nice to see how great a show can be when the people making it actually give a shit.

Lots of other shows end up trying to use stunt casting to make up for their awful writing, but with Justified you have a terrific cast from top to bottom that's always given terrific material to work from.  Lots of new faces this season.  Michael Rapaport, Alicia Witt, Amy Smart, David Koechner, Will Sasso, Dave Foley, and Xander Berkeley will be appearing this season.  It'll be interesting to see how many of the new faces will survive this season and maybe even be back for the next one.

If you're suffering Breaking Bad withdrawal and haven't given Justified a chance yet for some strange reason, you should definitely consider catching up on the first four seasons.

RIP Jean Stapleton

This is how I'll always remember her:

Freedom isn't free

(hat tip: @coloradorebecca)

Yet another eco-friendly pipe dream

So, some dufus says he invented a car that runs on air:

Yeah, that sounds great, except they never explain how much energy it takes to compress the air in the first place; after all, that energy is what will ultimately power his car, not the air itself.  Sorry, hippies, but there's no such thing as a perpetual motion machine.  The energy has to come from somewhere.  This car was a cute idea, but it takes a lot more than just a cute idea and sharing a birthday with Jules Verne to rewrite the laws of physics.

(By the way, what are the chances that a minor fender bender could cause the car's air tanks to explode?)

Happy Easter!

What the hell?

Someone with too much time on their hands made a really disturbing parody of a Japanese Furby ad:

Good lord... I'll never be able to look at a Furby quite the same way again.

Mitt Romney's speech at CPAC 2013

Here's Mitt Romney speaking at CPAC, with an introduction from Nikki Haley:

Except for the part where he praises that worthless piece of crap Chris Christie, I thought it was actually a pretty good speech.  But try telling that to the folks who are still 100% convinced that Obama=Romney and fly into a rage every single time they so much as hear Romney's name being mentioned.  (By the way, where's all the outrage about Donald Trump speaking at CPAC?  Is being a birther all it takes to get called a conservative these days?)

Screw you, Chris Christie!

So I'm guessing that Chris Christie has no plans to run for president in 2016, or ever, unless maybe it's as a Democrat.

I wouldn't mind seeing some more video of him yelling at teachers who need to be yelled at, but other than that I'm pretty much done with him.

And the band played on...

I've had this song stuck in my head all day for some reason:

Only five days left until Election Day...

Pay no attention to worthless polls based on 2008 turnout levels.  Don't let Obama distract you with his stupid, petty nonsense.  We can do this.  Get your game faces on:

(Found via Moe Lane.)

Thoughts on the final debate

I was hoping that Obama would get clobbered on Benghazi in the foreign policy debate, but that didn't happen.  Romney's strategy seemed to be to just make himself look like a plausible commander-in-chief. I thought he succeeded in doing that.  Not only was he plausible, I thought he looked much more presidential than our current commander-in-chief.  Obama was behaving more like an internet troll than a sitting president.  If Obama's only goal was to show independent voters what a petty little creep he is, then I'd say it worked beautifully.

This was supposedly Obama's best moment:

All I got out of Obama's condescending answer was that he likes to substitute snark for substance.  At no point did Obama attempt to explain why the Navy was wrong to ask for the 350 ships that Romney was talking about.  Also, I doubt Obama's snark will play very well in Virginia.

I thought Romney's best moment came when he was talking about Obama's Apology Tour:

Obama didn't really have an answer for that, other than to lie and try to hide behind the corrupt media's skirt.  And he won't have an answer for all the coverage Benghazi gets over the next two weeks, either.

Romney's best town hall debate moment

Tuesday's town hall debate was mostly a wash.  Romney won on substance, but Obama won on style.  And by style I mean interrupting constantly and telling outrageous lies in that stupid voice that sounds like he's trying to do an impression of Fred Armisen's Obama impression.  

This was Romney's best moment:

Obama got a lot of shots in, but he didn't have any single moment in the entire debate that even came close to being as effective as that moment of Romney's.  Romney completely laid waste to Obama's pathetic record and all Obama could do was just sit there and take it.  What was supposedly Obama's best moment came during an answer to a question about Benghazi... but after the debate was over even Obama had to concede to the questioner that Romney's point was correct.  I have a feeling this point will be revisited in the next debate, which will focus on foreign policy issues.  Hopefully by then Romney will also have a better response ready for Obama's faux outrage.  And in the meantime the rest of us will be talking about Benghazi:

The Man Who Laughs

I really don't think Joe Biden's maniacal laughter during the VP debate did Obama any favors:

It's hard to take someone seriously when he's acting like such a clown during a serious discussion about Iran's attempts to get nuclear weapons.  Lots of people keep making comparisons to Jack Nicholson's portrayal of The Joker... it actually made me think more of Nicholson's performance in The Pledge, the scene where he is sitting there all looking disheveled and muttering crazy thoughts to himself.  But speaking of The Joker, did you know that a film based on Victor Hugo's novel The Man Who Laughs was the original inspiration for The Joker?

Romney 1 - Obama 0

I've seen Mitt Romney debate before, so I knew what to expect... but based on Barack Obama's pathetic performance in last night's presidential debate, he must have been expecting to debate John McCain all over again.  He was wrong. Very, very wrong.

Obama's never really been challenged by anyone his whole life.  Now he had to suffer through one actual debate and he completely fell apart.  I can't wait to see how badly he does in the next one.

BREAKING: Obama voters are dumb

It's amazing how strongly people can feel about things they aren't even really trying to understand:

And then there's this bold fresh piece of humanity:

Good lord... yes, be sure to vote because we needs to keep Obama in president.