What do you get when you cross Gilbert & Sullivan with Star Trek? Why The U.S.S. Pinafore, of course! Adapted/written and directed by Jon Mullich, the new musical recently opened to critical acclaim at the Crown City Theatre in North Hollywood, CA. Check out the video below for some hilarious excerpts. As the Beastie Boys once sang:

All you Trekkies and TV addicts
don’t mean to dis don’t mean to bring static.
All you Klingons in the [bleep]in’ house
grab your backstreet friend and get loud.

Ch-check it out!



via broadwayworld.com

Our pal Matt Blum over at GeekDad has a nice post on the new movie Despicable Me, hitting theaters today. I've been wondering if I should take my son - if it's too scary, if he'd like it, etc. Matt screened it with his kid already and had this to say:

1. Will my kids like it?

Yes! Most of the humor is written for kids, and there are few scary moments of any sort: peril is kept to a minimum. There’s also very little to upset kids of moviegoing age, as even the fact that the children characters are orphans is fairly well glossed over.

Read the whole post over on GeekDad now.

Real belt buckle made from Nintendo control pad. A must have! Link

The Salariya Book Co. explains why "You Wouldn't Want to be a Polar Explorer!", Ernest Shackleton's 1914 expedition to Antarctica. Link

Suresh Joachin is the Guiness world record holder for longest marathon tv watching of 69 hours and 48 minutes. He broke the previous world record of 50 hours and 7 minutes. Suresh now holds 16 Guiness records, including longest duration balancing on one foot (76 hours and 40 minutes) and bowling for 100 hours. Why is he doing this? "To raise awareness of suffering children". http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/09/16/tv.record.ap/index.html to CNN article  |  http://tvplex.go.com/buenavista/regisandkelly/special/guinnessweek/rules.html#tvwatching to the rules at LIVE with Regis & Kelly

Natural and artificial snow flakes beautifully photographed by Ken Libbrecht at Caltech. The first one on the left is nature's own (photo by Patricia Rasmussen & Ken Libbrecht), the middle one is an unusual triangular shaped showflake. The one on the right is a designer or artificial snow flake, probably the world's largest, measuring at approximately 1 inch across. Link

Terry Duty enjoys bending steel bars. He's worked out the proper techniques of bending steel (yes, apparently there are proper techniques) that he called Slim the Hammer Man style and so forth. http://home.insight.rr.com/strongman/bending.html

“I was wondering if you were wondering what the deal was about that,” she said. “Well,” she said, “the truth is, the whole Ask Otis idea only hit me when I was musing on how to locate this guy I met.”

“Saul?”

“No. I don’t know his name.”

“What?” I said. “So you’re not working for mentalfloss?” I was suddenly filled with confusion and maybe even a small feeling like I was being tricked.

“No, no, I’m totally working for them. And I’m totally psyched about Ask Otis. I think it’s gonna be a huge viral hit and help me land a real job after. But basically the idea for the feature grew out of my desire to locate this guy, who I only met briefly once, a few weeks ago.”

Going back to the strange Saul questions now: if I remember myself right, the second day, when we were filming again at Pan Pacific Park, Eos didn’t ask anyone about Apostle Paul or the Detroit Tigers. Or what’s more likely is I just didn’t notice because I was still thinking all about my crazy dreams from that morning and the memory of Eos hugging me with her smooth black arms with the very nice veins was very fresh on my mind.

But on the third day, I know she asked the questions to many people. I clearly remember this because each person she asked was a boy near her age and I felt sort of jealous from it. Why wasn’t she asking me if I had an uncle named Saul? Or if I knew anything about the Detroit Tigers of 1938? Why didn’t she care if I knew the story of Apostle Paul and his revelation on the road to Dimashq? Just so you know, this is the Arabic name for the place where it is written Saul heard Jesus speak to him.

She thought it was a mouse—the limp, dark gray little sack of a creature hanging upside down in the cat’s mouth as he rammed through the cat-door headfirst, like a diver anticipating a belly flop.

It wasn’t supposed to look quite like this. The cat flap was supposed to be spacious enough to permit a free range of movement in a normal-sized cat, allowing the cat to simply walk through. But for an overfed, borderline obese animal like Cataclysm, it was a tight squeeze, and this gave the whole thing an additionally creepy effect. He was struggling, with an odd undulating movement—a sort of half-writhe, half paddle--to propel his massive body through the small plastic aperture without forfeiting his kill. Finally, he managed to wriggle himself through, mouse intact, his fatness clearly contradicting his need for additional rodent calories.

She screamed, naturally. “Damn it, Cat! Get out of here with that!”

The morning following the night in the Jacuzzi where Eos was asking me all the questions about being Druze, we went with the microphone and the video camera to a small park called Pan Pacific Park, which is very near to the Park La Brea apartments. Here they have sports fields, a running loop, and all kind of nice spots to picnic or fly a kite, as some few children were doing that day. Eos had the idea to ask many questions to each person we found agreeable to be on camera. This way, she said she’d be able to use different answers in all the future episodes and we wouldn’t have to film as many people. The main list of questions we’d come up with was the following:

1) What is the best-selling record album of all-time?

2) What percentage of the average human’s weight is blood?

3) How many miles is the moon from Earth?

4) Who invented the computer mouse?

5) Who was the first Emperor of China, ruling between 221 BCE and 210 BCE?

6) What is the main difference between an opera and a musical?

7) How many countries are on the continent of Europe?

8) How many US Presidents have been assassinated?

9) Who was Michael Faraday?

10) The original Latin word sinister means what?

The night before we started the Ask Otis questions, Eos announced that she wanted to know all kind of stuff about being Druze. We were seating in this Jacuzzi at the Park La Brea pool where she has a membership. I was her guest for some few dollars only and it was late, like maybe 9:30 at night or so. We were the only two people in the place, except for some small Latino woman who was doing some cleaning up of the pool chairs with yellow rubber dishwashing gloves on her hands.

Anyway, Eos said she’d never met a Druze before. So I told her how basically I wasn’t doing any praying or anything special for it. You just need to be born from a mother and father who are Druze and that’s it: you are basically Druze. My parents are secular, but even so, I told her that religion is always a small part of growing up in a small community, even if you’re not practicing because it’s part of how a family comes to be together and comes to inhabit a place. For a lot of the Druze people of Israel, that place is called Daliyat el-Carmel, located on Mount Carmel, some 25 kilometers southeast of the Mediterranean port city of Haifa.

She heard Lynette’s voice before she actually saw her. Standing behind Greg in the doorway, she would have had to lean around him to catch a glimpse, like a grinning child popping aside to take credit for faux rabbit ears in a photograph. She didn’t want to take credit for anything right now. She would simply wait.

First she heard Greg’s slightly baffled voice – “Hi, can I help you?” followed by Lynette’s unctuous upper-hand tone, feigning surprise. “Oh, you must be Greg. Hi. My name’s Lynette…”

“Oh, Lynette -- hi!” Amy willed herself to wait for Lynette to identify herself before acknowledging her by name; so many “Greg, sweetie, this is my pottery instructor, Lynette.”

“Oh, hey,” Greg said, smiling, now reoriented to the situation, certain of his place in it. Amy met Lynette’s mischievous green eyes, which were torturing her with bemused calculation, deciding what to do. Please, Amy tried to convey.

“So, based on the pottery Amy brings home, I’m guessing you teach the remedial course,” Greg’s blustery voice telegraphed the unexpected pleasure of teasing two attractive women. Lynette looked at Amy, and it seemed that her glance contained a blend of contempt and pity. “I’m not sure whether that one purple thing Amy made is a deformed measuring cup or a water bowl for a hamster on hallucinogenic drugs.”

Eos and I finished our dinner and walked back along the twisty path lined with all kind of nice little flowers and shrubs like purple iris and lavender. In between the plants, there were dripping irrigation tubes of brown or black, just like back home in my village, and also at the kibbutzim. Most people don’t know, but it was at a kibbutz in 1960 or so that an Israeli man with the name of Simcha Blass first laid down this dripping pipe. Well, there was always irrigation of this sort, but the tiny holes in the pipes were frequently becoming blocked by earth, sand and all kind of stuff like this. But Simcha Blass found some way to use friction instead of the tiny holes to slow the water down and save it. In a desert, of course each drop is very valuable and the drip method you’ll see everywhere.

Also on the path toward her place I saw something which was looking exactly like the reichardia tingitana flower, which I think is the scientific family name I read once. I don’t know how you are calling it in English but the flower is small and delicate and you can eat it. In fact, where I come from, the Bedouin people use it instead of lettuce for salads.

A day or two earlier

The thing about Warren is that you can never get pissed at him, even when he invites you to a party where you don’t know a single person, and texts you, sorry Holtzy. Had to bail. I send him a text that says, YOU OWE ME, and he writes back, I know, but you can handle it.

And he’s right. I can. But I am a little pissed, because I just moved to LA and I don’t know many people except Warren, whose supposed to be my best friend since middle school when we were co-captains of our quizbowl team. Back then, girls rolled their eyes at him, partly because he had a pizza face, and partly because he was born with the left arm and hand of a T-Rex, disturbingly puny, polio-like and ineffective—no, not thalidomide, rather it was genetic, an autosomal recessive trait.

But now he’s this big hotshot concert promoter, who buffed out and gets free stuff that all the ladies want. I went to Stanford and he went to UC San Diego, and here we are five years later meeting in the middle.

Warren texts: meet a girl for once, would you Holtzy

Me: it’ll be easier without you messing with my game

Warren: the only game you have is in war craft

I’m about to type, who has the higher score? when the lights go out. The screen of my iPhone is the only glow. A woman in the corner says, “What the fuck?” and panic whispering spreads across the room.