I Make Fun of State Quarters: Colorado

Ah yes, Colorado. Another one of those states that you just know is packed to the very edges of its square borders with snow-capped peaks, pine forests, scampering wildlife, burbling brooks, and just about every other beautiful aspect of nature you can imagine. It's known as the Centennial State because it gained its statehood in 1876, but if it had been a year earlier or later it may well have been the Landscape State or some such thing. So the state quarter will surely have to take in some of the-

TheUS50.com

Oh come on.

All right, so it did at least take in a scenic landscape, even if it is just the one mountain. But when you put it on a quarter it still looks like a desolate, gray, apocalypse-blasted wasteland. I half expect Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee to be trudging along in the foreground in a futile journey to find salvation. The mountains are pretty much gray anyway, although the surrounding landscape tends to be a beautiful mixture of greens and blues when you actually see it. You have to use a bit of imagination to see this as the "Colorful Colorado" it is in reality.

Like this! (aircoreyell.wordpress.com)

Norman Nemeth designed and engraved this quarter, which portrays a scene in the Rocky Mountains. According to StateQuarterGuide.com, it won out of a field of 1,500 entries and got final approval from the Colorado governor and U.S. Mint. The other options also seemed to be mostly nature-based, although one would have portrayed the 10th Mountain Division.

Since several other quarters have used state symbols as a way of garnishing their coins, I also thought to look at the list of Colorado's symbols. These include the greenback cutthroat trout, which would be perfect because hey, it's already got money in its name. And there's even a state grass: blue grama grass. Thrilling stuff. And in 1992 the state adopted square dancing as the official folk dance of Colorado, because apparently the legislature had nothing better to do than weigh in on the fierce rivalries among the different factions of folk dancing.

These two were high-kicked down by a rival Bulgarian dance troupe soon after this photo was taken (barynya.com)

It makes sense to include the Rockies, though it did risk a demand for more garnishing features. The Aspen community may have insisted that there be an addition of ski lifts and time-share condos to the slopes of the featured mountain. Frat boys may have wanted a shout-out to the brewing history of Golden by having giant Phi Beta Kappa members "tap the Rockies." Or maybe they would have asked to just scrub the whole thing and have a Coors logo as the design, with the unforgettable Coors slogan: "It's cold, and we're taking credit for what the refrigerator did."

In the end, though, as long as quarters are always going to have that bleak end-of-world color to them, perhaps the Colorado could have gone with a theme from Stephen King's apocalyptic plaque novel The Stand. Hey, maybe they could have even made the official design Mother Abigail Freemantle and redone George Washington a bit to make him Randall Flagg. Need to choose between good and evil but aren't sure where you stand? Flip a coin!

Mother Abigail Freemantle, official state seer of Colorado (sharetv.org)

A Demand For More Epic Board Game Movies

When I was growing up, I went through a minor phase where I thought the board game Battleship was the coolest thing ever. The gameplay, for those of you who haven't tried it out, involves a pair of players guessing the coordinates on an opponents' board and trying to hit the five ships of a fleet set out there. It involves a bit of luck and a bit of strategy, as players have to guess where the vessels are most likely to be. More often than not, it gets a little tedious as most games wind up sinking everything but the two-space destroyer and players spend turn after turn trying to hunt it down.

So it's a rudimentary naval warfare simulation where the main action is players sending white and red pegs into their opponent's board and tiny plastic ship models. It's good enough for a time passer, I guess, but basing a major motion picture around it doesn't seem like it would work. Hollywood must have plenty of good ideas floating around, after all, and-

(deathfall.com)

Oh. Um...

Well maybe I'm jumping to conclusions. Battleships were long ago mustered out of navies anyway as fleets transitioned more to aircraft carriers and support vessels, so making a movie about a battleship could be a good look back at the days when these powerful dreadnaughts ruled the sea. Maybe it will unearth one of the incredible stories of naval engagements. Maybe it can do a modern version of the classic Battleship Potemkin. It could even just be a good documentary. Perhaps-



What. The fuck. Was that?

It kind of looks like Michael Bay got out of bed one morning and said, "Wow, my Transformers trilogy sure is a magnum opus of modern kin-a-ma. If only I could work in more battleships like I did in Pearl Harbor. OH I'VE GOT IT. I'VE GOT IT I'M A GENIUS..."

Except that's not what happened. Michael Bay might be kicking himself for not having this brainstorm, but Battleship is the project of director Peter Berg as well as writers Jon and Erich Hoeber. I feel a little bad about ragging on Berg, since he went to Macalester College (my alma mater) and because his filmography as a director and actor has a few decent things. The Hoebers have have written a grand total of three other movies, of which Red has done the best with a 7/10 rating on both Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB user ratings.

But even if this team has a few satisfactory credits under their collective belts, the trailers for Battleship still suggest it's one of those movies Hollywood makes every now and then to whet the all-American appetite for explosions. Even so, it's pointing the industry back to board games as an inspiration for movies, something I don't think has really been done since Clue. So with that in mind, here are my suggestions for more epic movies based on board games. I expect full credit and remuneration for any movies that result from these wonderful ideas.

Candyland

An epic comparable in scope only to the Lord of the Rings trilogy, this tale might well have to be broken up into three films as well. Follow a couple of kids who get sucked into a magical land of tooth-rotting goodness to discover a world in peril. Civil war threatens the land, and King Kandy and Queen Frostine must stand fast against the growing army of Lord Licorice and Gloppy the Molasses Monster. Depending on the box office, there may well be room for a sequel hook in which the triumphant forces of good must face the terrible forces of Emperor Nutrition and his bombardment of fresh fruit and whole grains.

(screenrant.com)

And you're going to have to take my word for it when I say I wrote all that before I read this article saying that they're making a movie and that's totally what they're trying to do.

Settlers of Catan

Stupid trash can shutting down my brickyard... (clusterflock.org)

A tense political drama, this movie would look at the tensions inherent among a group of colonists on the habitable moon of a gas giant. Things build to the boiling point when one group sends forces to occupy a rich ore-producing region in response to another group's efforts to build a longer road and corner the market on space sheep. Can the situation be defused, or will the corporate backers of the enterprise upset the entire thing in frustration?

Risk

In the not-too-distant future, mankind is caught off-guard when the entire planet is suddenly occupied by a mechanical army known as R.I.S.K., or Robotic International Sexy Killbots. It consists entirely of androids played by Summer Glau. Mankind must rally to take back Earth, striking where the Glau-troops are most thin, making risky journeys such as a transatlantic invasion of Brazil from Africa, turning Australia into a fortress, and resisting the urge to fight a land war in Asia until we are ready to do so. The movie will emulate Risk by having a running time as long as the average game, or approximately ten hours.

Pictured: the gist of approximately nine hours of the movie (sciencefictionwallpaper.com)

Monopoly

All right, I'm not even going to touch this one because there's a group that's already done an excellent job with a fake movie trailer. Though it does make me think about opening up a strip club called The Community Chest.



Jenga

A drama in the vein of The Towering Inferno, the story would follow a skyscraper company trying to be the tallest building in the world. In their struggle to meet the challenge on budget, they start cannibalizing the lower floors to add onto the upper floors. During a party to celebrate the opening of the building, the unstable structure starts to fall apart and it becomes a race to rescue the people inside.

"Now get me O.J. Simpson to play a security guard" (inhabitat.com)

Pictionary

A hair-raising thriller about a crack police unit that tracks pictorial clues at crime scenes (because if TV shows are right there are plenty of more ridiculous teams on the law enforcement payroll). The prowess and mettle of the team is put to the test when a serial killer strikes, leaving sketchy pictures about his next destination and granting only a single minute of call time after the discovery of each clue to grant more clues about where he'll hit next. Much of the movie will be taken up by the killer shouting things like, "You already guessed panda bear! Three times! It's not a goddamn panda bear." And at the start of another call: "It was square dancing! How did you not get that?!"

The killer can't believe you didn't get "Lewiston, Idaho" (thesimpsonsforever.tumblr.com)

Checkers

An offshoot of My Dinner with Andre, this movie would be a two-hour shoot of two old men playing checkers in a park. Their conversation touches on numerous topics, like "What do the kids see in that darn rap music" and "Did you hear how the City Council wants to buy a new snowplow? They're out of control!"

Canadians get a little wild (blog.drawn.ca)

Double Feature Review: Rififi and Super 8

Rififi


Synopsis: A thief, recently released from prison, joins a pair of comrades in an attempt to pull one last heist.

The bad news first: In my personal experience, there's an odd flaw that happens in just about every heist movie. It's always interesting to see the way people put the scheme together, but once they actually start carrying out the heist the pace somehow slows down. It's especially the case in Rififi, where the theft is carried out in near-total silence with some aspects occurring in real time. It doesn't really detract from the story, and it isn't a bad scene (it's what many reviews praise the most about the film). But the meatiest parts of the movie are certainly the sections on either end of the heist sequence.

The other is more of a nitpick. Aside from providing one of the characters with a lounge singer girlfriend, the introduction of the "Rififi" song does little more than offer a musical interlude to the first act.

The good stuff: This isn't too well-known a movie. If it were, it would probably be more widely regarded as a classic piece of French cinema. As it stands, it's already regarded as a classic of the heist genre, with such an effective heist plan that the movie was initially banned in some countries since it was such an effective primer for how to pull off a robbery.

The real strength of the movie comes from the characters. A great deal of information comes from a few decisive pieces of dialogue or the way a shot is framed, and throughout the movie some more layers are added to each person. It makes the film all the more powerful on an emotional level in the second half, when everyone has to handle the aftermath of the heist.

It might be better to pop this in without reading the description on the Netflix envelope, at least if the one on the envelope I received is any indication. It essentially gave away the entire story up until the last 10 minutes or so. It's a testament to the story that it's still fascinating even when you watch it like this. I'll just say that it's a masterfully done plot where the heist is a focal point but not the conclusion of the film as is so often the case.

Verdict: If you're a fan of heist movies and haven't seen this, it's a can't miss. Even if you aren't, this should be a story that will fascinate you.


Super 8


Synopsis: A group of teenage filmmakers witnesses a military train wreck and strange things soon start happening in their town.

The bad news first: There's always a bit of a risk putting a bunch of young actors together, and some are more capable than others. Even for a sci-fi movie, there are places where a suspension of disbelief is required. The spectacular train wreck in the beginning breaks pretty much every rule of physics, and the driver of the truck that collides head-on with it somehow survives.

Another minor gripe is that there are a few parts of the story that seem kind of vestigial, such as the introduction of a love triangle that goes absolutely nowhere. There are also times when the exposition can be a little clunky, including a film reel that unravels much of the mystery in one go. And without spoiling too much, the mysterious creature in this seemed to be a bit too much of a throwback to Cloverfield. They probably could have come up with more of an original design.

The good stuff: This was promoted and largely reviewed as a bit of a throwback to the classic alien movies of the 80s, a la E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. At its best, Super 8 succeeds in doing this. Some reviews I've seen complain that the movie tries to emulate Steven Spielberg to such an extent that it loses its originality. This might be true at certain points, but it also has much darker elements than the Spielberg classics. Overall, parceling out the story is very good. In both the human stories and sci-fi element, most things are revealed at a pretty good pace, keeping you wondering about things that are introduced from the beginning.

Even if the characters are sometimes painted with a pretty broad brush, they're still pretty memorable. The narrative makes it clear that there aren't really any heroes or villains, just people doing what they think is right or needed. It certainly doesn't play out like the more cuddly alien dramas of yesteryear, but that lends the story some more realism.

Verdict: If you only have time to choose between this or a Spielberg classic, go with Spielberg. Otherwise, this is a fun sci-fi flick to check out.

Top 5 Quiet Deaths Of Web Series

Somewhere in the midst of the evolution of the Internet, there came the development of Flash games and movies. And yea, it was good. Thanks to this, people with a creative idea and a little bit of know-how are still able to put together fun (and maddeningly addictive) video games as well as stylish, creative animated shorts.

But quite a few of these series are labors of love, produced by people in their 20s or thereabouts in their free time. The lucky few get popular enough to sustain their creator, but sometimes life intervenes in even these successes and the series quietly dies off. Though I'm sure there are plenty of series that have disappeared over the years, here are the top five ones I once followed that have stalled in their tracks, perhaps never to rouse again.

5. Waterman

Waterman still has a bit of spark left, and for that we have to credit Leslie Nielsen. More on that later.


Like a lot of Flash series, this one found a home on Newgrounds, an aggregation site that offers people to submit their animations, games, and audio tracks to an appreciative or not so appreciative audience. "Bryan Waterman's series has serious television potential and a huge following," is the website's glowing blurb at the top of the Waterman page. "His advice: 'You will enjoy the series a lot more if you do not compare it to The Family Guy.'"

Refraining from that comparison is a little difficult, since Waterman shares the same predilection for cutting away from the narrative for a random joke. The randomness carries over to the overall setup, which is more Seinfeld-esque in the way it puts a bunch of strange characters together and sees how their relationships shake out in a strange situation. The cast includes Waterman, the hopefully more dull-witted expy of the creator; Pal, his slightly more level-headed friend; Ice Cream Girl, Waterman's occasional love interest; Roy-Bot, a man with the delusional belief that he's a robot; and Mr. Dillo, a wealthy armadillo. Along the way, they competed in a high-stakes ping-pong tournament, battled pirate reenactors, and befriended a robotic Chuck Norris.

The jokes sometimes fall quite flat, as is always the risk when one tries to turn a pop culture reference into a gag and occasionally decides that a reference is as good as a joke. Still, the series was quite enjoyable and had some pretty clever episodes along the way. Waterman says he was friends with the creators of the immensely popular web series Homestar Runner, dropping a few homages to them along the way. It also took the odd step of including Easter eggs in the form of text that could be read only by pausing the video and zooming in. The series had about 10 episodes and a few shorts in its run.

The disappearance:
The seventh episode was uploaded in August of 2004, and the next installment wasn't uploaded until some years later. It doesn't appear on the Newgrounds site, perhaps because it wasn't as well-received by fans; the plot basically involved the cast walking through a white void and performing with Reel Big Fish, who agreed to cameo themselves (one of several notable guest appearances of bands or celebrities in Flash videos over the years). In 2006, the last Waterman submission arrived and the series went out in a blaze of glory: upgraded graphics and a full 20-minute spectacle.

Bryan Waterman, meanwhile, started up a small graphic design and animation company in Boston known simply as Waterman Studios; the website says he's been in this line of work for over a decade, though he credits the start of the cartoon in 2003 and its modest success with helping him choose a career. He has continued to produce a few cartoons and shorts, available under the "distractions" tab.

However, Waterman has always intended to make the series go out on an even grander note and he's been trying his damndest to produce a full-length movie. A few snippets have appeared, including this impressive sample of the first two minutes. He even got Leslie Nielsen on board as voice talent. In a summary of the production history, Waterman says he nearly bankrupted himself and his company trying to get the movie (originally tagged for a 2008 release) up and running; an independent fundraising effort also failed to get a good response.


Then in November of 2010, Leslie Nielsen died of complications from pneumonia. What this means is that The Waterman Movie, should it ever see the light of day, would be the actor's final piece of work. Waterman says there has been a resurgence of interest in the film as a result and, though a year has passed, he is hoping the movie can eventually be made. "I have lost too much over the years that this project has been in development to never see it come to fruition, and the only personal gain that I have any interest in obtaining from all of this would be the satisfaction of giving my friend Leslie Nielsen another opportunity to keep us laughing," Waterman concludes. With a sentiment like that, there's nothing to do but wish him the best of luck. And maybe send in a donation or two, of course.

4. College University


College University got its start in March of 2001 with a short introduction to the characters and their graduation from high school (later expanded into a flashback episode in the series). It followed a couple of everyman protagonists, Mike and Parks, and their adventures at the titular school. It incorporated quite a bit of random elements, including a washed up kung fu star who runs a campus coffee/hash bar and Optimus Prime as a supporting character. The episodes evolved from the basic college challenges to bizarre plots such as the premiere of a reality show pitting 1980s action movie heroes against each other.

CU was a little clunky in its early days, with fairly basic animation and some slow pacing. Once it found its niche, though, it was able to have the characters play against each other fairly well. The series had 11 full-length episodes (some of which were divided up into multiple parts due to size) and several shorts. It managed to bring in Macho Man Randy Savage, Cynthia Rothrock, and the alternative rock band O.A.R. for guest spots. They also invented the game KushLash, which seems to have a cult following.

The disappearance:
The posting pace started to slow down in later episodes, with the 10th one appearing in 2005 and the 11th one showing up just about two years later. The creators, Mike and Andy Parker, once had an indicator on the website to show where the process on the latest CU episode was in script, storyboards, animation, and sound work. They eventually cautioned that episodes would be a lengthy affair, especially given their work and personal lives.

For a time, the site was updated with shorter, CU-related content that was usually timed to coincide with holidays. Then, out of the blue, the CU page started including links to other series the Parkers were doing. They were cranking out episodes at a much faster pace, usually one a week to the point where they boasted nearly as many as CU, and hosting them on CollegeHumor.com. It seems they hit a point where they were able to go through the production pretty quickly, but lost interest in continuing the adventures of their original characters. These new series still got off in a more refined way than the brothers' first project, with better animation and a good sense of where they wanted to go. They included Clock Suckers, about an irresponsible group of time traveling youngsters; Player Haters, about the adventures of some role-playing game characters through cyberspace; and The Game Show, wherein Mike and Andy give the Mystery Science Theater 3000 treatment to video games.

"Cloooocck suckers!"

According to Mike Parker's LinkedIn page, he worked for HMSDesign for several years after his graduation in 2001, then struck out on his own by launching LowBrow Studios in 2006 to provide animation services for TV and the Internet; the page says he was also a freelance animator for CollegeHumor for the first four years the company was in existence. People going to collegeuniv.com, the former site for the series, brings you to the Lowbrow site. There, you can still find the CU episodes along with numerous other examples of their work. I'm not sure what happened to Andy; there are three employees listed besides Mike, and Andy isn't one of them.

3. Dubtoons

"I'm dead either way, aren't I you stupid thick cunt?"

Dubbing over cartoons, games, movies, etc. etc. to humorous effect probably came out of the traditional dubs for foreign movies brought to new markets. The "lost in translation" effect along can be pretty funny, and it's been about 20 years since the people at Mystery Science Theater 3000 started adding their own humorous overlay to terrible B-movies; not a dub, per se, but similar. And though I haven't seen too much in the way of joking dubs aside from Spike TV's MXC, a re-dubbed and re-edited version of a crazy Japanese game show, it's a fun thing to try out and you can find a few of these projects on YouTube.

Dubtoons grew out of a series of YouTube videos known alternatively as "Boro Tintin" and "Teesside Tintin." The videos were created by Nick Donnelly and Andrew Stebulitis as a joke among friends, but it soon went viral. The basic premise is that they've dubbed The Adventures of Tintin, an animated cartoon following Herge's beloved comic book series, to make the titular character and everyone else who appears in the series a foul-mouthed, rude resident of Middlesbrough, England. The parody has a lot of references to this city that go over the head of the non-Boro viewers, and perhaps we're a little detached just on the basis of not ever meeting any of the more rough-and-tumble city residents. Overall, though, it's pretty clever the way the plots of the cartoon have been done over.



Donnelly and Stebulis later created Dubtoons.com to showcase the cartoons as well as a few Teesside dubs of more obscure toons such as Dogtanian and the Three Muskehounds, although the comments on those usually complained that they wanted the focus kept on Teesside Tintin. It was a pretty basic site, aiming to get a bit of revenue from T-shirt and ringtone sales while also inviting user submissions (which were inevitably blasted as being inferior to the creators' work).

The disappearance:
Dubtoons.com disappeared quite some time ago. Going there now brings you to one of those stand-in pages asking if you'd like to buy the domain; the links that are available on the page, oddly enough, are to a bunch of porno sites.
According to this article from the Middlesborough Evening Gazette, Donnelly and Stebulitis formed the film company Moving Picture Productions in 2005, when they were about 24 years old. I remember discovering the Teesside Tintin cartoons in about 2006, so they were still cranking them out while looking to make legit films. It looks like they've made several movies and short videos since then, and the company is still around offering corporate services as well as wedding and social videos. No doubt they're keeping pretty busy.

Like Waterman, there seems to be just a bit of life left in Teesside Tintin. Though the original YouTube channel has disappeared Donnelly and Stebulitis, perhaps spurred by the news that The Adventures of Tintin is hitting theaters as a full-length animated film, have even continued making Teesside Tintin at a slower rate. They have a YouTube channel containing a small mix of older cartoons, presumably their favorites, as well as some brand new ones that went up in the spring; dozens of others seem to have gone missing, although a few have been salvaged and uploaded by fans. More recently, in late October, the boys dubbed a trailer for the movie.



2. Fensler Films

"You tol' me do things, I done runnin'..."

Another dub project, albeit one that got a much bigger following, the Fensler Films contribution to cyberspace may be better known as "Those G.I. Joe PSAs." Back in the mid-80's, a cartoon started airing based on the line of G.I. Joe action figures and the comic book it inspired. The episodes concluded with a brief public service announcement in which the Joes saved dull-witted kids from harm while imparting a bit of a lesson. These always concluded with the kids declaring, "Now we know!" and the Joe responding, "And knowing is half the battle."
Eric Fensler thought these were perfect fodder for re-imagining, and he was right. He cranked out a total of 25 PSAs in 2003, dubbed and recut so as to remove nearly all trace of a lesson and become obscure if hilarious parodies. The most popular one is undoubtedly "Pork Chop Sandwiches," a video in which the Joe shouts that line while rushing to help some kids who have set their kitchen on fire (imparting the fire safety advice, "Oh shit, get the fuck out of here!"). These managed to go viral even before YouTube came about, getting passed around via e-mail.



The disappearance:
This is kind of an odd case. The videos have all disappeared from their original website, but have survived and proliferated on YouTube and other sites.

After about a year, Hasbro sent a cease and desist order to Fensler. The letter declared that the PSAs were "unauthorized derivative works of the G.I. Joe cartoons." Furthermore, Hasbro said, the use of the G.I. Joe logo at the end could violate trademark laws "because it is likely to cause confusion or mistake as to Hasbro's authorization or sponsorship of or association with the derivative PSAs." Despite the fact that the number of people likely to be confused by Snow Job yelling at a few children to "get that kid off my ice, you little wankers" would be small indeed, Fensler acquiesced to the request, and the videos disappeared.

By that time, of course, they had been dispersed to countless inboxes and other websites and Hasbro had no way of shutting down all of those. Since they made their way to YouTube, they have had millions of views. According to KnowYourMeme.com, Fensler later put the videos back on his website, with or without Hasbro's authorization, but if so they have all disappeared again. In fact, Fensler's site now only includes a music video he worked on, a series of links to other sites, and his contact information.

Like a lot of his Internet humor comrades, Fensler now works in video production. He did a bit of work with Cartoon Network's Adult Swim, putting together promos for Sealab 2021 and becoming a writer on Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! Most recently, according to his IMDB page, he wrote a short called The Terrys.
1. Homestar Runner


Homestar Runner may well be the most triumphant example of a successful independent web series, and that makes it all the sadder that updates slowed to a crawl and eventually stopped altogether.

The series, created by Mike and Matt Chapman - "The Brothers Chaps" - of Georgia, grew out of their mockery of children's books. They decided to do a story about the Homestar Runner, "a terrific athlete," and impart a good lesson in his effort to win a grape-carrying contest against the villainous and dishonest Strong Bad. Their initial forays into expanding the story followed along the same lines, including a cartoon where Homestar and his best friend take on Strong Bad and his pals in a wrestling match to retrieve his stolen star.

Then the brothers made a discovery: the bad guy was a lot more fun. So began Strong Bad E-mails, wherein the Mexican-masked, boxing glove wearing villain started to answer fan e-mails and spin various scenarios and sketches around them. Around a core set of characters - including Homestar, a nearly indescribable yellow lackey called The Cheat, polar opposite Strong brothers Strong Mad and Strong Sad, the shady concession store owner Bubs, and so on - the site put out a hilarious short each week. Based on the e-mails alone, they were able to expand on the universe with new settings, in-jokes, and characters. If you've come across Trogdor the Burninator, a dragon with a beefy arm sticking out of the back of his neck, this is where he originated. Along with the e-mails, the site put together some longer cartoons, video games, and other content.

The occasional custom conversion van...

The series became a huge hit, to the point where if you sent in an e-mail it would be competing with thousands of others. There were no ads to be found on the site, but the brothers managed to get by. After all, they were virtually the only ones involved (Matt on the voices, Mike on the animation, and Mike's wife Missy Palmer supplying the voice for the one female character). There was an extensive store offering T-shirts, posters, DVDs, and for a time an obscure "Kick the Cheat" toy. I once calculated that if even a small fraction of the world's population knew of the cartoon and that tiny fraction bought a single piece of $20 merchandise each year on average, the brothers were probably making salaries equivalent to CEOs. That might be a bit of an overstatement, but I'm sure they've done quite well.

The disappearance:
Babies happened.

Palmer gave birth to a daughter in 2006, while Matt's wife Jackie gave birth to a one daughter in 2007 and another in 2009. It was right about this time that the updates to the site started to slow to a crawl. The site even lampshaded a seven-week hiatus following the birth of Mike and Palmer's daughter with a cartoon entitled Welcome Back. As the stops and starts got more frequent, the cartoons were just regular submissions no reference to the gaps in time. One short cartoon in March of 2010 came about after a full five months of inactivity on the site. By the looks of it, the fact that every single person involved in the cartoon was dealing with toddlers took a bit of a toll on daily operations.

It's all about you, isn't it? 

The last e-mail Strong Bad answered was in August of 2009, after answering just three inquiries on his newest computer (a running gag being that Strong Bad always used ridiculously outdated computers, although his latest was more up to date). Some new content finally came around in December of 2010, some eight months after the last real update and over a year after a more significant update. Homestar Wiki has been keeping closer tabs on the site and a few stray appearances of the characters elsewhere (such as Strong Bad in a poker game released by Telltale Games), and if you count that things have still been fairly active. The most recent update to the wiki is an update provided to the site in September, detailing some aspects of a game the brothers were developing but gave up on.

There's also the success of the site to be considered; while the rest of the people on this list managed to build off the skills that went into their web series to create careers, the Chapmans were able to fully turn their series into a career. From a fairly early point, they were able to sustain themselves by merchandise sales. It would probably be too much to estimate that they had become millionaires, but odds are they've been able to live comfortably off the site and any continued revenue from the store. Still, we hope they can start to devote some more time to the site as their children grow older and bring the people of Free Country USA back to glory.

YouTube Scavenger Hunt, Volume II: Slow Motion

As the great Dave Chappelle once said, just about everyone and everything looks cooler in slow motion. Some day, I hope to do the slow motion nonchalant walk away from a giant explosion or dial things down to bullet time or something. But until that time, I give you 10 random actions or things I thought to check YouTube for to see if there's slow motion footage of them.

10. Chopping wood



A few years ago, my parents moved to a house that once again had a fireplace, and they added a wood-burning stove to boot. So now every year they get a pile of firewood dumped in the driveway, and my dad tends to correspond it to my summer visit so I can help split and stack the winter fuel. I tend to alternate between cleaving the piece like a big burly man and having the axe bounce off it with barely a dent left like a nancy boy. Whoever filmed this split the difference (HA) by getting a nice cut on a rather clumsy swing (even though another wood split video shows them neatly slicing through two pieces of firewood). Video is from LucidMovement, a slow motion specialist, in June of 2007.

Views: 7,653
Comments: 8

9. Whip



The top result, with nearly half a million views, is a Discovery Channel clip from a show called Time Warp (apparently about how cool things look in slow motion) where a couple of guys bullshit about whips without showing any slow motion at all. The end of a whip breaks the sound barrier when it creates the crack, and although this guy fooling around in his backyard doesn't give a nice close-up view of that it's still pretty neat. Shared by ksteryou, a bullwhip enthusiast and no doubt adventurous archaeologist, in December of 2008.

Views: 12,787
Comments: 33

8. Kiss



I remember the sitcoms and other shows of my youth as always portraying a really slow leadup to a kiss, both in the interaction between characters and the final magnetic pull between their lips. In retrospect, it was kind of like watching the docking scene in 2001, and offered ample opportunity for the characters to break off and pretend like it never happened (TV Tropes has a whole category for that).

Then I grew up and found out that kissing is a much speedier affair, except in the lazier makeouts. TV shows seem to have reflected the reality more in recent years, which might be why most of the results for a slow motion kiss are just scenes from shows slowed down a bit. Here's one from House, posted by superfan JustHuddy.

Views: 77,816
Comments: 81

7. Water balloon



Odds are you've already encountered a video or photo of a water balloon exploding, and that awesome moment when the skin has burst but the water remains in the globular shape of the balloon for awhile before dissolving into droplets or splattering about someone's face. This video's view count is higher than the population of several small countries, after all. In case you haven't seen anything like it, though...there it is. Uploaded by DiscoveryNetworks, the Discovery Channel page of YouTube, in January of 2009.

Views: 24,446,597
Comments: 32,729

6. Bottle breaking



Oh it's such a waste of a good beer...Put on the site by HumorKick, a website of humorous videos and photos and articles, way back in November of 2006.

Views: 3,171
Comments: 5

5. Card shuffling



I'm forgoing the main result, a slowed-down scene from a Western, in favor of this neat little parlor shuffle. HQMedia, or High Quality Stock Footage, brought this to us on July 29 of this year.

Views: 1 (just me??)
Comments: 0

4. Wrecking ball



An already beat-up old car gets punched in the top. It is indeed a pretty thing to see. This was uploaded by monkeycu in November of 2008.

Views: 7,445
Comments: 5

3. Guitar strings



Long, long ago in ninth grade, a couple of friends of mine used a slow-mo camera for a science class presentation and the outcome looked a bit like this grainy, close-up video of a guitar string getting plucked. And yes, the presentation was still a lot better than anything the rest of us came up with. Also, this was brought to us by twopamels of Spain, whose uploads are a mix of slow motion and music.

Views: 12,798
Comments: 3

2. Match strike



I wonder if the number of pyromaniacs skyrocketed after the development of cameras with high frames-per-second rates. This thing of beauty, uploaded in July of 2008, comes from 78James, an Englishman who seems to specialize in slow motion videos.

Views: 54,847
Comments: 41

1. Cannon firing



If you're reading this before you see the video, I'll save you some time: you can stop after five seconds unless you want to see 51 seconds of smoke wafting about. This was uploaded on July 5 of this year by MrPatriotOne, who had another video of his cannon, a biscuits and gravy tutorial, and something on a Second Amendment March because apparently the government wanted to take his cannons away.

Views: 248
Comments: 0

That's What I Miss About Mass.: Abbey Cutters

I attended my five-year college reunion in St. Paul, Minnesota earlier this year and realized, as I did on a visit two years ago, that I miss the place an awful lot. A significant portion of that comes from the fact that I had a lot of fun with good friends around that time, something that can't exactly be replicated with everyone scattered around the country and creating lives for themselves, but it still got me thinking about my own wanderings. There was a lot of time in Lanesborough, Massachusetts; the better part of four years in St. Paul; stints in England and Vermont; and a few years in Maine. Though I enjoy where I'm at now in New London, Connecticut, there are still places and things I miss from my old stomping grounds and thought I'd start documenting them.

Let's start in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, just south of the town I grew up in, with a little place called Abbey Cutters.


This screenshot from Google's Street View is, unfortunately, the only photo I can manage to pull of the business. It doesn't have a website, as perhaps is the case with most barbers. If your main service is cutting hair, it might not really be worth it to keep your shop in cyberspace just to let people know about its address, phone number, and hours. Especially when a place like Abbey Cutters likely has a lot of word-of-mouth traffic.

Abbey Cutters has more personality than any barber shop I've been in. It has the standard setup of a waiting area with a few magazines and a few chairs (only one of which is ever used). But the first thing you notice is the art. Dozens of prints of well-known pieces, posters for classic movies like Grease and Spartacus, photography, and a lot of quirky works cover every free space of the walls. A price sign at the counter offers the costs for various trims. Of course, they all cost the same and are simply qualified with conditions such as "Haircut with unwanted advice (happens often)." A relatively recent addition, gifted to owner Teddy after my family moved away, is a cactus in the window that has grown nearly out of control.

Teddy is a novelist in his spare time, working on stories about boxing. I kind of got the sense that he was looking to get his foot in the door in the writing world and then close up shop, but with a place like this you kind of hope that wouldn't be the case. I wish him all the luck in his writing endeavors, of course, but he could do worse than to be a famous or semi-famous author who has a barber shop.

Abbey Cutters (artist's conception)

Now I'm not one to insult someone who has done my shearing since, and I'm especially not one to criticize the woman who has control over a significant part of my appearance now. But you get kind of spoiled if you have Teddy as the guy who cuts your hair. I've visited three barbers since leaving Massachusetts and had a decent conversation or two with each one, but Teddy is one of those rare members of the old guard. He'll cut your hair and regale you at the same time with a perpetually upbeat demeanor and unmistakable Brooklyn accent. He's the priciest of the barbers I've been to, but you get plenty for the buck. A shampoo, some styling, and of course that advice, wanted or unwanted.

All of this is a long-winded way of saying that Teddy is the kind of barber who will chat with you non-stop. Unless you're the most tight-lipped and somber patron in need of hair shortening, you'll be able to carry on a good conversation as it meanders to everything from space exploration to sex.

Posted for you people who search for Summer Glau and sex and think this image represents that. And because we haven't seen her on the blog in nearly a year. Also, "It's the hardest thing to get right...hair"

Teddy is the kind of character you don't get all that often anymore in the barber shop: a genial, humorous, shoulder-to-lean-on, competent fatherly type figure, and from Brooklyn to boot. Admittedly a specific genotype, but a valuable one nonetheless. Here's to his continued health, well-being, and business success.

Top 10 Stupidest Final Destination Deaths

I had to double time on this article, as I realized that the fifth Final Destination movie it was supposed to preview or coordinate with came out today. The series can be described in two sentences. "Teens escape death in a [plane crash/highway pileup/roller coaster accident/race track disaster/bridge collapse]. Death stalks them one by one, and claims them in gruesome ways." It's the same damn movie five times over, and people keep going to see it. Apparently the first one was halfway decent, though now they're milking the series until, in the true Final Destination fashion, the auto-milking machine starts to suck out blood and innards (ie, film critics will personally murder anyone who continues to watch the new movies that come out and call it part of the experience, and the gross after all the lawsuits will be well in the red).

Now I know I'm complaining about something I haven't seen, what with...well, not watching any of these movies. But it seems like the only reason there's still a demand for this series is to see what ways the writers can come up with people to die. A lot of people have a certain morbid curiosity (it's why I know what a lot of the series' deaths are, after all), so they'll fork over the cash to see how the latest batch bites it. Most of the time it involves some sort of elaborate Rube Goldberg setup. Rube Goldberg, incidentally, died at the ripe old age of 87 after a long illness so apparently he and Death were on OK terms.

"It beats getting decapitated by an elevator."

So without further ado, here are my picks for the top 10 stupidest deaths in the Final Destination movies that have come out to date, minus the latest one which I will not watch. Keep in mind that there are the stupidest deaths...not the worst ways to die, of which there are plenty, but the ones that are absurd. Also, apologies for the clips I can't embed.

10. Movie theaters double as storage units for explosives (The Final Destination)

I'm really not sure how 3D movies came back. The glasses are less stupid-looking, and a bunch of theaters somehow became 3D capable, and quite a few movies now come in with this option. The better ones, like Avatar and How to Train Your Dragon, use it to make it something of an immersing experience without compromising the story. The worse movies use it as a gimmick to throw stuff at the audience. Case in point: this scene in The Final Destination.


Um...did we stumble into Inglourious Basterds or something? What mall theater leaves a depot of highly explosive materials in the megaplex where hundreds of people are concentrated? And not just highly explosive, but "spontaneously combustible" as the one barrel warns, so these things could just blow up for no reason at all. So we get the hot teens chewing the scenery over how they were supposed to be safe at this shitty movie within a shitty movie all along before the massive fireball blows out the screen and hurls a sharp piece of debris at the one girl for a last 3D thrill. Or perhaps your own theater just exploded and killed you? Those wags at The Final Destination sure know how to make you think, but they apparently don't know that most movie theaters have an emergency exit (aka, "the outside") behind the screen instead of a warehouse of nitroglycerin.

This technically doesn't qualify, since the whole sequence is just a vision and the blast is prevented. Still, enough explosives to level a block stored inside a movie theater...

9. The insanely unsafe race track (The Final Destination)

The Final Destination movies always start with some calamity killing dozens of people, and a handful escaping due to a character having a prescient filmstrip of the whole disaster. In the first two movies, it's a horrifying portrayal of a plane crash (thus the only real fitting use of "final destination") and a highway pileup. It gets into more obscure things from there, starting with a roller coaster mishap in the third movie and a race track catastrophe in the fourth movie.

To be fair, auto races aren't immune from tragedy; for some reason people still go to rally car races where the only thing separating spectators from injury or death is a line of tape making sure they don't go onto the track themselves. And a quick search of "race track disaster" brings up the the 24 Hours of Le Mans incident, in which a crashing vehicle did quite a few of the things portrayed here, albeit in the blink of an eye rather than an exaggerated period of half a dozen minutes. According to the Wikipedia article, the flying hood decapitated several people, the engine block flew into the crowd, and an estimated 84 people were killed.



That, however, was in 1955. This movie takes place some 55 years later, when modern race tracks have safety measures such as stronger fences and stop flags to ensure that every car doesn't obliterate itself and hurl debris into panicked grandstands. If the stadium at every racetrack had burning cars flying through flimsy fences and huge chunks of concrete collapsing into the stands, I think NASCAR would be a lot less popular, at least when it came to live attendance. On top of that, you have some downright ridiculous deaths such as the guy who slips and impales himself on a broken bench.

8. Unwanted face piercings (Final Destination 3)

If I'm interpreting this scene correctly, Ramona Flowers there is somehow interpreting a photo from the Carnival of Roller Coaster Death and translating it into "That little whirlwind is going to impale that guy with a bunch of stakes." At which point Death just decides that he'd much rather pile everyone under Ikea surplus and vault a bunch of stuff at a Goth girl so she falls into a possibly triggerless nail gun.



I don't do much in the way of home improvement projects, but I'm pretty sure nail guns need something to set them off. Was there a single frame of the nail gun trigger snagged on the table edge somewhere in this mess? Do some nail guns just operate by pressure alone? Let's watch that opening scene from the fourth season of The Wire, mainly to get a bit of a palette cleanser with some decent multimedia but also to learn some more about this particular power tool.



7. Window panes do not work that way! (Final Destination 2)

You've narrowly avoided a disaster which has killed dozens, and now the people who also cheated death are meeting their demise in ways which are gruesome and painful. In a sense, it's amazing these people aren't hiding out in a bomb shelter and waiting until Death is sated on the latest earthquake victims or something. But I guess you could stare Death in the eye and go about your daily business and run idiotically into a restricted zone to hassle some pigeons:



For shame, Final Destination 2 writers and producers. You couldn't think of some bloodier mishap, say a pane of glass guillotining him lengthwise from head to toe and leaving a couple of slices of human like you see in all the science museums these days? Instead, they decide that window panes versus humans must be done in a flat, head-on way that, for some reason, flattens this poor kid like he's made of mashed potatoes. Granted, this chart does suggest that giant panes of glass are heavy enough to do damage before they shatter, but judging from that clip I have to guess that Death was trying to trap him in the Phantom Zone and only got halfway through or something.

6. Muscles don't make you immortal, ass (Final Destination 3)

You've cheated death but discovered that Death is a nasty character and wants to, um, kill you. What's a guy to do? Why, punch Death in the face, I guess. That seems to be Jock Footballstar's attitude here:



So to recap: the team keeps a stuffed bear in the weight room, like any team with a bear mascot of course. A claw gets knocked into the face of some big guy (who, for a big guy, takes the unprecedented step of flinching away from a bear claw), and then there's some scimitars and head smashing and all.

I think the main thing to take away from this is the question of what school decided that a wise investment would be a coat of arms whose swords are sharp enough to slice through a fucking metal cable. I can only imagine the conversation that must have taken place for that:

Superintendent: I say we need razor sharp scimitars on the coat of arms in the weight room.
Board of Education Member: Are you sure? You know, we could use an upgrade to the computer lab. We're still on Windows 95 and-
Superintendent: NO. RAZOR SHARP SCIMITARS IN THE WEIGHT ROOM.

5. Yes, but can you make the pool drain dangerously powerful? (The Final Destination)

All right, I guess this is another one I might have to renege on. A simple search for "pool drain" uncovers this CNN story about how drains can exert 500 pounds of vacuum force and disembowel people. The stupidity factor lies more in the reason for Beef Jerkass heading to the bottom of the pool in the first place. OK, so his cell phone is dead and maybe this club has a pay phone he needs to use, but how is he going to check his voice mail? How is he even going to remember the number of the people he wants to dial in this, the age of mobile? Is he just really desperate to do his laundry and can't make do with only 30 minutes of drying?

"Curse you, socialist quarter! This is what happens when you put a Democrat in the White Houuuuu-[explodes]"

And we all know his reaction wouldn't be to go diving into the pool after a measly 25 cents, even in this economy. He'd go off onto the links to commit roid rage against whatever golfer looks like a reasonable enough culprit for a mis-aimed ball, or at least whatever golfer looks thrashable enough, which is to say, all of them. Death could have had a lot of fun figuring out a death out there, too, perhaps involving Rodney Dangerfield and a yacht.

4. Horse breaks the laws of physics (Final Destination 3)

I can at least appreciate that some of these setups are clever and even possible somewhere in the multiverse. There's a reason we have the phrase "freak accident," after all. But then there are scenes like this:



Putting aside the fact that the horse is only tied to a loosely planted flag, there's also the question of whether something with one, that's right, one horsepower has enough force to fling a javelin-like object in a nice arcing trajectory across the fairgrounds and right into some nice girl's back. If it did happen, odds are some people looked at this tragedy as some good inside information on the next Kentucky Derby results.

3. He should have just asked to be friends (The Final Destination)

I guess it's a requirement of the Final Destination universe that cars have to be leaking gas at all time. They must be perpetually at war in that universe to secure oil reserves for their fuel inefficient vehicles, the dumb motherfu-


Oh. Right. OK, let's just take a look at the clip.

So yeah, I'm not even sure why the tow truck's tank is spouting about a gallon of gas a minute, which seems to be the main cause of death here. Maybe there was something I missed earlier. Maybe he just decided to poke a hole in it to douse a cross for the burning, which seems to be his point in visiting this guy's house because the guy stopped him from going back into Le Mans Redux to save his wife or some such thing. Or maybe his company's motto is "Carter's Towing: We'll Pick You Up, But We Should Really Only Drive With A Half Tank Since There Are A Couple Of Punctures We Need To Patch Up At Some Point."

2. Death really hates educators (Final Destination)

Ah, teachers. Underpaid and overburdened with the responsibility of turning our youth into the leaders of tomorrow. Also, completely unaware of their surroundings.

I'm not sure about temperature differentials and all, aside from the time I spent working in a restaurant where the explicit instructions were to not leave an empty coffee pot heating on the burner because if you tried to fill it with water again it would explode in your face. Also the time my mother heated a Pyrex dish of something on the stove and it did just that, except for the my face part. Still, I think even the high school restaurant employees among us would recognize if a cup or container cracked open and started spilling liquid all over the place. Not so much the English teachers on Long Island, it seems. In all the ways Death succeeds in wounding this woman without delivering the fatal blow, I can only think of him as the incompetent hitman in Mulholland Drive. Hasn't he had hundreds of millions of years of practice in this sort of thing?



The idiot majority on YouTube believe the message of this clip is "teachers have flammable blood." No, it's more a result of this alcohol trail which is so very comprehensive that it can track its way back to the source bottle and detonate that. Perhaps vodka, like everything else in this universe, is just gasoline with another name. Credit is due for the teacher slipping on her own blood but recovering, but the fact that so much of her kitchen (and, after this clip, her entire house) winds up detonating is a bit odd. Was the teacher pulling a Breaking Bad sort of operation and running a meth lab in her kitchen cabinets?

1. The news media, now with more explosions! (Final Destination 2)

Given that I work in the media field, it's no secret that the TV news vans can show up awfully quick on the scene, sending either the rapid response SUV unit with a cameraman and good-looking reporter or the satellite truck which is apparently the exact same thing but allows you to broadcast live from the scene rather than just tape some footage for the next Live At Whatever. In this clip, it seems the former option has responded to a bad-enough car accident out in the middle of nowhere.



And once again you have to play the Breakfast Machine music as the ever-leaking vehicles over in Final Destinationland, the world's worst amusement park/alternate universe, as a cigarette ignites a gasoline trail that somehow leads from the accident to the news van (did they just decide that they needed to pull right up next to the wreck before the firefighters chased them off?), blows up the van, and throws some barbed wire at this Rory guy. Even assuming it would make it that far, with that much force, it's not razor wire or piano wire or anything that typically has the slicing capability in movies. It's probably just there to ensure the sheep don't wander off. Rory would likely get a couple of rusty puncture wounds, but I guess they didn't want to show a slow death by tetanus.