Everyone loves the Cox

I pimped Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story in today’s DomPost.

I probably get liquored up and watch this every couple of months.  It’s something akin to a spiritual experience. And I swear to god that this movie’s sole weakness is the one thing that also sunk it at the box office. It’s the By Jesus That’s Horrible movie poster of John C Reilly posing as Dewey Cox posing as Jim Morrison. A word to Hollywood: never let a goofy-looking man’s erect nipples form the basis of a publicity poster.

In fact, and it shames me to say this, that I avoided the movie for pretty much this reason.  And the funny thing was there was a much better poster which also gave out the vibe of the movie  a lot better. Luckily it was Scott Tobias at the AV Club at The Onion that alerted me to its pleasures.

Still, the movie is very funny. And the music is super. I think you probably have to be over 30 to get a lot of the references. I would say the ideal demographic is 55. Which isn’t great for going to the movies, but is an awesome group for buying the special two disk version. (Really, just for the songs.  The Walk Hard version with Jewel and Ghostface Killah is wonderful.

Here are some links to songs for playing via YouTube.

Guilty as Charged.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_djkPMdSMw&feature=related

Beautiful Ride is beautiful. In a break-down-and-weep sort of a way. (Though probably not in front of your mates. Then you just get kind of mocked …)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eIdXnxgcHU&feature=related

It’s either 20 years of Photoshop, or bad news for duck hunters

Crocoduck ... duckodile, whatever. We're going to lose a few retrievers this year.

This is the 20th anniversary of Photoshop. Gizmodo has some darn fine examples of the pixelators art at a contest for fave pics. The worrying thing is I am not sure if they all ARE Photoshopped.

Its the Casiotone for the 25th century!

 

Don’t get me wrong, I love the Beamz musical creation thingy. It has six frikkin’  laser beams, in-built rhythms, pre -recorded songs, and emulates lots of instruments.

However its potential is severely limited as long as live performances are based around a nerdy white guy rocking out by waving his arms in front of laser beams. Now, get a cool African American kid with his undies tied to his wrist getting creative , and you’ve onto something B.I.G..

Oh, and if any of my buddies want to come over and jam with me on my Beamz when I can afford one in 2014, I will kill them. To scary music.

Does Tem Morrison get to cast them?

I mean, Mr Morrison IS the genetic code for all Stormtroopers, is he not?

Sod the fanboy canonical scruples. Let’s face it, you just want the link to 25 hot Stormtrooperesses.

Here it be, at screenjunkies.

Probably just quicker to convert to full-time vegetarianism.

The Canon of Theodore. Who was an utter bastard.

THE Catholic Church, my particular home team, has always had a bit of a bee in its bonnet about bonking.

Well, not just about bonking, but anything that brings pleasure really in a physical fashion.  Such as banning interfemoral fornication. Which is, as if you didn’t already know, between the limbs. (I’m thinking elbows and knees, but I am of limited imagination in these things.)

Anyway, the penance for that particular frottering faux pas was a fast for 1 year or the 3 40-day periods.

It is included in the penitential (kind of a crib sheet for sinners used by dispensing confession-hearing priests)  held by Corpus Christi College. The  Corpus 190 of the Canons of Theodore has a great list of things that people are in A Lot Of Trouble For Doing.

Here are the rudey ones. History Blog has a link to the rest. And if you read the last one, you’ll see why smart people are so keen on the whole splitting of the Church and State thing.

Whoever fornicates with an effeminate male or with another man or with an animal must fast for 10 years.
Elsewhere it says that whoever fornicates with an animal must fast 15 years and sodomites must fast for 7 years.
If the effeminate male (bædling) fornicates with another effeminate male (bædling), (he is to) do penance for 10 years.
Whoever does this unintentionally (unwærlice) once must fast for 4 years; if it is habitual, as Basil says, for 15 years if he is not in orders and also one year (less?) so as a woman does. If it is a boy, for the first time, 2 years; if he does it again, 4 years.
If he is a boy, for the first time, 2 years; if he does it again, 4 years.
If he fornicates interfemorally (between the limbs), he must fast for 1 year or the 3 40-day periods.
If he defiles himself (masturbates), he is to abstain from meat for four days.
He who desires to fornicate (with) himself (i.e., to masturbate) and is not able to do so, he must fast for 40 days or 20 days.
If he is a boy and does it often, either he is to fast 20 days or one is to whip him.
If a woman fornicates [with another woman?] she must do penance for 3 years.
If she touches herself in the same way, i.e., in emulation of fornication, she must repent for 1 year.
One penance applies to a widow and a virgin; more (penance) is earned by her who has a husband if she fornicates.
Whoever ejaculates seed into the mouth, that is the worst evil. From someone it was judged that they repent this up to the end of their lives.

I think Hayek wins, but Keynes has a better fake moustache

One of my favourite podcasts is Econtalk.org which is hosted by Russ Roberts from the University of George Mason in Virginia.

Every week there is an hour or so given to a discussion with someone about economic behaviour, from scalping tickets at baseball games (a particularly cool show) through to how a couple of economists were at the right place and time after Rwanda went apeshit crazy to help it recover through branding its coffee for premium prices. Here, for that with Karol Boudreaux.

Some are deadly dull, at least to people like me who can’t appreciate some of the finer points of the fixing of interest rates in 19th century lower Guatemala (sorry Guatemala, or whoever it was. I just zoned out) and part of the interest in the last year or so as been listening to him puzzle over what the hell just happened to the world markets. And why certain people need to be put in the goddam stocks for their greed and stupidity and … well, I am raving now. But only because my super scheme took a big hit due to a bunch of overpaid anuses acting so fecking crazily with everybody’s money in a way that would see most people jailed for such arrant  … and there I go again.

Anyway now he and his team have broken new ground in economics with a rap song, Fear the Boom and Bust. Roberts is kind of from the Austrian school of economics these days, so he’s a Hayek fan. But as the song says, most people are still big Keynes fans. For the moment …

‘Learn to play the fxcking theremin!’

Dewey Cox: I don’t need people around me, stifling me. So if you don’t like it, there’s the door.

Theo: Dewey, are you sayin’ you don’t need us no more?

Dewey Cox: Not unless you can open your minds… and learn to play the fucking theremin.

Theo: FUCK YOU DEWEY!

From Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.

If you too have wanted to create the big vibratory sounds of the 60s, the one thing missing from your musical arsenal has probably been the theremin.

Now you can pick up your own handy-sized, take-home  versions for those epic six minute wondersound masterpieces the world has  been missing for so long.

But the Japan Trend Shop not only has a theremin, nope, it’s the Gakken Premium Theremin. At $155 (US) it comes with a full Japanese manual to help with your language lessons, and will scare the bejesus out of small children when you play it as a background to your stories about killers who live behind curtains and under beds.