8/31/2007 - Chicken Head Found in Chicken McNuggets

This news story freaked me out when I saw it af few years ago. I know that McDonald's employees aren't the most skilled workers out there, but you'd think that one of them would recognize a whole chicken head amongst their Chicken McNuggets! I just love how perfectly preserved it is after being deep fried. It's better than the mummification process the Egyptians used!



This video also gives me an opportunity to rant about McDonald's Chicken Nuggets. Specifically, how they made the bone-headed decision to get rid of the dark-meat pieces and go all white-meat. At the time they did this, their Chicken Selects were available and they were all white-meat chicken strips. If somebody wanted all white-meat, they could just choose the Chicken Selects, right? I know the dark-meat has more fat and some may consider it to be too oily or slimy, but I generally like dark-meat chicken. When I had the McNuggets, I expected the variety of having both meats... it was a flip of a coin of which you would get. Now, there is no more variety... no more excitement. By the way, what happens to all that unused dark-meat now?

8/29/2007 - Nintendo Sixty-FOOOOOOOOOOUR

Maybe I'm getting old, but when I got my Playstation 3, I wasn't really excited. Yeah, I obsessed over the pros and cons of the system when I was considering it over the XBox 360, and I'm still in great anticipation over the Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix game which was the greatest reason why I bought the PS3. But when I got it from UPS, opened the box, and plugged it to my TV, I was uncharacteristically calm. I think the last time I was really psyched about a video game system was the Super Nintendo. I think it was mainly due to the inclusion of Super Mario World, which was an ultra-sweet game that demonstrated how the SNES was technologically leaps and bounds better than the NES. As great as the NES was, and for all the hours and days I played on the NES, I was ready for more, and the SNES didn't disappoint.

While I was excited getting the SNES, I was nowhere near as apoplectic as this kid was in unwrapping his Nintendo 64:



Holy crap! If I didn't know better, I would say that he was taking caffeine intravenously. I actually like his reaction to his other Christmas present... I guess when you're that age, everything else is a letdown compared the Nintendo 64. Hmmm... I wonder what his reaction will be when he finds out it only comes with one controller and no games...

8/23/2007 - Teaser video for the next Goldeneye stunt!

The "Undercover Filmer" is a true gamer. He performs these "stunts" on the Nintendo 64 phenomenon Goldeneye, which consists of maxing out all the difficulty settings in the game and (slowly) traverses select stages. Some of these stages take close to an hour, and it's all on YouTube. You get to see step-by-step how he manages to make something so incredibly difficult seem like a routine playthrough of a first-person shooter level. The fact that he can add voice-over to these videos without being boring or repetitive is amazing.

As he admits in this video, though, the stunts haven't exactly been a thrill a minute. While the difficulty of the stunts are ridiculous, the methodical approach he uses makes it incredibly slow-paced sometimes. His next pair of stunts, however, promises to be different and loads more exciting. In fact, this teaser video itself is incredibly exciting. It is perhaps one of the best example of advertising I've ever seen. The makers of movie trailers should watch this video to really see how to drive anticipation!

8/22/2007 - Hitler Gets Banned (His Ultimate Downfall)

Rated R for profane subtitles

Here's a video that made the rounds a couple of months ago... it's a clip of a German biopic on Hitler at his most desperate state in World War II. But according to the subtitles, it's not because of any losses the Axis powers were incurring, it's because his XBox Live account was banned by Microsoft. Yes, it's a parody, but it certainly speaks the truth. Apparently, if your account has been flagged because you were abusing the chat features, your console could potentially be banned from getting online altogether! All your gamerpoints and achievements would be lost, while any XBox Live Marketplace points you've bought/acquired would be useless. If that were ever to happen to my PSN account, I'd probably have the same reaction as Hitler.

8/21/2007 - Sean Connery on smackin' bitches

Out of all the James Bonds (Connery, Lazenby, Moore, Dalton, Brosnan, and Craig), Sean Connery's is probably the favorite of most of the fans of the series. A lot of that fondness probably is due to the fact that that he is the "original" Bond... most people tend to favor the original actors of iconic characters as they probably think they're the represent the "authentic" version of that character, while the others that follow are merely imitators. One exception may be the Batman series, where people have taken to Christian Bale's version of the Dark Knight. Personally, I still like Michael Keaton's Batman.

Back to Sean Connery, I think people have a certain affinity to his male chauvinistic Bond. All the Bonds are fairly chauvinistic, but Connery's almost reveled in the politically incorrect environment of the 60's. If you watch the old movies, you wouldn't believe the stuff he got away with, even if it was a movie, and even if it was James Bond slapping the butts of the various Bond girls. I think Sean Connery took some of this Bond attitude to his real life. He stated in an interview that "it's not the worst thing in the world to slap a woman now and then" and Barbara Walters called him on it. You'd think that maybe he would shy way from those comments, but no... he regrets nothing! Now, I don't condone what he's advocating, but I do admire his honesty in the matter. In fact, the character of Bond he created may not be too far off from himself after all.

8/20/2007 - iPhone NES Emulator

In his keynote presentation introducing the iPhone, Steve Jobs said that the "killer app" of the iPhone is making calls. Well, I think there's a new killer app out there... some hacker out there took it upon himself (and I'm pretty sure it's a "him") to install a program that will emulate a Nintendo Entertainment System on the iPhone complete with a virtual NES controller! This is something Apple themselves should have done... the iPhone would be a great platform as a gaming machine and while it wouldn't rival the GameBoy, I think that it would entice even more people to buy the device. Portable gaming machines themselves cost well over $100, so if Apple could make the iPhone a gaming device, then it would somewhat justify the $500-$600 price point. Here's some video of the NES Emulator on the iPhone... it may be a little slow, but it's only Version 1...

8/18/2007 - Cop Car Cam Video

This is definitely one of the most hilarious reality videos I've ever seen. It's of an "alleged" drunk driver getting his rights read to him. Ordinarily, any video of a drunkard would be pretty funny. However, this particular wino has a... condition. If you watch the video, he spells it out very clearly. It's pretty easy to tell he's not faking it either. He even asks the arresting officers to relieve this condition for him. I think their refusal to do so really constitutes as cruel and unusual punishment.

8/17/2007 - Battle at Kruger

The lions, the buffalo, the crocodile... oh my!

8/15/2007 - MARKET MELTDOWN

Jim Cramer is popular for his over-caffeinated performances on his show "Mad Money". He bites the heads of his rubber toys and he used to begin his Lightning Round segments by throwing his chair. In the past couple of years, he's been pretty bullish on the stock market. More often than not, he's pushed the "BUY, BUY, BUY" button on his sound board than the "SELL, SELL SELL" button. That's why when he came out on August 3rd with the proclamation that "we have Armageddon", it really surprised me... even though not much surprises me these days.

And looking at how the market is performing, he may not be too far off. Losing more than 1000 points in the Dow Jones in less than a month is proof enough that Cramer knows what he's talking about. Of course, it could be argued that Cramer has a great influence on the markets that any bearish comments made by him would make his prophecy self-fulfilling. One thing's for sure... even though he may be bearish now, he's still the wild and crazy guy he was when he was bullish:



Poor Erin Burnett... she must feel like a mouse trying to stop a freight train.

8/14/2007 - Zune Ballmer

I'm taking another swipe at Microsoft's Steve Ballmer with today's video. Mostly because I've had it up to here with how buggy Microsoft Outlook is and the fact that I have to have it installed and configured on all our work computers. You'd think that a product used by millions of corporate users (and by Microsoft employees themselves, I would hope) would be smarter, easier to configure, and be somewhat stable. But NO! It's a great piece of bloatware that most people are forced to use just because it's a Microsoft product. Did you know that it takes less than 30 seconds to configure a Blackberry to work with an Exchange server while it takes ten times as long to configure Outlook? And that's if nothing goes wrong during the process!

Anyway, you know those Apple iPod ads with the silhouettes rocking to the ubiquitous MP3 player? Well, what would an ad like that look like with a Microsoft Zune instead of the iPod? Something like this:

8/13/2007 - 20Q - Rude word

Those electronic 20 Questions machines are really quite remarkable. If you have an object in mind that is relatively non-obscure, and you tell the truth to the machine, it will most likely guess the object correctly after 20 questions. Before computer memory was cheap, it would have been hard to imagine a handheld machine like this would be possible. Now, with solid-state memory averaging $10 per gigabyte, it's easy to see how an entire dictionary would fit into a small gaming device. You may think that there is some artificial intelligence built into a 20 Questions machine, and you would not be too far off. The machine will progressively ask questions that narrow downs the list of possible answers as much as it can. There is some fuzzy logic involved, but each dictionary item will have their own built-in answers to each of the questions asked. It just takes a computer that will play the game better than any human could.

So what happens when you choose a relatively obscure object... say, a certain part of the male anatomy? Well, not only does hilarity ensue, but the machine really comes close too...

8/12/2007 - 5 Guys in a Limo

Is it just me, or has the amount of trailers before the movies grown more these days? I mean, you can literally show up 15 minutes late to the theater and still see the beginning of the movie because there are so many trailers. Normally, I wouldn't mind... I like watching previews of upcoming movies. But you would think that with all the advertising involved, they could at least lower the price of the movie ticket. Instead, it goes up and up... while you're forced to sit there and wait for your movie to begin.

So if you're a regular moviegoer, you'll recognize the guys in this video... or specifically their voices. Yes, they're all of the announcers you hear in the trailers of movies. These guys probably get paid lots of money just to read a few lines, but they deserve their earnings... just their voices alone lend some credibility to the movie they're peddling. They sound so alike (except for the Disney guy), you'd swear they were all one person. Just play the video and close your eyes and you'll see what I mean.

8/11/2007 - Kung Fu Master Parody

Genius, genius, genius. That pretty much sums up this video that pays tribute to almost all the major video games of the 80's to the 90's. It begins as a simple parody of Kung Fu Master, but it soon turns into a cornucopia of various video gaming icons. They range all the way from Pac-Man to Metal Gear, with some obscure Japanese games thrown in for good measure. For some reason, though, the Street Fighter references stand out the most for me.



Also, the second portion of this video features the song "Okkusenman", the vocalized version of the great theme of Dr. Wily's Stage One in Megaman 2. All the more reason to love this video.

8/10/2007 - Cool Webpage Trick

This video isn't exactly a great video, but what it's demonstrating is undeniably cool. If you're using a browser and you can copy and paste, you can amaze your friends (and yourself) by following the instructions in the video's description to make the images of any webpage dance around the screen. I've been programming for years, and I didn't even know something like this was possible. Not the concept, but the fact that a piece of JavaScript pasted into the URL field of the browser would activate that script on that page. I'm not sure why browser programmers would allow that to happen... seems like a security risk to me, but it does make this cool trick possible!

8/7/2007 - Terminator Versus Robocop

More than 15 years later, I can still say that Terminator 2 is my favorite movie. I thought my taste in movies would be more "sophisticated" by now, and in many ways, it is. But whenever I watch T2, I'm taken back to that first late-night showing when my cousins and I were so jazzed up after becoming enamored with the original Terminator only a few months earlier. We saw the trailers, and we thought, "Wow, is Arnie going to be a bad-ass villain again?" It turns out the trailers were purposely misleading and Arnold Schwarzenegger did not play a bad Terminator, but he was still bad-ass.

Terminator 2: Judgment Day might not be a masterpiece in acting or drama, but it (in conjunction with the first one) is simply a masterstroke in sci-fi action storytelling. For its time, the special effects were a breakthrough, and all the special effects in todays movies show only evolutionary progress from T2. When I first saw the T-1000 turn from a liquid-metal humanoid into the police officer disguise, I nearly crapped my pants. Stories dealing time travel are always tricky (in terms of all the paradoxes that can take place), but the movie never strays too much into the scientific/philosophical arena. It's just two and a half hours of Arnie in the greatest role of his career, kicking butt and saying cool catchphrases.

The first Robocop movie was another favorite of mine. I first enjoyed it for the cool futuristic concept of a robotic policeman and its great action, but now I see it for what it was intended to be: a satirical take on society with plenty of black humor. If you think about it, Robocop is kind of the opposite of a Terminator. A T-800 model Terminator is living tissue over metal endoskeleton, while Robocop has a high-tech metal shell protecting his organics. Everybody always wonders who would win in a fight between Robocop and the Terminator. There have been graphic novels by Dark Horse comics on the subject. But this video, I think, is the best showcase of what would really happen...

8/3/2007 - Worst Fight Scene Ever

The original Star Trek series that ran in the sixties had some pretty good special effects for the time... although now, they all are so hokey that they are being remade using today's visual technology. Still, those old effects at least allowed those who watched them to suspend some disbelief and enjoy a good space opera.

There were some scenes, though, that made you disbelieve what you were seeing, and not in a good way. This fight scene between Kirk and an alien monster is one of them. The choreography sucks, the camera work sucks, the alien costume sucks, and even the normally cool James Kirk character comes across as lame. Look at how slow the alien swings its fists! How could you not avoid that? I know that William Shatner never gets embarrassed about his past work, but surely this has to make him wince.

8/2/2007 - matrix fart

I had a good laugh watching this fan clip of the Matrix years ago and I still get a chuckle over it. I know that toilet humor is an immature artform, but whoever said I wanted to be mature? If I still laugh at toilet humor when I'm in my sixties, then maybe something is wrong with me. But for now, this is better than Citizen Kane:

8/1/2007 - Monty python - Black knight (star wars)

With the most creative video editing geeks out there on the Internet, you knew this next video had to happen:



Monty Python and Star Wars? Goes together like peanut butter and jelly!