Speaking of "Matt" from
X-Entertainment, I am pleased to report that he now has a
.MOV file of the "Colgate Pump" commercial with the "British" kids (I've heard some people say they were the "Mini-Pops", but I
can't confirm this) dressed up in detective trenchcoats and the American girl dressed up as Uncle Sam singing about the Colgate Pump to the tune of Madness' early ska hit "Baggy Trousers", though, for some reason, the file is currently only on UGO.com and not X-E, though this might mean that he's doing a full article about it! If I could press a button and preserve just one commercial from my childhood, watching
Transformers and
G.I. Joe and Jem and the Holograms afterschool on WVNY-22 in Burlington, VT, it would be this one. It's just
so insane; you gotta watch it! (Scroll down; it's the third commercial on the page.)
Lyrics:
Wake up all you sleepyheads,
Colgate gets you out of bed!
Now there's the Colgate Pump!
We've got the Colgate Pump!
It's a neat new trick, you know.
Pump it on your brush and GO!
They've got the Colgate Pump!
She's got the Colgate Pump!
Even mums and dads agree,
what makes it good is M.F.P.! (Maximum Fluoride Protection)
Just a squirt (?) of minty gel,
protects your teeth...
(American girl) "...as you can tell!"
We've got the Colgate Pump!
We love the Colgate Pump! X2
I saw about 45 minutes of the
Michael Jackson thing on the 20/20 special last night (Thursday). I was at my apartment working but wanted to catch the 9:15 p.m. commuter train home, so I left the apartment at 8:45 p.m.. I could have watched it on the train on my 3-inch Casio TV, but, in all honesty, I felt like playing
Golden Sun on the Gameboy Advance more (great new "old school" RPG; maybe I'll write a review of it here when I'm done). I admit the facial surgery is horrific, but I always was under the impression that the guy was just really, really, really eccentric but harmless (I saw the bits about the way he behaves in hotels and inside his bedroom with the mannequins and the bit when he went into the Las Vegas store with the astronomically expensive artifacts and curios and just pointed at everything and had his assistants buy it). Some of the highlights from the special I've seen today, particularly the shot of him trying to feed his kid through the veil, are bringing me round to the opinion that Child Protective Services should be paying him a visit.
X-Entertainment.com's "Matt" has a great piece about this in his 'Blog that sums up pretty much the way I feel about him much better than I ever could, I think. That Michael Jackson is really someone to be pitied just because he never had the opportunity to learn social norms or interact at all with his peers as a kid. He also doubted that Michael Jackson would admit to sleeping with boys if there was anything sexual going on. However, in his "comments" section for the piece (I'm too wussy to add a "comments" section to my 'blog, by the way), "Jennifer" posted a link to
J. Chandler's sworn affadavit about his friendship with Michael Jackson which led to alleged molestations on
The Smoking Gun, which seemed to change "Matt"'s opinion, but then someone else posted a link to
a reposted article from GQ magazine by Mary A. Fischer that casts doubts on the veracity of the claims made in the affadavit. I think I can say for near certain that he's a pedophile, but one does have to keep in mind, however, that "pedophile" is a loaded word; one can have the attraction and never molest. It could be that he channels the attraction into the other endaevors we saw in the programme, though, admittedly, he's not someone I'd feel comfortable having around my own children, should I ever have children.
No matter what the truth is,
Thriller is still a kick-ass album.
RESTORING THE WORLD TRADE CENTER
I don't care much for
either of the "finalists", though, with a gun to my head, I'd choose Libeskind's "origami" towers because I hate, HATE,
HATE the "THINK" design, with the empty lattice work and a few "cultural centres" suspended within the lattice. The THINK design is really, really pretentious, it restores none of the lost office space, and it would ensure that the World Trade Center site remains a "Necropolis" with no commerce ever taking place there again.
Deroy Murdock, contributing editor to
National Review Online, feels the same way I do, that the majesty of the original Minoru Yamazaki designs should be restored, and, today, he links to a
very interesting proposal from a journalism student at Northwestern University named Justin Berzon. Berzon's "Standing Tall" design restores Yamazaki's twin towers, but moves them to the east of the World Trade Center site, leaving the "footprints" of the original towers untouched. I actually had a similar idea once, for those people that want the "footprints' preserved, except I would have moved the towers to the other two corners of the site. Murdock notes that the strength of the plan is that supporters of every position on the debate as to what to do with the site would have to make some sort of compromise...
Interestingly enough, "Standing Tall" asks something of almost everyone involved in the WTC rehabilitation debate. In this respect, it is a perfect compromise that everyone should embrace with enthusiasm.
-Purist rebuilders will have to relinquish the position that the World Trade Center be restored exactly as it was, as if the 9/11 hijackers had been arrested the night before they boarded their murderous flights. In exchange for seeing the old footprints vacant, we will revel as the Twin Towers soar to their former glory.
-Families of those killed on 9/11 will have to accept the return of the Towers. For some, this will be a jarring reminder of the worst day of their lives. Conversely, they will be relieved to see the original footprints preserved as part of a memorial to their loved ones.
-Grid restorers will see Greenwich Street dog-leg slightly to the west when passing the new Tower One. In turn, they will applaud the reopening of this north-south artery.
-The Port Authority will get a transit hub, although most likely a subterranean one rather than an above-ground Grand Downtown Terminal.
-Developer Larry Silverstein leased the World Trade Center when former Mayor Rudy Giuliani privatized it in summer 2001. He will witness the resurrection of the Towers he bought, although above the 65- to 70-story limit beyond which he has safety worries. On the other hand, he will see nearly all of his private commercial floor space rehabilitated.
I wanted to see the entire World Trade Center, including the smaller buildings like the chevron-shaped Marriott Hotel (WTC 3), restored, but, short of that, this is the only plan I'd endorse.
I also have this weird prediction that, should they build some other design, replicas of the original Yamazaki towers would still be rebuilt... but somewhere in China, possibly in that Jetson-futurescape city in Shanghai.
FINAL DESTINATION 2
Today, I saw
Final Destination 2 over at the Famous Players Paramount. It was in CInema 12, which means, after getting my New York Fries (with ketchup) and Pepsi, I have to ascend two escalators with both hands full.
I thought the original was underrated myself... they marketed it as another post-modern, post-
Scream teen horror flick like
I Know What You Did Last Summer so it gets no respect, at least on the sorts of movie boards I post on. I thought it was clever and very creative, especially since the killer wasn't some movie slasher with a clever gimmick but rather a force you can delay but never, ultimately (given a long enough time-line) defeat. Last time, "Death" was stalking teens that got kicked off a plane after one of them had a vision of the plane exploding after taking off, which it did, so "Death" knocked them off one-by-one in very clever ways in the order that they were originally supposed to die, since they had interfered with "Death"'s design. All but one, Clear Rivers (Ali Larter), who has voluntarily sequestered herself in a padded room in a mental hospital and whom has strict rules regarding what visitors cannot bring in just in case anything should go wrong. A.J. Cook (Kimberly Corman) has a vision of a horrific multivehicle pile-up and blocks the entrance to the expressway to prevent the pile-up from happening. It still does, but her actions save a handful of motorists that were supposed to die; Officer Thomas Burke (Michael Landes) pushes A.J. out of the way just as an out-of-control truck kills the three other occupants of her SUV. But, in A.J.'s vision, they (and she) were the last ones to die. Now, it seems, "Death" seems to be knocking off the people on his list in reverse order, and A.J. has to get help from Clear Rivers to try and throw a wrench in "Death's" plans. Tony Todd, of
Candyman fame, returns as the mortician William "Bill" Bludworth, who may or may not be "Death" in human form (love that ambiguity), and he advises them to watch out for the "signs", any clues as to what will be the next things to set off the chain reactions that will lead to the deaths of the survivors of the crash. Also, this time round, not only are the survivors themselves in danger, but also anyone else that would have been killed but had been indirectly delayed from going to the places of their demise by the survivors of the plane explosion and highway crash, say because they took two minutes and watched a news story about the survivors, as they had changed "Death"'s plans too. It's pretty much the same movie as the first time round, except with more expensive, graphic, Savini-esque demises. But the only reason I go to these films is the quality of the demises, which are the most creative, original deaths since the heyday of the
Nightmare on Elm Street series (a decapitation by wire fence is particularly well-executed). And fans of the really, really old-school
Street Cents (from around 1989 to 93 or so) will be thrilled to see the lovely Benita Ha as a dental receptionist. ***1/2/*****
So I actually found an original
Columbia joke that isn't just a recycled
Challenger joke in the
alt.tasteless.jokes newsgroup, but before I give the direct link to the joke, I must point out that I'm fully aware that "gallows humour" isn't for most tastes, which is why I'm
not just cutting-and-pasting the joke here in this blog. So consider yourself warned, if you're not into that sort of joke, don't click on the link, because, should you click on the link below, you aren't seeing the joke by accident, you are intentionally going out of your way to be offended, and, as such, your angry e-mail will be ignored. Most people don't like "black humour" ("black" meaning "morbid" in this case), especially immediately following a tragedy, and that's fine, but a few of us like using humour to cope with tragedies and we don't like being told what is the "proper" way to react. However, I should point out that most of the mainstream media made a big deal about a shuttle with an Israeli astronaut disintegrating over a city named "Palestine" (Texas), as though it were poetic justice... isnt't that sort of a joke, and one that would offend many Israelis because of the presumption of "injustice" in regards to the so-called "occupation" of "Palestine"? Plus, I've seen the "
Need
Another
Seven
Astronauts" joke in the first paragraph of several news stories about bureaucratic and/or funding problems at NASA... exactly when did it become "acceptable" to repeat that joke? Anyhow, withour further ado,
the link to the joke.
Hmm... from a South African news site,
News 24, an article about
an Indian astrologer who said the Columbia was doomed by the preponderance of the numbers 7 and 16 (1+6=7) in regards to the number of astronauts on board, the date of the launch (January 16th) and the length of the mission (16 days). I think he'd probably get along well with
this guy.
Personally, I feel about the same as when the Air France Concorde's engine blew up, causing it to crash into that hotel, it's sad, because there's loss of life involved, but both the Concorde and the space shuttle are the sort of machines where a whole myriad of things can go catastophically wrong, so, the only thing I found surprising is that these sorts of things don't happen more often. To be perfectly honest, when I watch a live shuttle launch on TV, I really am half-expecting something to go wrong. I'm nowhere near as disturbed by this as I was either with the original shuttle explosion in 1986, especially because I was only 11 at the time so it was the most traumatizing thing I had ever seen live on TV by far (as a child), or by 9-11, because you got to see United Airlines Flight 175 crash into the other tower from a dozen different angles followed by the complete destruction of two of the most famous skyscrapers in the world with, possibly, tens of thousands of people killed for all I knew at the time (plus hundreds of others in the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania, though those didn't seem quite as "real" because you didn't see them on TV)... I don't know if I'll ever see anything that horrifying again. So, sadly, I'm just a lot less disturbed by this as 1) it's not the first shuttle explosion, and 2) I've been numbed somewhat by more recent events and am harder to shock, though, obviously, I also feel for the families.
Unless something interesting is discovered in Texas, or I find a particularly amusing conspiracy theory, that's probably the last I'll say about the
Columbia, because I don't put sad feelings into words too well, nor do I want to be too maudlin or clich�d.
Mark Steyn said anything else I could say much better... not only do I hope this doesn't delay further missions too much, I wish they'd start taking bolder steps into space, with nuclear fusion engines to cut the trip to Mars and beyond from months and years to just weeks (for Mars) and months (for "beyond").
Lookit what I found... some jokes about the
space shuttle Columbia... tasteless? Very, but the twist is that they were written in January 1986 by someone who got the name of the space shuttle
Challenger wrong.
