Ready To Friday: Pizza Day Edition

I'm all dizzy with anticipation over here. I'm seriously tripping the light fantastic. But it's introverted and all quiet like. The results of which will become obvious soon. Sooner than you'd think. And that would be really exciting if I had given you any hint of what to expect.

Mum. And that's final. Too much grease, too little time.

The Edit

These here are the specific interests and perks of the weekly adventuring. Everything from tunes to articles or almost-lost files can be found below. Hopefully some of it will be recent, whereas some of it will be less so. But all of it I think is worth sharing with you; which is my gamble that you'll like it as much as I did.

• Remember the last time I let you know about Patrick Boivin and his little video "Iron Baby"? I bet you do, because everyone who reads these must be a genius with an enormous brain and a perfect memory. But not everyone will follow up on these people I try to illuminate for you, so here's the latest stop motion magic from that man, called "AT-AT day afternoon". I'm pretty sure Boivin runs his productions on charm and pixie dust.
• The world isn't ending this week, as far as I know, but there are a few terrible things to report, other than the growing ecological disaster we've all heard about. The growing disaster few are reporting on would be the largest movie opening in history going to the latest Twilight movie. Harsh words. Upsetting criticisms. Blah blah blah. I guess we knew this was coming, but my goodness, remember when a fandom couldn't do all that much financially? Then the Dark Knight gets topped by one of the worst entertainment phenomenons in history. But that's not what scares me about Twilight. I'm not normally the kind of person that'll jump on the wagon demonizing something for its message. But there's something about this Twilight thing feels dangerously ugly to me.
• Speaking of – I don't know what's worse, the reviews The Last Airbender is getting, or the fact that Eclipse isn't getting them too. Or I guess we're the one's losing this weekend, with nothing worth watching in theaters, unless you want to see Toy Story 3 again (I sympathize with the urge).
• Speaking of – the man who wrote the recently famous first sentence also has in the past, had some words to say about the state of video games as art, an oft debated subject among some people who consider themselves deeply interested in games. So it was strange when Roger Ebert, a man who admits to never actually playing a video game in any significant way, wrote off the entire medium as "not art", then later after rebuttal, not "high art." Now personally, I disagreed with his conclusions, but unlike a large population of the people who would not side with Ebert, I did not vent against him personally or hate him for it. Instead, I realized that, after much deliberation of Ebert's words, we were at an impasse of semantics; that he defined art differently than I did. Well, after all this time since his original blog on the subject, it seems that the man has decided to take back his statements, stating that he "should not have written that entry without being more familiar with the actual experience of video games." This admission, along with the rest of the piece he wrote about the whole ordeal further secures my respect for the man.
• Whoops! We got knocked out of the World Cup (but so did they). We lost to Ghana, which will result in a lot of people in America learning about a country they never heard of. Or it might just be a lot of this.
• If you've been wondering what about the Gulf oil spill without me mentioning it last week, be assured, it is still a big mess. But don't take my word for it.

Hearing Things

For my own reasons, I've decided to process the music appreciation of my weekly culture bomb into its own section. Hopefully this means you won't miss out on whatever I feel like highlighting here. But it also means it will be much more obvious when I don't have any musical suggestions.

• This week, I'm not so certain I need to be picking out any particular artist or album that you're lacking in your  circulation. I pointed out one of my favorite pieces of summer music last time because I wanted to share something that anyone's playlist could use this time of year. So this week, I'm widening the scope. Maybe off of Pet Sounds you picked up two or three songs for your own frequent listens. Instead of telling you what might suit some for a summer playlist, I'll show you what my summer sounds like, at least this week.
  
  Maybe every month I show off what I think sounds good in this more direct fashion. And maybe every month, you might dip in for a taste. There might be some redundancies, seeing as most new albums or bands I like get written about here at length anyway. But it might be worth killing so many birds with so few stones.

English Language of the Week:

This segment is based around my personal love of the modern english language, where, each week, I'll nominate my favorite phrase, sentence or paragraph that I have personally heard spoken in that time.

Shut up. Eat more.

National slogan for the weekend of the Fourth.

On Your Way Out

And with the Fourth in mind, let's flush everything away. Celebrate with others, or alone, or both. Fight the urge to be sour, I know – we know you're better than that.

No more chit chat, or smarmy banter. Let's all agree to be forth-coming in the most brazen, forward  kind of way. Let all the good stuff floweth over, and the same with the bad. But if you plan on insulting me to my face, please do it the right way.

-stg