Episode 7 of WhatTheCast, the pretty geeky podcast I participate in, is up. You can hear what I sounded like in the innocent days before LOLTrek. Patrick and I argue about whether Fox was right to kill off the show Drive (he says no, while I say yes), we make fun of the US Navy for naming some of their ships after the herpes simplex virus, Sony pretends to sacrifice a goat for the game God of War II instead of for the PS3 like they should have, and Patrick makes fun of the movie The Condemned. I do not use the phrase “doin’ it panda style” in this episode, though given recent events perhaps I should have.
Monthly Archives: May 2007
Friday Night Videos: I Want to Be Queen Some Day
Mika: Grace Kelly (2007)
Yes, yes, Mika doesn’t like the comparisons to Queen. Perhaps if you sang fewer lyrics like “I tried a little Freddy” and used your clear falsetto less. Anyway, the video is fun in a goofy kind of way, though I don’t know what’s up with the women bringing over cakes.
McFly: Transylvania (2007)Aah! Scary floating Queen-like heads! Actually, come to think of it, aping silent films will give you the chance for the kind of histrionic over-acting that goes well with the Queen vibe. My main complaint is that the video uses some of the tropes of silent films — dialogue cards, women tied to train tracks, flickering light — but then undermines the conceit by showing the band singing.
And for all of you wondering: day three. Still not a new dad.
No News is Annoying News
Well after all that lovely work I did yesterday and this morning, I’ve had maybe 3 contractions since noon. I’m very annoyed and am now going to go read Pretties since I finished Uglies at lunch time. I blame Stephen. He bought Uglies at Panoply for about $4 so after I finished it, I had to immediately zoom out to the bookstore to buy the next one. Maybe Liza is waiting until I’ve read all three before she decides to come. I guess that means I need to read faster.
I Would Have Written Sooner but I Couldn’t Get to My Own Website
I started having contractions sometime yesterday. The best I did then was about 45 minutes apart. I went to bed, expecting to be woken by something substantial going on and instead, slept all night. This morning, I had almost an hour of 5 minute apart contractions but then those easy, short ones stopped to be replaced by much further apart but much more intense and longer lasting ones.
If I didn’t have a doula to tell me to stay the heck at home, I probably would be all up at the hospital full of pitocin by now and possibly delivering already.
We are fine otherwise. Mom and I just took naps, each of us on a different couch. Stephen is “working” at the kitchen table. Maybe he’s doing something actually productive or maybe he’s busy getting ready to tump over the site again. Eli is at school doing whatever it is that he does at school. We’re gonna get some lunch and maybe something else will be happening this afternoon.
Someone will post again later today with an update. Either I’ll be bored and posting the weather report or maybe saying we’re headed to the hospital. Thanks for all your well wishes, thoughts and prayers.
Welcome LOLTrek Visitors
“Hey, this is funny,” my friend John says to me. “Do you mind if I submit LOLTrek to BoingBoing?”
“Sure,” I tell him, thinking that they won’t really link to it.
Two minutes later, we’re Boinged. Then Wil Wheaton links to LOLTrek. Someone in the comments says, “David Gerrold is a friend of mine, I am sooooo gonna show him this!!!” Now that we’ve had our own bacon cat moment, we can quit the Internet.
To the hordes of new folks, welcome! I’ve had a number of y’all ask if I’m going to do this again. Sadly, the answer is no. I think LOLTrek was funny at most one time, and I used all of my good jokes up on it. Though if I were going to do another TV show, I know which one I’d do.
[tags]loltrek, lolcats, lolhouse[/tags]
LOLTrek
Let’s talk about lolcats. Lolcats, or cat macros, are a subset of image macros. They’re pictures of cats with captions typed across them. In essence they’re the “Hang In There Baby” posters gone feral.
Anil Dash has a great post about them, in which he identifies a number of lolcat subclasses and discusses kitty pidgin, the mangled English used in many lolcat pictures. Kitty pidgin is surprisingly regular, which I suppose means, as Anil Dash puts it, that cats can has regular grammar.
A number of sites collect lolcat pictures, among them I Can Has Cheezburger and Meme Cats. If you browse through those sites, you’ll quickly get a feel for how lolcats work. If you’re inspired to make your own, remember: use Impact or Arial Black, and put a black outline around white letters.
While this is nice and all, I quickly realized that there are no long-form lolcat works. The closest is Spatch’s wonderful Cat Town, and it’s only a relative to lolcats. That set my fevered brain to spinning: what would a lolcat story look like? What if lolcats had a TV channel? What kind of shows would be on it?
The answer is clear: they would show Star Trek.
Heroes and Scruff
Hey, let’s talk about Monday night’s episode of Heroes and listen to my wild theories. The next bit is spoiler cut for your convenience.
Eli Has Nigel Beat
Eli has been crazed these last few days. He’s been getting up at 5:45 and, aside from early naps, been going non-stop until we all pass out from exhaustion at 7:30 or so. He gets into everything and tries to grab anything that catches his eye. It’s like living with a strung-out raccoon.
Just now we were in the kitchen. Eli was stomping around so he could hear the quarters in his pocket jingle. “Eli,” I asked, “are you dialed to eleven?”
“Ha, nooooo,” he said. “I’m dialed to twenty-two!“