Banana Fana Bo-Bam-a

This is so screwed up. A Hillary supporter, in Dearborn, Michigan who says she doesn’t trust Barack Obama because of his name:

“I feel John McCain is a true American and I want to support a true American,” she said.

But isn’t Obama a “true American?” she was asked.

“I don’t know,” she said after a measured pause. “I question it.”

Why?

“I don’t know — maybe because of his name?”

But gosh, what if she’s right? Obama rhymes with Osama, and Hussein is his middle name. That’s it! Barack is the missing Osama/Saddam link!

They ARE a girl group!

D.F. Rogers, in his “Denro the D.J.” persona, will introduce this K3 video, which he seems to feel is perhaps their most accessible to American listeners.

“Ladies and Gentlemen — Kah-Thrrree!” Wow! Hey, this is the missing link! This IS Girl Group Music! And they sing part of it in English — and very well! They even do a few Klangs! They do the Supremes thing — but again no “Diana’s” up front — they sing as a group and spread the solos parts equally. The interesting thing is that it seems to be the one K3 song that has comments [on YouTube] in English! The comments in English are divided between “What th…???” and “Awesome!” — mainly because parts are clearly in English and they have no idea what the heck the rest of that stuff is! It seems like it’s an American group – but it’s mind-bending! It has an English title, too. This a gateway to the real hard stuff! Pure Flemish! Een Klang Kusha!

[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/2008/JUL/K3LoveYouBaby.flv 448 308]Note: This video clip required major surgery to fix the shape of the image, so you will see some re-compression artifacts.

Bonus K3 Video! This one is also partially in English, and required no special treatment other than being scaled up from 320×240. Shades of “Happy Days”! Rather than being just fun-loving, Karen, Kathleen and Kristel seem a bit boy crazy here, over a bunch of lunkheads, but we can deal. 😉
[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/2008/JUL/K3HippyShake.flv 448 336]

YouTube, YouSuck

For single videos that I don’t capture and master myself, I download from YouTube and post them. Putting playlists into custom players was the one feature YouTube offered that I found useful. But now YouTube’s playlists are blown. Gone. Snafu. Broken.

7/31 Flash! As in Flash player. Playlists seem to be working again. I’ve only checked a couple of them, but at the moment, for now, YouTube has redeemed itself.

Coming ‘Round The Corner

Here I am at this year’s Boston Marathon, turning the corner onto Boylston Street, getting my first look at the finish line. Those last 385 yards are a killer!

Boston Marathon 2008

I’ll be running another half marathon in October, but won’t tackle a full 26.2 miles again unless I feel I can get my time back down to something approaching four hours. The facial hair is now gone, by the way.

Watching the Watchmen

Comic book fans have been full of talk about the Watchmen movie for quite a while. Time.com just put out an article about the Watchmen preview at the Comic-Con in San Diego, going on right now.

This sort of coverage represents a validation, approval and acceptance of comics that was unimaginable to me as a kid. The catch is, today’s comic books hold no interest for me, in part because I felt when the Watchmen series came out it was the final word on the super hero genre. Writer Alan Moore had succeeded in extracting everything there was to be said about costumed heroes.

The best place to see the Watchmen trailer is the official site, but I’ll post it here for convenience, if you want to avoid all of the Flash animation that’s typical of movie sites.

[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/2008/JUL/Watchmen.flv 640 272]

Overall, it looks very promising, but the Vietnam scenes have a fake appearance, and Dr. Manhattan isn’t quite as convincing as he should be. Rorschach’s voice is too similar to Christian Bale’s Batman. But all of this can be fixed in post-production. I’m also a bit concerned that if the big climax in the story isn’t handled just right, it will be unintentionally humorous. We’ll know in March.