putting the j in jjosh » net

putting the j in jjosh

putting the j in jjosh

will you be my valenmatine?

February 14th, 2008

According to my calendar, it’s Valenmatines Day!

Where does Valentine’s Day come from anyway? Who was St. Valentine? Is this another case of the Church co-opting a big pagan day and making it their own (see Christmas, Easter, Halloween)? The BBC has a great little history of Valentine’s Day that’s pretty interesting. Turns out, no pagan stuff here, though the time is noted as traditionally being the fertility celebration time for the Greeks and Romans…the Greeks celebrating the marriage of Zeus and Hera, the Romans celebrating Lupercus, the god of fertility (also known as the "protector of flocks against wolves").

Who? Lupercus?! Well that’s right, and according to the BBC, Lupercus’s festival was traditionally celebrated with your standard goat-slaughtering, wine-drinking and dead-goat-skin-touching by fertile young girls. Now that’s a Valentine’s Day I can get behind! How did this devolve into chocolates and cards!?

There’s more info here. My favorite bit:

One of [the rituals of Lupercus] was a lottery where the names of available maidens were placed in a box and drawn out by the young men. Each man accepted the girl whose name he drew as his love – for the duration of the festival, or sometimes longer.

Roman key party!

To get to the official Valentine’s Day of Feb 14th, we get to turn instead a heart-warming story of a martyred Bishop who conducted illicit marriages in Rome in 270 AD. The Emperor at the time thought that married men made poor soldiers so he outlawed marriages for young soldiers. But feisty Bishop Valentine (it’s a Roman name?) thought marriage was part of God’s plan and married young people anyway. Nice one!

Meanwhile, back here in 2008 AD, Kanye West celebrates Valentine’s Day by posting a short, Spike Jonze-directed video for "Flashing Lights". It’s kind of great. A bit gratuitous maybe, but isn’t that what Kanye (and Valentine’s Day) is all about?

When I first started reading about Kanye, I kept calling him Kayne. I bet that happened with a lot of people.

tokyo 1 & 2

February 10th, 2008

All I can remember about this is that Mark sent it to me ages ago and I’ve had it on my desktop ever since. I would check it out every now and then and think "I’ve gotta do something with this!" And now I have.

Without further ado…

"Tokyo 1 & 2"

up against the mini bar

February 10th, 2008

 This is so great. I read somewhere that it’s "all over the net", but you know, I mean, my sister hasn’t seen it yet, so I guess it’s not ALL over the net…

It’s on youtube, but the person who posted it somehow turned off embedding, which I didn’t know you could do…if you want to go to the original youtube posting, it’s here.

FEVER!

February 9th, 2008

I love the way Nicholas Cage will do a long string of major studio crap and then drop an indie gem on you. He’s so great. Leaving Las Vegas, Adaptation, Wild at Heart.

A week and a half ago I was over at M Devito’s and just wanted to crash on the couch and watch something on his absurdly large tv…National Treasure was just starting, so I figured I’d give a try. All I wanted to do was veg out. And I don’t think I even made it a half hour. It was so bad! Atrociously bad! The dialogue, story, acting…the sets were weak for crying out loud. For a moment I thought Christopher Plummer would be able to hold me in, but no. I changed the channel and watched the middle hour of Titanic.

And I guess National T made scads of $$$, as has the sequel, right? Let’s have a look…ah yes…box office for National Treasure 1 worldwide gross is estimated at 347 MILLION DOLLARS! Yikes. National Treasure 2 is still out and it’s already made 383 MILLION DOLLARS. Wow.

And then there’s this (thanks, Malcolm!):

 

and

mc trebek

February 8th, 2008

I love Alex Trebek, he’s so classy and brainy-seeming without being obnoxious. He seems like he has a good sense of humor and who doesn’t love a dry dry wit. Usually he’s really straight-faced without being super-serious, but every now and then (apparently) he can’t resist dropping into silly mode. But then it’s even funnier because he’s still sort of…straight…

Trebek with no pants

Trebek is morally outraged

Trebek goes to a rave

A young Trebek starts swearing  (very Casey Casem style)

And a couple of YTMND’s:

MC Trebek

Trebek in Funky Town

I don’t understand how people find all these little moments when there are like 5000 episodes of Jeopardy out there…but the internet has its ways…      

pirate cartels have dark bidding

February 8th, 2008

One of my favorite blogs, and the first "portal" (a la boingboing, metafilter, etc) I ever came across is waxy.org. It’s a bit tech-y perhaps, but I kind of love that…over the years he’s been pretty consistent with updating his links to interesting stuff, but not so consistent at posting blog entries. Fair enough, the links are great fun, and the blog posts would be fun when they showed up.

But now he’s trying to post daily(?!) and he’s turning out some good stuff. For instance, he’s got a great post crunching some data concerning Academy award screener DVD’s and pirated copies of movies that show up online. The graphs are fun, but the gist of the post is that more of the Oscar-nominated films than ever are available as DVD-quality pirate downloads, but that they don’t tend to be Academy screeners.

Interesting. Mark, Laura and Lila were visiting last weekend, and when, in the name of research, we downloaded No Country For Old Men, the quality was pretty amazing, and the film seemed to be all over the net. Lila loved it.

Waxy mentions that a lot of the pirate copies are due to overseas Region 5 DVD’s, or R5’s…as Waxy says: 

These DVDs transferred directly from the film source were intended to help them compete with pirates by providing high-quality retail copies of films at the time of the film’s release. Instead, it’s created a huge new method of acquiring films before screeners are even released.

check the definition of R5’s here, at Afterdawn. This sure seems like a weird way to try and defeat the pirates, doesn’t it? Seems like it would help them more than hinder them. I wonder if some massive pirate cartel has a man on the inside at the MPAA, doing their secret, dark bidding.

In the future where anything that can be copied will be stripped of value, anything that cannot be copied will become more valuable. I can see how this will work with music, where the performance will become something to pay for, something that can’t be replicated. But what’s going to happen to films? I suppose the cinema experience can’t really be replicated…although giant tv’s and surround sound are doing a pretty good job.

Also microwave popcorn.

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