More fun with IMDb trivia

From Back to the Future:

The device originally considered for use as the time travel machine was a refrigerator. Director Robert Zemeckis said in an interview that the idea was scrapped because he and Steven Spielberg did not want children to start climbing into refrigerators and getting trapped inside.

Hmm. I guess Stevie changed his mind about that. Too bad Zemeckis wasn't around to warn him against making crappy sequels.

All I want for Chistmas is...

Boing Boing posts about all kinds of off-the-wall items, but it also has a number of recurrent themes on their posts: Steampunk, Creative Commons and Disney's Haunted Mansion, just to name a few. Another is bookcases, which as a bibliophile I can totally get behind. However, most of the ones they feature are too esoteric for my rather conventional tastes. Then they posted this little number earlier today:


I so want one of these.

Unfortunately, it doesn't appear to be for sale (and it looks like it would be a pain in the butt to build by hand). Oh well, it looks like we're sticking with the Target pressboard we already have (sigh).

Not heeding the 13th Apostle

In Dogma, Rufus (Chris Rock) states that Jesus' biggest complaint with mankind was the factioning of the religions. Not that I expect for church leaders to watch Dogma (let alone take advice from it), It's nonetheless sad to see their continued determination to piss Jesus off.

Theological conservatives upset by the liberal views of the Episcopal Church are forming a rival denomination.

The new Anglican Church in North America will include four Episcopal dioceses that recently split from the U.S. church, along with breakaway Anglican parishes from Canada.

The announcement Wednesday in Wheaton, Illinois, comes after decades of debate over what Episcopalians should believe about issues ranging from salvation to sexuality. Tensions erupted in 2003 when Episcopalians consecrated the first openly gay bishop.

The world Anglican Communion is a fellowship of churches with roots in the Church of England. The Episcopal Church is the Anglican body in the United States. But the new North American church says it represents true Anglican beliefs.

Why don't they just call it the "Republican Church" and just get it over with?

Next up, jokes about Dunn & Bradstreet

I watched The Big Bus last night, which is kind of an Airplane-type goofy comedy that predates Airplane by four years. As with that later film, the jokes sometime go hard and fast, and when you have that density of jokes, you can afford to put in ones that only a few people (like, say, librarians) would get.

At some point during the film, the driver discovers a bomb underneath the bus. When he tells his girlfriend about it over the walkie talkie, she asks him if it has a red and white dial in the bottom right corner. When the driver says yes, the camera cuts to her in the front of the bus reading from an over sized blue book titled Jane's Book Of Bombs.

Somebody still has some anger issues.

While many liberals have decided to finally put Bush out of their minds now that the age of Obama is upon us, others are not as willing to let bygones be bygones.

The Onion's "In Brief" news section usually has headlines that tells the joke and then a paragraph-long story that expounds on it, such as "Financial Planner Advises Shorter Life Span". But in the past two weeks, it has featured two Bush stories that didn't really have a punchline. On the nineteenth, the story "Crocodile Bites Off Bush's Arm" was posted, and then nine days later the headline "Bush Passes Three-Pound Kidney Stone" was published.

There are no exaggerations in the story body that signals the joke (such as Bush heroically taking his severed arm and beating the crocodile to death). The two stories are told very straight as if these events actually happened. The commonality here, of course, is that Bush endures unbelievable pain in both instances. Could it be that someone at the Onion feels that karma is not moving fast enough and that we need to engage in fictional schadenfreude? It appears so.

Speaking for myself, I'm more in the camp of moving on instead of looking back. And as for the Onion, they should probably just stick to comedy.

Giancarlo Esposito Quote of the Month: December 2008

We end the year with a TV movie, but one which has the pedigree of a stellar TV series backing it up.

Homicide: The Movie comes at the end of the crime series' seven series run. I only caught a handful of episodes myself, but I could tell the quality just from that glimpse. Giancarlo's character only came in for the last season, which then transferred to the movie. He joined the regular cast (including Quote of the Month alumn Yaphet Kotto) to send the show out on a grand note. From what I've read, they did. And Giancarlo's Officer Giardello gets one of the last lines:

Det. Frank Pembleton: "Death is every day. Death goes on... and on and on."

Officer Mike Giardello: "And that's because life... goes on and on."