Ah, Burn Notice is back on for the summer. It’s such a great show for summer: silly and fun. The metaplot keeps things going and doesn’t matter at all, I’m sure Michael Weston’s spy tips will be invaluable if I ever need to bolt in the night, and now i see what the fuss is about about Bruce Campbell. I recommend it!

So there’s a new Sherlock Holmes movie coming out—check out the hi-def trailer. It has plenty of swashbuckling, pugilism, and double-entendres, along with (I assume), long exposition of brilliant deduction from Iron Man Holmes. I’m not familiar enough with the Holmes canon to know if this will be a travesty of modern re-imagining, or if it’s within the spirit of Doyle’s original Holmes. I need to finally get back into my Complete Sherlock Holmes to see, though it’s a safe bet that there are Holmes fanboys pre-emptively tearing the movie apart on the internets. I am sorry to see that there is no mention of Moriarty on the imdb page, but I suppose every movie needs to leave room for a sequel these days.

Nerds seem to have an affinity for Holmes. Two immediate examples that come to mind: TNG’s Holmes episodes, and Jon Bellairs’ Lewis Barnavelt, who dons his own deerstalker to solve mysteries. Anyone know of more nerdy tie-ins?

Extra credit: this post contains some blatant fanboy-bait; I assume any true Holmes fan is frothing at the mouth to point out my error. Find it!

I’m not exactly what you’d call an extreme sports guy. I don’t follow the X-Games, I’ve never been snowboarding, and I’ve owned two skateboards in my life—one was made of plastic and had removable handlebars, and the other was a $12 “Variflex” board from Target whose wheels were missing ball bearings. I also just used the phrase “extreme sports”, which I think immediately disqualifies me from having useful opinions on things.

All that being said, I still have a fascination with some of the things people can convince their bodies to do, sometimes with the aid of equipments (skateboards, bikes, etc.) and sometimes without any assistance but their own agility.

Take, for instance, Parkour, which you could call “extreme urban running”. The idea is to get from point A to point B in as fluid and efficient manner as is possible. The result is the sort of thing you see Jackie Chan doing all the time in his movies:

Some more here. These aren’t Jackass guys running into walls at top speed (amusing as that may be): these are people with a plan, whose goal is to not get hurt.

But there’s more than just Parkour.

Read the rest of this entry »

I think most of you guys read the same sites I do, and so you’ve probably seen this already, but:

This is probably the best sushi you can get in Grand Rapids, possibly in all of West Michigan. BUT — don’t go here if you’re hungry. Go stuff your face at an OCB instead. You can (read: I did) easily drop $20 for lunch because the first thing you order ends up just not being enough.

The photo above is my first lunch, $7.95. Avacodo rolls at the top, and on the bottom (from left) egg, salmon, tuna, yellow tail (I think?) and snapper. This lasted about five minutes and I was still hungry. I asked for the sushi menu and ordered a scallop roll and squid sushi. One Andrew Jackson later I left, still feeling a mite peckish.

The quality, however, was outstanding. Tops for me were the scallop rolls, which offered a texture and taste so divine I thought I was eating dessert. Except with raw shellfish.

The only real drawback was not having a nice glass of freezing cold sake or an Asahi tallboy to go with the meal. The job doesn’t necessarily like one coming back from lunch with al-kee-haul on one’s breath.

At some point in the future, I may learn to write original content instead of just linking to things I found via I Watch Stuff!. Until such a day comes, I’ll just link to the original story conference where Indiana Jones was invented.

I have not dived in to the 125-page PDF, but I bet it’s fascinating.

via

Through the magic of programming languages, I can tell you exactly how addicted to films I am: 64.4%. Translation: I have seen 64.4% of the movies on the IMDB Top 250 list, which sounds about right as I never could make it through “The Seven Samurai”. Maybe next time!

Anyway, compare your lives to mine, then kill yourselves. Do it now!

Nazi on the moon.

Speaking of non-historical Nazi pictures, why not Nazi Zombies?

If only Tom Cruise had been able to kill Hitler, we wouldn’t be facing these dual threats.

Oh, and yes, Star Trek has already covered the Nazis), in case you were curious.

1. It has Brad Pitt in it
2. It has a really stupid name
3. It has Brad Pitt doing a stupid fake southern accent in it
4. I have to “click to download” something to watch the trailer (which i don’t want to watch)
5. The old/young version of Brad Pitt is incredibly creepy and unnerving, in a bad way
6. It appears to contain one of the stupid/boring romantic encounters that Changed Everything, that I hate so much
7. A movie with Brad Pitt in it opening on Christmas is liable to ruin Christmas
8. Tagline: “Life isn’t measured in minutes, but in moments.” I literally gagged
9. A movie with Brad Pitt in it that also contains Cate Blanchett is liable to ruin Cate Blanchett
10. It just looks stupid and ridiculous and soppy and pointless and represents everything inane about American popular culture and it makes me sad just thinking about it

You don’t want to make me sad at Christmas time, do you?