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This Gawker article got me thinking… Thinking enough to bring back “A Few Of My Favorite Things”!

A Few Of My Favorite Things is a series that sometimes appears on weekends on Driven By Boredom. Each week I talk about three of my favorite things from a specific genre of film, music, or something else all together. Each favorite thing is accompanied by a video and a description of why it is one of my favorite things. Click here for more favorites.

I have never really been scared of movies in my life. I like a lot of horror films, but usually the ones I like are just really creepy or gory, I am never really scared by them. I remember when I realized this. I had just watched The Blair Witch Project on it’s first run. I am not sure if you remember, but before it became a big hit, it played only in a few cities. I think it was only playing in one theater in the DC area and I had to drive quite a ways to see it. At that time people were saying that it was real. Of course by the end, it was pretty clear that it was fake, but going in I thought I was watching some sort of documentary or something. By the end of the movie all my friends I went with were freaked out, and I wasn’t. I just kept thinking, “The worst thing that is going to happen is that they are going to die.” I sort of realized then I don’t fear death. This of course is bullshit, I just don’t fear theatrical death. I am sure that put in an actual life or death situation I would pee myself. So anyway I started thinking back to the movies in my life that did scare me and I came up with three. Keep reading to find out which.

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I have never really been an autograph collector exactly, but I had a few here and there. I had this one wall in my bedroom that I hung all sorts of stuff on. I had framed photos and a copy of the first record that came out on my old punk label and a three autographs:

1. The first autograph was John Snider from the Dukes Of Hazzard. I was a HUGE Dukes fan growing up and I found out that for a dollar her would send you a personalized autograph. It said “To Nate: God Bless. John R. Schneider.
2. The second was a letter that John McCain sent me thanking me for working/donating to his 2000 primary campaign. It is absolutely scary that a guy I would work so hard for would totally sell out and pander to the right like he has done. It pretty much makes me sick, but in 2000 I really trusted him and thought he would do a lot of good for this country.
3. The third autograph was from John Walsh from America’s Most Wanted. He was filming a scene in Old Town Alexandria, VA where my friends and I used to hang out every day. We kept yelling shit out whenever they started a take because we were punk ass kids. This guy Crazy Willy almost got arrested for it. I had been sitting watching this for about 30 minutes when I got an idea. I ran across the street to a CVS where a friend of mine worked… A girl who later got arrested for robbing a Ben And Jerry’s in full view of cameras where she was friends with half the staff who worked there. They came to her house a few hours after and found all the money, in a deposit bag with all the receipts. Amazing. Anyway, I ran into this CVS and asked her to hand me a WANTED poster that was hanging up. This guy had been hiding pornography in children’s books at the library or something. Anyway, I got this poster and got John Walsh to sign it. Awesome.

So, long story short… One day I realized when looking at this wall that all the autographs were of people named John. I thought this was very weird. I also am a big They Might Be Giants fan and they are both named John and I had their autograph… and when I was 10 I got John Ramita Jr’s autograph on an X-Man comic. These are weird conicidences. After that for about a month I became obsessed with collecting Johns’ autographs. I thought that since a signature is sometimes refered to as a “John Hancock” it was even more significant. I went on ebay and bought John Larroquette, John Lithgow and Neil Patrick Harris… okay, that last one is not a John, but it was only $3 and I am a pretty obsessive Doogie Howser fan.

Okay, long story short. I wanted to do something for a 4th of July update, so I decided to work on this idea of signing your “John”. John Hancock has the most recognizable signature in United States history. I wanted to do a little project to see how well people remembered their history books. Who remembers what his signature looks like? I just wanted to see peoples interpretation of it. I asked everyone to sign his name the way they think it looks on the Declaration of Independence and then I took a picture. I didn’t let them look at anyone else’s signature so everyone had their own view of what it looked like. Some people took it more seriously than others, and some people were just embarrassed that they didn’t know what it looked like. A surprisingly large amount of people had no idea what it looked like and basically mocked me for successfully completing 5th grade history class. I did not include those people in the project. Here are some interesting facts:

• Only 4 of 50 people underlined John Hancock. To me that is the first thing I think about with that signature.
• Almost everyone got the big J an H right.
• At least 5 people spelled his name blatantly wrong.
• It seems like 5% of the people involved in the project are completely illiterate.
• Two people wrote “John Han” and then drew a picture of a penis. Those people happened to be very close friends and did the exact thing as each other coincidentally only minutes apart. I made them redo them.
• Only one of the 50 people were actually named John.
• I shot 27 women and 23 men.

So what do we learn from this? I am not sure. But you should try the experiment on your own. Then look at his actual signature here. How did you do?

Check out all the photos here.

Today is the exact 10 year anniversary of me losing my virginity. In celebration of this fact I am posting a project that I have been working on for a while. I was not thinking about today when I started the project, but when I realized what it was, I thought that this was a perfect time to post it. Enjoy.

On a recent drive through the neighborhood I grew up in I realized that most of the strong feelings that I had were a result of a nostalgia directly related to a more innocent feeling of women and my own sexuality that I had when growing up in Alexandria, VA. I wanted to do a photo project on this and take some images of the spots that gave me the most tingles. I decided to use Polaroid film because it’s number one use is taking dirty pictures of people. My relationship with the film has also been a sleazy one as 95% of the pictures I have taken using the medium have been of naked girls. I though documenting my early sex life would be a perfect reason to use Polaroids to do something other than take naked pictures, yet to still play on the sexual identity of the medium.

I lived in Alexandria from 1980 to 1999. These were my formative years and they were they determined the way I dealt with women. When I was a kid I was very weird and had no luck with girls. This was not really an issue until I transfered to a private school outside my neighborhood in the 4th grade. From that point on I was in school with the same people for the next 9 years. The first week of 4th grade I made a joke about eating a praying mantis and that haunted me for the rest of my time at the school. At my old school eating bugs was funny, at my new school it was weird. From then on I was the weird kid… and then the fat kid, and then the weird kid kid again when I started getting into punk rock my freshman year of high school. I eventually started working out, lost all the weight and starting in about the 10th grade I really came into myself and started acting confidently. I stopped getting beat up at school, but I still had no luck with girls, because even then I was still viewed as the weird kid who ate bugs. As soon as I met girls outside of school, that changed forever. I have spent the last decade of my life trying to make up for my short comings as a kid and that has left me perpetually single and probably a bit more promiscuous than is healthy. But my unhealthy relationship with women started slowly and those more innocent times bring back amazing memories and that’s what this project is all about. Working thorough those early sexual encounters and finding out what the fuck went wrong.

I decided only to include stories and images from directly around my old neighborhood. Many of the important events in my life happened outside this little area as my school and all my high school hang out points were farther away. That being said, this is the most concentrated area and because of that, being in these few square miles gives me the strongest sense of my past, both of my life and specifically of my early sexuality

This project can be viewed by visiting the Google Map I made. Each map point has a Polaroid and a description of why that photo is important. The map points are listed in chronological order and should be read in that order. I hope you enjoy the project, I spent way too much time on it.

To view higher resolution versions of the polaroids click here.

Update: Due to the amount of interest that this post has received, if you are linking this, please link this post and not the map directly, as the explanation of the project is important to it, and the google map did not allow me enough space to get all my thoughts down. Also, if you dig this, Digg it.

So anyone who knows anything knows that this commercial is the greatest ever made. I have blogged about it at least twice, and now we can make it thrice. So my friend Sarah 2.0 IMed me today telling me how much she hates this commercial, so much that she blogged about it in a NEGATIVE way. This is completely contrary to what she should be doing. Luckily it was only a myspace blog so it doesn’t count… but I am going to still take the time to attack her arguments. Start out by reading her blog and watching the video.

She breaks the video down by seconds. I have posted said video below so you can compare. Hit the play button on the control panel and not on the video because it is fucked up for some reason and will try to tell you that it is no longer available.

Her comments in italics.

.05: The cannon shoots through the wall and the wall falls towards the blast
The thing is, the cannon knocks over the wall when it hits the front wall of the house. You see it has already gone through the back wall and at this point it does not have enough speed to rip through the front wall, but it does have enough to push the wall over, knocking all the walls down in the process. Duh.

.14: GROSS pirate teeth!
Just because they are gross doesn’t make them any less piratey and if I have learned anything from the internets is that pirates are cool.

.22: Ok the mermaid costumes are kinda cool, but I wish they flipped their tails only on the 4’s
That is just bullshit. The costumes are amazing of course, but you need that extra flip. It ties the whole scene together. That is like having the Godfather baptism scene without the baptism.

.24: She’s watching the ocean via her digital cable internet? Is that whats going on? I’m sure they didn’t do that on Bay Watch.
Um.. Bay Watch was FICTIONAL. It was a made up TV show. Real life guards use the extreme value that is the Optimum Triple Play so they can both watch their swimmers with greater efficiency AND watch Bay Watch AND use the telephone if they so desire. Each for just one flat rate of $29.95.

.36: Pelvic thrust…and in those outfits. Who choreographed this shit?
It is clearly an homage to one of Bob Fosse’s most famous numbers, “Steam Heat” from The Pajama Game. And you’d think a dance major on a full scholarship would know that…

.40: Who lays out NOT facing the beach? and the conk shell has a cord coming from under a beach towel, obviously not connected to some digital cables.
Sarah clearly does not know shit about the way conch phones work. And also, while it might be confusing from the commercial anyone who knows anything knows that they are filming at the famous Optimum Beach which has a isthmus that jets out between the ocean where there is beach on both sides. So while they are facing away from the beach in the shot, they are facing towards the beach that the camera is shooting from. According the the productions notes which I was lent for the purpose of this article, the camera was actually positioned from a sand bar.

.43 Ship-less pirates on the run.
Seriously… are you fucking mental? A HUGE pirate ship can not pull up to the beach. They set anchor and are now doing their best raping and pillaging on foot. They also happen to be running away from the sea monster who capsized their attack row boats.

.47: Sweet Christ what is that dragon doing? My friend Daniel Feld thinks he’s kinda hot, but what the hell is going on with the pirate in the background? He’s just holding the tail and swinging a sword around. WTF?!
Um… it’s called rapping. Look it up. And the pirate in the background is dealing with the force of the tail that is nearly whipping him about. That “dragon” is clearly a sea monster and he has amazing tail strength and if that pirate wasn’t holding on for dear life he would be certainly bashed against something with it. Either that or he is dancing.

Its pretty down hill from here.
And by down hill do you mean informative? How else would you know that the savings are for real? And that the triple play is the deal? Also.. we needed to see the logo once more in order to gain brand recognition. It’s called marketing dumb ass.

So, in conclusion: best commercial ever. And Sarah is fired from my life. And Reggaeton should be used to sell EVERYTHING. Case dismissed.

UPDATE: Read Sarah’s dimly worded response here.  I do have to thank her for catching some typos like the Fosse misspelling and the correct price.  That being said, “internets” is not a typo, it is a way of life.

Today we have two new signs that the world is ending.

Firstly, my greatest hero died recently. Honestly I did not even know him by name, but I do appreciate his controbution to the Earth daily. His name is Al Copeland and he founded my favorite restaurant Popeye’s Famous Chicken And Biscuits, which was evidently named after Popeye Doyle from the French Connection. This is a fact that I did not know, but am very glad to know. Speaking of the French Connection once I met someone who swore to me that he was Gene Hackman’s son, but he had never heard of the French Connection. He just kept talking to me about how he was once in a movie with Will Smith.

Secondly, giant Star Fish may or may not be taking over the world. I can’t imagine they would grow this large with out some plans of world domination. They cannot possibly have good intentions. As a man of science, I find it horrifying that we do not know about everything living in the sea. There could be Nazi’s or Communists or even bigger sea creatures living deep in the ocean training, getting ready to make us their slaves and we would never know. I have gone ahead and created a petition asking world leaders to drain the Earth so we know exactly what is down there so we can tag and number them and keep these monsters in line. Also, in a slightly unrelated note I take some issue to the creative language used in this article. Why the hell would an Associated Press article describe the giant star fish as “the size of big food platters”? What? What does that even mean. How do you define the size of a food platter… or a big food platter? And why would you associate mostly inedible mutant sea creatures with food? Bastards.

Don’t forget to sign the petition! These monsters must be stopped!

A Few Of My Favorite Things is a series that appears most weekends on Driven By Boredom. Each week I talk about three of my favorite things from a specific genre of film, music, or something else all together. Each favorite thing is accompanied by a video and a description of why it is one of my favorite things. Click here for more favorites.

Since I just wrote up Be Kind Rewind I decided it would be a good time to do a Favorite Things about one of my favorite directors, Michel Gondry. The first time I saw Eternal Sunshine I became obsessed with Gondry. I started trying to track down all his music videos. I got a big help when PALM released their Directors Label series which featured Gondry. It had a pretty good collection of his videos. When comparing it to the Spike Jonze DVD I realized that I was not as into the musicians Gondry worked with. I loved the videos though and I found myself watching Bjork videos despite hating her music. His videos got me into several bands and complete inspired me. I couldn’t come up with just three favorites, but I tried to do my best… so keep reading to see three of my favorite Michel Gondry videos.

(Read the article)

A Few Of My Favorite Things is a series that appears most weekends on Driven By Boredom. Each week I talk about three of my favorite things from a specific genre of film, music, or something else all together. Each favorite thing is accompanied by a video and a description of why it is one of my favorite things. Click here for more favorites.

Happy Super Bowl Sunday. In honor of this greatest of holidays I am going to be talking about three great football plays. Now, because of NFL’s fascist control over their highlights I can’t show you my favorite plays… or the favorite NFL moments I have had… in fact, I am not even going to be able to show you all of the plays that I am going to talk about. One of these clips is going to be from Tecmo Bowl. Anyway, I am sort of obsessed with football. I try not to mention it on here too much, but I do run a Miami Dolphins website (Bonus Link: me talking Dolphins football on FinsRadio.com) As you may or may not know, the Dolphins are the only team to have gone undefeated. Today our devision rivals, the New England Patriots attempt to become the first team since the Dolphins did it in 1972 to win every game. This I am not happy about. So I am root, root rooting for my home team and praying that some how the Giants can win this game. It is not likely, but I pray. Anyway, all my favorite football moments involve the Dolphins, and there are almost no Dolphins highlights online, so instead I am going to bring you three amazing football plays, for three different reasons. Keep reading to find out which.

(Read the article)

A Few Of My Favorite Things is a series that appears most weekends on Driven By Boredom. Each week I talk about three of my favorite things from a specific genre of film, music, or something else all together. Each favorite thing is accompanied by a video and a description of why it is one of my favorite things. Click here for more favorites.

I have a handful of movies that I break out when I really need to impress someone. If I think someone is really amazing, I invite them over and watch some insanely twisted movie with me that I know will blow them away. 9 times out of 10 it is an Asian Extreme film… Battle Royale or maybe something by Takashi Miike or Park Chan Wook. It was hard to narrow films down to just three… I figure too many people know Battle Royale, and not everyone can appreciate a film like Salo or the 45 minute rape scene in I Spit On Your Grave… and speaking of rape scenes, Irreversible is not a film I want to watch over and over again so showing that to people is sort of out. I can usually judge a persons character by how much they appreciate Wayne’s World (unless they are really young… or really old) so that spends a lot of time in my DVD player. But, when I really thought about it, I came up with three films that I show people over and over again, that have never failed to fuck up the minds of the friends and well wishers I invite over. Keep reading to find out the top 3 films that you need to bump to the top of your Netflix queue.

(Read the article)

A Few Of My Favorite Things is a series that appears most weekends on Driven By Boredom. Each week I talk about three of my favorite things from a specific genre of film, music, or something else all together. Each favorite thing is accompanied by a video and a description of why it is one of my favorite things. Click here for more favorites.

Last week I talked about how I couldn’t find my very favorite commercial jingles and I still can’t, but I did find some pretty great ones. The ones I can’t find were local DC commercials that I grew up with and the old AutoZone commercial which was sweet, but does not seem to exist on the internets. I did find some good stuff. Also, I just wanted to give a shout out to the Human Giant sketch that inspired todays post…. and part 2. Lastly I wanted to mention that this might be the last Favorite Things for the next two weeks because I will be out of town. Anyway, keep reading to listen to some amazing commercial jingles!

(Read the article)

A Few Of My Favorite Things is a series that appears most weekends on Driven By Boredom. Each week I talk about three of my favorite things from a specific genre of film, music, or something else all together. Each favorite thing is accompanied by a video and a description of why it is one of my favorite things. Click here for more favorites.

Today I spent a while looking for my favorite commercial jingles for this post but I couldn’t find the old Autozone commercial or the National Tire Warehouse commercial so I decided to come up with something else. While searching I ran into a He-Man commercial and I thought to write up my favorite toys as a kid… but everyone knows about He-Man and Transformers and Thundercats and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, so I decided to talk about some of the more obscure toys that I played with. Unless you were born between 1977 and 1983 or had siblings who were you probably won’t have any idea what this stuff is… Keep reading to find out my favorites.

(Read the article)

A Few Of My Favorite Things is a series that appears most weekends on Driven By Boredom. Each week I talk about three of my favorite things from a specific genre of film, music, or something else all together. Each favorite thing is accompanied by a video and a description of why it is one of my favorite things. Click here for more favorites.

In my life I have listened to a lot of music. Most of it is very up tempo and aggressive. I like music with great energy. I dig the anger of punk, the beat of hip hop and the dancability of electro… Once in a while though, I like to just sit back and relax. I need music to make out to. I touched boobs for the first time while listening to Bleach by Nirvana, which of course was awesome, but it’s not quite the same thing as making out on a bed listening to Marvin Gaye. I am very picky about my R&B. I am not a huge Motown fan and with the exception of R Kelly I don’t listen to any modern R&B. That being said there are a few artists, most of whom had been making hits for decades, made s super smooth seductive songs of the 70’s blow my mind. Keep reading to find out my three favorites of the decade.

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A Few Of My Favorite Things is a series that appears most weekends on Driven By Boredom. Each week I talk about three of my favorite things from a specific genre of film, music, or something else all together. Each favorite thing is accompanied by a video and a description of why it is one of my favorite things. Click here for more favorites.

Klaus Kinski is one of my favorite actors in theory. The dozen or so film I have seen with him in them I have loved, mostly his films with director Werner Herzog and a number of Spaghetti Westerns. That being said he has made over 100 films and I wouldn’t even know where to start. The films I have seen though blew me away. The 5 films he made with Herzog are generally considered the best of his long career. I got in to both Herzog and Kinski after watching a documentary Herzog made about their “friendship” during those five films called “My Best Fiend: Klaus Kinski”. They had a tumultuous relationship at best. On top of film acting Kinski was in many, many plays and wrote one of the most insane books that I have ever read. He also went on public speaking tours where he would just scream at the audience about Jesus. He also claims to have had sex with both his mother and his daughter (Natasha Kinski). Total fucking nut job, unbelievable actor. Keep reading to find out my three favorite Kinski scenes of all time.

(Read the article)

A Few Of My Favorite Things is a series that appears most weekends on Driven By Boredom. Each week I talk about three of my favorite things from a specific genre of film, music, or something else all together. Each favorite thing is accompanied by a video and a description of why it is one of my favorite things. Click here for more favorites.

From the day Kurt Kobain died in 1994 until I went to college in 1999 I listened to almost exclusively punk rock music. I have a pretty amazing 7″ record collection from that time period. I had a record label and ran a zine and supported my local scene DIY till you die, etc. I went to probably 2-3 shows a week during that entire period. Punk rock was my life. I mostly focused on local DC area bands, but I had my national favorites too. A lot of these bands rarely toured and with not much internet at the time the only way I heard these bands was buying comp CDs, getting mix tapes from my friends or reading the reviews in MRR or Flipside. I used to do so much mail order, ordering music from all over the country. I used to write back and forth with these bands. I thought it was amazing that my favorite bands would hand write me letters with shit I ordered. It instilled this weird mentality in me that makes me very unimpressed with musicians that I meet. For example, if I met an actor in a movie, I might get really excited, but meeting famous musicians has never been exciting to me (except when I hung out with Weird Al). Anyway, my three favorite punk bands in the mid-1990’s were all local bands who I hung out with daily and who I put out records by, and have no video footage to show you, so I am going to skip them and just talk about my three favorite national acts. Keep reading to find out who they are.

(Read the article)

A Few Of My Favorite Things is a series that appears most weekends on Driven By Boredom. Each week I talk about three of my favorite things from a specific genre of film, music, or something else all together. Each favorite thing is accompanied by a video and a description of why it is one of my favorite things. Click here for more favorites.

I have never been a big fan of musical theater. I did see Hairspray, but that is just because I am obsessed with John Waters and have a thing for movies about race, rock and roll and Baltimore. However for some reason a few of my favorite movies ever happen to be musicals. Clearly if you know my taste, these are not going to be the classical musicals. I mean I can’t stand West Side Story and only watched Cabaret because I had a one night stand with a girl who looked just like Liza Minelli and I had just watched Arthur 2. There are some sweet classical musicals I dig, but most of them involve the Nicholas Brothers or some kind of tap dancing which I think is amazing. On an unrelated note, although related to that Nicholas Brothers clip, when I was 15 I was obsessed with Cab Calloway, which I think is the most culturally inappropriate music a 15 year old suburban white kid living in the 1990’s could possibly dig on. 1930’s Harlem big band is not exactly Pearl Jam. Anyway, back to musicals. For some reason, despite my generally dismissive attitude towards musicals there are a few of them I watch over and over again. Check out my top 3 favorites after the jump:

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In the future the world will be full of clones and no one will know how to communicate in real life anymore because we will be all plugged into our computers at all times. We will sit in little pods 24 hours a day digesting information from all over the world with out moving out of our cells. Some people will gain the infinite wisdom of the universe, but most people will just spend their time coming up with creative ways to use emotions and to buy novelty pop culture t-shirts to decorate the flesh-shells of their clones that are living their sim life. Or something.

Today I had the shocking realization that time is much closer than we think, and this revelation had nothing to do with monkey cloning or the fact that Gmail insisted on letting me know about their new emoticons. It has every thing to do with one of the videos posted on myspace’s main page today. Watching this video was absolutely spine crawling. The video consists of Chad Vader being interviewed about his political leanings by Obama Girl. For those of you who have a life and are not aware of Chad and Obama Girl, they are two fictional characters featured in over played viral videos. They are representative of the down fall of media and entertainment and now they have crossed over into a world that should not exist. They are FICTIONAL characters, from different spheres of the internets, talking to each other. This video is like that weird movie in the 80’s where all the beloved cartoon characters of the day teamed up to teach you lessons about drugs, except 100 times more horrible and upsetting. I would much rather watch Alf talk about heroin than have to get my political incites from an minimum wage earning Sith Lord and a model who’s entire career is based on a three minute song she didn’t write or sing, or have really anything to do with. What is going to come next? Chris Crocker interviewing Goatse about gay marriage? Maybe LonleyGirl15 and Ms. Teen South Carolina could learn to Crank That. Or a major right wing presidential candidate reciting Chuck Norris facts? Oh wait, that happened. The apocalypse is upon us. Repent!

I am part of the problem. All your base are belong to my dick in a box.