Sunday, April 30, 2006
Didja see last night's "Press Corespondent's Dinner"
Friday, April 28, 2006
"Lost" Question Answered!
Thursday, April 27, 2006
Am I a trivia genius?
posted by RICK : 3:37 PM
So, apparently I was on Jeopardy last night under the pseudonym "Michael."
I did quite well.
In other programming...
I'm watching "Veronica Mars" last night on my computer because Nets basketball and a two-hour Top Model finale kept it from airing on actual television, and there were about 3 or 4 scenes involving Logan and Veronica and watching them made me feel kinda awesome. It was a feeling I hadn't really experienced since watching Zach and Kelly back in middle school. It made me realize that television typically produces horrible romances. Sure, if you want drama (or beter yet, melodrama), then TV is where to be, but actual romance will typically leave you cold.
I find this interesting, because there have been shows built entirely around the concept of romance and yet they are never actually romantic. "Ed" comes to mind-- a show I loved, but more for its humor, characters and quirks than for the underlying romance storyline. I mean, I bought it, but I never FELT it.
Perhaps the Logan/Veronica dynamic in VM works so well because we all know deep down that there's no WAY these two should ever get together but the notion that they might do so is too tempting to resist.
0 Comments
Tuesday, April 25, 2006
What Is Recoil Discoveries: The System Works!
posted by RICK : 10:18 AM
This morning I woke up at the crack of 7:15, got dressed and headed out to downtown Brooklyn in order to fulfill my civic responsibility, sitting in silent judgment of another. Here is the problem. I don't live in Brooklyn anymore. By the rules, this meant that I shouldn't be serving on a Kings County jury, but I wasn't about to try and get out of it, as I can only imagine everyone of the nearly half-million annual jurors in New York State tries to get out. But I came prepared. I brought along a couple pay-stubs and credit card bills showing my Manhattan address, just in case.
It went down thusly. I show up at the courthouse at 8:30am. I sit in a room with about a dozen or so people reading back issues of Esquire (March 2006, baby!). Halfway through the movie column about Joseph-Gordon Levitt [swoon] a friendly looking gentleman tells us to go into the jury room and take a seat. He'll be with us momentarily. I go in. I take a seat. I finish my JGL article and move on to Bill James. I look up and notice that the room full of a dozen or so potential new friends has suddenly turned into a room full of hundreds of definite strangers.
There was a guy up at the front who was telling everyone to take a seat and that he WOULDN'T be hearing our excuses as to why we shouldn't be here until after the movie.
Ooooh! A movie!
It featured such prominent personalities as Ed Bradley and Diane Sawyer and also had an moderately produced reenactment of the Salem witch trials (SPOILER! he didn't float).
Then the nice man came back and began the filtering process. "If you meet this piece of criteria, go through these doors and to the second room on the right," he'd say. The best part being the people who claimed the didn't speak English, to which the question was asked, "Are you a citizen?" They would answer yes, only for him to say, "How did you pass the test? It's written in English." BAM! Check and mate. Take that foreigners!
I sat tight. I wasn't going to raise my hand or try to weasel my way out. I was just going to sit there and if it took all day, so be it. And if all was said and done, and they didn't care that I'm technically no longer a "peer" of someone living in Brooklyn, then that would be fine by me. After all I did (intentionally) skip jury duty a month or so ago for that very reason (haha, breaking the law!).
But that isn't what happened. Instead, about 10 minutes after the video wrapped, the man said, "If you no longer live in Brooklyn, you can not serve on a jury so go through these doors and sit in the room at the right." I got up and did just that. It was me and this other guy. In came a woman. She was all business. She asked the other guy why he was there first. He said he didn't live in Brooklyn. She said she needed proof. He had none. She said he going to be asked back in six months and needed to bring proof then. He left. She came to me. I showed her my Juror form that came in the mail, and then I showed her my pay-stubs and credit card bills.
"Thanks Rick, you can go."
I was out by 9:35am.
The best thing about New York City government is that these people have heard it all before. There aren't any special cases, because there are so many people in this city everything has been done. This is why I found it amusing when people would walk into a room full of hundreds of strangers and instead of taking a seat going right up the guy in the front and trying to convince him they shouldn't be here. It only slowed things down. Eventually, they would be told to take their seat and their problem would be addressed to the group as a whole.
We're in this together people. No sense trying to rewrite the books.
0 Comments
Sunday, April 23, 2006
Patton Around the AA
Tuesday, April 18, 2006
Awesome web-stat of the day
Monday, April 17, 2006
Necessary Rock and Roll Reunions of the New Millennium
Sunday, April 16, 2006
Nashvizzle
Top 1 Reason I Should Update My Eye Prescription
V for I'm Gonna Start Writing Again
Saturday, April 15, 2006
The Loop!
posted by RICK : 11:33 AM
FOX was gracious enough to air two episodes of their hit new comedy The Loop this week. I watched both. Here's what the show is not about: the mysterious section of St. Louis known to young and old alike as "The Loop," and the crazy misadventures of three tourists looking for said loop in a late model Mazda after a wedding, but instead getting lost and inadvertantly touring a neighborhood full of St. Louis's most luxurious crumbling homes. It should also be noted that "The Loop" (the St. Louis version) didn't live up to its name as I-- er, these travelers-- detected a discernable beginning and ending. I suspect that if August Ferdinand Mobius had been from St. Louis, his invention would have been less like this and more like this.
Yes, FOX's The Loop is nothing like that. Instead it takes place in Chicago, and follows the misadventures of Sam Sullivan, a kid fresh-out-of-college who is the first amongst his group of friends to get a real job or, based on the two episodes I've seen, "a job". The Loop wants to be many things, but what it suceeds at most is being America's first, true, MySpace-comedy. It's the first series I can think of that appears to be marketed almost exclusively to the MySpace-mainstream-alternative. Clearly the logic is if SUPER-UNDERGROUND comic Dane Cook can have a quarter-trillion friends, surely the formula will get the as many viewers IF NOT MORE. So you take a gorgeous looking cast, put them in few clothes, throw in some whip-pans, a pop-punk soundtrack, and Courtney from the Dandy Warhols (he was on Thursday's episode for some reason*), simmer, serve. The fact that this show is one of the two new comedies (Free Ride being the other... which, actually, might have all ready been canceled) on FOX that were to replace Arrested Development just makes matters worse.
But there's a problem.
The problem is that I'm going to watch this show again. And I'll probably watch it until its inevitable cancelation (most kids on MySpace don't watch TV, they're too busy MySpacing) because of a critical saving grace: Philip Baker Hall is absofuckinghilarious. He plays the owner of whateverthehell airline the main character is suppose to work and everything that comes out of his mouth is pure gold. Perhaps the bigger question in all of this is why exactly PBH is on this stain of a series? Oh yeah, maybe its because PTA hasn't had a movie in six years.
*Not to be confused with his unnecessary appearance on Veronica Mars last fall, but at least in that case he was never actually addressed as "Courtney from the Dandy Warhols")
0 Comments
Friday, April 14, 2006
The dirtiest link I'll ever post:
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
BIG BAGS! WHUT?
Monday, April 10, 2006
A network move in the right direction.
Sunday, April 09, 2006
The Lord takes a curtain call
posted by RICK : 1:40 PM
Poor Carlos Beltran. New York hasn't been that kind to him since his arrival in Queens last season (well, unless you count the $119 million dollars he'll be receiving over the foreseeable future). He keeps getting booed. That is until he hit a homerun on Thursday and suddenly everyone loved him. Of course, then he had to go and say something asinine like this:"Well, I went out," Beltran said. "I just took my time. Like I say, at the beginning, I don't feel like doing it, but I just put myself in the situation of what would God have done in a situation like that. You know, I'm a Christian guy, and after getting booed the first two days, and all of a sudden you come through and get a hit and all of a sudden they want you to go out in a curtain call, I put myself right there and I do believe God would have gone out."
READ ON
Yes, Carlos. God would have gone out for a curtain call. Absolutely.
0 Comments
Tuesday, April 04, 2006
City of Omaha, we need more cowbell!
posted by Anonymous : 10:50 PM
Anyone who has lived in Omaha, even for a short timespan, knows that we love our roads. We fucking LOVE them. We build them and we rebuild them and sometimes we can't stand the fact that there's a road that hasn't been under construction in awhile, so it's worth tearing up and rebuilding again.
Granted, they do a good job of rebuilding them to "look nice," but it doesn't really matter because they'll be tearing it up again within the next five years. Sometimes they forget to engineer them properly before laying down the cement, and so it's all the more reason to tear that shit up again and start over. Ha ha, tax dollar oops.
And then sometimes they come up with funny ideas about putting roads in the sky, which really only results in 10 years of construction in rebuilding the roads to accomodate the building of these other roads and then rebuilding the rebuilt roads back to normal, except for the rebuilt roads that they need to rebuild to fit the overwhelming concept of the absurd roads they just built over the rebuilt roads. I'll at least say in regards to this particular project that perhaps they will serve their purpose in the long-term. And in some ways, they're aesthetically pleasing in temporarily fooling me into thinking we're a big city with big roads that hover over other roads, because one set of roads just won't do it. In the short-term, however, DAMN THAT'S A LOT OF CONSTRUCTION.
Anyhow, the point of this post is to discuss a job that I've become increasingly curious about. If you've lived in Omaha long enough, you've undoubtedly driven past an intersection where you've seen a car or truck awkwardly parked on a median or up on the curb with a person inside watching traffic-- a sign on the side of the vehicle that says "City of Omaha Traffic Study" or something to that effect. That's right. They're studying YOU. And they're going to do it ALL DAY.
So how does one earn that job? Or I guess a better question is: how does one get STUCK with that job?
Here's my questions about the job (enlighten me if you're a traffic studier or know about them):
- How much does the job pay? Is it salary or hourly? Are there benefits? What's the turnover rate?
- Do you voluntarily apply for and take the job? What are the qualifications for being able to study traffic to the satisfaction of the city? Is there a Traffic Study School with classes one must take before properly observing traffic?
- What exactly is being studied? Ratio of red cars to blue cars? Amount of road-head administered per hour at this particular intersection/stretch of road?
- Can they afford to be distracted? Do they take breaks? If I were to walk into the middle of the intersection and lay face-down on the pavement, would they be obligated to intervene or are they supposed to keep observing traffic, perhaps only making a note of my action in their log (if they keep one)? Can I bring them food or lemonade or something out of my pity for them?
- Would I be able to fake being a traffic observer? The signs they use on their vehicles are pretty simplistic and look like they're merely spray-painted stencils on plain paper, taped to the side of whatever they happen to be driving-- quite easy to replicate. Who would call me out on it? What are the penalties? What if they caught me but it turned out I took really good notes? Is it still a bad thing?
- What if I started an independent traffic study, unaffiliated with the city? Is that so wrong? Why would I even want to study traffic on my own, though? I didn't think that part out.
- Are they human? Do they eat and sleep like us? Do they live among us? How do they reproduce?
- If the answer is "yes" to all the questions in the above bullet point, are they a good lay?
So I'm not sure what to make of them, and I'm not sure whether or not I feel sorry for them. If they're asked by the city to constantly objectively reevaluate shit, then yeah, I feel bad because they'll be revisiting the same intersections over and over in their different incarnations. But if they're the people who actively say, "hey, better circle the wagons-- looks like we gotta tear shit up again," then I can't say I feel much pity.
But this is all just a matter of curiosity. If I ever see a hot traffic-studying chick (which I haven't), would it be unethical to approach her on the job and ask for her number? She can't really run away, which would be a great rationalization if I was sleazy and actually had no principles. Would she lose her job for me distracting her for a few seconds and throwing off the accuracy of her "report"?
These are the questions I concern myself with, and they clearly burn away the threads of the very fabric of society. We shall not drive in fear of one another.
Good night, and good luck.
0 Comments
Monday, April 03, 2006
Paint me a picture, dead man.
posted by Anonymous : 1:14 AM
I would never want to do this man any wrong. I really wouldn't. Just look at him. He's everyone's buddy. I almost want to purchase his whole Joy of Painting set just so I can have it run non-stop on my DVD player as I rest my head to sleep. The sound of his voice is a lullabye in itself. My dad and I used to sit in complete silent awe as we'd watch Bob paint practically THE EXACT SAME landscape everytime on his PBS show.
Premise of the show is simple: Bob stands in a studio for a half hour against no backdrop whatsoever and just paints a landscape that pretty much always ends up looking like the one pictured on the left. But the catch is, no matter how predictable it is, you end up watching the WHOLE FUCKING THING without flinching. How does a man command such power?
My dad likened his voice to being that of an "all-night DJ," which is pretty much accurate. If Bob Ross handled peace talks and general foreign relations, I think the whole world would resemble his artistic vision and Saddam would be busy planting trees while Iran would be harvesting pot-- not uranium.
Too bad Bob is dead.
I'm not one to offend easily, but somehow something seems wrong when the likeness of Mr. Ross is handed over to Nintendo for creating a painting video game, meant to showcase the free-handed capabilities of the Big N's new console, code-named Revolution.
Granted, I'm extremely enthused about the possibilities this console has. And it's a cool idea to implement the idea of using the weird-assed motion-sensitive controller as a paintbrush. But why Bob Ross?
I'm not naive, and I know the answer to this question, but when does marketing go too far? I understand this is a growing controversy when it comes to using the likeness of dead celebrities to hawk products. I saw Gene Kelly dancing with a vacuum and Steve McQueen driving the new Mustang, and I thought they were both tacky (yet somewhat clever, purely in their presentation). And who could forget when TuPac made more post-mortem albums than pre-mortem and even landed a theatrical release?
Enough, though. Perhaps it's more of a dilemma as to how their image is handled and carried on after death. I don't doubt that CG will take a turn toward recreating deceased actors for full-length features, resulting in a move to protect their estates and all sorts of legal troubles. I already read a blurb this last week where Paul Newman expressed worry over the unauthorized recreation and mishandling of his likeness after his death. I worry about the unauthorized recreation and mishandling of his salad dressing.
To bring everything back to a point, though, something seems dirty about playing a game where the essence of a dead man was attempted to be resurrected by splashing his name on the title and using images of him to create some artificial experience that could have otherwise held up without him. I couldn't imagine the character of my recently-deceased grandfather being warped and reused to benefit a company or campaign he never would have stood behind when he was alive.
The legend of Bob Ross is great to honor and celebrate through the work he completed while he was alive. But it's hard to celebrate a man's current work when he's been in the dirt since '95.
In other words, R.I.P. Bobbie. I hope you're cruising down the highway in the sky with McQueen while listening to some House of Pain.
0 Comments
Sunday, April 02, 2006
Have you seen that new movie Brick?
posted by RICK : 7:14 AM
I guess you could call it, "This year's Sin City." You could call it that. I'm hesitant to do so. Sure, there's definitely a case to be made that it's all style and no substance (Brick is a classic 1950s hard-boiled detective movie set in a contemporary high school). My preferred way of putting it is "style as substance." But even that seems to slight a film that is both unlike anything I've seen before and yet exactly like something I've seen before (though I guess the same could have been said for Sin City). Or maybe what this really comes down to is I think I have a man-crush on JGL. His performance is exactly as detached and unflinching as the role requires-- the opposite of Neil, where we previously saw him. Granted, "detached" generally means "bad acting," and maybe I'm too transfixed by his baby-browns, but being able to say a line like, "I gave him to you to see him eaten, not to see you fed," and somehow managing to pull it off speaks volumes about why he works so well in this movie. Perhaps the best thing I can say about Brick is that it does work. Sure, at any given moment you can take yourself out of the movie only to look back up again and say, "Wait a minute! Teenagers don't talk like that!" but that kind of kills point. It's Veronica Mars with an edge-- or rather, a different edge. It's kind of like those Trailer Contests where film promos are re-cut to fit into a different genre. It isn't exactly something you can make a career of, but damn if it isn't fun to watch.
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Saturday, April 01, 2006
I pity tha April foo'
posted by Anonymous : 8:53 PM
Okay, so I read a blog post on a phallic conspiracy and admired how it sounded like some of the low-brow material I've written in the past. It dances around the joke a little long-winded-like, but when you reach each punchline, it's pretty amusing. So I'll support this man's alleged Gatorade Conspiracy.
Granted, the whole joke about things that subtly resemble sex organs is pretty overdone. But every now and then comes along one that you never really thought about before, and the case made for it will never allow you to look at it the same again. I ironically guzzled down some Gatorade -- the EXACT SAME FLAVOR as the one featured at the beginning -- 2 minutes before reading it. Maybe that made the joke more disturbing.
Reminder: spring ahead tonight, suckas.
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Saturday Night Taped
Welcome to "What Is Recoil?." If you would like to post something on this blog, but don't have a WIR-Blogger login, then send me an e-mail, and I'll make it happen. SHAZAM!
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"Lost" Question Answered!
Thursday, April 27, 2006
Am I a trivia genius?
posted by RICK : 3:37 PM
So, apparently I was on Jeopardy last night under the pseudonym "Michael."
I did quite well.
In other programming...
I'm watching "Veronica Mars" last night on my computer because Nets basketball and a two-hour Top Model finale kept it from airing on actual television, and there were about 3 or 4 scenes involving Logan and Veronica and watching them made me feel kinda awesome. It was a feeling I hadn't really experienced since watching Zach and Kelly back in middle school. It made me realize that television typically produces horrible romances. Sure, if you want drama (or beter yet, melodrama), then TV is where to be, but actual romance will typically leave you cold.
I find this interesting, because there have been shows built entirely around the concept of romance and yet they are never actually romantic. "Ed" comes to mind-- a show I loved, but more for its humor, characters and quirks than for the underlying romance storyline. I mean, I bought it, but I never FELT it.
Perhaps the Logan/Veronica dynamic in VM works so well because we all know deep down that there's no WAY these two should ever get together but the notion that they might do so is too tempting to resist.
0 Comments
Tuesday, April 25, 2006
What Is Recoil Discoveries: The System Works!
posted by RICK : 10:18 AM
This morning I woke up at the crack of 7:15, got dressed and headed out to downtown Brooklyn in order to fulfill my civic responsibility, sitting in silent judgment of another. Here is the problem. I don't live in Brooklyn anymore. By the rules, this meant that I shouldn't be serving on a Kings County jury, but I wasn't about to try and get out of it, as I can only imagine everyone of the nearly half-million annual jurors in New York State tries to get out. But I came prepared. I brought along a couple pay-stubs and credit card bills showing my Manhattan address, just in case.
It went down thusly. I show up at the courthouse at 8:30am. I sit in a room with about a dozen or so people reading back issues of Esquire (March 2006, baby!). Halfway through the movie column about Joseph-Gordon Levitt [swoon] a friendly looking gentleman tells us to go into the jury room and take a seat. He'll be with us momentarily. I go in. I take a seat. I finish my JGL article and move on to Bill James. I look up and notice that the room full of a dozen or so potential new friends has suddenly turned into a room full of hundreds of definite strangers.
There was a guy up at the front who was telling everyone to take a seat and that he WOULDN'T be hearing our excuses as to why we shouldn't be here until after the movie.
Ooooh! A movie!
It featured such prominent personalities as Ed Bradley and Diane Sawyer and also had an moderately produced reenactment of the Salem witch trials (SPOILER! he didn't float).
Then the nice man came back and began the filtering process. "If you meet this piece of criteria, go through these doors and to the second room on the right," he'd say. The best part being the people who claimed the didn't speak English, to which the question was asked, "Are you a citizen?" They would answer yes, only for him to say, "How did you pass the test? It's written in English." BAM! Check and mate. Take that foreigners!
I sat tight. I wasn't going to raise my hand or try to weasel my way out. I was just going to sit there and if it took all day, so be it. And if all was said and done, and they didn't care that I'm technically no longer a "peer" of someone living in Brooklyn, then that would be fine by me. After all I did (intentionally) skip jury duty a month or so ago for that very reason (haha, breaking the law!).
But that isn't what happened. Instead, about 10 minutes after the video wrapped, the man said, "If you no longer live in Brooklyn, you can not serve on a jury so go through these doors and sit in the room at the right." I got up and did just that. It was me and this other guy. In came a woman. She was all business. She asked the other guy why he was there first. He said he didn't live in Brooklyn. She said she needed proof. He had none. She said he going to be asked back in six months and needed to bring proof then. He left. She came to me. I showed her my Juror form that came in the mail, and then I showed her my pay-stubs and credit card bills.
"Thanks Rick, you can go."
I was out by 9:35am.
The best thing about New York City government is that these people have heard it all before. There aren't any special cases, because there are so many people in this city everything has been done. This is why I found it amusing when people would walk into a room full of hundreds of strangers and instead of taking a seat going right up the guy in the front and trying to convince him they shouldn't be here. It only slowed things down. Eventually, they would be told to take their seat and their problem would be addressed to the group as a whole.
We're in this together people. No sense trying to rewrite the books.
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Sunday, April 23, 2006
Patton Around the AA
Tuesday, April 18, 2006
Awesome web-stat of the day
Monday, April 17, 2006
Necessary Rock and Roll Reunions of the New Millennium
Sunday, April 16, 2006
Nashvizzle
Top 1 Reason I Should Update My Eye Prescription
V for I'm Gonna Start Writing Again
Saturday, April 15, 2006
The Loop!
posted by RICK : 11:33 AM
FOX was gracious enough to air two episodes of their hit new comedy The Loop this week. I watched both. Here's what the show is not about: the mysterious section of St. Louis known to young and old alike as "The Loop," and the crazy misadventures of three tourists looking for said loop in a late model Mazda after a wedding, but instead getting lost and inadvertantly touring a neighborhood full of St. Louis's most luxurious crumbling homes. It should also be noted that "The Loop" (the St. Louis version) didn't live up to its name as I-- er, these travelers-- detected a discernable beginning and ending. I suspect that if August Ferdinand Mobius had been from St. Louis, his invention would have been less like this and more like this.
Yes, FOX's The Loop is nothing like that. Instead it takes place in Chicago, and follows the misadventures of Sam Sullivan, a kid fresh-out-of-college who is the first amongst his group of friends to get a real job or, based on the two episodes I've seen, "a job". The Loop wants to be many things, but what it suceeds at most is being America's first, true, MySpace-comedy. It's the first series I can think of that appears to be marketed almost exclusively to the MySpace-mainstream-alternative. Clearly the logic is if SUPER-UNDERGROUND comic Dane Cook can have a quarter-trillion friends, surely the formula will get the as many viewers IF NOT MORE. So you take a gorgeous looking cast, put them in few clothes, throw in some whip-pans, a pop-punk soundtrack, and Courtney from the Dandy Warhols (he was on Thursday's episode for some reason*), simmer, serve. The fact that this show is one of the two new comedies (Free Ride being the other... which, actually, might have all ready been canceled) on FOX that were to replace Arrested Development just makes matters worse.
But there's a problem.
The problem is that I'm going to watch this show again. And I'll probably watch it until its inevitable cancelation (most kids on MySpace don't watch TV, they're too busy MySpacing) because of a critical saving grace: Philip Baker Hall is absofuckinghilarious. He plays the owner of whateverthehell airline the main character is suppose to work and everything that comes out of his mouth is pure gold. Perhaps the bigger question in all of this is why exactly PBH is on this stain of a series? Oh yeah, maybe its because PTA hasn't had a movie in six years.
*Not to be confused with his unnecessary appearance on Veronica Mars last fall, but at least in that case he was never actually addressed as "Courtney from the Dandy Warhols")
0 Comments
Friday, April 14, 2006
The dirtiest link I'll ever post:
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
BIG BAGS! WHUT?
Monday, April 10, 2006
A network move in the right direction.
Sunday, April 09, 2006
The Lord takes a curtain call
posted by RICK : 1:40 PM
Poor Carlos Beltran. New York hasn't been that kind to him since his arrival in Queens last season (well, unless you count the $119 million dollars he'll be receiving over the foreseeable future). He keeps getting booed. That is until he hit a homerun on Thursday and suddenly everyone loved him. Of course, then he had to go and say something asinine like this:"Well, I went out," Beltran said. "I just took my time. Like I say, at the beginning, I don't feel like doing it, but I just put myself in the situation of what would God have done in a situation like that. You know, I'm a Christian guy, and after getting booed the first two days, and all of a sudden you come through and get a hit and all of a sudden they want you to go out in a curtain call, I put myself right there and I do believe God would have gone out."
READ ON
Yes, Carlos. God would have gone out for a curtain call. Absolutely.
0 Comments
Tuesday, April 04, 2006
City of Omaha, we need more cowbell!
posted by Anonymous : 10:50 PM
Anyone who has lived in Omaha, even for a short timespan, knows that we love our roads. We fucking LOVE them. We build them and we rebuild them and sometimes we can't stand the fact that there's a road that hasn't been under construction in awhile, so it's worth tearing up and rebuilding again.
Granted, they do a good job of rebuilding them to "look nice," but it doesn't really matter because they'll be tearing it up again within the next five years. Sometimes they forget to engineer them properly before laying down the cement, and so it's all the more reason to tear that shit up again and start over. Ha ha, tax dollar oops.
And then sometimes they come up with funny ideas about putting roads in the sky, which really only results in 10 years of construction in rebuilding the roads to accomodate the building of these other roads and then rebuilding the rebuilt roads back to normal, except for the rebuilt roads that they need to rebuild to fit the overwhelming concept of the absurd roads they just built over the rebuilt roads. I'll at least say in regards to this particular project that perhaps they will serve their purpose in the long-term. And in some ways, they're aesthetically pleasing in temporarily fooling me into thinking we're a big city with big roads that hover over other roads, because one set of roads just won't do it. In the short-term, however, DAMN THAT'S A LOT OF CONSTRUCTION.
Anyhow, the point of this post is to discuss a job that I've become increasingly curious about. If you've lived in Omaha long enough, you've undoubtedly driven past an intersection where you've seen a car or truck awkwardly parked on a median or up on the curb with a person inside watching traffic-- a sign on the side of the vehicle that says "City of Omaha Traffic Study" or something to that effect. That's right. They're studying YOU. And they're going to do it ALL DAY.
So how does one earn that job? Or I guess a better question is: how does one get STUCK with that job?
Here's my questions about the job (enlighten me if you're a traffic studier or know about them):
- How much does the job pay? Is it salary or hourly? Are there benefits? What's the turnover rate?
- Do you voluntarily apply for and take the job? What are the qualifications for being able to study traffic to the satisfaction of the city? Is there a Traffic Study School with classes one must take before properly observing traffic?
- What exactly is being studied? Ratio of red cars to blue cars? Amount of road-head administered per hour at this particular intersection/stretch of road?
- Can they afford to be distracted? Do they take breaks? If I were to walk into the middle of the intersection and lay face-down on the pavement, would they be obligated to intervene or are they supposed to keep observing traffic, perhaps only making a note of my action in their log (if they keep one)? Can I bring them food or lemonade or something out of my pity for them?
- Would I be able to fake being a traffic observer? The signs they use on their vehicles are pretty simplistic and look like they're merely spray-painted stencils on plain paper, taped to the side of whatever they happen to be driving-- quite easy to replicate. Who would call me out on it? What are the penalties? What if they caught me but it turned out I took really good notes? Is it still a bad thing?
- What if I started an independent traffic study, unaffiliated with the city? Is that so wrong? Why would I even want to study traffic on my own, though? I didn't think that part out.
- Are they human? Do they eat and sleep like us? Do they live among us? How do they reproduce?
- If the answer is "yes" to all the questions in the above bullet point, are they a good lay?
So I'm not sure what to make of them, and I'm not sure whether or not I feel sorry for them. If they're asked by the city to constantly objectively reevaluate shit, then yeah, I feel bad because they'll be revisiting the same intersections over and over in their different incarnations. But if they're the people who actively say, "hey, better circle the wagons-- looks like we gotta tear shit up again," then I can't say I feel much pity.
But this is all just a matter of curiosity. If I ever see a hot traffic-studying chick (which I haven't), would it be unethical to approach her on the job and ask for her number? She can't really run away, which would be a great rationalization if I was sleazy and actually had no principles. Would she lose her job for me distracting her for a few seconds and throwing off the accuracy of her "report"?
These are the questions I concern myself with, and they clearly burn away the threads of the very fabric of society. We shall not drive in fear of one another.
Good night, and good luck.
0 Comments
Monday, April 03, 2006
Paint me a picture, dead man.
posted by Anonymous : 1:14 AM
I would never want to do this man any wrong. I really wouldn't. Just look at him. He's everyone's buddy. I almost want to purchase his whole Joy of Painting set just so I can have it run non-stop on my DVD player as I rest my head to sleep. The sound of his voice is a lullabye in itself. My dad and I used to sit in complete silent awe as we'd watch Bob paint practically THE EXACT SAME landscape everytime on his PBS show.
Premise of the show is simple: Bob stands in a studio for a half hour against no backdrop whatsoever and just paints a landscape that pretty much always ends up looking like the one pictured on the left. But the catch is, no matter how predictable it is, you end up watching the WHOLE FUCKING THING without flinching. How does a man command such power?
My dad likened his voice to being that of an "all-night DJ," which is pretty much accurate. If Bob Ross handled peace talks and general foreign relations, I think the whole world would resemble his artistic vision and Saddam would be busy planting trees while Iran would be harvesting pot-- not uranium.
Too bad Bob is dead.
I'm not one to offend easily, but somehow something seems wrong when the likeness of Mr. Ross is handed over to Nintendo for creating a painting video game, meant to showcase the free-handed capabilities of the Big N's new console, code-named Revolution.
Granted, I'm extremely enthused about the possibilities this console has. And it's a cool idea to implement the idea of using the weird-assed motion-sensitive controller as a paintbrush. But why Bob Ross?
I'm not naive, and I know the answer to this question, but when does marketing go too far? I understand this is a growing controversy when it comes to using the likeness of dead celebrities to hawk products. I saw Gene Kelly dancing with a vacuum and Steve McQueen driving the new Mustang, and I thought they were both tacky (yet somewhat clever, purely in their presentation). And who could forget when TuPac made more post-mortem albums than pre-mortem and even landed a theatrical release?
Enough, though. Perhaps it's more of a dilemma as to how their image is handled and carried on after death. I don't doubt that CG will take a turn toward recreating deceased actors for full-length features, resulting in a move to protect their estates and all sorts of legal troubles. I already read a blurb this last week where Paul Newman expressed worry over the unauthorized recreation and mishandling of his likeness after his death. I worry about the unauthorized recreation and mishandling of his salad dressing.
To bring everything back to a point, though, something seems dirty about playing a game where the essence of a dead man was attempted to be resurrected by splashing his name on the title and using images of him to create some artificial experience that could have otherwise held up without him. I couldn't imagine the character of my recently-deceased grandfather being warped and reused to benefit a company or campaign he never would have stood behind when he was alive.
The legend of Bob Ross is great to honor and celebrate through the work he completed while he was alive. But it's hard to celebrate a man's current work when he's been in the dirt since '95.
In other words, R.I.P. Bobbie. I hope you're cruising down the highway in the sky with McQueen while listening to some House of Pain.
0 Comments
Sunday, April 02, 2006
Have you seen that new movie Brick?
posted by RICK : 7:14 AM
I guess you could call it, "This year's Sin City." You could call it that. I'm hesitant to do so. Sure, there's definitely a case to be made that it's all style and no substance (Brick is a classic 1950s hard-boiled detective movie set in a contemporary high school). My preferred way of putting it is "style as substance." But even that seems to slight a film that is both unlike anything I've seen before and yet exactly like something I've seen before (though I guess the same could have been said for Sin City). Or maybe what this really comes down to is I think I have a man-crush on JGL. His performance is exactly as detached and unflinching as the role requires-- the opposite of Neil, where we previously saw him. Granted, "detached" generally means "bad acting," and maybe I'm too transfixed by his baby-browns, but being able to say a line like, "I gave him to you to see him eaten, not to see you fed," and somehow managing to pull it off speaks volumes about why he works so well in this movie. Perhaps the best thing I can say about Brick is that it does work. Sure, at any given moment you can take yourself out of the movie only to look back up again and say, "Wait a minute! Teenagers don't talk like that!" but that kind of kills point. It's Veronica Mars with an edge-- or rather, a different edge. It's kind of like those Trailer Contests where film promos are re-cut to fit into a different genre. It isn't exactly something you can make a career of, but damn if it isn't fun to watch.
0 Comments
Saturday, April 01, 2006
I pity tha April foo'
posted by Anonymous : 8:53 PM
Okay, so I read a blog post on a phallic conspiracy and admired how it sounded like some of the low-brow material I've written in the past. It dances around the joke a little long-winded-like, but when you reach each punchline, it's pretty amusing. So I'll support this man's alleged Gatorade Conspiracy.
Granted, the whole joke about things that subtly resemble sex organs is pretty overdone. But every now and then comes along one that you never really thought about before, and the case made for it will never allow you to look at it the same again. I ironically guzzled down some Gatorade -- the EXACT SAME FLAVOR as the one featured at the beginning -- 2 minutes before reading it. Maybe that made the joke more disturbing.
Reminder: spring ahead tonight, suckas.
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Saturday Night Taped
Welcome to "What Is Recoil?." If you would like to post something on this blog, but don't have a WIR-Blogger login, then send me an e-mail, and I'll make it happen. SHAZAM!
-Rick
(co-creator)
Rick |
Dynamarx |
rus-trick |
ryan |
The Potato |
JDM |
DrNewsie |
Mr. MS |
AK |
Brooke |
Stein |
Moses |
G |
CarrieOkie |
Jen |
Duhn |
M. Moore | Laura |
Mr.T |
kat |
abby | Greg
09/2005 | 10/2005 | 11/2005 | 12/2005 | 01/2006 | 02/2006 | 03/2006 | 04/2006 | 05/2006 | 06/2006 | 07/2006 | 08/2006 | 09/2006 | 10/2006 | 11/2006 | 12/2006 | 01/2007 | 02/2007 | 03/2007 |
Am I a trivia genius?
posted by RICK : 3:37 PM
So, apparently I was on Jeopardy last night under the pseudonym "Michael."
I did quite well.
In other programming...
I'm watching "Veronica Mars" last night on my computer because Nets basketball and a two-hour Top Model finale kept it from airing on actual television, and there were about 3 or 4 scenes involving Logan and Veronica and watching them made me feel kinda awesome. It was a feeling I hadn't really experienced since watching Zach and Kelly back in middle school. It made me realize that television typically produces horrible romances. Sure, if you want drama (or beter yet, melodrama), then TV is where to be, but actual romance will typically leave you cold.
I find this interesting, because there have been shows built entirely around the concept of romance and yet they are never actually romantic. "Ed" comes to mind-- a show I loved, but more for its humor, characters and quirks than for the underlying romance storyline. I mean, I bought it, but I never FELT it.
Perhaps the Logan/Veronica dynamic in VM works so well because we all know deep down that there's no WAY these two should ever get together but the notion that they might do so is too tempting to resist.
0 Comments
Tuesday, April 25, 2006
What Is Recoil Discoveries: The System Works!
posted by RICK : 10:18 AM
This morning I woke up at the crack of 7:15, got dressed and headed out to downtown Brooklyn in order to fulfill my civic responsibility, sitting in silent judgment of another. Here is the problem. I don't live in Brooklyn anymore. By the rules, this meant that I shouldn't be serving on a Kings County jury, but I wasn't about to try and get out of it, as I can only imagine everyone of the nearly half-million annual jurors in New York State tries to get out. But I came prepared. I brought along a couple pay-stubs and credit card bills showing my Manhattan address, just in case.
It went down thusly. I show up at the courthouse at 8:30am. I sit in a room with about a dozen or so people reading back issues of Esquire (March 2006, baby!). Halfway through the movie column about Joseph-Gordon Levitt [swoon] a friendly looking gentleman tells us to go into the jury room and take a seat. He'll be with us momentarily. I go in. I take a seat. I finish my JGL article and move on to Bill James. I look up and notice that the room full of a dozen or so potential new friends has suddenly turned into a room full of hundreds of definite strangers.
There was a guy up at the front who was telling everyone to take a seat and that he WOULDN'T be hearing our excuses as to why we shouldn't be here until after the movie.
Ooooh! A movie!
It featured such prominent personalities as Ed Bradley and Diane Sawyer and also had an moderately produced reenactment of the Salem witch trials (SPOILER! he didn't float).
Then the nice man came back and began the filtering process. "If you meet this piece of criteria, go through these doors and to the second room on the right," he'd say. The best part being the people who claimed the didn't speak English, to which the question was asked, "Are you a citizen?" They would answer yes, only for him to say, "How did you pass the test? It's written in English." BAM! Check and mate. Take that foreigners!
I sat tight. I wasn't going to raise my hand or try to weasel my way out. I was just going to sit there and if it took all day, so be it. And if all was said and done, and they didn't care that I'm technically no longer a "peer" of someone living in Brooklyn, then that would be fine by me. After all I did (intentionally) skip jury duty a month or so ago for that very reason (haha, breaking the law!).
But that isn't what happened. Instead, about 10 minutes after the video wrapped, the man said, "If you no longer live in Brooklyn, you can not serve on a jury so go through these doors and sit in the room at the right." I got up and did just that. It was me and this other guy. In came a woman. She was all business. She asked the other guy why he was there first. He said he didn't live in Brooklyn. She said she needed proof. He had none. She said he going to be asked back in six months and needed to bring proof then. He left. She came to me. I showed her my Juror form that came in the mail, and then I showed her my pay-stubs and credit card bills.
"Thanks Rick, you can go."
I was out by 9:35am.
The best thing about New York City government is that these people have heard it all before. There aren't any special cases, because there are so many people in this city everything has been done. This is why I found it amusing when people would walk into a room full of hundreds of strangers and instead of taking a seat going right up the guy in the front and trying to convince him they shouldn't be here. It only slowed things down. Eventually, they would be told to take their seat and their problem would be addressed to the group as a whole.
We're in this together people. No sense trying to rewrite the books.
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Sunday, April 23, 2006
Patton Around the AA
Tuesday, April 18, 2006
Awesome web-stat of the day
Monday, April 17, 2006
Necessary Rock and Roll Reunions of the New Millennium
Sunday, April 16, 2006
Nashvizzle
Top 1 Reason I Should Update My Eye Prescription
V for I'm Gonna Start Writing Again
Saturday, April 15, 2006
The Loop!
posted by RICK : 11:33 AM
FOX was gracious enough to air two episodes of their hit new comedy The Loop this week. I watched both. Here's what the show is not about: the mysterious section of St. Louis known to young and old alike as "The Loop," and the crazy misadventures of three tourists looking for said loop in a late model Mazda after a wedding, but instead getting lost and inadvertantly touring a neighborhood full of St. Louis's most luxurious crumbling homes. It should also be noted that "The Loop" (the St. Louis version) didn't live up to its name as I-- er, these travelers-- detected a discernable beginning and ending. I suspect that if August Ferdinand Mobius had been from St. Louis, his invention would have been less like this and more like this.
Yes, FOX's The Loop is nothing like that. Instead it takes place in Chicago, and follows the misadventures of Sam Sullivan, a kid fresh-out-of-college who is the first amongst his group of friends to get a real job or, based on the two episodes I've seen, "a job". The Loop wants to be many things, but what it suceeds at most is being America's first, true, MySpace-comedy. It's the first series I can think of that appears to be marketed almost exclusively to the MySpace-mainstream-alternative. Clearly the logic is if SUPER-UNDERGROUND comic Dane Cook can have a quarter-trillion friends, surely the formula will get the as many viewers IF NOT MORE. So you take a gorgeous looking cast, put them in few clothes, throw in some whip-pans, a pop-punk soundtrack, and Courtney from the Dandy Warhols (he was on Thursday's episode for some reason*), simmer, serve. The fact that this show is one of the two new comedies (Free Ride being the other... which, actually, might have all ready been canceled) on FOX that were to replace Arrested Development just makes matters worse.
But there's a problem.
The problem is that I'm going to watch this show again. And I'll probably watch it until its inevitable cancelation (most kids on MySpace don't watch TV, they're too busy MySpacing) because of a critical saving grace: Philip Baker Hall is absofuckinghilarious. He plays the owner of whateverthehell airline the main character is suppose to work and everything that comes out of his mouth is pure gold. Perhaps the bigger question in all of this is why exactly PBH is on this stain of a series? Oh yeah, maybe its because PTA hasn't had a movie in six years.
*Not to be confused with his unnecessary appearance on Veronica Mars last fall, but at least in that case he was never actually addressed as "Courtney from the Dandy Warhols")
0 Comments
Friday, April 14, 2006
The dirtiest link I'll ever post:
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
BIG BAGS! WHUT?
Monday, April 10, 2006
A network move in the right direction.
Sunday, April 09, 2006
The Lord takes a curtain call
posted by RICK : 1:40 PM
Poor Carlos Beltran. New York hasn't been that kind to him since his arrival in Queens last season (well, unless you count the $119 million dollars he'll be receiving over the foreseeable future). He keeps getting booed. That is until he hit a homerun on Thursday and suddenly everyone loved him. Of course, then he had to go and say something asinine like this:"Well, I went out," Beltran said. "I just took my time. Like I say, at the beginning, I don't feel like doing it, but I just put myself in the situation of what would God have done in a situation like that. You know, I'm a Christian guy, and after getting booed the first two days, and all of a sudden you come through and get a hit and all of a sudden they want you to go out in a curtain call, I put myself right there and I do believe God would have gone out."
READ ON
Yes, Carlos. God would have gone out for a curtain call. Absolutely.
0 Comments
Tuesday, April 04, 2006
City of Omaha, we need more cowbell!
posted by Anonymous : 10:50 PM
Anyone who has lived in Omaha, even for a short timespan, knows that we love our roads. We fucking LOVE them. We build them and we rebuild them and sometimes we can't stand the fact that there's a road that hasn't been under construction in awhile, so it's worth tearing up and rebuilding again.
Granted, they do a good job of rebuilding them to "look nice," but it doesn't really matter because they'll be tearing it up again within the next five years. Sometimes they forget to engineer them properly before laying down the cement, and so it's all the more reason to tear that shit up again and start over. Ha ha, tax dollar oops.
And then sometimes they come up with funny ideas about putting roads in the sky, which really only results in 10 years of construction in rebuilding the roads to accomodate the building of these other roads and then rebuilding the rebuilt roads back to normal, except for the rebuilt roads that they need to rebuild to fit the overwhelming concept of the absurd roads they just built over the rebuilt roads. I'll at least say in regards to this particular project that perhaps they will serve their purpose in the long-term. And in some ways, they're aesthetically pleasing in temporarily fooling me into thinking we're a big city with big roads that hover over other roads, because one set of roads just won't do it. In the short-term, however, DAMN THAT'S A LOT OF CONSTRUCTION.
Anyhow, the point of this post is to discuss a job that I've become increasingly curious about. If you've lived in Omaha long enough, you've undoubtedly driven past an intersection where you've seen a car or truck awkwardly parked on a median or up on the curb with a person inside watching traffic-- a sign on the side of the vehicle that says "City of Omaha Traffic Study" or something to that effect. That's right. They're studying YOU. And they're going to do it ALL DAY.
So how does one earn that job? Or I guess a better question is: how does one get STUCK with that job?
Here's my questions about the job (enlighten me if you're a traffic studier or know about them):
- How much does the job pay? Is it salary or hourly? Are there benefits? What's the turnover rate?
- Do you voluntarily apply for and take the job? What are the qualifications for being able to study traffic to the satisfaction of the city? Is there a Traffic Study School with classes one must take before properly observing traffic?
- What exactly is being studied? Ratio of red cars to blue cars? Amount of road-head administered per hour at this particular intersection/stretch of road?
- Can they afford to be distracted? Do they take breaks? If I were to walk into the middle of the intersection and lay face-down on the pavement, would they be obligated to intervene or are they supposed to keep observing traffic, perhaps only making a note of my action in their log (if they keep one)? Can I bring them food or lemonade or something out of my pity for them?
- Would I be able to fake being a traffic observer? The signs they use on their vehicles are pretty simplistic and look like they're merely spray-painted stencils on plain paper, taped to the side of whatever they happen to be driving-- quite easy to replicate. Who would call me out on it? What are the penalties? What if they caught me but it turned out I took really good notes? Is it still a bad thing?
- What if I started an independent traffic study, unaffiliated with the city? Is that so wrong? Why would I even want to study traffic on my own, though? I didn't think that part out.
- Are they human? Do they eat and sleep like us? Do they live among us? How do they reproduce?
- If the answer is "yes" to all the questions in the above bullet point, are they a good lay?
So I'm not sure what to make of them, and I'm not sure whether or not I feel sorry for them. If they're asked by the city to constantly objectively reevaluate shit, then yeah, I feel bad because they'll be revisiting the same intersections over and over in their different incarnations. But if they're the people who actively say, "hey, better circle the wagons-- looks like we gotta tear shit up again," then I can't say I feel much pity.
But this is all just a matter of curiosity. If I ever see a hot traffic-studying chick (which I haven't), would it be unethical to approach her on the job and ask for her number? She can't really run away, which would be a great rationalization if I was sleazy and actually had no principles. Would she lose her job for me distracting her for a few seconds and throwing off the accuracy of her "report"?
These are the questions I concern myself with, and they clearly burn away the threads of the very fabric of society. We shall not drive in fear of one another.
Good night, and good luck.
0 Comments
Monday, April 03, 2006
Paint me a picture, dead man.
posted by Anonymous : 1:14 AM
I would never want to do this man any wrong. I really wouldn't. Just look at him. He's everyone's buddy. I almost want to purchase his whole Joy of Painting set just so I can have it run non-stop on my DVD player as I rest my head to sleep. The sound of his voice is a lullabye in itself. My dad and I used to sit in complete silent awe as we'd watch Bob paint practically THE EXACT SAME landscape everytime on his PBS show.
Premise of the show is simple: Bob stands in a studio for a half hour against no backdrop whatsoever and just paints a landscape that pretty much always ends up looking like the one pictured on the left. But the catch is, no matter how predictable it is, you end up watching the WHOLE FUCKING THING without flinching. How does a man command such power?
My dad likened his voice to being that of an "all-night DJ," which is pretty much accurate. If Bob Ross handled peace talks and general foreign relations, I think the whole world would resemble his artistic vision and Saddam would be busy planting trees while Iran would be harvesting pot-- not uranium.
Too bad Bob is dead.
I'm not one to offend easily, but somehow something seems wrong when the likeness of Mr. Ross is handed over to Nintendo for creating a painting video game, meant to showcase the free-handed capabilities of the Big N's new console, code-named Revolution.
Granted, I'm extremely enthused about the possibilities this console has. And it's a cool idea to implement the idea of using the weird-assed motion-sensitive controller as a paintbrush. But why Bob Ross?
I'm not naive, and I know the answer to this question, but when does marketing go too far? I understand this is a growing controversy when it comes to using the likeness of dead celebrities to hawk products. I saw Gene Kelly dancing with a vacuum and Steve McQueen driving the new Mustang, and I thought they were both tacky (yet somewhat clever, purely in their presentation). And who could forget when TuPac made more post-mortem albums than pre-mortem and even landed a theatrical release?
Enough, though. Perhaps it's more of a dilemma as to how their image is handled and carried on after death. I don't doubt that CG will take a turn toward recreating deceased actors for full-length features, resulting in a move to protect their estates and all sorts of legal troubles. I already read a blurb this last week where Paul Newman expressed worry over the unauthorized recreation and mishandling of his likeness after his death. I worry about the unauthorized recreation and mishandling of his salad dressing.
To bring everything back to a point, though, something seems dirty about playing a game where the essence of a dead man was attempted to be resurrected by splashing his name on the title and using images of him to create some artificial experience that could have otherwise held up without him. I couldn't imagine the character of my recently-deceased grandfather being warped and reused to benefit a company or campaign he never would have stood behind when he was alive.
The legend of Bob Ross is great to honor and celebrate through the work he completed while he was alive. But it's hard to celebrate a man's current work when he's been in the dirt since '95.
In other words, R.I.P. Bobbie. I hope you're cruising down the highway in the sky with McQueen while listening to some House of Pain.
0 Comments
Sunday, April 02, 2006
Have you seen that new movie Brick?
posted by RICK : 7:14 AM
I guess you could call it, "This year's Sin City." You could call it that. I'm hesitant to do so. Sure, there's definitely a case to be made that it's all style and no substance (Brick is a classic 1950s hard-boiled detective movie set in a contemporary high school). My preferred way of putting it is "style as substance." But even that seems to slight a film that is both unlike anything I've seen before and yet exactly like something I've seen before (though I guess the same could have been said for Sin City). Or maybe what this really comes down to is I think I have a man-crush on JGL. His performance is exactly as detached and unflinching as the role requires-- the opposite of Neil, where we previously saw him. Granted, "detached" generally means "bad acting," and maybe I'm too transfixed by his baby-browns, but being able to say a line like, "I gave him to you to see him eaten, not to see you fed," and somehow managing to pull it off speaks volumes about why he works so well in this movie. Perhaps the best thing I can say about Brick is that it does work. Sure, at any given moment you can take yourself out of the movie only to look back up again and say, "Wait a minute! Teenagers don't talk like that!" but that kind of kills point. It's Veronica Mars with an edge-- or rather, a different edge. It's kind of like those Trailer Contests where film promos are re-cut to fit into a different genre. It isn't exactly something you can make a career of, but damn if it isn't fun to watch.
0 Comments
Saturday, April 01, 2006
I pity tha April foo'
posted by Anonymous : 8:53 PM
Okay, so I read a blog post on a phallic conspiracy and admired how it sounded like some of the low-brow material I've written in the past. It dances around the joke a little long-winded-like, but when you reach each punchline, it's pretty amusing. So I'll support this man's alleged Gatorade Conspiracy.
Granted, the whole joke about things that subtly resemble sex organs is pretty overdone. But every now and then comes along one that you never really thought about before, and the case made for it will never allow you to look at it the same again. I ironically guzzled down some Gatorade -- the EXACT SAME FLAVOR as the one featured at the beginning -- 2 minutes before reading it. Maybe that made the joke more disturbing.
Reminder: spring ahead tonight, suckas.
0 Comments
Saturday Night Taped
Welcome to "What Is Recoil?." If you would like to post something on this blog, but don't have a WIR-Blogger login, then send me an e-mail, and I'll make it happen. SHAZAM!
-Rick
(co-creator)
Rick |
Dynamarx |
rus-trick |
ryan |
The Potato |
JDM |
DrNewsie |
Mr. MS |
AK |
Brooke |
Stein |
Moses |
G |
CarrieOkie |
Jen |
Duhn |
M. Moore | Laura |
Mr.T |
kat |
abby | Greg
09/2005 | 10/2005 | 11/2005 | 12/2005 | 01/2006 | 02/2006 | 03/2006 | 04/2006 | 05/2006 | 06/2006 | 07/2006 | 08/2006 | 09/2006 | 10/2006 | 11/2006 | 12/2006 | 01/2007 | 02/2007 | 03/2007 |
I did quite well.
In other programming...
I'm watching "Veronica Mars" last night on my computer because Nets basketball and a two-hour Top Model finale kept it from airing on actual television, and there were about 3 or 4 scenes involving Logan and Veronica and watching them made me feel kinda awesome. It was a feeling I hadn't really experienced since watching Zach and Kelly back in middle school. It made me realize that television typically produces horrible romances. Sure, if you want drama (or beter yet, melodrama), then TV is where to be, but actual romance will typically leave you cold.
I find this interesting, because there have been shows built entirely around the concept of romance and yet they are never actually romantic. "Ed" comes to mind-- a show I loved, but more for its humor, characters and quirks than for the underlying romance storyline. I mean, I bought it, but I never FELT it.
Perhaps the Logan/Veronica dynamic in VM works so well because we all know deep down that there's no WAY these two should ever get together but the notion that they might do so is too tempting to resist.
0 Comments
What Is Recoil Discoveries: The System Works!
posted by RICK : 10:18 AM
This morning I woke up at the crack of 7:15, got dressed and headed out to downtown Brooklyn in order to fulfill my civic responsibility, sitting in silent judgment of another. Here is the problem. I don't live in Brooklyn anymore. By the rules, this meant that I shouldn't be serving on a Kings County jury, but I wasn't about to try and get out of it, as I can only imagine everyone of the nearly half-million annual jurors in New York State tries to get out. But I came prepared. I brought along a couple pay-stubs and credit card bills showing my Manhattan address, just in case.
It went down thusly. I show up at the courthouse at 8:30am. I sit in a room with about a dozen or so people reading back issues of Esquire (March 2006, baby!). Halfway through the movie column about Joseph-Gordon Levitt [swoon] a friendly looking gentleman tells us to go into the jury room and take a seat. He'll be with us momentarily. I go in. I take a seat. I finish my JGL article and move on to Bill James. I look up and notice that the room full of a dozen or so potential new friends has suddenly turned into a room full of hundreds of definite strangers.
There was a guy up at the front who was telling everyone to take a seat and that he WOULDN'T be hearing our excuses as to why we shouldn't be here until after the movie.
Ooooh! A movie!
It featured such prominent personalities as Ed Bradley and Diane Sawyer and also had an moderately produced reenactment of the Salem witch trials (SPOILER! he didn't float).
Then the nice man came back and began the filtering process. "If you meet this piece of criteria, go through these doors and to the second room on the right," he'd say. The best part being the people who claimed the didn't speak English, to which the question was asked, "Are you a citizen?" They would answer yes, only for him to say, "How did you pass the test? It's written in English." BAM! Check and mate. Take that foreigners!
I sat tight. I wasn't going to raise my hand or try to weasel my way out. I was just going to sit there and if it took all day, so be it. And if all was said and done, and they didn't care that I'm technically no longer a "peer" of someone living in Brooklyn, then that would be fine by me. After all I did (intentionally) skip jury duty a month or so ago for that very reason (haha, breaking the law!).
But that isn't what happened. Instead, about 10 minutes after the video wrapped, the man said, "If you no longer live in Brooklyn, you can not serve on a jury so go through these doors and sit in the room at the right." I got up and did just that. It was me and this other guy. In came a woman. She was all business. She asked the other guy why he was there first. He said he didn't live in Brooklyn. She said she needed proof. He had none. She said he going to be asked back in six months and needed to bring proof then. He left. She came to me. I showed her my Juror form that came in the mail, and then I showed her my pay-stubs and credit card bills.
"Thanks Rick, you can go."
I was out by 9:35am.
The best thing about New York City government is that these people have heard it all before. There aren't any special cases, because there are so many people in this city everything has been done. This is why I found it amusing when people would walk into a room full of hundreds of strangers and instead of taking a seat going right up the guy in the front and trying to convince him they shouldn't be here. It only slowed things down. Eventually, they would be told to take their seat and their problem would be addressed to the group as a whole.
We're in this together people. No sense trying to rewrite the books.
0 Comments
Sunday, April 23, 2006
Patton Around the AA
Tuesday, April 18, 2006
Awesome web-stat of the day
Monday, April 17, 2006
Necessary Rock and Roll Reunions of the New Millennium
Sunday, April 16, 2006
Nashvizzle
Top 1 Reason I Should Update My Eye Prescription
V for I'm Gonna Start Writing Again
Saturday, April 15, 2006
The Loop!
posted by RICK : 11:33 AM
FOX was gracious enough to air two episodes of their hit new comedy The Loop this week. I watched both. Here's what the show is not about: the mysterious section of St. Louis known to young and old alike as "The Loop," and the crazy misadventures of three tourists looking for said loop in a late model Mazda after a wedding, but instead getting lost and inadvertantly touring a neighborhood full of St. Louis's most luxurious crumbling homes. It should also be noted that "The Loop" (the St. Louis version) didn't live up to its name as I-- er, these travelers-- detected a discernable beginning and ending. I suspect that if August Ferdinand Mobius had been from St. Louis, his invention would have been less like this and more like this.
Yes, FOX's The Loop is nothing like that. Instead it takes place in Chicago, and follows the misadventures of Sam Sullivan, a kid fresh-out-of-college who is the first amongst his group of friends to get a real job or, based on the two episodes I've seen, "a job". The Loop wants to be many things, but what it suceeds at most is being America's first, true, MySpace-comedy. It's the first series I can think of that appears to be marketed almost exclusively to the MySpace-mainstream-alternative. Clearly the logic is if SUPER-UNDERGROUND comic Dane Cook can have a quarter-trillion friends, surely the formula will get the as many viewers IF NOT MORE. So you take a gorgeous looking cast, put them in few clothes, throw in some whip-pans, a pop-punk soundtrack, and Courtney from the Dandy Warhols (he was on Thursday's episode for some reason*), simmer, serve. The fact that this show is one of the two new comedies (Free Ride being the other... which, actually, might have all ready been canceled) on FOX that were to replace Arrested Development just makes matters worse.
But there's a problem.
The problem is that I'm going to watch this show again. And I'll probably watch it until its inevitable cancelation (most kids on MySpace don't watch TV, they're too busy MySpacing) because of a critical saving grace: Philip Baker Hall is absofuckinghilarious. He plays the owner of whateverthehell airline the main character is suppose to work and everything that comes out of his mouth is pure gold. Perhaps the bigger question in all of this is why exactly PBH is on this stain of a series? Oh yeah, maybe its because PTA hasn't had a movie in six years.
*Not to be confused with his unnecessary appearance on Veronica Mars last fall, but at least in that case he was never actually addressed as "Courtney from the Dandy Warhols")
0 Comments
Friday, April 14, 2006
The dirtiest link I'll ever post:
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
BIG BAGS! WHUT?
Monday, April 10, 2006
A network move in the right direction.
Sunday, April 09, 2006
The Lord takes a curtain call
posted by RICK : 1:40 PM
Poor Carlos Beltran. New York hasn't been that kind to him since his arrival in Queens last season (well, unless you count the $119 million dollars he'll be receiving over the foreseeable future). He keeps getting booed. That is until he hit a homerun on Thursday and suddenly everyone loved him. Of course, then he had to go and say something asinine like this:"Well, I went out," Beltran said. "I just took my time. Like I say, at the beginning, I don't feel like doing it, but I just put myself in the situation of what would God have done in a situation like that. You know, I'm a Christian guy, and after getting booed the first two days, and all of a sudden you come through and get a hit and all of a sudden they want you to go out in a curtain call, I put myself right there and I do believe God would have gone out."
READ ON
Yes, Carlos. God would have gone out for a curtain call. Absolutely.
0 Comments
Tuesday, April 04, 2006
City of Omaha, we need more cowbell!
posted by Anonymous : 10:50 PM
Anyone who has lived in Omaha, even for a short timespan, knows that we love our roads. We fucking LOVE them. We build them and we rebuild them and sometimes we can't stand the fact that there's a road that hasn't been under construction in awhile, so it's worth tearing up and rebuilding again.
Granted, they do a good job of rebuilding them to "look nice," but it doesn't really matter because they'll be tearing it up again within the next five years. Sometimes they forget to engineer them properly before laying down the cement, and so it's all the more reason to tear that shit up again and start over. Ha ha, tax dollar oops.
And then sometimes they come up with funny ideas about putting roads in the sky, which really only results in 10 years of construction in rebuilding the roads to accomodate the building of these other roads and then rebuilding the rebuilt roads back to normal, except for the rebuilt roads that they need to rebuild to fit the overwhelming concept of the absurd roads they just built over the rebuilt roads. I'll at least say in regards to this particular project that perhaps they will serve their purpose in the long-term. And in some ways, they're aesthetically pleasing in temporarily fooling me into thinking we're a big city with big roads that hover over other roads, because one set of roads just won't do it. In the short-term, however, DAMN THAT'S A LOT OF CONSTRUCTION.
Anyhow, the point of this post is to discuss a job that I've become increasingly curious about. If you've lived in Omaha long enough, you've undoubtedly driven past an intersection where you've seen a car or truck awkwardly parked on a median or up on the curb with a person inside watching traffic-- a sign on the side of the vehicle that says "City of Omaha Traffic Study" or something to that effect. That's right. They're studying YOU. And they're going to do it ALL DAY.
So how does one earn that job? Or I guess a better question is: how does one get STUCK with that job?
Here's my questions about the job (enlighten me if you're a traffic studier or know about them):
- How much does the job pay? Is it salary or hourly? Are there benefits? What's the turnover rate?
- Do you voluntarily apply for and take the job? What are the qualifications for being able to study traffic to the satisfaction of the city? Is there a Traffic Study School with classes one must take before properly observing traffic?
- What exactly is being studied? Ratio of red cars to blue cars? Amount of road-head administered per hour at this particular intersection/stretch of road?
- Can they afford to be distracted? Do they take breaks? If I were to walk into the middle of the intersection and lay face-down on the pavement, would they be obligated to intervene or are they supposed to keep observing traffic, perhaps only making a note of my action in their log (if they keep one)? Can I bring them food or lemonade or something out of my pity for them?
- Would I be able to fake being a traffic observer? The signs they use on their vehicles are pretty simplistic and look like they're merely spray-painted stencils on plain paper, taped to the side of whatever they happen to be driving-- quite easy to replicate. Who would call me out on it? What are the penalties? What if they caught me but it turned out I took really good notes? Is it still a bad thing?
- What if I started an independent traffic study, unaffiliated with the city? Is that so wrong? Why would I even want to study traffic on my own, though? I didn't think that part out.
- Are they human? Do they eat and sleep like us? Do they live among us? How do they reproduce?
- If the answer is "yes" to all the questions in the above bullet point, are they a good lay?
So I'm not sure what to make of them, and I'm not sure whether or not I feel sorry for them. If they're asked by the city to constantly objectively reevaluate shit, then yeah, I feel bad because they'll be revisiting the same intersections over and over in their different incarnations. But if they're the people who actively say, "hey, better circle the wagons-- looks like we gotta tear shit up again," then I can't say I feel much pity.
But this is all just a matter of curiosity. If I ever see a hot traffic-studying chick (which I haven't), would it be unethical to approach her on the job and ask for her number? She can't really run away, which would be a great rationalization if I was sleazy and actually had no principles. Would she lose her job for me distracting her for a few seconds and throwing off the accuracy of her "report"?
These are the questions I concern myself with, and they clearly burn away the threads of the very fabric of society. We shall not drive in fear of one another.
Good night, and good luck.
0 Comments
Monday, April 03, 2006
Paint me a picture, dead man.
posted by Anonymous : 1:14 AM
I would never want to do this man any wrong. I really wouldn't. Just look at him. He's everyone's buddy. I almost want to purchase his whole Joy of Painting set just so I can have it run non-stop on my DVD player as I rest my head to sleep. The sound of his voice is a lullabye in itself. My dad and I used to sit in complete silent awe as we'd watch Bob paint practically THE EXACT SAME landscape everytime on his PBS show.
Premise of the show is simple: Bob stands in a studio for a half hour against no backdrop whatsoever and just paints a landscape that pretty much always ends up looking like the one pictured on the left. But the catch is, no matter how predictable it is, you end up watching the WHOLE FUCKING THING without flinching. How does a man command such power?
My dad likened his voice to being that of an "all-night DJ," which is pretty much accurate. If Bob Ross handled peace talks and general foreign relations, I think the whole world would resemble his artistic vision and Saddam would be busy planting trees while Iran would be harvesting pot-- not uranium.
Too bad Bob is dead.
I'm not one to offend easily, but somehow something seems wrong when the likeness of Mr. Ross is handed over to Nintendo for creating a painting video game, meant to showcase the free-handed capabilities of the Big N's new console, code-named Revolution.
Granted, I'm extremely enthused about the possibilities this console has. And it's a cool idea to implement the idea of using the weird-assed motion-sensitive controller as a paintbrush. But why Bob Ross?
I'm not naive, and I know the answer to this question, but when does marketing go too far? I understand this is a growing controversy when it comes to using the likeness of dead celebrities to hawk products. I saw Gene Kelly dancing with a vacuum and Steve McQueen driving the new Mustang, and I thought they were both tacky (yet somewhat clever, purely in their presentation). And who could forget when TuPac made more post-mortem albums than pre-mortem and even landed a theatrical release?
Enough, though. Perhaps it's more of a dilemma as to how their image is handled and carried on after death. I don't doubt that CG will take a turn toward recreating deceased actors for full-length features, resulting in a move to protect their estates and all sorts of legal troubles. I already read a blurb this last week where Paul Newman expressed worry over the unauthorized recreation and mishandling of his likeness after his death. I worry about the unauthorized recreation and mishandling of his salad dressing.
To bring everything back to a point, though, something seems dirty about playing a game where the essence of a dead man was attempted to be resurrected by splashing his name on the title and using images of him to create some artificial experience that could have otherwise held up without him. I couldn't imagine the character of my recently-deceased grandfather being warped and reused to benefit a company or campaign he never would have stood behind when he was alive.
The legend of Bob Ross is great to honor and celebrate through the work he completed while he was alive. But it's hard to celebrate a man's current work when he's been in the dirt since '95.
In other words, R.I.P. Bobbie. I hope you're cruising down the highway in the sky with McQueen while listening to some House of Pain.
0 Comments
Sunday, April 02, 2006
Have you seen that new movie Brick?
posted by RICK : 7:14 AM
I guess you could call it, "This year's Sin City." You could call it that. I'm hesitant to do so. Sure, there's definitely a case to be made that it's all style and no substance (Brick is a classic 1950s hard-boiled detective movie set in a contemporary high school). My preferred way of putting it is "style as substance." But even that seems to slight a film that is both unlike anything I've seen before and yet exactly like something I've seen before (though I guess the same could have been said for Sin City). Or maybe what this really comes down to is I think I have a man-crush on JGL. His performance is exactly as detached and unflinching as the role requires-- the opposite of Neil, where we previously saw him. Granted, "detached" generally means "bad acting," and maybe I'm too transfixed by his baby-browns, but being able to say a line like, "I gave him to you to see him eaten, not to see you fed," and somehow managing to pull it off speaks volumes about why he works so well in this movie. Perhaps the best thing I can say about Brick is that it does work. Sure, at any given moment you can take yourself out of the movie only to look back up again and say, "Wait a minute! Teenagers don't talk like that!" but that kind of kills point. It's Veronica Mars with an edge-- or rather, a different edge. It's kind of like those Trailer Contests where film promos are re-cut to fit into a different genre. It isn't exactly something you can make a career of, but damn if it isn't fun to watch.
0 Comments
Saturday, April 01, 2006
I pity tha April foo'
posted by Anonymous : 8:53 PM
Okay, so I read a blog post on a phallic conspiracy and admired how it sounded like some of the low-brow material I've written in the past. It dances around the joke a little long-winded-like, but when you reach each punchline, it's pretty amusing. So I'll support this man's alleged Gatorade Conspiracy.
Granted, the whole joke about things that subtly resemble sex organs is pretty overdone. But every now and then comes along one that you never really thought about before, and the case made for it will never allow you to look at it the same again. I ironically guzzled down some Gatorade -- the EXACT SAME FLAVOR as the one featured at the beginning -- 2 minutes before reading it. Maybe that made the joke more disturbing.
Reminder: spring ahead tonight, suckas.
0 Comments
Saturday Night Taped
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This morning I woke up at the crack of 7:15, got dressed and headed out to downtown Brooklyn in order to fulfill my civic responsibility, sitting in silent judgment of another. Here is the problem. I don't live in Brooklyn anymore. By the rules, this meant that I shouldn't be serving on a Kings County jury, but I wasn't about to try and get out of it, as I can only imagine everyone of the nearly half-million annual jurors in New York State tries to get out. But I came prepared. I brought along a couple pay-stubs and credit card bills showing my Manhattan address, just in case.It went down thusly. I show up at the courthouse at 8:30am. I sit in a room with about a dozen or so people reading back issues of Esquire (March 2006, baby!). Halfway through the movie column about Joseph-Gordon Levitt [swoon] a friendly looking gentleman tells us to go into the jury room and take a seat. He'll be with us momentarily. I go in. I take a seat. I finish my JGL article and move on to Bill James. I look up and notice that the room full of a dozen or so potential new friends has suddenly turned into a room full of hundreds of definite strangers.
There was a guy up at the front who was telling everyone to take a seat and that he WOULDN'T be hearing our excuses as to why we shouldn't be here until after the movie.
Ooooh! A movie!
It featured such prominent personalities as Ed Bradley and Diane Sawyer and also had an moderately produced reenactment of the Salem witch trials (SPOILER! he didn't float).
Then the nice man came back and began the filtering process. "If you meet this piece of criteria, go through these doors and to the second room on the right," he'd say. The best part being the people who claimed the didn't speak English, to which the question was asked, "Are you a citizen?" They would answer yes, only for him to say, "How did you pass the test? It's written in English." BAM! Check and mate. Take that foreigners!
I sat tight. I wasn't going to raise my hand or try to weasel my way out. I was just going to sit there and if it took all day, so be it. And if all was said and done, and they didn't care that I'm technically no longer a "peer" of someone living in Brooklyn, then that would be fine by me. After all I did (intentionally) skip jury duty a month or so ago for that very reason (haha, breaking the law!).
But that isn't what happened. Instead, about 10 minutes after the video wrapped, the man said, "If you no longer live in Brooklyn, you can not serve on a jury so go through these doors and sit in the room at the right." I got up and did just that. It was me and this other guy. In came a woman. She was all business. She asked the other guy why he was there first. He said he didn't live in Brooklyn. She said she needed proof. He had none. She said he going to be asked back in six months and needed to bring proof then. He left. She came to me. I showed her my Juror form that came in the mail, and then I showed her my pay-stubs and credit card bills.
"Thanks Rick, you can go."
I was out by 9:35am.
The best thing about New York City government is that these people have heard it all before. There aren't any special cases, because there are so many people in this city everything has been done. This is why I found it amusing when people would walk into a room full of hundreds of strangers and instead of taking a seat going right up the guy in the front and trying to convince him they shouldn't be here. It only slowed things down. Eventually, they would be told to take their seat and their problem would be addressed to the group as a whole.
We're in this together people. No sense trying to rewrite the books.
0 Comments
Patton Around the AA
Tuesday, April 18, 2006
Awesome web-stat of the day
Monday, April 17, 2006
Necessary Rock and Roll Reunions of the New Millennium
Sunday, April 16, 2006
Nashvizzle
Top 1 Reason I Should Update My Eye Prescription
V for I'm Gonna Start Writing Again
Saturday, April 15, 2006
The Loop!
posted by RICK : 11:33 AM
FOX was gracious enough to air two episodes of their hit new comedy The Loop this week. I watched both. Here's what the show is not about: the mysterious section of St. Louis known to young and old alike as "The Loop," and the crazy misadventures of three tourists looking for said loop in a late model Mazda after a wedding, but instead getting lost and inadvertantly touring a neighborhood full of St. Louis's most luxurious crumbling homes. It should also be noted that "The Loop" (the St. Louis version) didn't live up to its name as I-- er, these travelers-- detected a discernable beginning and ending. I suspect that if August Ferdinand Mobius had been from St. Louis, his invention would have been less like this and more like this.
Yes, FOX's The Loop is nothing like that. Instead it takes place in Chicago, and follows the misadventures of Sam Sullivan, a kid fresh-out-of-college who is the first amongst his group of friends to get a real job or, based on the two episodes I've seen, "a job". The Loop wants to be many things, but what it suceeds at most is being America's first, true, MySpace-comedy. It's the first series I can think of that appears to be marketed almost exclusively to the MySpace-mainstream-alternative. Clearly the logic is if SUPER-UNDERGROUND comic Dane Cook can have a quarter-trillion friends, surely the formula will get the as many viewers IF NOT MORE. So you take a gorgeous looking cast, put them in few clothes, throw in some whip-pans, a pop-punk soundtrack, and Courtney from the Dandy Warhols (he was on Thursday's episode for some reason*), simmer, serve. The fact that this show is one of the two new comedies (Free Ride being the other... which, actually, might have all ready been canceled) on FOX that were to replace Arrested Development just makes matters worse.
But there's a problem.
The problem is that I'm going to watch this show again. And I'll probably watch it until its inevitable cancelation (most kids on MySpace don't watch TV, they're too busy MySpacing) because of a critical saving grace: Philip Baker Hall is absofuckinghilarious. He plays the owner of whateverthehell airline the main character is suppose to work and everything that comes out of his mouth is pure gold. Perhaps the bigger question in all of this is why exactly PBH is on this stain of a series? Oh yeah, maybe its because PTA hasn't had a movie in six years.
*Not to be confused with his unnecessary appearance on Veronica Mars last fall, but at least in that case he was never actually addressed as "Courtney from the Dandy Warhols")
0 Comments
Friday, April 14, 2006
The dirtiest link I'll ever post:
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
BIG BAGS! WHUT?
Monday, April 10, 2006
A network move in the right direction.
Sunday, April 09, 2006
The Lord takes a curtain call
posted by RICK : 1:40 PM
Poor Carlos Beltran. New York hasn't been that kind to him since his arrival in Queens last season (well, unless you count the $119 million dollars he'll be receiving over the foreseeable future). He keeps getting booed. That is until he hit a homerun on Thursday and suddenly everyone loved him. Of course, then he had to go and say something asinine like this:"Well, I went out," Beltran said. "I just took my time. Like I say, at the beginning, I don't feel like doing it, but I just put myself in the situation of what would God have done in a situation like that. You know, I'm a Christian guy, and after getting booed the first two days, and all of a sudden you come through and get a hit and all of a sudden they want you to go out in a curtain call, I put myself right there and I do believe God would have gone out."
READ ON
Yes, Carlos. God would have gone out for a curtain call. Absolutely.
0 Comments
Tuesday, April 04, 2006
City of Omaha, we need more cowbell!
posted by Anonymous : 10:50 PM
Anyone who has lived in Omaha, even for a short timespan, knows that we love our roads. We fucking LOVE them. We build them and we rebuild them and sometimes we can't stand the fact that there's a road that hasn't been under construction in awhile, so it's worth tearing up and rebuilding again.
Granted, they do a good job of rebuilding them to "look nice," but it doesn't really matter because they'll be tearing it up again within the next five years. Sometimes they forget to engineer them properly before laying down the cement, and so it's all the more reason to tear that shit up again and start over. Ha ha, tax dollar oops.
And then sometimes they come up with funny ideas about putting roads in the sky, which really only results in 10 years of construction in rebuilding the roads to accomodate the building of these other roads and then rebuilding the rebuilt roads back to normal, except for the rebuilt roads that they need to rebuild to fit the overwhelming concept of the absurd roads they just built over the rebuilt roads. I'll at least say in regards to this particular project that perhaps they will serve their purpose in the long-term. And in some ways, they're aesthetically pleasing in temporarily fooling me into thinking we're a big city with big roads that hover over other roads, because one set of roads just won't do it. In the short-term, however, DAMN THAT'S A LOT OF CONSTRUCTION.
Anyhow, the point of this post is to discuss a job that I've become increasingly curious about. If you've lived in Omaha long enough, you've undoubtedly driven past an intersection where you've seen a car or truck awkwardly parked on a median or up on the curb with a person inside watching traffic-- a sign on the side of the vehicle that says "City of Omaha Traffic Study" or something to that effect. That's right. They're studying YOU. And they're going to do it ALL DAY.
So how does one earn that job? Or I guess a better question is: how does one get STUCK with that job?
Here's my questions about the job (enlighten me if you're a traffic studier or know about them):
- How much does the job pay? Is it salary or hourly? Are there benefits? What's the turnover rate?
- Do you voluntarily apply for and take the job? What are the qualifications for being able to study traffic to the satisfaction of the city? Is there a Traffic Study School with classes one must take before properly observing traffic?
- What exactly is being studied? Ratio of red cars to blue cars? Amount of road-head administered per hour at this particular intersection/stretch of road?
- Can they afford to be distracted? Do they take breaks? If I were to walk into the middle of the intersection and lay face-down on the pavement, would they be obligated to intervene or are they supposed to keep observing traffic, perhaps only making a note of my action in their log (if they keep one)? Can I bring them food or lemonade or something out of my pity for them?
- Would I be able to fake being a traffic observer? The signs they use on their vehicles are pretty simplistic and look like they're merely spray-painted stencils on plain paper, taped to the side of whatever they happen to be driving-- quite easy to replicate. Who would call me out on it? What are the penalties? What if they caught me but it turned out I took really good notes? Is it still a bad thing?
- What if I started an independent traffic study, unaffiliated with the city? Is that so wrong? Why would I even want to study traffic on my own, though? I didn't think that part out.
- Are they human? Do they eat and sleep like us? Do they live among us? How do they reproduce?
- If the answer is "yes" to all the questions in the above bullet point, are they a good lay?
So I'm not sure what to make of them, and I'm not sure whether or not I feel sorry for them. If they're asked by the city to constantly objectively reevaluate shit, then yeah, I feel bad because they'll be revisiting the same intersections over and over in their different incarnations. But if they're the people who actively say, "hey, better circle the wagons-- looks like we gotta tear shit up again," then I can't say I feel much pity.
But this is all just a matter of curiosity. If I ever see a hot traffic-studying chick (which I haven't), would it be unethical to approach her on the job and ask for her number? She can't really run away, which would be a great rationalization if I was sleazy and actually had no principles. Would she lose her job for me distracting her for a few seconds and throwing off the accuracy of her "report"?
These are the questions I concern myself with, and they clearly burn away the threads of the very fabric of society. We shall not drive in fear of one another.
Good night, and good luck.
0 Comments
Monday, April 03, 2006
Paint me a picture, dead man.
posted by Anonymous : 1:14 AM
I would never want to do this man any wrong. I really wouldn't. Just look at him. He's everyone's buddy. I almost want to purchase his whole Joy of Painting set just so I can have it run non-stop on my DVD player as I rest my head to sleep. The sound of his voice is a lullabye in itself. My dad and I used to sit in complete silent awe as we'd watch Bob paint practically THE EXACT SAME landscape everytime on his PBS show.
Premise of the show is simple: Bob stands in a studio for a half hour against no backdrop whatsoever and just paints a landscape that pretty much always ends up looking like the one pictured on the left. But the catch is, no matter how predictable it is, you end up watching the WHOLE FUCKING THING without flinching. How does a man command such power?
My dad likened his voice to being that of an "all-night DJ," which is pretty much accurate. If Bob Ross handled peace talks and general foreign relations, I think the whole world would resemble his artistic vision and Saddam would be busy planting trees while Iran would be harvesting pot-- not uranium.
Too bad Bob is dead.
I'm not one to offend easily, but somehow something seems wrong when the likeness of Mr. Ross is handed over to Nintendo for creating a painting video game, meant to showcase the free-handed capabilities of the Big N's new console, code-named Revolution.
Granted, I'm extremely enthused about the possibilities this console has. And it's a cool idea to implement the idea of using the weird-assed motion-sensitive controller as a paintbrush. But why Bob Ross?
I'm not naive, and I know the answer to this question, but when does marketing go too far? I understand this is a growing controversy when it comes to using the likeness of dead celebrities to hawk products. I saw Gene Kelly dancing with a vacuum and Steve McQueen driving the new Mustang, and I thought they were both tacky (yet somewhat clever, purely in their presentation). And who could forget when TuPac made more post-mortem albums than pre-mortem and even landed a theatrical release?
Enough, though. Perhaps it's more of a dilemma as to how their image is handled and carried on after death. I don't doubt that CG will take a turn toward recreating deceased actors for full-length features, resulting in a move to protect their estates and all sorts of legal troubles. I already read a blurb this last week where Paul Newman expressed worry over the unauthorized recreation and mishandling of his likeness after his death. I worry about the unauthorized recreation and mishandling of his salad dressing.
To bring everything back to a point, though, something seems dirty about playing a game where the essence of a dead man was attempted to be resurrected by splashing his name on the title and using images of him to create some artificial experience that could have otherwise held up without him. I couldn't imagine the character of my recently-deceased grandfather being warped and reused to benefit a company or campaign he never would have stood behind when he was alive.
The legend of Bob Ross is great to honor and celebrate through the work he completed while he was alive. But it's hard to celebrate a man's current work when he's been in the dirt since '95.
In other words, R.I.P. Bobbie. I hope you're cruising down the highway in the sky with McQueen while listening to some House of Pain.
0 Comments
Sunday, April 02, 2006
Have you seen that new movie Brick?
posted by RICK : 7:14 AM
I guess you could call it, "This year's Sin City." You could call it that. I'm hesitant to do so. Sure, there's definitely a case to be made that it's all style and no substance (Brick is a classic 1950s hard-boiled detective movie set in a contemporary high school). My preferred way of putting it is "style as substance." But even that seems to slight a film that is both unlike anything I've seen before and yet exactly like something I've seen before (though I guess the same could have been said for Sin City). Or maybe what this really comes down to is I think I have a man-crush on JGL. His performance is exactly as detached and unflinching as the role requires-- the opposite of Neil, where we previously saw him. Granted, "detached" generally means "bad acting," and maybe I'm too transfixed by his baby-browns, but being able to say a line like, "I gave him to you to see him eaten, not to see you fed," and somehow managing to pull it off speaks volumes about why he works so well in this movie. Perhaps the best thing I can say about Brick is that it does work. Sure, at any given moment you can take yourself out of the movie only to look back up again and say, "Wait a minute! Teenagers don't talk like that!" but that kind of kills point. It's Veronica Mars with an edge-- or rather, a different edge. It's kind of like those Trailer Contests where film promos are re-cut to fit into a different genre. It isn't exactly something you can make a career of, but damn if it isn't fun to watch.
0 Comments
Saturday, April 01, 2006
I pity tha April foo'
posted by Anonymous : 8:53 PM
Okay, so I read a blog post on a phallic conspiracy and admired how it sounded like some of the low-brow material I've written in the past. It dances around the joke a little long-winded-like, but when you reach each punchline, it's pretty amusing. So I'll support this man's alleged Gatorade Conspiracy.
Granted, the whole joke about things that subtly resemble sex organs is pretty overdone. But every now and then comes along one that you never really thought about before, and the case made for it will never allow you to look at it the same again. I ironically guzzled down some Gatorade -- the EXACT SAME FLAVOR as the one featured at the beginning -- 2 minutes before reading it. Maybe that made the joke more disturbing.
Reminder: spring ahead tonight, suckas.
0 Comments
Saturday Night Taped
Welcome to "What Is Recoil?." If you would like to post something on this blog, but don't have a WIR-Blogger login, then send me an e-mail, and I'll make it happen. SHAZAM!
-Rick
(co-creator)
Rick |
Dynamarx |
rus-trick |
ryan |
The Potato |
JDM |
DrNewsie |
Mr. MS |
AK |
Brooke |
Stein |
Moses |
G |
CarrieOkie |
Jen |
Duhn |
M. Moore | Laura |
Mr.T |
kat |
abby | Greg
09/2005 | 10/2005 | 11/2005 | 12/2005 | 01/2006 | 02/2006 | 03/2006 | 04/2006 | 05/2006 | 06/2006 | 07/2006 | 08/2006 | 09/2006 | 10/2006 | 11/2006 | 12/2006 | 01/2007 | 02/2007 | 03/2007 |
Awesome web-stat of the day
Monday, April 17, 2006
Necessary Rock and Roll Reunions of the New Millennium
Sunday, April 16, 2006
Nashvizzle
Top 1 Reason I Should Update My Eye Prescription
V for I'm Gonna Start Writing Again
Saturday, April 15, 2006
The Loop!
posted by RICK : 11:33 AM
FOX was gracious enough to air two episodes of their hit new comedy The Loop this week. I watched both. Here's what the show is not about: the mysterious section of St. Louis known to young and old alike as "The Loop," and the crazy misadventures of three tourists looking for said loop in a late model Mazda after a wedding, but instead getting lost and inadvertantly touring a neighborhood full of St. Louis's most luxurious crumbling homes. It should also be noted that "The Loop" (the St. Louis version) didn't live up to its name as I-- er, these travelers-- detected a discernable beginning and ending. I suspect that if August Ferdinand Mobius had been from St. Louis, his invention would have been less like this and more like this.
Yes, FOX's The Loop is nothing like that. Instead it takes place in Chicago, and follows the misadventures of Sam Sullivan, a kid fresh-out-of-college who is the first amongst his group of friends to get a real job or, based on the two episodes I've seen, "a job". The Loop wants to be many things, but what it suceeds at most is being America's first, true, MySpace-comedy. It's the first series I can think of that appears to be marketed almost exclusively to the MySpace-mainstream-alternative. Clearly the logic is if SUPER-UNDERGROUND comic Dane Cook can have a quarter-trillion friends, surely the formula will get the as many viewers IF NOT MORE. So you take a gorgeous looking cast, put them in few clothes, throw in some whip-pans, a pop-punk soundtrack, and Courtney from the Dandy Warhols (he was on Thursday's episode for some reason*), simmer, serve. The fact that this show is one of the two new comedies (Free Ride being the other... which, actually, might have all ready been canceled) on FOX that were to replace Arrested Development just makes matters worse.
But there's a problem.
The problem is that I'm going to watch this show again. And I'll probably watch it until its inevitable cancelation (most kids on MySpace don't watch TV, they're too busy MySpacing) because of a critical saving grace: Philip Baker Hall is absofuckinghilarious. He plays the owner of whateverthehell airline the main character is suppose to work and everything that comes out of his mouth is pure gold. Perhaps the bigger question in all of this is why exactly PBH is on this stain of a series? Oh yeah, maybe its because PTA hasn't had a movie in six years.
*Not to be confused with his unnecessary appearance on Veronica Mars last fall, but at least in that case he was never actually addressed as "Courtney from the Dandy Warhols")
0 Comments
Friday, April 14, 2006
The dirtiest link I'll ever post:
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
BIG BAGS! WHUT?
Monday, April 10, 2006
A network move in the right direction.
Sunday, April 09, 2006
The Lord takes a curtain call
posted by RICK : 1:40 PM
Poor Carlos Beltran. New York hasn't been that kind to him since his arrival in Queens last season (well, unless you count the $119 million dollars he'll be receiving over the foreseeable future). He keeps getting booed. That is until he hit a homerun on Thursday and suddenly everyone loved him. Of course, then he had to go and say something asinine like this:"Well, I went out," Beltran said. "I just took my time. Like I say, at the beginning, I don't feel like doing it, but I just put myself in the situation of what would God have done in a situation like that. You know, I'm a Christian guy, and after getting booed the first two days, and all of a sudden you come through and get a hit and all of a sudden they want you to go out in a curtain call, I put myself right there and I do believe God would have gone out."
READ ON
Yes, Carlos. God would have gone out for a curtain call. Absolutely.
0 Comments
Tuesday, April 04, 2006
City of Omaha, we need more cowbell!
posted by Anonymous : 10:50 PM
Anyone who has lived in Omaha, even for a short timespan, knows that we love our roads. We fucking LOVE them. We build them and we rebuild them and sometimes we can't stand the fact that there's a road that hasn't been under construction in awhile, so it's worth tearing up and rebuilding again.
Granted, they do a good job of rebuilding them to "look nice," but it doesn't really matter because they'll be tearing it up again within the next five years. Sometimes they forget to engineer them properly before laying down the cement, and so it's all the more reason to tear that shit up again and start over. Ha ha, tax dollar oops.
And then sometimes they come up with funny ideas about putting roads in the sky, which really only results in 10 years of construction in rebuilding the roads to accomodate the building of these other roads and then rebuilding the rebuilt roads back to normal, except for the rebuilt roads that they need to rebuild to fit the overwhelming concept of the absurd roads they just built over the rebuilt roads. I'll at least say in regards to this particular project that perhaps they will serve their purpose in the long-term. And in some ways, they're aesthetically pleasing in temporarily fooling me into thinking we're a big city with big roads that hover over other roads, because one set of roads just won't do it. In the short-term, however, DAMN THAT'S A LOT OF CONSTRUCTION.
Anyhow, the point of this post is to discuss a job that I've become increasingly curious about. If you've lived in Omaha long enough, you've undoubtedly driven past an intersection where you've seen a car or truck awkwardly parked on a median or up on the curb with a person inside watching traffic-- a sign on the side of the vehicle that says "City of Omaha Traffic Study" or something to that effect. That's right. They're studying YOU. And they're going to do it ALL DAY.
So how does one earn that job? Or I guess a better question is: how does one get STUCK with that job?
Here's my questions about the job (enlighten me if you're a traffic studier or know about them):
- How much does the job pay? Is it salary or hourly? Are there benefits? What's the turnover rate?
- Do you voluntarily apply for and take the job? What are the qualifications for being able to study traffic to the satisfaction of the city? Is there a Traffic Study School with classes one must take before properly observing traffic?
- What exactly is being studied? Ratio of red cars to blue cars? Amount of road-head administered per hour at this particular intersection/stretch of road?
- Can they afford to be distracted? Do they take breaks? If I were to walk into the middle of the intersection and lay face-down on the pavement, would they be obligated to intervene or are they supposed to keep observing traffic, perhaps only making a note of my action in their log (if they keep one)? Can I bring them food or lemonade or something out of my pity for them?
- Would I be able to fake being a traffic observer? The signs they use on their vehicles are pretty simplistic and look like they're merely spray-painted stencils on plain paper, taped to the side of whatever they happen to be driving-- quite easy to replicate. Who would call me out on it? What are the penalties? What if they caught me but it turned out I took really good notes? Is it still a bad thing?
- What if I started an independent traffic study, unaffiliated with the city? Is that so wrong? Why would I even want to study traffic on my own, though? I didn't think that part out.
- Are they human? Do they eat and sleep like us? Do they live among us? How do they reproduce?
- If the answer is "yes" to all the questions in the above bullet point, are they a good lay?
So I'm not sure what to make of them, and I'm not sure whether or not I feel sorry for them. If they're asked by the city to constantly objectively reevaluate shit, then yeah, I feel bad because they'll be revisiting the same intersections over and over in their different incarnations. But if they're the people who actively say, "hey, better circle the wagons-- looks like we gotta tear shit up again," then I can't say I feel much pity.
But this is all just a matter of curiosity. If I ever see a hot traffic-studying chick (which I haven't), would it be unethical to approach her on the job and ask for her number? She can't really run away, which would be a great rationalization if I was sleazy and actually had no principles. Would she lose her job for me distracting her for a few seconds and throwing off the accuracy of her "report"?
These are the questions I concern myself with, and they clearly burn away the threads of the very fabric of society. We shall not drive in fear of one another.
Good night, and good luck.
0 Comments
Monday, April 03, 2006
Paint me a picture, dead man.
posted by Anonymous : 1:14 AM
I would never want to do this man any wrong. I really wouldn't. Just look at him. He's everyone's buddy. I almost want to purchase his whole Joy of Painting set just so I can have it run non-stop on my DVD player as I rest my head to sleep. The sound of his voice is a lullabye in itself. My dad and I used to sit in complete silent awe as we'd watch Bob paint practically THE EXACT SAME landscape everytime on his PBS show.
Premise of the show is simple: Bob stands in a studio for a half hour against no backdrop whatsoever and just paints a landscape that pretty much always ends up looking like the one pictured on the left. But the catch is, no matter how predictable it is, you end up watching the WHOLE FUCKING THING without flinching. How does a man command such power?
My dad likened his voice to being that of an "all-night DJ," which is pretty much accurate. If Bob Ross handled peace talks and general foreign relations, I think the whole world would resemble his artistic vision and Saddam would be busy planting trees while Iran would be harvesting pot-- not uranium.
Too bad Bob is dead.
I'm not one to offend easily, but somehow something seems wrong when the likeness of Mr. Ross is handed over to Nintendo for creating a painting video game, meant to showcase the free-handed capabilities of the Big N's new console, code-named Revolution.
Granted, I'm extremely enthused about the possibilities this console has. And it's a cool idea to implement the idea of using the weird-assed motion-sensitive controller as a paintbrush. But why Bob Ross?
I'm not naive, and I know the answer to this question, but when does marketing go too far? I understand this is a growing controversy when it comes to using the likeness of dead celebrities to hawk products. I saw Gene Kelly dancing with a vacuum and Steve McQueen driving the new Mustang, and I thought they were both tacky (yet somewhat clever, purely in their presentation). And who could forget when TuPac made more post-mortem albums than pre-mortem and even landed a theatrical release?
Enough, though. Perhaps it's more of a dilemma as to how their image is handled and carried on after death. I don't doubt that CG will take a turn toward recreating deceased actors for full-length features, resulting in a move to protect their estates and all sorts of legal troubles. I already read a blurb this last week where Paul Newman expressed worry over the unauthorized recreation and mishandling of his likeness after his death. I worry about the unauthorized recreation and mishandling of his salad dressing.
To bring everything back to a point, though, something seems dirty about playing a game where the essence of a dead man was attempted to be resurrected by splashing his name on the title and using images of him to create some artificial experience that could have otherwise held up without him. I couldn't imagine the character of my recently-deceased grandfather being warped and reused to benefit a company or campaign he never would have stood behind when he was alive.
The legend of Bob Ross is great to honor and celebrate through the work he completed while he was alive. But it's hard to celebrate a man's current work when he's been in the dirt since '95.
In other words, R.I.P. Bobbie. I hope you're cruising down the highway in the sky with McQueen while listening to some House of Pain.
0 Comments
Sunday, April 02, 2006
Have you seen that new movie Brick?
posted by RICK : 7:14 AM
I guess you could call it, "This year's Sin City." You could call it that. I'm hesitant to do so. Sure, there's definitely a case to be made that it's all style and no substance (Brick is a classic 1950s hard-boiled detective movie set in a contemporary high school). My preferred way of putting it is "style as substance." But even that seems to slight a film that is both unlike anything I've seen before and yet exactly like something I've seen before (though I guess the same could have been said for Sin City). Or maybe what this really comes down to is I think I have a man-crush on JGL. His performance is exactly as detached and unflinching as the role requires-- the opposite of Neil, where we previously saw him. Granted, "detached" generally means "bad acting," and maybe I'm too transfixed by his baby-browns, but being able to say a line like, "I gave him to you to see him eaten, not to see you fed," and somehow managing to pull it off speaks volumes about why he works so well in this movie. Perhaps the best thing I can say about Brick is that it does work. Sure, at any given moment you can take yourself out of the movie only to look back up again and say, "Wait a minute! Teenagers don't talk like that!" but that kind of kills point. It's Veronica Mars with an edge-- or rather, a different edge. It's kind of like those Trailer Contests where film promos are re-cut to fit into a different genre. It isn't exactly something you can make a career of, but damn if it isn't fun to watch.
0 Comments
Saturday, April 01, 2006
I pity tha April foo'
posted by Anonymous : 8:53 PM
Okay, so I read a blog post on a phallic conspiracy and admired how it sounded like some of the low-brow material I've written in the past. It dances around the joke a little long-winded-like, but when you reach each punchline, it's pretty amusing. So I'll support this man's alleged Gatorade Conspiracy.
Granted, the whole joke about things that subtly resemble sex organs is pretty overdone. But every now and then comes along one that you never really thought about before, and the case made for it will never allow you to look at it the same again. I ironically guzzled down some Gatorade -- the EXACT SAME FLAVOR as the one featured at the beginning -- 2 minutes before reading it. Maybe that made the joke more disturbing.
Reminder: spring ahead tonight, suckas.
0 Comments
Saturday Night Taped
Welcome to "What Is Recoil?." If you would like to post something on this blog, but don't have a WIR-Blogger login, then send me an e-mail, and I'll make it happen. SHAZAM!
-Rick
(co-creator)
Rick |
Dynamarx |
rus-trick |
ryan |
The Potato |
JDM |
DrNewsie |
Mr. MS |
AK |
Brooke |
Stein |
Moses |
G |
CarrieOkie |
Jen |
Duhn |
M. Moore | Laura |
Mr.T |
kat |
abby | Greg
09/2005 | 10/2005 | 11/2005 | 12/2005 | 01/2006 | 02/2006 | 03/2006 | 04/2006 | 05/2006 | 06/2006 | 07/2006 | 08/2006 | 09/2006 | 10/2006 | 11/2006 | 12/2006 | 01/2007 | 02/2007 | 03/2007 |
Monday, April 17, 2006
Necessary Rock and Roll Reunions of the New Millennium
Sunday, April 16, 2006
Nashvizzle
Top 1 Reason I Should Update My Eye Prescription
V for I'm Gonna Start Writing Again
Saturday, April 15, 2006
The Loop!
posted by RICK : 11:33 AM
FOX was gracious enough to air two episodes of their hit new comedy The Loop this week. I watched both. Here's what the show is not about: the mysterious section of St. Louis known to young and old alike as "The Loop," and the crazy misadventures of three tourists looking for said loop in a late model Mazda after a wedding, but instead getting lost and inadvertantly touring a neighborhood full of St. Louis's most luxurious crumbling homes. It should also be noted that "The Loop" (the St. Louis version) didn't live up to its name as I-- er, these travelers-- detected a discernable beginning and ending. I suspect that if August Ferdinand Mobius had been from St. Louis, his invention would have been less like this and more like this.
Yes, FOX's The Loop is nothing like that. Instead it takes place in Chicago, and follows the misadventures of Sam Sullivan, a kid fresh-out-of-college who is the first amongst his group of friends to get a real job or, based on the two episodes I've seen, "a job". The Loop wants to be many things, but what it suceeds at most is being America's first, true, MySpace-comedy. It's the first series I can think of that appears to be marketed almost exclusively to the MySpace-mainstream-alternative. Clearly the logic is if SUPER-UNDERGROUND comic Dane Cook can have a quarter-trillion friends, surely the formula will get the as many viewers IF NOT MORE. So you take a gorgeous looking cast, put them in few clothes, throw in some whip-pans, a pop-punk soundtrack, and Courtney from the Dandy Warhols (he was on Thursday's episode for some reason*), simmer, serve. The fact that this show is one of the two new comedies (Free Ride being the other... which, actually, might have all ready been canceled) on FOX that were to replace Arrested Development just makes matters worse.
But there's a problem.
The problem is that I'm going to watch this show again. And I'll probably watch it until its inevitable cancelation (most kids on MySpace don't watch TV, they're too busy MySpacing) because of a critical saving grace: Philip Baker Hall is absofuckinghilarious. He plays the owner of whateverthehell airline the main character is suppose to work and everything that comes out of his mouth is pure gold. Perhaps the bigger question in all of this is why exactly PBH is on this stain of a series? Oh yeah, maybe its because PTA hasn't had a movie in six years.
*Not to be confused with his unnecessary appearance on Veronica Mars last fall, but at least in that case he was never actually addressed as "Courtney from the Dandy Warhols")
0 Comments
Friday, April 14, 2006
The dirtiest link I'll ever post:
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
BIG BAGS! WHUT?
Monday, April 10, 2006
A network move in the right direction.
Sunday, April 09, 2006
The Lord takes a curtain call
posted by RICK : 1:40 PM
Poor Carlos Beltran. New York hasn't been that kind to him since his arrival in Queens last season (well, unless you count the $119 million dollars he'll be receiving over the foreseeable future). He keeps getting booed. That is until he hit a homerun on Thursday and suddenly everyone loved him. Of course, then he had to go and say something asinine like this:"Well, I went out," Beltran said. "I just took my time. Like I say, at the beginning, I don't feel like doing it, but I just put myself in the situation of what would God have done in a situation like that. You know, I'm a Christian guy, and after getting booed the first two days, and all of a sudden you come through and get a hit and all of a sudden they want you to go out in a curtain call, I put myself right there and I do believe God would have gone out."
READ ON
Yes, Carlos. God would have gone out for a curtain call. Absolutely.
0 Comments
Tuesday, April 04, 2006
City of Omaha, we need more cowbell!
posted by Anonymous : 10:50 PM
Anyone who has lived in Omaha, even for a short timespan, knows that we love our roads. We fucking LOVE them. We build them and we rebuild them and sometimes we can't stand the fact that there's a road that hasn't been under construction in awhile, so it's worth tearing up and rebuilding again.
Granted, they do a good job of rebuilding them to "look nice," but it doesn't really matter because they'll be tearing it up again within the next five years. Sometimes they forget to engineer them properly before laying down the cement, and so it's all the more reason to tear that shit up again and start over. Ha ha, tax dollar oops.
And then sometimes they come up with funny ideas about putting roads in the sky, which really only results in 10 years of construction in rebuilding the roads to accomodate the building of these other roads and then rebuilding the rebuilt roads back to normal, except for the rebuilt roads that they need to rebuild to fit the overwhelming concept of the absurd roads they just built over the rebuilt roads. I'll at least say in regards to this particular project that perhaps they will serve their purpose in the long-term. And in some ways, they're aesthetically pleasing in temporarily fooling me into thinking we're a big city with big roads that hover over other roads, because one set of roads just won't do it. In the short-term, however, DAMN THAT'S A LOT OF CONSTRUCTION.
Anyhow, the point of this post is to discuss a job that I've become increasingly curious about. If you've lived in Omaha long enough, you've undoubtedly driven past an intersection where you've seen a car or truck awkwardly parked on a median or up on the curb with a person inside watching traffic-- a sign on the side of the vehicle that says "City of Omaha Traffic Study" or something to that effect. That's right. They're studying YOU. And they're going to do it ALL DAY.
So how does one earn that job? Or I guess a better question is: how does one get STUCK with that job?
Here's my questions about the job (enlighten me if you're a traffic studier or know about them):
- How much does the job pay? Is it salary or hourly? Are there benefits? What's the turnover rate?
- Do you voluntarily apply for and take the job? What are the qualifications for being able to study traffic to the satisfaction of the city? Is there a Traffic Study School with classes one must take before properly observing traffic?
- What exactly is being studied? Ratio of red cars to blue cars? Amount of road-head administered per hour at this particular intersection/stretch of road?
- Can they afford to be distracted? Do they take breaks? If I were to walk into the middle of the intersection and lay face-down on the pavement, would they be obligated to intervene or are they supposed to keep observing traffic, perhaps only making a note of my action in their log (if they keep one)? Can I bring them food or lemonade or something out of my pity for them?
- Would I be able to fake being a traffic observer? The signs they use on their vehicles are pretty simplistic and look like they're merely spray-painted stencils on plain paper, taped to the side of whatever they happen to be driving-- quite easy to replicate. Who would call me out on it? What are the penalties? What if they caught me but it turned out I took really good notes? Is it still a bad thing?
- What if I started an independent traffic study, unaffiliated with the city? Is that so wrong? Why would I even want to study traffic on my own, though? I didn't think that part out.
- Are they human? Do they eat and sleep like us? Do they live among us? How do they reproduce?
- If the answer is "yes" to all the questions in the above bullet point, are they a good lay?
So I'm not sure what to make of them, and I'm not sure whether or not I feel sorry for them. If they're asked by the city to constantly objectively reevaluate shit, then yeah, I feel bad because they'll be revisiting the same intersections over and over in their different incarnations. But if they're the people who actively say, "hey, better circle the wagons-- looks like we gotta tear shit up again," then I can't say I feel much pity.
But this is all just a matter of curiosity. If I ever see a hot traffic-studying chick (which I haven't), would it be unethical to approach her on the job and ask for her number? She can't really run away, which would be a great rationalization if I was sleazy and actually had no principles. Would she lose her job for me distracting her for a few seconds and throwing off the accuracy of her "report"?
These are the questions I concern myself with, and they clearly burn away the threads of the very fabric of society. We shall not drive in fear of one another.
Good night, and good luck.
0 Comments
Monday, April 03, 2006
Paint me a picture, dead man.
posted by Anonymous : 1:14 AM
I would never want to do this man any wrong. I really wouldn't. Just look at him. He's everyone's buddy. I almost want to purchase his whole Joy of Painting set just so I can have it run non-stop on my DVD player as I rest my head to sleep. The sound of his voice is a lullabye in itself. My dad and I used to sit in complete silent awe as we'd watch Bob paint practically THE EXACT SAME landscape everytime on his PBS show.
Premise of the show is simple: Bob stands in a studio for a half hour against no backdrop whatsoever and just paints a landscape that pretty much always ends up looking like the one pictured on the left. But the catch is, no matter how predictable it is, you end up watching the WHOLE FUCKING THING without flinching. How does a man command such power?
My dad likened his voice to being that of an "all-night DJ," which is pretty much accurate. If Bob Ross handled peace talks and general foreign relations, I think the whole world would resemble his artistic vision and Saddam would be busy planting trees while Iran would be harvesting pot-- not uranium.
Too bad Bob is dead.
I'm not one to offend easily, but somehow something seems wrong when the likeness of Mr. Ross is handed over to Nintendo for creating a painting video game, meant to showcase the free-handed capabilities of the Big N's new console, code-named Revolution.
Granted, I'm extremely enthused about the possibilities this console has. And it's a cool idea to implement the idea of using the weird-assed motion-sensitive controller as a paintbrush. But why Bob Ross?
I'm not naive, and I know the answer to this question, but when does marketing go too far? I understand this is a growing controversy when it comes to using the likeness of dead celebrities to hawk products. I saw Gene Kelly dancing with a vacuum and Steve McQueen driving the new Mustang, and I thought they were both tacky (yet somewhat clever, purely in their presentation). And who could forget when TuPac made more post-mortem albums than pre-mortem and even landed a theatrical release?
Enough, though. Perhaps it's more of a dilemma as to how their image is handled and carried on after death. I don't doubt that CG will take a turn toward recreating deceased actors for full-length features, resulting in a move to protect their estates and all sorts of legal troubles. I already read a blurb this last week where Paul Newman expressed worry over the unauthorized recreation and mishandling of his likeness after his death. I worry about the unauthorized recreation and mishandling of his salad dressing.
To bring everything back to a point, though, something seems dirty about playing a game where the essence of a dead man was attempted to be resurrected by splashing his name on the title and using images of him to create some artificial experience that could have otherwise held up without him. I couldn't imagine the character of my recently-deceased grandfather being warped and reused to benefit a company or campaign he never would have stood behind when he was alive.
The legend of Bob Ross is great to honor and celebrate through the work he completed while he was alive. But it's hard to celebrate a man's current work when he's been in the dirt since '95.
In other words, R.I.P. Bobbie. I hope you're cruising down the highway in the sky with McQueen while listening to some House of Pain.
0 Comments
Sunday, April 02, 2006
Have you seen that new movie Brick?
posted by RICK : 7:14 AM
I guess you could call it, "This year's Sin City." You could call it that. I'm hesitant to do so. Sure, there's definitely a case to be made that it's all style and no substance (Brick is a classic 1950s hard-boiled detective movie set in a contemporary high school). My preferred way of putting it is "style as substance." But even that seems to slight a film that is both unlike anything I've seen before and yet exactly like something I've seen before (though I guess the same could have been said for Sin City). Or maybe what this really comes down to is I think I have a man-crush on JGL. His performance is exactly as detached and unflinching as the role requires-- the opposite of Neil, where we previously saw him. Granted, "detached" generally means "bad acting," and maybe I'm too transfixed by his baby-browns, but being able to say a line like, "I gave him to you to see him eaten, not to see you fed," and somehow managing to pull it off speaks volumes about why he works so well in this movie. Perhaps the best thing I can say about Brick is that it does work. Sure, at any given moment you can take yourself out of the movie only to look back up again and say, "Wait a minute! Teenagers don't talk like that!" but that kind of kills point. It's Veronica Mars with an edge-- or rather, a different edge. It's kind of like those Trailer Contests where film promos are re-cut to fit into a different genre. It isn't exactly something you can make a career of, but damn if it isn't fun to watch.
0 Comments
Saturday, April 01, 2006
I pity tha April foo'
posted by Anonymous : 8:53 PM
Okay, so I read a blog post on a phallic conspiracy and admired how it sounded like some of the low-brow material I've written in the past. It dances around the joke a little long-winded-like, but when you reach each punchline, it's pretty amusing. So I'll support this man's alleged Gatorade Conspiracy.
Granted, the whole joke about things that subtly resemble sex organs is pretty overdone. But every now and then comes along one that you never really thought about before, and the case made for it will never allow you to look at it the same again. I ironically guzzled down some Gatorade -- the EXACT SAME FLAVOR as the one featured at the beginning -- 2 minutes before reading it. Maybe that made the joke more disturbing.
Reminder: spring ahead tonight, suckas.
0 Comments
Saturday Night Taped
Welcome to "What Is Recoil?." If you would like to post something on this blog, but don't have a WIR-Blogger login, then send me an e-mail, and I'll make it happen. SHAZAM!
-Rick
(co-creator)
Rick |
Dynamarx |
rus-trick |
ryan |
The Potato |
JDM |
DrNewsie |
Mr. MS |
AK |
Brooke |
Stein |
Moses |
G |
CarrieOkie |
Jen |
Duhn |
M. Moore | Laura |
Mr.T |
kat |
abby | Greg
09/2005 | 10/2005 | 11/2005 | 12/2005 | 01/2006 | 02/2006 | 03/2006 | 04/2006 | 05/2006 | 06/2006 | 07/2006 | 08/2006 | 09/2006 | 10/2006 | 11/2006 | 12/2006 | 01/2007 | 02/2007 | 03/2007 |
Necessary Rock and Roll Reunions of the New Millennium
Sunday, April 16, 2006
Nashvizzle
Top 1 Reason I Should Update My Eye Prescription
V for I'm Gonna Start Writing Again
Saturday, April 15, 2006
The Loop!
posted by RICK : 11:33 AM
FOX was gracious enough to air two episodes of their hit new comedy The Loop this week. I watched both. Here's what the show is not about: the mysterious section of St. Louis known to young and old alike as "The Loop," and the crazy misadventures of three tourists looking for said loop in a late model Mazda after a wedding, but instead getting lost and inadvertantly touring a neighborhood full of St. Louis's most luxurious crumbling homes. It should also be noted that "The Loop" (the St. Louis version) didn't live up to its name as I-- er, these travelers-- detected a discernable beginning and ending. I suspect that if August Ferdinand Mobius had been from St. Louis, his invention would have been less like this and more like this.
Yes, FOX's The Loop is nothing like that. Instead it takes place in Chicago, and follows the misadventures of Sam Sullivan, a kid fresh-out-of-college who is the first amongst his group of friends to get a real job or, based on the two episodes I've seen, "a job". The Loop wants to be many things, but what it suceeds at most is being America's first, true, MySpace-comedy. It's the first series I can think of that appears to be marketed almost exclusively to the MySpace-mainstream-alternative. Clearly the logic is if SUPER-UNDERGROUND comic Dane Cook can have a quarter-trillion friends, surely the formula will get the as many viewers IF NOT MORE. So you take a gorgeous looking cast, put them in few clothes, throw in some whip-pans, a pop-punk soundtrack, and Courtney from the Dandy Warhols (he was on Thursday's episode for some reason*), simmer, serve. The fact that this show is one of the two new comedies (Free Ride being the other... which, actually, might have all ready been canceled) on FOX that were to replace Arrested Development just makes matters worse.
But there's a problem.
The problem is that I'm going to watch this show again. And I'll probably watch it until its inevitable cancelation (most kids on MySpace don't watch TV, they're too busy MySpacing) because of a critical saving grace: Philip Baker Hall is absofuckinghilarious. He plays the owner of whateverthehell airline the main character is suppose to work and everything that comes out of his mouth is pure gold. Perhaps the bigger question in all of this is why exactly PBH is on this stain of a series? Oh yeah, maybe its because PTA hasn't had a movie in six years.
*Not to be confused with his unnecessary appearance on Veronica Mars last fall, but at least in that case he was never actually addressed as "Courtney from the Dandy Warhols")
0 Comments
Friday, April 14, 2006
The dirtiest link I'll ever post:
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
BIG BAGS! WHUT?
Monday, April 10, 2006
A network move in the right direction.
Sunday, April 09, 2006
The Lord takes a curtain call
posted by RICK : 1:40 PM
Poor Carlos Beltran. New York hasn't been that kind to him since his arrival in Queens last season (well, unless you count the $119 million dollars he'll be receiving over the foreseeable future). He keeps getting booed. That is until he hit a homerun on Thursday and suddenly everyone loved him. Of course, then he had to go and say something asinine like this:"Well, I went out," Beltran said. "I just took my time. Like I say, at the beginning, I don't feel like doing it, but I just put myself in the situation of what would God have done in a situation like that. You know, I'm a Christian guy, and after getting booed the first two days, and all of a sudden you come through and get a hit and all of a sudden they want you to go out in a curtain call, I put myself right there and I do believe God would have gone out."
READ ON
Yes, Carlos. God would have gone out for a curtain call. Absolutely.
0 Comments
Tuesday, April 04, 2006
City of Omaha, we need more cowbell!
posted by Anonymous : 10:50 PM
Anyone who has lived in Omaha, even for a short timespan, knows that we love our roads. We fucking LOVE them. We build them and we rebuild them and sometimes we can't stand the fact that there's a road that hasn't been under construction in awhile, so it's worth tearing up and rebuilding again.
Granted, they do a good job of rebuilding them to "look nice," but it doesn't really matter because they'll be tearing it up again within the next five years. Sometimes they forget to engineer them properly before laying down the cement, and so it's all the more reason to tear that shit up again and start over. Ha ha, tax dollar oops.
And then sometimes they come up with funny ideas about putting roads in the sky, which really only results in 10 years of construction in rebuilding the roads to accomodate the building of these other roads and then rebuilding the rebuilt roads back to normal, except for the rebuilt roads that they need to rebuild to fit the overwhelming concept of the absurd roads they just built over the rebuilt roads. I'll at least say in regards to this particular project that perhaps they will serve their purpose in the long-term. And in some ways, they're aesthetically pleasing in temporarily fooling me into thinking we're a big city with big roads that hover over other roads, because one set of roads just won't do it. In the short-term, however, DAMN THAT'S A LOT OF CONSTRUCTION.
Anyhow, the point of this post is to discuss a job that I've become increasingly curious about. If you've lived in Omaha long enough, you've undoubtedly driven past an intersection where you've seen a car or truck awkwardly parked on a median or up on the curb with a person inside watching traffic-- a sign on the side of the vehicle that says "City of Omaha Traffic Study" or something to that effect. That's right. They're studying YOU. And they're going to do it ALL DAY.
So how does one earn that job? Or I guess a better question is: how does one get STUCK with that job?
Here's my questions about the job (enlighten me if you're a traffic studier or know about them):
- How much does the job pay? Is it salary or hourly? Are there benefits? What's the turnover rate?
- Do you voluntarily apply for and take the job? What are the qualifications for being able to study traffic to the satisfaction of the city? Is there a Traffic Study School with classes one must take before properly observing traffic?
- What exactly is being studied? Ratio of red cars to blue cars? Amount of road-head administered per hour at this particular intersection/stretch of road?
- Can they afford to be distracted? Do they take breaks? If I were to walk into the middle of the intersection and lay face-down on the pavement, would they be obligated to intervene or are they supposed to keep observing traffic, perhaps only making a note of my action in their log (if they keep one)? Can I bring them food or lemonade or something out of my pity for them?
- Would I be able to fake being a traffic observer? The signs they use on their vehicles are pretty simplistic and look like they're merely spray-painted stencils on plain paper, taped to the side of whatever they happen to be driving-- quite easy to replicate. Who would call me out on it? What are the penalties? What if they caught me but it turned out I took really good notes? Is it still a bad thing?
- What if I started an independent traffic study, unaffiliated with the city? Is that so wrong? Why would I even want to study traffic on my own, though? I didn't think that part out.
- Are they human? Do they eat and sleep like us? Do they live among us? How do they reproduce?
- If the answer is "yes" to all the questions in the above bullet point, are they a good lay?
So I'm not sure what to make of them, and I'm not sure whether or not I feel sorry for them. If they're asked by the city to constantly objectively reevaluate shit, then yeah, I feel bad because they'll be revisiting the same intersections over and over in their different incarnations. But if they're the people who actively say, "hey, better circle the wagons-- looks like we gotta tear shit up again," then I can't say I feel much pity.
But this is all just a matter of curiosity. If I ever see a hot traffic-studying chick (which I haven't), would it be unethical to approach her on the job and ask for her number? She can't really run away, which would be a great rationalization if I was sleazy and actually had no principles. Would she lose her job for me distracting her for a few seconds and throwing off the accuracy of her "report"?
These are the questions I concern myself with, and they clearly burn away the threads of the very fabric of society. We shall not drive in fear of one another.
Good night, and good luck.
0 Comments
Monday, April 03, 2006
Paint me a picture, dead man.
posted by Anonymous : 1:14 AM
I would never want to do this man any wrong. I really wouldn't. Just look at him. He's everyone's buddy. I almost want to purchase his whole Joy of Painting set just so I can have it run non-stop on my DVD player as I rest my head to sleep. The sound of his voice is a lullabye in itself. My dad and I used to sit in complete silent awe as we'd watch Bob paint practically THE EXACT SAME landscape everytime on his PBS show.
Premise of the show is simple: Bob stands in a studio for a half hour against no backdrop whatsoever and just paints a landscape that pretty much always ends up looking like the one pictured on the left. But the catch is, no matter how predictable it is, you end up watching the WHOLE FUCKING THING without flinching. How does a man command such power?
My dad likened his voice to being that of an "all-night DJ," which is pretty much accurate. If Bob Ross handled peace talks and general foreign relations, I think the whole world would resemble his artistic vision and Saddam would be busy planting trees while Iran would be harvesting pot-- not uranium.
Too bad Bob is dead.
I'm not one to offend easily, but somehow something seems wrong when the likeness of Mr. Ross is handed over to Nintendo for creating a painting video game, meant to showcase the free-handed capabilities of the Big N's new console, code-named Revolution.
Granted, I'm extremely enthused about the possibilities this console has. And it's a cool idea to implement the idea of using the weird-assed motion-sensitive controller as a paintbrush. But why Bob Ross?
I'm not naive, and I know the answer to this question, but when does marketing go too far? I understand this is a growing controversy when it comes to using the likeness of dead celebrities to hawk products. I saw Gene Kelly dancing with a vacuum and Steve McQueen driving the new Mustang, and I thought they were both tacky (yet somewhat clever, purely in their presentation). And who could forget when TuPac made more post-mortem albums than pre-mortem and even landed a theatrical release?
Enough, though. Perhaps it's more of a dilemma as to how their image is handled and carried on after death. I don't doubt that CG will take a turn toward recreating deceased actors for full-length features, resulting in a move to protect their estates and all sorts of legal troubles. I already read a blurb this last week where Paul Newman expressed worry over the unauthorized recreation and mishandling of his likeness after his death. I worry about the unauthorized recreation and mishandling of his salad dressing.
To bring everything back to a point, though, something seems dirty about playing a game where the essence of a dead man was attempted to be resurrected by splashing his name on the title and using images of him to create some artificial experience that could have otherwise held up without him. I couldn't imagine the character of my recently-deceased grandfather being warped and reused to benefit a company or campaign he never would have stood behind when he was alive.
The legend of Bob Ross is great to honor and celebrate through the work he completed while he was alive. But it's hard to celebrate a man's current work when he's been in the dirt since '95.
In other words, R.I.P. Bobbie. I hope you're cruising down the highway in the sky with McQueen while listening to some House of Pain.
0 Comments
Sunday, April 02, 2006
Have you seen that new movie Brick?
posted by RICK : 7:14 AM
I guess you could call it, "This year's Sin City." You could call it that. I'm hesitant to do so. Sure, there's definitely a case to be made that it's all style and no substance (Brick is a classic 1950s hard-boiled detective movie set in a contemporary high school). My preferred way of putting it is "style as substance." But even that seems to slight a film that is both unlike anything I've seen before and yet exactly like something I've seen before (though I guess the same could have been said for Sin City). Or maybe what this really comes down to is I think I have a man-crush on JGL. His performance is exactly as detached and unflinching as the role requires-- the opposite of Neil, where we previously saw him. Granted, "detached" generally means "bad acting," and maybe I'm too transfixed by his baby-browns, but being able to say a line like, "I gave him to you to see him eaten, not to see you fed," and somehow managing to pull it off speaks volumes about why he works so well in this movie. Perhaps the best thing I can say about Brick is that it does work. Sure, at any given moment you can take yourself out of the movie only to look back up again and say, "Wait a minute! Teenagers don't talk like that!" but that kind of kills point. It's Veronica Mars with an edge-- or rather, a different edge. It's kind of like those Trailer Contests where film promos are re-cut to fit into a different genre. It isn't exactly something you can make a career of, but damn if it isn't fun to watch.
0 Comments
Saturday, April 01, 2006
I pity tha April foo'
posted by Anonymous : 8:53 PM
Okay, so I read a blog post on a phallic conspiracy and admired how it sounded like some of the low-brow material I've written in the past. It dances around the joke a little long-winded-like, but when you reach each punchline, it's pretty amusing. So I'll support this man's alleged Gatorade Conspiracy.
Granted, the whole joke about things that subtly resemble sex organs is pretty overdone. But every now and then comes along one that you never really thought about before, and the case made for it will never allow you to look at it the same again. I ironically guzzled down some Gatorade -- the EXACT SAME FLAVOR as the one featured at the beginning -- 2 minutes before reading it. Maybe that made the joke more disturbing.
Reminder: spring ahead tonight, suckas.
0 Comments
Saturday Night Taped
Welcome to "What Is Recoil?." If you would like to post something on this blog, but don't have a WIR-Blogger login, then send me an e-mail, and I'll make it happen. SHAZAM!
-Rick
(co-creator)
Rick |
Dynamarx |
rus-trick |
ryan |
The Potato |
JDM |
DrNewsie |
Mr. MS |
AK |
Brooke |
Stein |
Moses |
G |
CarrieOkie |
Jen |
Duhn |
M. Moore | Laura |
Mr.T |
kat |
abby | Greg
09/2005 | 10/2005 | 11/2005 | 12/2005 | 01/2006 | 02/2006 | 03/2006 | 04/2006 | 05/2006 | 06/2006 | 07/2006 | 08/2006 | 09/2006 | 10/2006 | 11/2006 | 12/2006 | 01/2007 | 02/2007 | 03/2007 |
Nashvizzle
Top 1 Reason I Should Update My Eye Prescription
V for I'm Gonna Start Writing Again
Saturday, April 15, 2006
The Loop!
posted by RICK : 11:33 AM
FOX was gracious enough to air two episodes of their hit new comedy The Loop this week. I watched both. Here's what the show is not about: the mysterious section of St. Louis known to young and old alike as "The Loop," and the crazy misadventures of three tourists looking for said loop in a late model Mazda after a wedding, but instead getting lost and inadvertantly touring a neighborhood full of St. Louis's most luxurious crumbling homes. It should also be noted that "The Loop" (the St. Louis version) didn't live up to its name as I-- er, these travelers-- detected a discernable beginning and ending. I suspect that if August Ferdinand Mobius had been from St. Louis, his invention would have been less like this and more like this.
Yes, FOX's The Loop is nothing like that. Instead it takes place in Chicago, and follows the misadventures of Sam Sullivan, a kid fresh-out-of-college who is the first amongst his group of friends to get a real job or, based on the two episodes I've seen, "a job". The Loop wants to be many things, but what it suceeds at most is being America's first, true, MySpace-comedy. It's the first series I can think of that appears to be marketed almost exclusively to the MySpace-mainstream-alternative. Clearly the logic is if SUPER-UNDERGROUND comic Dane Cook can have a quarter-trillion friends, surely the formula will get the as many viewers IF NOT MORE. So you take a gorgeous looking cast, put them in few clothes, throw in some whip-pans, a pop-punk soundtrack, and Courtney from the Dandy Warhols (he was on Thursday's episode for some reason*), simmer, serve. The fact that this show is one of the two new comedies (Free Ride being the other... which, actually, might have all ready been canceled) on FOX that were to replace Arrested Development just makes matters worse.
But there's a problem.
The problem is that I'm going to watch this show again. And I'll probably watch it until its inevitable cancelation (most kids on MySpace don't watch TV, they're too busy MySpacing) because of a critical saving grace: Philip Baker Hall is absofuckinghilarious. He plays the owner of whateverthehell airline the main character is suppose to work and everything that comes out of his mouth is pure gold. Perhaps the bigger question in all of this is why exactly PBH is on this stain of a series? Oh yeah, maybe its because PTA hasn't had a movie in six years.
*Not to be confused with his unnecessary appearance on Veronica Mars last fall, but at least in that case he was never actually addressed as "Courtney from the Dandy Warhols")
0 Comments
Friday, April 14, 2006
The dirtiest link I'll ever post:
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
BIG BAGS! WHUT?
Monday, April 10, 2006
A network move in the right direction.
Sunday, April 09, 2006
The Lord takes a curtain call
posted by RICK : 1:40 PM
Poor Carlos Beltran. New York hasn't been that kind to him since his arrival in Queens last season (well, unless you count the $119 million dollars he'll be receiving over the foreseeable future). He keeps getting booed. That is until he hit a homerun on Thursday and suddenly everyone loved him. Of course, then he had to go and say something asinine like this:"Well, I went out," Beltran said. "I just took my time. Like I say, at the beginning, I don't feel like doing it, but I just put myself in the situation of what would God have done in a situation like that. You know, I'm a Christian guy, and after getting booed the first two days, and all of a sudden you come through and get a hit and all of a sudden they want you to go out in a curtain call, I put myself right there and I do believe God would have gone out."
READ ON
Yes, Carlos. God would have gone out for a curtain call. Absolutely.
0 Comments
Tuesday, April 04, 2006
City of Omaha, we need more cowbell!
posted by Anonymous : 10:50 PM
Anyone who has lived in Omaha, even for a short timespan, knows that we love our roads. We fucking LOVE them. We build them and we rebuild them and sometimes we can't stand the fact that there's a road that hasn't been under construction in awhile, so it's worth tearing up and rebuilding again.
Granted, they do a good job of rebuilding them to "look nice," but it doesn't really matter because they'll be tearing it up again within the next five years. Sometimes they forget to engineer them properly before laying down the cement, and so it's all the more reason to tear that shit up again and start over. Ha ha, tax dollar oops.
And then sometimes they come up with funny ideas about putting roads in the sky, which really only results in 10 years of construction in rebuilding the roads to accomodate the building of these other roads and then rebuilding the rebuilt roads back to normal, except for the rebuilt roads that they need to rebuild to fit the overwhelming concept of the absurd roads they just built over the rebuilt roads. I'll at least say in regards to this particular project that perhaps they will serve their purpose in the long-term. And in some ways, they're aesthetically pleasing in temporarily fooling me into thinking we're a big city with big roads that hover over other roads, because one set of roads just won't do it. In the short-term, however, DAMN THAT'S A LOT OF CONSTRUCTION.
Anyhow, the point of this post is to discuss a job that I've become increasingly curious about. If you've lived in Omaha long enough, you've undoubtedly driven past an intersection where you've seen a car or truck awkwardly parked on a median or up on the curb with a person inside watching traffic-- a sign on the side of the vehicle that says "City of Omaha Traffic Study" or something to that effect. That's right. They're studying YOU. And they're going to do it ALL DAY.
So how does one earn that job? Or I guess a better question is: how does one get STUCK with that job?
Here's my questions about the job (enlighten me if you're a traffic studier or know about them):
- How much does the job pay? Is it salary or hourly? Are there benefits? What's the turnover rate?
- Do you voluntarily apply for and take the job? What are the qualifications for being able to study traffic to the satisfaction of the city? Is there a Traffic Study School with classes one must take before properly observing traffic?
- What exactly is being studied? Ratio of red cars to blue cars? Amount of road-head administered per hour at this particular intersection/stretch of road?
- Can they afford to be distracted? Do they take breaks? If I were to walk into the middle of the intersection and lay face-down on the pavement, would they be obligated to intervene or are they supposed to keep observing traffic, perhaps only making a note of my action in their log (if they keep one)? Can I bring them food or lemonade or something out of my pity for them?
- Would I be able to fake being a traffic observer? The signs they use on their vehicles are pretty simplistic and look like they're merely spray-painted stencils on plain paper, taped to the side of whatever they happen to be driving-- quite easy to replicate. Who would call me out on it? What are the penalties? What if they caught me but it turned out I took really good notes? Is it still a bad thing?
- What if I started an independent traffic study, unaffiliated with the city? Is that so wrong? Why would I even want to study traffic on my own, though? I didn't think that part out.
- Are they human? Do they eat and sleep like us? Do they live among us? How do they reproduce?
- If the answer is "yes" to all the questions in the above bullet point, are they a good lay?
So I'm not sure what to make of them, and I'm not sure whether or not I feel sorry for them. If they're asked by the city to constantly objectively reevaluate shit, then yeah, I feel bad because they'll be revisiting the same intersections over and over in their different incarnations. But if they're the people who actively say, "hey, better circle the wagons-- looks like we gotta tear shit up again," then I can't say I feel much pity.
But this is all just a matter of curiosity. If I ever see a hot traffic-studying chick (which I haven't), would it be unethical to approach her on the job and ask for her number? She can't really run away, which would be a great rationalization if I was sleazy and actually had no principles. Would she lose her job for me distracting her for a few seconds and throwing off the accuracy of her "report"?
These are the questions I concern myself with, and they clearly burn away the threads of the very fabric of society. We shall not drive in fear of one another.
Good night, and good luck.
0 Comments
Monday, April 03, 2006
Paint me a picture, dead man.
posted by Anonymous : 1:14 AM
I would never want to do this man any wrong. I really wouldn't. Just look at him. He's everyone's buddy. I almost want to purchase his whole Joy of Painting set just so I can have it run non-stop on my DVD player as I rest my head to sleep. The sound of his voice is a lullabye in itself. My dad and I used to sit in complete silent awe as we'd watch Bob paint practically THE EXACT SAME landscape everytime on his PBS show.
Premise of the show is simple: Bob stands in a studio for a half hour against no backdrop whatsoever and just paints a landscape that pretty much always ends up looking like the one pictured on the left. But the catch is, no matter how predictable it is, you end up watching the WHOLE FUCKING THING without flinching. How does a man command such power?
My dad likened his voice to being that of an "all-night DJ," which is pretty much accurate. If Bob Ross handled peace talks and general foreign relations, I think the whole world would resemble his artistic vision and Saddam would be busy planting trees while Iran would be harvesting pot-- not uranium.
Too bad Bob is dead.
I'm not one to offend easily, but somehow something seems wrong when the likeness of Mr. Ross is handed over to Nintendo for creating a painting video game, meant to showcase the free-handed capabilities of the Big N's new console, code-named Revolution.
Granted, I'm extremely enthused about the possibilities this console has. And it's a cool idea to implement the idea of using the weird-assed motion-sensitive controller as a paintbrush. But why Bob Ross?
I'm not naive, and I know the answer to this question, but when does marketing go too far? I understand this is a growing controversy when it comes to using the likeness of dead celebrities to hawk products. I saw Gene Kelly dancing with a vacuum and Steve McQueen driving the new Mustang, and I thought they were both tacky (yet somewhat clever, purely in their presentation). And who could forget when TuPac made more post-mortem albums than pre-mortem and even landed a theatrical release?
Enough, though. Perhaps it's more of a dilemma as to how their image is handled and carried on after death. I don't doubt that CG will take a turn toward recreating deceased actors for full-length features, resulting in a move to protect their estates and all sorts of legal troubles. I already read a blurb this last week where Paul Newman expressed worry over the unauthorized recreation and mishandling of his likeness after his death. I worry about the unauthorized recreation and mishandling of his salad dressing.
To bring everything back to a point, though, something seems dirty about playing a game where the essence of a dead man was attempted to be resurrected by splashing his name on the title and using images of him to create some artificial experience that could have otherwise held up without him. I couldn't imagine the character of my recently-deceased grandfather being warped and reused to benefit a company or campaign he never would have stood behind when he was alive.
The legend of Bob Ross is great to honor and celebrate through the work he completed while he was alive. But it's hard to celebrate a man's current work when he's been in the dirt since '95.
In other words, R.I.P. Bobbie. I hope you're cruising down the highway in the sky with McQueen while listening to some House of Pain.
0 Comments
Sunday, April 02, 2006
Have you seen that new movie Brick?
posted by RICK : 7:14 AM
I guess you could call it, "This year's Sin City." You could call it that. I'm hesitant to do so. Sure, there's definitely a case to be made that it's all style and no substance (Brick is a classic 1950s hard-boiled detective movie set in a contemporary high school). My preferred way of putting it is "style as substance." But even that seems to slight a film that is both unlike anything I've seen before and yet exactly like something I've seen before (though I guess the same could have been said for Sin City). Or maybe what this really comes down to is I think I have a man-crush on JGL. His performance is exactly as detached and unflinching as the role requires-- the opposite of Neil, where we previously saw him. Granted, "detached" generally means "bad acting," and maybe I'm too transfixed by his baby-browns, but being able to say a line like, "I gave him to you to see him eaten, not to see you fed," and somehow managing to pull it off speaks volumes about why he works so well in this movie. Perhaps the best thing I can say about Brick is that it does work. Sure, at any given moment you can take yourself out of the movie only to look back up again and say, "Wait a minute! Teenagers don't talk like that!" but that kind of kills point. It's Veronica Mars with an edge-- or rather, a different edge. It's kind of like those Trailer Contests where film promos are re-cut to fit into a different genre. It isn't exactly something you can make a career of, but damn if it isn't fun to watch.
0 Comments
Saturday, April 01, 2006
I pity tha April foo'
posted by Anonymous : 8:53 PM
Okay, so I read a blog post on a phallic conspiracy and admired how it sounded like some of the low-brow material I've written in the past. It dances around the joke a little long-winded-like, but when you reach each punchline, it's pretty amusing. So I'll support this man's alleged Gatorade Conspiracy.
Granted, the whole joke about things that subtly resemble sex organs is pretty overdone. But every now and then comes along one that you never really thought about before, and the case made for it will never allow you to look at it the same again. I ironically guzzled down some Gatorade -- the EXACT SAME FLAVOR as the one featured at the beginning -- 2 minutes before reading it. Maybe that made the joke more disturbing.
Reminder: spring ahead tonight, suckas.
0 Comments
Saturday Night Taped
Welcome to "What Is Recoil?." If you would like to post something on this blog, but don't have a WIR-Blogger login, then send me an e-mail, and I'll make it happen. SHAZAM!
-Rick
(co-creator)
Rick |
Dynamarx |
rus-trick |
ryan |
The Potato |
JDM |
DrNewsie |
Mr. MS |
AK |
Brooke |
Stein |
Moses |
G |
CarrieOkie |
Jen |
Duhn |
M. Moore | Laura |
Mr.T |
kat |
abby | Greg
09/2005 | 10/2005 | 11/2005 | 12/2005 | 01/2006 | 02/2006 | 03/2006 | 04/2006 | 05/2006 | 06/2006 | 07/2006 | 08/2006 | 09/2006 | 10/2006 | 11/2006 | 12/2006 | 01/2007 | 02/2007 | 03/2007 |
Top 1 Reason I Should Update My Eye Prescription
V for I'm Gonna Start Writing Again
Saturday, April 15, 2006
The Loop!
posted by RICK : 11:33 AM
FOX was gracious enough to air two episodes of their hit new comedy The Loop this week. I watched both. Here's what the show is not about: the mysterious section of St. Louis known to young and old alike as "The Loop," and the crazy misadventures of three tourists looking for said loop in a late model Mazda after a wedding, but instead getting lost and inadvertantly touring a neighborhood full of St. Louis's most luxurious crumbling homes. It should also be noted that "The Loop" (the St. Louis version) didn't live up to its name as I-- er, these travelers-- detected a discernable beginning and ending. I suspect that if August Ferdinand Mobius had been from St. Louis, his invention would have been less like this and more like this.
Yes, FOX's The Loop is nothing like that. Instead it takes place in Chicago, and follows the misadventures of Sam Sullivan, a kid fresh-out-of-college who is the first amongst his group of friends to get a real job or, based on the two episodes I've seen, "a job". The Loop wants to be many things, but what it suceeds at most is being America's first, true, MySpace-comedy. It's the first series I can think of that appears to be marketed almost exclusively to the MySpace-mainstream-alternative. Clearly the logic is if SUPER-UNDERGROUND comic Dane Cook can have a quarter-trillion friends, surely the formula will get the as many viewers IF NOT MORE. So you take a gorgeous looking cast, put them in few clothes, throw in some whip-pans, a pop-punk soundtrack, and Courtney from the Dandy Warhols (he was on Thursday's episode for some reason*), simmer, serve. The fact that this show is one of the two new comedies (Free Ride being the other... which, actually, might have all ready been canceled) on FOX that were to replace Arrested Development just makes matters worse.
But there's a problem.
The problem is that I'm going to watch this show again. And I'll probably watch it until its inevitable cancelation (most kids on MySpace don't watch TV, they're too busy MySpacing) because of a critical saving grace: Philip Baker Hall is absofuckinghilarious. He plays the owner of whateverthehell airline the main character is suppose to work and everything that comes out of his mouth is pure gold. Perhaps the bigger question in all of this is why exactly PBH is on this stain of a series? Oh yeah, maybe its because PTA hasn't had a movie in six years.
*Not to be confused with his unnecessary appearance on Veronica Mars last fall, but at least in that case he was never actually addressed as "Courtney from the Dandy Warhols")
0 Comments
Friday, April 14, 2006
The dirtiest link I'll ever post:
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
BIG BAGS! WHUT?
Monday, April 10, 2006
A network move in the right direction.
Sunday, April 09, 2006
The Lord takes a curtain call
posted by RICK : 1:40 PM
Poor Carlos Beltran. New York hasn't been that kind to him since his arrival in Queens last season (well, unless you count the $119 million dollars he'll be receiving over the foreseeable future). He keeps getting booed. That is until he hit a homerun on Thursday and suddenly everyone loved him. Of course, then he had to go and say something asinine like this:"Well, I went out," Beltran said. "I just took my time. Like I say, at the beginning, I don't feel like doing it, but I just put myself in the situation of what would God have done in a situation like that. You know, I'm a Christian guy, and after getting booed the first two days, and all of a sudden you come through and get a hit and all of a sudden they want you to go out in a curtain call, I put myself right there and I do believe God would have gone out."
READ ON
Yes, Carlos. God would have gone out for a curtain call. Absolutely.
0 Comments
Tuesday, April 04, 2006
City of Omaha, we need more cowbell!
posted by Anonymous : 10:50 PM
Anyone who has lived in Omaha, even for a short timespan, knows that we love our roads. We fucking LOVE them. We build them and we rebuild them and sometimes we can't stand the fact that there's a road that hasn't been under construction in awhile, so it's worth tearing up and rebuilding again.
Granted, they do a good job of rebuilding them to "look nice," but it doesn't really matter because they'll be tearing it up again within the next five years. Sometimes they forget to engineer them properly before laying down the cement, and so it's all the more reason to tear that shit up again and start over. Ha ha, tax dollar oops.
And then sometimes they come up with funny ideas about putting roads in the sky, which really only results in 10 years of construction in rebuilding the roads to accomodate the building of these other roads and then rebuilding the rebuilt roads back to normal, except for the rebuilt roads that they need to rebuild to fit the overwhelming concept of the absurd roads they just built over the rebuilt roads. I'll at least say in regards to this particular project that perhaps they will serve their purpose in the long-term. And in some ways, they're aesthetically pleasing in temporarily fooling me into thinking we're a big city with big roads that hover over other roads, because one set of roads just won't do it. In the short-term, however, DAMN THAT'S A LOT OF CONSTRUCTION.
Anyhow, the point of this post is to discuss a job that I've become increasingly curious about. If you've lived in Omaha long enough, you've undoubtedly driven past an intersection where you've seen a car or truck awkwardly parked on a median or up on the curb with a person inside watching traffic-- a sign on the side of the vehicle that says "City of Omaha Traffic Study" or something to that effect. That's right. They're studying YOU. And they're going to do it ALL DAY.
So how does one earn that job? Or I guess a better question is: how does one get STUCK with that job?
Here's my questions about the job (enlighten me if you're a traffic studier or know about them):
- How much does the job pay? Is it salary or hourly? Are there benefits? What's the turnover rate?
- Do you voluntarily apply for and take the job? What are the qualifications for being able to study traffic to the satisfaction of the city? Is there a Traffic Study School with classes one must take before properly observing traffic?
- What exactly is being studied? Ratio of red cars to blue cars? Amount of road-head administered per hour at this particular intersection/stretch of road?
- Can they afford to be distracted? Do they take breaks? If I were to walk into the middle of the intersection and lay face-down on the pavement, would they be obligated to intervene or are they supposed to keep observing traffic, perhaps only making a note of my action in their log (if they keep one)? Can I bring them food or lemonade or something out of my pity for them?
- Would I be able to fake being a traffic observer? The signs they use on their vehicles are pretty simplistic and look like they're merely spray-painted stencils on plain paper, taped to the side of whatever they happen to be driving-- quite easy to replicate. Who would call me out on it? What are the penalties? What if they caught me but it turned out I took really good notes? Is it still a bad thing?
- What if I started an independent traffic study, unaffiliated with the city? Is that so wrong? Why would I even want to study traffic on my own, though? I didn't think that part out.
- Are they human? Do they eat and sleep like us? Do they live among us? How do they reproduce?
- If the answer is "yes" to all the questions in the above bullet point, are they a good lay?
So I'm not sure what to make of them, and I'm not sure whether or not I feel sorry for them. If they're asked by the city to constantly objectively reevaluate shit, then yeah, I feel bad because they'll be revisiting the same intersections over and over in their different incarnations. But if they're the people who actively say, "hey, better circle the wagons-- looks like we gotta tear shit up again," then I can't say I feel much pity.
But this is all just a matter of curiosity. If I ever see a hot traffic-studying chick (which I haven't), would it be unethical to approach her on the job and ask for her number? She can't really run away, which would be a great rationalization if I was sleazy and actually had no principles. Would she lose her job for me distracting her for a few seconds and throwing off the accuracy of her "report"?
These are the questions I concern myself with, and they clearly burn away the threads of the very fabric of society. We shall not drive in fear of one another.
Good night, and good luck.
0 Comments
Monday, April 03, 2006
Paint me a picture, dead man.
posted by Anonymous : 1:14 AM
I would never want to do this man any wrong. I really wouldn't. Just look at him. He's everyone's buddy. I almost want to purchase his whole Joy of Painting set just so I can have it run non-stop on my DVD player as I rest my head to sleep. The sound of his voice is a lullabye in itself. My dad and I used to sit in complete silent awe as we'd watch Bob paint practically THE EXACT SAME landscape everytime on his PBS show.
Premise of the show is simple: Bob stands in a studio for a half hour against no backdrop whatsoever and just paints a landscape that pretty much always ends up looking like the one pictured on the left. But the catch is, no matter how predictable it is, you end up watching the WHOLE FUCKING THING without flinching. How does a man command such power?
My dad likened his voice to being that of an "all-night DJ," which is pretty much accurate. If Bob Ross handled peace talks and general foreign relations, I think the whole world would resemble his artistic vision and Saddam would be busy planting trees while Iran would be harvesting pot-- not uranium.
Too bad Bob is dead.
I'm not one to offend easily, but somehow something seems wrong when the likeness of Mr. Ross is handed over to Nintendo for creating a painting video game, meant to showcase the free-handed capabilities of the Big N's new console, code-named Revolution.
Granted, I'm extremely enthused about the possibilities this console has. And it's a cool idea to implement the idea of using the weird-assed motion-sensitive controller as a paintbrush. But why Bob Ross?
I'm not naive, and I know the answer to this question, but when does marketing go too far? I understand this is a growing controversy when it comes to using the likeness of dead celebrities to hawk products. I saw Gene Kelly dancing with a vacuum and Steve McQueen driving the new Mustang, and I thought they were both tacky (yet somewhat clever, purely in their presentation). And who could forget when TuPac made more post-mortem albums than pre-mortem and even landed a theatrical release?
Enough, though. Perhaps it's more of a dilemma as to how their image is handled and carried on after death. I don't doubt that CG will take a turn toward recreating deceased actors for full-length features, resulting in a move to protect their estates and all sorts of legal troubles. I already read a blurb this last week where Paul Newman expressed worry over the unauthorized recreation and mishandling of his likeness after his death. I worry about the unauthorized recreation and mishandling of his salad dressing.
To bring everything back to a point, though, something seems dirty about playing a game where the essence of a dead man was attempted to be resurrected by splashing his name on the title and using images of him to create some artificial experience that could have otherwise held up without him. I couldn't imagine the character of my recently-deceased grandfather being warped and reused to benefit a company or campaign he never would have stood behind when he was alive.
The legend of Bob Ross is great to honor and celebrate through the work he completed while he was alive. But it's hard to celebrate a man's current work when he's been in the dirt since '95.
In other words, R.I.P. Bobbie. I hope you're cruising down the highway in the sky with McQueen while listening to some House of Pain.
0 Comments
Sunday, April 02, 2006
Have you seen that new movie Brick?
posted by RICK : 7:14 AM
I guess you could call it, "This year's Sin City." You could call it that. I'm hesitant to do so. Sure, there's definitely a case to be made that it's all style and no substance (Brick is a classic 1950s hard-boiled detective movie set in a contemporary high school). My preferred way of putting it is "style as substance." But even that seems to slight a film that is both unlike anything I've seen before and yet exactly like something I've seen before (though I guess the same could have been said for Sin City). Or maybe what this really comes down to is I think I have a man-crush on JGL. His performance is exactly as detached and unflinching as the role requires-- the opposite of Neil, where we previously saw him. Granted, "detached" generally means "bad acting," and maybe I'm too transfixed by his baby-browns, but being able to say a line like, "I gave him to you to see him eaten, not to see you fed," and somehow managing to pull it off speaks volumes about why he works so well in this movie. Perhaps the best thing I can say about Brick is that it does work. Sure, at any given moment you can take yourself out of the movie only to look back up again and say, "Wait a minute! Teenagers don't talk like that!" but that kind of kills point. It's Veronica Mars with an edge-- or rather, a different edge. It's kind of like those Trailer Contests where film promos are re-cut to fit into a different genre. It isn't exactly something you can make a career of, but damn if it isn't fun to watch.
0 Comments
Saturday, April 01, 2006
I pity tha April foo'
posted by Anonymous : 8:53 PM
Okay, so I read a blog post on a phallic conspiracy and admired how it sounded like some of the low-brow material I've written in the past. It dances around the joke a little long-winded-like, but when you reach each punchline, it's pretty amusing. So I'll support this man's alleged Gatorade Conspiracy.
Granted, the whole joke about things that subtly resemble sex organs is pretty overdone. But every now and then comes along one that you never really thought about before, and the case made for it will never allow you to look at it the same again. I ironically guzzled down some Gatorade -- the EXACT SAME FLAVOR as the one featured at the beginning -- 2 minutes before reading it. Maybe that made the joke more disturbing.
Reminder: spring ahead tonight, suckas.
0 Comments
Saturday Night Taped
Welcome to "What Is Recoil?." If you would like to post something on this blog, but don't have a WIR-Blogger login, then send me an e-mail, and I'll make it happen. SHAZAM!
-Rick
(co-creator)
Rick |
Dynamarx |
rus-trick |
ryan |
The Potato |
JDM |
DrNewsie |
Mr. MS |
AK |
Brooke |
Stein |
Moses |
G |
CarrieOkie |
Jen |
Duhn |
M. Moore | Laura |
Mr.T |
kat |
abby | Greg
09/2005 | 10/2005 | 11/2005 | 12/2005 | 01/2006 | 02/2006 | 03/2006 | 04/2006 | 05/2006 | 06/2006 | 07/2006 | 08/2006 | 09/2006 | 10/2006 | 11/2006 | 12/2006 | 01/2007 | 02/2007 | 03/2007 |
V for I'm Gonna Start Writing Again
Saturday, April 15, 2006
The Loop!
posted by RICK : 11:33 AM
FOX was gracious enough to air two episodes of their hit new comedy The Loop this week. I watched both. Here's what the show is not about: the mysterious section of St. Louis known to young and old alike as "The Loop," and the crazy misadventures of three tourists looking for said loop in a late model Mazda after a wedding, but instead getting lost and inadvertantly touring a neighborhood full of St. Louis's most luxurious crumbling homes. It should also be noted that "The Loop" (the St. Louis version) didn't live up to its name as I-- er, these travelers-- detected a discernable beginning and ending. I suspect that if August Ferdinand Mobius had been from St. Louis, his invention would have been less like this and more like this.
Yes, FOX's The Loop is nothing like that. Instead it takes place in Chicago, and follows the misadventures of Sam Sullivan, a kid fresh-out-of-college who is the first amongst his group of friends to get a real job or, based on the two episodes I've seen, "a job". The Loop wants to be many things, but what it suceeds at most is being America's first, true, MySpace-comedy. It's the first series I can think of that appears to be marketed almost exclusively to the MySpace-mainstream-alternative. Clearly the logic is if SUPER-UNDERGROUND comic Dane Cook can have a quarter-trillion friends, surely the formula will get the as many viewers IF NOT MORE. So you take a gorgeous looking cast, put them in few clothes, throw in some whip-pans, a pop-punk soundtrack, and Courtney from the Dandy Warhols (he was on Thursday's episode for some reason*), simmer, serve. The fact that this show is one of the two new comedies (Free Ride being the other... which, actually, might have all ready been canceled) on FOX that were to replace Arrested Development just makes matters worse.
But there's a problem.
The problem is that I'm going to watch this show again. And I'll probably watch it until its inevitable cancelation (most kids on MySpace don't watch TV, they're too busy MySpacing) because of a critical saving grace: Philip Baker Hall is absofuckinghilarious. He plays the owner of whateverthehell airline the main character is suppose to work and everything that comes out of his mouth is pure gold. Perhaps the bigger question in all of this is why exactly PBH is on this stain of a series? Oh yeah, maybe its because PTA hasn't had a movie in six years.
*Not to be confused with his unnecessary appearance on Veronica Mars last fall, but at least in that case he was never actually addressed as "Courtney from the Dandy Warhols")
0 Comments
Friday, April 14, 2006
The dirtiest link I'll ever post:
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
BIG BAGS! WHUT?
Monday, April 10, 2006
A network move in the right direction.
Sunday, April 09, 2006
The Lord takes a curtain call
posted by RICK : 1:40 PM
Poor Carlos Beltran. New York hasn't been that kind to him since his arrival in Queens last season (well, unless you count the $119 million dollars he'll be receiving over the foreseeable future). He keeps getting booed. That is until he hit a homerun on Thursday and suddenly everyone loved him. Of course, then he had to go and say something asinine like this:"Well, I went out," Beltran said. "I just took my time. Like I say, at the beginning, I don't feel like doing it, but I just put myself in the situation of what would God have done in a situation like that. You know, I'm a Christian guy, and after getting booed the first two days, and all of a sudden you come through and get a hit and all of a sudden they want you to go out in a curtain call, I put myself right there and I do believe God would have gone out."
READ ON
Yes, Carlos. God would have gone out for a curtain call. Absolutely.
0 Comments
Tuesday, April 04, 2006
City of Omaha, we need more cowbell!
posted by Anonymous : 10:50 PM
Anyone who has lived in Omaha, even for a short timespan, knows that we love our roads. We fucking LOVE them. We build them and we rebuild them and sometimes we can't stand the fact that there's a road that hasn't been under construction in awhile, so it's worth tearing up and rebuilding again.
Granted, they do a good job of rebuilding them to "look nice," but it doesn't really matter because they'll be tearing it up again within the next five years. Sometimes they forget to engineer them properly before laying down the cement, and so it's all the more reason to tear that shit up again and start over. Ha ha, tax dollar oops.
And then sometimes they come up with funny ideas about putting roads in the sky, which really only results in 10 years of construction in rebuilding the roads to accomodate the building of these other roads and then rebuilding the rebuilt roads back to normal, except for the rebuilt roads that they need to rebuild to fit the overwhelming concept of the absurd roads they just built over the rebuilt roads. I'll at least say in regards to this particular project that perhaps they will serve their purpose in the long-term. And in some ways, they're aesthetically pleasing in temporarily fooling me into thinking we're a big city with big roads that hover over other roads, because one set of roads just won't do it. In the short-term, however, DAMN THAT'S A LOT OF CONSTRUCTION.
Anyhow, the point of this post is to discuss a job that I've become increasingly curious about. If you've lived in Omaha long enough, you've undoubtedly driven past an intersection where you've seen a car or truck awkwardly parked on a median or up on the curb with a person inside watching traffic-- a sign on the side of the vehicle that says "City of Omaha Traffic Study" or something to that effect. That's right. They're studying YOU. And they're going to do it ALL DAY.
So how does one earn that job? Or I guess a better question is: how does one get STUCK with that job?
Here's my questions about the job (enlighten me if you're a traffic studier or know about them):
- How much does the job pay? Is it salary or hourly? Are there benefits? What's the turnover rate?
- Do you voluntarily apply for and take the job? What are the qualifications for being able to study traffic to the satisfaction of the city? Is there a Traffic Study School with classes one must take before properly observing traffic?
- What exactly is being studied? Ratio of red cars to blue cars? Amount of road-head administered per hour at this particular intersection/stretch of road?
- Can they afford to be distracted? Do they take breaks? If I were to walk into the middle of the intersection and lay face-down on the pavement, would they be obligated to intervene or are they supposed to keep observing traffic, perhaps only making a note of my action in their log (if they keep one)? Can I bring them food or lemonade or something out of my pity for them?
- Would I be able to fake being a traffic observer? The signs they use on their vehicles are pretty simplistic and look like they're merely spray-painted stencils on plain paper, taped to the side of whatever they happen to be driving-- quite easy to replicate. Who would call me out on it? What are the penalties? What if they caught me but it turned out I took really good notes? Is it still a bad thing?
- What if I started an independent traffic study, unaffiliated with the city? Is that so wrong? Why would I even want to study traffic on my own, though? I didn't think that part out.
- Are they human? Do they eat and sleep like us? Do they live among us? How do they reproduce?
- If the answer is "yes" to all the questions in the above bullet point, are they a good lay?
So I'm not sure what to make of them, and I'm not sure whether or not I feel sorry for them. If they're asked by the city to constantly objectively reevaluate shit, then yeah, I feel bad because they'll be revisiting the same intersections over and over in their different incarnations. But if they're the people who actively say, "hey, better circle the wagons-- looks like we gotta tear shit up again," then I can't say I feel much pity.
But this is all just a matter of curiosity. If I ever see a hot traffic-studying chick (which I haven't), would it be unethical to approach her on the job and ask for her number? She can't really run away, which would be a great rationalization if I was sleazy and actually had no principles. Would she lose her job for me distracting her for a few seconds and throwing off the accuracy of her "report"?
These are the questions I concern myself with, and they clearly burn away the threads of the very fabric of society. We shall not drive in fear of one another.
Good night, and good luck.
0 Comments
Monday, April 03, 2006
Paint me a picture, dead man.
posted by Anonymous : 1:14 AM
I would never want to do this man any wrong. I really wouldn't. Just look at him. He's everyone's buddy. I almost want to purchase his whole Joy of Painting set just so I can have it run non-stop on my DVD player as I rest my head to sleep. The sound of his voice is a lullabye in itself. My dad and I used to sit in complete silent awe as we'd watch Bob paint practically THE EXACT SAME landscape everytime on his PBS show.
Premise of the show is simple: Bob stands in a studio for a half hour against no backdrop whatsoever and just paints a landscape that pretty much always ends up looking like the one pictured on the left. But the catch is, no matter how predictable it is, you end up watching the WHOLE FUCKING THING without flinching. How does a man command such power?
My dad likened his voice to being that of an "all-night DJ," which is pretty much accurate. If Bob Ross handled peace talks and general foreign relations, I think the whole world would resemble his artistic vision and Saddam would be busy planting trees while Iran would be harvesting pot-- not uranium.
Too bad Bob is dead.
I'm not one to offend easily, but somehow something seems wrong when the likeness of Mr. Ross is handed over to Nintendo for creating a painting video game, meant to showcase the free-handed capabilities of the Big N's new console, code-named Revolution.
Granted, I'm extremely enthused about the possibilities this console has. And it's a cool idea to implement the idea of using the weird-assed motion-sensitive controller as a paintbrush. But why Bob Ross?
I'm not naive, and I know the answer to this question, but when does marketing go too far? I understand this is a growing controversy when it comes to using the likeness of dead celebrities to hawk products. I saw Gene Kelly dancing with a vacuum and Steve McQueen driving the new Mustang, and I thought they were both tacky (yet somewhat clever, purely in their presentation). And who could forget when TuPac made more post-mortem albums than pre-mortem and even landed a theatrical release?
Enough, though. Perhaps it's more of a dilemma as to how their image is handled and carried on after death. I don't doubt that CG will take a turn toward recreating deceased actors for full-length features, resulting in a move to protect their estates and all sorts of legal troubles. I already read a blurb this last week where Paul Newman expressed worry over the unauthorized recreation and mishandling of his likeness after his death. I worry about the unauthorized recreation and mishandling of his salad dressing.
To bring everything back to a point, though, something seems dirty about playing a game where the essence of a dead man was attempted to be resurrected by splashing his name on the title and using images of him to create some artificial experience that could have otherwise held up without him. I couldn't imagine the character of my recently-deceased grandfather being warped and reused to benefit a company or campaign he never would have stood behind when he was alive.
The legend of Bob Ross is great to honor and celebrate through the work he completed while he was alive. But it's hard to celebrate a man's current work when he's been in the dirt since '95.
In other words, R.I.P. Bobbie. I hope you're cruising down the highway in the sky with McQueen while listening to some House of Pain.
0 Comments
Sunday, April 02, 2006
Have you seen that new movie Brick?
posted by RICK : 7:14 AM
I guess you could call it, "This year's Sin City." You could call it that. I'm hesitant to do so. Sure, there's definitely a case to be made that it's all style and no substance (Brick is a classic 1950s hard-boiled detective movie set in a contemporary high school). My preferred way of putting it is "style as substance." But even that seems to slight a film that is both unlike anything I've seen before and yet exactly like something I've seen before (though I guess the same could have been said for Sin City). Or maybe what this really comes down to is I think I have a man-crush on JGL. His performance is exactly as detached and unflinching as the role requires-- the opposite of Neil, where we previously saw him. Granted, "detached" generally means "bad acting," and maybe I'm too transfixed by his baby-browns, but being able to say a line like, "I gave him to you to see him eaten, not to see you fed," and somehow managing to pull it off speaks volumes about why he works so well in this movie. Perhaps the best thing I can say about Brick is that it does work. Sure, at any given moment you can take yourself out of the movie only to look back up again and say, "Wait a minute! Teenagers don't talk like that!" but that kind of kills point. It's Veronica Mars with an edge-- or rather, a different edge. It's kind of like those Trailer Contests where film promos are re-cut to fit into a different genre. It isn't exactly something you can make a career of, but damn if it isn't fun to watch.
0 Comments
Saturday, April 01, 2006
I pity tha April foo'
posted by Anonymous : 8:53 PM
Okay, so I read a blog post on a phallic conspiracy and admired how it sounded like some of the low-brow material I've written in the past. It dances around the joke a little long-winded-like, but when you reach each punchline, it's pretty amusing. So I'll support this man's alleged Gatorade Conspiracy.
Granted, the whole joke about things that subtly resemble sex organs is pretty overdone. But every now and then comes along one that you never really thought about before, and the case made for it will never allow you to look at it the same again. I ironically guzzled down some Gatorade -- the EXACT SAME FLAVOR as the one featured at the beginning -- 2 minutes before reading it. Maybe that made the joke more disturbing.
Reminder: spring ahead tonight, suckas.
0 Comments
Saturday Night Taped
Welcome to "What Is Recoil?." If you would like to post something on this blog, but don't have a WIR-Blogger login, then send me an e-mail, and I'll make it happen. SHAZAM!
-Rick
(co-creator)
Rick |
Dynamarx |
rus-trick |
ryan |
The Potato |
JDM |
DrNewsie |
Mr. MS |
AK |
Brooke |
Stein |
Moses |
G |
CarrieOkie |
Jen |
Duhn |
M. Moore | Laura |
Mr.T |
kat |
abby | Greg
09/2005 | 10/2005 | 11/2005 | 12/2005 | 01/2006 | 02/2006 | 03/2006 | 04/2006 | 05/2006 | 06/2006 | 07/2006 | 08/2006 | 09/2006 | 10/2006 | 11/2006 | 12/2006 | 01/2007 | 02/2007 | 03/2007 |
The Loop!
posted by RICK : 11:33 AM
FOX was gracious enough to air two episodes of their hit new comedy The Loop this week. I watched both. Here's what the show is not about: the mysterious section of St. Louis known to young and old alike as "The Loop," and the crazy misadventures of three tourists looking for said loop in a late model Mazda after a wedding, but instead getting lost and inadvertantly touring a neighborhood full of St. Louis's most luxurious crumbling homes. It should also be noted that "The Loop" (the St. Louis version) didn't live up to its name as I-- er, these travelers-- detected a discernable beginning and ending. I suspect that if August Ferdinand Mobius had been from St. Louis, his invention would have been less like this and more like this.
Yes, FOX's The Loop is nothing like that. Instead it takes place in Chicago, and follows the misadventures of Sam Sullivan, a kid fresh-out-of-college who is the first amongst his group of friends to get a real job or, based on the two episodes I've seen, "a job". The Loop wants to be many things, but what it suceeds at most is being America's first, true, MySpace-comedy. It's the first series I can think of that appears to be marketed almost exclusively to the MySpace-mainstream-alternative. Clearly the logic is if SUPER-UNDERGROUND comic Dane Cook can have a quarter-trillion friends, surely the formula will get the as many viewers IF NOT MORE. So you take a gorgeous looking cast, put them in few clothes, throw in some whip-pans, a pop-punk soundtrack, and Courtney from the Dandy Warhols (he was on Thursday's episode for some reason*), simmer, serve. The fact that this show is one of the two new comedies (Free Ride being the other... which, actually, might have all ready been canceled) on FOX that were to replace Arrested Development just makes matters worse.
But there's a problem.
The problem is that I'm going to watch this show again. And I'll probably watch it until its inevitable cancelation (most kids on MySpace don't watch TV, they're too busy MySpacing) because of a critical saving grace: Philip Baker Hall is absofuckinghilarious. He plays the owner of whateverthehell airline the main character is suppose to work and everything that comes out of his mouth is pure gold. Perhaps the bigger question in all of this is why exactly PBH is on this stain of a series? Oh yeah, maybe its because PTA hasn't had a movie in six years.
*Not to be confused with his unnecessary appearance on Veronica Mars last fall, but at least in that case he was never actually addressed as "Courtney from the Dandy Warhols")
0 Comments
Friday, April 14, 2006
The dirtiest link I'll ever post:
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
BIG BAGS! WHUT?
Monday, April 10, 2006
A network move in the right direction.
Sunday, April 09, 2006
The Lord takes a curtain call
posted by RICK : 1:40 PM
Poor Carlos Beltran. New York hasn't been that kind to him since his arrival in Queens last season (well, unless you count the $119 million dollars he'll be receiving over the foreseeable future). He keeps getting booed. That is until he hit a homerun on Thursday and suddenly everyone loved him. Of course, then he had to go and say something asinine like this:"Well, I went out," Beltran said. "I just took my time. Like I say, at the beginning, I don't feel like doing it, but I just put myself in the situation of what would God have done in a situation like that. You know, I'm a Christian guy, and after getting booed the first two days, and all of a sudden you come through and get a hit and all of a sudden they want you to go out in a curtain call, I put myself right there and I do believe God would have gone out."
READ ON
Yes, Carlos. God would have gone out for a curtain call. Absolutely.
0 Comments
Tuesday, April 04, 2006
City of Omaha, we need more cowbell!
posted by Anonymous : 10:50 PM
Anyone who has lived in Omaha, even for a short timespan, knows that we love our roads. We fucking LOVE them. We build them and we rebuild them and sometimes we can't stand the fact that there's a road that hasn't been under construction in awhile, so it's worth tearing up and rebuilding again.
Granted, they do a good job of rebuilding them to "look nice," but it doesn't really matter because they'll be tearing it up again within the next five years. Sometimes they forget to engineer them properly before laying down the cement, and so it's all the more reason to tear that shit up again and start over. Ha ha, tax dollar oops.
And then sometimes they come up with funny ideas about putting roads in the sky, which really only results in 10 years of construction in rebuilding the roads to accomodate the building of these other roads and then rebuilding the rebuilt roads back to normal, except for the rebuilt roads that they need to rebuild to fit the overwhelming concept of the absurd roads they just built over the rebuilt roads. I'll at least say in regards to this particular project that perhaps they will serve their purpose in the long-term. And in some ways, they're aesthetically pleasing in temporarily fooling me into thinking we're a big city with big roads that hover over other roads, because one set of roads just won't do it. In the short-term, however, DAMN THAT'S A LOT OF CONSTRUCTION.
Anyhow, the point of this post is to discuss a job that I've become increasingly curious about. If you've lived in Omaha long enough, you've undoubtedly driven past an intersection where you've seen a car or truck awkwardly parked on a median or up on the curb with a person inside watching traffic-- a sign on the side of the vehicle that says "City of Omaha Traffic Study" or something to that effect. That's right. They're studying YOU. And they're going to do it ALL DAY.
So how does one earn that job? Or I guess a better question is: how does one get STUCK with that job?
Here's my questions about the job (enlighten me if you're a traffic studier or know about them):
- How much does the job pay? Is it salary or hourly? Are there benefits? What's the turnover rate?
- Do you voluntarily apply for and take the job? What are the qualifications for being able to study traffic to the satisfaction of the city? Is there a Traffic Study School with classes one must take before properly observing traffic?
- What exactly is being studied? Ratio of red cars to blue cars? Amount of road-head administered per hour at this particular intersection/stretch of road?
- Can they afford to be distracted? Do they take breaks? If I were to walk into the middle of the intersection and lay face-down on the pavement, would they be obligated to intervene or are they supposed to keep observing traffic, perhaps only making a note of my action in their log (if they keep one)? Can I bring them food or lemonade or something out of my pity for them?
- Would I be able to fake being a traffic observer? The signs they use on their vehicles are pretty simplistic and look like they're merely spray-painted stencils on plain paper, taped to the side of whatever they happen to be driving-- quite easy to replicate. Who would call me out on it? What are the penalties? What if they caught me but it turned out I took really good notes? Is it still a bad thing?
- What if I started an independent traffic study, unaffiliated with the city? Is that so wrong? Why would I even want to study traffic on my own, though? I didn't think that part out.
- Are they human? Do they eat and sleep like us? Do they live among us? How do they reproduce?
- If the answer is "yes" to all the questions in the above bullet point, are they a good lay?
So I'm not sure what to make of them, and I'm not sure whether or not I feel sorry for them. If they're asked by the city to constantly objectively reevaluate shit, then yeah, I feel bad because they'll be revisiting the same intersections over and over in their different incarnations. But if they're the people who actively say, "hey, better circle the wagons-- looks like we gotta tear shit up again," then I can't say I feel much pity.
But this is all just a matter of curiosity. If I ever see a hot traffic-studying chick (which I haven't), would it be unethical to approach her on the job and ask for her number? She can't really run away, which would be a great rationalization if I was sleazy and actually had no principles. Would she lose her job for me distracting her for a few seconds and throwing off the accuracy of her "report"?
These are the questions I concern myself with, and they clearly burn away the threads of the very fabric of society. We shall not drive in fear of one another.
Good night, and good luck.
0 Comments
Monday, April 03, 2006
Paint me a picture, dead man.
posted by Anonymous : 1:14 AM
I would never want to do this man any wrong. I really wouldn't. Just look at him. He's everyone's buddy. I almost want to purchase his whole Joy of Painting set just so I can have it run non-stop on my DVD player as I rest my head to sleep. The sound of his voice is a lullabye in itself. My dad and I used to sit in complete silent awe as we'd watch Bob paint practically THE EXACT SAME landscape everytime on his PBS show.
Premise of the show is simple: Bob stands in a studio for a half hour against no backdrop whatsoever and just paints a landscape that pretty much always ends up looking like the one pictured on the left. But the catch is, no matter how predictable it is, you end up watching the WHOLE FUCKING THING without flinching. How does a man command such power?
My dad likened his voice to being that of an "all-night DJ," which is pretty much accurate. If Bob Ross handled peace talks and general foreign relations, I think the whole world would resemble his artistic vision and Saddam would be busy planting trees while Iran would be harvesting pot-- not uranium.
Too bad Bob is dead.
I'm not one to offend easily, but somehow something seems wrong when the likeness of Mr. Ross is handed over to Nintendo for creating a painting video game, meant to showcase the free-handed capabilities of the Big N's new console, code-named Revolution.
Granted, I'm extremely enthused about the possibilities this console has. And it's a cool idea to implement the idea of using the weird-assed motion-sensitive controller as a paintbrush. But why Bob Ross?
I'm not naive, and I know the answer to this question, but when does marketing go too far? I understand this is a growing controversy when it comes to using the likeness of dead celebrities to hawk products. I saw Gene Kelly dancing with a vacuum and Steve McQueen driving the new Mustang, and I thought they were both tacky (yet somewhat clever, purely in their presentation). And who could forget when TuPac made more post-mortem albums than pre-mortem and even landed a theatrical release?
Enough, though. Perhaps it's more of a dilemma as to how their image is handled and carried on after death. I don't doubt that CG will take a turn toward recreating deceased actors for full-length features, resulting in a move to protect their estates and all sorts of legal troubles. I already read a blurb this last week where Paul Newman expressed worry over the unauthorized recreation and mishandling of his likeness after his death. I worry about the unauthorized recreation and mishandling of his salad dressing.
To bring everything back to a point, though, something seems dirty about playing a game where the essence of a dead man was attempted to be resurrected by splashing his name on the title and using images of him to create some artificial experience that could have otherwise held up without him. I couldn't imagine the character of my recently-deceased grandfather being warped and reused to benefit a company or campaign he never would have stood behind when he was alive.
The legend of Bob Ross is great to honor and celebrate through the work he completed while he was alive. But it's hard to celebrate a man's current work when he's been in the dirt since '95.
In other words, R.I.P. Bobbie. I hope you're cruising down the highway in the sky with McQueen while listening to some House of Pain.
0 Comments
Sunday, April 02, 2006
Have you seen that new movie Brick?
posted by RICK : 7:14 AM
I guess you could call it, "This year's Sin City." You could call it that. I'm hesitant to do so. Sure, there's definitely a case to be made that it's all style and no substance (Brick is a classic 1950s hard-boiled detective movie set in a contemporary high school). My preferred way of putting it is "style as substance." But even that seems to slight a film that is both unlike anything I've seen before and yet exactly like something I've seen before (though I guess the same could have been said for Sin City). Or maybe what this really comes down to is I think I have a man-crush on JGL. His performance is exactly as detached and unflinching as the role requires-- the opposite of Neil, where we previously saw him. Granted, "detached" generally means "bad acting," and maybe I'm too transfixed by his baby-browns, but being able to say a line like, "I gave him to you to see him eaten, not to see you fed," and somehow managing to pull it off speaks volumes about why he works so well in this movie. Perhaps the best thing I can say about Brick is that it does work. Sure, at any given moment you can take yourself out of the movie only to look back up again and say, "Wait a minute! Teenagers don't talk like that!" but that kind of kills point. It's Veronica Mars with an edge-- or rather, a different edge. It's kind of like those Trailer Contests where film promos are re-cut to fit into a different genre. It isn't exactly something you can make a career of, but damn if it isn't fun to watch.
0 Comments
Saturday, April 01, 2006
I pity tha April foo'
posted by Anonymous : 8:53 PM
Okay, so I read a blog post on a phallic conspiracy and admired how it sounded like some of the low-brow material I've written in the past. It dances around the joke a little long-winded-like, but when you reach each punchline, it's pretty amusing. So I'll support this man's alleged Gatorade Conspiracy.
Granted, the whole joke about things that subtly resemble sex organs is pretty overdone. But every now and then comes along one that you never really thought about before, and the case made for it will never allow you to look at it the same again. I ironically guzzled down some Gatorade -- the EXACT SAME FLAVOR as the one featured at the beginning -- 2 minutes before reading it. Maybe that made the joke more disturbing.
Reminder: spring ahead tonight, suckas.
0 Comments
Saturday Night Taped
Welcome to "What Is Recoil?." If you would like to post something on this blog, but don't have a WIR-Blogger login, then send me an e-mail, and I'll make it happen. SHAZAM!
-Rick
(co-creator)
Rick |
Dynamarx |
rus-trick |
ryan |
The Potato |
JDM |
DrNewsie |
Mr. MS |
AK |
Brooke |
Stein |
Moses |
G |
CarrieOkie |
Jen |
Duhn |
M. Moore | Laura |
Mr.T |
kat |
abby | Greg
09/2005 | 10/2005 | 11/2005 | 12/2005 | 01/2006 | 02/2006 | 03/2006 | 04/2006 | 05/2006 | 06/2006 | 07/2006 | 08/2006 | 09/2006 | 10/2006 | 11/2006 | 12/2006 | 01/2007 | 02/2007 | 03/2007 |
FOX was gracious enough to air two episodes of their hit new comedy The Loop this week. I watched both. Here's what the show is not about: the mysterious section of St. Louis known to young and old alike as "The Loop," and the crazy misadventures of three tourists looking for said loop in a late model Mazda after a wedding, but instead getting lost and inadvertantly touring a neighborhood full of St. Louis's most luxurious crumbling homes. It should also be noted that "The Loop" (the St. Louis version) didn't live up to its name as I-- er, these travelers-- detected a discernable beginning and ending. I suspect that if August Ferdinand Mobius had been from St. Louis, his invention would have been less like this and more like this.
Yes, FOX's The Loop is nothing like that. Instead it takes place in Chicago, and follows the misadventures of Sam Sullivan, a kid fresh-out-of-college who is the first amongst his group of friends to get a real job or, based on the two episodes I've seen, "a job". The Loop wants to be many things, but what it suceeds at most is being America's first, true, MySpace-comedy. It's the first series I can think of that appears to be marketed almost exclusively to the MySpace-mainstream-alternative. Clearly the logic is if SUPER-UNDERGROUND comic Dane Cook can have a quarter-trillion friends, surely the formula will get the as many viewers IF NOT MORE. So you take a gorgeous looking cast, put them in few clothes, throw in some whip-pans, a pop-punk soundtrack, and Courtney from the Dandy Warhols (he was on Thursday's episode for some reason*), simmer, serve. The fact that this show is one of the two new comedies (Free Ride being the other... which, actually, might have all ready been canceled) on FOX that were to replace Arrested Development just makes matters worse.
But there's a problem.
The problem is that I'm going to watch this show again. And I'll probably watch it until its inevitable cancelation (most kids on MySpace don't watch TV, they're too busy MySpacing) because of a critical saving grace: Philip Baker Hall is absofuckinghilarious. He plays the owner of whateverthehell airline the main character is suppose to work and everything that comes out of his mouth is pure gold. Perhaps the bigger question in all of this is why exactly PBH is on this stain of a series? Oh yeah, maybe its because PTA hasn't had a movie in six years.
*Not to be confused with his unnecessary appearance on Veronica Mars last fall, but at least in that case he was never actually addressed as "Courtney from the Dandy Warhols")
0 Comments
The dirtiest link I'll ever post:
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
BIG BAGS! WHUT?
Monday, April 10, 2006
A network move in the right direction.
Sunday, April 09, 2006
The Lord takes a curtain call
posted by RICK : 1:40 PM
Poor Carlos Beltran. New York hasn't been that kind to him since his arrival in Queens last season (well, unless you count the $119 million dollars he'll be receiving over the foreseeable future). He keeps getting booed. That is until he hit a homerun on Thursday and suddenly everyone loved him. Of course, then he had to go and say something asinine like this:"Well, I went out," Beltran said. "I just took my time. Like I say, at the beginning, I don't feel like doing it, but I just put myself in the situation of what would God have done in a situation like that. You know, I'm a Christian guy, and after getting booed the first two days, and all of a sudden you come through and get a hit and all of a sudden they want you to go out in a curtain call, I put myself right there and I do believe God would have gone out."
READ ON
Yes, Carlos. God would have gone out for a curtain call. Absolutely.
0 Comments
Tuesday, April 04, 2006
City of Omaha, we need more cowbell!
posted by Anonymous : 10:50 PM
Anyone who has lived in Omaha, even for a short timespan, knows that we love our roads. We fucking LOVE them. We build them and we rebuild them and sometimes we can't stand the fact that there's a road that hasn't been under construction in awhile, so it's worth tearing up and rebuilding again.
Granted, they do a good job of rebuilding them to "look nice," but it doesn't really matter because they'll be tearing it up again within the next five years. Sometimes they forget to engineer them properly before laying down the cement, and so it's all the more reason to tear that shit up again and start over. Ha ha, tax dollar oops.
And then sometimes they come up with funny ideas about putting roads in the sky, which really only results in 10 years of construction in rebuilding the roads to accomodate the building of these other roads and then rebuilding the rebuilt roads back to normal, except for the rebuilt roads that they need to rebuild to fit the overwhelming concept of the absurd roads they just built over the rebuilt roads. I'll at least say in regards to this particular project that perhaps they will serve their purpose in the long-term. And in some ways, they're aesthetically pleasing in temporarily fooling me into thinking we're a big city with big roads that hover over other roads, because one set of roads just won't do it. In the short-term, however, DAMN THAT'S A LOT OF CONSTRUCTION.
Anyhow, the point of this post is to discuss a job that I've become increasingly curious about. If you've lived in Omaha long enough, you've undoubtedly driven past an intersection where you've seen a car or truck awkwardly parked on a median or up on the curb with a person inside watching traffic-- a sign on the side of the vehicle that says "City of Omaha Traffic Study" or something to that effect. That's right. They're studying YOU. And they're going to do it ALL DAY.
So how does one earn that job? Or I guess a better question is: how does one get STUCK with that job?
Here's my questions about the job (enlighten me if you're a traffic studier or know about them):
- How much does the job pay? Is it salary or hourly? Are there benefits? What's the turnover rate?
- Do you voluntarily apply for and take the job? What are the qualifications for being able to study traffic to the satisfaction of the city? Is there a Traffic Study School with classes one must take before properly observing traffic?
- What exactly is being studied? Ratio of red cars to blue cars? Amount of road-head administered per hour at this particular intersection/stretch of road?
- Can they afford to be distracted? Do they take breaks? If I were to walk into the middle of the intersection and lay face-down on the pavement, would they be obligated to intervene or are they supposed to keep observing traffic, perhaps only making a note of my action in their log (if they keep one)? Can I bring them food or lemonade or something out of my pity for them?
- Would I be able to fake being a traffic observer? The signs they use on their vehicles are pretty simplistic and look like they're merely spray-painted stencils on plain paper, taped to the side of whatever they happen to be driving-- quite easy to replicate. Who would call me out on it? What are the penalties? What if they caught me but it turned out I took really good notes? Is it still a bad thing?
- What if I started an independent traffic study, unaffiliated with the city? Is that so wrong? Why would I even want to study traffic on my own, though? I didn't think that part out.
- Are they human? Do they eat and sleep like us? Do they live among us? How do they reproduce?
- If the answer is "yes" to all the questions in the above bullet point, are they a good lay?
So I'm not sure what to make of them, and I'm not sure whether or not I feel sorry for them. If they're asked by the city to constantly objectively reevaluate shit, then yeah, I feel bad because they'll be revisiting the same intersections over and over in their different incarnations. But if they're the people who actively say, "hey, better circle the wagons-- looks like we gotta tear shit up again," then I can't say I feel much pity.
But this is all just a matter of curiosity. If I ever see a hot traffic-studying chick (which I haven't), would it be unethical to approach her on the job and ask for her number? She can't really run away, which would be a great rationalization if I was sleazy and actually had no principles. Would she lose her job for me distracting her for a few seconds and throwing off the accuracy of her "report"?
These are the questions I concern myself with, and they clearly burn away the threads of the very fabric of society. We shall not drive in fear of one another.
Good night, and good luck.
0 Comments
Monday, April 03, 2006
Paint me a picture, dead man.
posted by Anonymous : 1:14 AM
I would never want to do this man any wrong. I really wouldn't. Just look at him. He's everyone's buddy. I almost want to purchase his whole Joy of Painting set just so I can have it run non-stop on my DVD player as I rest my head to sleep. The sound of his voice is a lullabye in itself. My dad and I used to sit in complete silent awe as we'd watch Bob paint practically THE EXACT SAME landscape everytime on his PBS show.
Premise of the show is simple: Bob stands in a studio for a half hour against no backdrop whatsoever and just paints a landscape that pretty much always ends up looking like the one pictured on the left. But the catch is, no matter how predictable it is, you end up watching the WHOLE FUCKING THING without flinching. How does a man command such power?
My dad likened his voice to being that of an "all-night DJ," which is pretty much accurate. If Bob Ross handled peace talks and general foreign relations, I think the whole world would resemble his artistic vision and Saddam would be busy planting trees while Iran would be harvesting pot-- not uranium.
Too bad Bob is dead.
I'm not one to offend easily, but somehow something seems wrong when the likeness of Mr. Ross is handed over to Nintendo for creating a painting video game, meant to showcase the free-handed capabilities of the Big N's new console, code-named Revolution.
Granted, I'm extremely enthused about the possibilities this console has. And it's a cool idea to implement the idea of using the weird-assed motion-sensitive controller as a paintbrush. But why Bob Ross?
I'm not naive, and I know the answer to this question, but when does marketing go too far? I understand this is a growing controversy when it comes to using the likeness of dead celebrities to hawk products. I saw Gene Kelly dancing with a vacuum and Steve McQueen driving the new Mustang, and I thought they were both tacky (yet somewhat clever, purely in their presentation). And who could forget when TuPac made more post-mortem albums than pre-mortem and even landed a theatrical release?
Enough, though. Perhaps it's more of a dilemma as to how their image is handled and carried on after death. I don't doubt that CG will take a turn toward recreating deceased actors for full-length features, resulting in a move to protect their estates and all sorts of legal troubles. I already read a blurb this last week where Paul Newman expressed worry over the unauthorized recreation and mishandling of his likeness after his death. I worry about the unauthorized recreation and mishandling of his salad dressing.
To bring everything back to a point, though, something seems dirty about playing a game where the essence of a dead man was attempted to be resurrected by splashing his name on the title and using images of him to create some artificial experience that could have otherwise held up without him. I couldn't imagine the character of my recently-deceased grandfather being warped and reused to benefit a company or campaign he never would have stood behind when he was alive.
The legend of Bob Ross is great to honor and celebrate through the work he completed while he was alive. But it's hard to celebrate a man's current work when he's been in the dirt since '95.
In other words, R.I.P. Bobbie. I hope you're cruising down the highway in the sky with McQueen while listening to some House of Pain.
0 Comments
Sunday, April 02, 2006
Have you seen that new movie Brick?
posted by RICK : 7:14 AM
I guess you could call it, "This year's Sin City." You could call it that. I'm hesitant to do so. Sure, there's definitely a case to be made that it's all style and no substance (Brick is a classic 1950s hard-boiled detective movie set in a contemporary high school). My preferred way of putting it is "style as substance." But even that seems to slight a film that is both unlike anything I've seen before and yet exactly like something I've seen before (though I guess the same could have been said for Sin City). Or maybe what this really comes down to is I think I have a man-crush on JGL. His performance is exactly as detached and unflinching as the role requires-- the opposite of Neil, where we previously saw him. Granted, "detached" generally means "bad acting," and maybe I'm too transfixed by his baby-browns, but being able to say a line like, "I gave him to you to see him eaten, not to see you fed," and somehow managing to pull it off speaks volumes about why he works so well in this movie. Perhaps the best thing I can say about Brick is that it does work. Sure, at any given moment you can take yourself out of the movie only to look back up again and say, "Wait a minute! Teenagers don't talk like that!" but that kind of kills point. It's Veronica Mars with an edge-- or rather, a different edge. It's kind of like those Trailer Contests where film promos are re-cut to fit into a different genre. It isn't exactly something you can make a career of, but damn if it isn't fun to watch.
0 Comments
Saturday, April 01, 2006
I pity tha April foo'
posted by Anonymous : 8:53 PM
Okay, so I read a blog post on a phallic conspiracy and admired how it sounded like some of the low-brow material I've written in the past. It dances around the joke a little long-winded-like, but when you reach each punchline, it's pretty amusing. So I'll support this man's alleged Gatorade Conspiracy.
Granted, the whole joke about things that subtly resemble sex organs is pretty overdone. But every now and then comes along one that you never really thought about before, and the case made for it will never allow you to look at it the same again. I ironically guzzled down some Gatorade -- the EXACT SAME FLAVOR as the one featured at the beginning -- 2 minutes before reading it. Maybe that made the joke more disturbing.
Reminder: spring ahead tonight, suckas.
0 Comments
Saturday Night Taped
Welcome to "What Is Recoil?." If you would like to post something on this blog, but don't have a WIR-Blogger login, then send me an e-mail, and I'll make it happen. SHAZAM!
-Rick
(co-creator)
Rick |
Dynamarx |
rus-trick |
ryan |
The Potato |
JDM |
DrNewsie |
Mr. MS |
AK |
Brooke |
Stein |
Moses |
G |
CarrieOkie |
Jen |
Duhn |
M. Moore | Laura |
Mr.T |
kat |
abby | Greg
09/2005 | 10/2005 | 11/2005 | 12/2005 | 01/2006 | 02/2006 | 03/2006 | 04/2006 | 05/2006 | 06/2006 | 07/2006 | 08/2006 | 09/2006 | 10/2006 | 11/2006 | 12/2006 | 01/2007 | 02/2007 | 03/2007 |
BIG BAGS! WHUT?
Monday, April 10, 2006
A network move in the right direction.
Sunday, April 09, 2006
The Lord takes a curtain call
posted by RICK : 1:40 PM
Poor Carlos Beltran. New York hasn't been that kind to him since his arrival in Queens last season (well, unless you count the $119 million dollars he'll be receiving over the foreseeable future). He keeps getting booed. That is until he hit a homerun on Thursday and suddenly everyone loved him. Of course, then he had to go and say something asinine like this:"Well, I went out," Beltran said. "I just took my time. Like I say, at the beginning, I don't feel like doing it, but I just put myself in the situation of what would God have done in a situation like that. You know, I'm a Christian guy, and after getting booed the first two days, and all of a sudden you come through and get a hit and all of a sudden they want you to go out in a curtain call, I put myself right there and I do believe God would have gone out."
READ ON
Yes, Carlos. God would have gone out for a curtain call. Absolutely.
0 Comments
Tuesday, April 04, 2006
City of Omaha, we need more cowbell!
posted by Anonymous : 10:50 PM
Anyone who has lived in Omaha, even for a short timespan, knows that we love our roads. We fucking LOVE them. We build them and we rebuild them and sometimes we can't stand the fact that there's a road that hasn't been under construction in awhile, so it's worth tearing up and rebuilding again.
Granted, they do a good job of rebuilding them to "look nice," but it doesn't really matter because they'll be tearing it up again within the next five years. Sometimes they forget to engineer them properly before laying down the cement, and so it's all the more reason to tear that shit up again and start over. Ha ha, tax dollar oops.
And then sometimes they come up with funny ideas about putting roads in the sky, which really only results in 10 years of construction in rebuilding the roads to accomodate the building of these other roads and then rebuilding the rebuilt roads back to normal, except for the rebuilt roads that they need to rebuild to fit the overwhelming concept of the absurd roads they just built over the rebuilt roads. I'll at least say in regards to this particular project that perhaps they will serve their purpose in the long-term. And in some ways, they're aesthetically pleasing in temporarily fooling me into thinking we're a big city with big roads that hover over other roads, because one set of roads just won't do it. In the short-term, however, DAMN THAT'S A LOT OF CONSTRUCTION.
Anyhow, the point of this post is to discuss a job that I've become increasingly curious about. If you've lived in Omaha long enough, you've undoubtedly driven past an intersection where you've seen a car or truck awkwardly parked on a median or up on the curb with a person inside watching traffic-- a sign on the side of the vehicle that says "City of Omaha Traffic Study" or something to that effect. That's right. They're studying YOU. And they're going to do it ALL DAY.
So how does one earn that job? Or I guess a better question is: how does one get STUCK with that job?
Here's my questions about the job (enlighten me if you're a traffic studier or know about them):
- How much does the job pay? Is it salary or hourly? Are there benefits? What's the turnover rate?
- Do you voluntarily apply for and take the job? What are the qualifications for being able to study traffic to the satisfaction of the city? Is there a Traffic Study School with classes one must take before properly observing traffic?
- What exactly is being studied? Ratio of red cars to blue cars? Amount of road-head administered per hour at this particular intersection/stretch of road?
- Can they afford to be distracted? Do they take breaks? If I were to walk into the middle of the intersection and lay face-down on the pavement, would they be obligated to intervene or are they supposed to keep observing traffic, perhaps only making a note of my action in their log (if they keep one)? Can I bring them food or lemonade or something out of my pity for them?
- Would I be able to fake being a traffic observer? The signs they use on their vehicles are pretty simplistic and look like they're merely spray-painted stencils on plain paper, taped to the side of whatever they happen to be driving-- quite easy to replicate. Who would call me out on it? What are the penalties? What if they caught me but it turned out I took really good notes? Is it still a bad thing?
- What if I started an independent traffic study, unaffiliated with the city? Is that so wrong? Why would I even want to study traffic on my own, though? I didn't think that part out.
- Are they human? Do they eat and sleep like us? Do they live among us? How do they reproduce?
- If the answer is "yes" to all the questions in the above bullet point, are they a good lay?
So I'm not sure what to make of them, and I'm not sure whether or not I feel sorry for them. If they're asked by the city to constantly objectively reevaluate shit, then yeah, I feel bad because they'll be revisiting the same intersections over and over in their different incarnations. But if they're the people who actively say, "hey, better circle the wagons-- looks like we gotta tear shit up again," then I can't say I feel much pity.
But this is all just a matter of curiosity. If I ever see a hot traffic-studying chick (which I haven't), would it be unethical to approach her on the job and ask for her number? She can't really run away, which would be a great rationalization if I was sleazy and actually had no principles. Would she lose her job for me distracting her for a few seconds and throwing off the accuracy of her "report"?
These are the questions I concern myself with, and they clearly burn away the threads of the very fabric of society. We shall not drive in fear of one another.
Good night, and good luck.
0 Comments
Monday, April 03, 2006
Paint me a picture, dead man.
posted by Anonymous : 1:14 AM
I would never want to do this man any wrong. I really wouldn't. Just look at him. He's everyone's buddy. I almost want to purchase his whole Joy of Painting set just so I can have it run non-stop on my DVD player as I rest my head to sleep. The sound of his voice is a lullabye in itself. My dad and I used to sit in complete silent awe as we'd watch Bob paint practically THE EXACT SAME landscape everytime on his PBS show.
Premise of the show is simple: Bob stands in a studio for a half hour against no backdrop whatsoever and just paints a landscape that pretty much always ends up looking like the one pictured on the left. But the catch is, no matter how predictable it is, you end up watching the WHOLE FUCKING THING without flinching. How does a man command such power?
My dad likened his voice to being that of an "all-night DJ," which is pretty much accurate. If Bob Ross handled peace talks and general foreign relations, I think the whole world would resemble his artistic vision and Saddam would be busy planting trees while Iran would be harvesting pot-- not uranium.
Too bad Bob is dead.
I'm not one to offend easily, but somehow something seems wrong when the likeness of Mr. Ross is handed over to Nintendo for creating a painting video game, meant to showcase the free-handed capabilities of the Big N's new console, code-named Revolution.
Granted, I'm extremely enthused about the possibilities this console has. And it's a cool idea to implement the idea of using the weird-assed motion-sensitive controller as a paintbrush. But why Bob Ross?
I'm not naive, and I know the answer to this question, but when does marketing go too far? I understand this is a growing controversy when it comes to using the likeness of dead celebrities to hawk products. I saw Gene Kelly dancing with a vacuum and Steve McQueen driving the new Mustang, and I thought they were both tacky (yet somewhat clever, purely in their presentation). And who could forget when TuPac made more post-mortem albums than pre-mortem and even landed a theatrical release?
Enough, though. Perhaps it's more of a dilemma as to how their image is handled and carried on after death. I don't doubt that CG will take a turn toward recreating deceased actors for full-length features, resulting in a move to protect their estates and all sorts of legal troubles. I already read a blurb this last week where Paul Newman expressed worry over the unauthorized recreation and mishandling of his likeness after his death. I worry about the unauthorized recreation and mishandling of his salad dressing.
To bring everything back to a point, though, something seems dirty about playing a game where the essence of a dead man was attempted to be resurrected by splashing his name on the title and using images of him to create some artificial experience that could have otherwise held up without him. I couldn't imagine the character of my recently-deceased grandfather being warped and reused to benefit a company or campaign he never would have stood behind when he was alive.
The legend of Bob Ross is great to honor and celebrate through the work he completed while he was alive. But it's hard to celebrate a man's current work when he's been in the dirt since '95.
In other words, R.I.P. Bobbie. I hope you're cruising down the highway in the sky with McQueen while listening to some House of Pain.
0 Comments
Sunday, April 02, 2006
Have you seen that new movie Brick?
posted by RICK : 7:14 AM
I guess you could call it, "This year's Sin City." You could call it that. I'm hesitant to do so. Sure, there's definitely a case to be made that it's all style and no substance (Brick is a classic 1950s hard-boiled detective movie set in a contemporary high school). My preferred way of putting it is "style as substance." But even that seems to slight a film that is both unlike anything I've seen before and yet exactly like something I've seen before (though I guess the same could have been said for Sin City). Or maybe what this really comes down to is I think I have a man-crush on JGL. His performance is exactly as detached and unflinching as the role requires-- the opposite of Neil, where we previously saw him. Granted, "detached" generally means "bad acting," and maybe I'm too transfixed by his baby-browns, but being able to say a line like, "I gave him to you to see him eaten, not to see you fed," and somehow managing to pull it off speaks volumes about why he works so well in this movie. Perhaps the best thing I can say about Brick is that it does work. Sure, at any given moment you can take yourself out of the movie only to look back up again and say, "Wait a minute! Teenagers don't talk like that!" but that kind of kills point. It's Veronica Mars with an edge-- or rather, a different edge. It's kind of like those Trailer Contests where film promos are re-cut to fit into a different genre. It isn't exactly something you can make a career of, but damn if it isn't fun to watch.
0 Comments
Saturday, April 01, 2006
I pity tha April foo'
posted by Anonymous : 8:53 PM
Okay, so I read a blog post on a phallic conspiracy and admired how it sounded like some of the low-brow material I've written in the past. It dances around the joke a little long-winded-like, but when you reach each punchline, it's pretty amusing. So I'll support this man's alleged Gatorade Conspiracy.
Granted, the whole joke about things that subtly resemble sex organs is pretty overdone. But every now and then comes along one that you never really thought about before, and the case made for it will never allow you to look at it the same again. I ironically guzzled down some Gatorade -- the EXACT SAME FLAVOR as the one featured at the beginning -- 2 minutes before reading it. Maybe that made the joke more disturbing.
Reminder: spring ahead tonight, suckas.
0 Comments
Saturday Night Taped
Welcome to "What Is Recoil?." If you would like to post something on this blog, but don't have a WIR-Blogger login, then send me an e-mail, and I'll make it happen. SHAZAM!
-Rick
(co-creator)
Rick |
Dynamarx |
rus-trick |
ryan |
The Potato |
JDM |
DrNewsie |
Mr. MS |
AK |
Brooke |
Stein |
Moses |
G |
CarrieOkie |
Jen |
Duhn |
M. Moore | Laura |
Mr.T |
kat |
abby | Greg
09/2005 | 10/2005 | 11/2005 | 12/2005 | 01/2006 | 02/2006 | 03/2006 | 04/2006 | 05/2006 | 06/2006 | 07/2006 | 08/2006 | 09/2006 | 10/2006 | 11/2006 | 12/2006 | 01/2007 | 02/2007 | 03/2007 |
A network move in the right direction.
Sunday, April 09, 2006
The Lord takes a curtain call
posted by RICK : 1:40 PM
Poor Carlos Beltran. New York hasn't been that kind to him since his arrival in Queens last season (well, unless you count the $119 million dollars he'll be receiving over the foreseeable future). He keeps getting booed. That is until he hit a homerun on Thursday and suddenly everyone loved him. Of course, then he had to go and say something asinine like this:"Well, I went out," Beltran said. "I just took my time. Like I say, at the beginning, I don't feel like doing it, but I just put myself in the situation of what would God have done in a situation like that. You know, I'm a Christian guy, and after getting booed the first two days, and all of a sudden you come through and get a hit and all of a sudden they want you to go out in a curtain call, I put myself right there and I do believe God would have gone out."
READ ON
Yes, Carlos. God would have gone out for a curtain call. Absolutely.
0 Comments
Tuesday, April 04, 2006
City of Omaha, we need more cowbell!
posted by Anonymous : 10:50 PM
Anyone who has lived in Omaha, even for a short timespan, knows that we love our roads. We fucking LOVE them. We build them and we rebuild them and sometimes we can't stand the fact that there's a road that hasn't been under construction in awhile, so it's worth tearing up and rebuilding again.
Granted, they do a good job of rebuilding them to "look nice," but it doesn't really matter because they'll be tearing it up again within the next five years. Sometimes they forget to engineer them properly before laying down the cement, and so it's all the more reason to tear that shit up again and start over. Ha ha, tax dollar oops.
And then sometimes they come up with funny ideas about putting roads in the sky, which really only results in 10 years of construction in rebuilding the roads to accomodate the building of these other roads and then rebuilding the rebuilt roads back to normal, except for the rebuilt roads that they need to rebuild to fit the overwhelming concept of the absurd roads they just built over the rebuilt roads. I'll at least say in regards to this particular project that perhaps they will serve their purpose in the long-term. And in some ways, they're aesthetically pleasing in temporarily fooling me into thinking we're a big city with big roads that hover over other roads, because one set of roads just won't do it. In the short-term, however, DAMN THAT'S A LOT OF CONSTRUCTION.
Anyhow, the point of this post is to discuss a job that I've become increasingly curious about. If you've lived in Omaha long enough, you've undoubtedly driven past an intersection where you've seen a car or truck awkwardly parked on a median or up on the curb with a person inside watching traffic-- a sign on the side of the vehicle that says "City of Omaha Traffic Study" or something to that effect. That's right. They're studying YOU. And they're going to do it ALL DAY.
So how does one earn that job? Or I guess a better question is: how does one get STUCK with that job?
Here's my questions about the job (enlighten me if you're a traffic studier or know about them):
- How much does the job pay? Is it salary or hourly? Are there benefits? What's the turnover rate?
- Do you voluntarily apply for and take the job? What are the qualifications for being able to study traffic to the satisfaction of the city? Is there a Traffic Study School with classes one must take before properly observing traffic?
- What exactly is being studied? Ratio of red cars to blue cars? Amount of road-head administered per hour at this particular intersection/stretch of road?
- Can they afford to be distracted? Do they take breaks? If I were to walk into the middle of the intersection and lay face-down on the pavement, would they be obligated to intervene or are they supposed to keep observing traffic, perhaps only making a note of my action in their log (if they keep one)? Can I bring them food or lemonade or something out of my pity for them?
- Would I be able to fake being a traffic observer? The signs they use on their vehicles are pretty simplistic and look like they're merely spray-painted stencils on plain paper, taped to the side of whatever they happen to be driving-- quite easy to replicate. Who would call me out on it? What are the penalties? What if they caught me but it turned out I took really good notes? Is it still a bad thing?
- What if I started an independent traffic study, unaffiliated with the city? Is that so wrong? Why would I even want to study traffic on my own, though? I didn't think that part out.
- Are they human? Do they eat and sleep like us? Do they live among us? How do they reproduce?
- If the answer is "yes" to all the questions in the above bullet point, are they a good lay?
So I'm not sure what to make of them, and I'm not sure whether or not I feel sorry for them. If they're asked by the city to constantly objectively reevaluate shit, then yeah, I feel bad because they'll be revisiting the same intersections over and over in their different incarnations. But if they're the people who actively say, "hey, better circle the wagons-- looks like we gotta tear shit up again," then I can't say I feel much pity.
But this is all just a matter of curiosity. If I ever see a hot traffic-studying chick (which I haven't), would it be unethical to approach her on the job and ask for her number? She can't really run away, which would be a great rationalization if I was sleazy and actually had no principles. Would she lose her job for me distracting her for a few seconds and throwing off the accuracy of her "report"?
These are the questions I concern myself with, and they clearly burn away the threads of the very fabric of society. We shall not drive in fear of one another.
Good night, and good luck.
0 Comments
Monday, April 03, 2006
Paint me a picture, dead man.
posted by Anonymous : 1:14 AM
I would never want to do this man any wrong. I really wouldn't. Just look at him. He's everyone's buddy. I almost want to purchase his whole Joy of Painting set just so I can have it run non-stop on my DVD player as I rest my head to sleep. The sound of his voice is a lullabye in itself. My dad and I used to sit in complete silent awe as we'd watch Bob paint practically THE EXACT SAME landscape everytime on his PBS show.
Premise of the show is simple: Bob stands in a studio for a half hour against no backdrop whatsoever and just paints a landscape that pretty much always ends up looking like the one pictured on the left. But the catch is, no matter how predictable it is, you end up watching the WHOLE FUCKING THING without flinching. How does a man command such power?
My dad likened his voice to being that of an "all-night DJ," which is pretty much accurate. If Bob Ross handled peace talks and general foreign relations, I think the whole world would resemble his artistic vision and Saddam would be busy planting trees while Iran would be harvesting pot-- not uranium.
Too bad Bob is dead.
I'm not one to offend easily, but somehow something seems wrong when the likeness of Mr. Ross is handed over to Nintendo for creating a painting video game, meant to showcase the free-handed capabilities of the Big N's new console, code-named Revolution.
Granted, I'm extremely enthused about the possibilities this console has. And it's a cool idea to implement the idea of using the weird-assed motion-sensitive controller as a paintbrush. But why Bob Ross?
I'm not naive, and I know the answer to this question, but when does marketing go too far? I understand this is a growing controversy when it comes to using the likeness of dead celebrities to hawk products. I saw Gene Kelly dancing with a vacuum and Steve McQueen driving the new Mustang, and I thought they were both tacky (yet somewhat clever, purely in their presentation). And who could forget when TuPac made more post-mortem albums than pre-mortem and even landed a theatrical release?
Enough, though. Perhaps it's more of a dilemma as to how their image is handled and carried on after death. I don't doubt that CG will take a turn toward recreating deceased actors for full-length features, resulting in a move to protect their estates and all sorts of legal troubles. I already read a blurb this last week where Paul Newman expressed worry over the unauthorized recreation and mishandling of his likeness after his death. I worry about the unauthorized recreation and mishandling of his salad dressing.
To bring everything back to a point, though, something seems dirty about playing a game where the essence of a dead man was attempted to be resurrected by splashing his name on the title and using images of him to create some artificial experience that could have otherwise held up without him. I couldn't imagine the character of my recently-deceased grandfather being warped and reused to benefit a company or campaign he never would have stood behind when he was alive.
The legend of Bob Ross is great to honor and celebrate through the work he completed while he was alive. But it's hard to celebrate a man's current work when he's been in the dirt since '95.
In other words, R.I.P. Bobbie. I hope you're cruising down the highway in the sky with McQueen while listening to some House of Pain.
0 Comments
Sunday, April 02, 2006
Have you seen that new movie Brick?
posted by RICK : 7:14 AM
I guess you could call it, "This year's Sin City." You could call it that. I'm hesitant to do so. Sure, there's definitely a case to be made that it's all style and no substance (Brick is a classic 1950s hard-boiled detective movie set in a contemporary high school). My preferred way of putting it is "style as substance." But even that seems to slight a film that is both unlike anything I've seen before and yet exactly like something I've seen before (though I guess the same could have been said for Sin City). Or maybe what this really comes down to is I think I have a man-crush on JGL. His performance is exactly as detached and unflinching as the role requires-- the opposite of Neil, where we previously saw him. Granted, "detached" generally means "bad acting," and maybe I'm too transfixed by his baby-browns, but being able to say a line like, "I gave him to you to see him eaten, not to see you fed," and somehow managing to pull it off speaks volumes about why he works so well in this movie. Perhaps the best thing I can say about Brick is that it does work. Sure, at any given moment you can take yourself out of the movie only to look back up again and say, "Wait a minute! Teenagers don't talk like that!" but that kind of kills point. It's Veronica Mars with an edge-- or rather, a different edge. It's kind of like those Trailer Contests where film promos are re-cut to fit into a different genre. It isn't exactly something you can make a career of, but damn if it isn't fun to watch.
0 Comments
Saturday, April 01, 2006
I pity tha April foo'
posted by Anonymous : 8:53 PM
Okay, so I read a blog post on a phallic conspiracy and admired how it sounded like some of the low-brow material I've written in the past. It dances around the joke a little long-winded-like, but when you reach each punchline, it's pretty amusing. So I'll support this man's alleged Gatorade Conspiracy.
Granted, the whole joke about things that subtly resemble sex organs is pretty overdone. But every now and then comes along one that you never really thought about before, and the case made for it will never allow you to look at it the same again. I ironically guzzled down some Gatorade -- the EXACT SAME FLAVOR as the one featured at the beginning -- 2 minutes before reading it. Maybe that made the joke more disturbing.
Reminder: spring ahead tonight, suckas.
0 Comments
Saturday Night Taped
Welcome to "What Is Recoil?." If you would like to post something on this blog, but don't have a WIR-Blogger login, then send me an e-mail, and I'll make it happen. SHAZAM!
-Rick
(co-creator)
Rick |
Dynamarx |
rus-trick |
ryan |
The Potato |
JDM |
DrNewsie |
Mr. MS |
AK |
Brooke |
Stein |
Moses |
G |
CarrieOkie |
Jen |
Duhn |
M. Moore | Laura |
Mr.T |
kat |
abby | Greg
09/2005 | 10/2005 | 11/2005 | 12/2005 | 01/2006 | 02/2006 | 03/2006 | 04/2006 | 05/2006 | 06/2006 | 07/2006 | 08/2006 | 09/2006 | 10/2006 | 11/2006 | 12/2006 | 01/2007 | 02/2007 | 03/2007 |
The Lord takes a curtain call
posted by RICK : 1:40 PM
Poor Carlos Beltran. New York hasn't been that kind to him since his arrival in Queens last season (well, unless you count the $119 million dollars he'll be receiving over the foreseeable future). He keeps getting booed. That is until he hit a homerun on Thursday and suddenly everyone loved him. Of course, then he had to go and say something asinine like this:"Well, I went out," Beltran said. "I just took my time. Like I say, at the beginning, I don't feel like doing it, but I just put myself in the situation of what would God have done in a situation like that. You know, I'm a Christian guy, and after getting booed the first two days, and all of a sudden you come through and get a hit and all of a sudden they want you to go out in a curtain call, I put myself right there and I do believe God would have gone out."
READ ON
Yes, Carlos. God would have gone out for a curtain call. Absolutely.
0 Comments
Tuesday, April 04, 2006
City of Omaha, we need more cowbell!
posted by Anonymous : 10:50 PM
Anyone who has lived in Omaha, even for a short timespan, knows that we love our roads. We fucking LOVE them. We build them and we rebuild them and sometimes we can't stand the fact that there's a road that hasn't been under construction in awhile, so it's worth tearing up and rebuilding again.
Granted, they do a good job of rebuilding them to "look nice," but it doesn't really matter because they'll be tearing it up again within the next five years. Sometimes they forget to engineer them properly before laying down the cement, and so it's all the more reason to tear that shit up again and start over. Ha ha, tax dollar oops.
And then sometimes they come up with funny ideas about putting roads in the sky, which really only results in 10 years of construction in rebuilding the roads to accomodate the building of these other roads and then rebuilding the rebuilt roads back to normal, except for the rebuilt roads that they need to rebuild to fit the overwhelming concept of the absurd roads they just built over the rebuilt roads. I'll at least say in regards to this particular project that perhaps they will serve their purpose in the long-term. And in some ways, they're aesthetically pleasing in temporarily fooling me into thinking we're a big city with big roads that hover over other roads, because one set of roads just won't do it. In the short-term, however, DAMN THAT'S A LOT OF CONSTRUCTION.
Anyhow, the point of this post is to discuss a job that I've become increasingly curious about. If you've lived in Omaha long enough, you've undoubtedly driven past an intersection where you've seen a car or truck awkwardly parked on a median or up on the curb with a person inside watching traffic-- a sign on the side of the vehicle that says "City of Omaha Traffic Study" or something to that effect. That's right. They're studying YOU. And they're going to do it ALL DAY.
So how does one earn that job? Or I guess a better question is: how does one get STUCK with that job?
Here's my questions about the job (enlighten me if you're a traffic studier or know about them):
- How much does the job pay? Is it salary or hourly? Are there benefits? What's the turnover rate?
- Do you voluntarily apply for and take the job? What are the qualifications for being able to study traffic to the satisfaction of the city? Is there a Traffic Study School with classes one must take before properly observing traffic?
- What exactly is being studied? Ratio of red cars to blue cars? Amount of road-head administered per hour at this particular intersection/stretch of road?
- Can they afford to be distracted? Do they take breaks? If I were to walk into the middle of the intersection and lay face-down on the pavement, would they be obligated to intervene or are they supposed to keep observing traffic, perhaps only making a note of my action in their log (if they keep one)? Can I bring them food or lemonade or something out of my pity for them?
- Would I be able to fake being a traffic observer? The signs they use on their vehicles are pretty simplistic and look like they're merely spray-painted stencils on plain paper, taped to the side of whatever they happen to be driving-- quite easy to replicate. Who would call me out on it? What are the penalties? What if they caught me but it turned out I took really good notes? Is it still a bad thing?
- What if I started an independent traffic study, unaffiliated with the city? Is that so wrong? Why would I even want to study traffic on my own, though? I didn't think that part out.
- Are they human? Do they eat and sleep like us? Do they live among us? How do they reproduce?
- If the answer is "yes" to all the questions in the above bullet point, are they a good lay?
So I'm not sure what to make of them, and I'm not sure whether or not I feel sorry for them. If they're asked by the city to constantly objectively reevaluate shit, then yeah, I feel bad because they'll be revisiting the same intersections over and over in their different incarnations. But if they're the people who actively say, "hey, better circle the wagons-- looks like we gotta tear shit up again," then I can't say I feel much pity.
But this is all just a matter of curiosity. If I ever see a hot traffic-studying chick (which I haven't), would it be unethical to approach her on the job and ask for her number? She can't really run away, which would be a great rationalization if I was sleazy and actually had no principles. Would she lose her job for me distracting her for a few seconds and throwing off the accuracy of her "report"?
These are the questions I concern myself with, and they clearly burn away the threads of the very fabric of society. We shall not drive in fear of one another.
Good night, and good luck.
0 Comments
Monday, April 03, 2006
Paint me a picture, dead man.
posted by Anonymous : 1:14 AM
I would never want to do this man any wrong. I really wouldn't. Just look at him. He's everyone's buddy. I almost want to purchase his whole Joy of Painting set just so I can have it run non-stop on my DVD player as I rest my head to sleep. The sound of his voice is a lullabye in itself. My dad and I used to sit in complete silent awe as we'd watch Bob paint practically THE EXACT SAME landscape everytime on his PBS show.
Premise of the show is simple: Bob stands in a studio for a half hour against no backdrop whatsoever and just paints a landscape that pretty much always ends up looking like the one pictured on the left. But the catch is, no matter how predictable it is, you end up watching the WHOLE FUCKING THING without flinching. How does a man command such power?
My dad likened his voice to being that of an "all-night DJ," which is pretty much accurate. If Bob Ross handled peace talks and general foreign relations, I think the whole world would resemble his artistic vision and Saddam would be busy planting trees while Iran would be harvesting pot-- not uranium.
Too bad Bob is dead.
I'm not one to offend easily, but somehow something seems wrong when the likeness of Mr. Ross is handed over to Nintendo for creating a painting video game, meant to showcase the free-handed capabilities of the Big N's new console, code-named Revolution.
Granted, I'm extremely enthused about the possibilities this console has. And it's a cool idea to implement the idea of using the weird-assed motion-sensitive controller as a paintbrush. But why Bob Ross?
I'm not naive, and I know the answer to this question, but when does marketing go too far? I understand this is a growing controversy when it comes to using the likeness of dead celebrities to hawk products. I saw Gene Kelly dancing with a vacuum and Steve McQueen driving the new Mustang, and I thought they were both tacky (yet somewhat clever, purely in their presentation). And who could forget when TuPac made more post-mortem albums than pre-mortem and even landed a theatrical release?
Enough, though. Perhaps it's more of a dilemma as to how their image is handled and carried on after death. I don't doubt that CG will take a turn toward recreating deceased actors for full-length features, resulting in a move to protect their estates and all sorts of legal troubles. I already read a blurb this last week where Paul Newman expressed worry over the unauthorized recreation and mishandling of his likeness after his death. I worry about the unauthorized recreation and mishandling of his salad dressing.
To bring everything back to a point, though, something seems dirty about playing a game where the essence of a dead man was attempted to be resurrected by splashing his name on the title and using images of him to create some artificial experience that could have otherwise held up without him. I couldn't imagine the character of my recently-deceased grandfather being warped and reused to benefit a company or campaign he never would have stood behind when he was alive.
The legend of Bob Ross is great to honor and celebrate through the work he completed while he was alive. But it's hard to celebrate a man's current work when he's been in the dirt since '95.
In other words, R.I.P. Bobbie. I hope you're cruising down the highway in the sky with McQueen while listening to some House of Pain.
0 Comments
Sunday, April 02, 2006
Have you seen that new movie Brick?
posted by RICK : 7:14 AM
I guess you could call it, "This year's Sin City." You could call it that. I'm hesitant to do so. Sure, there's definitely a case to be made that it's all style and no substance (Brick is a classic 1950s hard-boiled detective movie set in a contemporary high school). My preferred way of putting it is "style as substance." But even that seems to slight a film that is both unlike anything I've seen before and yet exactly like something I've seen before (though I guess the same could have been said for Sin City). Or maybe what this really comes down to is I think I have a man-crush on JGL. His performance is exactly as detached and unflinching as the role requires-- the opposite of Neil, where we previously saw him. Granted, "detached" generally means "bad acting," and maybe I'm too transfixed by his baby-browns, but being able to say a line like, "I gave him to you to see him eaten, not to see you fed," and somehow managing to pull it off speaks volumes about why he works so well in this movie. Perhaps the best thing I can say about Brick is that it does work. Sure, at any given moment you can take yourself out of the movie only to look back up again and say, "Wait a minute! Teenagers don't talk like that!" but that kind of kills point. It's Veronica Mars with an edge-- or rather, a different edge. It's kind of like those Trailer Contests where film promos are re-cut to fit into a different genre. It isn't exactly something you can make a career of, but damn if it isn't fun to watch.
0 Comments
Saturday, April 01, 2006
I pity tha April foo'
posted by Anonymous : 8:53 PM
Okay, so I read a blog post on a phallic conspiracy and admired how it sounded like some of the low-brow material I've written in the past. It dances around the joke a little long-winded-like, but when you reach each punchline, it's pretty amusing. So I'll support this man's alleged Gatorade Conspiracy.
Granted, the whole joke about things that subtly resemble sex organs is pretty overdone. But every now and then comes along one that you never really thought about before, and the case made for it will never allow you to look at it the same again. I ironically guzzled down some Gatorade -- the EXACT SAME FLAVOR as the one featured at the beginning -- 2 minutes before reading it. Maybe that made the joke more disturbing.
Reminder: spring ahead tonight, suckas.
0 Comments
Saturday Night Taped
Welcome to "What Is Recoil?." If you would like to post something on this blog, but don't have a WIR-Blogger login, then send me an e-mail, and I'll make it happen. SHAZAM!
-Rick
(co-creator)
Rick |
Dynamarx |
rus-trick |
ryan |
The Potato |
JDM |
DrNewsie |
Mr. MS |
AK |
Brooke |
Stein |
Moses |
G |
CarrieOkie |
Jen |
Duhn |
M. Moore | Laura |
Mr.T |
kat |
abby | Greg
09/2005 | 10/2005 | 11/2005 | 12/2005 | 01/2006 | 02/2006 | 03/2006 | 04/2006 | 05/2006 | 06/2006 | 07/2006 | 08/2006 | 09/2006 | 10/2006 | 11/2006 | 12/2006 | 01/2007 | 02/2007 | 03/2007 |
Poor Carlos Beltran. New York hasn't been that kind to him since his arrival in Queens last season (well, unless you count the $119 million dollars he'll be receiving over the foreseeable future). He keeps getting booed. That is until he hit a homerun on Thursday and suddenly everyone loved him. Of course, then he had to go and say something asinine like this:"Well, I went out," Beltran said. "I just took my time. Like I say, at the beginning, I don't feel like doing it, but I just put myself in the situation of what would God have done in a situation like that. You know, I'm a Christian guy, and after getting booed the first two days, and all of a sudden you come through and get a hit and all of a sudden they want you to go out in a curtain call, I put myself right there and I do believe God would have gone out."Yes, Carlos. God would have gone out for a curtain call. Absolutely.
READ ON
0 Comments
City of Omaha, we need more cowbell!
posted by Anonymous : 10:50 PM
Anyone who has lived in Omaha, even for a short timespan, knows that we love our roads. We fucking LOVE them. We build them and we rebuild them and sometimes we can't stand the fact that there's a road that hasn't been under construction in awhile, so it's worth tearing up and rebuilding again.
Granted, they do a good job of rebuilding them to "look nice," but it doesn't really matter because they'll be tearing it up again within the next five years. Sometimes they forget to engineer them properly before laying down the cement, and so it's all the more reason to tear that shit up again and start over. Ha ha, tax dollar oops.
And then sometimes they come up with funny ideas about putting roads in the sky, which really only results in 10 years of construction in rebuilding the roads to accomodate the building of these other roads and then rebuilding the rebuilt roads back to normal, except for the rebuilt roads that they need to rebuild to fit the overwhelming concept of the absurd roads they just built over the rebuilt roads. I'll at least say in regards to this particular project that perhaps they will serve their purpose in the long-term. And in some ways, they're aesthetically pleasing in temporarily fooling me into thinking we're a big city with big roads that hover over other roads, because one set of roads just won't do it. In the short-term, however, DAMN THAT'S A LOT OF CONSTRUCTION.
Anyhow, the point of this post is to discuss a job that I've become increasingly curious about. If you've lived in Omaha long enough, you've undoubtedly driven past an intersection where you've seen a car or truck awkwardly parked on a median or up on the curb with a person inside watching traffic-- a sign on the side of the vehicle that says "City of Omaha Traffic Study" or something to that effect. That's right. They're studying YOU. And they're going to do it ALL DAY.
So how does one earn that job? Or I guess a better question is: how does one get STUCK with that job?
Here's my questions about the job (enlighten me if you're a traffic studier or know about them):
- How much does the job pay? Is it salary or hourly? Are there benefits? What's the turnover rate?
- Do you voluntarily apply for and take the job? What are the qualifications for being able to study traffic to the satisfaction of the city? Is there a Traffic Study School with classes one must take before properly observing traffic?
- What exactly is being studied? Ratio of red cars to blue cars? Amount of road-head administered per hour at this particular intersection/stretch of road?
- Can they afford to be distracted? Do they take breaks? If I were to walk into the middle of the intersection and lay face-down on the pavement, would they be obligated to intervene or are they supposed to keep observing traffic, perhaps only making a note of my action in their log (if they keep one)? Can I bring them food or lemonade or something out of my pity for them?
- Would I be able to fake being a traffic observer? The signs they use on their vehicles are pretty simplistic and look like they're merely spray-painted stencils on plain paper, taped to the side of whatever they happen to be driving-- quite easy to replicate. Who would call me out on it? What are the penalties? What if they caught me but it turned out I took really good notes? Is it still a bad thing?
- What if I started an independent traffic study, unaffiliated with the city? Is that so wrong? Why would I even want to study traffic on my own, though? I didn't think that part out.
- Are they human? Do they eat and sleep like us? Do they live among us? How do they reproduce?
- If the answer is "yes" to all the questions in the above bullet point, are they a good lay?
So I'm not sure what to make of them, and I'm not sure whether or not I feel sorry for them. If they're asked by the city to constantly objectively reevaluate shit, then yeah, I feel bad because they'll be revisiting the same intersections over and over in their different incarnations. But if they're the people who actively say, "hey, better circle the wagons-- looks like we gotta tear shit up again," then I can't say I feel much pity.
But this is all just a matter of curiosity. If I ever see a hot traffic-studying chick (which I haven't), would it be unethical to approach her on the job and ask for her number? She can't really run away, which would be a great rationalization if I was sleazy and actually had no principles. Would she lose her job for me distracting her for a few seconds and throwing off the accuracy of her "report"?
These are the questions I concern myself with, and they clearly burn away the threads of the very fabric of society. We shall not drive in fear of one another.
Good night, and good luck.
0 Comments
Monday, April 03, 2006
Paint me a picture, dead man.
posted by Anonymous : 1:14 AM
I would never want to do this man any wrong. I really wouldn't. Just look at him. He's everyone's buddy. I almost want to purchase his whole Joy of Painting set just so I can have it run non-stop on my DVD player as I rest my head to sleep. The sound of his voice is a lullabye in itself. My dad and I used to sit in complete silent awe as we'd watch Bob paint practically THE EXACT SAME landscape everytime on his PBS show.
Premise of the show is simple: Bob stands in a studio for a half hour against no backdrop whatsoever and just paints a landscape that pretty much always ends up looking like the one pictured on the left. But the catch is, no matter how predictable it is, you end up watching the WHOLE FUCKING THING without flinching. How does a man command such power?
My dad likened his voice to being that of an "all-night DJ," which is pretty much accurate. If Bob Ross handled peace talks and general foreign relations, I think the whole world would resemble his artistic vision and Saddam would be busy planting trees while Iran would be harvesting pot-- not uranium.
Too bad Bob is dead.
I'm not one to offend easily, but somehow something seems wrong when the likeness of Mr. Ross is handed over to Nintendo for creating a painting video game, meant to showcase the free-handed capabilities of the Big N's new console, code-named Revolution.
Granted, I'm extremely enthused about the possibilities this console has. And it's a cool idea to implement the idea of using the weird-assed motion-sensitive controller as a paintbrush. But why Bob Ross?
I'm not naive, and I know the answer to this question, but when does marketing go too far? I understand this is a growing controversy when it comes to using the likeness of dead celebrities to hawk products. I saw Gene Kelly dancing with a vacuum and Steve McQueen driving the new Mustang, and I thought they were both tacky (yet somewhat clever, purely in their presentation). And who could forget when TuPac made more post-mortem albums than pre-mortem and even landed a theatrical release?
Enough, though. Perhaps it's more of a dilemma as to how their image is handled and carried on after death. I don't doubt that CG will take a turn toward recreating deceased actors for full-length features, resulting in a move to protect their estates and all sorts of legal troubles. I already read a blurb this last week where Paul Newman expressed worry over the unauthorized recreation and mishandling of his likeness after his death. I worry about the unauthorized recreation and mishandling of his salad dressing.
To bring everything back to a point, though, something seems dirty about playing a game where the essence of a dead man was attempted to be resurrected by splashing his name on the title and using images of him to create some artificial experience that could have otherwise held up without him. I couldn't imagine the character of my recently-deceased grandfather being warped and reused to benefit a company or campaign he never would have stood behind when he was alive.
The legend of Bob Ross is great to honor and celebrate through the work he completed while he was alive. But it's hard to celebrate a man's current work when he's been in the dirt since '95.
In other words, R.I.P. Bobbie. I hope you're cruising down the highway in the sky with McQueen while listening to some House of Pain.
0 Comments
Sunday, April 02, 2006
Have you seen that new movie Brick?
posted by RICK : 7:14 AM
I guess you could call it, "This year's Sin City." You could call it that. I'm hesitant to do so. Sure, there's definitely a case to be made that it's all style and no substance (Brick is a classic 1950s hard-boiled detective movie set in a contemporary high school). My preferred way of putting it is "style as substance." But even that seems to slight a film that is both unlike anything I've seen before and yet exactly like something I've seen before (though I guess the same could have been said for Sin City). Or maybe what this really comes down to is I think I have a man-crush on JGL. His performance is exactly as detached and unflinching as the role requires-- the opposite of Neil, where we previously saw him. Granted, "detached" generally means "bad acting," and maybe I'm too transfixed by his baby-browns, but being able to say a line like, "I gave him to you to see him eaten, not to see you fed," and somehow managing to pull it off speaks volumes about why he works so well in this movie. Perhaps the best thing I can say about Brick is that it does work. Sure, at any given moment you can take yourself out of the movie only to look back up again and say, "Wait a minute! Teenagers don't talk like that!" but that kind of kills point. It's Veronica Mars with an edge-- or rather, a different edge. It's kind of like those Trailer Contests where film promos are re-cut to fit into a different genre. It isn't exactly something you can make a career of, but damn if it isn't fun to watch.
0 Comments
Saturday, April 01, 2006
I pity tha April foo'
posted by Anonymous : 8:53 PM
Okay, so I read a blog post on a phallic conspiracy and admired how it sounded like some of the low-brow material I've written in the past. It dances around the joke a little long-winded-like, but when you reach each punchline, it's pretty amusing. So I'll support this man's alleged Gatorade Conspiracy.
Granted, the whole joke about things that subtly resemble sex organs is pretty overdone. But every now and then comes along one that you never really thought about before, and the case made for it will never allow you to look at it the same again. I ironically guzzled down some Gatorade -- the EXACT SAME FLAVOR as the one featured at the beginning -- 2 minutes before reading it. Maybe that made the joke more disturbing.
Reminder: spring ahead tonight, suckas.
0 Comments
Saturday Night Taped
Welcome to "What Is Recoil?." If you would like to post something on this blog, but don't have a WIR-Blogger login, then send me an e-mail, and I'll make it happen. SHAZAM!
-Rick
(co-creator)
Rick |
Dynamarx |
rus-trick |
ryan |
The Potato |
JDM |
DrNewsie |
Mr. MS |
AK |
Brooke |
Stein |
Moses |
G |
CarrieOkie |
Jen |
Duhn |
M. Moore | Laura |
Mr.T |
kat |
abby | Greg
09/2005 | 10/2005 | 11/2005 | 12/2005 | 01/2006 | 02/2006 | 03/2006 | 04/2006 | 05/2006 | 06/2006 | 07/2006 | 08/2006 | 09/2006 | 10/2006 | 11/2006 | 12/2006 | 01/2007 | 02/2007 | 03/2007 |
Anyone who has lived in Omaha, even for a short timespan, knows that we love our roads. We fucking LOVE them. We build them and we rebuild them and sometimes we can't stand the fact that there's a road that hasn't been under construction in awhile, so it's worth tearing up and rebuilding again.Granted, they do a good job of rebuilding them to "look nice," but it doesn't really matter because they'll be tearing it up again within the next five years. Sometimes they forget to engineer them properly before laying down the cement, and so it's all the more reason to tear that shit up again and start over. Ha ha, tax dollar oops.
And then sometimes they come up with funny ideas about putting roads in the sky, which really only results in 10 years of construction in rebuilding the roads to accomodate the building of these other roads and then rebuilding the rebuilt roads back to normal, except for the rebuilt roads that they need to rebuild to fit the overwhelming concept of the absurd roads they just built over the rebuilt roads. I'll at least say in regards to this particular project that perhaps they will serve their purpose in the long-term. And in some ways, they're aesthetically pleasing in temporarily fooling me into thinking we're a big city with big roads that hover over other roads, because one set of roads just won't do it. In the short-term, however, DAMN THAT'S A LOT OF CONSTRUCTION.
Anyhow, the point of this post is to discuss a job that I've become increasingly curious about. If you've lived in Omaha long enough, you've undoubtedly driven past an intersection where you've seen a car or truck awkwardly parked on a median or up on the curb with a person inside watching traffic-- a sign on the side of the vehicle that says "City of Omaha Traffic Study" or something to that effect. That's right. They're studying YOU. And they're going to do it ALL DAY.
So how does one earn that job? Or I guess a better question is: how does one get STUCK with that job?
Here's my questions about the job (enlighten me if you're a traffic studier or know about them):
- How much does the job pay? Is it salary or hourly? Are there benefits? What's the turnover rate?
- Do you voluntarily apply for and take the job? What are the qualifications for being able to study traffic to the satisfaction of the city? Is there a Traffic Study School with classes one must take before properly observing traffic?
- What exactly is being studied? Ratio of red cars to blue cars? Amount of road-head administered per hour at this particular intersection/stretch of road?
- Can they afford to be distracted? Do they take breaks? If I were to walk into the middle of the intersection and lay face-down on the pavement, would they be obligated to intervene or are they supposed to keep observing traffic, perhaps only making a note of my action in their log (if they keep one)? Can I bring them food or lemonade or something out of my pity for them?
- Would I be able to fake being a traffic observer? The signs they use on their vehicles are pretty simplistic and look like they're merely spray-painted stencils on plain paper, taped to the side of whatever they happen to be driving-- quite easy to replicate. Who would call me out on it? What are the penalties? What if they caught me but it turned out I took really good notes? Is it still a bad thing?
- What if I started an independent traffic study, unaffiliated with the city? Is that so wrong? Why would I even want to study traffic on my own, though? I didn't think that part out.
- Are they human? Do they eat and sleep like us? Do they live among us? How do they reproduce?
- If the answer is "yes" to all the questions in the above bullet point, are they a good lay?
So I'm not sure what to make of them, and I'm not sure whether or not I feel sorry for them. If they're asked by the city to constantly objectively reevaluate shit, then yeah, I feel bad because they'll be revisiting the same intersections over and over in their different incarnations. But if they're the people who actively say, "hey, better circle the wagons-- looks like we gotta tear shit up again," then I can't say I feel much pity.
But this is all just a matter of curiosity. If I ever see a hot traffic-studying chick (which I haven't), would it be unethical to approach her on the job and ask for her number? She can't really run away, which would be a great rationalization if I was sleazy and actually had no principles. Would she lose her job for me distracting her for a few seconds and throwing off the accuracy of her "report"?
These are the questions I concern myself with, and they clearly burn away the threads of the very fabric of society. We shall not drive in fear of one another.
Good night, and good luck.
0 Comments
Paint me a picture, dead man.
posted by Anonymous : 1:14 AM
I would never want to do this man any wrong. I really wouldn't. Just look at him. He's everyone's buddy. I almost want to purchase his whole Joy of Painting set just so I can have it run non-stop on my DVD player as I rest my head to sleep. The sound of his voice is a lullabye in itself. My dad and I used to sit in complete silent awe as we'd watch Bob paint practically THE EXACT SAME landscape everytime on his PBS show.
Premise of the show is simple: Bob stands in a studio for a half hour against no backdrop whatsoever and just paints a landscape that pretty much always ends up looking like the one pictured on the left. But the catch is, no matter how predictable it is, you end up watching the WHOLE FUCKING THING without flinching. How does a man command such power?
My dad likened his voice to being that of an "all-night DJ," which is pretty much accurate. If Bob Ross handled peace talks and general foreign relations, I think the whole world would resemble his artistic vision and Saddam would be busy planting trees while Iran would be harvesting pot-- not uranium.
Too bad Bob is dead.
I'm not one to offend easily, but somehow something seems wrong when the likeness of Mr. Ross is handed over to Nintendo for creating a painting video game, meant to showcase the free-handed capabilities of the Big N's new console, code-named Revolution.
Granted, I'm extremely enthused about the possibilities this console has. And it's a cool idea to implement the idea of using the weird-assed motion-sensitive controller as a paintbrush. But why Bob Ross?
I'm not naive, and I know the answer to this question, but when does marketing go too far? I understand this is a growing controversy when it comes to using the likeness of dead celebrities to hawk products. I saw Gene Kelly dancing with a vacuum and Steve McQueen driving the new Mustang, and I thought they were both tacky (yet somewhat clever, purely in their presentation). And who could forget when TuPac made more post-mortem albums than pre-mortem and even landed a theatrical release?
Enough, though. Perhaps it's more of a dilemma as to how their image is handled and carried on after death. I don't doubt that CG will take a turn toward recreating deceased actors for full-length features, resulting in a move to protect their estates and all sorts of legal troubles. I already read a blurb this last week where Paul Newman expressed worry over the unauthorized recreation and mishandling of his likeness after his death. I worry about the unauthorized recreation and mishandling of his salad dressing.
To bring everything back to a point, though, something seems dirty about playing a game where the essence of a dead man was attempted to be resurrected by splashing his name on the title and using images of him to create some artificial experience that could have otherwise held up without him. I couldn't imagine the character of my recently-deceased grandfather being warped and reused to benefit a company or campaign he never would have stood behind when he was alive.
The legend of Bob Ross is great to honor and celebrate through the work he completed while he was alive. But it's hard to celebrate a man's current work when he's been in the dirt since '95.
In other words, R.I.P. Bobbie. I hope you're cruising down the highway in the sky with McQueen while listening to some House of Pain.
0 Comments
Sunday, April 02, 2006
Have you seen that new movie Brick?
posted by RICK : 7:14 AM
I guess you could call it, "This year's Sin City." You could call it that. I'm hesitant to do so. Sure, there's definitely a case to be made that it's all style and no substance (Brick is a classic 1950s hard-boiled detective movie set in a contemporary high school). My preferred way of putting it is "style as substance." But even that seems to slight a film that is both unlike anything I've seen before and yet exactly like something I've seen before (though I guess the same could have been said for Sin City). Or maybe what this really comes down to is I think I have a man-crush on JGL. His performance is exactly as detached and unflinching as the role requires-- the opposite of Neil, where we previously saw him. Granted, "detached" generally means "bad acting," and maybe I'm too transfixed by his baby-browns, but being able to say a line like, "I gave him to you to see him eaten, not to see you fed," and somehow managing to pull it off speaks volumes about why he works so well in this movie. Perhaps the best thing I can say about Brick is that it does work. Sure, at any given moment you can take yourself out of the movie only to look back up again and say, "Wait a minute! Teenagers don't talk like that!" but that kind of kills point. It's Veronica Mars with an edge-- or rather, a different edge. It's kind of like those Trailer Contests where film promos are re-cut to fit into a different genre. It isn't exactly something you can make a career of, but damn if it isn't fun to watch.
0 Comments
Saturday, April 01, 2006
I pity tha April foo'
posted by Anonymous : 8:53 PM
Okay, so I read a blog post on a phallic conspiracy and admired how it sounded like some of the low-brow material I've written in the past. It dances around the joke a little long-winded-like, but when you reach each punchline, it's pretty amusing. So I'll support this man's alleged Gatorade Conspiracy.
Granted, the whole joke about things that subtly resemble sex organs is pretty overdone. But every now and then comes along one that you never really thought about before, and the case made for it will never allow you to look at it the same again. I ironically guzzled down some Gatorade -- the EXACT SAME FLAVOR as the one featured at the beginning -- 2 minutes before reading it. Maybe that made the joke more disturbing.
Reminder: spring ahead tonight, suckas.
0 Comments
Saturday Night Taped
Welcome to "What Is Recoil?." If you would like to post something on this blog, but don't have a WIR-Blogger login, then send me an e-mail, and I'll make it happen. SHAZAM!
-Rick
(co-creator)
Rick |
Dynamarx |
rus-trick |
ryan |
The Potato |
JDM |
DrNewsie |
Mr. MS |
AK |
Brooke |
Stein |
Moses |
G |
CarrieOkie |
Jen |
Duhn |
M. Moore | Laura |
Mr.T |
kat |
abby | Greg
09/2005 | 10/2005 | 11/2005 | 12/2005 | 01/2006 | 02/2006 | 03/2006 | 04/2006 | 05/2006 | 06/2006 | 07/2006 | 08/2006 | 09/2006 | 10/2006 | 11/2006 | 12/2006 | 01/2007 | 02/2007 | 03/2007 |
I would never want to do this man any wrong. I really wouldn't. Just look at him. He's everyone's buddy. I almost want to purchase his whole Joy of Painting set just so I can have it run non-stop on my DVD player as I rest my head to sleep. The sound of his voice is a lullabye in itself. My dad and I used to sit in complete silent awe as we'd watch Bob paint practically THE EXACT SAME landscape everytime on his PBS show.Premise of the show is simple: Bob stands in a studio for a half hour against no backdrop whatsoever and just paints a landscape that pretty much always ends up looking like the one pictured on the left. But the catch is, no matter how predictable it is, you end up watching the WHOLE FUCKING THING without flinching. How does a man command such power?
My dad likened his voice to being that of an "all-night DJ," which is pretty much accurate. If Bob Ross handled peace talks and general foreign relations, I think the whole world would resemble his artistic vision and Saddam would be busy planting trees while Iran would be harvesting pot-- not uranium.
Too bad Bob is dead.
I'm not one to offend easily, but somehow something seems wrong when the likeness of Mr. Ross is handed over to Nintendo for creating a painting video game, meant to showcase the free-handed capabilities of the Big N's new console, code-named Revolution.
Granted, I'm extremely enthused about the possibilities this console has. And it's a cool idea to implement the idea of using the weird-assed motion-sensitive controller as a paintbrush. But why Bob Ross?
I'm not naive, and I know the answer to this question, but when does marketing go too far? I understand this is a growing controversy when it comes to using the likeness of dead celebrities to hawk products. I saw Gene Kelly dancing with a vacuum and Steve McQueen driving the new Mustang, and I thought they were both tacky (yet somewhat clever, purely in their presentation). And who could forget when TuPac made more post-mortem albums than pre-mortem and even landed a theatrical release?
Enough, though. Perhaps it's more of a dilemma as to how their image is handled and carried on after death. I don't doubt that CG will take a turn toward recreating deceased actors for full-length features, resulting in a move to protect their estates and all sorts of legal troubles. I already read a blurb this last week where Paul Newman expressed worry over the unauthorized recreation and mishandling of his likeness after his death. I worry about the unauthorized recreation and mishandling of his salad dressing.
To bring everything back to a point, though, something seems dirty about playing a game where the essence of a dead man was attempted to be resurrected by splashing his name on the title and using images of him to create some artificial experience that could have otherwise held up without him. I couldn't imagine the character of my recently-deceased grandfather being warped and reused to benefit a company or campaign he never would have stood behind when he was alive.
The legend of Bob Ross is great to honor and celebrate through the work he completed while he was alive. But it's hard to celebrate a man's current work when he's been in the dirt since '95.
In other words, R.I.P. Bobbie. I hope you're cruising down the highway in the sky with McQueen while listening to some House of Pain.
0 Comments
Have you seen that new movie Brick?
posted by RICK : 7:14 AM
I guess you could call it, "This year's Sin City." You could call it that. I'm hesitant to do so. Sure, there's definitely a case to be made that it's all style and no substance (Brick is a classic 1950s hard-boiled detective movie set in a contemporary high school). My preferred way of putting it is "style as substance." But even that seems to slight a film that is both unlike anything I've seen before and yet exactly like something I've seen before (though I guess the same could have been said for Sin City). Or maybe what this really comes down to is I think I have a man-crush on JGL. His performance is exactly as detached and unflinching as the role requires-- the opposite of Neil, where we previously saw him. Granted, "detached" generally means "bad acting," and maybe I'm too transfixed by his baby-browns, but being able to say a line like, "I gave him to you to see him eaten, not to see you fed," and somehow managing to pull it off speaks volumes about why he works so well in this movie. Perhaps the best thing I can say about Brick is that it does work. Sure, at any given moment you can take yourself out of the movie only to look back up again and say, "Wait a minute! Teenagers don't talk like that!" but that kind of kills point. It's Veronica Mars with an edge-- or rather, a different edge. It's kind of like those Trailer Contests where film promos are re-cut to fit into a different genre. It isn't exactly something you can make a career of, but damn if it isn't fun to watch.
0 Comments
Saturday, April 01, 2006
I pity tha April foo'
posted by Anonymous : 8:53 PM
Okay, so I read a blog post on a phallic conspiracy and admired how it sounded like some of the low-brow material I've written in the past. It dances around the joke a little long-winded-like, but when you reach each punchline, it's pretty amusing. So I'll support this man's alleged Gatorade Conspiracy.
Granted, the whole joke about things that subtly resemble sex organs is pretty overdone. But every now and then comes along one that you never really thought about before, and the case made for it will never allow you to look at it the same again. I ironically guzzled down some Gatorade -- the EXACT SAME FLAVOR as the one featured at the beginning -- 2 minutes before reading it. Maybe that made the joke more disturbing.
Reminder: spring ahead tonight, suckas.
0 Comments
Saturday Night Taped
Welcome to "What Is Recoil?." If you would like to post something on this blog, but don't have a WIR-Blogger login, then send me an e-mail, and I'll make it happen. SHAZAM!
-Rick
(co-creator)
Rick |
Dynamarx |
rus-trick |
ryan |
The Potato |
JDM |
DrNewsie |
Mr. MS |
AK |
Brooke |
Stein |
Moses |
G |
CarrieOkie |
Jen |
Duhn |
M. Moore | Laura |
Mr.T |
kat |
abby | Greg
09/2005 | 10/2005 | 11/2005 | 12/2005 | 01/2006 | 02/2006 | 03/2006 | 04/2006 | 05/2006 | 06/2006 | 07/2006 | 08/2006 | 09/2006 | 10/2006 | 11/2006 | 12/2006 | 01/2007 | 02/2007 | 03/2007 |
I guess you could call it, "This year's Sin City." You could call it that. I'm hesitant to do so. Sure, there's definitely a case to be made that it's all style and no substance (Brick is a classic 1950s hard-boiled detective movie set in a contemporary high school). My preferred way of putting it is "style as substance." But even that seems to slight a film that is both unlike anything I've seen before and yet exactly like something I've seen before (though I guess the same could have been said for Sin City). Or maybe what this really comes down to is I think I have a man-crush on JGL. His performance is exactly as detached and unflinching as the role requires-- the opposite of Neil, where we previously saw him. Granted, "detached" generally means "bad acting," and maybe I'm too transfixed by his baby-browns, but being able to say a line like, "I gave him to you to see him eaten, not to see you fed," and somehow managing to pull it off speaks volumes about why he works so well in this movie. Perhaps the best thing I can say about Brick is that it does work. Sure, at any given moment you can take yourself out of the movie only to look back up again and say, "Wait a minute! Teenagers don't talk like that!" but that kind of kills point. It's Veronica Mars with an edge-- or rather, a different edge. It's kind of like those Trailer Contests where film promos are re-cut to fit into a different genre. It isn't exactly something you can make a career of, but damn if it isn't fun to watch.
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I pity tha April foo'
posted by Anonymous : 8:53 PM
Okay, so I read a blog post on a phallic conspiracy and admired how it sounded like some of the low-brow material I've written in the past. It dances around the joke a little long-winded-like, but when you reach each punchline, it's pretty amusing. So I'll support this man's alleged Gatorade Conspiracy.
Granted, the whole joke about things that subtly resemble sex organs is pretty overdone. But every now and then comes along one that you never really thought about before, and the case made for it will never allow you to look at it the same again. I ironically guzzled down some Gatorade -- the EXACT SAME FLAVOR as the one featured at the beginning -- 2 minutes before reading it. Maybe that made the joke more disturbing.
Reminder: spring ahead tonight, suckas.
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Saturday Night Taped
Okay, so I read a blog post on a phallic conspiracy and admired how it sounded like some of the low-brow material I've written in the past. It dances around the joke a little long-winded-like, but when you reach each punchline, it's pretty amusing. So I'll support this man's alleged Gatorade Conspiracy.Granted, the whole joke about things that subtly resemble sex organs is pretty overdone. But every now and then comes along one that you never really thought about before, and the case made for it will never allow you to look at it the same again. I ironically guzzled down some Gatorade -- the EXACT SAME FLAVOR as the one featured at the beginning -- 2 minutes before reading it. Maybe that made the joke more disturbing.
Reminder: spring ahead tonight, suckas.
0 Comments
Saturday Night Taped
Welcome to "What Is Recoil?." If you would like to post something on this blog, but don't have a WIR-Blogger login, then send me an e-mail, and I'll make it happen. SHAZAM!
-Rick
(co-creator)
Rick | Dynamarx | rus-trick | ryan | The Potato | JDM | DrNewsie | Mr. MS | AK | Brooke | Stein | Moses | G | CarrieOkie | Jen | Duhn | M. Moore | Laura | Mr.T | kat | abby | Greg
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