What do you do when fluffy dies? Try some mouth-watering guinea pig recipes. You’d be surprised how few recipes for guinea pigs are easily available on the web, considering that the Peruvians munch through around 65 million of the cute little rodents each year. Why am I linking to this? Mainly so that when you go home today you can tell other people that you spent the afternoon looking at recipes for guinea pigs, of course.

Variety magazine has published a (very US-centric) review of the biggest movie flops of 2006. Many of these aren’t surprising, and some of them I haven’t heard of – suggesting that they might not have been released in the UK yet. On a side-note, it’s rather patronising how ‘foreign money’ is barely considered worth accounting for in the calculations, despite often being twice the US takings. Anyway…

What is it about lists of the worst performing films that always mkes them interesting? I guess it’s just that so many people had such great belief in a project and it’s strange to see them all being so wrong… Or maybe they didn’t have the belief in it either? Perhaps the makers of the films were all busy trying to convince themselves and others that they were in on a big thing and missed the chance that none of them realised the other person was only pretending too.

The emperor is wearing no clothes, and he appears to be Nicolas Cage in the remake of The Wicker Man: surely if there was ever a film that was going to be a no-brainer appearence in turkey lists then this was it. A remake of a classic British horror/thriller, relocated away from Britain, starring a man better known for his action movies and equine face than his acting range, and ill-advised plot alterations. Nicolas Cage is not Edward Woodward, but what the film really lacked was a convincing big-name enemy, someone against whom the hero could pit his wits. In the first film we had Christopher Lee, and in the second…? Do American actors play ‘evil’ as well as British ones? Can anyone compete with someone like Christopher Lee? Or Alan Rickman? Hell, even Bob Hoskins can play a completely twisted nutter convincingly.

Variety doesn’t take the ‘this was a turkey from the beginning’ view of its films, but their response to The Wicker Man is quite amusing:

Cage’s mopey face didn’t make for titillating marketing.

Another phrase that they use is more telling though:

[The Wicker Man] faced the dilemma of not fitting neatly into either the horror or thriller genre.

Do audiences really need such comfortable boundaries? In recent years films like Donnie Darko and Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind have shown that you don’t have to be in a genre, or even have the biggest stars, to work. Maybe the secret that Hollywood is missing is that audiences are getting better at spotting yet another dud remake, and that should strike fear into a lot of projects that are probably being pitched as you read this.

The Variety article is here.
Origianl source from the ever-reliable Register.

I can handle Christmas songs during the summer, but by December they mainly want me to go on a rampage with a blunt chisel. Maybe this is because I’ve worked in shops where Christmas songs are on a loop…

There’s one in particular that could push me over the edge into the sea of despair, it’s called ‘The Happiest Little Christmas Tree’. The sonic vibrations of that track have emanated throughout the known universe. It is the reason why aliens have not contacted us to join in the heavenly galactic community and instead choose to probe various parts of our anatomy to discover how our species could have created such an aural abomination. The trouble is, now I’ve posted this, there are probably people out there who will be intrigued, and the cycle of devastation will begin again.

Ommmmmm!

Instant anagrams, ‘tea gazing ash om’ is ‘Matazone Haggis’, and Doctor Who’s anagramatical spin-off ‘Torchwood’ would have been very different if they had gone for ‘Hot Rod Cow’. Anagrams of ‘Matazone The Other Side’ bring up ‘threesome’ in the jumbles, so that amused me greatly!

After a thread on a forum dicussing computer games, the poster finished with ‘that’s my 2gil worth.’ I’m not sure if I should be horrified at the simple fact that I get that, or delighted with the level of in-joke that it conveys. I think probably the former.

If this doesn’t put a glimmer of warmth in your heart then you might as well drive yourself to the morgue right now:

Bunny fun.

When finishing work with my girlfriend one night we left the building by the back and found a huge box. Obviously, I immediately put it on my head. We then added a face, and arm holes. We then found another one that we put on her and decorated in similar fashion. We then waltzed for a little while.

We left the boxes side by side, with a little matchbox-child next to them and a sign saying ‘Gerald and Lola: boxes in love’.

Yes, the French are completely insane, we all know this, but that doesn’t make them bad people. It does make them legendarily bad drivers, or should that be ‘inconsiderate’. Perhaps they are beaten by the Italians for legendarily bad driving, and I’ve been in a coach going around clifftops in Majorca as a child with some quite, quite death-wish laden drivers, but this wins over everything I’ve seen so far.

On an August morning in 1978, French filmmaker Claude Lelouch mounted a gyro-stabilized camera to the bumper of a Ferrari 275 GTB and had … all » a friend, a professional Formula 1 racer, drive at breakneck speed through the heart of Paris. The film was limited for technical reasons to 10 minutes; the course was from Porte Dauphine, through the Louvre, to the Basilica of Sacre Coeur.

No streets were closed, for Lelouch was unable to obtain a permit.

The driver completed the course in about 9 minutes, reaching nearly 140 MPH in some stretches. The footage reveals him running real red lights, nearly hitting real pedestrians, and driving the wrong way up real one-way streets.

Upon showing the film in public for the first time, Lelouch was arrested. He has never revealed the identity of the driver, and the film went underground until a DVD release a few years ago.

Highlights are the Arc Du Triomphe at 1min 20sec, into oncoming traffic at 4mins 15secs, and on cobbles from 7mins 35secs onwards.

I’m not sure whether ‘enjoy’ is the phrase, more likely ‘fear’.

Have you seen better online? Let me know!

(Thanks to my friends at Ladybird’s for the link.)

The Warner Brothers came up with a formula for cuteness, a graphical version can be seen here.

What I find interesting about this is that I don’t really respond very well to Warner Brothers’ characters. I find them ingratiating, like they are trying too hard to be cute. Maybe that’s not so much about the visual style as it is the movements and the personalities that they are given; they are usually quite mature in their cynicism, which potentially clashes with their cute styling, making the appearence seem false.

Does anyone here think that the Warner characters are cute?

I’m sure a few people have said ‘spare me my life!’ during an aerobics class, and everyone else just has (sensibly) not gone to an aerobics class; however, I feel it’s slightly less likely that people have chanted ‘I was robbed by two men’, and ‘take anything you want’ could perhaps be misunderstood when chanted by three women in lyotards.

What am I on about? It’s the Zuiikin Girls, who have been trying to find an interesting way to teach English and get fit at the same time, producing what is one of the most bizarre things I’ve seen for a long time, and makes my idea for Thesercise seem positively sensible.

Next time you’re brushing your teeth, try holding your hand still and moving your head instead. It helps if you get some good nodding music playing in the background; I suggest ‘Here Comes Your Man’ by The Pixies (UK link US link) but most things would probably work.

For bonus points you could also try using your non-favoured hand to hold the brush.

Go on, try it!

In other news, http://www.StickScene.com is nearing 350 puzzles now. Go play!

I can’t promise you won’t see anything you don’t like, but this page assembles a random selection of images posted on LiveJournal and provides an interesting moment’s browsing.