mgroves

Archive for 2007

Just to get this out of the way: the “Matt” of the title does not refer to me.

During my time at Ohio University, I was accosted on a street corner (probably Court Street, I don’t remember) by a wild-haired guy passing out fliers for a comedy troupe show. This group was known as Four Funny Guys and Matt.

My wife (then girlfriend) and I made the 1 hr trek back to Athens twice during my tenure at OU to see them. The first time because I had heard some buzz about these guys and I thought it might be a hoot to check them out. The second time because they were uproariously funny and clever. I think the second time was post-9/11 because for some reason there was a model of the WTC towers in the lobby of the auditorium. It’s odd what things I remember and what things I don’t.

Which brings me to present day: my living room. I’m watching Adult Swim or something, and all of a sudden this cell phone commercial comes on for Alltel:

It didn’t hit me at first, of course. I rarely pay attention to commercials, so it took a few times for it to hit me: a vague feeling of familiarity. I scoured what memories have survived my Scotch-soaked synapses. I felt like Philip J. Fry jumping up and down on the verge of grasping some obvious thing. Hey…WAIT A MINUTE. THAT’S THE GUY! He’s one of the guys from Four Funny Guys and Matt! In case you can’t tell where I’m pointing, it’s the pudgy guy in the yellow shirt representing “Sprint”.

Of course, I didn’t know his actual name. The only guy whose name I could remember from Four Funny Guys and Matt is–not surprisingly–Matt. But in fact, there may not have even been a “Matt” in the group at all.

Turns out that his name is Mike Busch and he has both a MySpace page and his own official website. Turns out that Mike Busch is the founder of the comedy troupe (which has since split up). I found more information about other projects that they are doing with a little judicious Googling. My guess is that we’ll be seeing a lot of these guys sooner or later.

From what I can remember about the shows I attended at OU, the group was very Kids-in-the-Halls-esque. Almost KITHensian, in fact. But as the “second half” of their show, they did “Whose Line is it Anyway”-style improvisation comedy, which was very entertaining and very interactive. I think one of my suggestions was even used, and let me tell you right now: I can’t remember what it was, but, man, was it zany!

The second and final show I attended actually featured a couple of other acts. Eric Moneypenny did an opening stand-up comedy set which was very good. He was good at impressions, he looked like Jason Biggs and has his own website: Ericmoneypenny.com. Apparently he has blown up too, touring with some of the biggest names in stand-up today (and Doug Benson as well). So, he’s got that going for him.

The other act was a musical comedy act (read: comedian with a guitar). He was very funny and very talented and provided the troupe with a great way to segue between sketches. It is this performer, who I wouldn’t even pretend to know the name of, who stands out the most in my memory. I can’t remember a single sketch, but for some reason I can remember this guy. In particular: one segue between sketches he played a rather violent and angry (as violent and angry as an acoustic guitar can get) song about Mr. Miyagi. We’re not talking a wacky Weird Al song or anything, it was more like “F!#@ YOU MISTER MIYAGI F!#@ YOU! F#*( YOU!” over and over with no further explanation for like 20 seconds. It was one of the most bizarre things I’ve ever seen. And as Mike Busch approached the microphone to start the next sketch, he gave this guy the most hilariously authentic look of bemused puzzlement. Like I said, it’s odd what things I remember and what things I don’t.

The other thing I remember is the wild-haired guy impersonating a penguin or something during the improv show and doing a rather painful looking slide on his belly across the stage floor and then off the front edge of the stage.

So yeah, now these guys are blowing up and starting to become famous. So uh, go Bobcats, I guess? Woo.

Some people insisted that me putting watermarks on images that are hosted here at mgroves.com was an overreaction or that it’s flat out wrong to put my “spam” on to an otherwise pristine picture.

If you think I overreacted, then you’re head might explode when you read about someone else in a similar situation.

Jason Scott was put into a similar situation to my own (and many many other webmasters) regarding “hotlinking” of images. If you aren’t familiar with this term, it’s when the HTML for one site points to an image on another site, typically without permission.

Generally speaking, this is bad. At best, it’s rude, at worst it’s downright theft. It usually occurs when someone does a Google image search for a picture and puts that into a forum post/signature. Sometimes blogs use hotlinking for pictures instead of just hosting their own. In rare cases, there are much more egregious uses of hotlinking, such as the one described by Jason.

The best solution to hotlinking, of course, is to only allow requests for files that originate from the same server. That’s not a solution I really want to do for various reasons. But by putting a watermark on my pictures, at least I get some free advertising out of the deal.

What shocked me the most about Jason’s tale is not the ignorant MySpace user who thinks that they are getting “hacked”, but the unmitigated gall of HotFreeLayouts’ request that Jason remove the offending picture–from his own website–which is “flodding” them so that HotFreeLayouts can continue propogating the hotlinking and spending Jason’s money.

To me, it seems akin to asking a homeowner to “please stop locking the door so that we can go in every night and steal your money.” Unbelievable!

So. Compared to Goatse, Watermarks aren’t so bad, are they?

The more I read stories from the media, the more I want to fly out and punch them in the neck.

[Note from editor: this is the first post to mgroves.com that was actually not written by me. The author is a friend of mine who will be introducing himself shortly. In the meantime, enjoy his rant.]

I was recently reading a story from MSN/Foxsports about Jason Kidd’s recent relationship problems and came across the following. I’m not going to bore you with the whole story but here’s an excerpt.

“Jason Kidd filed for divorce from his wife today on the grounds of extreme cruelty over a long period of time,” Kidd’s attorney, Madeline Marzano-Lesnevich, said in a statement Tuesday. “As this is an extremely difficult personal matter, I ask that the privacy of the Kidd family be respected.”

I continue to read down until the article is over and then read this…

“The Kidds’ home phone number is unlisted. An after-hours message left for Joumana Kidd’s lawyer was not immediately returned.”

What the blue hell?

• Jason Kidds marriage shouldn’t even be in the news, it’s nobody’s business.
• Even if Jason Kidd was listed, why the hell would he want to speak to you about his failed marriage?

Why can’t they just respect the man’s wishes and be left alone, what impact does this news have on the world and why should anyone care about it? Let’s look for more of this crap.

“The Miami Dolphins have asked the Jets for permission to speak to offensive coordinator Brian Schottenheimer about their head-coaching vacancy, a league official told The Star-Ledger last night. The official requested anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the discussions.”

Who’s this league official that he has to spill his guts to a MSN reporter like a 13 year old school girl? Doesn’t anyone believe in honor and giving their word anymore?

From this moment on, I will never visit MSN or Fox Sports again. I’m done.

Can someone truly write an introduction of epic proportions?

I’m the new resident writer around here. I’ve been a constant reader of this site since it’s inception. With all the crazy political, AJAX, and Reds talk going on around here, I always thought mgroves.com was the Frasier of blogs and Matt was Frasier Crane of bloggers. I was brought in to be the Woody Boyd.

I’m an average 25 year old guy who has a love for technology and piracy. Sure, 98% of the internet has at least one piece of software on their computer that wasn’t paid for. Maybe it was that copy of Winzip that you keygenned.

Well. I’m the ultimate pirate lord. I treat piracy as a dedicated 60+ hour a week job. My giganews account has over 900 GBs a month downloaded and I’ve spent over $2000 in blank media alone. If there was a 10 most wanted list for pirates I’d be number 1.

I’m into console modding also so you’ll probably hear a little bit about that stuff. Some of my tutorials on Afterdawn are legendary and I’m pretty famous in a few online modding communities for my creations. From my extremly pimped XBox, to my Gamecube Fish Tank I support myself by modding game consoles.

So that’s it. I’m sometimes controversial, sometimes funny. Hopefully I’ll entertain you a little bit, and hopefully you’ll learn a few things. I guess I’m not so average after all.

*cough* If you’re a member of law enforcement I was just kidding about that whole piracy thing.

This is a Mythbusters segment that has not made it to the U.S. yet. Apparently they air in England first or something. Or maybe this was deemed too offensive for U.S. TV? Unlikely. Fart jokes are pretty much a staple of American humor. It says that you “won’t see this on the Discovery channel”, so who knows. It could have been cut for other reasons as well.

This is some sort of bootleg video (obviously), but I was amazed by how much more entertaining the video was with audience laughter. It almost makes me think that some sort of travelling live MythBusters show would go over very very well (with myths demonstratable in under a few hours of course).

Another interesting tidbit: the narrator for this clip is obviously English. But I have always speculated that the narrator for the version aired in the U.S. is an Englishman who fakes an American accent (a la Hugh Laurie). Listen carefully to the narrator and you’ll hear words and phrases that aren’t in common usage in America. It’s very subtle, so I can’t think of an example off the top of my head. But it’s usually stuff like calling an elevator a “lift” or some such thing.

Not that it really matters, it’s just something I observed.

From time to time, Jonny, a regular reader of mgroves.com and a friend & coworker of mine regales his fellow coworkers with tales of the old days at a dot-com he worked at in the not-to-distant past.

One of the many interesting tales is that of budding writer, artist, and abuser of exclamation points, Jeffrey Marzi.

The story goes something like this:

An action figure company receives an envelope from Jeffrey Marzi which contains a cover letter, a script, and several illustrations. Marzi has penned a handful of scripts, but the most common one in our tale is Prehistoric Park.

Reading the cover letter, it’s discovered that Prehistoric Park is a copyrighted sequel to Jurassic Park, which was created before Jurassic Park 2: The Lost World. As you might guess, Prehistoric Park–and Marzi’s other works, Pterodactyloid Man’s Flight to Paris and Pterodactyloid Man Goes Around the World in 76 Days–involve dinosaurs, mainly cyborg dinosaurs.

I guess that in the case of the action figure company, Marzi wanted them to make action figures of Prehistoric Park or Pterodactyloid Man.

If the story were to end there, it would be a relatively normal tale of thousands of writers who cold-send their stuff to everyone they can, in the hopes that they are noticed/find a producer/etc.

But it certainly does not end there.

It turns out that Jeffrey Marzi’s works are somewhat of a shibboleth among the action figure/comics/entertainment world. Upon going to a convention and speaking with others in similar businesses, Jonny soon realized that almost everyone had received a similar packet from Marzi, and everyone was equally baffled by it.

Not much is known about Jeffrey Marzi beyond what he writes about himself in his cover letters and what we can infer about him in his stories. According to one documentary, his father says that he was involved in an accident very early in his life and that has caused some sort of brain damage or mental problems. He lives with his father and is not employed. He’s on social security, which he uses mostly to pay for postage and writing supplies. He resents Michael Crichton for coming out with Jurassic Park 2 because of his “lust for money.” He talks about his “suicidal caving [craving]” and that his writing is the best “mantle [mental] therapy.” While his cover letter is rambling, poorly spelled, and even brings up that he wants to open some sort of dinosaur-themed restaurant, his actual stories appear to be much more proofread.

You can find all his stories at this Geocities site: The Old Dinosaur Park. I’ve attached a zip file containing image scans of his cover letter for posterity. They are all full of plot holes, non-sequitors, and are all endlessly fascinating.

Oh, there is just one more thing. In 2003, a TV series called The AMC Project featured a brief documentary called “Malkovich’s Mail”, in which they explored the piles and piles of pitch letters and spec scripts submitted to John Malkovich’s production company, Mr. Mudd. The documentary crew picked out a handful of scripts and travelled to meet and interview the writers. Jonny told me that he saw this episode and was astounded that they featured Jeffrey Marzi.

I searched everywhere to see if I could find this show: torrents, YouTube, Amazon, future TV schedules. In the end, I found and purchased an advanced press copy VHS tape of the episode on eBay. This is an mgroves.com exclusive, as I couldn’t find the show being offered anywhere else.

Thanks go out to Joe for ripping it from VHS to a digital format, and of course to Jonny for sparking my interest in Marzi to begin with.

Watching Marzi and his father watch Malkovich as Pterodactyloid Man near the end of the show was both touching and inspirational. It’s easy to dismiss Marzi as just another nut with pie-in-the-sky dreams, but it’s truly a great thing when one’s dreams are realized, even if they aren’t realized in exactly the way they were dreamed. Maybe that’s a metaphor for life.

If nothing else, the video “rejections” show that Malkovich is a great, great actor and an extremely caring man. While perhaps at the behest of the documentary crew, he and his company took waaaay too much time out of their busy schedule to slap together very impressive mini-productions. Malkovich’s rendition of Pterodactyloid Man shone through the ridiculous absurdity of the story and showed me that perhaps there’s a little bit of Jeffrey Marzi in each one of us. It makes me wonder if the writing that does make it into production isn’t but a marginal fraction better than Marzi’s writing.

Jackson Publick has announced that the Venture Brothers Season 2 DVD Box Set will soon be released.

I asked for the Season 1 Box Set for Christmas, and it has been well worth the (relatively low) price for hours and hours of entertainment, even if you’ve seen every single airing on Adult Swim. Twice.

While we’re on the subject of Venture Brothers, I also highly recommend Jackson Publick’s Livejournal. It’s mostly Venture Brothers stuff, sure, but this is a very creative guy who also worked on another of my favorites: The Tick. Go subscribe to his RSS right now!

I just noticed that there was some sort of Wii gun prototype at some sort of trade show. Why haven’t we heard anything about this gun yet?

By all accounts, this thing looks like an incredibly inexpensive little gizmo that could add a lot to the game playing experience of, say, Call of Duty 3, Red Steel, all Wii FPS games for that matter?

So, why aren’t we seeing it? My guess is that Nintendo is afraid of the controversy of a introducing a gun-like device into an already more-immersive-than-normal playing environment. I seem to recall Nintendo getting some flak about the original Zapper and changed the color because of it. 

I think along with putting The Year of Our Lord 2006 to rest, we should also put some components of the English language to rest as well. Specifically some of the more annoying and/or stupid ones.

Lake Superior State University puts out a list every year of “banned words”. On this year’s list that I particularly hate:

• “We’re Pregnant”. Unless you are representing a group of 2 or more pregnant women, NO YOU ARE NOT.
• “Undocumented Alien”. Can we also put to rest any law that wants to give illegal aliens any privelege reserved for legal citizens?
• “Ginormous”. I heard this “word” before Will Ferrel’s Elf, but I hate it now more than ever.

Well, ginormous isn’t on the list. BUT IT SHOULD BE!

Coding Horror also suggests some words/phrases that bloggers and commenters should STOP USING ALREADY:

• “Um, [condescension]?” We get it, you’re smarter than everyone.
• “[negative experience, situation, or description]; I just threw up a little bit in my mouth.” Didja?
• “[undesirable counter-example], not so much.” I’m looking at you, Jon Stewart!
• “I’m looking at you, [example of complaint].” I’m looking at you, me.

If you really want to avoid cliche, you should put your writing into the Cliche Finder. After all, a day without cliches is like a day without horrible searing pain.