Sometime I’ll have to post my long in gestation piece on why I love Amy Winfrey’s Making Fiends, a successful web animations series that Nickelodeon made into a a swell TV show it failed to adequately promote.
In the meantime, enjoy this April Fools episode, which, if you haven’t followed the original series, probably won’t make much sense to you…
Last night the Rockets beat the Lakers to go 30-25. Barring an end-of-season meltdown (always a possibility), it looks like the Rockets will make the playoffs and be seeded somewhere between 6 and 8 in the stacked West. This is a mild surprise, given how shaky they looked early in the season and how two of what were their best three players going in (Kyle Lowery and Kevin Martin) have been out with health issues during the latest run.
Given the back-to-back defeat of the East-leading Bulls, and the still-tough Lakers, it’s time to consider that maybe, just maybe, Kevin McHale knows how to coach a little.
This is actually something of a surprise, since many people (myself included) were skeptical when Daryl Morey tapped McHale to be head coach after the departure of Rick Adelman (McHale’s Hall of Fame playing career notwithstanding). The fact that McHale was awful as the Timberwolves GM (drafting Kevin Garnett in 1995 was pretty much the only thing he did right as GM until the Kevin Love trade in 2008) and that he went 39-55 in two brief stints as their coach didn’t exactly inspire confidence.
But McHale has the superstar-deficient Rockets playing unselfish, team-oriented basketball. Though it’s hard to compare due to the strike-shortened season, McHale’s team is two games ahead of where Adelman’s was 11 games before the end of the season. Granted, having two legit centers in Marcus Camby and Samuel Dalembert (as opposed to the always-scrappy but height-challenged Chuck Hayes (whose stats in Sacramento are way down)) certainly doesn’t hurt, but no one going into this season would have thought that would remotely make up for all the time Lowery and Martin have missed.
Once again we’re faced with the possibility that Daryl Morey just might know what he’s doing.
In which we learn, yet again, that mother nature really hate 18-wheelers.
I guess those annoying sirens are the new “TORNADOES WILL KILL YOU UNLESS YOU TAKE SHELTER RIGHT FUCKING NOW!!!!” warning.
Filmed off a TV, but impressive close-ups:
From Lancaster
Aftermath:
(Note: This is a restaurant review that will eventually end up on The Logbook of the Saturday Dining Conspiracy, but since: A.) We’ve pretty much sucked at keep that up to date, and B.) We both have blogs, and, hey, content!, I thought I’d start putting my reviews up in transit to the main SDC pages.)
Chagos Caribbean Cuisine
7301 N Lamar Blvd.
Austin, Texas 78752
(512) 275-6013
http://www.chagos.biz/
Dining Date: March 24, 2012
This is a nice, cheap, hole-in-the-wall restaurant on a stretch (north Lamar between Airport and 183) that has traditionally been hostile to any restaurant not named “Kim Phung.” Although the plantano and yucca chips didn’t grab me, the chicken appetizer was sort of interesting, the salad wasn’t bad, and my Bistec Encebollado was reasonably tasty.
My Tres Leches cake was quite deliciously sweet but undersized. Service was attentive and personal, but they weren’t particularly busy.
If you live nearby, and are in the mood for something both cheap and not bland TexMex, Chagos is worth a try.
Here’s a film I’ve never heard of, that never got a U.S. theatrical release, that cost some €25 million to make, that sounds not just like a train wreck, but like horrifying, misconceived, epic train wreck.
The premise, from IMDB:
Cheyenne, a wealthy former rock star, now bored and jaded in his retirement embarks on a quest to find his father’s persecutor, an ex-Nazi war criminal now hiding out in the U.S.
Well, they doesn’t sound very promising right off the bat. But then you see who’s playing the lead role:
That’s right: Sean Penn, 50-something EMO rocker. That moves it from merely bad to legendarily bad. You look at the IMDB listing and think: “Well, it has David Byrne playing himself. That might be the only thing about this film that doesn’t suck.” And then you watch the trailer:
And think: “Well, it has David Byrne playing himself. That might be the only thing about this film that doesn’t suck.”
This may be the most ill-conceived film involving Auschwitz since Jerry Lewis’ The Day the Clown Cried.
But unlike The Day the Clown Cried, This Must be The Place was actually released. And I’d be willing to watch either of them once.
Once.
Edited to add: Though it’s played in Europe and Sundance, it doesn’t seem to have had a general U.S. release, so it might still pop up at art houses across the country this year.
It does seem to have gotten mostly good reviews from the kind of people who give films like this good reviews…
My April 1st piece, detailing Margaret Atwood’s new science fiction magazine, is up over at Locus Online.
My many previous April 1 offerings include:
Alsion’s Halo was evidently among the first American band to respond to the first wave of Manchester-base Shoegazer, forming in Arizona in 1992.
Evidently the stopped recording for a while, then reformed as a band called Lochheed (sic), which sounds more ambient.
You may remember my mention of Robert Ben Rhodes (the truck driver accused of torturing, killing and raping as many as 50 women) who was awaiting trial in the same Big Spring, Texas jail that also housed child-abusing polygamist Warren Jeffs.
Rhodes has been sentenced to life imprisonment rather than the death penalty. This is disappointing, since he was already serving a life sentence for murders committed in Illinois and if any U.S. criminal currently behind bars in the U.S. deserves the death penalty, it’s Rhodes. But he’d been awaiting trial since 2009, which suggests there was some problem with prosecution evidence. And since he’s already 66, there was a good chance Rhodes would have died behind bars before the sentence was carried out anyway…
Two names that are not otherwise paired together.
Tony Banks, the keyboardist for Genesis (and, with Mike Rutherford, the only member through all the band’s lineups) is 62 today. In celebration, here’s a live version of “The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway”:
Director Tarantino turns 49 today, which gives me a chance to talk about his film Django Unchained, an antebellum slave revenge fantasy that looks like looks like a cross between Mandingo and, well, Kill Bill. No trailer yet, but since it’s Tarantino, we know won’t be screwed up by any of that annoying political correctness. Also, damn, look at that cast: Samuel L. Jackson, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Kurt Russell, Christoph Waltz, Jamie Foxx, James Remar (Dexter’s dad), Don Johnson (in the “Designated John Travolta Career Resurrection Role”), Sacha Baron Cohen, and Leonardo DiCaprio as the bad guy.
I fully expect it to rock.