If you're curious as to who the real identity of Satoshi Nakamoto (the inventor of Bitcoin) is, the New York Times has an article claiming to have identified him here.
They come to the same conclusion that this Youtube series did, except 5 years later.
And just a helpful tip: any time a media site hides something behind a paywall, you can almost always get around it with archive.is.
Blind Mike has started hate watching GD Fenderson's second stand-up comedy special and it's worth noting that there is a playlist for all the clips of him watching GD Fenderson's first comedy special.
Dubbed "The World's Worst Comedy Special: The GD Fenderson Saga," it can be seen here.
Note that the order of the playlist is unfortunately REVERSE chronological order.
I was waiting for a compilation video - that would have been better, but here we are.
And, man, don't sleep on "Swingin' Spathiphyllums," it's a trip.
Somewhere around 2000-2003 (college) I resolved to watch every episode of "Mystery Science Theater 3000." It was the heyday of file-sharing, in those days, and such a thing was just, at that precise moment, theoretically possible. Big, special shout-out to eDonkey and eMule. "Possible" but not necessarily easy.
To illustrate the effort of watching every MST3K episode, I used to say that it was harder than watching every episode of "The Simpsons" (or basically pick any long running series you want). The reasoning is simple: there were (at that time) about 200 episodes of MST3K and each one was about 1.5 hours long, so that's about 300 hours of viewage. Compared to "The Simpsons", I'll even include all the episodes made since then, the math is: 805 episodes, at 0.3 hours each episode that's about 250 hours of viewage. Note: it's a pretty good metric for comparison because download effort and file availability are generally proportional to the length of material. This metric, of course, doesn't take into account how bad "The Simpsons" has become, though.
Given the disorganized nature of file-sharing, I created a spreadsheet to act as the source of truth, each episode listed, each had a "watched" or "not watched" status. I even added percentage calculation and a countdown to 0 because I had a lot of time on my hands and it seemed cool. But on that spreadsheet there were always 4 blank spots: 4 "lost" episodes that did not exist publicly in any form.
After 1 or 2 years (perhaps more, it was a long time ago), I finished the goal - I had watched every available episode and, by that time, I simply made peace with the idea that there were 4 episodes that just did not exist.
Then, in 2008 the "Pilot Episode" ("The Green Slime") (not really an episode) was shown at a convention and bootlegged on Youtube. Check. Down to 3.
Then, in 2016 two more "lost" episodes ("Invaders From The Deep" and "Revenge of the Mysterions from Mars") were found by the MST3K Producers in their archives and were released to backers of the 11th Season Kickstarter. Check and check.
That left ONE unreleased, "lost" episode.... One episode that no fan has turned up. One episode that even the creators of MST3K confirmed they had no access to.... What are the chances that someone somewhere taped it, kept the tape, held on to it for 38 years and never told anyone?
A few days ago, arthurputie on Reddit posted that his cousin had bought a load of old VHS's at a garage sale in the Minneapolis area and that one of them was labeled with the episode name ("Star Force: Fugitive Alien II"). Arthurputie confirmed it to actually be the lost episode and it has now been uploaded it to Youtube.
Lost no more.
"Wild Horses" sucks, Craig.
Continuing my exploration of Robert Duvall movies and I cannot be definitive here - I haven't watched them all, nor will I - but I may have hit upon the worst movie Robert Duvall ever made.
With such a legendary actor in such a lousy movie, what scapegoat can I blame for this outrage?
Written By: Robert Duvall
Directed By: Robert Duvall
Starring: Robert Duvall.
DANG IT.
"Wild Horses" stars Robert Duvall, James Franco and Josh Hartnett (remember Josh Hartnett?). Three fine actors, and yet none of these people plays the protagonist of the movie. The protagonist of this movie is, apparently, played by one of the worst actors in the history of film. I say "one of the worst" but cannot say that she is "the worst" for I have seen Rod in "Birdemic" ....but she's clearly one of the worst. The main plot is a crime investigation of sorts - Luciana Pedraza is an Argentinian playing a Native American cop with no emotion and a Texan accent; she is paired with a cop partner (not worth looking up) who is coincidentally played by another insanely awful actor. Whenever there are scenes of these two people interacting, it's incredible, it's like staring into infinity mirror of emotionlessness.
How did this happen? How does the best American actor of his generation not weed out terrible actors when casting his own movie? Well, I can only explain the terrible lead - the terrible lead is played by his real-life wife, a woman 41 years younger than himself.
Bad acting from main characters is huge in this movie but isn't the entire problem. There's also bad acting from the minor characters - and in pivotal scenes. Very pivotal and very emotional and very terrible scenes. But also, the cinematography of this movie varies between on-par-with-Walker-Texas-Ranger and dreadful. There are moments with bad sound. These moments could have easily been fixed in ADR but weren't, somehow, for some reason. The editing is weird and awkward. The pacing is weird. The movie is lifeless and not believable - it's simply boring. At many points, this movie doesn't even feel like a movie.
If you've ever wondered what would happen if you dropped a great actor into a terrible movie, here's your experiment. I would like to say that Robert Duvall transcends his surroundings but I can't say that. This movie is so empty and unconvincing it even makes Robert Duvall's acting seem questionable.
I looked on youtube for a scene or compilation of the bad acting in "Wild Horses" to share for demonstration, but I see nothing. That seems strange. Maybe, as bad movies go, this flew below the popular radar.
The Commodore 64 is an important part of computer history as well as the best selling computer model of all-time. It's now being re-released for sale.
Actually, it was re-released a year ago but I only found out today so I'm passing the info along.
The new version has USB and WI-FI.
The Commodore 64 was a huge part of a lot of people's childhoods, though I don't know that I ever came across one, personally. Strange how that works.
Cigarettes & Coffee - 1993
Look at the entire aesthetic of "Cigarettes & Coffee" and compare to...
That's extremely close.
Of course "Cigarettes & Coffee" is Paul Thomas Anderson's short film that was later made into...
Hard Eight - 1996
Pulp Fiction - 1994
and
The Big Lebowski - 1998
One of the things I love discovering and posting about is pop-culture surprises and oddities. A while back I looked at the history of Peanuts TV Specials and noted the oddity of the live-action "It's the Girl in the Red Truck, Charlie Brown." There is another Peanuts oddity that I have been avoiding posting anything about but I may as well just get it over quickly and move on.
I'm just going to say it. The plot of "Why, Charlie Brown, Why?" is: a little girl in Charlie Brown's class gets cancer. And.... that's not what you expect when you want to watch Snoopy.
I can't do a beat-by-beat breakdown of how wacky and crazy it is - it's well executed, I suppose. The noteworthy thing is just the very concept is shocking and unusual. So it exists, I watched it, it doesn't make sense to me but perhaps that's due to the nature of Peanuts - it's watched by kids but wasn't intended to be solely for kids; it's not afraid to get serious among the jokes, and so forth.
Evidently it was well received and was praised for helping educate kids on this subject.
The corollary of finding his mother was black is that he has black kin who he's never met, including a black brother (James Earl Jones). Duvall sets out to meet his brother and events evolve from there.
This movie is very much a product of the 90s (both good and bad but mostly good) and it's just a very nice, fairly mundane character-study-slash-buddy-movie. It has the feel of a play. The premise (or the casting, really) is ridiculous Robert Duvall doesn't look mixed race in any respect, but if you get past that hurdle, it's excellent. I considered it like "Back to the Future" - you just have to accept that a DeLorean was made into a time machine and then you move on. The true highlight of the movie is simply seeing two great actors - Robert Duvall and James Earl Jones - acting together.
A few more notes: the script was written by Billy Bob Thornton - this is after he'd made the "Sling Blade" short but before "Sling Blade." Secondly, James Earle Jones was a lifelong stutterer though I never saw it in any form and I doubt you did either, but in this movie he uses it as part of his character. Finally, I just to have to get out that the title is terrible. It's so uninteresting and unmemorable - it may be the sole reason this movie is so obscure.
So there you go, I'm not saying this is a classic, it is not perfect, but it's a solid, charming movie from another era with two legendary leads and I really enjoyed it.
I was quite sure that I posted this in 2020 and I was quite sure that the video was taken down and that the link on my blog needed to be corrected, once a substitute was found. So here is the substitute, even though I now see no evidence that I ever posted it in the first place. Having memories of false posts is an annoying problem.
This is The Hu, a Mongolian metal band who are no longer new but put your mind back to 2020 and they were pretty new. The mixture of Mongolian throat singing with metal rhythms, plus the utilization of the Morin Khuur (horsehead fiddle) within a rock context is, if nothing else, extremely unique, you have to admit. What a tremendous and unexpected East-meets-West mash-up.
Of the songs of theirs that I've heard this is the only one that really hit me hard. It rocks.
Now let's all agree this post is real and definitely exists now.
