President Pryor's Convictions

I just watched a clip from The Richard Pryor Show where Pryor portrays himself as Jimmy Carter's successor-in-POTUS. I was struck not only by how many not-yet-stars there were (can you spot Robin Williams?), but also how the jokes had aged.

Set-up 1 (0:32): The worsening situation in the mid-east

• Punchline: There isn't any (ha-ha, Richard Pryor was being SERIOUS)
• Metapunch: It's 33 years later and this premise still works. Let's face it: it will always work. -_-

Set-up 2 (0:57): SALT/Neutron Bombs

• Punchline: Either Pryor misread his prompter, or something funny happened off-screen.
• Metapunch: Despite few ERWs, the US still has arms reduction talks with Russia and still has a President that can't go off-prompter. ZING!

Set-up 3 (1:43): ≤5% Unemployment

• Punchline: For minorities it's 45%! ...Ha?
• Metapunch: Annual-avg-unemployment wouldn't dip below 5% for another 20 years, since when it has nigh-doubled. The unemployment rate for Black people in America hovers 'round double the general population's, but in March it was "only" 7-tenths higher. So, yeah, way to play the race card over nothing, President Pryor.

Set-Up 4 (2:20): You just okayed a $250m increase in our space program

• Punchline: I think it's time Black people went to space. White people have been going to space for years, and "spacing out" on us, you might say. [blahblah] Miles Davis.
• Metapunch: First of all, wow, John Witherspoon in a suit. Second of all, three years later a Black person did reach space...a cosmonaut.[1] Thirdly, the current-POTUS still has plans for space travel, if not extra-galaxial.

Set-Up 5 (3:17): On your list of candidates for director of the FBI, are you including Huey Newton?

• Punchline: "Yes...he knows the ins and outs of the FBI."
• Metapunch: Newton's most lasting contribution to the next 33 years was probably being the inspiration for Huey Freeman.

Set-Up 6 (3:41): Blacks in the labor force

• Punchline: "I plan not only to have lots of Black quarterbacks, but we gon' have Black coaches and Black owners of teams...I'm tired of this mess that's been goin' down; ever since the Rams got rid of James Harris my jaw's been uptight. You know what I'm talkin' 'bout?"
• Metapunch: While Blackness isn't exactly a non-issue in the NFL, there have been lots of Black QBs and coaches. I don't think there have been any Black owners, though. Of course, the real president has better things to do than worry about professional American football...like worry about amateur American football.[2]

Set-up 7 (4:37): Mississipi Herald

• Punchline: President Pryor refuses to answer a journalist's question on the assumption he's from a racist organization.
• Metapunch: Obama obviously feels Ailes is out to get him, but even he recently sat down with Fox News.

Set-up 8 (4:48): A Christian Woman's News reporter asks if President Pryor will keep "courting" white women

• Punchline: "As long as I can keep it up. I mean, why you think they call it the White House?"
• Metapunch: The chick who asked this question was kinda hot.

Set-up 9 (5:34): Yo MOMMA

• Punchline: When you say bad things about a Black man's mother, he becomes angry.
• Metapunch: Obama had a teenage mother named Stanley who married an older man that was already married, then she dumped her kid off with her parents and ran off to Indonesia to further her career...YET THIS WASN'T AN ISSUE!

[1] I'm not saying it was better to be Black in the Soviet Union or Cuba than it was in America...I'm just sayin'. p_o

[2] The whole idea of Ebony sending a Black Muslim journalist — who then calls a silent Sarah Sandra Bernhard "Snow White" — to ask Obama about helping Black people get jobs...this sequence could just never happen today. I mean, really, Ebony having journalists? ¿Amirite? ^_^

The Good PokeShip Hippop[otas]

For a while I've considered The Muppet Wiki as the world's best fanwank after Das Trekkers' Memory-Alpha. But Fuck Yeah PokeMeme has me reading Bulbabedia a lot lately, and I gotta give those kids credit.

Following are my five favorite entries (ephhwiyi: I find these genuinely interesting p_^;;; )

• Legendary PokéMon, A to Z. DYK: The Weather Trio is based on the Old Testament?
• Cartoon characters' clothing. DYK: Ash pretended to be a girl to enter Celadon Gym?
• 130+ romantic relationships. DYK: 13 of the entries feature people/PokéMon pairs?
• CODs/Characters of the Day. DYK: Ash's combatant in EP076 was Pete Pebbleman?
• PokéMon World & Universe. DYK: Most game locations can be mapped onto Japan?
• A Catch Rate for a PokéMon. DYK: Rarity of finding a PokéMon is unrelated to this?

How could you NOT love that? I mean, besides not being a dork. But, if you're not a dork, how'd you even find this? Mad suss, son...

Which Brat is Wurst? [See what I did there?]

The children of sailors and marines are more likely to be called "juniors" than brats, so I understrand their low numbers. But, why are there so many hits for "Coast Guard Brat" and so few for "(Air Force or USAF)" brat? I wouldn't have figured the former a more transient lifestyle than the latter. And "National guard brat"??? Don't they always stay in their home state? It's not like the kids go with them to the theater of war...right? o_O

In Which I Clearly Started With a Tumblr Post

[image via yeezy]

Fact: kanYe had 6 Grammy nominations this year, giving him 36 in 6 years.

Fact: Quincy Jones holds the all-time record* in Grammy nominations, with 79.

Assumption: ∴ kanYe will hold the all-time record for Grammy nominations by 2018.

CONCLUSION: Deal with it, Taylor Swift. QUOD ERAT DEMONSTRANDUM

N.B.: kanYe has won 12 Grammys. George Solti is the all-time leader with 31 wins. kanYe's never catchin' that LAWL

A Triptychal Patch (i.e. "Three Updates")

1) The latest album from Britney Spears has pushed Kanye West's "808s & Heartbreak" out of The Top 10 Debut Weeks of the year (which should have included Taylor Swift).

2) Although it's not completely out of theaters — and is slated for re-release next year — with approximately 75 million tickets sold, The Dark Knight is now the third most-seen superhero movie (population adjusted), and most seen in absolute numbers.

3) Harvard (296 Ghits) & Princeton (295 Ghits) have leapfrogged Columbia to become the Ivy League domain-name most-associated with hipsters. Dartmouth slips to the bottom. Order otherwise unchanged.

Counting O{n, ut} Kanye

Last July, MTV.com had a story comparing demand for the latest Miley Cyrus album to Lil Wayne's "Tha Carter 3." Despite the fact that Cyrus bettered the first-week of sales of her previous album by 14%, the article noted this was nowhere close to Wayne's sales. Never mind that the oft-delayed "Carter III" was the first album in 3-and-a-half years to sell a million in one week — somehow Cyrus fans were supposed to be insatiable despite placing TWO Hanna Montana CDs in the Top 20 the year prior. I chalked this up to MTV sensationalism and tried to forget it.

Today, however, Billboard.com had a story projecting Kanye's latest album to sell a "disappointing" 450k units in its debut. Things to keep in mind:

1. Kanye's first 3 releases had been spaced apart over 2 years, but the space between "Graduation" & "808s & Heartbreak" was a little over a year. Indeed he was still touring based on his old albums while the "808s" singles were dropping.
   
2. He's SINGING IN AUTO-TUNE THROUGHOUT THE ENTIRE ALBUM. That's obviously going to polarize his fan base more than attract new people.
   
3. Searching Billboard.com is a pain. It'd be like if Variety kept different box office charts for different genres, mentioned ticket sales for the first few movies, then only ranked the rest.
4. This means he outsold "Chinese Democracy," an archetype of vaporwagner
   
5. 450k units is not bad. That would put Kanye in the Top 10 this year:

Kanye's actually about in line with other pop solo stars like Usher, Mariah Carey, and Beyoncé, whose 482k-unit week Billboard considered "whopping." Never mind Kanye outright outsold a lot of other singers, including Madonna, Janet Jackson, Jack Johnson, and, yup Miley Cyrus.

Joe Kelly Likes Pablo Neruda Puns

In the last episode of 'How I Met Your Mother', Ted -- while nude -- cites the following poem as being his favourite:


Get it? 'Cause it's about being nude!

Somewhere there must be someone else blogging about this. Not because HIMYM has a sizable Spanish-speaking audience[1], but because its Nielsen sample ratings among 18-49 year-olds consistently put it on par with 'The Office.' Those are the bloggers, right?

Or maybe the bloggers are the people with DVRs that can over-analyze every frame. Does that mean somewhere there is a dedicated '90210' online fandom like for Chisme Chica and SPN?

[1] Tangentially, it has a very white cast for a show set in Manhattan.

Super Tix for Hero Pix

Superman (1978), Batman (1989), and Spider-Man (2002) each broke box-office weekend records. Adjusting for inflation, theater counts or population growth may mitigate the impressive intakes of other comic book blockbusters, but not those three. Today The Dark Knight has set a new mark for weekend ticket sales, putting it in deceptively good position to join the pantheon.

Top 25 Comic Book Movies by Tickets Sold[1]

Batman's 10.2-million-tickets opening bested previous record-holder 1984's Temple of Doom by nearly 50%.[2] Yet, while one in every 24 Americans[3] saw Batman on its opening weekend, one in every 13.5 saw The Dark Knight.

≈96% as many people saw The Dark Knight this weekend as saw 1997's Batman & Robin in its entire run (23.4 mil). Previous record-holder Spider-Man 3's opening run represented a whopping 45% of its total; similar attrition for The Dark Knight would bring in 51 million tickets, surpassing ...Begins (32 mil), ...Returns (39 mil), and ...Forever (42 mil) to become the 2nd most-seen Batman movie.

Catching the original Batman would require the sale of 38 million more tickets. 47 million more would match Spider-Man's 69-million-mark, which is the 2nd-highest this decade, but — as Shrek 2 proved — doable even for a sequel. To match Superman's being seen by one-in-every-3.88 Americans, however, The Dark Knight would have to sell 56 million more. At today's prices, that would be a haul of $540 million, smack dab between Star Wars: A New Hope and Titanic.


[1] Sources:
Box office data -- http://boxofficemojo.com/genres/chart/?id=comicbookadaptation.htm
Monthly Population 1978-1999 -- http://www.census.gov/popest/archives/1990s/nat-total.txt
Monthly Population 2000-2007 -- http://www.census.gov/popest/national/NA-EST2007-01.html
July 2008 Population -- http://www.census.gov/main/www/popclock.html
[2] Coincidentally Ghostbuster II set the box office revenue record in the prior week and Returns would end up breaking it yet again.
[3] Box office numbers we see include Canada, so this ratio is ntrinsically flawed. Of course, the ticket sales themselves are just estimates and can't account for such variables as discounted prices (eg children) per picture. This is all just an excuse to post a pretty chart, though. p_^

Hipster of Their Domain

The City's Spoony Bard

14 years ago[1], there was a Saturday morning cartoon about a blue superhero who used "spoon" as a battlecry. Even now — for a certain class of people — "spoon" conjures up images of a valiant warrior going into battle against villains with chairs for faces, Mad Bombers What Bomb at Midnight, and Soviet-made computers that speak like vaqueros.

Suffice to say, it was one of the best shows ever made in the history of showmaking, and you can tell by the fact that someone, somewhere, typed spoon out to 97 o's[2]. Here's a graph of Google hits yesterday for "sp[o^x]," where 3≤x≤100[3].

[1] Judging by the fact that I was watching Saturday Morning Cartoons only 14 years ago, would you guess that am I young , immature, or both?
[2] I accidentally skipped 63 Os when I was making the graphic, so if you count backwards from 100 Os you'll get the wrong number. /")_("\
[3] Google hits where x=2 were ≈31.6 million, at x=1 it's ≈7.4 million and for x=0 it's ≈10.8 million (S.P.N. is a surprisingly popular name.)

ポケモン Movie Money (OR Squirtle Sequel Specie)

***
In honor of the Transformer DVD's release today, the fact that I spent at least an hour today sending messages from Optimus Prime, and being too upset over 松坂 大輔, to watch baseball, I figure now's a good time to explore the latter half of Google Docs & Spreadsheets.

***

South Korea, Mainland China and Japan were far-and away the largest non-English markets for Michael Bay's Transformers, and in that order. My surprise at this has three layers of diminishing affiliation to anthropomorphic automobiles:
1) Transformers is based on Japanese toys, the cartoon had more iterations in Japan than it did in the US, and the Japanese localization also roped in old voice actor[s?], yet in Japan it grossed less than half of either Pirates or Potter. In the US, it outgrossed them both.
2) For some reason I assumed Japan was a more sophisticated movie marketplace than Korea. However, through October 7th, the Japanese box office is averaging ≈$14M[1] a week for 21 movies, and RoK $16M on a whopping 60 movies.
3) 'Pokémon 2007' was the #6 movie in Japan when Transformers opened. All told it's made ≈$42M, a good $8M more than Transformers grossed there.

Even considering residual hype from the 2006 release of Nintendo DS PokéMon games, such revenue seemed really high; at the time it was Japan's biggest home-grown hit.[2] I went back to see how the other films in the series did.

[3]

Guess it's that's not that weird after all.

Next time, 宮崎 駿 v ゴジラ, the Fantastic Four Double-Feature in Korea, Stomp-ing the Yard in Japan, and Tonic Google Presentations.

[1]US Dollars (exchange rates perplex me). FTR: the PRC's weekly average is 9 movies and 45.8M 圆/圓
[2]Since surpassed by Hero, an adaptation of the same-named TV series
[3] Grosses 2003-2007 are from Japan only.

The Non-Revolution Sparked by St Elmo's Fire[1]

Box Office Mojo's list of the top "Twentysomething" movies displays something curious: the top two movies -- St Elmo's Fire and About Last Night...-- are from the mid-80s. Mind you, these are unadjusted grosses; those two sold twice as many tickets as the nearest competitor: 1994's Reality Bytes. According to this list, there wasn't anything approaching a hit between 1994 and 2004's Garden State. What happened?

Caveat#1: Some of the movies on the list did well outside of theaters, and/or built up cult followings. The fact that Clerks and Before Sunrise both received sequels is testament to this.

Caveat#2: The list is incomplete. A distinction should be made between movies about people who happen-to-be-in-their-twenties and movies about coming to terms with adulthood, but even that narrower definition certainly applies to more than 29 films over the past 27 years. Knocked Up immediately comes to mind, and it's sold more tickets than St Elmo's Fire and About Last Night combined.

The notion that Demi Moore and Rob Lowe could carry two Twentysomething movies in consecutive years and not be followed by copycats seems inexplicable. Even Clerks begat Telling You (not to mention Waiting).[2]

At the same time, I don't know if I can think about many Twentysomething movies that did well, Knocked Up and The Graduate aside. It's entirely possible that some St Elmo's-lite[3] happened and bombed, escaping the BoM editors' notice. The reason for all this still eludes me, though. What is it about post-college coming of age stories that are unappealing to Boomers, Gen Xers, and Millennials alike? Or is it the producers who shy away, aiming broader with high school comedies and midlife weepers? Could the fact that we still need to grow up even after we "graduate" be too depressing a concept to dramatize?


[1] Watching I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With put me in the mood to listen to "Rod Stewart Sings the American Songbook," of all things, but the first song that popped up was "Some Guys Have All the Luck," and I got in an eighties mood instead. Hence my viewing of St Elmo's Fire, which started out as a standard Ti'No article, but became this (in no small part because St Elmo's Fire must already have been covered by nostalgic bloggers ad wackseum). My notes on that never-to-be entry can be viewed [warning: cussin!] here.
[2]Why isn't there are quarter-life crisis keyword on IMDb? I tried combining keywords to get there, but no dice. I did discover that slackers and yuppies can coexist.
[3]Acknowledging that St Elmo's Fire:The Big Chill::Summer:Ethan Frome

Where Was Kang? OR Token July Post!

I slapped together Box Office Mojo's separate lists of TV-to-film adaptations -- Cartoon-to-Cartoon, Cartoon-to-Live Action, and Live Action-to-Live Action[1] -- to see how The Simpsons Movie stacks up. At current estimates, it has the highest opening-weekend gross[2]:

The Simpsons Movie $71,850,000 7/27/07
Mission: Impossible II $70,616,300 5/24/00
Mission: Impossible $67,641,300 5/22/96
Scooby-Doo $61,332,500 6/14/02
Charlie's Angels $48,988,100 11/3/00

Even more surprising, of the 56 cartoon-to-film transitions BoxOfficeMojo's tracked since 1980, The Simpsons Movie already has the 14th-highest total gross[adj]:

The Flintstones $205,477,300 5/27/94
Scooby-Doo $173,610,300 6/14/02
Casper $151,760,800 5/26/95
George of the Jungle $150,900,300 7/18/97
The Rugrats Movie $139,477,700 11/20/98
Inspector Gadget $126,163,900 7/23/99
Popeye $121,872,000 12/12/80
Pokemon: The 1st Movie $110,927,500 11/10/99
Rugrats in Paris $92,925,900 11/17/00
Beavis and Butt-Head $92,1877,00 12/20/96
SpongeBob SquarePants $90,357,400 11/19/04
Scooby-Doo 2 $89,234,600 3/26/04
Garfield: The Movie $79,860,200 6/11/04
The Simpsons Movie $71,8500,00 7/27/07
South Park $67,403,000 6/30/99

A few things about that list (and f00 things about the data set):
1) The Simpsons Movie made more in its first weekend than Bigger, Longer, Uncut made in its whole run.
2) Popeye, Beavis & Butt-Head Do America, and George of the Jungle made a lot more than I remember.
3) Box Office Mojo doesn't think Transformers ($287M) and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles ($210M[adj]) count as TV-to-film adaptations.
π) MST3K ($1.5M), Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy ($3.95M), and Batman: Mask of the Phantasm ($8.9M), made less combined than the opening weekend of the 1994's Little Rascals ($15.8M).[3] In fact, MST3K has the fourth lowest overall gross of the 117 movies in the set.[4]

Given how much of its gross was due to upfront demand, The Simpsons Movie is a longshot to surpass The Flinstones, so there's no way it's getting to the dataset's overall leader: The Fugitive ($292M[adj]). I'd go into where its chances stand in terms of animation-in-general, but then I'd have to contemplate the possibility of Shrek the Third grossing 150% of Ratatouille,[5] and that's just not right.


[1] Why aren't there Live Action-to-Cartoon adaptation? I would argue that 'Clone Wars' was better than AotC, Fox Kids' 'Godzilla' was better than Tristar's G.I.N.O., and I have fuzzily fond memories of 'Teen Wolf.'
[2] Inflation-adjusted, 'natch.
[3] All Ibid.
[4] カウボーイビバップ 天国の扉,, 劇場版ポケットモンスター 水の都の護神 ラティアスとラティオス,, and Gumby bring up the rear.
[5] Not counting foreign box-office, which is going down in my list of future-entry-ideas, along with comparing the Marx Bros & Cary Grant Monkey Business-es and concocting an "Everybody Votes" Omnibus.

TransFanwanking (OR Autobot Apologetics)

My housemates were discussing an AP article on Orson Welles and Transformers[1], and one displayed shock that Transformers the Movie made ≈$6 million. It was a bust for a many reasons, but the thing to note is that animation in general had just finished bottoming out in 1986. The highest-grossing cartoon that year was Amblin's initial animation effort An American Tail,[2] which didn't even break the annual top 10; Disney made more off its Lady and the Tramp re-release than it did with the Independence Day debut of The Great Mouse Detective.

Never heard of The Great Mouse Detective? Time to put Walt Disney [Feature] Animation Studios in context. Here's the original-release and adjusted grosses of all Disney cartoons since Uncle Walt awakened to the life immortal:

Title (Original Release Date)------------Original Gross---Inflation-Adjusted Gross
The Jungle Book (1967)--------------------------------$73,741,048----$404,346,747
[3]
The Rescuers (1977)------------------------------------$29,000,000---$85,569,507
The Fox and the Hound (1981)------------------------$39,000,000---$92,309,353
The Black Cauldron (1985)----------------------------$21,288,692----$39,459,040
The Great Mouse Detective (1986)-------------$25,336,794--$44,936,955
Oliver & Company (1988)-----------------------------$53,279,055----$85,298,341
The Little Mermaid (1989)----------------------------$84,355,863---$139,814,000
The Rescuers Down Under (1990)--------------------$27,931,461----$43,448,939
Beauty and the Beast (1991)---------------------------$145,863,363--$227,976,468
Aladdin[π] (1992)----------------------------------------$217,350,219--$528,161,032

Disney was only just getting out of some 20 year-doldrums. The Smurfs and Care Bears had moderate success translating to the big screen — The Care Bears Movie actually made more than The Black Cauldron — but most cartoons of the 80s pulled in poor box office numbers. Cartoons released into 400+ theaters averaged a $2.24 million gross. In the 90s, there were over twice as many 400+ cartoons, and they averaged $5.84 million. There were more 400+ cartoons from 2000 to 2006 alone, and they averaged $8.72 million. Even accepting that current ticket prices are 2.4x those in 1980, it's clear there's simply a bigger market for animation then, even if none of it is has fire-breathing robotic dinosaurs that can fly.

Back to my housemates: they suggested that the forthcoming Transformers[4] is intended for people who could remember the first cartoon, and I brought up the fact that Shia Labeouf is getting to be a bankable star for precisely those people that couldn't tell Optimus from Opie. I don't know enough about the toy market — I mean, really, knights are popular??? — to track those trends, but I'd say the base for Transformers nostalgia can't be very big. Unlike Harry Potter there isn't a creepily large contemporary base, unlike LoTR the story was too vapid to keep people interested,[5] and it hardly has the pedigree of any superhero movie this side of Mystery Men. When the director is suggesting people would rather die than watch the '86 movie[6], you can't seriously believe Dreamworks is wooing anybody with a soft spot for Stan Bush.

For now I'm inclined to believe that there's nothing like Transformers: it's a movie built on an awesome premise that was almost never well-executed and has minimal staying power. I'm also inclined to end this post because it is long and increasingly esoteric.

[1]Personally I prefer my paper on Orson Welles and The Incredibles
[2]Which of course lead Don Bluth to believe he could beat Disney at its own game. Let us hope Chris Sanders learns from his mistakes.
[3]BoxOfficeMojo doesn't have the grosses for The Aristocats (1970), Robin Hood (1973), or The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (1977)
[π]At which point Disney "realized" if it made pop-cultural references for the old-folks, it could be entertaining for more than just kids, meeting its logical end in the surprisingly charming but nonetheless unprofitable Emperor's New Groove. Then for some reason they decided to make aesthetically unpleasing action movies like Atlantis (cel-shaded CGI is boring), and Shrek latched onto the pop-culture-caboose, putting Spielberg back above Disney for the first time since...An American Tail! ... Well, I think that's funny.
[4]Produced by Steven Spielberg. Dun-dun-dun.
[5]No offense to Bob Forward and other folks behind 'Beast Wars.' Seriously, it was good stuff.
[6]Wired used "urtext"? +3. +Less Than Three, even.

Raise Your Hand if You've Seen 'The Adventures of Ford Fairlane'

In full on MSM-hater/symbiosis mode:

The Los Angeles Times made a list of 8 "summer sleepers," in anticipation of Knocked Up being the next one[1]:

1) 40 Year-Old Virgin (8/19/05)
2) Wedding Crashers (7/1505)
3) Mean Girls (4/30/04)
4) My Big Fat Greek Wedding (4/19/02)
5) The Sixth Sense (8/6/99)
6) There's Something About Mary (7/15/98)
7) Forrest Gump (7/6/94)
8) Ghost (7/13/90)

I'm not going to suggest additions but I did double-check to see if these movies were really unexpected hits. For example, Mean Girls was the widest release on the weekend it opened and the 4th widest release in April[2]. Calling Mean Girls one of the greatest summer sleepers of all time is like calling Disturbia the same because both had no real competition.[3] With the MTV Movie Awards coming up tomorrow, it also reminds me that Shia LaBeouf was once just "That curly-haired kid from Holes[4] with the thing for Lindsay Lohan."[5]

Ghost is the one choice that really enlightened me. It was the number 2 grossing movie of 1990 — behind the juggernaut Home Alone — but had the 71st biggest opening. Of the 70 opening wider, I can remember seeing about 20 in theaters, and of the other 154 below it, I saw but one (Fantasia) in theaters and can at least recognize only 5 others.[6] Point being, Ghost really did come out of nowhere, and, furthermore, I'm probably not going to remember Mr Brooks in 2024. As is, I've already forgotten everything else Kevin Costner did between and Thirteen Days and The Guardian.[7]

[1] Although it seems paradoxical (if not quite oxy-moronic), I can't convince myself that something shouldn't still be a sleeper if everyone picks it to be, and for that I blame Bill Simmons
[2] Behind 13 Going on 30, Kill Bill vol. 2 and Home on the Range, the last of which I really do still plan to review.
[3] Disturbia was acutally this April's widest release. 2, 3, & 4 were Are We Done Yet?, Firehouse Dog[!], and Next.
[4] /'Even Stevens' which I assure you I never watched. Really. ¬_¬
[5] Just My Luck, Prairie Home Companion & Georgia Rule COMBINED made less than 'Disturbia.' Let's not even speculate on Surf's Up, Transformers, and Indy freakin-4. Considering how things have been going for him, I'm surprised LaBeouf doesn't have Justin Long's role in Live Free or Die Hard to boot.
[6] Mo Better Blues, House Party, Dances with Wolves, The Freshman, Green Card, and Edward Scissor Hands.
[7] Ooooh...stylin on Kevin Costner? I'm mad edgy, manky.

LeBron James ♥s Unicorns

Thanks to my supposedly-professional interest in pictures, I've taken to scouring delimages, a site that indexes graphics based on del.icio.us[1] tags. It's not the first time I developed an affinity for an image-aggregator; I've spent far too many hours of my life playing around on decontextualized LiveJournal image generators. What makes delimages different is[2] two things:

α) Since del.icio.us is already a link-list — albeit one created by people and not robots — and is automatically integrated with fellow-Yahoo! Brand Flickr[3], delimages is a third-order-aggregation. Pump them all through some Pipes and you'll have constructed one fancy echo-chamber. As is, I'm solidly a part of the Google Ecosystem, so I'm fine with just delimages, but the recursive possibilities certainly amuse me.

β) "venilla_pdy" has a Russel's Teapot comic that mentions unicorns being in Numbers 22:23. I checked the King James Bible and, apparently, unicorns get mentioned nine times. Near as I can tell this is one translation of the Hebrew "re'em"/"rimu" which might refer to an ox, or something. Frankly, I'm a fan of cryptozoological bestiaries, so, sure, maybe most unicorns are sideways oryxes, maybe mermaids are manatees, maybe dragons are just rationalizations of dinosaur bones, but wouldn't life be grander if they were real? They don't have to have magical powers or anything; I may be silly but I'm not crazy.

[1] I can't decide if not knowing what del.icio.us is makes this entry more interesting or more opaque.
[2] "are"? Can "what" be plural?
[3] There's some question whether Flickr is the biggest photo site or not. Comscore says it has the biggest unique audience. Hitwise says it's 3rd in hits. Yahoo! Photos says Yahoo! Photos is "the largest," but can we really trust them? Okay, I'm giving myself a Oh-Wait-I'm-Not-a-Real-N3RD headache with all this website-traffic-metric talk. @_@

Wii Users Smell Nice

It turns out I was wrong: most Wii-voters (51.5%) wear perfume or cologne. For women this rate is 64.4% and for men it is 46.6%. What this shows is that the vast majority of Wii-voters (≈72.5) are men[1] and a little under half of these men are emasculated dandies. Nice job proving the haters wrong, guys.

Honestly, I'm just bitter that I've guessed incorrectly on 5 of the last 7 polls. Apparently buses, doppelgängers, coffee shops (as places to read) and — global poll alert! — heat aren't nearly as popular as I thought. With the global poll, generally hot countries didn't like heat and cold countries didn't like the cold[3]. The grass is always greener...

As a check, I looked at the global Wiilectorate's sex ratio, and men are once again the vast majority (≈70.8%[2]). Learning this mitigates my prognosticatory pessimism, as does the hilariously low prediction success rate of my fellow amateur statisticians (40.3%).

The current crop of questions includes: "Have you weighed yourself in the last month?" and "Is there such a thing as a soul mate?" on which I am predicting "No" for the former and "Yes" for the latter. Presumably Wii-men are just romantic enough to believe in an ineffable and inimitable connection to another human being, but still don't care about their health because, after all, they're spending their time voting through Wiis. Although, considering their 2:1 preference for trees over coffee shops, maybe Wiivoters are both Romantic AND romantic[5] enough to head outdoors.

Let's not forget: Wii is its own workout. @ Brian: I feel your pain (literally[6]).

[1] If ♂% of all Wii-voters are men then .466♂+.644(1-♂)=.515 —> -.178♂+.644=.515 —> .129=.178♂ —> 72.5≈♂
[2] If ♂% of all global Wii-voters are men then .530♂+.465(1-♂)=.511 —> .065♂+.465=.511 —> .065♂=.046 —> 70.8≈♂
[3][4] See: The amazing desultory YouTube clip I've embedded, which is scored with a sped-up version of the 'Dynasty' theme for no real reason
[4] How badly did the out-of-order footnotes mess with your head?
[5] Who thought Vin Diesel and Wesley Snipes were "ugly" enough to get on that list‽ Preposterous. p_^
[6] In the past, at least; I'm in a deep enough MLB withdrawal to play the GCN 2k6 >_<

Contemplating a Fandom-Lead Critique of Canon

Thousand Year Door has been tough for me to get through because it seems designed to avoid/prevent grinding, and I'm very big on over-preparation.[1] I want to ditch it altogether and go onto Super Paper Mario, but I need to follow protocol. However, leaving the ol' blogspot lying fallow all week has left me feeling like an absentee landlord, so I provide two fillers:

1) Nearly three weeks ago I promised to report on a Wii-pole and, per my prediction, Wii-voters prefer comedy movies (62%) to action (38%) ones. More to the point, I wondered what this would say about the gendering of the Wiilectorate, as men would obviously be more likely to prefer action.[2] Indeed 42.2% of Wii-men prefer action to comedy, while only 25.5% of Wiiwomen do. The most interesting thing out of all this is that only 58.4% correctly predicted the preference, which means some good chunk of people who prefer comedy thought they were weird outliers. Come on people: try some statistical analysis of box office receipts, why don'cha[3]

Another current question asks if Wiivoters wear perfume and/or cologne, which will test the metrosexuality of Wii-men. I'm torn between the stereotypical wussyness of Wii-owners and the stereotypical poor hygiene of gamers, but I'm going with the latter. For the record, I'm 21 for 26 with predictions.[4]

2) Even though Comcast claimed to have the final Spider-Man 3 trailer last month, on Thursday "Trailer 4" popped up on Apple's Trailer site. It's pretty much the same thing as what's on the Comcast site, but they use different clips of the villain Venom. At first I decided to write an entire post about this, but then I was reminded of this XKCD comic.

With Spider-Man 3, Transformers, and — to a lesser extent — The Simpsons Movie and The Order of the Phoenix — young professionals are seeing their fandoms realized on the screen in a big way this summer. Although fandom has been allowed to take over the official before,[5] the fandoms I was part of haven't. Venom is coeval with my interest in comics and Transformers: The Movie has been my favorite video to watch for the past two decades years; I am fairly certain I know more about these characters than any of the screenwriters, but do I know more about it than the reviewers? The depth of niche knowledge that some reviewers have never ceases to amaze me.

So, I wonder, is there a professional reviewer out there who will invoke Todd McFarlane and Erik Larsen when describing the CGI in Spider-Man 3, or will debate picking Peter Cullen over Gary Chalk to voice Optimus Prime in Transformers?

[1] It's what makes me a such a great PokeMaster, but that's a story for Tuesday.
[2] One could quibble about the masculinity of Men-who-use-Wiis — or Women-who-play-video games for that matter — but I will only do so through apophasis.
[3] Based on Box Office Guru and IMDb data from July 1997 through November 2003. I had yet to discover the beauty that is BoxOfficeMojo.
[4] Who knew so many people owned furry fish?
[5] FTR, I don't claim to add anything to what people already know about the interplay between fandom and "canon."

Jody Rosen is DEFINITELY Stylin' on Akon

Back in my grad school days, I performed [warning: cussin!] a Foucaldian analysis of Akon and Snoop Dogg's I Wanna [fsck] You, which is to say I've thought about their music critically, and recently. I'm thus not so surprised that Slate's resident Christgau[1] would come out against Akon so vehemently. He holds that Akon's stardom arose due to the short-attention span of both modern music technology (i.e. the ringtone) and the cultural Zeitgeist (e.g. this blog). However, not only was Akon already a star, but Rosen's got the causality on ringtones and popularity completely bass ackwards.

This is, essentially, my gripe with NYTimes take on Timbaland[2], but remixed. Nobody's stepping up to defend Akon's lyrics, and one could argue Rosen didn't go far enough in hating on Akon's, let's say, retrogressive writing style. What people need to acknowledge is that just because a guy doesn't chart #1 on Billboard, doesn't mean he's not a big deal.

Hitting up the good-ol-RIAA database, we see Akon went platinum with his debut album, and he had three gold singles: "Locked Up," "Lonely," and "Bonanza." Now, this was in 2005, a year when The Game came in #16th despite going double-platinum. Akon came in 66th, above Rod Steward but below Hilary Duff. Those two slices of bread in the Akon sandwich are stars, right? So why isn't Akon?

Rosen does make a stronger argument than "Akon is star;" he's saying Akon is the preeminent superstar, that nobody else can really touch him right now. I'm going to consciously hate on Rosen twice here: Akon's not "B-List" but he's not the best-n-brightest either. He basically lucked into a hot song with "I Wanna [fsck] You," he had Eminem's blessing on "Smack That" and "Don't Matter" — while no way better than the chimpunk-Pole of "Lonely" — simply requires less self-loathing to listen to than other current Top of the Pops cohabitants like Fergie, Mims, Avril, and Timberlake.

For further proof Akon's style isn't emblematic of the e-era, look no further than the Billboard Ringtone chart, on which "Don't Matter" isn't even outselling "Locked Up," and both are buried in the 20s. Rosen's whole "Lord of the Ringtone" hook doesn't make any sense when you consider that, Buckherry, Gym Class Heroes, Henry Mancini, and 近藤 浩治, are all beating Akon. Next week that may change, but, at least when I'm writing, he was hardly dominant, and the other ringtones don't really seem like catalysts for anything. In fact, the most recent song in the Top 10 right now is "Cupid's Chokehold," which has been charting for 9 weeks, but the song is over 2 years old. Are we going to blame ringtones both for the hip-hop braggadocio's invasion of "R&B"[3] and for emo-tion couched in a rapper's cadence?

[1] I.e. How do I describe Jody Rosen? This is why all online papers should have bios.
[2] Revisiting that, arguably Sanneh was right about Timbaland not being a star, as he only shipped ≈140k units his opening week. Granted, he had the 2nd best digital-single opening ever, but it's no coincidence that the #1 song is another Justin[ / ]Timberland-track.
[3] Pretty much code for "Black people singing." Akon ain't exactly Fats Domino.

Worldwide Wii Poll #f00: The Future

I'm prepping for the release of Super Paper Mario by giving its GCN predecessor a test-run. This requires firing up the not-so-ol' Wii, and I love checking out the Everybody Votes "channel." As a bit of a numbers n3rd, I'm always trying to uncover variations hidden by the macro yes/no numbers. DYK:

—Michigan and Kentucky really love basketball, but Vermont is non-plussed
—Puerto Ricans have weird teeth-brushing habits
—Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado residents are the only ones that prefer mountains to beaches.[1]
—Females are significantly more likely than males to think a woman will win 'American Idol'

I bring this up because the latest result fascinates me: 58.9% of Wii users worldwide[2] would rather know their own future than the planet's future. Given humans' tendency to ignore what happens past their lifetime, that shouldn't be surprising. The funny part is which countries are most self-interested: Austria, Germany, US & the UK. We all know the US is selfish, and the UK just bites America's style. Austria and Germany, though? While the obvious joke to make here is about WWI alliances, this breaks down once you consider that the US didn't really care about Europe's infighting until Germany courted Mexico and that, in any case, I have heard only one funny joke about WWI.

For the record, Denmark, Scandinavia, and Portugal are running the bottom. I presume Scandinavia just cares about global warming. Portugal, I don't know, I'm lost. There's something funny in all this; I just can't find it yet.

On the current round of polls, I would rather meet Einstein than Edison, prefer the window to the aisle, and am pretty sure comedy beats the action. The last one is a real test of the Wii's gendering, though. I'll make sure to check back in four days from now. Meanwhile, much respect for/hate on "Mark" for getting to Everybody Votes before I. Honestly, I wanted to cover this in print but I can't convince an editor[3] that it's important enough.

[1] New Mexico seems torn. So much for "the grass is always" greener, non?
[2] The non-response bias on these questions may be crazy high, and without sample size the polls' validities are anyone's guess, but I don't feel like qualifying the statement more than I already have so nyaaaah.
[3] Of course, I just barely convinced myself it was worth blogging about.