February | 2009 | Cavalcade of Awesome

Archive for February, 2009

Weekly Geeks 2009-07 – Interview with Barney Stinson

Posted in books, How I Met Your Mother, TV shows, Weekly Geeks with tags How I Met Your Mother, TV shows, Weekly Geeks on February 27, 2009 by Paxton

Weekly Geeks, time, people. You, in the back, take that iPod off or I’ll strangle you to death with the headphone cord. Pay attention.

Okay, this week’s theme is “A Character Conversation”. They want you to pick your favorite character from a book and invite them to your blog for an interview. Not a bad idea. I remember doing this exercise in one of my Honors English classes. Yes, I realize I could just say “english class” and not include the Honors, but a) I want you to know I took Honors English because I’m needy and shallow like that and b)…well, there is no b), I pretty much covered my reasons in a).

Anywho, I had several characters I could choose from but I’ve decided to invite one of my heroes, Barney Stinson, to The Cavalcade for an interview. Barney can be seen on the CBS TV show, How I Met Your Mother. However, Barney also penned the bestseller The Bro Code along with Matt Kuhn. I read The Bro Code last month and was thoroughly entertained. I thought this could be a dynamite interview.

Continue reading →

7 Comments »

My Own Album Cover and Action Comics #1 goes up for sale

Posted in comic books, random, Superman with tags comic books, personal, Superman on February 27, 2009 by Paxton

Okay, had an interesting week this week. Work and personal stuff kept me from typing a proper article. So, I have a potpourri of stuff to talk about today. The first is a cool email exercise that creates your own personal album cover, including band name and album title. It’s totally random and uses Wikipedia and Flickr to find the info. It was first sent to me by my friend Steve and I’ve passed it along. Here are the instructions:

1 – Go to Wikipedia. Hit “random”
or click http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first Wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.

2 – Go to Quotations Page and select “random quotations”
or click http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last few words of the very last quote is the album title.

3 – Go to Flickr and click on “explore the last seven days”
or click http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days
Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

4 – Mash it all together.

5 – Post it, with this text and TAG the friends you want to join in. (Or just the ones that you think might have the skills to know how to do this – that is why I tagged these people!)

So, without further ado, here is my album cover. My band name is Run Like Hell and the album’s name is “Doing Something Interesting”.

Continue reading →

8 Comments »

Kick ass alternative covers for books and movies

Posted in Back to the Future, books, Harry Potter, movies, ninjas, Penguin Classics, pop culture with tags advertising, books, movies on February 20, 2009 by Paxton

Last week I did a Weekly Geeks theme in which I discussed several alternate, foreign book covers for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. It was cool doing the research for that and while looking around I came across several other alternate book covers that were so cool I had to share them here.

The covers we’ll look at today are different than the Harry Potter covers, though. The book covers I am going to show you today are entirely fan created by graphics artists. They create them because they are a fan of design and there are several initiatives on their blogs and in Flickr where they create these designs just to stay sharp and keep up on their designing skills. These book covers may not be real, but they rock. They look entirely professional, like some publisher actually created these and are selling them somewhere. Don’t go thinking they are available in some crazy limited edition in Uruguay, and I had to traipse my lazy, white ass through the Uruguayan jungles to find these little treasures. I didn’t, I barely want to traipse my ass to the fridge for another Girl Scout Cookie. I’m not going to Uruguay for a book. However, if these books were real, I would be very tempted to try.

So let’s start off with cover redesigns from the series I talked about last week; Harry Potter (click the images for larger versions).

Continue reading →

6 Comments »

Gate River Run: My declaration of intent

Posted in Gate River Run, life, personal, running with tags exercise, personal, running on February 16, 2009 by Paxton

Jacksonville’s biggest (read “Most Popular”) race is the Gate River Run (click image up top for more info). I”ve been lurking around the event since I started running several years ago. However, I’ve been too chicken to actually sign up and run it, preferring to only run 5K races. Well, the wife got fed up with me saying that someday I would do it so she pretty much has forced me to do it under threat of spousal violence (ie kicking my ass).

So, I officially started training this past week and I turned in my entry form on Saturday. And just to keep myself honest, I’m making a delcaration of intent to the 3 readers who randomly happen by my blog looking for info about the Hula Burger. I’ll be running the Gate River Run 15K (9.3 miles) on March 14, 2009. It’s possible I may (repeat MAY) try to parlay this into a half-marathon by the end of the year. We’ll see.

Today is President’s Day. My wife, as a first grade teacher, has today off so I decided to also take it off so we can spend it together. Have a good day whether you have it off or not. I’ll be back in a day or so with another article.

11 Comments »

Weekly Geeks 2009-05 – Alternate book covers

Posted in books, Harry Potter, pop culture, Weekly Geeks with tags advertising, books, Harry Potter, Weekly Geeks on February 12, 2009 by Paxton

There’s a very cool blog site called Weekly Geeks. Every week it posts a theme that you can do on your own blog. I’ve somewhat passively watched this for a year or so and have debated about following along on this blog. I’ve enjoyed many of the themes they come up with and I especially enjoyed watching other bloggers execute the theme.

This week’s theme is called Judge a Book By It’s Cover. You pick one of your favorite books and talk about the different covers that have been released for that book. Here’s this week’s explanation:

This week it’s all about judging books by their covers! Pick a book–any book, really–and search out multiple book cover images for that book. They could span a decade or two (or more)…Or they could span several countries. Which cover is your favorite? Which one is your least favorite? Which one best ‘captures’ what the book is about?

the bookworm did a great job with Gone With the Wind on her blog. I thought it was a really fun idea so I’m going to try doing this myself. It’s pretty simple and easier to do than a full article, so I’m going to try it.

My pick is going to be my favorite book in the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. I’m not going to show all the different covers, because we’d be here until I keeled over on the keyboard dead before we could finish it all, but there are some very interesting covers for this book. Here are a few of the coolest/most interesting.

This is obviously the American version of the Harry Potter 6 cover. I like all the green and the scene depicted shows Dumbledore and Harry gazing into the pensieve. A very ominous, but great looking cover.