Spock arrived last week and we got to spend the weekend together. I showed him the sights of Jacksonville and we bonded. It was nice.
Eclectorama is going to post a few of my pictures from this weekend as he’s the Spockcation host. But I’ll go ahead and show you guys a few of the pics with some commentary. If you want to see more of these pics head to my Spockcation 2009 Flickr set. Click the below images to make them BIGGER.
While waiting around for me to get home from work Spock had lots of time to read. Surprisingly, his reading choices did not deviate from reading about himself. The dude is a narcissist.
Well, Michael Jackson was pronounced dead yesterday at 50 years old. Very sad. I loved Michael Jackson during the ’80s and ’90s. The guy was a phenomenal performer, whose career success and problems later in life mirrored fellow superstar, Elvis Presley.
Jackson’s most popular album, Thriller, was released in late 1982. It earned Jackson a record breaking 7 Grammy awards and stayed in the Billboard Top Ten for over a year. Seven of the album’s nine songs were released as singles. The videos for Beat It, Billie Jean and Thriller have become industry classics. Michael Jackson’s performance on the TV special Motown 25 in 1983 cemented his status as a performing sensation and kept Thriller on the top of the charts.
I posted back in April that I was a part of Eclectorama’s Spockcation 2009. Spockcation 2009 involves a 12″ Spock action figure traveling abroad and getting his picture taken in tons of different cities. As of two days ago, Spock has arrived at my place. I’ll be spending the next week hanging out with him. I have some fun places for us to visit. Maybe we’ll visit the beaches and scope for chicks, maybe visit Jacksonville Memorial Stadium where the Jacksonville Jags play, maybe I’ll even challenge him to a drinking contest because we all know Vulcans can’t hold their liquor. We’ll see where the week takes us.
It’s time to get rowdy like a 1st grade classroom. I’ll post the pics of the aftermath of our Vulcan Olympics next week.
20 Years ago today, June 23, 1989, Tim Burton’s first Batman film with Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson was released in theaters.
The release of this movie in 1989 was an event not seen probably since the release of Return of the Jedi in 1983. The merchandising and hype leading up to this movie was at near-Star Wars levels. There were daily news stories, TV specials, t-shirts, hats, posters, toys, product tie-ins etc. The bat signal was seen everywhere. People were talking about missing work to see it opening day.
I totally bought into the Batman hype that summer; hook, line and sinker. I was so excited I bought the movie novelization and read it before I saw the movie. I still have that novel as well as every other Batman movie novelization after it.
A Batman movie had been in development in some form or another since the late ’70s. Superman co-writer Tom Mankiewicz wrote a first draft of what would become the modern Batman movie in 1980. After the success of Pee Wee’s Big Adventure in 1985, Warner Bros asked Tim Burton to take over the Batman movie development. Burton threw out Mankiewicz’s draft, wrote his own 30 page treatment and hired Sam Hamm to write the script. However, due to a writer’s strike in the late ’80s, development dragged on and Sam Hamm had to leave the project. Warren Skaaren was hired to finish the script. The final script was green-lit in 1988 after the success of Beetlejuice at the box office.
The Batman movie development went through many iterations before finally landing on the final script and cast; Michael Keaton, Jack Nicholson and Kim Bassinger. Here’s some behind the scene trivia for the movie:
It’s been just over 9 months since I last talked about my iPhone, so I thought it was time to remedy that situation (cue everyone rolling their eyes at me and whispering…”GREAT”). On Wednesday, Apple made available the latest update to the iPhone’s operating system, v3.0. Listening to the buildup of this OS update (along with the release of the new iPhone version 3G S today), I couldn’t help but get excited. So many new features were being added including multimedia messaging (MMS) which has surprisingly been missing from the very first iteration of the iPhone until now. If you receive a picture via text, the text message asks you to log in to a separate website with a userid and password (given within the text) to see the pic. This worked, maybe 50% of the time. Maybe. Seems odd the greatest phone on the planet Earth could not send/receive a picture via text message. But that’s neither here nor there as MMS is in the “new features list” on Apple.com (see below, third in the list) and after I download and install it to my iPhone, everything is going to be cotton candy and rainbows and fluffy bunnies and kittens.
So, when I connected my iPhone 3G to my laptop Thursday morning and proceeded to download the new OS, I was giddy as a schoolgirl. I had the requisite pics of my crotch on my iPhone’s camera reel and they were ready to be sent to all my friends via text message. It was gonna be EPIC. Legend–wait for it–ary. Then I did the install.
Cavalcade of Awesome 