We saw a preview of the first 45 minutes of Pixar’s newest animated feature, Up, back in March at WonderCon. Boy, were we ever impressed. One of the most enjoyable characters in the film is Dug, a dog who can talk. Now, I know what you’re thinking: talking dogs, big deal, it’s been beaten to death starting with Homeward Bound and most recently with Underdog. The difference with Dug is that Dug actually is a talking dog, not a dog talking like a human:
Up comes out in theaters (in 2D and 3D) on May 29th, but we’ll be at a screening on May 11th and give you the lowdown a couple weeks early.
If you haven’t seen the new Mac vs PC ads yet, I recommend checking them out. I use both Macs and PCs, so I try not to take sides in the fanboy battles, but I do enjoy the ads from Apple. Well one of the recent ads had a lot of legal mumbo-jumbo on the screen whenever PC would make a statement. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, go watch it and come back, this will make more sense. Anyway, have you wondered just what all of that tiny text said? Well wonder no longer, as a few people have squinted at their screens long enough to transcribe the whole thing. Read on for the dirty details.
When we posted about the Tauntaun Sleeping Bag on April 1, a couple of you mentioned that April Fool’s joke product or not, you’d really, really like one. Turns out you aren’t alone, and ThinkGeek is taking notice:
ATTN Tauntaun Fanatics! Due to an overwhelming tsunami of requests from YOU THE PEOPLE, we have decided to TRY and bring this to life. We have no clue if the suits at Lucasfilms will grant little ThinkGeek a license, nor do we know how much it would ultimately retail for. But if you are interested in ever owning one of these, click the link below and we’ll try!
There’s certainly some precedent for this; last year, after pranking everyone with a personal sound track shirt on April 1, ThinkGeek ended up producing them. You can sign up here to be notified if the Tauntaun sleeping bag ever comes to pass, but you’ll better believe you’ll see it right here if it happens.
Qualcomm has come up with a great idea to provide ubiquitous digital network coverage to people in both rural and urban areas: network base stations, implanted in pigeons. But, pigeons are vulnerable to predators and inclement weather, so Qualcomm spliced them with wolves to create the wolfpigeon. Of course, wolfpigeons might be dangerous, so Qualcomm took the obvious step of creating sharkfalcons to keep them in check:
I think that Qualcomm is overlooking a critical fact: wolfpigeons are going to need a food source designed specifically for their hybrid palates. I’m talking, of course, about a breadmarmot. See a picture of a breadmarmot in the wild, after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »
ThinkGeek has released a bevy of new products today. My favorite of the bunch has to be this Tauntaun sleeping bag, complete with lightsaber zipper pull and toasty warm faux-intestine liner. It’s not as warm as sleeping inside a real freshly dead animal, but I bet it smells a heck of a lot better. You can get this for about $40, but you’ll have to wait for it to be shipped in from the ThinkGeek wearhouse on Hoth. A couple more new products, after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »
Oh Google, you will never cease to amaze me with your advanced knowledge of the interweb. It seems like not a week goes by that I don’t discover something new and wonderful tool that you’ve created. Why, just this morning I’ve stumbled onto your Autopilot for Gmail.
As you can imagine, I get a lot of email from PR companies and such, and I honestly don’t have time to read all of them. Sure, many of them are interesting, but I have the attention span of a 4-year-old when it comes to my inbox. But thanks to Gmail Autopilot, I don’t need to read them, let alone actually respond. All you need to do is let the Autopilot read a sampling of your conversations (more than 100 is ideal), then adjust a few simple settings and it will do the rest.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve been meaning to update my resume, I remember hearing something about Google opening a moonbase a little while back. I totally need to get in on that.
Let’s say that you’ve had a rough day and you go out to the bar and get, well, for lack of a better word shit-faced. Now you don’t exactly have someone at home that can come pick you up, so what do you do? Cabs cost money and you don’t have any friends, so it’s a good thing that you hooked up a motor and some wheels to your barstool. Hell, now you don’t even have to get off your ass to go home. Just have someone get the door and the open road is all yours.
Yes I do have a rather active imagination, but these events actually happened. Some guy over in Ohio did these very things, and ended up wrecking his precious barstool. This caused the police to get involved, which of course arrested him on DUI charges. The man gave the officer a couple of interesting details before issuing his “Not Guilty” plea. First, the stool has a top speed of 38mph, which isn’t bad for a bar stool. He then informed the officer that he had drank 15 beers before speeding off on his power stool. “Not Guilty” indeed.
I always love a good conspiracy theory. There’s nothing quite like diving into the complex possibilities of what our government or some large company might be cooking up. Well the best one that I’ve heard recently is concerning those fancy little DTV converter boxes that the government is handing out coupons for. Why do you think that they are trying so hard to get those into our houses? It’s because they’re trying to spy on us!
While I’m sure at least a few people out there gave some thought to that last line, it isn’t actually true. A YouTube clip that surface recently showed someone taking apart such a device and discovering a small camera and microphone stashed away inside. While there were some who inevitably fell for the hoax, it was just that. Someone merely cracked open the case, carefully added the components to the board and made it look believable.
When you think about it, there’s no way that the government would plant such devices. Could you imagine the number of people that would have to sit around all day watching people who are watching TV? Now that would be a crappy job.
People have been posting Monty Python clips on YouTube for years… Not to put too fine a point on it but, YouTube users have been distributing copyrighted multimedia content without authorization. Shocking. Rather than go after poor college kids with lawsuits like the RIAA and MPAA have decided to do, the Pythons themselves started their own YouTube channel with this description:
For 3 years you YouTubers have been ripping us off, taking tens of thousands of our videos and putting them on YouTube. Now the tables are turned. It’s time for us to take matters into our own hands.
We know who you are, we know where you live and we could come after you in ways too horrible to tell. But being the extraordinarily nice chaps we are, we’ve figured a better way to get our own back: We’ve launched our own Monty Python channel on YouTube.
But we want something in return.
None of your driveling, mindless comments. Instead, we want you to click on the links, buy our movies & TV shows and soften our pain and disgust at being ripped off all these years.
As of yesterday, Monty Python’s DVDs are now #2 on Amazon’s Movies and TV bestsellers list, which is an increase of 23,000% (yes, thousand) over pre-YouTube sales. Okay, so this model obviously can’t work for everything, but the point is that free content can actually get people to pay for what they like. The key is to embrace new media creatively rather than try and suppress or destroy it. Easier said than done, perhaps, but if Monty Python can do it…
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