Posts tagged with tv

Here is as close as we've ever got to a poster of the entire cast of Futurama... from their most recent direct-to-DVD movie Into the Wild Green Yonder. It's notable for two things in my mind: first, it doesn't include most of the principles (they would be easy to add) and second, wow, Futurama just doesn't have as many characters as Simpsons. Simpsons has a LOT of characters. What do they say, 50 active on-going basis? That's a lot.

And now my fellow Earthicans ... More Futurama is Coming ...

Comedy Central was happy with the specials and with the 72 produced episodes of "Futurama" it acquired from 20th Century Fox TV in 2006. "Yet there is nothing like new, self-contained episodes week to week," said David Bernath, Comedy Central's senior vp programming. "This is all about reinvigorating the franchise, giving it a new burst of energy."

In other words, futurama pays.

OK, this is stupid but I came up with this joke for Zap Brannigan.

SCENE: ZAP BRANNIGAN IS YET AGAIN TAKING CHARGE OF A
TOP-PRIORITY MILITARY MISSION BY DRAFTING SOMEONE. LET'S SAY
LEELA. IT COULD BE ANYONE, THOUGH.

ZAP: Ahh, do you remember me? I'm Zap Brannigan.
Captain Zap Brannigan. I put myself in your charge.

SOMEONE: How generous of you.

ZAP: By which I mean I put myself in Charge. Of You.

Lame joke? Maybe. But I don't see YOU making up jokes and blogging them for everyone to see.

Futurama, possibly one of the best TV shows ever made, say some people. And full of good advice for every day situations too.

• You were doing well until everyone died
• Don't do anything that affects anything. Unless it turns out that you were supposed to do it; in which case, for the love of God, don't not do it!
• Bodies are for hookers and fat people.
• The Dave Matthews Band doesn't rock.
• If you want a box hurled into the sun, you've got to do it yourself.

I was going to make up a sort of "All I need to know I learned in Kindergarten" kind of poster, but I need more quotes so I'll just have to re-watch more Futurama. So much good TV & Movies to watch, so little time...

I just went for a walk in the rain. It was nice and mellow. Nothing with me, no keys, no wallet, and best of all, no cellphone.

Anyway, here's some nice links to lists of all time greatest movies.

The mother of all lists of course is the IMDB Top 250. IMDB has been around forever! ...it's been on the web since 1993 which is like before the web even existed. Basically any movie on this list is worth watching. And it's the popular choices, as opposed to the critics, so they aren't just chosen for originality or historical significance (like some of the below) but rather because they're good to watch.

For the "critics choices" you can use the Best of Rotten Tomatoes. Rotten Tomatoes has to be one of the worst named websites of all time. But no matter. The problem with the all time list is that it includes movies that are loved by critics but aren't necessarily very watchable. However, they have a useful feature which is to see the top movies by year. For example here is the top 10 for 1969 (I've seen 5 of the 10 so far...). It's a cool way to explore cinematic history.

For more critic's lists, try the British Film Institute top 45 list. And here's more detail on their top 10. And then there's the American Film Institute top 100 (linking to wikipedia because the AFI site requires a stupid login).

And finally here are a few more from random publications:

• The Times top 100 (UK newspaper)
• Time Magazine top 100 (US magazine)

Well, that's enough of that. It's interesting to see the differences in the list. Is the best movie of all time The Godfather? Casablanca? Citizen Kane? Or as IMDB users would have it, Shawshank? (I don't think so...). Forget about the latest releases. Watch the classics.

My name is Lieutenant Frank Drebin, Police Squad, a division of the Police Department. I just got a call from headquarters. Someone killed off a cop series in the prime of its life, and we couldn't find the body. Fortunately some new evidence turned up, and it looked like we might have found the body and it's killer.

And so begins this week's episode of A Bit of Torrent , a weekly (almost) feature of Simon Says where we highlight the absolute latest in downloadable content. This week in the crosshairs: Police Squad!

If you've ever seen Leslie Nielsen or any of the Naked Gun movies, you know what to look for. You know what I mean. Exactly. It's basically six mini-Naked Gun movies in a row.

Download Police Squad (complete) on The Pirate Bay .

Sadly, the show was cancelled before its time. Cigarette? Yes. I know.

This week on "a bit of torrent" ...

Aren't british comedies brilliant? Bittorrent — isn't that brilliant? I mean, downloading TV over the internet — what will they think of next? It's fantastic. The Fast Show, isn't it great? It's a bunch of sketches but before they wear out, they start the next one. And all the sketches are brilliant. Well, not all of them, the one with the thief wasn't so good, but then they get him off the set and on to the next one. Brilliant!

Meanwhile.... nothing will ever touch the true genius of "A bit of Fry and Laurie" — seriously, don't even go there — but The Fast Show gets pretty close at times. It's called the fast show because (a revolution in comedy at the time) the sketches are short and sweet. No lengthy build-ups here. Good ones come back in the next episodes, and they have a series of really hilarious steadies like the "brilliant" guy, who thinks everything is great, even the Nazis; Ted and Ralph, who aren't really funny, and a soccer newscaster who always goes off on a tangent about "boys in the park, jumpers for goalposts, eh?"

Most of the best characters are played by Paul Whitehouse so it's weird that I've never heard of him before. He's a bit of a chameleon. He appears in two of the attached pictures but every time, it's a different voice, a completely different look, different body language. He hasn't been in a lot of movies but even so I'd not be sure that I'd spot him.

Anyway, definitely a top pick. Here are some links. There are 3 seasons. There's also some specials out there somewhere.

TorrentSpy :

• The.Fast.Show.-.Season.1.torrent
• The.Fast.Show.-.Season.2.torrent
• The.Fast.Show.-.Season.3.torrent

UPDATE: ... but don't bother with season three. It's a dog.

A bunch of links and things.

Ahree Lee created (or is creating?) an amazing short film. Starting in 2001 she started to take a picture of herself, every day, in the same pose. As of 2004, she created a short film called Me in which the images are flashed at you at the rate of about one week per second. If you want to download the film, you can use mplayer (like I did...) with something like this from your unix shell. (Note that the rtsp URL might change, you can get it from AtomFilms web page / View Source.) (Also note that I had to insert a backslash in front of the exclamation mark, probably inserted by atomfilms to foil script kiddies trying to use this method.) I think you could do some cool analysis of the images over time.

mplayer -dumpfile out.rm -dumpstream 'rtsp://shockreal.edgestreams.net/real.atomshockwave-secure_!/me_300.rm?auth=caEascHb6b7dRbpdudXcLbKdibBaHbDbbdP-be81D5-cOW-REAwJrGowGoHn3wlB&aifp=123&span=10800' 

My cousin Suzanne Thoma finally has a website. She still sings but mostly she's now a freelance graphic designer. My opinion: website needs some work. I'm not sure that my parents would be able to navigate it.

How to create little bar charts inside the cells of an Excel spreadsheet looks useful and pretty easy to do. Generally speaking Excel's graphing sucks, and it looks like the Excel 12 graphs aren't going to get any better. Apple's iWord graphs are somewhat better but not perfect and some important graph types are missing.

Finally, let's hear it for art: The Grooming of the Woodside Man V1 by Simon Donikian and The Grooming of the Woodside Man V4 .

Enough for now...

I've been watching a lot of torrents lately and frankly, a lot of it has been crap. Like this "Around the world in 80 treasures" show where the host is just insufferable (deleted). Also I've been watching these SNL best of shows and they're pretty good. This one is the best so far.

Go and grab the torrent from The Pirate Bay or view the IMDB page . Until next week, enjoy your A bit of torrent !

Last week on 'A bit of torrent'I brought you the torrents to A bit of Fry and Laurie' . This week let's explore something a little less funny and more educational. But good. But not funny. Well, occasionally it's a bit funny. In any case, it's The Planets' , a miniseries put together about seven years ago by the combined efforts of the BBC and A&E. ( IMDB , Wikipedia .)

The Planets takes you through the formation and present state of the Solar System that we call home.

Eric Idle :

Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving

And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour,

That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned,

A sun that is the source of all our power.

You'll find out in the first two episodes all about the geology of the solar system — volcanoes on Io, geysers on Titan, the resurfacing of Venus about 500 million years ago. So sorry, Mr. Python, but the sun isn't the source of all our power.

What's good about The Planets? It's got amazing archive footage that I've never seen of space exploration. It presents images as they were seen through time, so your picture of each planet progresses from the dim blobs that they knew just 40 years ago to the detailed maps that we now have from fly-bys and orbiting explorers. The computer animation is also good, although a bit of a 90s plastic feel to the solid planets. And heavy on the particle effects, which were pretty novel at the time.

My biggest problem with this series is the totally lousy music. Unlike most BBC work this has an over-the-top orchestral score by a sub-par composer. It gets annoying sometimes.

But overall the visuals are amazing, the narration is solid, the footage is fascinating, and it's pretty thorough.

The best source I found was created by MVGroup —  You can get it most easily from mininova . Here's The Planets episode 1 of 8, Different Worlds ... and here's All episodes of The Planets .

Till next time, bye bye.

Welcome to 'A bit of torrent'.

This is where I'm going to give you a link to a bittorrent file and you're going to watch it because it's cool. First the basics. A bittorrent file is a very small file that 'points'to a very large file. So a little bitty file, like, say, abit.torrent can point to a huge movie or an album or whatever.

Let's say you want to download that big movie. Well, you don't. First you download the little torrent file. It 'points'you a bunch of other people and collectively, peer2peer (P2P) you will all very quickly download the file. So to review. (A) Get the torrent file. (B) Use it to get the big file. (You need this software ).

Of course first you need to find the torrent file (or as they say, the 'torrent'). Which is not so hard if you use a good torrent search site like The Pirate Bay or isoHunt . But the best part is to find obscure cool stuff, not the pop crap that everyone's looking at but the old good stuff you can't get on TV any more (or might not think of at least). And that's where 'A bit of torrent'comes in.

Each week, or actually whatever irregular interval I feel like, I'll post a link to a torrent that I like. If you want to watch it, then you can and you don't have to search around. I'm going to start with, and explain the name of this series with, a show called A bit of Fry and Laurie' .

IMDB :

Monty Python's footballing philosophers sketch is a good example of the painful varsity guff that has been a part of British TV and radio right up until today's 'League of Gentlemen'. It isn't what Fry and Laurie do at all. They plough a completely original furrow of snatched conversation, admass and inane banter that forms an impressionistic picture of the most baffling and frustrating 'bits'of the British experience.

Basically, Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry (who appeared together in Wooster and Jeeves and are both in a fair number of movies and TV shows), do a comedy sketch show.

Hugh: Good evening and welcome to "Realizing I've Given The Wrong Directions To...". Tonight I shall be Realizing I've Given The Wrong Directions To Rabbi Michael Leibovitz. Sadly, Rabbi Leibovitz is unable to be with us tonight. Till next time, bye bye.

Well, here's the link you've been so patiently reading for. A Bit Of Fry & Laurie - Season 1 Torrent Link . Find the other seasons at digitaldistractions .

Till next time, bye bye.