RSS FeedDecember = Top 10 Time
I knew I had written about this before so I wanted to link to it. I had to dig deep in the archives. This post was from 5 years ago.
One of my favorite things about the month of December is that every TV station starts running their ‘Top 10′ shows. I have loved these type of shows since I was a little kid. Top 10 sports moments being my all time favorite. What’s nice is that these days you get way more than just sports in general. You’ll get top 10 touchdown plays, amazing baseball catches, goals in hockey, NASCAR crashes… you name it.
Today I found a great article on Time.com entitled “The Top 10 Everything of 2008.”There are a total of 50 different Top 10 lists. I haven’t made my way through all of them yet, but I will over the next couple days. Regardless, there are some stand-outs.
- #7 Top 10 Buzzwords: Rickrolled: If you haven’t been RickRolled, you just haven’t lived. Seriously, they RickRolled everybody during the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. That’s a big RickRoll.
- #9 Top 10 Buzzwords: Tweet: With my addiction to Twitter, you know I had to include this as a stand-out!
- #3 Top 10 Gadgets: Apple iPhone 3G: The first gen phone was good, but with the release of the new phone also came the App Store. A great source of both productivity and anti-productivity. How this isn’t the #1 gadget of the year is beyond me.
- #1 Top 10 Viral Videos: Where the Hell is Matt?: this guy travels around the world shooting video of himself doing a silly dance either alone or with a group of natives. It’s sillyness is part of the fun. The places this guy visited and the smiles on the kids from around the world are simply amazing.
- #3 Top 10 Viral Videos: Christian The Lion: Seriously, if this video doesn’t touch you, you may want to check yourself for a pulse.
I’m looking forward to watching the rest of the videos, but it will have to wait for another day. I’m off to compile my own top 10 list. I should probably pick a subject first.
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I’m Going Down to South Park Gonna Have Myself a Time
Last night i was flipping channels on the TV before going to bed and I ran across an episode of South Park on Comedy Central. I stopped for a few minutes and laughed as they made fun of High School Musical in typical South Park fashion. Even though I don’t watch the show on a regular basis these days, it seems that even after 10+ seasons, the show continues to be really funny. It made me sad to realize I haven’t seen more than a hand full of episodes in the past 4 years. That has got to change.
I told my wife last night that I want to get caught up on South Park. I want to see every episode from every season and there is only one way to do that; Netflix. So today I went on Netflix and added the first 10 seasons of South Park to my queue and moved them all to the top. I have no idea how long it’s going to take me to watch 30+ DVDs of South Park shenanigans, but I’m ready to find out.
If this goes well, I may have to do the same for the Simpsons when I’m done.
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Pole Position Indoor Karting
Saturday night, in honor of Kristen’s Birthday, a group of us met up at Pole Position Raceway for some go-kart racing. We had about 20 of use there, but only a dozen of us were racing. We signed up for a 2 race event. The first race has all 12 of us on the the track and they record your lap times. Then, in the second race they line you up NASCAR style and you have an all-out race.
These go-karts are like none I had ever seen before. They are all electric powered and they are all tied in to a hand-held remote control carried by one of the track officials. When they first let you out of the gate, they are on minimal power. Once everybody is on the track and they have the gate closed, he pushes the button put the karts in high gear. If there is any sort of incident on the track, a quick push of the button and the carts are back in low gear. It’s really a cool way to moderate the races. I’m sure that for more experienced racers, there is a gear higher than they let us have access to. I should thank them for keeping it away from us.
Todd and I both took our camera equipment. I was having a great time taking pictures of the other races that were going on between ours. Shooting at high speed was proving to be quite a challenge. I think I’d like to go back there and just practice shooting.
I hope to make it out there again. We had a great time and it was an awesome way to spend an evening with a dozen people and get them all involved in a single activity. I’m sure this would make a for a great team-building outing for companies. (If any of the higher-ups at my office are reading this… hint hint)
Before you pack up the kids and head over to Pole Position, keep two things in mind. First, it’s not cheap. The two race deal was $55 per person. For a family four, that’s a pricey evening out. Also, these cars are fast. My daughter basically missed the final part of an S turn and drove UNDER the barricade. It ripped her helmet off her head. Amazingly she wasn’t injured at all. Shaken up quite a bit, but nothing that some Aleve and rest couldn’t handle. Make sure the people you take with you have all had experience driving karts before. These are probably not the best for first timers.
Here’s a link to some additional photos from our racing adventures.
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First Friday in Las Vegas
Yesterday was another first for our family. We headed on down to Downtown Las Vegas to check out First Friday, an art & music festival that takes place on the… wait for it… First Friday of every month.
From the First Friday website:
First Friday is produced by Whirlygig, Inc., a Nevada non-profit arts organization founded in October 2002. First Friday has grown from 300 attendees in 2002 to today’s monthly attendance of 5-10,000. The event now encompasses more than 20 city blocks with five blocks closed to vehicular traffic to create a pedestrian area for the outdoor festivities. This grassroots community festival has become “Las Vegas’ favorite community art event” with gallery hopping, free exhibition spaces for artists, live entertainment, street entertainers, shopping food, beverages, and more. More than 80 galleries, restaurants and retail businesses work together to make the First Friday experience unique to the Las Vegas downtown arts district. Volunteers currently jury the art, work the information tables, set up and tear down parts of the event, place the trolley signs, coordinate the trolley guides, and sell soda and water to benefit First Friday. As Mayor Oscar Goodman says, “First Friday is the best thing that has ever happened to Las Vegas.”
Since we had never been, we thought there was a possibility that there were many others who had never been as well. So, we scheduled a last minute meetup for our Tweetup Las Vegas group. Big thanks to Jake & Nate from Black Diamond Digital for letting us use their office as a meeting place. They are only a block and a half from the festivities, so it worked out really well.
We met at BDD around 5:15 and had a chat with a couple people who had heard of Twitter, but had never used it. I gave them a quick tutorial and they both seemed very interested in using it. A few more from our group showed up and we hung out and talked about photography, social networking and hockey until around 6:15. We then headed down to First Friday and walked around checking out the different artists. There were painters, jewelry makers, musicians and even some break dancers. I had a great time taking a bunch of photos, especially of the break dancers.
As we were heading back to BDD we stopped by the Art Factory. This place was absolutely awesome. It’s a two story building with SEVERAL room inside. Each room was taken up by a different artist showing off there work. All types, all genres, all styles and all of them cool. Even though the place looked pretty busy to us, we were told that this was one of the slower nights. Yikes, makes me wonder what it’s like when it’s busy!
The event was really cool and I’m glad we finally made it out. Hopefully I can talk Jake and Nate in to letting us use that as a starting point each month for our twitter meetups. That would be very cool.
See you there next month.
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Rocky Horror Revisited
Many years ago my wife and I used to perform in the Rocky Horror Picture Show when we were MUCH younger. On rare occasions when we are in Los Angeles over a weekend and we have Saturday night free, we stop in to the Nuart to see if any of our old pals are still around. We typically show up early to hang out with people in the parking lot before the show, go in to the theater and stay long enough to see the pre-show and then leave within 5 minutes of the movie starting. That’s pretty much been our only involvement with Rocky in the past 10 years or so.
Recently I learned that Todd had NEVER seen the Rocky Horror Picture Show. This came as a HUGE shock to me since Todd is a hard core geek. Well, when I found out that the Onyx Theater here in Vegas was going to be showing Rocky ON Halloween, which conveniently fell on a Friday night this year, well, there was nothing I could do. We were basically FORCED to drag him out to the show.
We put out an invite to a group of friends and found out that two other people we know, Kim & Rob, have also never seen the show. Ahh, this was gonna be fun!
The show was set to start at 8. We all met for drinks around 6 and showed up to the theater around 7:40. The theater is nestled in the back corner of a fetish clothing store called The Rack. We made our way in, got frisked by security (I made a second stop at the cute female security guard so she could pat me down a second time) and went in to find seats. The theater is really small and at first glance it looked to be PERFECT for showing Rocky. There was a nice sized stage area and the screen was low so the actors would be partly in front of the screen. Then, the show started…
The pre-show was decent. Our friends all took part in the Virgin Sacrifice. A healthy dose of embarrassing photos and a video later, they were back in their seats and the movie began. This is when the wheels started to come off the bus.
First, I gotta say that the cast, Divine Decadence, was pretty decent. They had good costumes and decent props. They did a few things differently than I’ve seen at other Rocky shows, so that part was pretty cool.
Now for the list of complaints.
- The Stage. I thought it was going to be cool that the stage was so close to the screen. However, given the size of the screen (it’s small), the actors took up 2/3s of the screen area.
- The lighting. This sorta ties in to the location of the stage/screen. When the cast members are on stage and the lighting crew is shining flashlights on them, it washes out the screen to the point of almost not being able to see it at all.
- The audience participation callbacks. The idea behind a callback is to say a line during the time the actors on screen are not talking. Then, the actor says something that goes along with what you said and hilarity ensues. Unfortunately, the people doing the call backs have horrible timing and would end up saying their line OVER the actor’s response. So, it was not only not funny, it was hard to make out the joke they were trying to make.
- The AMOUNT of audience participation. Rocky is 30+ years old. People have been watching the movie and coming up with new lines for that whole time. Over time you can come up with 2 or 3 (or 10) different jokes for the same callback. That doesn’t mean you need to try and yell them all. There was SO much yelling going on, hardly any of it in unison, so it was again, almost impossible to catch the jokes.
As a long time Rocky goer, it was difficult for me to follow along with most of the callbacks and sight gags. For my 3 virgin friends, it was nearly impossible.
We did all manage to have a good time. And yet, I’m not sure I’ll be rushing out to see Rocky again any time soon.
Here are some photos from our night at Rocky
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