America’s fun­ny­man, Bob Hope, turned 100 today. Hope accord­ing to his daugh­ter Linda was a kid more than a par­ent and to all those who know him, he’s an ad-libbing, wise-cracking man who has enter­tained mil­lions through­out his life time. His ear­li­est of begin­nings were in Vaude­ville in the 1920s which even­tu­ally led to his own radio show and var­i­ous tele­vi­sion appear­ances. To Hope, tele­vi­sion was “vaude­ville in a box” and gar­nered him guest spots on The Tonight Show and the Golden Girls.

Hope knew that in order to have comedic effec­tive­ness he needed a crew of writ­ers with top-notch jokes. Among the orig­i­nal 8 writ­ers was Sher­wood Shwartz, cre­ator of Gilli­gans Island and The Brady Bunch. In ‘Amer­ica explained by Bob Hope’ Shwartz explains that he orig­i­nally was pur­su­ing to be a doc­tor and instead answered the call of Bob Hope. On a typ­i­cal evening, Bob Hope and his writ­ing team would meet at his home (rented by Woody Wood­pecker cre­ator’ Wal­ter Lantz) and brain­storm ideas. In order to remain fresh and cutting-edge Hope would pool together the best of the worst and use them on his radio show. Unlike an appear­ance at a Com­edy Club, being on the radio meant hav­ing a great col­lec­tion of jokes and mak­ing sure every­one of them was a win­ner con­sid­er­ing you can’t hear the lis­tener laugh.

His great­est tri­umph how­ever lies within his com­mit­ment to enter­tain­ing and sup­port­ing the troops dur­ing world con­flicts (namely World War 2). Var­i­ous pho­tographs and doc­u­men­taries show Hope on stage with an audi­ence of thou­sands atten­tive and laugh­ing their hearts out. To Hope, this was his great­est plea­sure because he was never sure who would be around in the com­ing days dur­ing the war.

For a man to have lived 100 years and live to tell about his adven­tures you have to applaud his per­for­mance. How­ever, for a man to make mil­lions laugh in his life­time deserves a stand­ing ovation.

Happy Birth­day, Bob. 

Who is up for a game of Monop­oly? America’s favorite board game, where you con­trol land and mort­gage options. Not to men­tion try­ing to sucker some­one into not buy­ing Board­walk or Park­place so you can gain finan­cial supe­ri­or­ity. It’s a game granted, but a game that pro­vides lots of enter­tain­ment and casual bitterment.

If you’re bored of just plain Monop­oly, you might be able to find a spe­cial custom-flavored ver­sion in these var­i­ous forms: (which, by the way actu­ally exist)

Tow­nop­oly: Monop­oly tai­lored specif­i­cally for land­marks for your area.

Reli­giono­ply: This is where reli­gion and Monop­oly clash to form a spiritually-fun time.

Movieopoly: Your favorite flick but with cus­tom char­ac­ters from the spe­cific movie.

For all the hom­mies and the homettes out there, you could always play Ghet­topoly. Its descrip­tion of game­play is cap­ti­vat­ing: “Buy­ing stolen prop­er­ties, pay­ing pro­tec­tion fees and get­ting car jacked”.

Word. 

Pie in a Jar is a entre­prenuer internet-powered busi­ness where any­one can pur­chase for a “mere” $19.95 a Pie in a Jar. Accord­ing to the site’s owner, he said this con­cept was orig­i­nally con­ceived by an old Gypsy woman who he found one night while tak­ing a short­cut through Graven’s Pet Semetary.

Not really the story that is dis­played on the site, but hey, I tried to add some sort of sus­pense and inter­est to how it was con­cep­tu­al­ized. In real­ity, it was an old woman who sug­gested the idea of how inge­nious it would be to sell an entire pie in a jar. I don’t believe she con­sid­ered the Inter­net as it’s start­ing grounds but prob­a­bly a more down home set­ting like along­side the road in one of those mis­shapen lemonade-type stands.

Some­times these kinds of ideas flour­ish because of their roots in the Inter­net. How­ever, it seems that every­one is try­ing to cap­i­tal­ize on the ‘Net by putting up noth­ing more than a dig­i­tal garage sale. Don’t get me wrong, Ebay and Half.com are exactly that; yard sales on the ‘Net — yet, it seems that among the nor­mal plants there exist a few weird weeds. The sites that sell stu­pid items that only peo­ple who fre­quent yard sales would ever con­sider purchasing.

In the past few months I’ve seen every­thing from just stu­pid to insane. From ideas like “cats in a jar” where the kit­ten is placed into a jar in it’s young life and remains there until it’s grown into a cat. The idea is that the kitten’s body will con­form to the shape of the jar and for­ever remain the size of a “kit­ten” while actu­ally being full grown. Sup­pos­edly, this idea comes from an Asian prac­tice of mak­ing cats that remain in kit­ten form. Admit­tedly, I’d love for a kit­ten to stay the same but it’s insane to force the shape of it’s body to remain so small.

I’ve seen peo­ple try to sell their belly-button lint or a tile from their old kitchen floor of which they “just remod­eled”. Why would any­one buy these things? It’s sim­ple as George Car­lin would say, peo­ple love buy­ing other people’s junk. Fill­ing their house brim to brim with stuff and when they go on vaca­tion they take smaller por­tions of their stuff and ulti­mately buy more stuff on their trip.

In which case, I’ve decided to put up an Inter­net store to sell off bits of the car­pet shav­ings in my room. 

“So you think you can write a bet­ter A-Team episode than those crazy writ­ers did, do you? Well, let’s start the process with some baby steps.” It’s an A-Team Mad Lib, sucka.

Speak­ing of Madlibs, the other day I pur­chased a 3-pack from the store. I didn’t even know that they were still being made. Madlibs were a fun past­time that I can remem­ber shar­ing with my cousins and fam­ily. Although, I remem­ber the urgency to com­plete the ‘lib cou­pled with the con­fu­sion as to what an adjec­tive was. “What’s an adjec­tive?”, they would exclaim. “A describ­ing word, you fool.”

Even I remem­ber what an adjec­tive is to this day, but just in case, there is a ref­er­ence chart in the book that explains the def­i­n­i­tions of verbs, nouns, plural nouns, etc. When I was in grade school (or ele­men­tary) I remem­ber learn­ing about ‘plural nouns’ for the first time. The noun was ‘rat’ and to teach us what a plural was, the teacher sim­ply added an ‘s’ on the end of the word. We were amazed how sim­plis­tic that was. I won­dered while sit­ting in my desk if I spoke in plural for the rest of my life, would it throw peo­ple off? Imag­ine walk­ing up to some­one and ask­ing them how they’re doing, they look at you puz­zled and reply, “I’m going okay todays. Doesn’t the Statue of Lib­er­ties look grand today?”

Yeah, sure buddy. Where’s the bus stop to your world? Point me in the right direction.

Click here for the A-Team slash Mad Lib experiment.

*Mr. T says, “I pity the fool who doesn’t click that link!” 

I’ve seen the Matrix, actu­ally saw it on Open­ing Day last Thurs­day. My ini­tial impres­sion with the sec­ond movie is that the dia­logue was too heavy and the fight scenes too sparse. How­ever, my mis­take was that a good movie­goer would watch the orig­i­nal Matrix to fully under­stand its sequels. I didn’t, except for the brief view­ing of it when it ran on Cable a week or so ago.

The story of the Matrix is very meta­phys­i­cal with dra­matic reli­gious under­tones. My phi­los­o­phy is that the Broth­ers Wachowski were sit­ting in church one day and thought, “What if we mixed reli­gious per­spec­tives and beliefs with tech­no­log­i­cal themes?” When they had this rev­e­la­tion each of them ran home and with­out wast­ing any time wrote the Matrix in it’s entirety. It’s only Hol­ly­wood and I’m sure the choice of the Broth­ers to split the movie into three dis­tinct pieces. The first being the intro­duc­tion as “orig­i­nal” movies usu­ally are, the sec­ond explain­ing the pur­pose and char­ac­ters fur­ther and finally the third lead­ing to the cli­max and ulti­mately the wrap up of the entire story arc.

The Broth­ers are smart. Indeed, they have cre­ated a deep story with strength in it’s mean­ing. Yet, they have also mar­keted the movie into other sto­ries and chap­ters (Flight of the Ori­sis, Ani­ma­trix) and a video game enti­tled ‘Enter the Matrix’ which fills in the plot for the sec­ondary char­ac­ters Niobe (Jada Pinkett-Smith) and Ghost (Anthony Wong). It’s a phe­nom­e­non that has struck the world’s chord and caused a mas­sive cult fol­low­ing for the Matrix.

Even­tu­ally, when the third movie is released (Matrix Rev­o­lu­tions), the tril­ogy will make it’s way on DVD. It is then that I would like to sit down and watch the entire tril­ogy and con­nect the dots. Already by play­ing the video game and watch­ing a cou­ple episodes of the Ani­ma­trix (Detec­tive and Pro­gram) I’m begin­ning to under­stand the Broth­ers vision of this epic story.

Read this excel­lent expla­na­tion of the Matrix here as writ­ten by the Cor­po­rate Mofo. 

I recently found a web­site that tries your skills in hack­ing (and it’s com­pletely legal in this case). The site gives you 5 lev­els of hack­ing sim­u­la­tion. They con­sist of guess­ing the pass­word or user­name to move on to the next level. At the moment, there are only 5 lev­els, the other 5 are being worked on. So far I’ve got­ten past level 4, still work­ing on level 5.

Any­ways, check it out.. It’s actu­ally pretty fun.

http://www.try2hack.nl 

“[Grow-A-Brain Café] Here are the most inter­est­ing places to visit on the inter­net. They may rep­re­sent no spe­cific phi­los­o­phy or coher­ent world­view, but you will find many of them to be fas­ci­nat­ing, enlight­en­ing and intel­li­gent… Some of course are just stupid…

Visit the the stu­pid ones at your own risk.

All links are PG-13, as far as could be dis­cerned, and some can be best enjoyed if you have a fast Inter­net con­nec­tion (DSL, cable, etc.).”

Visit Grow a Brain Café, and grow your brain. Of the most inter­est­ing arti­cles are the Etch-a-Sketch works of art and the only known pho­to­graph of Pres­i­dent Lincoln. 

I know a lot of you read­ing this arti­cle will already know this infor­ma­tion, heck, if you don’t where have you been the last cou­ple of months? We’ve all played Half Life once in our lives, and we each equally can say that it was one hell of a game. Not only did Valve cre­ate a game that was easy to play but most impor­tantly also easy to cus­tomize. Tons of Half-Life Mod­i­fi­ca­tions have been released, the most famous being “Counter-Strike” and “Day of Defeat”.

With recent games start­ing to show up on the mar­ket and also at E3 (includ­ing my favorites; Deus Ex 2, Thief 3 and Doom 3), the gam­ing indus­try is evolv­ing and the main pri­or­ity is to cre­ate more real­ism. No more ugly pix­els blended together to make a graphic, now the new king of the hill is a very real­is­tic and very smooth shape. Now, I could go on describ­ing the recent changes in graphic cards, but who really cares about the tech­ni­cal mumbo-jumbo. We want mouth-watering, jaw-dropping, eyes pop­ping outta’ the head graph­ics and a sto­ry­line to go with it!

Well, Half Life 2 will make you won­der what a retard you were for think­ing that Kings Quest I had the best graph­ics. (Oh I know, that was then.. when Kings Quest I was first released, I know many of you thought it was gods gift to man). In this whole new Half-Life install­ment, you’re play­ing the same ol’ love­able Gor­don Free­man and many of the old char­ac­ters are back (Includ­ing the Afri­cian Amer­i­can sci­en­tist, and that very humor­less G-Man!) Any­ways, to make this entry short go check out this movie on the Half-Life 2 game­play (as shown at E3)

Trust me, you’re going to be in awe and if you’re not . . well too bad!

IGN: Stream­ing E3 Pre­sen­ta­tion 

Fur­ther proof that two seper­ate enti­ties of con­cepts can relate to one another*;

Accord­ing to this guy in the arti­cle, he came up with an Internet-ready toi­let called the iLoo. The inven­tion is inter­est­ing; you can search the Inter­net whilst on a pub­lic toi­let and print on toi­let paper.

Then along comes Microsoft and you know the rest …

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=9442

* Depend­ing on your point of view. Some peo­ple might con­sider these two in the same category. 

Here’s alit­tle infor­ma­tion I bet you didn’t know. Among new mutants in the X-Men 2, there was one spe­cific that was cut from the final film. Many of you know him as Gam­bit, the card throw­ing, rod bash­ing cajun pimp from the X-Team. The actors name who is cred­ited in Inter­net Movie Data­base is James Bam­ford, a hard­core stunt­man. You can see his pic­ture at http://www.stuntscanada.net/james_bamford.htm

It is rumored that his cutscene will be included inside the DVD, but no real infor­ma­tion on this has sur­faced. Another rumor is that a cer­tain one eyed leader of the X-Team will be able to finally take off those ugly red specs and see with his nor­mal eyes (With help of a cer­tain phoenix).

We’ll just have to see, moan-a-me.….