"The football! His groin! It works on so many levels!"

After getting word that my readership swelled to a 5th individual person, I feel pressure to start delivering actual "content" (warning - not actual content)...

While the Wife spent most of her vacation yelling "Woooo!" (you'll have to ask her for an explanation), I relaxed with some cheesy summer reading (getting called a nerd for reading), helped a pre-med student with her homework (got made fun of much less after that, because nerds are useful!), and got devoured by vicious swarms of bugs - so now I'm sitting back in Ohio scratching myself...

I also created a new idiom (in the tradition of "bitchcakes" and "asshat," both mine) that I'm going to try to popularize over the next few week. So, ladies and gentlemen, I present:

Southern Gentlemen

As in, "Ow! That football just hit me in the Southern gentlemen!" (just imagine George C. Scott saying it)



While it's definitely a fool's errand to try to follow that clip up with anything substantial, I've got a few minor movie reviews. I just got done watching the Shaw Brothers' 36 Chambers of Shaolin, which is one of the most influential kung-fu films ever made - you can pretty much see Tarantino lifting various scenes and shots. The framing story, about some sort of insurrection in historical Canton, is pretty flimsy, but the movie rocks during the training montage (the really important part of any true "gong-fu" film is the hard work and training of the protagonist that conveniently helps him win a later fight), where we see Gorden Liu's Sun Ta actually work through each of the 35 chambers - each one is a different aspect of martial arts, such as balance, arm strength, peripheral vision, and bo staff fighting.

The other 'movie' I have to whole-heartedly recommend is the 25-minute The Amazing Screw-On Head, which is based on a short comic series by Mike Mignola (the guy who is most famous for creating Hellboy), and has a fantastically dry sense of humor. The story is about Screw-On Head, a secret paranormal agent who is literally a head that screws into various robot bodies (and is voiced by Paul Giamatti) - it's never explained at all how it's possible for a head to move around on its own or control the robot frames, but you never really care, since the storytelling's just that good. The Head works for Abraham Lincoln, and fights his nemesis, Emperor Zombie (formerly Mr. Zombie, prior to his promotion to Emperor). There are plenty of one-liners, and the only downside is that it's only a half-hour long.

(there, that counts as legitimate substance...happy now?)