“groundhog day” goes international.

Happy Groundhog Day, imaginary Intertubes pals!

Those of you following me on Twitter will have seen these, but I figured I’d pull them into a single post for the non-Tweeting audience. It’s a quick list of what I think the various national remakes of Groundhog Day would look like.

• In the German adaptation, a guy in a black turtleneck stands in a starkly-lit white room and yells “Murmeltier! Verboten!” at the camera for 89 minutes. Then he takes a dump on the coffee table.
• In the French version, the main character Philippe spends the day chain-smoking Gauloises and discussing Camus with the groundhog. It rains throughout the entire movie.
• The Swedish remake takes place entirely at night and chronicles the groundhog’s decline into insanity. ( NC-17 for violence, graphic sex.)
• The Uwe Boll version features Burt Reynolds as a humanoid Punxsutawney Phil. Also, he’s a wizard. Then Jason Statham kills him. There are boobies, and something with tree elves on trapezes. (In 3D.)
• In the Russian version, the groundhog’s village is burned down by the invading Nazis, and he spends the rest of the movie drinking vodka and singing depressing folk songs. Then his own countrymen kill and eat him. (Categorized under “Light-hearted Comedies”.)

Did I miss any good local or regional remake ideas? Japanese anime? Bollywood? Made-for-TV telenovela?

everyone’s a moderate in their own mind.

Over at Atomic Nerds, the super-smart LabRat has a post up on the nature of media bias. It’s very much worth reading, so you should do so right away:

Fish in Blue Water (Atomic Nerds)

a glimpse into hef’s private bordello.

This article on life in the Playboy mansion makes me want to scrub myself down with lye.

There’s absolutely nothing about Hefner’s little fantasy fulfillment lifestyle that isn’t icky to the extreme–and I say that while having no Puritan hang-ups about sex whatsoever.  What Hugh Hefner practices is not a “sexy” lifestyle.  A guy who pays a harem of twenty-something women to sleep with him and give the world (and himself) the illusion that he’s some sort of bon-vivant stud is not sexy.  It’s just an old, sad, pajamas-wearing, Viagra-popping dude who likes to have sex with pneumatic blondes, and who built a business around the fulfillment of that desire.   At the end of the day, the fact remains that he has to pay for sex.

On a side tangent, this shows how silly, arbitrary, and misogynistic our prostitution laws are.  What happens at the Playboy mansion isn’t legally speaking prostitution, even though it involves a guy paying women to live and have sex with him for $1,000 in pocket money a week and a chance to become a centerfold.  If those women walked out of the Playboy Mansion, went to the next shopping mall, and offered some random stranger sexual favors for $1k a week, they’d be arrested for prostitution.  Where exactly is the difference here–other than the fact that it’s the male initiating and controlling the transaction here, and not the woman?

Like I said–lye scrubdown.  Living in a place with soiled mattresses and dog shit on the carpet, to be on sexual standby for an octogenarian man-child who probably never got a woman interested in him without the prospect of money or career advancement?  Ick, ick, a thousand times ick.  I think any streetwalker is far more respectable than any member of Hef’s harem…at least straight-up hookers don’t practice self-deception about what they do for a living.

i’ll take “first drafts written in crayon” for $100, alex.

I still only have the vaguest idea who “Snooki” is, but apparently she has written a novel, and it’s a NYT bestseller.  It’s also one of those books with Amazon reviews that have vastly more entertainment value and literary merit than the work they review.

one of the all-time great sf shows.

For my money, the high water mark for hard Science Fiction was the Muppet Show’s ‘”Pigs In Space”. Nothing will ever top its drama, character development, science fidelity, or special effects.

another poll on a matter of vital importance.

fueling your private jet with pure hypocrisy.

Bono’s charity, ONE, is the poster child for feel-good limousine liberal activism.  In 2008, they took in $14 million in donations, and disbursed a mere $184,000 (or 1%) to charities.  A whopping $8 million (or 57%) of those donations went to executive and employee salaries.  Meanwhile, ONE spends a bunch of cash sending expensive schwag to New York newsrooms to make them help convince the government to cough up $6 billion of taxpayer cash to fight AIDS and tuberculosis in Africa.

That’s the Berkeley Way right there: take in donations, take a sixty percent cut for yourself off the top, and spend most of the rest on stuff Starbucks coffee and Moleskine notebooks to woo reporters.  Focus your efforts on convincing the government to write out checks.  Ask for money that has to be confiscated from other people’s paychecks, people who are so greedy and cold-hearted that they simply don’t care to shell out those $6 billion voluntarily.  Meanwhile, you tour the world in private jets, and carry your nose high because you’re running a non-profit charity.

Now, I’m not slamming charity here.  But what Boner and the other limousine liberals just like him are practicing isn’t charity.  It’s self-congratulatory (and lucrative) grandstanding.

much bigger on the inside than you’d think.

Some writers have little writing shacks tucked into tranquil corners of their properties.  I’ve long been intrigued by the idea of a detached writing office without distractions, only to be used for cranking out pages.  Every time I go to Home Depot, I check out their pre-fabricated tool sheds, some of which are almost like houses in their own right.  I’ve also been browsing the Interwebs for inspiration and ideas.

Well, I think I’ve finally settled on the perfect design for the writing shack I want to build at the far end of the garden:

Construction will begin as soon as I can get my hands on a schematic for a 1950s English police box, and I figure out the exact Pantone value for the light blue color.  Oh, and I should probably level up my woodworking skills a bit…

your latin lesson for the day.

While we’re on the subject of the money-grubbing Florida rodent:

I haven’t retained much from the Latin lessons I took for a year before I switched to French, but I do remember that Mickey Mouse’s Latin name is “Michael Musculus”.

the rat will turn you upside down and shake out all your money.

News from Orlando: Admittance to the Rat Kingdom will now be an arm, a leg, two years of indentured servitude, and half your first-born.

Holy cow, I did not realize how much it actually costs to go see Mickey for a weekend.  A family of four needs to come up with some serious scratch once you consider airfare, rental, meals, admission, souvenirs, snacks…

Financially, it would be much easier on our family treasury to see the family in Germany for three weeks than to go get mugged by Mickey and Goofy for a long weekend.  Hell, for that kind of cash, I could have a fun weekend in the Big Apple, drinking expensive hooch while snorting foot-long lines of primo Bolivian Marching Powder off a squad of high-dollar call girls.