Category: And also

They were penned up and set out for purchase by huge beasts who wanted to chop them to pieces and devour their corpses. Before they could be eaten they staged a daring breakout and fled into the night. Finding a safe place to stop running, they established their own hidden sanctuary where they created a new society of their own, where they would hopefully be safe from being eaten. They named their community in memory of that threat, so they would never become complacent. They were… the Munch Bunch.
The whole terrifying tale retold as a jaunty song.
These characters were important to me when I was little, particularly the Banana Bunch. The all-knowing Wikipedia has an entry that mentions the special New Zealand series of characters. I remember these fondly, and I remember being pleased that there were NZ characters in the books (even if they never turned up on the television show).

because I was befriending parrots:

The Alligator has the story.

As my Christmas gift to you all, I’ve created a profile on Hoffspace, the social networking system for David Hasselhoff! You may express your gratitude in comments.
Merry Hoffmas to all and to each a good night!

The grandad of fandom died the other day. Forrest J Ackerman was the first great fan of science fiction and horror, an unfailingly nice gentleman whose passion for genre animated him throughout his life. His seminal magazine, Famous Monsters of Filmland cast a long shadow over 60s pop culture, and his friendships with the greats of horror and science fiction were legendary.
Most of all, though, I think we should remember Forry for being one of the champions of culture as a horizontal experience, rather than a vertical experience – that the greatest fun can be had not from sitting in a darkened theatre watching a film in silence, but in gleefully talking about it with friends afterwards. He was one of the first fans, and he was perhaps the nicest and most generous of all of us.
I was lucky enough to see him talk and to meet him briefly, back in ’91. He made an impression as a very nice chap indeed. Thanks for everything, Forry.
LA Times obituary

A poll says MacGyver is the toughest hero.
How tough is he?
So tough he can do THIS.
I could watch that all day.
(h/t to Richie)

Karate Kid remake to be set in Beijing.
(There are more things wrong with it too.)

Bad Horse put out the call: the Evil League of Evil was seeking applicants. A rare opportunity to get on-side with the Thoroughbred of Sin. Many people rose to the challenge. And I helped one of those people. Here’s the app:

Evil League of Evil Application: The Embezzler from Jarratt Gray on Vimeo.
This is all a spin-off from internet musical Dr Horrible, created by Buffy-maestro Joss Whedon during the writers’ strike. When Dr Horrible is released to DVD, ten or so ELE applicants will round out the package. The open call was an invitation to compete for one of those spots.
JB saw his chance and devised a heck of a script around the Embezzler character. He gathered together a crew of amigos and amigas to make it all happen. A lot of effort went into prep, and a lot into editing etc. afterwards, but it still felt like the day of the shoot was when it all happened – always to remember, shooting a film takes a lot of effort. I was recruited to play second-string character Devil’s Advocate, and when we did a script readthrough in the morning I took the opportunity to stick my nose in about how the story resolved. To my delight, the whole crew managed to usefully find a shared creative energy – sometimes too many cooks will spoil the broth, but here it felt like every idea contributed moved us closer to a solid final product. I note that I am co-credited on the script, but to be honest, it’s very close to JB’s original, and most of the changes originated from other people – my main contribution was finding a good structure for a three-minute bit, and even then I had lots of help.
It was cool to have Jarratt behind the camera. its the first time we’ve worked together on a film since ’99 I think, and his expertise has grown – he does this sort of thing for a living after all. The rest of us could have put our heads together and got the material down to about 3′ 15″, but the only way we would have made the required 3 minutes was by cutting out jokes. Jarratt was able to apply years of experience to slice it down to 3 minutes without losing anything important, finding just the right way to compress information. That is highly impressive to me.
Directing was shared between everyone, even me for a bit (is this the first time I’ve directed since the nonsensical Morgue’s World project of ’92?) and in fact everyone pitched in all over the place. Lovely crew made a very busy shoot a delightful experience. I had some doubts when I arrived in the morning that it would all get done but it did, and while it was hard work it wasn’t unpleasant. Good fun times were had, pizza was scoffed, and baby Hurricane made numerous behind-the-scenes appearances.
Speaking of Baby Hurricane, here’s his application, the work of Debz (the assessor in the Embezzler vid) and Matt C (who spent most of the shoot wandering the streets with the leetle super hero). It’s a treat as well. Good luck to them both!

cute!
etuc!
utec!
tuec!
tecu!
Googling anagrams – your best route to the world’s trivia.

You should all know about this: a website created specifically to keep you informed of whether or not the Large Hadron Collider has destroyed the earth.
It is the best way to stay abreast of the news in this area.