Sunday Burst of Weirdness

Wow, what nice weather we've had the last couple of days. That plus The Wife being out of town for a couple of days, leaving me alone with The Daughter, made blogging less of a priority for a bit. In Buffalo, our springs are generally dismal, so we have to take our nice weather as we get it for these few months, and this year the spring has been even more dismal than usual. So this weekend I finally gave the grill its maiden voyage with a couple of steaks. Mmmmm, steak.

So where's the weirdness? Well, I didn't really notice a whole lot of outright weirdness this week, because I didn't spend as much time trolling the Interweb for links. But I did find a few things of varying degrees of weirdness.

:: As a submission for a film class, a film student remade one of the most harrowing scenes from 24, the death of Ryan Chappelle. It's easy to critique the acting -- that's the filmmaker playing Chappelle -- but he indicates that his original Chappelle backed out, leaving him to do it. What's interesting is how closely he got the background stuff, even going so far as to shoot his scene at the same location as the original.

And here's the original, for the sake of comparison.

:: This is an older article, but I'm only just seeing it now (via). It's twenty-five great installments from Calvin and Hobbes. Sadly, my own personal favorite storyline from that strip -- when Calvin was paired with Susie for a school project -- didn't make their cut, but hey, Calvin was rarely less than brilliant.

:: Rich Little was the main entertainment at the Correspondents Dinner in Washington this year. Rich Little. The main entertainment. Apparently Soupy Sales was booked?

:: Sometimes I'm willing to wax poetic about how much better stuff was when I was a kid, but not on the subject of playgrounds. Hard steel jungle gyms and slides on hard rubber (or even bare concrete), whose component parts would reach tremendously hellish temperatures in the baking hot sun of summer, such that the sound of kids coming down the slide was more often the screech of agony when inadvertently bare skin contacted metal than the squeal of thrilled delight at attaining speeds of maybe a mile an hour coming down those speed-challenged slides. Yeah, playgrounds back then were pretty bogus affairs.

Not so much anymore. These kids today will never realize how good they got it!