This is too awesome. Not only is "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" an awesome song (recently sampled on the new Kanye single), but this fan video takes it to the next level. It starts out looking somewhat stupid, but I assure you it gets good quickly. The funniest part is when the voice in the song is flickering/wavering.



And there's another interesting video on YouTube pointing out where Daft Punk sampled several of their own songs from. The best part is a few people in the comments complain about how Daft Punk is stealing music from the original artists, and someone responds "You do know that DJs do that all the time, right?"

Remember when Google had the Da Vinci Code Quest? Dave and I know it all too well. It was a bunch of puzzles created to promote both the Da Vinci Code movie and Google's various services. It looks like they're going to do something similar for the upcoming Bourne movie, The Bourne Ultimatum.

No word yet on any details of the type of game/quest it will be or if any prizes will be involved (like the cryptex), but the official Bourne movie website simply says "The Ultimate Search for Bourne on Google starts this summer." The movie itself comes out August 3rd.

For anyone that hasn't noticed already, there's now a rotating banner image at the top of this site. At my request for site improvements I could make, dave gave me a couple of ideas of new banners I can use. Before I could even think about it, he put together several of them and suggested I rotate through them. I liked all of the ones he gave me so that sounded like a great idea. It wasn't long before he had given me 13 logos and I implemented the rotation. I made an additional 6, and counting the original banner there's now 20 banners you can see here.


I plan to continue expanding the banners, and with 20 it's already gotten interesting. If you want to take a quick glance at the available banners without refreshing the page a million times, there's now a page which displays all of the banners in rotation.

And anyone else that wants to submit a banner for rotation can feel free to do so...I like the idea of a changing face at the top of the page.

Sorry, Harvey (S4E4)

This week's episode was funny in a lot of ways. I'm liking that Entourage is picking up again, and I'm even happier to have an episode without Billy "Wally Balls" Walsh. Drama's throwaway storyline was actually quite amusing and led to a hilarious TMZ outcome. The result of the valet switch was awesome...especially when Ari gave the guy an extra (verbal) jab before driving off.

Given the title of this week's episode, is this screencap really a spoiler?

It was also funny how Vince and E both acted tougher than they were...nobody stands up to Harvey unless he's in the hand of bouncers already. The cranberry thing was a stupid way to set that up, but setting up the opportunity for Johnny to blatantly break the news was great. Overall I've got nothing to complain about in this episode...it was truly entertaining without any cringe-inducing or boring moments.

And the best line of the episode by far: Johnny: "Even more thoughtful, were the coffees I brought over to the Beverly Hills firehouse when I went over to introduce myself." E: "Are you expecting a fire, or are you just hoping to slide up and down on their pole?"

This was a review of Episode 46. See more reviews.

I've still got to see Knocked Up, Sicko, and Die Hard and all of those movies are out right now. I just saw Transformers which came out this week, and License to Wed which also came out this week looked terrible. And now I need to keep track of movies that are about to come out too...I've been looking forward to The Bourne Ultimatum and The Simpsons Movie for a while now, and they're finally approaching release.

Keeping track of movies, especially during the summer months, can be a pain. So I'm now displaying movie information from Rotten Tomatoes that includes their Tomatometer rating for movies released recently, as well as movies about to be released. You can find this new tool near the bottom of the left navigation pane.

Feel free to suggest any changes to the way it is displayed or the content itself. Overall I'm already finding it quite useful, and I'm sure it will help keep track of upcoming releases in particular.

A CGI-laden popcorn flick with some campy acting, one heck of a nostalgia rush and plenty of action and humor. If you expected anything more, prepare to be disappointed. But considering that was pretty much what I was expecting (and it's not like the trailers were very misleading), I was left satisfied. This is a mass-appeal Hollywood blockbuster reminiscent of Independence Day. And the proof couldn't be more clear - on Rotten Tomatoes the critics gave it a 57% while users gave it an 84%.

Sure if you are going to complain and nitpick you've got plenty of material, including (spoilers) ridiculous eBay/internet jokes, the fact that the Autobots resemble a GM showroom, cheesy kid-parent interactions, cheesy kid-robot interactions, the government letting a kid keep a robot that could destroy everything, etc. But going through all that would be missing the point. It's not a movie I'd watch 100 times, but it was entertaining the first time.

dave submitted a story I remember seeing a while back, but it's funny enough that I think it merits posting. Two women started sending a hotdog back and forth to each other, and before you know it it's been 54 years and the thing looks disgusting.

Flora Zimbelman says it all started 54 years ago when she put an uncooked hot dog in her sister's suitcase. "I don't know what made me do it. The devil I guess," she said.

Flora's sister, Rose, found the hot dog when she opened the suitcase back up in Idaho, where she lived at the time. "She mailed it back to me telling me to keep my garbage at home," said Flora. The game was on.

In the years that followed, Flora would find a way to sneak the hot dog back into Rose's life. And Rose would find another way to sneak it back to Flora. "I found it under my pillow once, I found it in between the drapes and once I found it in the kitchen drawer," said Flora.

Flora still has that hot dog. It looks just about as disgusting as you might expect. Yet, earlier this year, Flora's sister, best friend, and victim of her continuous pranks, lost her battle with cancer.

Flora says she misses her friend, and even though it's difficult to look at, she'll still show you the hot dog and tell you the story behind it.

The disgusting looking 54-year old hotdog.

I've known about and enjoyed the YouTube mashup of clips from NBC's The Office with the song SexyBack. The person that made the mashup obviously spent a lot of time finding clips that fit the lyrics and also the major changes in the song and made it look really synchronized. Then today I saw a link for the Mr. Roboto mashup and found that it was also an excellently edited mashup. So I dug a little more. In all I found four really good Office mashups, and here they are, all in one place:

SexyBack - the first one I was aware of

Domo Arigato, Mr. Scott-o - has a surprising amount of relevant clips...Dwight on the recorder is priceless

It's Getting Hot In Here - I like how this one has several spots where it looks like characters are singing lyrics

Scranton Party - this one's a bit repetitive because the source material is limited, but it's still a good one and short as well

There's been two developments in building hype for the upcoming Simpsons movie coming out July 27th. First, their site at simpsonsmovie.com went live and you can explore all sorts of content. You can even make your own Simpsons avatar, though they oddly lack the ability to add either glasses or facial hair. So here's me without a goatee:


And over this last weekend, a bunch of 7-Eleven stores got converted to Kwik-E-Marts as part of the promotion. They seem to have done a pretty good job, with lots of jokes from the show. It's good to see that 7-Eleven was willing to poke some fun at itself. There's a ton of pictures up on Flickr of the stuff they put up in the stores, and you can see if one near you got converted on this page. The page lists Burbank, CA; Chicago, IL; Dallas, TX; Denver, CO; Lake Buena Vista/Orlando, FL; Las Vegas/Henderson, NV; Los Angeles, CA; New York City, NY; San Francisco, CA/Mountain View, CA; Seattle, WA; Vancouver/Coquitlam, BC; Washington DC/Bladensburg, MD as locations that were converted.

Malibooty (S4E3)

This week's episode was great in that it felt like things are back to normal. More on that in a second. But I found it funny how E has now fucked Harvey twice. I'm sure he wants to kill him. But, now he won't have Walsh wanting to kill him. Of course getting into Cannes doesn't necessarily mean the film will be well received, so there's still some room for drama there. It was funny how the trailer looked just as ridiculous as the actual movie. Everyone is blown away by it and half of it is just prosthetic chubby Vince getting money rained down on him in slow motion.

The website shown above from the trailer actually exists and is owned by HBO, though it currently just says "Coming Soon". Maybe they'll add some content to it soon?

So finally we get a real return to Agent Ari instead of sending him off on some bizarre subplot to develop his family (or whatever the point of that was last week). I'm happy to see more of Lloyd again...it makes it all the more apparent how absent he has been as well. Drama and Turtle are up to the usual, Vince is being irresponsible, and E seems more worried about everything going on again. Vince and E clash a bit but everything works out. This is the Entourage that the 2nd half of Season 3 had forgotten, so it's nice to get back to the familiar flow. Somehow while it's familiar it still doesn't feel predictable or less enjoyable.

It makes you wonder, if E manages to pull all this off, will they have anything to do with Ari now? It seems like he doesn't have much to offer then.

This was a review of Episode 45. See more reviews.