Posts Tagged: ‘shenanigans’

Our friends at Science Channel have picked up the rights to air “Firefly,” starting Sunday, March 6. Nathan Fillion did an interview with EW.com to promote the show’s return to TV, in which he said that if he won $300 million from the California Lottery, he’d “buy the rights to ‘Firefly,’ make it on [his] [...]

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One of my favorite TV shows right now is “Leverage.” And one of my favorite running gags on “Leverage” is a joke I don’t think it’s touched on in a while. Eliot Spencer (Christian Kane, also of “Angel” and a bunch of stuff I’ve never watched) will describe something that’s going on. He’ll spot a specific detail — the kind of gun being used, the backgrounds of the hired bodyguards. One of the others in the “Leverage” version of the Scooby Gang will say, “How do you know X is Y?” Eliot’s answer: “It’s a really distinctive [whatever it is].” The gun had a very distinctive “crack” when it fired. The bodyguards had very distinctive haircuts. You get the idea.

I went to YouTube to see whether some ingenious person had put together a montage of all of Eliot’s “very distinctive” whatevers. No luck. Nor has anybody made a video of every time he tells somebody, “You have a tell.”

There are plenty of other “all-of-the-times-X-happens” videos, though. So I thought I’d share. I’d start with a few from “The Wire,” but they’re all NSFW, so here are some substitutes instead.

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If I had been remotely diligent in this blog during the month of December, you might have noticed my conspicuous absence last week. But since I haven’t been diligent at all … last week I was out of the country on vacation. On a boat full of nerds. At JoCo Cruise Crazy.

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Starting word count: 5,004

Yesterday’s word count: 1,997

Total word count: 7,001

The product: A little fleshing out in chapter three and drafting of chapter four, in which we eat fruit tart in low gravity and meet a matchmaker. Later, we see major drama between journalists arguing the pros an cons of NaNoWriMo.

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Last night, Neil Gaiman held a reading and book signing in Decatur, Ga. The event was co-hosted by Little Shop of Stories — an independent bookstore in Decatur — and Agnes Scott College. By the end of the evening, I’d met Neil, gotten some books signed and had my picture taken with him.

If you’re a fan of Neil Gaiman, that probably sounds cool, but it doesn’t really sum up what was most awesome about the event. Perhaps more than any other fan event I’ve ever attended, last night’s signing required extraordinary patience and perseverance from pretty much everyone involved. Find out what happened (in all three acts) after the jump.

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Confession time: In the last month, I’ve logged in to Google Reader and marked 1,000+ items as read in one fell swoop at least four times. And if you read FanStuff regularly, you’ve probably noticed that, aside from a flurry of activity leading up to Halloween, the blog’s been pretty quiet. There’s plenty of cool stuff happening in the worlds of TV, movies, music and games, and I could probably get to it all with the help of time dilation. But as it stands now, FanStuff needs more cowbell than I can provide by myself.

So, starting this week, HowStuffWorks editor Chanel Lee is going to be joining me at FanStuff. Find out more about her after the jump.

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It’s not hard to think of real animals that feed on blood. It’s not even hard if you narrow it down to ones we’ve written about. Mosquitoes. Fleas. Ticks. Bats. Bed bugs. The one big-name bloodsucker that hasn’t gotten the full HowStuffWorks.com treatment yet is the leech, so I’m putting that on the list of things to do.

But there are plenty of vampire creatures that haven’t spent much time in the limelight. Here are some of my favorites — and the B-grade horror movies they could star in.

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One of the many, many events I missed during Dragon*Con ’09 was an attempt to break the Guinness world record for the most people doing the dance from Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video. I had both practice sessions and the record-breaking attempt marked on my calendar, and I made it to none of them. I consoled myself by thinking that when the results came back — and with 903 participants, surely they’d win! — I’d write about the achievement. I didn’t know that a group of 13,597 dancers had just tried to break the record in Mexico, and I learned yesterday that the record now lies with them.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Inside Access blog noted that the Dragon*Con organizers had contacted a lawyer because the Mexico team hadn’t followed the rules. Wondering just what was up with that, I e-mailed organizer Lauren Leasure, and early this morning, I got a response that was considerably perkier than what I’d expect from someone who’d just come out on the wrong side of an adjudicating panel. Find out what she said after the jump.

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Earlier this week, I wrote about a couple of big changes to Dragon*Con this year: It’s bigger, it spans more hotels, and it’s getting started earlier. In fact, I’m already in line — at an hour usually reserved for sleeping or packing in previous years — waiting to see William Shatner and Leonard Nemoy.

If you’re headed downtown to the convention, or if you’re already here, I’ve got a couple more resources you might find handy.

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In May of this year, Stephen Torrence and cohorts wound up performing his sign language interpretation of the song “First of May” onstage with Jonathan Coulton and Paul and Storm. (It’s a song about springtime, and, in case you missed yesterday’s post and aren’t a JoCo fan, it’s not safe for work.) Stephen describes the performance as “one of the most exciting experiences I’ve ever had.”

Stephen didn’t start out making videos with the idea of becoming e-famous, though. His first ASL video, for “Still Alive,” was the result of a project for an ASL class at Texas Tech. He decided to put the song on YouTube and, in his words, “It snowballed from there.”

When I got in touch with Stephen, he suggested a video interview, since sign language is such a visual medium. I recorded the interview using iChat and a MacBook Pro, and our intrepid video team has scissored out the best parts into two videos.

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