Random Day 6: Two for the Price of One!

Okay, so it is 11:34 p.m. on Friday night and I am changing my plan for today's (Saturday's) post. I had originally intended something completely different to share today, but I just found something and I had to share.

This comes to you again courtesy of my brother, who is just as much of a Disney nut as I am. And he likes Star Wars too. And yes, it is a Disney YouTube thing again. But stick with me for a second.

For those of you who don't know, Disneyland and Walt Disney World just got brand new revamped versions of Star Tours (the Star Wars themed simulation ride in the Disney parks). There are some pretty funny Star Wars themed commercials out there, but this one has to be my favorite.

Darth Vader goes to Disneyland:


My favorite part? Taking a lightsaber to the ghosts in the Haunted Mansion. Oh, and when he's watching the princess float in the parade with the Mickey balloon in his hand while the two stormtroopers have on their classic Mickey hats. I just about died laughing.

So if you scroll down a bit you'll see the entire post I had originally planned for today's date. So you get two bits o' random entertainment for the price of one!








Orignal Post:

Today is Day 6 of the Week o' Random Entertainment. 

For today's video I have something a little different.  One of my favorite Sunday comic strips is Pearls Before Swine by California cartoonist Stephan Pastis.  The series features anthropomorphic animals Pig, Rat, Goat, and Zebra as they bring animal life to suburban living. 

One of my favorite running gags is Zebra's next door neighbors the crocodiles.  Being natural predators, they are constantly trying to kill Zebra.  But they are also incredible stupid, which leads to some pretty funny situations.  A few Pearls Before Swine strips have recently started being animated, including these two, which are some of the best croc strips:



And that concludes our Week o' Random Entertainment.  I hope you enjoyed yourself at least a bit and I didn't bore you all too much.  Come back tomorrow for the kickoff of Round 2 for the 2011 YA Bloggers Book Battle!

Random Day 5: Muppets!

We're winding down the Week o' Random Entertainment, with today's entry as number five. 

I know I've featured a couple of the Muppet videos before, but I don't think I've posted this before and it's one of my favorites.  It's like the greatest YouTube spoof ever.  Not much left to say, so I hope it makes you laugh as much as it does for me:

Random Day 4: One Man Disney Movie

Welcome to Day 4 of the Week o' Random Entertainment.  I saved one of my favorites for today.  A friend tipped me off on this one, and I've been meaning to share it with you for awhile.  Here is the One Man Disney Movie.  Yes, it's another Disney clip, but I couldn't resist.  Disney is in my blood, you know.  ;)

This is Nick Pitera, and although he has lots of videos on YouTube, this is my favorite.  He's recorded himself singing the same set of Disney songs 6 different times, so it looks like 6 different people.  His vocal range is super amazing, and I like the arrangement too.  This is one you'll want to watch more than once so you can pay attention to the other "characters" facial expressions when they're not singing. 

Bonus points if you can name all 9 Disney movies too. 

Random Day 3: Harry Potter Puppet Pals

Today is Day 3 of the Week o' Random Entertainment, and today's feature is actually book-related.  Sort of. 

Have you heard of the Harry Potter Puppet Pals?  Probably a lot of you have.  But if you haven't, and you're a Harry Potter fan, this is definitely a group of videos you should see.  Today I present my favorite of the Harry Potter Puppet Pals features: The Mysterious Ticking Noise

Random Day 2: How It Should Have Ended

Today for our Week O' Random Entertainment... how it should have ended!

I know I've mentioned HISHE before on here, but for those of you who are new, this is an animated series that features ideas on how various movies should have ended.  What would really happen if you strip away all the Hollywood drama?  Well, the results are pretty humorous. 

About a month ago my brother talked me into watching Inception for the first time.  And it made my brain hurt.  A lot.  But I did ultimately enjoy the movie.  So here for your viewing pleasure today, how Inception really should have ended:

Random Day 1: New Pirates!!

Welcome to Day 1 of the Week o' Random Entertainment! 

Today I have a video my brother tipped me off on  from his blog post last week.  If you're a longtime blog follower, you know I'm a huge Disney fan.  And one of my favorite things about Disney is the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise.  The new Pirates movie came out just a week ago (I've already seen it) and it is awesome! 

For those of you who aren't on the west coast, Disney's California Adventure (sister park to Disneyland in Anaheim) has a new nighttime show called World of Color.  I haven't seen it in person yet (my brother has, lucky kid) but the videos I've seen look super epic-y awesome!  And they just added a new section for the new Pirates movie.  It's pretty neat, so here's a video so you can see.  This actually goes through the end of the show too, just to give  you a glimpse of how amazing it is.  And it has the princesses too, which next to pirates is my favorite Disney thing.  :)  

So without further ado, check out this Pirate awesomeness. It begins with the new mermaid section from the fourth movie (and mermaids are scary!) moves on to feature the new villian Blackbeard, the one-of-a-kind Captain Jack Sparrow, and the pirates music you all love. Oh, and fire too. Lots and lots of fire...



Captain, I'd like to report a mutiny.  I can name fingers and point names.  Classic.  I love it.  :)

Plans for the Next Week

So, responses from my Round 2 judges have been coming in slowly but surely, so I'm still organizing the shortlisted books into brackets.  Hopefully after this week it will be all done.  :)  So if you haven't answered my email yet, you're not too late.  And in the same vein, if you didn't get an email, but think you should have, let me know.  Also, a few people have dropped out, so if you're still interested in being a Round 2 judge, check out this post for all the details to sign up. 

So what to do in the meantime?  My poor little blog has been so neglected as I've been busy organizing things this past few weeks.  I spend all my free time behind the scenes rather than posting much content.  So to make up for it, I'm holding a special event all week long.  I call it:

The Week O' Random Entertainment

What is that, you say?  I'll tell you.  Pretty much what it sounds like.  But here's where it came from.  One of my favorite things to do (other than read) is to watch random clips on YouTube.  Things my brother finds, things I've seen posted other places, etc.  I usually plan to do a random post about various videos, but oftentimes my plans get off track (for whatever reason).  But not this week!

Every day this week (starting Monday) I will be posting a random video for your entertainment.  It gives you something to watch while I'm busy setting things up for Round 2, and I get to share some stuff I've been wanting too.  Two birds with one stone. 

Some come back tomorrow to see what random video is in store.  And if you're not up for this sort of thing, feel free to completely ignore the blog this week.  And we hope to see you back here on the 5th for the Round 2 kickoff. 

Have a great week everyone!

The Peril of a Large TBR pile

You ever feel like the books on your bookshelf are talking to you?



Pick me, says that little paperback in the corner. Read me!

I can't, you say. I'm reading something else right now.

But remember when you first got me? it replies. That day I came in the mail and you opened me up and there I was sitting for you, all shiny and waiting. Remember how excited you were to read me?

Yes, I remember, you admit. You reluctantly put down the book you're reading and grab the little paperback, once more reading the description on the back cover. I forgot how excited I was about reading you.

But no, you can't. You quickly put down the paperback back on the shelf.

I'm sorry, you explain to the little book. But I already have a big stack of books that I need to read and review. See there, the pile by the bed? There's at least six books there! And the review deadlines are in two weeks. I can't possible afford to be distracted at the moment.

But it will be all right, the paperback counters. I'm just a little guy. Won't take you more than a day. If that.

Yes, you agree. But one day distractions lead to more distractions and then two weeks are over and I still don't have these other books even started. I really, really can't right now.

Determined in your resolve, you turn away from the paperback and pick up the gigantic 500 page novel you've spent 2 weeks already trying to wade through. It feels almost heavier in your hands as you try to thumb through the pages looking for your bookmark.

Please? you hear the paperback plead behind you. Pretty please?

Against your better judgement you turn around to look at the book a final time... and your fate is sealed. Sighing, you pick the little paperback up once more.

I never could resist the puppy dog look.

Completely Random: How To Waste 20 Minutes On YouTube

It starts simple enough. First you jokingly make a reference to your brother about "Oh Long Johnson". When he looks at you like you don't know what he's talking about, of course you have to show him:



Then, thanks to YouTube's related videos feature, this clip catches your attention:



Okay, that was kind of freaky. Let's find something more normal. Ooh, here's one with two cats, I wonder what it is:



Oh, that's just so cute. So you watch it again. And then another related video pops up. There's a translation, cool!:



Hehe. That was kind of funny. Ooh look, the same guy's got another video:



I love this guy! What other kind of videos does he have? A mystic cat?:



Which leads to this:



And then this (which is my favorite):


By this time you are rolling on the floor, so you call your dad over to show him, and play all 8 videos again.

20 minutes wasted. Thanks YouTube.

What I Do When Not Reading

Alea of Pop Culture Junkie has a meme I love to read that she calls her Weekly Dose of Crafts. Every week or so she shows off the projects she's worked on during the past week.

So I decided to do something a little different and show off my own crafting hobby. With the Holiday Bookmark Swap coming up, I've been busy making bookmarks. And one of my favorite bookmark projects are cross stitch bookmarks. I like doing cross stitch because it gives me a break from work and reading (although I still enjoy reading a lot) and bookmarks are a quick project that I won't get burned out on easily.

My big thing at the moment are name bookmarks. I made one for myself and my brother and one of my best friends for her birthday and they were a big hit. So then I started to get orders for them. So I custom make and sell them now. And it's a lot of fun, because I design them myself.

Here's one I did for a kid who loves Disney. I found a Disney handwriting font and was able to convert it to stitches. I then did it in his favorite colors of navy blue and gray.

After making that one, he liked it so much that he ordered one for his friend, who loves Halo. Hence the Halo font on this one. He also wanted the edges fringed instead of folded over, which was a little bit different effect:
(sorry for the crappy picture. My cell phone camera is all I had when I took this and it sucks)

Here's the first bookmark I did with variegated (color changing) thread. It's a little hard to see because the picture is so bad (see comment about camera phone above), but the thread changes colors as it goes along the letter. It took a little experimenting to figure out the best way to use the thread, but in the end I think it blended really nicely.

This is my latest project, finished last night. Again, I used variegated thread, but only one color this time instead of two. I really like the way it turned out, although I wish I could have gotten the text a little taller. It was a bit hard to work with since the name was so long.
Anyway, that's a little preview of what I've been working on lately. Let me know what you guys think of this post. If this kind of stuff interests you I'll share my projects occasionally. And if not, then I'll just keep my stitching to myself. :) Anyway, I have to go finish another order I have for someone's birthday in December, so I'll wrap this up.

A Bookish Conundrum

I was trying to get my mom to read Pride and Prejudice today because she just got done reading a modern retelling of it and didn't really like it that much because she hadn't read the original. After explaining what it was about, she was reluctant to read it because she doesn't like historical fiction.

Which made me wonder something...

If a book that whose setting was contemporary at the time it was written, now that time has passed, is it considered historical fiction.

Take Pride and Prejudice, for example. Ignoring the fact that it's usually branded nowadays as a classic, is it historical fiction? Austen wrote about her own time period, which would be the equivalent of today's young adult fiction set in modern high schools. So 140 years from now, will those books be considered historical fiction, even though they were contemporary for the period they were written in?

Anyway, my brain thinks of weird things this late at night...

Ramblings: Currently Reading

So I've been missing again for the past couple of days, mostly because I've been using my free time to play around with my new Goodreads account. The "currently reading" feature kind of fascinates me. And it made me think of something.

I'm the kind of person who can read multiple books at a time. I think I picked up this school through my English classes for college, since I would have a lot of different school books I was reading, and then ones I was reading for fun too. But as I'm trying to fill in my library, I notice I have a LOT of books that could be marked "currently reading". Not only do I have about 7 that I'm actively reading, but I have probably that many (or more) that I started to get into and then were placed aside for the time being in favor of something else. I wonder if that counts as "currently reading" too. Obviously I'm reading it, because I'm in the middle and I haven't abandoned it completely, but I'm not actively reading it either.

So what do you all do? Are you the type of reader who reads one (or two) books straight through before picking up a new one? If you read multiple books at a time, how many do you typically read at a time? What's the biggest number you've been reading at once?

Enquiring minds want to know. ;)

A Very Random Post

Still battling El Nino here. Weather kind of scary and internet still shaky. Will be back when I can. Some hail, over 1" of rain, and 50 mph winds today. More coming tomorrow...

Anyway, this is completely random, but I just saw this in someone's signature and thought I'd share. I figured I'd better hurry and share before 1) I forget and/or 2) our power decides to snuff it:

Foolish human, do not meddle in the affairs of dragons. Because you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup.

Food for thought. :)

Work in Progress

Thank you to everyone who has commented on my two posts involving stolen content. Your comments have been both helpful and uplifting.

I hadn't planned it this way, but based on some of the comments I've been receiving, I am going to do a few more series of posts on this topic. This is a serious issue, and I want to share the information I've been learning with my fellow bloggers so we can fight this together.

Right now I'm planning additional posts on these topics: How to tell if you content has been stolen, Steps to take when you become a victim of plagiarism, How to protect your work against future theft, and Tips for making sure you don't inadvertently steal someone's work. I'm going to continue the research I've been doing and spread these out over the next few weeks so you are bogged down in such a serious topic all the time. I don't want the tone of my blog to be like that, but this is important, so it will have to simply be like that some of the time over the next few days.

In the meantime, if you have any tips or suggestions you'd like to offer on any of these topics, please send me an email at shadyglade(AT)mail(DOT)com. As I said, I'm doing lots of research on this, but no amount of typing things into Google can compare with personal experience.

Okay, now I promise on to happier things. I appreciate you hanging in there with me through this.

Stolen Content: An Urgent Plea to Bloggers

It saddens me that I have to write a post like this, but unfortunately I feel I must. Today I happened to find a blog that was stealing content from other blogs, two of which I am familiar with. I'm not going to link to the blog because they don't deserve to get a hike in their numbers, but I feel I do need to speak out.

I happened to come across this because of a Google Alert I have set up with my blog name. One of the stolen blogs had written a post mentioning my blog name and so it showed up in the same Google alert as under a different website. It was obvious as soon as clicking over that this blog DID NOT write the post in question (as well as every other post there) and did not give credit to the people who had written the content.

Please, please, please if you ever notice a blog where posts appear to be stolen, contact the owner of the original blog right away. It may turn out they were reposted with permission, but it's better to play it safe than sorry.

Stealing someone's posts is WRONG. It doesn't matter if it's on the internet, that post still belongs to the person who wrote it and is protected under copyright law. The thing that really gets me mad about this blog is one of the feeds they are stealing from has a copyright notice written into each and every post to prevent this from happening. And although they didn't remove it, they did twist it around so it meant something completely different. Quoting someone and linking back to their post is fine (and I think should be encouraged) but do so with the permission of the person who wrote it. We bloggers are a pretty friendly lot (generally speaking), and a quick email just to check will suffice.

Now, if this has happened to any of you reading this, what did you do to respond? I've been looking for things all day, but I have yet to find a good, definitive source on how to take care of this sort of thing. If anyone has any links/suggestions/etc. please leave them in the comments.

We're all in this together. Let's help support our fellow bloggers and keep our eyes open for stolen content.

Okay, plea over. We now return you to your regularly scheduled blog.

Random Ramblings: Some Classical Music That Will Make You Smile

So it's been quite a while since I last blogged about my YouTube wanderings (I really do spend too much time on that site...), and I thought I'd share some new favorites with you. I love the Muppets, and so when I come across these classical variations, I just had to share. I hope these bring a little smile to your day. And just so you know, Statler and Waldorf at the end of each one is the best part.

Beaker and the Swedish Chef in "Habanera" (With an appearance by Animal)


Gonzo the Great and his chickens do "The Blue Danube"


Beaker performs "Ode to Joy" (all by himself!)


(Saved the best for last!) Sam the Eagle brings you "Stars and Stripes Forever!". A tribute to the upcoming President's Day. :-)

Crummy Weather

We've having ugly weather today. It seems to be spitting. Yes, you read that right, the sky is spitting. It's not rainging, it's not snowing, but it's kinda misting, but not really. It's spitting.

So I'm going to go curl up on the couch with a book and some homework. I want to post a Cybils update soon, so keep an eye out for that. But right now, it's time to hide from the weather...

Off Topic

Not much time to blog at the moment. I have three papers staring me down right now that are due on Monday. But I figured I'd share this cute little thought with you:

Why can't I get one of these in the mail?

I'll try to be back soon. I've got big plans for the blog (including about 30 posts in draft) I just need to find time to work on it!

Random: Am I the only one who hasn't heard of this?

So I'm doing research for a magazine article in one of my classes about the ghosts that supposedly haunt Hampton Court Palace in England. I'm thinking mostly about Catherine Howard (Henry VIII's fifth wife) who has been spotted running down a room known as the Haunted Gallery shrieking for her life to be spared (she was beheaded shortly thereafter).

But this I didn't know. Maybe I just hadn't heard about this because I'm not a ghost enthusiast, but apparently there was a ghostly spotting in October 2003. You can read more about the incident here, but this is the video that is "proof" of the incident. Kinda spooky, even if it isn't real....

We Interrupt This Blog

to bring you this. I don't know if you are familar with the comic Get Fuzzy, but occasionally it can be quite funny. I was reading through the archives and came across this gem from last June. Since I also like Star Wars, this is one I truly enjoyed. Click on the pic to enlarge it. Happy reading!