Rambocky

Wawa Records and Filmed Entertainment presents Rambocky, starring Philly Boy Roy and Patton Oswalt.

See it HERE.

Rojo Johnson

Earlier in the week:

"The Round Rock Express have acquired Billy Ray "Rojo" Johnson... Johnson, who was born in East Texas but was raised in Venezuela, recently had his prison sentence commuted. He served time for running a smuggling ring that imported rare and illegal species of reptiles into the United States from South America during the mid-to-late 1990s."

Pitcher Rojo Johnson made his minor league debut for the Round Rock Express last night. Astonishingly, he threw only one pitch before being chased out of the ballpark. Just watch.

'Nem Tasers

On this week's Best Show on WFMU, "Philly Boy" Roy Ziegler had a chance to react publicly to the week's news about his son running around Citizens Bank Park and eventually being tasered into submission.

TO hear it, click HERE, and skip to 22:15.

WDW Lines

Another option for wait time application, assuming you think you need one (and I do), is WDW Lines by touringplans.com. This program is different than Ride Hopper because it accepts user-submitted wait times, but encourages people not to use them. Instead, their primary attraction wait time program was built using thousands of statistical data points and models, using over 10 years of park history. This program is specific to Disney World while Ride Hopper is not, and also includes suggestions for parks to avoid on any given day. I assume this will be the more accurate application.

Ride Hopper

Ride Hopper is an Android app I intend on trying out in Disney World next week. It's a multi-park tool that allows people touring those parks to submit wait times for rides. To prevent anyone from submitting false times from their couch at home, the program uses your phone's GPS to verify that you are in the same zip code as the park you're submitting a time for.

Seems useful, but I'm thinking that user-submitted data may be too small a cross section to really be accurate. We'll see.

Hard to Handle

I heard Otis Redding's original version of the song "Hard to Handle" on XPN a few days ago and ignorantly thought to myself, "this is such a great cover of the Black Crowes' song." It was an ignorant thing to think for several reasons, not the least of which is the fact that Redding has been dead since 1967. So to honor the man, let's all listen to the song that sparked this post and make a pact to be music snobs together and point out to anyone listening to the Black Crowes that arguably their biggest and only hit is the one they didn't write.

Runner Runner

No, that's not the cast of the new show Jersey Shore Emo, it's Runner Runner, the first and only band signed to David Letterman's new Clear Entertainment record label.

On one hand, I'm not surprised Dave has a record label as he's consistently been the late night host who books the best bands and he seems to genuinely care about the music. But, on the other hand, this might be the worst pop-punk band I've ever heard, and the label's signing is an obviously pandering to the Hannah Montana generation where the quality of the music means nothing.

Hear for yourself with Runner Runner's new "single" "So Obvious":

Por Favor Manténgase....

I've been putting together a list of odd things I want to accomplish for the 6 days I'm in Disney World. I'll still be seeing the typical attractions, but I'm also excited about some of the other random things I can do. I just started the brainstorming, but I like what I have so far.

1. Re-create a photo from past Disney trips. Lots of people do this, but I haven't been to WDW since 1996, so this could be interesting. Here's one, but this one would be hard to re-create (although all of these people will be in attendance)given the state of the castle and I'm sure a family photo will take place in similar proximity anyway simply because that's what people do. I can do better.

2. Shun all of the Disney character attempts to say hello to me, but be really, visibly excited to meet "Bert" the chimney sweep from Mary Poppins. Is it chimney sweep Bert or One-Man-Band Bert? Is it a real brit, or a cheap Van Dykian imposter? I'll find out.

3. Record audio of the monorail's "stand clear of the door" warning, specifically for the awesome spanish translation, "Por favor mantengase alejado de las puertas."

...is what I would have made #3 if this hadn't already been done for me by the internets.

See, it was during that last Disney trip in '96 that my family and I (just me and my brother) started to memorize that line, simply because we heard it so often on our monorail trips and the spanish part is admittedly fun to say. But when we came home to 1996 suburban Philadelphia the technology just wasn't there for us to be able to hear it again. No matter how many alta vista searches and web crawls I performed, I just couldn't find a .wav file that didn't take 9 days to download on our very normal dial-up Prodigy connection. Fast forward to 2010, 10+ years since I'd even given the phrase a thought I do a google search and it turns out thousands of people are obsessed with the monorail audio, so much so even that when WDW retired the original voice actor's entire monorail speech, they KEPT the "stand clear of the doors" portion of his speech and replaced the rest with someone new. Not only that, but they sell t-shirts with the popular spanish phrase IN THE PARK (see above).

So until next time, por favor mantengase alejado de las puertas.

End of the Century

In last week's post about It Might Get Loud, I mentioned it was my second favorite documentary. The first is one I've blogged about before, and that is End of the Century: The Story of the Ramones. I love it simply because it seems surreal. People who hate the band's music would be interested in their story simply because of the multiple personalities involved and the length of their careers. And now I can prove it because it's available in parts on Youtube.

Start with Part 1, here.

Sky Map

I recently moved into the world of modern cell phone technology by purchasing the HTC Droid Eris which besides allowing me to stay on the Verizon network that I enjoy (as opposed to buying an iPhone), also offers the freedom of Linux-based mobile processing with the Android Operating System, which was developed by Google. Although having so much data available at my fingertips was overwhelming at first, I'm finding that one of the great things about a phone like this is the array of free applications available. There's a thousand ways to make your day easier just by taking a minute to download something new. This is a concept I'm getting used to, so expect some posts about different apps I'm trying, like this one, Google's Sky Map.

I haven't used it yet, but supposedly all I need to do is point my phone at the sky on a clear night and the GPS function on my phone will point out the different constellations I'm looking at or pointing me towards an object I'm looking for (like in the picture above) and showing me how to spot it. The app already gets some rave reviews on the internet, but I'll check back with mine once I try it out.