Thursday, 25 May 2006

Surfing late night, not in any particular order: Watched some of the Late show with Craig Ferguson. [flip] The Drew Carey Show. There’s Craig Ferguson again (as the boss). Also, there’s Libby (from Lost). [flip] Will & Grace. There’s Eric Stoltz (from Some kind of wonderful, which the girls and I just watched a week or so ago) and Seth Green (Oz from Buffy). [flip] Late Night with Conan Obrien. Conan is interviewing Seth Green.

sidenote: I was struck by just how *happy* Seth Green seemed. Not in a druggy fake happy, he just seemed comfortable and enjoying himself. It’s hard to dislike people who are genuinely happy.

Thursday, 25 May 2006

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Femme Fatale, The Devil’s Rejects, Hero, This Girl’s Life, Alias, Lost, Rilo Kiley (Take Off’s and Landings)

Wednesday, 3 May 2006

In one of those odd coincidences of life, I have friends who I see much less frequently than I would like since we live several states apart. [That's not the coincidence part] For some some reason whenever we get together, at some point during the day or weekend Esperanto somehow always gets mentioned. I have a sneaking suspicion that _I_ might be the one bringing it up and that I either have a secret Esperanto fixation, or maybe I think it’s a humorous concept but only use it when people I know will appreciate the reference are around? Anyways I hung with these friends a couple of weeks ago and once again Esperanto got mentioned.

Now go back in time to a few months ago : one of the local dollar stores had all these DVDs for $1 so since that’s cheaper than a rental and I sometimes like bad movies (though this latest batch might have cured me, they were *really* bad [Ninja Avenger I & II were particularly dubious]) I looked through them and found a bunch I thought I was vaguely interested in watching, and one of the ones I picked up was an old “cult horror movie”, the front blurb describes it as “mind boggling, and utterly bizarre” (TV Guide) which peaked my curiousity, and since the pictures from the movie are all in color though it says it’s B&W, so that’s a good candidate for so bad-it-might-be-good-ness. It’s been sitting on my shelf since I got it and I occassionally pulled it out glanced at it, then put it back on the shelf. Anyways I took a closer look last week and realized the lead actor is William Shatner - pre-StarTrek circa 1965! So, I figured it has to be at least campy, so I looked it up on line found out that entire movie is [coincidence alert) in ESPERANTO!

That's right, it's the second full length movie ever made in Esperanto (the first US Esperanto release). Apparently the director wanted the film to be eery and that was one element of his eerieness.

Wikipedia notes that Esperanto fans were displeased with Shatner's pronounciation because he spoke Esperanto with such a strong French accent (he grew up in Quebec). For some reason the idea of Captain Kirk speaking with a French accent is very funny to me, though of course I am imagining him to sound like Inspector Clouseau.

Coincidence alert #2: I just looked up the spelling of "Clouseau" and found out that the "Shot in the Dark" Pink Panther movie was based on a play by Harry Kurnitz, which in turn was based upon the play L'Idiot by Marcel Achard (another french connection) which ran on Broadway in 1961-1962 and William Shatner was in the cast!

[this anecdote excerpted and paraphrased from an email]