The Geekorium

I’ve scoured Soundcloud to find the best Christmas music I could find. It’s chock full of Christmas favourites (and a few new ones) that are guaranteed to:

1. Bring Christmas cheer
2. Not suck

Thank you to all the artists who have shared their Christmas songs on SoundCloud for the rest of us!

{{< soundcloud 167228826 >}}

The Christmas Playlist That Doesn’t Suck (2015)

I’ve scoured Soundcloud to find the best Christmas music I could find. It’s chock full of Christmas favourites (and a few new ones) that are guaranteed to:

1. Bring Christmas cheer
2. Not suck

Thank you to all the artists who have shared their Christmas songs on SoundCloud for the rest of us!

{{< soundcloud 62612028 >}}

The Christmas Playlist That Doesn’t Suck (2014)

NOTE: I posted this in 2015, backdated to 2013 when I created it because I wanted an archive of each year.

I’ve scoured Soundcloud to find the best Christmas music I could find. It’s chock full of Christmas favourites (and a few new ones) that are guaranteed to:

1. Bring Christmas cheer
2. Not suck

25+ tracks from great musicians with a unique sound to bring to your Christmas celebrations. Including favourites like “Away in a Manger”, “Carol of the Bells”, and even a special rendition of an old favourite from a much beloved Star Wars character!

Thank you to all the artists who have shared their Christmas songs on SoundCloud for the rest of us!

{{< soundcloud 15217087 >}}

The Christmas Playlist That Doesn’t Suck (2013)

NOTE: I posted this in 2015, backdated to 2013 when I created it because I wanted an archive of each year.

Not your usual Christmas Candy

I’ve scoured Soundcloud (for literally hours) to find the best Christmas music I could find and my playlist is finally complete. It’s chock full of Christmas favourites (and a few new ones) that are guaranteed to:

1. Bring Christmas cheer
2. Not suck¹

30 tracks from the likes of Ivy Levan, Swing Republic, Pomplamoose, and Owen Pye. Who are these people you ask? Well, they’re all great musicians and they each have a unique sound to bring to your Christmas celebrations. Including favourites like Away in a Manger, Carol of the Bells, and even the Theme from Home Alone.

Over an hour of music, all completely free (although Soundcloud lets you buy tracks if you so desire)!

{{< soundcloud 2946037 >}}

2010 Playlist

As much as I miss the genius of Jim Henson, I realised the other day that I will miss something else just as much as Jim’s Muppet characters. I will miss the insane and brilliant pieces of comedy gold he used to create with Frank Oz.

Frank Oz is nowadays probably best known for being the voice of Yoda, but he’s also a respected and talented film director. He’s still entertaining, long after Jim Henson’s death and I hope he continues to do so for a long time to come.

But what the world has lost since Jim’s death is not only a talented puppeteer and performer, but some classic comedic pairings of his characters with those of Frank Oz. I cry a little inside when I realise that there will be nothing new created by these two fabulous men working together.

Let me give you some examples. First up the most obvious pair:

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This is the only video in this collection that I’ll forgive you for not watching in full. It’s a scene from my least favourite of the Muppet movies (Muppets take Manhattan¹) showing the “wedding” between Miss Piggy and Kermit the Frog, probably the most memorable Muppet pairing of all time (even if it’s not one of my favourites). Though an unlikely pair, Jim and Frank made the pig’s flamboyant declarations of love and the frog’s seeming indifference oddly engaging and has created a love affair that is still going strong.

The next classic pair were Kermit and Fozzie Bear:

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As well as some terrific running gags throughout the Muppet Show, this odd couple were the backbone of the first two major Muppet movies - as travelling companions in the first and as brothers² in the Great Muppet Caper³. I think their relationship is part of what made Muppet Treasure Island feel like old-school Muppets.

Rowlf and Fozzie:

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These guys had some great musical moments together (check out I got rhythm on YouTube for another classic bit). Frank rarely got to show off his musical talent, playing the fool in a lot of songs or singing shrilly in his Miss Piggy voice. It made for some great comedy moments though.

Sam the American Eagle and Rowlf:

{{< youtube ueuA-9pqRok >}}

Sam is one of the most hilarious characters to come from the Muppets, and can instantly make any other character funnier, just by being the worlds most over the top straight man. Once again, it’s almost like Frank is playing up a lack of musical talent, and it’s brilliant.

Moving briefly to some Sesame Street pairings, and the most obvious (and maybe even more famous than any of the above) is the classic duo of Bert and Ernie. With Jim playing the prankster and Frank the straight man, there was no situation too simple to be made into a hilarious farce - and even kids could get it.

{{< youtube 51ZhEjB_KvU >}}

I’m just not emotionally secure enough to do this Ernie.

And some rarer but no less fantastic pairings came when Kermit⁴ ran into the Cookie Monster:

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or Grover:

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These two men made comedic character pairings to rival some of the greatest in history: think Laurel & Hardy, Abbot and Costello, Aykroyd and Belushi, French and Saunders, Fry and Laurie, The Mighty Boosh, or Lano and Woodley.⁵ All things must come to an end I guess. The loss of Jim Henson alone was a dreadful blow, but the loss of the joyful playful scenes that these two men could create together make the loss that much harder to accept.

Of course I don’t mean to detract from the other brilliant pairings that the Muppet show produced. Statler and Waldorf come to mind as another well known pair (voiced by Jim and both Jerry Nelson and Richard Hunt). Dr. Bunsen Honeydew and Beaker are the other two that spring to mind. Their sketches are just as fun, but I believe that Jim and Frank had a spark of something greater in their performances.

I’ll leave you with one other pair that might be less obvious, but is one of the defining partnerships of the Muppet Show - and is firmly entrenched in public consciousness. The pairing of Jim Henson’s head and characteristic voice, and Frank Oz’s out-of-control hands for the Swedish Chef:

{{< youtube UerBCXHKJ5s >}}

Here’s my favourite pancake recipe. It’s excellent with some good quality yoghurt and fruit instead of maple syrup.

I’ve worked out the Calorie count for these pancakes.

• If you use 1/5th the mixture per pancake, you’re eating roughly 890kJ or 215Cal.
• If like me you add 2 tbsp it’s only an extra 10Cal per pancake.
• A 1/4 cup of choc-chips adds an extra 100Cal to each pancake.

Some updates:

Spurred on by the outpouring of comments and (!) blog posts after asking for feedback, I got stuck into a few posts here and on my other site. Thank you everyone who responded and wrote replies - it gave me some much needed confidence and meant the world to me. I was buoyed for days afterwards (and loved the commentfest that followed here and elsewhere).

I officially quit Twitter (with my joshnunn account at least). I was leaving it open ended so I could come back without looking like a fool, but now I’ll have to hang my head in shame if I DO return.

First Waves is going great-guns. tjb654 tweeted “Wave on Slow Cook” and was retweeted by Pamela Fox (one of the Wave API evangelists). So I got a bunch of new readers and some more Facebook Fans!

I began re-working my portfolio site. I couldn’t be bothered installing a test environment on my laptop, so I put it up and started editing it live. It took me a little longer than I expected to make it usable though, as the documentation for MODx¹ went down just as I started, so I couldn’t figure out how to build menus. Eventually I got something I’m happy with up just before…

Lifehacker (!!) linked to my site What the F is that about?! I suspect I’ve stepped into a mirror world where the Joshua Nunn of this world produces things that interest people and that they want to read. I kinda feel sorry for the poor schmuck who got sucked into my universe, but then I remember he probably goes around with a goatee, so it serves him right.

Tonight I published a massive post on First Waves. I suspect that because I’m massively proud of it, it won’t be read by anyone and I’ll realise that my mirror-self managed to reverse the polarity of the neutron flow and switch us back… bastard. Or I could be pleasantly surprised that I get some people reading it. I’ve paid for a Clicky account, so now I’ll know when YOU are reading this… unless you’re using a feed reader… or I’m not on my computer when you do… What was i saying? This point has descended into a Rubenerd-esq sort of ramble. My apologies.

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I can’t think of a way they can possibly top this clip. Brilliantly shot in High Def, beautifully choreographed, and perfectly synchronised. If you liked their treadmill clip (symbolically shattered half way through) you’ll love how clever this is. It also knowingly nods to the Internet and Youtube crowd (did I see the mars rover? Something like the water bird that Homer uses to press the “any” key when he works from home? An OK Go concert rendered in Lego?).

What a joyful and exciting clip from a band that knows how to engage their audience. Bravo!

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I’ll be purchasing Caravan Palace ASAP. I’ve found a group that embodies the music I love. Apparently it’s called Electro Swing. I haven’t heard a single one I haven’t liked yet.¹

I think in the near future there will be docking stations everywhere with a screen and a keyboard. You simply pull out your phone, plug it into the docking station, and instantly all your applications and data are available to you. Chrome, Google Apps, and Android make this vision possible.

via Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing: Google vs Microsoft on the browser, cloud, and mobile platforms.

Dammit! I said this to people 3 years ago. I should have written it down, if only to prove that I’m at least as good at imagining the future as Don Dodge. Of course it might never happen like this, but the thought that 3 years after I first said it, Don Dodge can now see it happening before his eyes at Google is kinda gratifying.

When I was 13 I was around at my mate’s place as often as I could be just to play Wolfenstein 3D on his better-than-mine system. He had colour graphics and a sound card, while my Commodore 64 only had enough grunt for side-scrolling platformers and breakout clones¹ and my IBM clone could barely muster monochrome. Wolfenstein was the pinnacle of gaming. It was just like you were there, with your little gun waving in front of you and meals left on the floor. And B.J. Blazkowicz’s face peering out at you to remind you to keep away from big men with chain-guns. I couldn’t play it enough.

Seriously. Couldn’t play it nearly as much as I wanted. My mate wanted to play too, and I couldn’t really stay there all the time playing his computer. Multiplayer was not invented for 3D shooters until Goldeneye,² so I had precious little time to play it. Add four strict Christian parents hovering around and I never got to play more than a few levels.

I still remember clicking space at every wall panel to try and find the secrets on the precious few levels I played. Remember the glee at finding a new gun levels before you we due to find it just lying around in the course of the game later on.

Every first-person shooter to come since has built on wolf3d.exe - adding a bobbing gun, smarter bad guys, and polygons, but they’re all trying to capture the same sense of joy 13 year-olds got playing this game for the first time. Knowing instinctively that this was the beginning of something monumentally fun. For me, every first-person shooter since has been just as frustratingly out-of-reach for me too. I’ve never had the hardware required to play the groundbreaking games that have been released.

But not today. Today I have Wolfenstein 3D on my iPhone. Lovingly re-crafted by the man who made it the first time round. Full of the same bad-guys, the same weapons and the same secrets. I have in my pocket something I couldn’t run on the machine on my dad’s desk. It’s my proudest purchase, and one of my fastest.³

Wolfenstein 3D Classic (App store link) [hat-tip to oliyoung]

I love The Muppet Show (if the title “greatest show of all time” didn’t tell you that). It had an innocence and irreverence that is almost completely missing from our TVs today. Jim Henson’s creativity is still missed since his death almost 20 years ago. Three of Henson’s wonderful creations were creatures who could barely talk, yet made us laugh with a cacophony of squeaks, grunts and pseudo-language that left us baffled while we let out tears of laughter. They were the Swedish Chef, Animal, and Beaker.

Here they are in their greatest moment together.

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