Slice of Fried Gold

Monday, January 21, 2013

A Movie Snack to Tide You Over

Faithful readers, I'm cooking up my lengthy, annual, subjective 2012 movie list for next week, so this week's post is just going to be something to wet your whistle. However, this video deserves a post of its own anyway. I've featured the work of Gen Ip on Slice of Fried Gold before, but every year I am amazed how she can take a plethora of films and piece them together in a beautiful way that brings out common themes and ideas -- and that plus the music make these yearly Filmographies strangely inspiring. Every time I watch Gen Ip's Filmography videos, I feel inspired to do something more with my life. . .and I feel the urge to watch more movies. Those two things aren't mutually exclusive, right? Right??

So, without further ado (because I said this post was going to be short), here is Gen Ip's Filmography 2012:

How many of these have you seen? I've only seen about 21 out of the 300+ portrayed in this video.

P.S. If you want to figure out which movie is which in that montage, here you go.

Monday, January 14, 2013

Ladies, What Does a Lightsaber Say?

During a company party last year, the comedian entertaining the group asked for one male and one female to join him onstage. My table volunteered me and I was then asked to face off with a female coworker named Shannon in a battle of sounds. I was asked to provide a sound effect (such as a machine gun and a lightsaber) and then Shannon was asked to do the same sound effect. The point of the exercise was 1. to entertain the audience and 2. prove, once and for all, that men are better than women at sound effects -- keep in mind that this was his theory, not mine.

I thought it was a bit unfair, initially, because I figured my female opponent would simply hear the way I did a sound effect and then copy it, but I was surprised to find out that the noises I have been making since I was a little boy didn't come as naturally to her. Shannon has a fun, outgoing personality, so I knew that it wasn't because she was nervous -- she just didn't have as much practice as I did making punching noises with my mouth.

And then, as I was chuckling about that experiment with my wife on the drive home, I challenged her to give a few of the sound effects a shot. The chuckles soon escalated to full-blown guffaws. Even though she had heard the differences in my sound effects and Shannon's, she still made noises like "pew, pew" when imitating gunfire. I was stunned. Men and women really are different when it comes to sound effects.

Shannon and I have exchanged a few light-hearted barbs since that party. Recently, she sent me the following video along with a note saying, "Just to point out that nobody even knows what a light saber is....boys or girls." And while I don't agree with her on that specific point (there are some good lightsaber noises from the men AND the women in this video), I'll let you, the faithful readers, be the judge of which gender makes the best sound effects in this highly entertaining short film.

Monday, January 7, 2013

Pointless or Awesome?

When I was a kid, my dad had something in his office called the Do Nothing Machine. It looked something like this:

Go ahead, give me a spin. You know you want to!

The idea was simple, you would grab the handle and spin it around, and the little wooden pieces would go back and forth, slowly missing each other. Pointless? Sure. But my brothers and I would spend hours spinning that thing around and around while sitting in his office. I remember trying very hard to get the pieces to collide with one another, but, obviously, it never happened. This wasn't like my dad's Rubik's Cube, where we could easily peel the stickers off and put them back on where they belonged -- this was something special.

Now, before you judge me for spending so much time on the Do Nothing Machine, think about how many times you've checked your Facebook or Twitter account today -- I'd say we're about even. And even though technology has advanced drastically since I was a kid, there are people today who are making machines that are just as pointless, and just as entertaining.

Check it out:

Full disclosure: I find this video (and this machine) to be endlessly entertaining. I like to imagine that the little robot inside the machine (who I've nicknamed Preston) is getting so annoyed that someone keeps flipping his switches. But what about you, faithful readers? Do you think this is the most useless invention ever invented? Or is it simply awesome?

I eagerly await your feedback.

Monday, December 31, 2012

2012: Someone Else's Look Back

2012 is done.

We made it, faithful readers - and no thanks to John Cusack.

We finished out the year that the Mayans thought would be our end. I guess that will teach them to have Harold Camping lead up their calendar project (ZING!). I, of course, knew that the world wasn't going to end in 2012 because Marty McFly visited the year 2015 -- and we only have two more years for those hoverboards to become a reality.

Now while I could do an end-of-year post, reflecting on the good times of 2012 and the bad, it would pale in comparison of Dave Barry's Year in Review. For those of you who don't know who Dave Barry is, shame on you. For those of you who do know Dave Barry, you're still mourning the loss of his regular humor column and relish in his annual contributions, such as his holiday gift guide and, of course, the Year in Review. Dave Barry's writing style is the one I wished to emulate when I started Slice of Fried Gold. And here we are four years later I still am in awe about how insightful Dave is, as well as how sharp his wit still is, even though he's well into his 90s by now, right?

So, without further ado, I present to you Dave Barry's Year in Review for your reading pleasure.

What? You didn't click the embedded link above or the picture yet? You still need a little incentive? Ok, here are some brief excerpts to wet your whistle:

"The emerging front runner is Mitt Romney, who combines a strong resume of executive experience with the easygoing natural human warmth of a parking meter. Still in contention, however, is Newt Gingrich, whose popularity surges briefly, only to wane when voters begin to grasp the fact that he is Newt Gingrich. This opens the door for Rick Santorum, whose strong suit is that he has a normal first name, and who apparently at one point was a senator or governor of Pennsylvania or possibly Vermont."

"In Spain and Greece, hundreds of thousands of people take to the streets in protest against government-imposed austerity measures necessitated by the fact that for the past five years pretty much nobody in Spain or Greece has done anything except take to the streets in protest."

"In sports, the National Football League imposes stiff penalties on the New Orleans Saints following the shocking revelation that some Saints players might have deliberately committed acts of violence against opposing players for monetary gain, which is of course totally contrary to the spirit of professional football. Commissioner Roger Goodell states that the NFL is also investigating disturbing allegations that players sometimes deliberately knock their opponents to the ground via a violent tactic known as 'tackling.'"