Isegoria

Grover explains how to smell like a monster:

If you don’t get the reference, you need to watch the original The Man Your Man Could Smell Like ad for Old Spice.

Google celebrates John Lennon’s birthday — a bit ahead of schedule. His birthday is tomorrow.

Ridley Scott made his name directing the stylishly dystopian Blade Runner, which was loosely based on Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Now he plans to executive-produce a four-part BBC1 mini-series based on The Man in the High Castle, the seminal alternative-history novel depicting an America that lost the war against Germany and Japan.

I expect it to be stylishly dystopian and only loosely based on the original story — which was itself stylishly dystopian and only loosely plotted via random I Ching selections.

Kevin Conroy is a classically trained actor and graduate of Juilliard — whose claim to “fame” is providing the voice of Batman in the animated series:

A number of years ago, I was in the Hollywood Post Office parking lot. I left everything in the car, because I was just going straight to the mail drop with the envelope. This guy, who was sitting on the curb, obviously homeless, says to me “Hey, buddy, have you got a quarter?”

And I said, “I’m so sorry. I literally don’t. I have nothing.”

He said, “You’re Kevin Conroy!”

I got really nervous — you just assume that your job is anonymous working on animation — so I asked him how he knew that and he said, “Oh, everybody knows who’s Batman.”

I said, “No, believe me, everyone doesn’t know who’s Batman.”

He said, “Oh, please — please — please — please do the voice.” He said, “Just say it … I am vengeance.” He knew the lines.

I said, “I am vengeance.”

He said, “Oh, my God. Batman’s here! Batman’s here!” He said, “Say it: I am the night.”

I said, “I am the night.”

He said, “Go! Go! Finish! Finish!”

And I said “I am Batman!”

So the two of us are there screaming “I am Batman!” in the parking lot, and he started clapping and clapping, yelling “I can’t believe I have Batman in the parking lot.”

He went on to explain to me that all television monitors at the Circuit City on Hollywood Blvd. showed Batman every day, and he would stand outside and watch the show.

So I said, “Wait, just a second,” and I went running back to the car for some cash.

He said, “Oh, I can’t take Batman’s money.”

I told him he was going to take Batman’s money so he wouldn’t tell anyone that Batman is cheap [laughs]. That whole scene was wild, though — the last place you’d expect for someone to recognize a voice actor is in the parking lot of the post office.

Fans of True Blood and Sesame Street may enjoy True Mud.

In its original rough draft, Star Wars was called The Journal of the Whills, and Chewbacca the Wookiee was Chuiee, an alien barbarian prince from the jungle planet of Yavin — already eight feet tall and furry, but described as a huge, grey bushbaby with fierce baboon-like fangs.

This original design disappeared as Ralph McQuarrie borrowed a design from John Shoenherr’s illustration for George R.R. Martin’s Hugo-nominated novelette, And Seven Times Never Kill Man — which draws its title from a Kipling poem.

As McQuarrie explains it, he took the illustration that George Lucas gave him, took off the breasts and added a bandolier, et voilà!

(Hat tip to Boing Boing.)

Terry Pratchett, author of the best-selling comic-fantasy Discworld series, was knighted by the Queen and decided to forge his own sword to match his new status:

With help from his friend Jake Keen — an expert on ancient metal-making techniques — the author dug up 81 kg of ore and smelted it in the grounds of his house, using a makeshift kiln built from clay and hay and fuelled with damp sheep manure.

Pratchett, who has Alzheimer’s disease, also said he had thrown in “several pieces of meteorites — thunderbolt iron, you see — highly magical, you’ve got to chuck that stuff in whether you believe in it or not”.

After days of hammering the metal into bars, he took it to a blacksmith, whom he helped to shape it into a blade, which was finished with silverwork.

Pratchett has stored the sword, which he completed last year, in a secret location, apparently concerned about the authorities taking an interest in it.

He said: “It annoys me that knights aren’t allowed to carry their swords. That would be knife crime.”

A giant bale of hay has killed a founding member of the Electric Light Orchestra (ELO) after it tumbled down a hill and crashed into his van:

Cellist Mike Edwards, 62, died after the 600 kg (1,323 lb) bale rolled down a steep field in Devon, southern England, smashed through a hedge and careered on to the road.

He died instantly in the freak accident on Friday afternoon.

Police said they used photographs and YouTube footage to identify Edwards and are investigating whether the bale may have fallen from a tractor working on farmland near the road.

Edwards, who played with the band between 1972 and 1975, is believed to have swerved into another vehicle as the bale crushed his cab.

Here he is playing casually just last year:

Jim Henson’s widow, Jane, is donating the original Kermit the Frog puppet to the Smithsonian:

The first Kermit creation from Jim Henson’s Muppet’s collection appeared in 1955 on the early TV show “Sam and Friends,” produced at Washington’s WRC-TV. Henson’s widow Jane Henson on Wednesday donated 10 characters from the show to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.

She said the original characters provided five minutes of fun each night after the local news.
[...]
The Smithsonian already has a familiar Kermit the Frog puppet made famous on “Sesame Street” and “The Muppet Show.” But the original Kermit was more lizard-like, and a duller green. His body was made from an old coat thrown out by Henson’s mother.

Some of the other early Muppets donated to the museum include the puppets that inspired Cookie Monster and Oscar the Grouch, as well as Sam from “Sam and Friends.” The puppets mostly mimed and would lip-sync to popular music.

Their first hit was “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Your Face,” by Rosemary Clooney. Donning a wig, Kermit took the lead as “Kermina,” Jane Henson said. In 1969, Kermit made it big and joined “Sesame Street.”
[...]
Visitors will recognize the original Kermit, though he didn’t have his trademark collar and webbed feet.

James Hance produces relentlessly cheerful art, like these Wookiee the Chew illustrations, done in the style of Ernest Shepard’s classic Winnie the Pooh “decorations” — but with Han Solo as Christopher Robin, Chewbacca as Winnie the Pooh, R2 as Piglet, and an AT-AT as Eeyore.

NPR considers giving Charlie Chan a second chance:

Depending on your cultural politics, you’ll find the following scene from the 1934 film Charlie Chan in London either charming or wince-making: Our venerable detective is being congratulated by a British official for his cleverness in discovering the true identity of a dastardly criminal. The actor who played Charlie Chan in that and 40 other films was Warner Oland; like Sidney Toler, the actor who succeeded him in the role, Oland was Caucasian — Swedish, in fact! But, to Hollywood, Oland looked vaguely Asiatic. To play Chan, Oland merely brushed his eyebrows up and had a few drinks to make his speech more halting and to put a grin on his face — like the perpetually congenial Chinese sleuth. Offensive, right?

But, before we condemn Oland’s “Yellowface” incarnation of Charlie Chan, consider this next curious bit of film history: In 1933, Oland made a trip to Shanghai, where he was celebrated by movie audiences there for bringing to life the first positive Chinese character in American film. (After all, compared with the venal Dr. Fu Manchu, whom Oland had also played in the movies, Chan was a hero.) The nascent Chinese film industry then got busy making a series of homegrown Charlie Chan movies. According to contemporary accounts, the Chinese actor who played Chan scrupulously copied the white Oland’s Chinese screen mannerisms and speech. Cultural cross-pollination at work at its most endearing — or dismaying.