Mike DeWolfe : The Daily Edition

Here is an example of a teleportation special effect I did up. After hearing about the Battlestar Galactica Videomaker contest , I thought I should hone my video skills. In the next few days, I am going to post a how-to for this video. As a teaser: with Adobe Premiere Elements, this is SUPER EASY.

CFAX today had Jack Etkin on their morning talk show to talk about the plight of the free press. He was complaining that we have lost our free press to the corporate conglomerates. Guest host Erick Thompson (who is on Chum-- er-- Bell Global Media's-- payroll) got all defensive and claimed that A-Channel news staff decide what they will cover and don't get any interference from their national overlords. Maybe that's true; maybe that's hokum. Maybe he doesn't know how a corportation can influence a local outlet through hiring decisions and budget; or through control of their national feed, so the local outlet gets a small list of stories to use for national and international coverage. Jack Etkin dithered on that we needed an independent media and not media owned by corporations. What an idiot. Any organization of any size has to incorporate and become a corporation to sever the health of the enterprise from the health of the owner. Joe's Weekly News should be a ...

Two advents: First, we launched the "Those DeWolfes" site-- a one stop shop of our interests and affairs. Second, I finally published (on Those DeWolfes), a piece entitled "They Could Be Brothers". Enjoy! Some actors in Hollywood look so much alike I get them confused. These actors should be cast together in the same movies. Maybe Hollywood is done with turning TV shows into movies and it's time they start movies with three brothers or mother-daughter combos. Dad and His Two Sons: Treat Williams, Ron Livingston & Colin Farrell They have the dark-haired leading man thing going on but you could spin it as a former hustler (Williams), his neurotic son (Livingston) and his crazy son (Farrell).

I've been reading Vernor Vinge . Alot of his stuff. He is super cool. In the latest book I've been reading, A Deepness in the Sky , he uses seconds extensively for dating: mega-seconds (1 million seconds) and giga-seconds (1 billion seconds). Given that 1 billion seems like such an unreal number, I thought it was interesting to ponder hitting the 1 billion (second) mark. So to calculate when that happened, I did up a script: What's a Gigasecond? What were you doing when your gigasecond odometer rolled over?

Nelly Furtado is going to return to her home town of Victoria, BC and celebrate Nelly Furtado day on March 21st. She will go on to perform at Save-On-Food Memorial Place Centre Arena (etc.). I thought I would harken back to one of Nelly's concerts here a few years back... After performing her set, Nelly left the stage. Backstage, there were throngs of people crushing to get close to the pop star. At the top of the stairs was Nelly. At the bottom were adoring fans. In between her and the mob was a dumpy security guard facing the crowd. Nelly wanted through, so she booted the security guard in the ass and sent him flying so that she could continue on. C'mon, Victorians! Let's all share some choice Nelly moments. Did anyone suffer her in high school drama class? Was she your nightmare date in High School? Dish! Dish in time for Nelly Furtado Day ! Leave me a comment with a link to your anecdotes and I will make sure they appear below.

Rather than subtitle Yankee TV shows and movies, Turkish producers remake the shows. Sometimes with terrifying results.

These are seriously cool comparisons of the before and after of the remaster original Star Trek:

I have been mostly sick for 4 months. Four fricking months. It hasn't been one thing: it's been a string of things: strep throat, bronchitis, a stomach flu, a fever, a few ear infections. I spent Christmas Day doing a white-knuckle drug-induced haze of 12 hours of cooking and trying not to pass out. I am currently battling a chest cold and the left side of my rib case has been ripped up from coughing-- it leaves me with an average of three solid hours of sleep peppered with waking up to roll over; retch; or try to exhaust myself so that I can't help but sleep. One solution to this cycle: therapeutic exercise. The problem: I am too sick to walk 50 yards, so I can't exercise to break the cycle. I haven't had more than four days in between illnesses. My daughter has also spent much of this time being sick as well. These colds have resulted in trucking down to local clinics with some frequency. Why not use a family GP? Our regular doctor was replaced by a locum who shif...

This stuff is very cool. Roll it, form it, pour and do it again. The best part: anyone can do it. Materials Big jar or measuring cup (1 qt. or 1l) Bowl - 2 quart (2l) Measuring cup Borax powder 4 ounce (120 ml) bottle of white glue (not school glue!) Water (pref. distilled) Pour the white glue into the jar. Then re-fill the glue bottle with water, swish it and add it to the jar. Stir. Pour one cup (240 ml) of distilled water into the bowl and add 1 teaspoon of borax powder. Mix well. Slowly add the glue mixture to the bowl, stirring constantly. Place the thick slime that forms into your hand and knead until it feels dry. (There will be an excess of water remaining in the bowl.) It starts out messy, then it mixes better and becomes less sticky and firmer. Store your slime in a bag in the fridge. Then pull out the bag to have fun.

I have watched Monday Magazine slide beneath the waves like the Lusitania. Once edgy and interesting. Now, it's a panic-ridden myopic pong match between local lifestyles magazine and edgy lefty-alternative zine. I can see where the split is: in one part of their Broughton St. building offices hip salesdudes (and saleschicks) tour local soft touch businesses who don't like the rate card of the Times Colonist but do like to advertise with Monday magazine. In the other corner, the reporters and editors who are part of this (once) well-respected and (once) eagerly read alternative weekly. They're also hip in their own Don Quixote way, exposing the underbelly of BC stuffy Capital. They're underpaid, they're squeezed to work long sets of unpaid overtime. In short, it's thankless and their output is better than you could expect. In it's heyday, if I had the choice of getting a copy of the Georgia Straight or Monday, I'd choose Monday in a second. Today, I disco...