Month: April 2006

Graham Rournieu’s photo essay Coming Attractions: Improving the modern movie experience is pretty funny…

Check out this horribly cheesy video, starring none other than born-again Kirk Cameron, that contends that “a well-made banana” proves the existence of God. Amazing!

GasBuddy.com presents the USA National Gas Temperature Map, which plots average gas temperatures for the United States by county. Here in Maryland we don’t have the worst of it (yet), but we’re not far from it…

I’m The Decider, Koo-Koo-Kachoo (embedded MP3; beware…).

The BBC reports that “A California woman is going ahead with the construction of a house made of elements from a 747 Jumbo jet:”

Francie Rehwald wanted her house to look “feminine”, have curves and be eco-friendly. Her architect’s answer was: “Let’s use a 747!”

The wing of the Boeing jet will be used for the roof, its nose as a meditation temple while its trademark “bulge” will serve as a loft.

The plane’s parts were obtained from an aeroplane scrap yard in California.

I guess this takes recycling to a new extreme…

Stop The Madness is allegedly the only ‘80s music video to be sponsored by the White House. As you might have guessed, the video is a 1985 anti-drug spot spearheaded by Nancy Reagan and is eerily familiar to We Are The World in certain sections. With that in mind, you would expect lots of guest stars, and they are certainly there. They include: New Edition, Whitney Houston, LaToya Jackson, Toni Basil, Boogaloo Shrimp, Lyle Alzado, Kim Fields, David Hasselhoff, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Casey Kasem, Stacey Keach, David Keith, John Matuszak, Gerald McRaney, Arnold Schwarzeneggar, among others.

Too cheesy; here are YouTube and iFilm video links.

Inspired by The J-Walk Blog’s random Blogmeister images and thanks to A List Apart’s random image rotation script, I’ve added a “random image from The Mind Of Driko” to the right sidebar (and to the right in this post).

The image pool consists of all kinds of pop culture references that I’ve come across over the years, which is quite a lot, believe me. 🙂 I’ll continue to add images to the pool to make it slightly more diverse, as it’s a bit biased toward imagery from the ‘80s at the moment (go figure). Let me know what you think!

After over three years of saying that I’ve been working on my ‘80s homage, I finally finished the next portion, the seventh “pane.” The image above is a small version of that section; click on it to go see the entire image. This particular section is mostly ’80s personalities that have died recently, although you’ll see many of their colleagues from TV shows, movies, and musical groups along with them in the homage. See if you can name them all (a tall order, I know), and let me know what you think!

There is big buzz today surrounding the news that J.J. Abrams will produce and direct the eleventh Star Trek feature film, with a tentative release date of 2008. The film will supposedly “center on the early days of seminal Trek characters James T. Kirk and Mr. Spock, including their first meeting at Starfleet Academy and first outer space mission.”

Abrams is best known as creator of the television series Lost and Alias as well as the director of the upcoming Mission: Impossible 3. As much as I like his work, I’m not sure about this approach to the Star Trek franchise. Although that storyline might be interesting, it implies that we probably won’t see any familiar Star Trek actors from any of the previous series, a big mistake in my opinion…

Imagine This (YouTube video) is:

…an audio mash up of GW Bush singing the John Lennon classic Imagine, it has been a worldwide hit and has made it into (John Peel’s) BBC Radio 1 Music Festive 50 on UK Radio 1.

The audio was produced by Waxaudio, I created a video for it by tracking down over 40 separate video clips from George Bush speeches, I lip synched these clips to the audio and interspersed them with footage from the original imagine Video, along with some Iraq war footage and some other bits and pieces. This creates a powerful and moving, yet humorous visual accompaniment to the track.

Note: I’ve removed the embedded player, as it takes too long to load and the static image is kind of ugly…