Crosswalks to Nowhere

I recently discovered Cinematic Titanic, the latest product of the minds that originally brought us Mystery Science Theater 3000 in the 1990s.

Cinematic Titanic takes old (and some not so old), really bad movies and alters them (their official legal terminology) by "riffing" on them. Essentially, this involves the 5 members of the CT team watching the movie and throwing out comments as it plays. We see the members of the group in silhouette as they watch and react to the film.

The image above shows how the effect looks, and this link will take you to the promo for the most recent CT release, The Wasp Woman, where you can see the team in action.

The cast of Cinematic Titanic consists of Joel Hodgson, Trace Beaulieu, Frank Conniff, Mary Jo Pehl, and Josh Elvis Weinstein. If you were an MST3K fan, you'll recognize all those names from the heyday of that show's greatness.

Unlike MST3K, Cinematic Titanic's movies aren't shown on TV-- they're available on DVD (or download) through the group's web site and at the occasional live performance. In fact, we'll be attending one of their upcoming Chicago appearances in December.

(For what it's worth, my favorite MST3K episode was, and remains, their treatment of The Giant Gila Monster. I still crack up every time I see a clip.)

I bought The Wasp Woman online and burned it to a DVD, and we watched it last night. It was hilarious, and exactly what we would expect from this group. Another nice feature is the fact that when you download the movie, you get a printable copy of the DVD sleeve insert and the disc label.

If you're a fan of the original MST3K or you love poking fun at awful movies, check out Cinematic Titanic!

This past weekend we visited Lisa's parents in Frankfort and continued the Apple Butter tradition for the third year.

This year's addition? Matching T-shirts (I'll spare you). :-)

We started with two bushels and a peck of various apples, including Golden Delicious, Cortland, and Ida Red. These were peeled and cored, and put into a big copper pot over a flame for several hours.

Here's what it looked like at the start:

Then, about four hours in:

..and finally, around hour 7:

At the very end, we added sugar and a pound or so of red hots, and after a final 30 minutes of stirring the finished product was put up in jars:

The next morning, we sampled the stuff on fresh biscuits. Good stuff.

Hopefully, this year's batch will last through to next year.

There's an ad running on TV for a service called "Finally Fast" which claims to clean and speed up your PC.

Sure, there's money to be made selling this sort of this thing, but I have to question the integrity of a company who pitches a product that doesn't even run on the computers shown in its advertisements.

Check out these photos snapped from the commercial: the computer in the shot above is clearly an iMac, and the iBook below seems to have miraculously died from a Windows Blue Screen of Death.

And here's the kicker:

How seriously can you take a company who misleads the people who view their commercials?

Or maybe they just think Macs look cool.

This year's pumpkins by (from left to right) Becca, Lisa, and Emma.

We received no corporate sponsorship money. :-)