MUSIC MONDAY! X-MAS SPECIAL FT. KEVIN MCCALLISTER, THE MARIO BROS, & CAPTAIN PICARD!

HOME ALONE: THE SONG

This little ditty had me whistling the soundtrack from Home Alone for two nights straight at work and, really, that's the most Christmasy I've felt this season (save when I've spent time with my friends and family). It really makes you appreciate the care and effort put into the film's soundtrack has helped it stand the test of time as a Christmas classic. And the sequel is good too. But the next sequel is kinda suck too.

And the fourth movie is just awful. Terrible. Horrible Awful.

STARBOMB: LUIGI'S BALLAD!

What's better than Danny Avidan and Arin Hanson, of Game Grumps, teaming up for a new band? A new Egoraptor (AKA Arin Hanson) cartoon based on a song from their debut album ft. Rachel Bloom. It puts the classic rivalry of Mario and Luigi on display, over the affections of the fair Princes Peach, and is a fun way to close out the Year of Luigi. It's a fun bit of fan fiction that is pulled right out Game Grumps. I dunno if I think Mario deserves to be portrayed as a sexual maniac and Luigi a soft-spoken and sensitive lover, but I digress. It's pretty frickin' sweet.

This is the best animated work Ego has ever done, in my humble opinion, with a level of detail, style, and visual humor that really shows off his talents that, when combined with the lyrics, creates an awesome story. It's not Christmasy, but it deserves to be seen right now.

CAPTAIN PICARD SINGS "LET IT SNOW!"

Patrick Stewart as Captain Picard from the best Stark Trek, The Next Generation (in my humblest opinion), remixed to sing a Christmas Song? Best Christmas ever.

And if you didn't like one of these videos, even a little...

WORD OF THE DAY! 7/29/13!

allusion [uh-looh-zhun]
noun
1. Obsolete.  A metaphor or parable.
2. An incidental reference, either directly or indirectly implying something.
3. The act or incident of subtle reference in a piece of art.

EX. Communication and interactions on line are unique because they can take so many forms, over such a long distance, and reach so many different/diverse audiences that no other forum of sharing has ever matched. The language of this communication relies upon metaphor and allusion more-so than any other form I've ever seen; as seen above, the images allude to Star Trek: The Next Generation, then a collage of popular meme imagery, then the "Mother of God" meme face (a reference to the film cliche where someone removes their glasses and says "Mother of God"), then the "Aliens" guy from the History Channel, before returning back with the conclusion of the images, that the internet is much like the alien race that Picard met in the TNG episode, The Children of Tama.

The reason that I found this neat little image series so amusing is that one of my high school Spanish teachers was a big Trekker (he even had a Klingon language chart hanging in the room) and showed The Children of Tama as a learning tool to describe the relationship between language and cultural references. Without a frame of reference, some parts of language are difficult to comprehend.

The episode was also one of my first exposures to TNG and well, as I'm currently on track to finish watching every episode of all Trek series by the end of the year, I'm probably grateful for the exposure to such a great program.