Hey, Awesome Stuff!

With great character acting comes a wide range of hairstyles, as is shown in this incredible infographic.

Click for today’s lesson in Mr. Smith’s haircut range!

For all my glutards:

Let me know if you think pins of this are in order.

Dumb, I know. Click to embiggen.

You’ve probably seen this INSPI(RED) campaign, against HIV/AIDS. And it’s all fine and good, if that’s your thing.

I’ve made a few updates, for the nerds.

click to embiggen!

Click to embiggen.

My mom was a pretty good seamstress. When I was a kid she made my brother and I cordouroy coats. She even used the little stitching on her machine that looked like a dog. In fact, now that I think about it, my grandmother told me once that my paternal great-grandmother was a seamstress for the Lisbon playhouse. So, I have a lot to live up to.

After receiving a sweet sewing machine from my brother Ben and his wife Michelle, I’ve taken it upon myself to learn how to excel in the crazy art of sewing and stuff. As it has remained somewhat of a mystery to me my entire life (I once paid like 12 dollars to have the buttons moved in my peacoat), every new step I take seems very alien, but when finished, very rewarding. Today I wanted to move on from making little pouches out of old t-shirts and step it up a notch.

Still using old t-shirts.

Excuse the photo quality, this was a Droid-driven documentation.

Using this website, I began my task:

I cut up these old t-shirts into strips. In retrospect, I should have probably *measured* the strips, but i just freehanded it, because this project was really more about getting more familiar with the sewing machine and less about the final product… although the final product is pretty friggin sweet. Once this was done, I started sewing them together:

nice little seamy mcseamus there.

Got all of those sewed together as that page suggests and just belted out one long seam on either side, turned it inside out, closed it up, and voila!

SCARF. MADE BY ME. USED TO BE T-SHIRTS. NOW IT KEEPS MY NECK WARM.

Super pleased, to say the least.

I’m just gonna leave this here.

For New Years, we decided to throw what we called a “Bedazzled NYE”, meaning sparkles and shiny and glittery. A prime example of how a girl would pull this off is:

Whereas a guy might go an alternate route:

But this post isn’t about costume choices. I was tasked with finding a suitable movie to show on the TV while dance music played in the background. Taking it to the net, my friend Jamie and I began with the usual suspects of Google searches.

“Shiny movies”, I type in, and then discover an entire fetish I wasn’t really aware of.

I then think “glitter movies” and realize there’s a fucking movie called “Glitter” already. That shit must be full of glitter? Right? Wrong. I found it somewhere online and the lack of glitter in that movie is overwhelming. Huge fucking misnomer.

So then we start brainstorming the disco era, and we realize the Olivia Newton-John masterpiece “Xanadu” is probably quite sufficient for our needs. Heading straight for Netflix, we soon find out keeping your fingers crossed doesn’t always lead to good luck, as it is not playable on-demand. The upside to Netflix? They are really good at recommending similar movies.

And that’s how we stumbled upon this sleeper gem:

Lost in time thanks to the waning popularity of disco, and I’m sure the 1980′s moviegoers were rolling their eyes “like whoa” at the plot, this seemingly high-budget masterpiece sparkle-filled musical from the director of Stallone’s “Over The Top” had our partygoers glued to the screen, incredulously aghast at the goings-ons they were witnessing.

WE CAN’T FUCKING TAKE OUR EYES OFF OF IT.

Not wanting to give away too much, I urge you to watch this one on Netflix: On-Demand. In the same “so bad it’s good” category that Tommy Wiseau’s “The Room” falls into, this movie is LUDICROUS. From Netflix user N&B:

“The Apple wholly transcends the “so-bad-it’s-good” category. It’s a marvelous piece of film-making that offers a wry look at late modernity, packaged in an avalanche of glitz (for which it offers an implicit critique). This film deftly weaves references to Milton, Goethe, Orwell, Christianity, National Socialism, commodity fetishism, and the growing hegemony of IBM into a breathtaking tapestry of song and dance. It’s a subversive film that looks ahead to a capitalist-created dystopia where pleasure is pre-packaged and forced down the throats of the conforming masses. The Apple, set in 1994 and released in 1980, gives contemporary viewers a lens through which to evaluate the excesses of popular culture and corporate power. In the age of “American Idol,” media consolidation, and political delusion offered as reality, The Apple is relevant now more than ever. The surfeit of glitter, flashing lights, and outrageous costumes bolsters the film’s underlying criticism of consumer capitalism. It presents a scathing and prescient assessment of the 1980s and all of its schlock and drivel. The Apple is a film to behold, treasure, and learn from.”

…and this trailer does the movie no justice whatsoever.

So, at the least, glitter movie attained. At the most, I feel like we discovered something 20-something irony loving 2011 needs to see.

Decided to do something this year 365 times, but couldn’t easily decide what. So I took a chance:

Well, this could have been a weird year given the alternate choices.

Hell yeah, I wrote and performed “The Ballad of Biff Tannen” and then made this video for it. The dude almost made it to world domination. Instead he lived in Hill Valley for over 70 years and never really amounted to anything.