Cash for Caulkers – One mispronunciation away from being inappropriate

On Thursday the House passed a new Bill that offers incentive to make your home more energy efficient. I love the idea because it combines so many of my favorite things: money, energy efficiency, home improvement, and do-it-yourselfing.

The Bill itself is pretty cool, you can get up to $3000 or $8000 depending on how much you upgrade your home. The problem I have though is with the name. It’s actual name is the Home Star Bill which is all fine and good, but the common name that is floating around is “Cash for Caulkers”.

I get that they were working off the very successful and popular “Cash for Clunkers” program but I feel this new name was not fully thought out. Firstly, I have never heard someone refer to one who caulks as a “caulker”. I think there is a very good reason for this, “caulk” and it’s name derivatives are a bit awkward to say and only one slip of the tongue away from being immaturely inappropriate. Secondly, it’s ambiguous. Caulk is used in all manners of home repair and is not limited to sealing drafty windows. And imagine if the “National Association of Caulkers”, should they exist, get wind of it and start demanding money that is apparently theirs.

If they had to go for the “currency for home improvement” alliterative route, they had a host of other options available to them, here is a short list of program names that would have been just as ambiguous as “Cash for Caulkers” but less likely to make you giggle;

• Green for Green
• Dollars for Double Panes
• Money for Makeovers
• Rebates for Renovations
• Dough for Duct sealing
• Bucks for Busting your ass improving your house
• Funds for Furnace Upgrades
• Bills for Building improvements

Have more ideas for better names? Leave them in the comments.

Source [CBS News]

WTF Wednesday: Personal Flying Cars to be Unveiled Tomorrow!

That’s right folks, tomorrow NASA is set to unveil it’s new “hover-capable, electric-powered, super-quiet personal VTOL (vertical takeoff and landing) aircraft”, or in layman’s terms: a frickin’ flying car! Ok so it’s just a concept right now but it hasn’t stopped the Jetsons theme from going off in my head.

Here’s the scoop. NASA (famous for putting people on far away rocks orbiting Earth) has come up with a little one manned plane that theoretically can achieve 30,000 feet. It’s called the Puffin, which is named after some bird that looks like it shouldn’t be physically able to fly. It will travel at speeds of around 150 mph but can obtain 300 mph when you’re late for work. With current tech it will have a range of about 50 miles per charge but that number is predicted to double or triple by the time it is actually built. Of course throw in the obvious environmental benefits of electric vehicles and the idea just gets better and better.

For now though, disregard the science and pay attention to the science fiction. Sure it has great potential use in the military but really we all know the truth: This little craft is destined to become personal transportation. From Scientific American: “Quieter aircraft  also mean that airports for civil applications such as personal travel and fast courier services could be located much closer to population centers and perhaps even residences without bothering others, significantly cutting down commute times.” Did you hear that, we’re finally getting the flying cars! And only 10 years late too.

Right now it’s just a concept video, but with sound science and brilliant minds behind it this thing is going to become a reality. I just hope they figure out the “folding into a briefcase” feature by the time it goes into production.

Source: [Gizmodo], [Scientific American]

~Mavi

Top 12: Non-Standard Christmas Songs

It’s December which means it’s time for the Holidays and everything coming in Twelves. More specifically it’s time for holiday music. There are a ton of Christmas and general holiday songs out there that you will hear over and over again in the next few weeks until your ears bleed. You are probably familiar with all of them and don’t need someone else to tell you which you like and which you don’t.

However, there are also those songs that aren’t as well known and certainly aren’t traditional by any means. Some songs do their best to discredit Christmas, some are offensive to all considered, some are just straight up awesome. I will be surprised though if you have heard of all of the following. It’s tempting to just put up Trans-Siberian Orchestra and call it a day but awesome as they are, they are not the only players in the game.

12. “So this is Christmas” by John Lennon

We’ll start out with an old song by the great John Lennon. A very nice song talking about the end of war and peace on earth and all sorts of other good stuff. You will still hear this song every once in a while when radio stations have played “All I want for Christmas” for the 30^th time. The only problem I have with the song is that it doesn’t really do much more than say “Hey it’s Christmas and soon it will be New Years too!”

11. “Podsafe Christmas Song” by Jonathon Coulton

Oh Johnny C, probably best known nowadays for “Still Alive” or “I Feel Fantastic”, he took two things that most people can’t stand (Alvin and the Chipmunks and the RIAA) and made them into a thoroughly enjoyable little Christmas song.

10. “Chiron Beta Prime” by Jonathon Coulton

Another one by Coulton. This one really just plays to my inner nerd. I mean there is nothing that really expresses the spirit of the season like working in a mine for our Robot Overlords.

9. “A Lonely Jew on Christmas” by Kyle Broflovski by way of South Park

Oh South Park, you have always been an interesting mix of crossing every line imaginable and yet still having a somewhat deep message. This song is from years ago on the first Christmas episode (most memorable for being the first appearance Mr. Hanky). Kyle here is sad that he is Jewish and cannot fully appreciate Christmas like the rest of his friends.

8. “Jingle Bells” performed by The Stingers Trombone Revolution at the University of Rochester

Ok fine, it’s a shameless plug for the band I used to be a part of. But come on! It’s an all trombone band playing a funky version of Jingle Bells, how can that be a bad thing?

7. “Christmas Eve (Sarajevo 12-24)” by Trans-Siberian Orchestra

This is in the middle of the list only because it is still technically a traditional Christmas song that has just been given an incredible rock upgrade. Carol of the Bells was a pretty kickass song to begin with but then add in some electric guitar, drums, lasers, smoke… yea you take the awesomeness all the way up to eleven. (The intro narration is nice to listen to, but if you’re just interested in the music skip ahead to 2:30)

6. “Merry F*cking Christmas” by Mr. Garrison by way of South Park

South Park again. Of course it’s them, only they would write a song that specifically bashes pretty much every culture that doesn’t celebrate Christmas. And only they would do it with a song that is catchy, fun, and stays in my head for hours if not days every time I hear it.

5. Super Mario’s Sleigh Ride

This I admit I just discovered and am already thinking Christmas ringtone. A mashup of music from Super Mario World and the classic Sleigh Ride? Hell yes! Those people over at http://www.ocremix.org do some awesome stuff and this has quickly made it to my favorites.

4. “The Night Santa Went Crazy” by Weird Al Yankovich

Santa’s been at this gig for how long now? A few hundred years depending on which legends you believe (or about 94 years according to one company). I’m surprised it was only recently when thanks to Weird Al we hear about the time Santa snapped and went postal on his workers.

3. Twelve Pains of Christmas

Anti-Christmas song number 2 on this list. The twelve pains is a hilarious take on the twelve days of Christmas. My favorite line is and always will be “Now why the Hell are they blinking?!” Though I have a much greater appreciation for the “Hangover” lines than I did when I first heard this when I was younger. (By the way, probably a good idea to stop the video after 4 minutes, the credits are long and there is some crap music playing)

2. “Wizards in Winter” by the Trans-Siberian Orchestra

Included more for the awesome video than the also great song, Wizards in Winter pretty much started the phenomenon of making Christmas lights flash in step to music (or at least it perfected it).

1. “Snoopy’s Christmas” by the Royal Guardsmen

This was such an easy choice for numero uno for me. This is hands down my personal favorite Christmas song. No this is not the music from Charlie Brown’s Christmas. This is a song by the Royal Guardsmen where Snoopy must take up battle against his archenemy the Red Baron on Christmas Eve. I listen to this song all year long because it is just that good.

WTF? Wednesdays: Crane Judo-Chops House

Imagine if you will that you hired a crew to come and take out an old oak tree from your backyard. Then imagine that you get a call from said crew a few hours later. That call went something like this “Yea hi, we had a little hiccup removing the tree. It’s actually kind of funny really; you’ll laugh when I tell you. See our crane became a little unbalanced and well, smashed through your house”

Now personally I would flip shit, I can only assume the McCarthy’s did the same. Oh and should I mention that Mrs. McCarthy was just in a car accident earlier that week? Luckily no one was hurt in this little mishap. If you’re friends with these people though you should probably stay away for a while, as they’ve either been jinxed or Mr. McCarthy is channeling Tim “The Tool Man” Taylor.

Looking at it in hindsight, did that tree really need to come out? And what the fuck did they need a giant crane for anyway? Why didn’t they just keep cutting the thing until the pieces were manageable? The pictures show guys back there and nice little pieces. Perhaps this company also moonlights as a lumber provider and needed some 20 foot long 2x4s.

One thing is sure though. These are lumberjacks, and they’re not okay.

WTF Wednesday: Hollywood is filled with idiots

VS  

You are currently connected to the internet, this is fact considering you are reading this article. I would put money down that at some point you committed some act of piracy. You may download music, games, movies, whatever. Or just watch something on YouTube that is copyrighted. In my opinion there is nothing wrong with that and the morality of pirating is certainly not the focus of this article.

Instead it is the fact that Hollywood (and the music industry, but that’s another show) just straight up refuses to embrace the incredible marketing tool that is BitTorrent. Let me compare for you the cases of two new movies. In the Hollywood corner, weighing in at a budget of $24 million: Zombieland; and in the indie corner, weighing in at a budget of $250,000: Ink. Both movies have been pirated all over the web and have made it to TorrentFreak’s top 10 pirated movie lists for various weeks.

Zombieland was downloaded over one million times, Ink was downloaded more than 400,000 times. No matter how you slice it that is a shit-ton of people who have seen those movies. The important thing here is how the two camps responded to this incredible popularity.

First let’s tackle Ink. Who here has even heard of Ink? I hadn’t until I read about it today. It’s a movie with an interesting sounding story, and I am probably going to download it later. Now as an independent movie you would think that the creator of the film would probably be none too pleased to see all his hard work get him nothing as so many people see his movie for free. Completely on the contrary though he has chosen to embrace the piracy and at a request of the pirates put up a Donate link on his website. He has gotten unprecedented exposure and hundreds of thousands of unanticipated fans.

Now let’s look at Zombieland. A movie which I still need to see admittedly but pretty much looks like Left 4 Dead in movie format (which would be a very good thing). The movie took $24 million to make and has pulled in $84 million in box office revenue so far. Needless to say it’s a popular movie. So how does one of the co-writers respond to seeing his movie pirated one million times? Is he as happy as the Indie guys? Thrilled that so many people liked his movie? Not in the slightest.

Quoth the Twitter: “Beyond depressing. This greatly affects the likelihood of a Zombieland 2.”

Are you effing kidding me? You’ve made $60 million dollars on this film and one million frickin’ people want to see this movie. In Hollywood it seems to be pretty much guaranteed that if you sell even one ticket to a movie there will be a sequel so I don’t think incredible popularity is really going to cause too many problems.

The issue here is that his response perfectly represents Hollywood’s stance on piracy. They just can’t seem to realize that they have an insanely powerful tool for them to use for free! Now I’m no marketing guru here but I would think that someone would have looked into this and saw that box office revenues, DVD sales, merchandise sales have all gone up. Seriously Hollywood, WTF?

The Peanut Gallery Reviews: Earth Defense Force 2017

I’m sure a lot of you just read that title and went “Bwah?”, including I’d imagine the owner of this fine website. Well I’m here to tell you about this game that came out back in 2007 and is a helluva lot of fun.

Here’s the backstory to the game, aliens finally contacted Earth and have come to destroy us, go kill them. That’s it! There is no character development, no sassy sidekick, no love interest, no shady government agencies, no ‘roided up super space marines. It’s just about you, an infantryman in the planet-wide military, going around killing giant ants, spiders, robots, and Godzilla knockoffs.

Maybe it’s because I’m a simple creature, or because I really have some issues with insects (Fucking giant spiders gave me nightmares). But any time I can take a machine gun and just go to town on hordes and hordes of acid spitting ants and watch their body parts fly off in all different directions, I call that a good time.

Yup that’s right, the aliens, termed the oh so creative “Ravagers” have come in giant ships dropping enormous insects which nicely explode when hit with machine guns, grenades, rocket launchers, whatever. The entire premise is to go around killing giant things for 50 or so levels. There are no sub missions, no “don’t hurt the civilian” clauses, no one to rescue, you’re practically encouraged to destroy every building (with a single rocket each mind you) you can see, there is nothing except you versus thousands and thousands of aliens.

The gameplay is simple, you have a squad of other infantrymen who vary between cannon fodder and mission savingly helpful, but you can kill them all at any point and no one is going to even give you a slap on the wrist for it. The aliens usually spawn from some place so you need to find those, be they mounds of dirt or dropships and take them out to finish each level. You pick up health, ammo, armor upgrades (increases HP), and new weapons that the aliens drop when they go splat. There are a ton of weapons but mainly you just get upgraded versions of the ones you had with a few unique things thrown in here and there. Also, avoid the vehicles, just trust me on this one; they handle like bricks steered by a cows.

You can chose to play through each level of the game on any of the five different difficulty settings, with the best weapons being found in the hardest setting. But in the end you just play through all the levels and tackle the huge Mothership and all the alien spawn that still kicking (alone, while on foot, yielding little more than a machine gun and rocket launcher remember).

Now the bad news, this is straight up a budget game. It is missing some things like stellar graphics and the ability to play on Xbox Live, but what it lacks in shininess it makes up for in senseless violence. Basically I have considered buying Xbox 360 just so I could pick up this game and play it again; I’m jonesing for some alien insect genocide.

Compare it to your favorite B movie, be it The House of the Dead, Killer Clowns from Outer Space, or Army of Darkness. Why were those movies so good? Because they were so over the top trying to be something great that they fell right off and we laughed as they tumbled down. This is the same thing. There are various glitches and it completely lacked a story but that’s part of the beauty. It’s a fun game to pick up and play for a while and then put it down wondering how you just spent three hours killing giant murderous ants.

I’m sure by now I’ve convinced you all to go spend $20 and pick up this game. But I found that the video review by GameTrailers pretty much shows you exactly why you want to get the game (complete with in game footage). So I thought I’d throw it in here just to hammer home my point.

Final verdict: 7 out of 10 peanuts

The Peanut Gallery Reviews: Up and the Disney Digital 3D Experience

Disney and Pixar are at it again, trying to keep up their long running tradition of bringing credibility back to animated movies. Their newest weapon in their arsenal is “Up” a movie about an old man who sets his house airborne with balloons (which apparently really could happen) to go on one heck of an adventure.

The movie opens with a backstory about the old man, Carl Fredricksen, which includes some very adult topics I was surprised to see. Without wanting to spoil anything about the motive, let me just say young kids will probably not understand but you will appreciate the topics they cover to make you familiar with this man.

Overall the movie ends up being deeper and more immersive than I expected. The trailers depicted a grouchy old man who is trying to just be left alone in one final flight of fancy. In reality though there is a lot of emotion in this surprisingly dynamic character as he tries to fulfill a long standing promise to the woman he loves but gets stuck with this cub scout overachiever, Russell.

The movie progresses as expected for a Disney children’s movie. Things start out fine, then they run into some obstacles here and there, there is a villain with some henchmen who need to be defeated somehow, loveable sidekicks, happy ending. Despite this cookie-cutter storyboard, the execution is spot on. The writing is superb and there are enough jokes both with and without mature connotations to keep you laughing. It is still for kids though so expect some slap-stick type of humor, but tastefully done. And then there is Dug.

Dug is a golden retriever written to be just like a golden retriever. He is lovable but stupid, loyal but clumsy, and doles out affection like an overzealous lunchlady with a really big ice cream scooper. And he can talk! One of the best parts about the movie is that yes it’s a talking dog but not a talking dog like in say Lady and the Tramp where the dogs were basically humans with paws and fur.

Instead the dogs (Dug may be the best one, but there are more than just him) talk like you would expect dogs to talk. The collars are supposed to turn their thoughts into words so the mention and sight of a ball for example sends Dug into an excited frenzy.  His words are exactly what you would expect a dog out in the wilderness to say too, especially a golden retriever meeting new people. If for no other reason, go see this movie for Dug. Here’s a little preview of one of his “golden” lines: “Hey, that is a bird! I have never seen one up close, but this is a bird. May I take your bird back to camp as my prisoner?”, now tell me you couldn’t see a dog saying that.

Also there is an old man versus old man fencing scene which is quite funny and basically just spits in the eye of the Hollywood old people “taboo”.

Finally I wanted to make a short statement about the Disney Digital 3D experience: “Holy Shit!”

This was the first time I saw a “3D” movie since seeing some crummy Muppet show at Universal Studios in Florida when I was six. There part of the 3D was to put bubbles out into the audience, here though it was incredibly well done. Say goodbye to those gimmicky “I’m reaching out of the screen to get you” visuals and hello to background and foreground separation. It was much more as if you were watching theatre. After a while you kind of forget that you’re watching something in “3D” and just appreciate that it looks really really good and realistic despite being animated. If you have the option watch this movie in 3D, I’m sure it will still be great without it, but it has to be powers of ten better with it.

Final verdict:
9.5 out of 10 peanuts due to the pre-movie Pixar short that just did not live up to previous animations (though it did have an admittedly cute and touching ending)

~Walnut

Top 10: Things NOT to Get Your Mom for Mother’s Day

Mother’s Day is tomorrow so I hope you already have something special to give that woman who carried your dead weight around for 9 months.

In case you’ve dragged your feet or couldn’t think of anything here is a helpful list. Below are the 10 things that you should never get your mother on her special day.

10.  A Supersized Laundry Basket

Nothing says I love you like making it easier for your mom to clean up after you.

So big, it's on wheels

9. Power Tools

I think you have confused which parent you’re supposed to be buying for.

If this was my mom, Freud would have a field day with me

8.  A Dozen Black Roses

Oh what is that you say? You want to get roses but you don’t wan’t to be cliche and get red ones. Hey those black ones are really sharp, but oh wait, black roses symbolize death… Don’t want your mom thinking that you’re just waiting for her to die so you can get the inheritance (she might spend it all if she knew that).

7.   A Muu Muu

There is really no other picture I could have put here

This is pretty obvious here. You certainly will not gain any points by suggesting she has some weight on her she could lose.

6.   Mom’s First Computer

Are we connected to the tubes of internet now?

I mean unless spending countless hours explaining every little thing to her sounds like fun… “Mom you need to empty the Recycling Bin in order to delete things!”

5.  Anything Acquired Through a Five-Fingered Discount

Unless of course your mother is Ma Beagle

4. That Random Product You Saw On TV

Hi Billy Mays here for this piece of crap that won’t work

3.  An Assult Rifle

Unless your mom is this lady

2. A Big Black Dildo

Really doesn’t matter the size or the color here, I doubt you are so close to your mom that this would ever be considered a good idea.

sorry but I'm not putting up a picture of a big black dildo, I think you can visualize it for yourself

1. A Copy of Oedipus Rex

I was deeply moved by this play Mom, can't say why though

“So… any baggage I should know about?”

WTF? Wednesday: Rocket Shatner

Ok it’s not Wednesday (and I’m not Max) but whatever, here is a WTF for you all.

It should come as no surprise that we here at the Peanut Gallery are huge science fiction fans.  That said I think we are all rather excited about the Star Trek movie that is out now (and getting incredible reviews).

Now I personally am a Star Wars freak but I have an open mind. I’m not one of those flame-war veterans that discuss which is better. Star Trek has an incredible history and I can’t wait to see it tonight.

That said you can expect a Peanut Gallery review in the very near future for sure.

But now the reason you are actually here. In honor of the new Star Trek movie I present to you the one and only William Shatner performing his rendition of Elton John’s “Rocket Man”. If you are a Family Guy fan I’m sure you’ve seen Stewie do something similar, this is where they got it from.

Billy, I understand you have a huge fan base (something about scoring tons and tons of space ‘tang) but come on man, WTF?!

Serious Nut: Spacebat Oddity Update

We salute you Spacebat with a tribute video in your honor. RIP