Posts tagged “Stephen Fry”

Link of the Month:
Don Hertzfeldt’s BitterFilms.com
Does the name Don Hertzfeldt sound familiar to you? It probably should. By the time he was 23 he’d already been nominated for an Academy Award and been included in the top 100 most influential animators of all time, and at 33 (just a couple of years ago) he’d won a lifetime achievement award. His deceptively simple stick-figure-animation films are shockingly funny and disturbing and profound. And they’re only available through him personally. I urge you to watch as many of them as you can (or can stomach).

DVD & Game of the Month:
Super Mario 3D Land
This 3D Mario game eschews the more open-world, mission-based gameplay of previous 3D Mario games like Super Mario 64 and Super Mario Galaxy. Instead, it takes a simple pose: what if you took the straight-ahead, level-based gameplay of New Super Mario Bros., but made it 3D? The result is a fascinating and very fun.

TV Show of the Month:
Stephen Fry in America
In 2008 Stephen Fry took a tiny, black, British taxi and drove it through all 48 lower states (then flew to Alaska and Hawaii). It is a very charming, witty, dry, and lovely travelogue in six hour-long episodes from the perspective of a very charming, witty, dry, and lovely British gentleman. True, some states get a bit of a short shrift (Ohio and Idaho come instantly to mind), and Florida doesn’t come out so well. But Mr. Fry stops in some delightfully unexpected places as well. In the end it seems a delightful but somehow all too brief visit from our darling neighbor from across the pond.

Something completely adorable happened on Tuesday. See, musician Molly Lewis is a big fan of Stephen Fry — and why shouldn’t she be, really? Why shouldn’t everyone be a fan of Stephen Fry? No good reason as far as I can see. Anyhoo, a while back she wrote a song for/about Stephen Fry called “An Open Letter to Stephen Fry,” and last week she got about to releasing a recording of it. Things moved rather quickly after that.

The Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard announced that they would be honoring Stephen Fry at an event on Tuesday evening. Similarly, Molly Lewis posted a cryptic plea on her website asking if her fans could perhaps help with airfare so she could fly out to some event in Massachusetts…

Well, tl;dr — I’ll let their own Tweets tell some of the story:

And now that your curiosity is no doubt piqued, here is the serenade in question. There’s no video of the actual event, but you can watch Molly Lewis’s original video (or if you don’t want to watch it, you can just listen to the song below the video).

Adobo, no? Here’s a nice recap of the whole event. Now be a good little jellybean and support Molly Lewis by tossing four quarters into her coffers: Buy that song!

I decided it was about damned time that I made myself a new mix CD. For your convenience, I’ve included (when I can) links to where you can get these songs for yourself, should you so desire!

1. Things I Think About On Planes – Palmdale
2. An Open Letter to Stephen Fry – Molly Lewis
3. All The Same To Me – Anya Marina
4. Airbrushed – Anamanaguchi
5. Career Advice – Open Mike Eagle
6. Common Scents – Spot Two – JP Inc.
7. Dark Dark Eyes – Marian Call
8. Deer God – Busdriver feat. Open Mike Eagle
9. End Of Line – Daft Punk
10. Stay The Same – Bonobo & Andreya Triana
11. Haircut – Open Mike Eagle
12. The Internet – JP Inc.
13. Juicy Fruit – Mtume
14. Meet The Future Downlow – Palmdale
15. The Mating Game – Bitter:Sweet
16. Sentimental Heart – She & Him
17. Nothing in Between – Celene Ramadan
18. Lieutenant Custard & His Banger Of Time – JP Inc.
19. Promise – Cocorosie
20. Three Is a Magic Number – Molly Lewis
21. Your Woman – White Town
22. Original Butterscotch Confection (Three Ninjas Remix) – Open Mike Eagle feat. Busdriver
23. Bucky Done Gun – M.I.A.
24. Nothing Unusual – Three Ninjas feat. Geli Wuerzner
25. Twice As Nice – Pomplamoose

I especially like how I have a Busdriver song featuring Open Mike Eagle AND an Open Mike Eagle song featuring Busdriver.

Stephen Fry, the lovable rapscallion often thought of alongside cohorts Hugh Laurie and/or Rowan Atkinson, has been in Louisiana for a few days doing various bits about life in the N’Orleans area for a project of his. Well, life got very interesting for Mr. Fry very quickly on Sunday afternoon, and because he is such an aficionado of Twitter, we got to see the excitement first-hand.

The day started off pleasantly enough:

But at 2:39 in the afternoon he tweeted a rather more ominous message:

He tweeted again in the next few minutes (titling them simply “Uh-oh” and “Snaking its way down…”). Each tweet was accompanied by a photograph showing the progress of the tornado:

Then Mr. Fry’s tweeting ceased. This caused a bit of a sit in the Twitterverse—had he been swallowed up by the meteorological menace? Eventually, just over a half-hour later, Mr. Fry returned to reassure everyone:

Whew! And here we have another example of what a wondrous future we live in, wherein a man armed only with an iPhone and a Twitter account can give an immediate account of astounding weather phenomena. We don’t have to rely on the hope that someone caught some footage of it that might make it to the local news that evening, which might then possibly be picked up by a national news (or perhaps end up as footage in Mr. Fry’s Louisiana project a while down the road). Instead the connection is instant between the witness and the audience, without need for any pesky middle-men sticking their thumbs in it.

It also helps that I just so happen to have an incredible fascination with tornadoes.

From his Twitter feed last night:

What a pleasure it is to be quite enormously and unrepentantly drunk. Hic! xxxxxxx 

Then a couple of hours later:

I am now putting my rather fragile and oopsy self gently to bed. Love to you all and then more love and a spot more just for luck.Oh dear x 

And then again this morning:

Right. Well. Water. Down throat. Splashed on face. Bwaah! Better. Not too grim a hangover. My room a bomb site. Two hours to pack for home x