Posts from March 2014

Wednesday, 19 March 2014

Social Media Advice from Jon Hendren!

Jon Hendren (@fart) created a very funny narrative on Twitter yesterday. What started out as a series of inane, buzzword-babble “advice” tweets about social media quickly went to a dark and hilarious place:

Dark comedy at its finest, people. Follow Jon Hendren on Twitter.

Categories: Links.
Tags: , .

Posted by Christopher Grant Harris at 9:00 am.
No comments/trackbacks... »

Tuesday, 11 March 2014

Neighbor Gary is Sent from Somewhere Else

Tacoma's B&I is Somewhere Else all right...

Tacoma’s B&I is Somewhere Else all right…

Sometimes the guy who lives across the hall from your first apartment likes to take photographs. And sometimes, almost 14 years later, that same guy has an art gallery exhibiting his photographs.

At least that’s the case with me and Carrie, and our across-the-hall Neighbor Gary “Terrapin” Lappier, whose exhibit is entitled Sent from Somewhere Else. Here’s what he says about it:

I received a camera for my fifth birthday, which is around the same time I made my first visit to the B&I. It was a technicolor buzz full of goodies and amazements. A crown jewel in a city full of promise named Tacoma. Since a young age I had fantasized about documenting this unique place and the variety found within. As I grew and developed my craft, the B&I aged and declined. Sent from Somewhere Else is the photographic result of this exploration.
-Gary Lappier

We’re fortunate enough to own several Gary Lappier originals that adorn the walls of our house:

Gary Lappier Originals.

Gary Lappier Originals.

He doesn’t live across the hall from us anymore. But he does live in a house only about three blocks away from ours. So we’re super excited to head to Fulcrum Gallery in Tacoma this Friday night for the Opening Reception of his exhibit. SO CAN YOU!

Details:
Sent from Somewhere Else: The Black and White Photography of Gary Lappier (Facebook event)
March 14th – April 5th
Opening Reception Friday, March 14th 6:00 – 9:00 PM
Fulcrum Gallery
1308 Martin Luther King Jr. Way, Tacoma
More info: http://www.fulcrumtacoma.com/category/now-showing/

Categories: Art & Artists, Concerts/Shows, Tacoma.
Tags: , .

Posted by Christopher Grant Harris at 7:00 am.
No comments/trackbacks... »

Monday, 10 March 2014

New Movie Review: Frozen (2013)

Let it go...

Let it go…

Frozen (2013): ***½

Directed by Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee

In very many ways a spiritual successor to Disney’s Tangled, Frozen takes many very similar elements and improves on most all of them. It also does an excellent job of taking many familiar tropes of fairy tales and twisting them in clever and new ways. I don’t like to review movies by comparing them to other movies, but Frozen really does make Tangled seem like a rough draft in many ways. More… »

Categories: Movie Reviews.
Tags: .

Posted by Christopher Grant Harris at 6:00 pm.
No comments/trackbacks... »

Saturday, 8 March 2014

“Of the Month” March 2014

Tweeter of the Month:
chrissyteigen Chrissy Teigen
Yes, she’s a model, and yes, she’s married to John Legend. And, yes, she’s mostly nekkid in her Twitter profile picture. But she also happens to be whip-smart and one of the funniest people on Twitter right now. She is biting, acerbic, and very charming, and she has no fear of sliding into the vulgar and/or scatalogical territories of twitter (i.e., some NSFW stuffs). I enjoy it. Perhaps so can you to do?

Instagrammer of the Month:
jamesfrancotv James Franco

James Franco has always seemed a bit of a paradox; he comes off as a doofy, grinning, slacker type, but he periodically gets nominated for Golden Globes and Oscars and other prestigious acting awards. And then he appears on a soap opera. His Instagram feed is similarly all over the place, running from bizarre and funny things he’s found on the internets to plugging his appearance in Of Mice and Men on Broadway. But it’s all very friendly and personable, and like Franco himself, you can tell that no publicist or agent or manager has the tiniest bit of influence over what shows up:

Book of the Month:
bluberrygirl Blueberry Girl by Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman wrote a poem, a prayer to a newborn little girl (the daughter of Tori Amos originally) that she may grow up to be strong, wise, independent, and fun:

Keep her from spindles and sleeps at sixteen;
Let her stay waking and wise.

There might be a four-month-old reason why this book resonates so much with me… it is seriously beautiful, with Charles Vess’s gorgeously detailed but not literal illustrations. Chokes me up a li’l. You know.

Categories: Of the Month.
Tags: , , , .

Posted by Christopher Grant Harris at 7:00 am.
No comments/trackbacks... »

Friday, 7 March 2014

New Article: Tweeting the Oscars

And the Tweet Goes To...

And the Tweet Goes To…

This year it seemed like Twitter upstaged the Oscars in some big ways. And I, yes, even I got in on the action. Earlier in the weekend I made a decision:

I then started a show-long joke that I doubt anyone actually got because (A) very few people follow me on Twitter and (B) it was a four-hour joke with a punchline that doesn’t really look like a punchline unless you know I was doing a joke. Let’s see if you can figure it out. Look closely at this first tweet, and then watch the time stamps on the following tweets.

Get it? The overall theme was that I would live-tweet the Oscars but miss the vast majority of it by making and eating dinner and then taking a two-hour bathroom break. Yeah, okay, it wasn’t that funny, but it sure was ambitious.

Twitter was actually a part of the Oscar ceremony in a big way this year. Host Ellen DeGeneres was very vocal about tweeting the goings-on, including her now-infamous, twitter-breaking, group selfie (more on that later). Gobs of the celebrities in attendance were tweeting the goings-on as well. But for me the real highlight of Oscar tweeting was Chrissy Teigen.

Chrissy Teigen is a model and the wife of singer John Legend. She was on the cover of the 50th Anniversary Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue:

Not only that, but she just happens to be whip-smart and one of the funniest people on Twitter. She also had my favorite dress of anyone at the Oscars:

She was very active on Twitter that night, which led to two of my favorite Twitter moments of the Oscars. She started out pretty normal:

But she soon made a rather critical spelling error in a tweet about Angelina Jolie:

Apparently her followers started to rib her something fierce about it, and she was understandably embarrassed:

But she quickly gave up and embraced it:

And after that it was on: finding a way to insert one or more scatological words in to celebrity names. In the span of the next couple of minutes we got:

  1. Bradley Pooper
  2. Leonardo dicraprio
  3. Amy Shatams
  4. Brad Shitt
  5. Angelina PooPee

And soon, of course, her fans joined in and sent her gems like:

  • Liza Shitsmelli
  • Steve Fartin
  • Anne Crapaway
  • Joseph Gordon-Levshitt
  • Natalie Pootman
  • Gwynneth Boweltro

After which Chrissy sagely observed:

But my absolute favorite part of the night came just a few minutes later, when Ellen DeGeneres created her group selfie tweet. She gathered a bunch of celebrities and took a photo (well, had Bradley Cooper take a photo), which she tweeted in an attempt to break the record for most re-tweets of a photo. It worked:

But one Katie Henderson, who was watching the television at that moment, noticed someone in the background with a camera raised…

Yes, that’s Chrissy Teigen behind everyone, taking a photo of a photo being taken! And here it is:

Well, I thought that was pretty durned awexome.

But anyway. Aside from the show-long lame joke that I concocted, there was another reason why I didn’t really live-tweet the Oscars. And that’s the fact that I actually really enjoy the Oscars. I always have. There’s a reason why I write an article about the Oscars every year. And sitting there with a phone or laptop in my hand, forcing myself to be funny/sarcastic about something that I genuinely enjoy experiencing just sounded like a special kind of Hell to me. So instead I made my cute li’l joke, sat back, and enjoyed the show.

I think Kris Straub said it best, so I’ll let this strip from his Chainsawsuit webcomic sum up my feelings:

Source: Chainsawsuit by Kris Straub.

Source: Chainsawsuit by Kris Straub.

Don’t get me wrong, I love being funny. People pay five bucks a head every weekend to see me be funny. But sometimes there’s nothing wrong with just putting Twitter down and being immersed in the moment. Try it sometime.

Categories: Featured Posts.
Tags: , , , , , , .

Posted by Christopher Grant Harris at 10:00 am.
No comments/trackbacks... »

Thursday, 6 March 2014

The Funniest Thing on Twitter in a Long Time

So there’s some bad stuffs going on in Ukraine right now involving Russia. David Cameron, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, I guess wanted to show that he was standing in solidarity with the USA, so he tweeted this:

This is very strange. Did he use a stock photo of him looking serious on the phone? Or did he have an aide photograph him just for this occasion? Why did he need a photo of himself on the phone in the first place? Did he think twitter wouldn’t believe that he actually talked to Obama on the phone?

Despite how serious the Ukraine situation is, this of course needed to be mocked. And mocked it was. And who better to mock the Prime Minister than Twitter superstar Rob Delaney?

And Sir Patrick Stewart was thankfully also on the case:

But things couldn’t get started until comic writer Michael Moreno joined in:

Whew! Now I know the situation is well in hand!

Edit: 11:59 AM
O noes! Wil Wheaton was too late to join the call 🙁

Hahahahahaha

Categories: Celebrities.
Tags: , , , , , , .

Posted by Christopher Grant Harris at 9:00 am.
No comments/trackbacks... »