This week we are hungover and talk about all sorts of weird stuff from the Super Bowl and its debut commercials, the Poltergeist reboot trailer, Angelina Jolie's Unbroken, catch up on Foxcatcher and probably a whole lot more! It's fast and loose - just like your significant other! (The image is from the Tee Fury charity shirt by Bamboota. Available here: http://www.teefury.com/chris-vs-chris)
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This week things get a little bit silly as we discuss the World Cup, Game of Thrones, DC's movie plans, Harrison Ford's cybernetic ankle, Michael Keaton's triumphant return to the superhero world, plus we finally see and review The Grand Budapest Hotel. And there's a lot more! And, in some ways, a lot less! Put it in yo' lugholes!
This week Luke and Jacinta tackle the Benedict Cumberbatch Star Wars rumours, Fifty Shades of Grey, Transformers 4 and the Robocop reboot! Plus Jacinta gives a full report on Singapore Toy Game, and Comic Convention and fruitlessly attempts to explain Fantasy Football to Luke. Put it in your pretty face! (Via the ears preferably).
Being a nerd and being into sport aren't as mutually exclusive as they used to be. There's no reason why you can't geek out over the storyline of your favourite show right before you discuss the effectiveness of your Captain's possessions in last night's game. In that spirit, the AFL have teamed up with DC & WB to bring us a series of tshirts merging our favourite team colours with the logo of the (super)man of the moment.
Confusingly, they don't feature all 18 teams in the AFL. I can rationalise that perhaps the West Coast logo would be a bit hard to incorporate into a pleasing merged design, but they persisted with Gold Coast (though to be fair, it ain't a good looking shirt). Even though my main team has been overlooked, I'm pretty happy that my second choice looks badass. Will definitely be getting an Essendon shirt.
All designs are available on the Online AFL Shop, and once they're gone, they're gone, so be sure to snap one up!
Happy Friday/Saturday depending on where you are in the world! No matter how bad a week you had, it can't have been worse than this guy, getting hit in the nuts on live TV at the Australian Open.
With the baseball playoffs starting up this week, and with the Red Sox season effectively being a really bad nightmare, I'm reminded of one of the more bizarre baseball stories I've heard - Dock Ellis and his LSD-fueled no-hitter.
Dock Ellis was a pitcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates, and was a character on a team with a lot of characters. As it stands, Ellis is a good pitcher - starting pitchers only pitch every fifth day, so there's a lot of downtime between starts. So, on an off day before what he thought was another off day, he drops acid with a friend of his. Friend wakes up in the morning, sees that Ellis is scheduled to pitch in the game that day, and rushes Ellis to the stadium.
Ellis, well...it was apparently an adventure for him:
“I didn’t see the hitters. All I could tell was if they were on the right side or the left side of the plate…. There were times when the ball was hit back to me and I jumped because I thought the ball was coming fast but it was coming slow… I caught the ball coming back from the catcher with two hands because it was a big old ball and I thought it was small… It was easier to pitch with the LSD, because I was so used to medicating myself. That’s the way I was dealing with the fear of failure–the fear of losing and the fear of winning.”
Football season is upon us, and my Patriots have already blown a winnable game.
Sigh.
In honor of football season starting, though, the History Channel, in a rare feat of actually sharing something about history that isn't about Hitler, posted a pretty neat story about two football teams coming together during the lean years of World War II (okay, it's adjacent to Hitler, but we'll let it pass):
The National Football League faced an uncertain future during World War II. Due to government restrictions on travel, the NFL nearly canceled the entire 1943 season before agreeing to slash team rosters and reduce the regular season schedule. The military draft had already claimed more than 600 players—a vast majority of the sport’s elite athletes.
...
Though both franchises were losing money, they stood to lose even more if they didn’t play at all. So the respective owners agreed to a one-year-only merger that created the “Phil-Pitt Combine.” It didn’t take long for fans and journalists to devise a far more interesting nickname: the “Steagles.”
It's kind of a neat story, especially if you enjoy pre-merger NFL.
Hopefully I'll be back in full force by the end of the month.
We're swiftly approaching release day for Christopher Nolan's trilogy-ending The Dark Knight Rises, and as part of the lead-up, Australian Rugby League team the Melbourne Storm are playing a 'specially themed Dark Knight Rises match' this weekend. I'm assuming it just involves them wearing a sponsored jersey, not having Bane come to explode half of the playing surface. Shame.
You can buy your very own Dark Knight Rises jersey from the Melbourne Storm online store for the princely sum of $175. Only 500 are being released, and the initial online allocation has already been exhausted, so if you're keen then get in quick!
All of us here at Fruitless Pursuits love geeking out over nerdy stuff, but some of us also love geeking out over the traditionally less nerdy area of sports. A guy who shares our geek sports love is Dave from Dave's Geeky Hockey. What started as a few 'Hey wouldn't this be cool...' ideas has escalated into teaming up with custom jersey company Rinkgear to get some of these designs off the computer screen and onto the backs of fans. I myself have this bad boy on the way, and fittingly it should arrive just in time for ACTUAL winter:
Jump below the cut for a look at a few more of Dave's kickass designs.
Jeff and his wife with the Stanley Cup - go Bruins!
Tomorrow evening marks the start of the Stanley Cup playoffs, the prize for the best team in professional hockey in North America. If you're into competitive anything, there's little like playoff hockey - it's 60 minutes of fast, fast sport, and it will likely take some years off your life. A number of people, however, don't know quite how historic the Cup truly is, though. There's a lot of history and tradition with the Stanley Cup, and it might just be enough to get you interested for the next few months of playoff hockey.
Ah, baseball. America's pastime, and one of my favorite things in the world. I've been a Red Sox fan for as long as I can remember, and it's been a long, cold winter without baseball to warm me up. Opening Day 2012 is tomorrow night in Miami (if someone hits a home run, we get to see this go off), and I love baseball for all sorts of reasons. Unfortunately, baseball carries a bit of a stigma - the season is long (162 games) and the games, at 3 hours plus, are overextended and boring. I don't agree, and I think you'll find that there's a lot for even your most hardened nerd to find interesting about baseball.
Getting in bright and early with this!! And I also made a conscious effort to not put in another cat gif. So I'm going to the polar opposite of a cat gif, which is obviously Michael Phelps.
I grew up under the all-encroaching shadow of a particularly magnificent mo, in the guise of distinguished and rotund Australian Cricketer, Merv Hughes.
Sadly he's far more grey around the edges nowadays, but damn if that wasn't a mo to aspire to. Merv Hughes, I salute you.
(For the Americans - might be worth knowing that Cricket is one of the few/only professional world grade sports where the players can get rather amazingly tubby)
The new Justice League came out last week and it's being talked about in many places including right here on Fruitless Pursuits (here and here). My thoughts were that it wasn't the best Justice League story I've read. It wasn't even my favourite one from this year. The honour of that title goes to the following great story that appeared as a free insert in most DC comics earlier this year:
Let me present to you Justice League/Subway Famous Fans!
