Let's Take A Breather

So...what did I do this April?

Nothing much, really. Well, STUFF did happen. Easter happened, people died, some people went crazy.

I saw the Mario Galaxy movie, at least. My verdict? I liked it more than the first one. The first one had a better story, this one had more action. And way fewer random needle drops! But this was relentless. I read a review that called it "made for the Youtube Shorts generation" and I couldn't get it out of my head. A thing happens, they go to the next thing, repeat until the credits pop up. Nothing gets to breathe and lots of characters are just...there. Bowser in particular has an inconsistent arc.

But it's a treat for folks like me that love the deep cuts of Mario lore. So many times I was like Leo DiCaprio pointing at the screen to see this thing or that thing remembered, let alone on a big screen in HD. I wish we weren't spoiled on Star Fox or the SMB 2 villains, but they looked gorgeous. There were a few other cool cameos and Easter Eggs I won't spoil, but it's been out for almost a month, you probably know what they are by now.

No Wario, Waluigi, or the Koopalings, though. They're like the only major Mario characters that haven't shown up yet. They must be saving them for the next movie.

And if you're aware of Frinkiac, the site where you can look up Simpsons screenshots and make gifs out of them, someone recently made one for King of The Hill

And The Venture Bros.

Boompane and Spanakopedia, respectively, have been godsends for the meme community. But while Frinkiac worked with static images, you could make actual clips with these sites. With audio. And (just about) every episode of those shows are on there, even the Hulu reboot season for King of The Hill. That...kinda technically makes them pirate sites. Even if the clips can't be longer than a minute. So enjoy them while you can, folks.

And we were watching a Super Champion on Jeopardy!

Jamie Ding was on a 31 game streak, and was finally knocked out this past Monday. He came close to losing a few times, like in a really good one last week with Patrick. But his buzzer game was one of the strongest I'd ever seen, and a lot of his episodes looked like this Far Side comic.

Greg, the guy who beat him was a chess champion who was faster than Jamie was. Although to do so he needed a "buzz first, think later" approach. It was successful at beating Jamie at his own game, but the rest of the games he played this week, to buzz in and have a brain fart almost every single time while keeping the rest of us in suspense was...not at all frustrating to watch. It happens to the best of us, but every time? He was knocked out today by someone who was able to grab the Daily Doubles from him.

Weird Al sums it up better than I do:

And then I did have one great pickup this month:

A new cel! I've been wanting a Scooby-Doo cel forever, but they're usually pricey as hell. Old series, iconic series, iconic characters? Good luck paying for less than triple digits.

But this one I got an actual good deal on. It's from 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo. Most cheap cels from this show that pop up on eBay either have half of a character, or they're really tiny, or it's some no name extra, or it's Flim Flam. I found one that has most of Scooby (he's missing his tail), and all of Flim Flam. Well, it's no Vincent van Ghoul, but I couldn't pass this opportunity up.

The background is a reproduction, and it's not even from the original scene. It originally looked like this: 

I don't blame the seller for including a background that made the characters pop better. This particular cel is from episode 3, "Scoobra Cadabra," where for some reason they disguise themselves as used car salesmen in this scene.

The frame pops up at around 1:37 in the video.

Oh! And one of my Seattle cousins sent me this care package out of the blue

All cool stuff from the Funko HQ store in Everett, Washington. You might recall that I visited it during my Seattle trip last year.

And one of my other cousins that lives in Arizona took her family to Disneyland a few weeks ago and sent me this guidemap in the mail that I wasn't expecting at all.

You have no idea how happy I am that Disneyland still makes these. And it checks off a lot of my boxes: Disney theme parks. Guidemaps. Anniversary promotion (still in the middle of the 70th anniversary!). And Bluey!

Don't know what I did to deserve these gifts, but I welcome them.

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Number 39

 Last week I celebrated my 39th trip around the sun.

And I spent it sick.

Don't worry, it was just a cold and a mild sinus infection and I'm fine now. But those couple of days SUCKED. Started Saturday, finally got my smell and taste back around Thursday.

Well, on Friday I was well enough to venture into Manhattan again since my birthday week is one of the vacation weeks I get off every year.

If spice level 7 from Ichiran wouldn't clear the sinuses, nuthin will. Thankfully, it did.

And it was a bit of a spur of the moment thing, but I finally went to see the Museum of Modern Art. I always wanted to see it, and I'm glad I did.

And this is what you see when you go in.

I thought I'd breeze through the thing in like two hours. It's just looking at paintings, right?

Well, I was wrong. If you ever go, I'd set aside plenty of time for it. There's five floors, and I must've spent and hour and a half on just the fifth floor alone.

It's the floor with most of the works I wanted to see, no wonder I spent so much time there. I started there first and made my way down.

Van Gogh's "Starry Night" was one of the show stoppers. It was hard to get close to it, let alone get a good shot of it. But it is quite beautiful.

Picasso's works were everywhere.

As were Mondrian's. You see these in pictures for years, but it's truly something else to see them up close and in person. It's lines and squares, they shouldn't be fascinating...yet they are.

Monet's "Water Lillies" was another of the show stoppers. The main pieces took up the entire room. But there were too many people in front of it, so I couldn't get a picture of it. But I did get this smaller work, which was still pretty big.

And I finally got to see one of my favorite pieces in person: Dali's "The Persistence of Memory." You know, the melting clock painting. I couldn't help but go back several times to keep looking at it. You can really see the brush strokes that make these possible when you're up close.

But what they never said about this piece is that it's, uh,

Tiny.

The whole thing was about the size of a corkboard. I was like "that's it?" when I first found it. You see all these giant artworks, and then this one. But that makes it even more impressive how Dali was able to fit all of that on such a small canvas.

Mark Chagall's centerpiece of the Cubism room.

One of the many cool sculptures I saw.

Another fascinating one. Plenty of pieces challenge the definition of "representational."

This one blew me away.

Technically an artistic nude. Picasso got weird in his later years.

Fun fact: this was the first painting to enter MoMA's collection. And it was just hanging on a wall.

Right next to this famous piece, actually.

Of course they had a Georgia O'Keefe. The funny thing is that there's a lot of placards that are geared towards kids. The one under this one more or less said "hey kids, notice how Georgia O'Keefe worked with curves in this painting?"

Yes, yes. Curves. They knew what they were doing.

One of the first things I saw when I walked into the fifth floor was a screen showing the classic "A Trip to The Moon" silent film from 1902.

My attention span really is shot, I kept saying "when are they gonna get to the part where they hit the moon in the eye?" There's a big buildup to it and it really doesn't disappoint.

They even had a few drawings from it.

Other highlights from the fifth floor:

Then I finally made my way down to the fourth floor, which was where they kept Warhol's works.

You really do appreciate the artistry that goes into these pieces when you're allowed to get close to them. Well, as close as possible before the workers snip at you.

All 32 Campbell's soup cans were on display, and what shocked me was that they were all different! Not just which variety was on each can, but they're all subtly different. They weren't exact copies.

Two of his other works.

Jackson Pollack had plenty of representation, too.

"They're just paint splatters." Well, sometimes painting is more HOW you paint something, rather than what it looks like when it's done. Different methods of dripping paint netted different shapes and lines.

Or sculpting, for that matter.

And sometimes sculpting is stuff that's cobbled together.

A lot of times, art is rebellious. Sometimes it's the subject matter.

Other times it's putting a rope on a block and calling it art.

Or you're a troll like Duchamp where you bought a shovel that caught your eye, signed it, hung it from the ceiling, and now it's in a fancy art museum.

Plenty of photography was on display, too. This one caught my eye.

And this one.

I really felt like the further into the 20th century I went, the more Modern Art, and modern artists, got more pretentious. People just straining the definition of what IS art. A lot of it I didn't get, but it meant something to the artist. 

Then came the special exhibits.

First, a Wilfredo Lam exhibit.

I didn't know what to expect here, but these pieces just blew me away. I was sad that I was running out of time to get through everything, I could've spent all day in just this hall.

And then I found the Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera exhibit that had just opened.

And these were some highlights on the second floor:

Oh, there was plenty more good stuff, but I didn't want to show everything, now could I? I'm just sad I had to rush through the bottom floors because the museum closed at 5:30 and I got done with the whole thing with about fifteen minutes to spare. I couldn't even stop to watch some films or even go in some of the other special exhibits on the bottom floors.

But I have to share the other cool thing I did this month:

I met Doug Jones! Yes, Mac Tonight himself! About ten years ago, me and my buddy met him at NYCC, but I didn't realize he played Mac Tonight until AFTER I got home! I finally fixed that.

Just the sweetest human being. But I brought along a toy Mac Tonight to show him...and I forgot to take it out of my backpack until I was long done with this photo. I just hope another ten years doesn't go by until I can see him again and fix THIS, too.

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