We've been seeing commercials for a new Animal Planet show called Meerkat Manor.

It apparently follows the soap-opera-like adventures of a family of meerkats, called a "mob". I didn't know what a meerkat was, I was later informed that Timon from The Lion King was supposed to be a meerkat. Well, hakunna matatta to you Nathan Lane.

OH!
When they say soap opera they really mean it... In one particular commercial we are introduced to a meerkat named "Shakespeare." When Shakespeare is struck by a snake while protecting some pups, he limps back to the burrow while the narrator asks, "Will Shakespeare make it?"

I MUST KNOW!!

Or when an owl threatens to grab some pups the family forms a distracting "Line of Defense" while the little guys scurry back to the burrow, the narrator asks, "Will the line hold long enough for the pups to get back to safety?"

I DON'T KNOW, WILL IT!?!

This show is my new Lost.

Who is this supposed to be?

Lars Ulrich of the heavy metal band Metallica.

Are his voice talents featured in the Pleaseeasaur Animation?
Quite Possibly.

Does he encourage illegal Peer to Peer downloading?
Absolutely Not.

It's time for our twice-weekly Amazing Adventures of Pleaseeasaur organizational updates. Exciting!

In tropical Atlanta we've spent this whole weekend trying to finish up prepping all the character files we've received so far from JP and Tommy.

These are the infamous Pizza Bros. and Sons. I think when we animate them they'll always stay in that exact grouping, just like they're all connected. Moving together as one unit.... Because in the live stage show, JP wears a harness with two mannequins on either side of him, I want to try to capture how hilarious that is in the animation.

We've juuuust about got them all ready, only a few more. We should be receiving more soon from the Pleaseeasaur home offices. Meanwhile across the country in the rain soaked streets of Seattle... Pleaseeasaur themselves are recording dialogue for the first scene of the animation, "The Diamond Heist." They told us we'd have the whole soundtrack for the first scene by the end of the long weekend. Awesome!

I should have all the character files we currently have prepped by the time I get the soundtrack from them. That way we can start putting together scenes in our animation program, we're using Adobe After Effects. So far so good, if I can keep just a step ahead of JP and Tommy we should be fine, but the second I get behind them we need to start husslin.

For RP, here's what we're listening to:

Audrey Pic is dreamy, even though I don't know what she looks like.

C-dub and I have been working on prepping the character files for the Pleaseeasaur animation. JP and Tommy have been sending us files (via clunkrobot.com ftp) for all the characters in the Pleaseeasaur Universe. We have to cut them up in Photoshop and make them animatable, with 4 mouth positions and a blink, oldshcool Sealab 2021 style. So we asked Ed Mundy if he'd be available to help us animate it, cuz that's like his wheelhouse. He said yes, he was very even tempered about the whole thing. I'm glad he's available. With him and Mack, we'll have a handle on quality animation.

Oh, yeah.
I asked JP and Tommy if they'd be comfortable with me writing about the animation in my stupid weblog, and they were totally cool with it. So I'm going to try to keep up with the progress here... Hi tech style every Monday and Thursday. That's when C-Dub and I have our P-Saur planning meetings, we map out what stuff we have to get done for the week. We even set up a google calender (get the rss feed here), that way anybody who joins the project can check the calendar and see what needs to get done. I'm in comunication with JP and Tommy via an Instant Messager program for questions and direction. It's kinda cool... like the fuuuutuuuure.

Here's what I'm doing right now:

Drawing Tough Guy arms. He'll also have an "extreme" pointing animation... Time permiting. Which brings us to one of the reasons I'm tracking this project... It's a lot of work. The more I stay organized, the better the end product will be. As Hugh McIntyre of the Hanso Foundation Board of Director's is known for saying:
"Accuracy and transparency above all."

True that.

**update**
We watched the show, I need to digest everything...
The foot!
yikes!

Tonight is the 2 hour season finale of our most beloved of television series, Lost.

The trailer for tonight's episode has been running the tag line: "Your Lost questions answered." And while that certainly is an enticing advertisement, it cannot possibly be true. Not if you've come to appreciate Lost the way we have... you never get straight answers. And if you DO get answers, they are always couched in an even bigger question. This, to me, is the beauty of the show Lost. These rules are fair to play by, and Lost has never broken their own unspoken set of rules.

Besides, do you REALLY want these answers? Well maybe you do, I dunno.

Until tonight: Good Luck, and namaste.

Today the ACLU launches a national campaign to pressure the FCC to investigate illegal NSA wiretapping of U.S. citizens like you and me (well, if you live here anyhow) without warrants or authorization from the Court. The fact that the ACLU must pressure the FCC to DO IT'S JOB is ridiculous.

Demand the Truth, Don't Spy on Me:

The FCC has the authority and the obligation to investigate the NSA spying scandal, despite their wrong-headed refusal to act. Tell the regulators to take action and penalize any phone company that is colluding with the Bush administration's illegal program. Add your name to the public record and support our formal demand to the FCC.

If you watch someone long enough you'll eventually find them doing something wrong. This is not how National Security should work. Don't spy on me.

Related to Origami, Papercraft is a sort of "big city cousin" to Origami's traditional paper folding farm hand. Papercraft models require glue to hold them together, and are often crafted from several sheets of paper. This is not to say, however, that the skill involved in creating papercraft models is any less impressive than that of Origami.

You can find tons papercraft models on the internet for free to download, print out, cut and glue together. Some are impossibly complex, like these scale model, extremely accurate Yamaha motorcycles. Or if that's too boring for you, why not build Keneda's superbike from the movie Akira. If you really want to go the extra mile, build yourself an Ecto-1, the vehicle from the Ghostbusters... for seriously... out of paper...

You can find lots of old 80's anime vehicles around if you look hard enough. I read on one site that a guy is working on a papercraft model of the Star Blazer's space battleship. If you want to start small, and practical, here is a real working papercraft pinhole camera you can download and actually use.

Halo.
So we've established that we're all nerds about Apple Computers, and we're cool with that...

Today the brand new, state of the art, Flagship Apple store opens on 5th Avenue in New York City, known affectionately (amongst apple nerds) as The Cube.

The glass cube acts as the entrance to the underground store. To enter the store you either take the glass elevator people have started calling "the syringe" or the spiral staircase that wraps around "the syringe." Beneath the street lies the largest Apple store to date. Number 1 plans on making an appearance.

Ok, I know I said we were taking a break to recharge...
but SERIOUSLY!

We got a nod on the comedy central blog.

I guess that means we are really doing this.

We've had quite a week. First we had a couple of 20 year olds staying with us, then we had the twin brains of Pleaseeasaur sleeping on our futon and couch, respectively. Throw in Nattybump's dog Socks for a few days and... Well, we are exhausted.

The funny thing is, we are only at the very begining of our jamed full action packed "Summer of Excitement." This week we begin work on the animation for the much anticipated (by us) Pleaseeasaur DVD being released by Comedy Central.

So please stand by while we at clunkyrobot.com recharge our energon cubes for a day or two, and in the meantime, watch this CNN report about "The Scooter Boom."

Last night was the Pleaseeasaur show.

(photo by Mack Williams)

Thanks to everyone who made it out, I know many of you came out specifically to support us at clunkyrobot. Seriously thank you, and I hope now you are full-on fans of Pleaseeasaur. How could you not be? It was awesome, and just as great as I remembered. If you missed it, check out Mack's photos here.

We only caught one of the opening acts, a band called Club Awesome. They were an excellent live band. They were also giving away their first CD free to anyone who would "friend" them on their myspace page. I don't have a myspace page, but I've gotten pretty good at being friends with people... some would argue... I also took a CD.

Pleaseeasaur: Where Man meets Beast, where Machine IS Man.
P-Saur Countdown: 0 Days, 3 hours
Sunday May 14th @ The Earl, doors open 8:00pm

I've told the story a million times. I'll recount the short version here for you.

I went to see Neal Hamburger do his intentionally bad stand-up act at the Earl. His opening act was a guy who went by the name Pleaseeasaur. One man singing funny songs about a collection of characters he all plays himself. The show has at least 6 costume changes. We were fans the second we heard him.

I could go on, I could spend paragraph after paragraph describing how charming and weird and funny this show is. But it would only be a disservice to Pleaseeasaur. You must experience it. Now is your chance... Pleaseeasaur is appearing for one night only, at The Earl on Sunday May 14th, doors open at 8:00pm. There are 2 opening acts. Get your tickets now.

Pleaseeasaur has recently signed with Comedy Central Records (who?) to produce 2 DVD's full of songs, live action, and animation. The Pleaseeasaur Team (JP, and Thomas) have asked clunkyrobot.com to provide the animation for the first upcoming DVD. A show of support for P-saur is also support for clunkyrobot.com. So DO IT. The show is only $7.00 american.

Right now at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry you can see an exhibit of Leonardo da Vinci's Codex Atlanticus. In which he drew sketches and schematics for many of his most famous contraptions. (via metafilter)

A design team from Milan has reconstructed these sketches into 3d models. Those models were used to create actual working replicas of da Vinci's designs.

There was a time when brilliant men were also skilled artists. Paid to sit and dream and draw all day long. Spend a few years trying to figure out how to make man fly, then turn around and paint not one, but two of the worlds greatest works of art. Side note: remember to grow long unruly beard.

There's a Flux Capacitor for sale on eBay. Now you can travel back in time and hang out with Crispin Glover.

"The Hanso Foundation, where you can experience all of the social and scientific endeavors we are pioneering to make your world a better place."

Be sure to sign up for their news letter. Use any name you'd like. Then when asked, enter the password: breakingstrain

During last night's episode of Lost, the character Sawyer is reading a screenplay. The screenplay was for a movie called Bad Twin, based on a fictitious book written by a fictitious author named Gary Troup. You can even get it on audiobook, and from Amazon.

A creepy interview with the fictitious author can be watched here, where he talks about The Valenzetti Equation. A mathematical equation that predicts the end of the world. Guess what, Enzo Valenzetti had a Foundation also.

You've been known to be called what?

I was never a huge fan of the White Stripes, but I can certainly appreciate their music. And that Jack White made great music for the radio when great music was very much needed for the radio. I mean... David Byrne of the Talking Heads loves Jack White, and we love David Byrne, so he can't be all bad right?

Well now we have even more reason to like him. He's teamed up with another guy we love here on the Satellite named Brendon Benson. (iTunes link) We bought Benson's album when it came out last year some time, it's been on rotation ever since.

Jack White and Brendon Benson got together in a hot attic and wrote a single song together, Steady as She Goes. This song inspired them to build a band and write a full album worth of songs. Thus The Raconteurs were born. Their website is from 1981, in a good way, and features samples of the upcoming album.

You can get the single for a dollar minus 1 on iTunes, and the full album, Broken Boy Soldiers, will be released Tuesday May 16th. Mark your calendars.

Is it bad to love a brand?

Many people who are Macintosh enthusiasts don't just love Mac computers, but all Apple products. And, income providing, would happily own all of those products. (though for some, exceeding income is also not an issue) I cannot blame these people, because to be honest, I am one of them. I hate my cellphone, I hate using it, I hate carrying it. But if the rumored iPhone were to ever be released, I would f'ing want it.

I recently watched the documentary The Corporation. (props to Matt-o) One of the major themes of the movie is the concept of buying a brand... You see, in today's market place, The Big Corporations don't want you to just buy their products, they want you to buy the brand. The product, for the most part, is simply an end to a means. That's why sneaker companies don't give a shit about the quality of a shoe, it's not the shoe that's important, it's the logo on the shoe.

Can you live your life without any logos?

I am in love with the Apple brand. I love them because their products are of a higher quality. In fact, they've built their market share on producing smaller amounts of higher quality products. And for this quality we pay a premium. I am fond of all their products that meet or exceed this high level of quality. I would not, however, buy a crappy laptop simply because it's got an Apple logo in it.

But I am stilling buying the Apple, I get the computer for free.
Lucky for me it's a bad ass computer, if that was not the case, maybe I would re-examine my love for Apple. Or maybe not... Maybe I'm too far gone.

Author and funny-man John Hodgeman, who wrote the delightful book/almanac The Areas of My Expertise, has recently been featured in the new Apple Get a Mac campaign. He plays a "PC" who talks to a hip looking scruffy "Mac." They never say the man playing the "PC" is John Hodgeman, and he certainly isn't famous enough to be recognized. Interesting.

Stephen Colbert spoke as the "Stephen Colbert" character at the White House Correspondent Associates Dinner, with guest of honor George W. Bush himself... Past speakers include Cedric The Entertainer, so they may not have been ready for what Stephen would deliver.

"It's like the movie "Rocky." In this case the President is Rocky Balboa, and Apollo Creed is... Everything else in the world."

Man...
He really lets Bush have it, who happens to be sitting just a few feet away, that takes guts. It's hilarious, and available in three parts on youtube.

part1
part2
part3