"Let's Boo-Boo! Just Not Over to the Dog Park!"

Eleanor and I went out to the cinema last night, to catch the third Pegg/Frost/Wright installment in the oddly-named "Cornetto trilogy," none of which really have much to do with each other except the Pegg/Frost/Wright part. And the awesomeness.

This one's titled World's End, and it begins, 20-odd years ago, with an attempted pub crawl through twelve of the licenced establishments in the fictional English town of Newton Haven (actually based on the real English town of Letchworth Garden City, which ironically has one of the lowest counts per capita of pubs in the whole country).  Switching quickly to present day, Pegg's Gary King character "gets the band back together," said band consisting of four other, far more sedate members of the upper middle twit British class, including Frost and Martin Freeman in between gigs on sets with hobbits, consulting detectives and hedgehogs.

Watch the names of the pubs carefully, as they pretty much lay out a road map of everything you will see.  Including, pretty much, the same kind of weird-ass shit you saw in Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz.  The jokes are awesome, the fight-scene choreography is wicked, the soundtrack rocks and then some (even including a perfectly appropriate track from The Sundays that Eleanor, and even I eventually, recognised); and the ending is not pat so much as preferable.  Plenty of Harry Potter alums work their way in, which is always fun to see.

The reference in the title of this blog post is one which gives you a clue how these guys think. Over their long years of friendship, they took the oft-cited Shakespeare stage direction from Winter's Tale- "Exit, pursued by a bear"- and morphed it into a reference to Yogi Bear, eventually shortened to a reference to his companion Boo-Boo, whereupon all other nouns and verbs (which they also provide instruction on) left the building and they, and we, were happily left with this extreme form of exeunting.


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Then, this morning, on this holiday celebrating our labors, Eleanor went to work. I, mostly, didn't- I did spend some time returning calls, messages and texts from various family members, and cranking out a couple of documents for my early day tomorrow- and thus I had time enough at last! for either or both of last night's premium cable offerings on SHO and HBO....

Except there warn't none.  Both Dex and The Newsroom took the night off for the holiday weekend, so something had to come along to pay attention to.

Something did:



Jeffrey Cranor and Joseph Fink have the news of the weird covered: they're the creative masterminds behind the popular sci-fi podcast . Though only a year old, the spooky Night Vale — which channels David Lynch, Orson Welles and H.P. Lovecraft in its descriptions of a small, weird desert town — has rocketed up the iTunes ratings list to claim the number one most downloaded spot.

Fink tells NPR's Jacki Lyden that he wanted to work on a podcast with Cranor, but he didn't want it to be anything like the podcasts he already listened to. "And I've always been fascinated by conspiracy theories. And also, to a lesser extent fascinated by the Southwest desert. Fascinating things probably happen there on a regular basis. So I came up with this idea of a town in that desert where all conspiracy theories were real, and we would just go from there with that understood."

Not sure whether to just dive in with the just-released 30th episode or start from the beginning, I opted for the pilot.  And oh. My.

"The City Council announces the opening of a new dog park at the corner of Earl and Sommerset, near the Ralph’s. They would like to remind everyone that dogs are not allowed in the dog park. People are not allowed in the dog park. It is possible that you will see hooded figures in the dog park. DO NOT APPROACH THEM. DO NOT APPROACH THE DOG PARK. The fence is electrified and highly dangerous. Try not to look at the dog park, and, especially, do not look for any period of time at the hooded figures. The dog park will not harm you." \

The parallels to Newton Haven are remarkable. Both have incredible soundtracks. So far, Night Vale has less bitter, but it's early.

I think I'm good for the coming week:)