March 2007 Archives

Take two minutes of your time and help us pick York's Best Male Bartender! We've accepted your nominations and now it's time to pick the best of the best!

"TMNT" was the No. 1 movie in America for a reason this past week - it rocked. OK, so maybe I'm a little biased since I spent many a day in my youth (nearly two decades ago) playing with Ninja Turtle action figures, video games, going to the "Ninja Turtles: Coming Out of Their Shells" live tour, dressing up as a Ninja Turtle for Halloween and easily getting caught during a game of hide-and-go-seek-in-the-dark because I accidentally wore my glow-in-the-dark Leonardo PJs.

In all seriousness, the movie was better than I expected. Sure, there were plenty of groan-worthy jokes and plot holes big enough to drop a man hole cover through, but all-in-all this was actually a more grown-up Ninja Turtles movie in comparison to its early '90s counterparts. Go see it. Now.

For those who haven't heard, 105.7 The X DJ Lyndi Starr died Tuesday, ten days after giving birth. The story is available here.

In a death as sudden and tragic as this, there really isn't a whole lot to be said. It's impossible to say kind words or words of consolation simply because the wind is just knocked out of you, whether you knew the person or not. I did not know Lyndi, but like anyone else who's heard about her passing, you can really only sit there and go, "Oh my god."

What's interesting is watching how Gen Xers and Gen Yers respond to tragedy in the modern Internet age. Take a look at Number One Son's MySpace page, one of the other DJs at The X, as well as a very close friend of Lyndi's - almost every one of his top friends, many of whom were also friends with Lyndi, have changed their profile pictures to photos of Lyndi or photos with her.

So I spent 20 minutes of my drive up 83 to work this morning watching a set of these swinging to and fro below the license plate of a black Ford pickup in front of me:

An elderly lady named Gladys from Austin, Texas, had called "The Ellen DeGeneres Show"
to tell her she needed to move the plant that was on the table behind her head because the camera angle made her look like Alfalfa from the Little Rascals. Ellen decided to call her at home and this is the YouTube video of the phone call. The lady's pretty funny.

If, like me, you work at a place where snow days don't exist (can you imagine the uproar if we decided not to put out a paper one day because of snow!), and you have no choice but to brave driving on back roads, municipal streets, Route 30 and Interstate 83 to get to and from your job, you will probably understand -- and agree with -- the following tips.

If you are lucky and can stay home when the flakes start to fall, please -- whether you're religious or not -- pray for the rest of us and follow at least the last tip.

I'm a little afraid of heights. I say that because it's not something that I think about often, and this realization has only manifest itself twice in my life - first when my best friend forced me to be a tourist and go to the top of the Empire State Building (we got some great pictures, but my knees were shaking the whole time) and most recently last weekend when I was forty feet in the air, strapped into a harness and balancing my feet on small, rocklike pieces jutting out of the wall.

Instead of heading to the gym for our usual workouts, my boyfriend and I decided to check out Climbnasium in Mechanicsburg, an indoor rock climbing place. It's an old barn converted into an indoor playground, basically, with two climbing walls on the first level, a loft with bouldering areas and a basement with two taller climbing walls. The walls have regular vertical walls, overhangs that require much more skill and slab, these tilelike pieces that have a different sort of texture on each one that you can grab on to and make your way up the wall.

Oh, Will Ferrell, you've let me down.
You used to wear the comedic crown
But you've found a way to make me frown
... in "Stranger than Fiction."

Your quips in "Old School" and "Saturday Night Live"
Where you cheered and jumped and jived
And your bit on the Oscars with Jack Black, oh my!
... but what were you thinking in "Stranger than Fiction"?

You sparkled on the racetrack as Ricky Bobby
And it might seem that I sound a bit snobby
I hope being serious is not your new hobby...
... especially after "Stranger than Fiction."

Take two minutes of your time and help us pick York's Best Female Bartender! We've accepted your nominations and now it's time to pick the best of the best!

As entertainment reporter, I talk to local bands. A lot. A whole lot. It's a blessing and a curse. The truth is, there is something supernatural about York County because I think there are more bands than there are people. You think I'm kidding but they're everywhere. I open my shower curtain at night and there's a new local band holding out my towel for me. It's kind of getting creepy.

When it comes to self-promotion some bands are better than others. Some contact me and when I try and get back to them, I never hear from them again. Some check in with frequent e-mails to make sure I haven't forgotten that I promised them a profile in FlipSide. I haven't.

Here's a bit of entertainment for those of us who enjoy both "Heroes" and "The Office."

So I'm flipping through one of the random bits of mail totally unrelated to my job that somehow find their way to my work mailbox, and I see an article talking about the Web 2.0 explosion.

Web 2.0?

Did I miss something? Is there another World Wide Web? An updated version of the regular-old Web that I use almost daily? Do I need to plug in new addresses (now called URLs) when I search for information? Do I need some kind of expensive new software to access this?

For your reading pleasure, here are a couple mini reviews on the good and the bad that I've seen or heard lately. Try and enjoy.

The Arcade Fire - "Neon Bible" - Mega wow. It took me a few listens to really get into The Arcade Fire's follow up to "Funeral," but hot diggity damn, it's solid. It's a little more morose than their last outing, which is odd, since they wrote "Funeral" while they all had family members dropping dead like flies, but it is what it is. As much as I hate to admit it, the best track on here is a revamped version of "No Cars Go," from their early self-titled EP. I never cared much for the song... until now. Now it lights up my soul. It's an overdrive-fantasy-turn-it-up-to-11-sends-shivers-down-your-spine-while-driving-80-down-the-highway-in-a-snowstorm kinda song. Or so I think. Another great track? "Black Waves/Bad Vibrations." 9 out of 10.