Anyway, if you've been wondering exactly what such a musical might look like, here's some footage that got posted thanks to Dread Central.

Direct link for the feedreaders.

On one hand, the Creature participating in a rawk love ballad is pretty funny. On the other hand, are they singing what I think they're singing? Wow.

• Click here to buy the original on DVD from Amazon.

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Creature From The Black Lagoon The Musical: He's Hungry

Written by: Ehren Kruger, Roberto Orci, and Alex Kurtzman
Directed by: Michael Bay
Starring: Shia LaBeouf, Megan Fox, Josh Duhamel, Tyrese Gibson, John Turturro, Ramon Rodriguez, Peter Cullen, Hugo Weaving

Review: The only problem I had with the first one of these was that it tended to have things on the screen that weren't giant robots fighting other giant robots. So that needed fixing. And so it was! This time around, if you're not seeing a big bot tear another's face off (seriously, this is done quite a bit), then you're probably instead focused on some of Megan Fox's various parts. Which is acceptable. You can shut your brain down for this one. Shut it down hard.

Time: 21 seconds

• Click here to buy Transformers stuff from Amazon.

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Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen - 27 Second Review

Ken Plume from Quick Stop Entertainment and I spend a lot of time on the phone. We have conversations that make very little sense. Then one day, I decided that we should harness our powers to ensure that gravity as we know it is kept at its current strength. But Ken would hear none of it and instead he insisted we harness our powers for this...whatever it is, entitled "Nuts on the Road."

Just remember...you've been warned.

Here we have another very special episode of Nuts on the Road. It was recorded live in front of a crowd of stunned onlookers. Some of which were nuns. Oh, one last thing: we're very, very sorry.

Direct download of the file here.

Download audio file (nutsontheroad-579.mp3)

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Nuts on the Road, Episode 579: Lonesome Mel - Rider Of The Plains

The madness continues. For more information, go here.

601. Random Vanilla Boobs.
I have no idea. Ask Dom.

602. International House of Drunkcakes.
From the mind of Miss Destructo.

603. The Kangaroo Wing Dings.
No, seriously.

604. Call the Plumber, My Shower is Evil.

605. Hello Kitty Dress-up Wolves.
Brilliant from Rikki Simons.

606. Aleister Crowley's Chiropractor (and Friends).
A.C.C. is one guy and the roster of his backing musicians changes with each album. Imagine Peeping Tom if it was fronted by Weird Al instead of Mike Patton.

607. Are You Awake at the Wheel?
Taken from here.

608. This is the War Room.

609. The God-like Walrus Quartet.
I'm not sure, but imagine Frank Zappa covering the works of Paul Winter.

610. Reaper's Dozen.
Again, uncertain, but I just imagine a bluegrass Blue Oyster Cult cover band.

New band names up for grabs each Tuesday and Thursday. When we're not...doing something else. Until we hit 700.

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700 Bands: 601 - 610

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Stuff You Need to Know: Do You Think They've Offered "Gobots" to Uwe Boll Yet?

Direct link for the feedreaders.

Why is that so terribly disturbing? Best not to speculate.

I do see very readily, though, that this strange anthropomorphic hot dog--this refugee from Upton Sinclair's The Fugitive--had an ancestor:

Direct link for the feedreaders.

Okay, that's also disturbing. What sort of mad world is it in which a giant disembodied head has a processed meat jester to cavort for the head's amusement--and then the jester simply lays down in a bun to be consumed? And we know the head is a giant one because do a size comparison between the head and the people working the concession stand. Are they merely the slaves of this floating horror, destined to do naught but produce the anthro-hot dogs in vats beneath the drive-in and send them to their grinning doom?

Man, I really need to clear my head of this madness.

Direct link for the feedreaders.

Ah, sweet. That did it, thanks.

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Welcome to the Wienerschnitzel

Don't make me use this. (I mean the inflatable moose head behind me, of course.)

No, really, I'm serious. As serious as I have ever been and the doctor says I'll get over it and be back to normal eventually.

I need your brain. I need to know what's going on in that mind of yours re: Needcoffee. Because I'm about to start doing some serious cogitations about the future of the site, and it's no good unless I get your input.

It's a short survey. It'll take maybe 2 or 3 minutes. (There aren't any trick questions.) And I would greatly appreciate it, if for no other reason than staging that photo was a pain because that chainsaw was not light.

You can find the survey here.

Thanks in advance for your help, gazpachos.

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Widge Wants You

I owned Thriller when it first came out. I enjoyed the album. I thought the videos were cool and positively loved the "Thriller" music video...and that's probably not a surprise to anybody here. I never really got into his later albums as much as Thriller, but I did always respect him as a performer. Even when his outfits, among other things, seemed to make less and less sense.

So I tried to find something that wouldn't be just a boring music video and wouldn't be something from his later years that I just never got into. And I finally settled on this snippet. Which is, I'm afraid, darkly apt.

Direct link for the feedreaders.

Among the other obits you can find elsewhere, I think I appreciate this one the best. Thanks to Bill Corbett for the headsup.

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RIP: Michael Jackson

As a bit of a tribute, here's her first appearance from I Dream of Jeannie:

Direct link for the feedreaders.

I thought about posting her appearance from The Dating Game but the guys are just so skeevy I couldn't bring myself to do it. If you want to see it for yourself, though, it's here.

But I guess that means we'll go with the classic...the original opening to the pilot:

Direct link for the feedreaders.

Thanks for everything, Farrah.

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RIP: Farrah Fawcett

Written by: Akiva Goldsman and David Koepp, based on the novel by Dan Brown
Directed by: Ron Howard
Starring: Tom Hanks, Ayelet Zurer, Ewan McGregor, Stellan Skarsgård, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Pierfrancisco Favino

Review: Well, they fixed the hair. And that's good. But they did well with the rest of it as well, and that's unexpected. Instead of an overhyped dissapointment, this one seems to be the unholy union of National Treasure with the first movie. Which occured in a meat grinder. That was on fire.

Also, Anti-Matter! Yay!

Time: 13 seconds

• Click here to buy Angels & Demons stuff from Amazon.

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Angels & Demons (2009) - 27 Second Review

And we're back. With even more wrongness than before. And it's full of cholesterol too. As always, we'd like to apologize to pretty much everybody who listens and, in this case, everyone who took part. No tacos were injured during the making of this podcast.

Please note: this podcast, if you haven't figured it out, is profane and not safe for consumption by children or animals. Or mammals of any sort.

Agenda:

• The cheerleader finals
• Aaron's sinus problems...in detail
• How Jon's love is like being Sisyphus
• ScottC, played by his understudy
• Widge's voice sucks
• Multitasking
• Steam emo
• The Cure as a goth vs. emo delineator
• Jon Talk Pretty One Day
• How many kinds of wrong?
• Can't get enough of your huh, babe
• Has the podcast started?
• Are you goats?
• Rox, queen of retro, and her moment
• Shoot the hostage
• Has the podcast started?
• The podcast as Hoover Dam
• Ken's hair (reprise)
• The correct line
• Your Service update
• Drunk Dialing Doc
• All About Cardboard
• The cardboard post-mortem
• The Kim Sim Update!
• What is an evil shower?
• All About Potatoes
• Narration and how to abuse it
• Widge, go to your room
• Another way to end the podcast

Thanks to Jon from The Unique Geek for helping us sound good.

You can find all of our Recommendations at our Amazon Store.

As always, special thanks go out to Clutch for letting us use their absolutely badass song, "Promoter (of earthbound causes)" as our theme music for this.

Buy Blast Tyrant, which is where you can find "Promoter". Buy their latest album, From Beale Street to Oblivion. Send them love and coin.

BTW, you iTunes subscriber types can nab this feed here. If you like us, why not rate us? We don't bite. Mostly.

Or if you want to do something else with it, the feed feed is here.

To download this episode directly, Weekend Justice Episode 30: Brought To You By The Letter Haitch, then do that thing.

Download audio file (wjustice062609.mp3)

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Your Weekend Justice #30: Brought To You By The Letter Haitch

What if Gene Roddenberry and Stan Lee had an ugly-ass baby?

ScottC's Note: Everyone, please welcome guest columnist Greg Hyatt. When asked to describe himself, this is what he said: "I was sent from the distant future to prevent a devastating war between humanity and bionic Civil War re-enactors, Stranded in the past after the completion of his mission, I currently resides in Kansas City where I enjoy superheroes, '80s cartoons and New Wave music."

There have been Star Trek novels for decades. And in the nineties, Marvel Comics made sure their characters were everywhere. We got animated series, action figures, trading cards, Pogs, and novels.

Marvel also had the Star Trek license in the nineties. Which means not only did we get a line of Trek comics, we got special issues like Star TreX and Star Trek: The Next Generation/X-Men: Second Contact.

And that second title is where Star Trek: The Next Generation/X-Men: Planet X comes in. The novel is a sequel to the comic, which takes place moments after the end of the film First Contact. The crew of the Enterprise-E didn't make it back to their time on their first attempt. They were actually thrown back to the then-present Marvel Universe where they teamed up (after a brief battle) with the X-Men. There are problems with the timeline and Kang the Conqueror asks (orders) the two groups to repair them.

Of course they do and the Enterprise crew returns to their time. (After all, you can't alter the status quo even slightly in a licensed product!)

Except Marvel and Paramount had a novel waiting. A sequel. And this time, the X-Men visit the 24th century.

Hey, it's only fair.

So, nobody can figure out why the X-Men have popped up in their future instead of returning home. As the crew of the Enterprise investigates, a planet is experiencing an interesting situation. They've got mutants. Of course, Captain Picard and his crew are the nearest ship and are sent to assess the situation. And the X-Men want in.

An alien ship is in orbit around the planet. Turns out they're attempting to harvest these alien mutants. Oh, and the government of this planet? Rounded them up and put them in a camp.

Blah blah blah, you know what happens, even if you haven't read the book. Picard's crew and the X-Men team-up and beat the aliens and save the day, returning everything back to the way it was before the novel happened.

I loved this book when I was sixteen.

Don't judge me.

Actually, go ahead. When I was sixteen I also purchased and enjoyed Smash Mouth's debut album and drank Bud Ice. That's not even mentioning my girlfriend at the time. (Wait, she friended me on Facebook. I hope she doesn't read this.)

I've kept the novel on the bookshelf since I bought it. I hadn't read it since I was in high school.

Until last week.

Does it hold up well?

No, not at all. The problem is... well, there are a lot of problems. The story is kind of ridiculous. I mean, superpowers don't really work in the Star Trek universe. Sure, Counselor Troi is empathic and Q's omnipotent and there are telepaths and shapeshifters and pretty much every alien race is superstrong, but something about the X-Men just doesn't let them fit. Maybe it's the costumes, maybe it's the social message and symbolism that mutants in general and the X-Men in particular represent.

But, when I was sixteen and I'd spend hours in my room reading comic books and checking out Star Trek books from the library I worked at? I was in heaven. Which just goes to show that I had lousy taste back then. (See my previous comment about my then-girlfriend.) I don't know how many times I read it all those years ago. Probably a lot. I was a big nerd like that. (Don't believe me? How's this: I had a CD player shaped like the U.S.S. Defiant that played different sound effects when you hit the various buttons. No, I'm not kidding.)

The book isn't entirely bad. There's a cute scene between Guinan and Wolverine in Ten-Forward. And the author makes a joke about Picard and Xavier bearing a striking resemblance a few years before Patrick Stewart was cast in the role every geek knew he should play. But the rest of the book is filled with talk of how the Starfleet crew is annoyed by the visiting/stranded X-Men (except Worf and Wolverine and a very bizarre romance between Picard and Storm), bad dialogue and ham-fisted references to previous adventures. Don't get me wrong, I love nods to prior events, but give me a modicum of subtlety.

Oh, and don't have Chief O'Brien appear in the same book as Banshee if you're not going to have them interact at all.

Because that is not right.

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Where No X-Man Has Gone Before

German minister of family affairs, Ursula von der Leyen

Quick note from Widge: One of the best things about having international contributors is we can get info from people who are "on the ground" where stuff is actually happening. So Dom decided to send us his take on the recent news about Germany and their bright idea of internet censorship.

I'd rather be fighting Zombies. Or windmills. Or even zombie windmills.

I should have known. Really. When--out of the fear of cyber-criminals and hackers--the German government passed a law that declared the development and usage of software that is aimed at testing the security of networks and computer systems, I should have known.

This law, if "interpreted" like some people read the Bible, makes it practically illegal to ping a network and makes it illegal for software companies in Germany to produce security testing software. Nice one. Can I still use "ping"? I have the feeling I can not.

As so many really silly laws though, this one never really was a problem because the police neither has the means nor the knowledge to hunt hackers or sysadmins. It would make for some great comedy though. "Put down the mouse! Don't you dare start that brute force attack!" - "I have a port listener and I am going to use it!"

And while this law does what laws do best (it exists quietly and unnoticed) the IT incompetence of our government marches on. We have an election year, a major one. Local and European elections happened already, state and national elections are next.

Time for our leaders to fight the three biggest threats at hand. Computer games, freedom of information and our constitution. Wait, what?

The discussions about so called "killer games" have been dominating the headlines for some time and were fueled once again when another school kid went crazy, took an automatic gun to school and used it for its intended purpose. Evidently, the weapons were easily obtainable for the kid although he had shown signs of depression before but conservative politicians focused on something the shooter had in common with a few million people. Yes, how surprising: like so many people today he enjoyed the playful over the top violence of computer games.

Although there are some scientists saying that playing first person shooters makes it easier for someone to kill with a gun, I still think the gun in the hand of the problem child is the bigger part of the issue. I guess I am a pragmatist. If you disagree and think the games are the problems, here is some nice fact for you: Germany has the strictest youth protection laws when it comes to entertainment in the whole of Europe and yet the highest number of school shootings.

Still, only a short time ago, the ministers of the interior of our states decided to propose a new law: "For games with essential components like the virtual practice of killings which are portrayed close to reality, or other cruel or otherwise inhuman deeds of violence against humans or human like beings, an explicit ban of production and distribution is to be realized as fast as possible."

I am no lawyer but I know my way around words and their interpretation. If you interpret this very literally and have a somewhat weird understanding of non-absolute terms like "close to reality," "cruel" and "human like," then wrestling games, zombie games and maybe even a certain Italian plumber could be in danger. But I digress.

Say what you want about the ban of not only a product but also an industry, what really irks me about this is the speed with which this was brought up. The ministers try to realize this ban before the national elections. Gee, I wonder why.

Yet this has not been the first of incompetent reactions to school shootings, the one in Winnenden on March 11 this year being the most recent one. In April, the mayor of Nürnberg did not allow an eSport event to happen in his city, due to the school shooting the month before while allowing a gun exhibition only weeks after the shooting--an exhibition during which fifteen guns were stolen. I guess the eSport event would have been more dangerous, imagine fifteen kids throwing around computer mice and DVDs, yes, they would scare me in a dark alley.

In their tradition of rushing things and completely failing at understanding technology, the two big leading parties have reached a new climax. On June 18, the German Bundestag (Federal Parliament) passed a new law in order to fight the distribution of child pornography through the internet. An internet filter is to be established that makes it possible for the federal police to prevent German internet surfers from visiting internet sites that are on their blacklist. A secret blacklist of course so that nobody knows which internet sites are forbidden. Everyone with a little knowledge about technology knows that this filter will be easily bypassed by anyone who can use Google and everyone who does not like to have a infrastructure of censorship applied to the internet is of course mad as hell. Before the law was passed, the initiator--the minister of family affairs, Ursula von der Leyen--shined with quotes like "Browsers? What are browsers again?" and over 130.000 Germans did not care to be mentioned in the same breath as paedophiles by signing a petition against the law.

Von der Leyen has been named "Zensursula von den Laien" (Censursula of the Laymen) more than once by now. She effectively took over the throne of internet ridicule from the former king: the German minister of internal affairs, Wolfgang Schäuble. He made headlines trying to give the police the power to infiltrate computers by using trojan horse software and effectively binding internet providers to save the connection data of all Germans for a year...in case someone lost an important email I guess.

Now that the law is passed and will soon be fought in Germany's Constitutional Court, the signs of a political change manifest themselves more clearly. The German "Pirate Party" is close to entering the parliament--and in a way already has, since a social democrat changed his alignment after the passing of the bill. How much this will affect the elections is unclear. We are facing a generational problem here: those who understand and care about the freedom of information online and whether or not a computer game should be illegal while buying and producing guns is legal belong mostly to a younger generation. The two big parties governing the country through a big coalition right now have most of their voters among people who do not know the difference between the internet and a computer navigation system. They are the majority, though, and they are traditionally more likely to show up at the voting booth.

They won't care, or won't understand what this Internet Filter means--but they might care that is all done in order to prevent child pornography. If you tell them the filter is almost ineffective they will say "at least they did SOMEthing", if you tell them they are building a censorship infrastructure that lacks an effective control system they will most likely not know what you mean.

But let's come full circle: another member of the German parliament now wants to use the instrument to ineffectively censor the internet for German citizens to also fight the evil "Killergames". Since a DNS filter wont be able to censor a game on your computer, the Christian democrat Thomas Strobl must be talking about censoring websites that include information about those games. Yes. That sounds nothing like 1984. Not at all.

I hope to be able to report better news soon, friends of distant lands.

I would love to provide some links but instead I am going to link you guys here to Wikileaks: they have done a good job collecting a lot of data.

More of Dom can be found at GeekEteers.

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The German Internet Freedom Charlie Foxtrot

First of all, for the record, let me say that I have not seen the new Transformers sequel. I'm aware of the hype and I did see the first one. Thankfully, this is not a review of the new movie. It's a review of a couple of the reviews I've read for that movie.

In the early, pre-dawn hours of the morning this morning, I rolled over and picked up my Blackberry to catch a glimpse of the headlines. There's always something there that will help lock your eyeballs open for the day. This day, it was the absolute idiocy of a couple of movie reviews that was able to get me from the bed to the coffee pot.

The first review I read was by Tom Charity on CNN.com. The second was by Joe Morgenstern on the Wall Street Journal Online.

These reviews insulted my intelligence. Seriously. I'll respond in more detail in just a minute. First, I have a couple of questions. Was anyone reading this expecting a Michael Bay film to suddenly become the next Citizen Kane or Throne of Blood? Should anyone have been surprised to learn that this movie is loaded with computer-generated animation and lots of explosions? Was there anyone reading this expecting the screenplay to suddenly rival Shakespeare with its use of wit and rhetorical devices?

The answer, in short, is no. To all of these questions.

Oh yeah, just for the record, there is also a very hot female playing one of the leads. I'll get to that in a minute.

When you read these two reviews, though, you get the idea that that's exactly what these two critics were expecting. They discuss Bay's gratuitous use of pyrotechnics and CG. Seriously? Have they ever seen a Michael Bay film? This movie is nothing more than a summer blockbuster aimed with its cross-hairs on two key demographics: Young Teenage Boys Who Still Want Their Moms To Go Out And Buy The Action Figures For Them and Men My Age Who Had Their Moms Go Out And Buy The Action Figures For Them 20 Years Ago. Incidentally, some men my age are still buying the action figures, they're just doing it themselves now (and are okay with that).

But I digress.

When you consider the target audience of the movie, the director of the film and his filmography (and, I might add, his financial success in doing it), and the fact that Megan Fox is in the movie, why would any reviewer write about stupid stuff like plot devices and editing styles...unless they were just trying to prove to their readers that they are clever and highly intelligent? And, if they have to prove that to their readers, what does that say?

Full disclosure: I liked the first movie. Liked. I didn't rush out and buy thirty copies of the DVD only to have to buy them all over again on Blu-ray. However, since I walked into the movie (actually, I rented it) with the expectations I outlined above, I was not disappointed. It was a good action movie with the typical Michael Bay flair. I knew what I was getting, I asked for it, and I got it.

Take this excerpt from Mr. Charity's review:

Let's take this point by point:

The combat scenes are a "bewildering blur of crunching metal" BECAUSE THEY ARE FUCKING ROBOTS. If I went into a Michael Bay movie and saw two Transformers begin a fight with one of them taking his glove of and gently slapping the other on the face, with a fight that consisted of them drawing pistols at ten paces, I would walk out of the theatre and then smack the concession stand attendant.

"...the humans are essentially bystanders and onlookers..." BECAUSE THE MOVIE IS CALLED TRANSFORMERS. When they make a movie called "Humans" will Mr. Charity complain that the robots in the movie didn't really play a role?

Which brings me to my final point about this quote. There wouldn't be a point to the movie if any human could really fight the Transformers, would there? I mean, If LaBeouf's character could stand in front of any of the Decepticons and pull a rocket-launcher out of his ass and kill any of them, it would take away from it, right? As for Megan Fox's role in the show, let's not put on any airs about that one.

Megan Fox is Very Hot. Make no mistake about it. I know that's my own opinion, but I'm still right. She was cast in the movie(s) because she is smoking hot and they wanted to have a somewhat geeky, nerdy guy win the hot chick in the end. Of the movie. Megan Fox knew what she was doing when she signed the contract to be in this movie. She knew exactly what her role was and, by signing the contract, implied that she's okay with that. She will make a career out of being smoking hot. Who knows, at some point, she might do a movie that let's us see that she can actually act, too. However, if that doesn't happen, she's still going to make a billion dollars. Why? Because she's smoking hot, she knows it, and she is going to get paid for it. I'll actually be helping to pay her salary as her career continues. So, it can hardly be argued that her running away in "lingering slow motion" can be considered a negative point to this movie. That was the whole point.

I'm tempted to go see this movie in the theater just because of this line in this review. Not only because I now know for sure that I'm going to see a lot of Megan Fox, but because someone was stupid enough to write that as a negative point in their review of the movie.

Mr. Morgenstern takes a much more "social studies" tone to his review, referencing recent current events.

To his credit, he points out that "anything" which might help GM out is a plus. But, it's the way he says it that is...um...deceptive here. It's a backhanded compliment. He is not very coy about taking a stab at the movie for partnering with GM for product placement of their cars. It's called The Movie Business. He makes it sound like GM is pimping out their shit to any old crappy movie that comes along because they are in such dire straits. I thought we wanted GM to succeed. Didn't we? Sorry, after all the buyouts and government money being thrown their way, I'm actually lost as to whether GM is a good guy or a bad guy right now.

And, again, we have a reviewer picking on Ms. Fox again. If the review is supposed to be a "bad" review, why would you point out one of the strongest selling points to discredit it? For the movie's target audience, this line alone would make them wait in line for three days without food or water, just to see the movie for the tenth time.

I would just like to see a review of a movie that actually takes the director and production house's target audience into account while it's being written. What was their purpose in making this movie? Did they succeed in that? Well, in this case, their purpose was to make a lot of money banking on the creation and continuation of a lucrative franchise. Did they succeed? As of this writing, the numbers for its opening weekend are still out. Either way, whether or not they succeeded is actually up to the people who actually matter: the moviegoers.

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Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen: A Non-Review