Posts Tagged ‘the shining

18
Mar
13

Escape Monday: Rad Behind The Scenes Photos From Famous Films

16-Photos-From-Behind-The-Scenes-Of-Famous-Films-16Watching movies you forget that when they were being made, the cameras probably spent more time off than on and what was a super serious, iconic scene quickly turned into bored actors dicking around.

That’s why I love stumbling on pics like these that give you a taste of what was happening behind the curtain when movies like Jaws, Star Wars, Terminator and The Shining were being made.

It’s a pretty cool reminder that despite the massive impact these films have had on pop culture, they were made by people just like you and I who were probably bored to tears a lot of the time.

Take the guys manning the camera rig for this famous scene from The Shining for example.

Ho hum.

 

 

And James Cameron, realising way too late that he got into the water before taking his watch off again.

 

 

And so on and so on.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Good luck with your respective Mondays, hang in there, on Thursday we all get to sleep in and then after that, we’re hitting the beach if it’s sunny or the DVD store if it isn’t and relaxing to the maximum.

Yeeeeeeee-ha!

-ST

13
Feb
13

Sakhi’s Puke

ChefSo as I mentioned in passing last week, J-Rab is currently in the UK visiting her sister who is due to have a baby, so your Tiger pal has been toughing it out alone the past ten days.

In the beginning I was like, “Huh. This is kinda cool – more time to write in the evenings, the car all to myself (we share it normally), life on my own terms fuck yeah!”

But after awhile the evenings really start to stretch out. Not having the other person around starts becoming unnerving and even with music blasting in the background, you can’t escape the eerie silence that settles like a shroud over the space you used to share.

How do single people live like this?! Doesn’t it drive you guys fucking bonkers? I was making meatballs on Monday night and I was lost so deep in my own thoughts that I dredged up a memory I swear I haven’t thought about for about 18 years.

 

 

At my Prep school we had this huge 6ft cook, this gigantic rotund black man called Sakhi. I remember him clear as day – he was a permanently greasy guy who seemed to toil endlessly in the kitchen, banging pots and pans and doing whatever was necessary to make sure we got fed every day at lunchtime.

His hygiene left almost as much to be desired as his cooking, which we all complained about endlessly, but he wasn’t a bad person, he didn’t deliberately try to poison us with aphid-ridden vegetables and gloopy, over-cooked meat, that was just his style of cooking (if you could call it that).

 

 

So I was thinking about ol’ Sakhi on Monday night while I was making spaghetti and meatballs when I suddenly remembered his signature dish – the one kids would whisper about the same way we’d tell each other ghost stories when we went on school camps.

“Sakhi’s Puke.”

To this day, I have no idea what Sakhi’s Puke actually was, but the random way it jumped right out of my brain after 18 years of not thinking about it at all made me instantly crack up laughing and I swear I didn’t stop for a good 20 minutes.

 

 

It wasn’t funny back then though. Back then if they were serving “Sakhi’s Puke” kids would literally hide in the bathrooms during lunch hour to avoid eating whatever that stuff was.

So yeah, if you could have seen me on Monday night, rattling around my flat all alone, laughing like a crazy person and repeating the words “Sakhi’s Puke” over and over, laughing a little harder each time, you’d be forgiven for thinking I had completely lost my mind.

J-Rab’s back on Sunday.

Not a moment too soon Winking smile

-ST

29
Mar
12

The Nokia Lumia 800 Three Weeks In

nokia-lumia-800-angle-main-imageIt’s been nearly a month since I got my hands on the Lumia 800, one of the first Nokia Windows 7 phones to be released to market and I can still hardly find fault with this phone.

So far I’ve looked at form factor, some of the live tiles, Twitter and Facebook on the phone, the camera and the battery life (which did improve after I updated the phone, thanks Seerower!).

Today we’re synching this puppy with my PC, checking out the Skydrive and playing around with Office cause I’m thorough that way. I’m like Ogden Nash walking on the beach. I leave no tern unstoned. [SFX: Crickets].

Synching:

This is an interesting one. You can’t synch a Windows 7 phone to your PC unless you download Zune, which is a 100MB file.

I did this a little reluctantly because to be honest, with Windows Media Player and iTunes already fighting for dominance over the media on my PC, the last thing I needed was another media player in the mix getting all my media confused and insisting on obscure file formats in a fascist attempt to force some kind of twisted brand loyalty.

 

 

Aaannyway, I downloaded Zune, installed it, synched my phone to my PC and actually found the whole experience relatively painless. Zune turned out to be not so bad, it quietly synchs the content on your phone with your machine and the Zune interface looks pretty slick.

It gives you instant access to the Microsoft Marketplace where you can buy any number of apps, the prices of which are all listed in RANDS, which is a major bonus.

It also must have had a sneaky conversation with Windows Media Player because my entire music library was just magically in Zune the minute I fired it up, album art and everything.

Of course, my problem now is that with a Macbook and an iPad back at home and a PC and a Windows 7 phone that I use day-to-day, I’ve permanently got one foot in the iSide of life and one in the Microsoft camp with content scattered EVERYWHERE.

Yeah I know, #firstworldproblems right? Man the fuck up Slick, there are starving kids in Africa who have never even SEEN an iPad, never mind use one everyday to play Angry Birds Space!

 

 

Skydrive:

I touched on this is my last review, but the Skydrive is truly one of the things that makes this phone super slick.

Think of it as your own personal hard drive in the sky with the added bonus that you can back your entire phone up on your Skydrive.

This means when you eventually upgrade, provided your new phone is a Windows Mobile device, you’ll simply log on to your Skydrive and minutes later, all the content from your old phone will be transferred to your new one.

 

 

For a borderline OCD freak like me, this is a huge deal because it means that I’ll never lose a contact and even better than that, I’ll only need to link my contacts’ different accounts up once and the Skydrive will remember that shit FOR LIFE.

Also you can obviously access your Office docs from anywhere. You just hit https://skydrive.live.com/, log in to your account and there your files are, ready to be shared with the world.

It’s also a killer way to backup all your music and photos if you can spare the bandwidth. On my current measly internet cap it would take me 10 months just to get my music up there alone but it’s something I’d love to do one day because hard drives crash, but SKYDRIVES are forever yo.

 

 

Office:

Which brings me neatly to Office. On older incarnations of Windows phone (or Windows Mobile as it was known) you could easily synch your phone to Office on your computer and BAM! Every douchey work contact you ever saved was on your phone, as well as all your calendar appointments and your emails.

Which was great. But try actually opening simple Word docs or Excel spreadsheets and they quickly became a nightmare to actually edit or use in any way.

The way Office works on the Lumia 800 is so dead simple, at first I thought I was missing something. The whole experience has been streamlined to the point where creating a new spreadsheet can be done by touching the screen twice and maybe swiping once depending on what screen you were last on in the Office tile.

The responsiveness of the touch screen means you can actually legitimately create and edit documents without losing your mind because the screen you’re looking at is cluttered to the max with tiny icons you keep pressing my mistake.

 

 

You can also go the whole hog and do what’s called an Office 365 synch, which will replicate your office suite on your phone so that all your aforementioned douchey contacts are just a touch away.

I didn’t do this though. I keep the line between my work life and my phone separate. I’m old school that way.

So all in all, the Lumia 800 continues to impress. I’ll wrap this up in the next Lumia 800 post where I’ll be looking at internet browsing and wracking my brain to find any negative points (if they exist) about this phone so that you guys don’t think Nokia own my soul.

-ST

13
Jul
10

The Tiger’s Top 3 Swearers Of All Time

Swearing is something nobody stops to think about because all of us do it all the fucking time. There was a time when slipping the odd ‘fuck’ into everyday conversation was like flashing your willy at your girlfriend’s parents or flashing your vagina at err, well, anyone really.

I trawled the internet for information about swearing to back my theory up about how nobody gives a fuck about it anymore and after countless hours of searching, found the following useful infographic:

 

 

As this graph clearly illustrates, since the new millennium began way back in 2000, people’s attitudes to swearing have changed quite drastically. So much so, that except for a sharp spike around 2010 (which was probably a result of the graph artist being shouted at by his boss for drawing silly graphs instead of doing his day job) we can see without a shadow of a doubt that people actually enjoy the fuck out of swearing.

Nowadays you can’t even go to the fucking video store without hearing a ‘shit’, ‘ass’ or ‘fuck’ somewhere, whether it’s the dude behind the counter lambasting you for returning the Lord Of The Rings boxset 6 months late or the car guard outside attacking you verbally for reversing over his leg, it seems EVERYONE thinks it’s cool to let rip with a ‘eat shit muthufukka’ whenever it suits them.

I blame rap music for this diabolical drop in societal standards. That and Verimark infomercials which though they may not contain any swearing, really make you want to swear.

 

 

Inevitably, with this increase in volume of swearing comes a marked decrease in the quality of swearing. People just don’t say ‘fuck’ like they used to, they don’t say it with any feeling or any meaning which I think is not only an insult to this brilliantly versatile word, but also reflects poorly on the swearer himself who is probably only doing it to sound ‘hip’.

And so I’ve compiled a list of my top 3 swearers of all time so that people can listen to these cats and learn how to swear fucking well, because until you can do that, no one’s gonna take you seriously, not your boss, not your girlfriend, not her parents, not your parents, not even your friends, nobody.

So pay attention, this will change your life.

 

NUMERO TRES: Jack Nicholson

Jack Nicholson has been swearing since way back when he was banging your mom at Woodstock, which makes him a certified pro at dropping the F-bomb with maximum impact.

He’s got the whole devilish charm thing working for him tinged with a healthy dose of sheer insanity which makes him really compelling to watch because you constantly get the feeling like he’s going to flip the fuck out at any given moment.

 

 

When he says ‘fuck’ he means it. He doesn’t just fire the word out there willy nilly, no. He says it with enough gravity to crush planets. He makes you feel like he’s swearing at you, like you’re the one who fucked up, asshole.

Just rent The Shining and watch for the scene when he verbally assaults Shelley Duvall on the staircase of the Overlook Hotel. Or how about the one where he explains to Duvall why she shouldn’t bother him while he’s writing? It’s pretty brutal.

Jack Torrance: Wendy, let me explain something to you. Whenever you come in here and interrupt me, you’re breaking my concentration. You’re distracting me. And it will then take me time to get back to where I was. You understand?
Wendy Torrance: Yeah.
Jack Torrance: Now, we’re going to make a new rule. When you come in here and you hear me typing
[types]
Jack Torrance: or whether you DON’T hear me typing, or whatever the FUCK you hear me doing; when I’m in here, it means that I am working, THAT means don’t come in. Now, do you think you can handle that?
Wendy Torrance: Yeah.
Jack Torrance: Good. Now why don’t you start right now and get the fuck out of here? Hm?

It’s bad enough just reading it, but hearing him say it makes you want to get the fuck out of there too. Take a note out of Jack’s book, swear like you’re dangerously close to losing your mind and people will simultaneously fear AND respect you.

 

NUMERO DOS: Edward Norton

What’s great about Ed Norton’s swears is that he is able to load his colourful language with SARCASM AND IRONY. When he swears he sounds like he’s sick to death of all this fucking hypocritical bullshit y’know?

 

 

His ‘fucks’ are LADEN with burning, biting sarcasm that communicate a kind of world-weariness that can’t be faked.

You can’t get angry at a guy like Ed Norton when he swears at you because he’s so completely beyond giving a fuck that you’d just look like an asshole if you took any offence to him calling you a backward, cousin-fucking retard.

Of course, when he’s angry his ‘fucks’ land like haymakers, just watch the monologue scene when Norton’s staring at his reflection in the bathroom mirror in The 25th Hour and you’ll know exactly what I mean.

Monty Brogan: Yeah, fuck you, too. Fuck *me*? Fuck *you*, Fuck you and this whole city and everyone in it. Fuck the panhandlers, grubbing for money, and smiling at me behind my back. Fuck the squeegee men dirtying up the clean windshield of my car – get a fucking job! Fuck the Sikhs and the Pakistanis bombing down the avenues in decrepit cabs, curry steaming out their pores stinking up my day. Terrorists in fucking training. SLOW THE FUCK DOWN! Fuck the Chelsea boys with their waxed chests and pumped-up biceps. Going down on each other in my parks and on my piers, jingling their dicks on my Channel 35. Fuck the Korean grocers with their pyramids of overpriced fruit and their tulips and roses wrapped in plastic. Ten years in the country, still no speaky English? Fuck the Russians in Brighton Beach. Mobster thugs sitting in cafés, sipping tea in little glasses, sugar cubes between their teeth. Wheelin’ and dealin’ and schemin’. Go back where you fucking came from! Fuck the black-hatted Chassidim, strolling up and down 47th street in their dirty gabardine with their dandruff. Selling South African apartheid diamonds! Fuck the Wall Street brokers. Self-styled masters of the universe. Michael Douglas, Gordon Gekko wannabe mother fuckers, figuring out new ways to rob hard working people blind. Send those Enron assholes to jail for FUCKING LIFE!

Powerful stuff. When he doesn’t give a fuck, his swears are cool as hell, but when he does you get the fuck out of his way FAST.

 

NUMERO UNO: Chris Rock

No man on this Earth swears with the passion, explosiveness or brute force of Chris Rock, it’s like getting blasted in the face with a shotgun, awe-inspiring stuff I tell ya!

The thing about Mr Rock is he relishes his swear words, he knows how powerful they can be when delivered correctly and has probably worked his whole life to make sure that no other man on this planet can match him when it comes to the sheer force of his swears.

 

 

He’s like a fucking force of nature, especially when he’s doing stand-up. Rent one of his shows and watch it nice and loud to get the full effect.

Also, the man’s funny as fuck.

Chris Rock: Damn. It’s all fucked. The world’s fucked up man. Michael Jackson lost his mind. What the hell is wrong with Michael? Another kid? Another kid? I thought it was groundhog’s day when I heard that shit. Another kid. Get the fuck out of here. That’s how much we love Michael. We love Michael so much. We let the first kid slide. Another kid. I’m fuckin done. I’m done with Michael. I was a fan my whole life. I am fuckin’ done! I’m handing in my glove. I saw Michael on 60 Minutes. Ed Bradley tried his best to make Michael look like a mammal. Someone that drink water and breathe air, right? He gave Michael the easiest question in the world, the easiest GED questions in the world, and Michael could not pass the test. He said, "Oh Michael, do you think it’s proper for a 45 year old man to sleep in the bed with 13 year old boys?"
[Michael says]
Chris Rock: "Yes".
[Ed Bradley says]
Chris Rock: "Ok, ok, oh let me rephrase that question." "Michael, would you let your children sleep in a bed with a 45 year old man that has been accused of child molestation?"
[Michael says]
Chris Rock: "Yes". Ed Bradley looked at Michael Jackson like he wanted to say, "Nigga, is you crazy?" Like he wanted to take the 60 Minutes clock and push the shit forward and say "get the fuck off my show!"

Hope you’ve enjoyed my choice of top 3 swearers of all time. I’d challenge the people reading this to add to this list, but I know they won’t because a) I’ve fucking nailed it! NAILED IT IN THE ASS! and b) No one fucking reads this.

-ST