"Wouldn't marry the pres-i-dent"

The National Film Board of Canada has a Vimeo channel. Want to get lost in a land of cinematic wonder, we ask, rhetorically? It's one of the best places on the Web to spend some time being entertained and educated.

Here's a great example of what NFBC does with its money, and reader, we think that's money well spent.


Mr. Frog Went A-Courting from National Film Board of Canada on Vimeo.

And we highly recommend Blinkety Blank by Norman MacLaren (1955).

Please Enter Your Password Now

Perhaps you've never been part of a corporate conference call. If not, you're missing out on a naturally strange and often absurdly funny bit of accidental theatre, for the average conference call often sounds as if it were scripted by Eugene Ionesco.

Participants accidentally talk over each other. There are awkward pauses and sometimes bouts of great silence. Technical glitches haunt the proceedings and very little actual communication happens.

Now you can experience for the first time, or re-live, the magic of a conference call via the wonderfully bizarre conference call simulator. Click the link, follow the simple instructions and disappear into corporate madness.

[We give a firm handshake to Brooklyn's own James Barnes for giving us the passcode to join this thing. Hi James!]

So Much to See

Sometimes we see blogs, Tumblrs and other stops on the web and wonder why we even bother. Then we remember, we bother because if we weren't here to pass the links on to you, who would?

At least that's what we tell ourselves at night before drinking enough cough syrup to fall asleep while listening to old radio dramas.

Imagine some sort of brass fanfare here. Now look!

Can you even stand it?! Yeah, exclamation points. Journalism-degree-be-damned. If ever there was a still from a Disney cartoon that merited a freak-out, this certainly makes the grade.

This is just a smoked pepper corn amongst the bounty of spicy offerings at the Graves and Ghouls Tumblr.

It's run by a woman named Cat who has another Tumblr worth your time, Vintage Gal.

There are GIFs on both, which tend to bug our wonky eyes, but that's one broken match in the factory full of joy. And please know there are ladies in various states of undress on both blogs, so don't get fired on our watch, okay?

And So It Begins

Here we are three days into October and you probably feel like we've left you at T-ball practice and it's starting to rain. Relax, get yourself a beverage and grab a donut -- you know the drill.

Welcome to the 5th annual Typing Monkey Halloween Frenzy. For the next 30 27 days we'll do our best to pollute your innocent eyes with as much seasonal evil as possible.

However, we will stick with tradition by easing you into things with a video from filmmaker we featured last  year. This one's not Halloween related, but might scare you and your cats.


Catnip: Egress to Oblivion? [Classroom Drug Educational Film] from Jason Willis on Vimeo.

Monkey Love: Science Monster

One of the first Websites we linked to after the launch of The Typing Monkey was the magnificent Science Monster.

As Ray Bolger sang in the Scotch Buy jingle:  "'Tain't fancy but it sure is good."

If you go to the site it seems so low-tech, positively Unix. That's because chief Monster Scientist, Mark Assaf, didn't waste time making a site that's fun to look at. He focused his effort on filling Science Monster with links to download-ready public domain movies, old radio shows and even some music.

Need to watch the 1958 black and white goof Teenage Zombies right now? Done, son.  [It's a "horror" film so tame it plays as if it was funded by the Lutheran Church. -- ed.] And yes, Assaf is selling a fair bit of his catalog too -- 16 mm prints if you're into that sort of thing.

Assaf says his download content, the films especially, are ideal for those bored days at work when there's little else to do but watch a rickety old monster movie compressed and digitized to fit on either a portable device or a small video window on your PC. Don't get fired on our account.


Thank Science Monster, not us. He's doing the Lord's work.

Visibly Frenzied

It must be noted that Dr. Fred Beldinstein now operates out of an Arbor called Ann. He's painstakingly restored and reassembled his lab there and has resumed posting to his video blog Frenzy of the Visible. There he lets all his personal demons run free in the form of YouTube, Hulu and other online video files.

Need to see the preview of the Mexican vampire movie The Genie of Darkness? Crave some vintage concert footage of Venom? Done and done. At FotV Dr. Beldinstein posts educational films, forgotten cartoons, punk videos, schlock horror films and clips that defy easy classification.

He finds them so that you don't have to waste time looking for entertainment you didn't know you needed. We suggest you click on over there post haste.