MUSIC FROM SPACE: "Coo Coo Daddy Long Legs" - The Cheats

As the classic UK comedy series The Young Ones taught us, Buddy Holly did not actually die on the Day the Music Died, but instead parachuted to safety, somehow landed in Bristol and spent the next 23 years hanging upside down in a student flat and subsisting on insects. It was a lonely life, but Holly never let it get him down and even composed a butt-kicking song about the virtues of an all-bug diet, Coo Coo Daddy Long Legs. The clip above features a cover of Holly's song by the obscure punk band the Cheats. Kick back with a plate of crunchy crickets and beetles, and enjoy.

Read more by Greg Stacy at GregStacy.com. Got a tip for Monsters and Rockets? Want to contribute to the site? Send us an email.

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Monsters and Rockets... dot NET?!

After several long months offline, lost in Internet limbo, Monsters and Rockets is back! But we've lost our .com, so from now on you'll find us at Monstersandrockets.net.

Why the change? Blame our friends at Google.

See, this site is hosted by Blogger.com, AKA Blogspot, which was acquired a while back by Google, which also apparently has some controlling interest in both Youtube and Yahoo. (For the purposes of brevity, and because I hate them just that much, I shall henceforth refer to this monster of a mega-corp as Blurgspurt.) A few months ago I got an email from Blurgspurt saying that my URL was due for its yearly re-up. It should have been a simple matter, but I knew from bitter experience that things with Blurgspurt have a way of getting needlessly, exhaustingly complicated in a hurry so I immediately tried to pay Blurgspurt to let me keep my URL for another year.

Only problem: they wouldn't take my money. Every time I tried to log on to Blurgspurt to renew my domain, I kept getting redirected to a sign-in page. (This apparently happens a lot.) Weeks went by, and I couldn't sign in and pay my freakin' $10.

So, of course I contacted Blurgspurt and got the whole mess sorted out quick... or at least that's how it would have gone, if Blurgspurt offered any way to contact them at all. They really, really do not ever want to talk to their customers. They have no phone number for tech support, no email address, nothing. Calling the main number on their contact page just gets you a recording, always. They will not talk to you. Ever.

I spent months getting the runaround from Blurgspurt, with their various useless "help" pages directing me to their user forums. When I went to the forums, I found many other users with the exact same problem and no idea how to fix it. That was Blurgspurt's idea of tech support: go talk to our other clueless customers. That's some Beware of the Leopard-level B.S., right there.

So, the weeks flew by, my URL expired and that royally sucked, and then I got cancer and all of this stuff stopped mattering for a while. Eventually I got better, and when I got out of the hospital I found out some walking crap-sack had bought my .com out from under me. I was fully prepared to buy it back, but Google (I mean, Blurgspurt) made it so complicated to track down Mr. Crap-Sack that finally I just said screw it and switched to a dot-freaking-net.

This year I survived cancer and another epic Blurgspurt runaround. Cancer's worse than Blurgspurt... but you know, Blurgspurt's a surprisingly close second.

Anyway. I'm still alive, Monsters and Rockets is back... and Google can bite every single inch of me.

Read more by Greg Stacy at GregStacy.com. Got a tip for Monsters and Rockets? Want to contribute to the site? Send us an email.

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Relative sizes of STAR TREK & STAR WARS spaceships!

That chart showing the relative sizes of various sci-fi spaceships has been online for years. (Fair warning: if you've never seen it before, after you click on that link you will spend the next 20 minutes or so scrolling around in a geek trance, completely oblivious to your surroundings.) But while the images below depict similar information, they have a very different feel, with three dimensional views of the ships from the Star Wars and Star Trek franchises. Click the images to enlarge-ify.

It's interesting to see that a Next Generation-era Klingon Bird of Prey looks like it could probably take out an AT-AT with one shot, while the USS Defiant looks outmatched by the rebel ship from the opening scenes of the first Star Wars film.

The ships are unlabeled, but if you're hardcore geek you'll recognize most of them on sight. A few of them are just too small though, they're little gray dots. I'm not sure what the big doorknob-like ship is in the upper right of the top picture. I presume it's something from the Star Wars prequels; I've worked hard to repress most of my memories of those movies.











Read more by Greg Stacy at GregStacy.com. Got a tip for Monsters and Rockets? Want to contribute to the site? Send us an email.

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Secret Cinema's epic GHOSTBUSTERS event

Recently the original Ghostbusters has been in heavy rotation on cable, and from what I've seen of it I'm afraid it doesn't quite live up to my childhood memories. (I love Bill Murray as much as any right-thinking person, but Peter Venkman now strikes me as kind of a jerk. That stuff at the beginning, where he's trying to impress a blonde coed by using electric shocks to torture a dorky college kid? That is just nasty.)

But all that being said, I will go to my grave regretting that I never made it to London to see Secret Cinema's truly epic Ghostbusters screening event in November. Not only did the screening feature a live (er, undead?) appearance from Slimer, complete with a squad of proton-pack sporting Ghostbusters to catch him right there in the theater, but there was also a rare appearance by Gozer and his/her hellhounds, and even a visit from a great big Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. Click on over to their gallery to see some of this madness, then join me in sorrow that we missed this thing.

Read more by Greg Stacy at GregStacy.com. Got a tip for Monsters and Rockets? Want to contribute to the site? Send us an email.

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Peter Capaldi's FRANZ KAFKA'S IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE

Following the news that Peter Capaldi will take over the role of the titular Doctor on Doctor Who, the Scottish actor suddenly finds himself an object of intense fascination for nerds around the globe. That's led to the unearthing of Franz Kafka's It's a Wonderful Life, a dark yet daffy and kind of delightful short-ish film that Capaldi wrote and directed in 1994. Richard E. Grant is spectacular as Kafka, making this famously tormented writer both comical and affecting.

Read more by Greg Stacy at GregStacy.com. Got a tip for Monsters and Rockets? Want to contribute to the site? Send us an email.

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Miniature models of classic artists at work in their studios

Courtesy of the folks at Juxtapoz magazine, check out this amazing gallery of miniature model portraits of classic artists at work in their studios.


Read more by Greg Stacy at GregStacy.com. Got a tip for Monsters and Rockets? Want to contribute to the site? Send us an email.

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A very Betamax Christmas to you!

If you need a little retro Christmas TV, right this very minute, Betamax Christmas will put the jolly back in your holly. The site recreates a full evening of Christmas TV programming circa 1989 or so, complete with rabbit ears on the TV that you have to fiddle with to get a better picture. (You change the channel by flipping the remote floating over on the right. It seems obvious once you notice it, but it took me a while to spot it.)


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But do you recall... the most obscure Rankin/Bass specials of all?

Much as I love the classic Rankin/Bass holiday specials, at this point I've seen 'em and seen 'em and seen 'em all again. But it turns out that there are a few that aren't familiar to me, and maybe they're just as new to you.

Does Pinocchio's Christmas sound even slightly familiar to you? How about Nestor the Long-Eared Christmas Donkey? Or The Leprechaun's Christmas Gold?)

(I get that feeling that as time passed Rankin and Bass started getting kind of desperate for new Christmas special ideas. I mean, Nestor the Long-Eared Christmas Donkey?

Read more by Greg Stacy at GregStacy.com. Got a tip for Monsters and Rockets? Want to contribute to the site? Send us an email.

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"I'm Dreaming of a Blue Sunset"

Enjoy this Doctor Manhattan-esque footage of a sunset as seen from the surface of Mars.

Read more by Greg Stacy at GregStacy.com. Got a tip for Monsters and Rockets? Want to contribute to the site? Send us an email.

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FREAKS AND GEEKS: THE INTERACTIVE YOUTUBE GAME

Courtesy of the Fine Bros. Unofficial, but awesome.

Read more by Greg Stacy at GregStacy.com. Got a tip for Monsters and Rockets? Want to contribute to the site? Send us an email.

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