Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Mike Nelson spoofs Steve Reeves in "The Giant of Marathon"




Since my academic issues are starting to wind down, I've had a lot more free time (not that much, of course). YouTube has a new Movies channel, with free, high-quality ready to watch films. Many of them are laughably bad ones, but there are a few gems, like Robert Townsend's HOLLYWOOD SHUFFLE. Townsend, at first, seemed like a visionary with this movie on the level of Cronenberg or Spike Lee, but alas, 20 years later he seems like the movie equivalent of a one-hit wonder. There's also INVASION OF THE BEE GIRLS, one of Roger Ebert's favorite guilty pleasures, that was the screenwriting debut of Nicholas Meyer, a man known to me through two fandoms: he was the author of the Sherlock Holmes novel THE SEVEN PER-CENT SOLUTION and also wrote the screenplay of its movie adaptation, and he was also the screenwriter and director of the best of the Star Trek movies, WRATH OF KHAN.


There are also a ton of the Brucesploitation movies made after the Little Dragon's death, starring Bruce Lei, Bruce Le, and Bruce Li. The best of the lot has to be BRUCE LEE IN NEW GUINEA, which is more like a cross between a Bruce Lee film and Tintin comics.

One of the highlights is also the Steve Reeves camp-classic, the GIANT OF MARATHON. Even with Steve Reeves's physical perfection, it's hard to watch. But wait, what's that? It features a commentary track by Mike Nelson and Kevin Murphy where they crack wise! It's like watching a movie with your funniest friends while drunk.


Like I said before, GIANT OF MARATHON is basically a Western set in Ancient Greece, with a clean-limbed hero that loves independence and the wilderness, with villains that are scheming plotters that try to marry the hero's girl as a part of their schemes, and there's even the Persians standing in for Indians, with Steve Reeves leading a cavalry charge that saves the day.


It's worth watching, not just for Steve Reeves but also Mike Nelson spoofing the entire proceedings. His bits on YouTube are a worthy successor to Mystery Science Theater.

Unfortunately, embedding is forbidden so just take the link.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n43UkxXcVLg

Saturday, June 27, 2009

Have a Scien-Tastic Day!


400 years ago exactly, Galileo Galilei first used a telescope to identify four moons of Jupiter and found the Moon had craters. Thus, 2009 is the international year of Astronomy, and I encourage every science lover to go out someplace and stargaze.

One of the defining points of Summer viewing: look South (southwest to southeast depending on the time of night) and you should catch the gorgeous summer triangle, Altair, Deneb and Vega.


Speaking of science, my childhood hero Bill Nye, the Science Guy returned for an entertaining adult-themed look at scientific issues in his blink and you miss it short lived 2006 series, "The Eyes of Nye." Intriguingly, the show wasn't about the usually science kiddie show tricks like baking soda and vinegar, but about controversial issues that are actually socially important, like "race" and global cooking.

Incidentally, here's some super-rare footage of Bill Nye on the local Seattle sketch comedy series, Almost Live!




Bill Nye has a degree in Aerospace Engineering from Cornell, and parts he invented at Boeing are still used in most 747s. Also, he invented a device that was used on the Mars Rover back in the 1990s. Hats off, Bill!

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

EXCLUSIVE! Interview with Konstantin Ruzanov


Imagine my excitement to receive an email from natural bodybuilder Konstantin Ruzanov himself. Not just because it's a friendly message from a famous person that appreciates my work, but also because it means somebody somewhere is reading this and I'm not just shouting at hyperspace like I've long suspected.



One important correction: previously I stated that Konstantin Ruzanov was leaving bodybuilding, which was hearsay. He's big and impressive as ever, and still has the world's best pectorals.


Konstantin was considerate enough to agree to do an exclusive interview with this blog! One that is the first such segment but hopefully not the last.




Esperanto Grrl: What made you get into bodybuilding? What made you interested in muscles?


Konstantin Ruzanov: As a young man of age 16 I was a drummer in a band. Carrying around a heavy drum set required a great deal of muscles. I was very skinny at the time. (5'9 120 pounds) Our manager of the band suggested I go grow some muscles. Jokingly perhaps. But I took it seriously and since the moment I stepped into the gym, the band lost me.


EG: What do you think about the current state of the bodybuilding industry? What can be done to improve it?

KR: I think we need a new big idol, with graceful and elegant shapes. Not bulky and huge. Grace! to show the beauty of males body that would appeal to masses. I can be that idol!


EG: Who are some of your bodybuilding heroes?

KR: Arnold. Bob Paris. Frank Zane.





EG: Since this is a blog about women that like muscular guys, have you had any encounters with women that are fans of muscular guys?

KR: I have. Almost all the women I encountered loved muscles! As long as its presented in a right package.

EG: How do you see your career going? Are you at all interested in acting or movies? Is there any role in particular you'd be interested in?

KR: I would love to get into movies. Any producers out there interested? I see myself as a next James Bond, or some romantic muscular hero.

EG: Are you involved with any other sports?

KR: Not involved with any sports.

EG: Do you have any tips or advice for young bodybuilders, male or female?

KR: Yes. Read my book when it becomes available. I just finished it, it's all there. But in a few words, what you do with your daily life is what you go to become, physically and mentally. [The Book's] philosophy, training, eating naturally, resting peacefully.

EG: What made you decide to stay natural?

KR: Experimenting and seeing the difference in results. State of mind is very important to me. In a clean body - pure soul.




EG: You're from the Ukraine, what made you come to the United States?

KR: The American Dream...

Male Celebs with a taste for beefcake


A while ago I wrote an article about female celebs with a taste for beefcake, a list dominated by the stellar personality of Mae West to the point where I wrote the article and even I can’t remember who else was on it. After writing that piece I feel like kicking myself for not including many, many others that I've learned about since then, the biggest name being fifties blonde bombshell/sex symbol Jayne Mansfield, who married bodybuilder Mickey Hargitay.

In any case, I thought it’d be amusing to do the converse, an article that was the flip-side version of that one, with male celebs into muscular ladies.


Gregory Hines


Greg Hines was one of the greatest tap dancers in history, and was also a friend of bodybuilding: he would often be seen in the audience of exhibitions. The woman he was engaged to marry at the time of his death was a female bodybuilder, Negrita Jayde.



Jean-Claude van Damme


Who knew that the Muscles from Brussels was a fanboy for female bodybuilders? Apparently, as a weedy teen in Belgium with cokebottle-thick glasses, Jean Claude used to read all the fitness magazines and had a gigantic crush on Gladys “The Tigress” Portugues, one of the stars of PUMPING IRON II: THE WOMEN. With his usual go-getter spirit, when JC first moved to LA as a virtual unknown and penniless nobody, he found out where Gladys was having a photo shoot and tried to woo and win her over…a scenario that sounds like the plot of a B-romantic comedy.

Jean-Claude is someone I have a great deal of sympathy for, which is surprising because in all honesty I’ve never seen one of his movies from start to finish. Except for maybe some of Errol Flynn and Douglas Fairbanks’s pictures or the occasional Western, I’ve never liked action movies, and certainly not the “I’m tougher than you” violent and revenge-themed sort that van Damme made in the late 1980s. Van Damme reminds me of a late-period Steve Reeves, forgotten because Hollywood no longer made the kind of movies he was famous for and totally unable to reinvent himself.



R. Crumb


Underground cartoonist R. Crumb seemed to be a professional deviant weirdo, but one of the biggest cartoons of his was “What to do With a Strong Girl.” Incidentally, if you haven’t seen the R. CRUMB biopic movie, do yourself a favor and see it: it’s easily the funniest and weirdest movie ever. The film’s sense of humor can be summarized with the movie’s opening line: “When I was eight years old, I found I was sexually attracted to Minnie Mouse.”



Alex Daoud


The mayor of Miami Beach during the heady “Scarface” and "Miami Vice" cocaine cowboy days in the eighties when everything Miami was cool. Alex Daoud was a former boxer, a big tough and flamboyant guy that was not only corrupt as hell and associated with organized crime, but also laughably obvious about it, yet who somehow oversaw Miami Beach’s explosion and renaissance into a world-class destination and was easily one of the city’s best mayors. I can think of very few people universally beloved by both elderly Jews and European clubbers.

Somehow, Alex Daoud comes off as much more likeable and interesting than any squeaky-clean do-gooder or political white knight, because here was a man that knew how to TCB. And he was totally into female muscle girls, which makes his book tour all the more surreal, as everywhere he went, he was flanked on either side by foxy female bodybuilders.

Another Ulisses Jr. Sighting



Ulisses Jr. was spotted as one of several brawny black Adonises at a black and white arty photoshoot with Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bundchen.




Part of the reason photographers love these black-on-white photoshoots is because of how slick the contrast is in black and white film, but also because it courts controversy - just look at what happened to Robert Mapplethorpe. Personally, I don't see the appeal to his work, but anything Senator Jesse Helms doesn't like can't be all bad.

It's getting rarer and rarer to find new pics of the superstudly Ulisses Jr., so anything new is really welcome. I have trouble believing this, considering he may be the handsomest man on earth.

Hexadecimal Clocks


And you thought “Metric Time” from the Simpsons was just a joke…

For my fellow mathematics buffs out there, several hexadecimal clocks exist. A few just take the existing date and time numbers and convert them into hexadecimal notation, but there are some that have a radically different, base-sixteen way of measuring time. One of them shows time as a hexadecimal fraction (between 0 and 1) expressing how much time of the day has passed, as the advantage is it can be infinitely precise, with as many digits as desired.


To convert between hexseconds and hexminutes, just switch the digit. 3C.2^16 hexseconds equals 3.C2^16 hexminutes for instance. To convert between them, just use this formula:

1 hour = 0.667^10 (0.AAB^16) hexhours

So 1 hexhour is around 1 hour and thirty minutes.


Here's another link to a site with a true binary clock that doesn't use the 24/60/60 division.


This is almost as interesting as the "hexidecimal dollar" I once got at a mathematics convention, one listed as worth $2.56!