The most important question of our time!

I humorously ponder a rather important question I have yet to hear a consensus about...

Our robot masters have arrived... with ice cream! Yay!

Located at the Tokyo Summer Land amusement park.

It's the song that really makes it. Yasukawayasukawayasukawayasukawayasukawayasukawaku~n!

MC Pinky in da house yo!

I've had this joke in my head for quite a while, but I always imagine it told by Pinky. So finally, I let Pinky tell it, using Linda's mini Pinky plush who's dressed in overalls and a backward hat, making him MC Pinky, yo.

Keeper sings! and a harrowing tale of bus travel (or lack thereof)

I threw in a bit of vocals and kazoo as I recorded this video during the afterglow party following the 2010 West Coast Ragtime Festival this weekend:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6XAA4Rz1vs


The song is a hit from WW1, When Alexander Takes His Ragtime Band to France.

The trip back was a nightmare. Snowing over I80. The bus driver didn't put chains on despite seeing every other vehicle stopped on the road doing so. Eventually, as traffic came to a crawl, it got to the point where the bus couldn't get traction on the ice. He just floored it, spinning the wheels. Tire smoke entered the cabin.

He sat there for 20 minutes, not telling anyone anything, until a CHP officer came up asking why he was stopped in the middle of the road (while traffic was moving along just fine around us). He told the CHP that the bus had broken down.

A big truck pushed the bus to the shoulder, then a tow vehicle towed us over the summit and into Truckee. However, the bus driver still was convinced that the bus was not working. I told him multiple times that it was fine; he just had gotten wheelspin and couldn't go uphill. Now that we were past the summit, the roads were perfectly passable and I was sure the bus could be driven again. He didn't listen.

So we sat in Truckee, in sub-freezing temperatures, for six hours. Greyhound sent a "relief bus" but not from nearby Reno -- from Sacramento. That bus couldn't make it because of an oncoming storm. Another tow driver came by after six hours and told our driver that with the big storm coming in, we needed to get the heck out of there and he should try to move the bus if at all possible.

So, finally, he tried moving the bus. What do you know! There was nothing wrong with the bus after all, just like I had said. We arrived in Reno 6.5 hours late. Because I was catching a cold, I had paid extra to transfer to an earlier bus -- one that should have arrived at 4:25 instead of my originally scheduled bus that arrived at 6:50. But this "earlier" bus arrived at 11:00 -- all due to driver incompetence.

Greyhound couldn't refund my ticket because of the fact I had done the transfer to the earlier bus, so they just wrote me a $75 gift voucher.

For people who were supposed to transfer to another bus, they were stuck in Reno with no place to stay and no more buses leaving until morning. One girl was in tears because it meant she'd still be on the bus while her family was having Thanksgiving dinner. All because of the idiot driver.

Awesome people I know...

I usually write only cartoony stuff on this blog, but I thought I'd share this from another big part of my life -- ragtime music!

A couple guys I know brought down the house with this performance of Russian Rag a few weeks ago.



Left is Tom Brier. Right is Carl Sonny Leyland.

Wakko's Two-Note Song in ragtime

Suddenly, on a whim, I thought, "By gosh, I should do a video of Wakko's Two-Note Song in ragtime!" even though I hadn't played it in 10 years or so...



Didn't have time to rehearse it much 'cause Linda had a TV show she wanted to watch in just a few minutes.

But there it is. So there.

"You remind me of a very young Randy Rogel."

...as Slappy would say.

Back in the late 1980s, I got copies of some rather famous fan-made Doctor Who films. They were famous for their use of a woman in the leading role, and their relatively high production values for fan films.

Then in 1996 as I was showing the films to a friend, I was startled by the name Randy Rogel in the credits. Turns out, yes, it was that Randy Rogel who played the companion, Carl Evans. Randy even choreographed his own song'n'dance number in the second episode.

Yet I never had seen online copies of these films, until now. Apparently, producer Ryan K. Johnson has allowed them to be included in a fan-film archive.

So enjoy some young Randy Rogel...

The Wrath of Eukor
Visions of Utomu
Broken Doors

And an additional film which was not a Doctor Who story per se, but does have the Doctor and Carl in it: Pentagon West

Then when you're done with that, check out this video I shot as I presented my transcription of the Animaniacs theme to a friend who's a phenomenal sight-reader: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcZroW6fGcA

Sorry I'm wearing pants, but...

Phew. I'm not as young as I used be.
Anyway, enjoy me doing Wakko's America on a giant map!

At last, I can show you the NARF

It's been a long time that I've wanted to show this to folks. I finally got round to doing so, in my own "special" way. Naaaaarf.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNFZXF6qDRk



I picked up the NARF way back when I worked at CompUSA. The bottom of the form says "rev 0792" which may mean July 1992, in which case it's purely a coincidence and not evidence of Pinky & The Brain fans working for CompUSA corporate.

CompUSA failed and went bankrupt rather quickly in 2006, so one might think it was just one of Brain's plans that failed horribly.

Zany to the max!

I finally sat down and wrote out a transcription of the Animaniacs theme. I had done it way back in 1994 or 1995, by ear. For this new arrangement, still by ear, I added some harmony notes to the melody, and noticed a couple of transitional chords that had been wrong in my initial transcription.

It can be downloaded here:
http://members.cruzio.com/~keeper/temp/animsolo.pdf

And I threw together a quick video of what the arrangement sounds like (I really did throw it together; if I had had time, I would have cut out a few systems at a time so the music was more readable on the screen):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wo73yhg66Ds

I've always wanted to transcribe the Freakazoid theme, but only ever got round to doing the melody. Maybe someday. Now I've got someone begging me for transcriptions of the Looney Tunes title themes.

Charismatic Cackle?

Someone called my evil laugh in the Angelina title sequence a "charismatic cackle."

I thought that was amusing.

Anyway, huzzah to Valerie for managing to get that animation featured as a "Daily Deviation" on DeviantArt. The first couple times that animation was uploaded, the folks at DeviantArt removed it, thinking it was a violation of the Terms of Use. In other words, they thought it was too good to be the work of the poster, my old friend Federica Giulietti. They thought it was a real TV show's title sequence. Well, Federica certainly dreams that one day it would be...

No digital animation or effects there. Even the backlit-shading effects were all drawn by her hand. The music is original too. I should know, because I wrote it.