Wallpapers of the Week: Ralph McQuarrie ‘Star Wars’ concept art

FROM JASON’S DESKTOP – My father took me when I was four to see Return of the Jedi at the drive-in. It was the first film I ever saw on the big screen; from that moment on, I was a Star Wars acolyte.

No joke. I would line up my stuffed animals on my bed and they would help me pilot the Millenium Falcon through the Death Star’s infrastructure. In my mind, epic battles were waged against storm trooper legions. A long, cardboard giftwrap tupe became my lightsaber.

Those imaginary campaigns stopped long ago, but my fascination with Star Wars backstory and its greater universe never faded. When I was about 11, I discovered a large picture book filled with artistic renderings that looked almost — but not quite — like Star Wars. There were hairy monsters that looked almost like Wookies, and a hulking figure in black that looked more like a robot ninja than Darth Vader.

These were the drawings of Ralph McQuarrie, commissioned to envision the worlds and characters and atmosphere from Geoge Lucas’ mind before they could be transported to film.

There’s something incredibly attractive about that process, watching idealized pulp imaginings change as prop, costume, and set designers wrestle to make them solid and practicable.

So I was very excited the other day when I came on a cache of these McQuarrie pieces in a larger format. I quickly resized them, tinkered with the contrast and brightness ratios to offset some fading and dullness, and ran them through a quick crosshatch filter to make the lines a little bolder and modern.

The results make, I think, for some great desktop wallpapers for Star Wars geeks like me. Enjoy. Click any of the images for a 1024×768 version.

New obsessesion: Flight of the Conchords

FROM JASON’S YOUTUBE – The obsession has lasted three days already.

Good laughs are hard to find these days; once you get past the miserable sea of fart and sex jokes out there, there’s not much left. My single criterion for all sitcoms and comedy acts: They have to be damned clever.

That’s why snarky, off-beat shows like Arrested Development and 30 Rock caught my attention, and recently I’ve noticed the same low-fi buzz that surrounded both has encompassed a new act — The Flight of the Conchords. After hearing the show’s title bandied around all the right circles, I decided Tuesday to check out New Zealand’s fourth most popular folk/comedy duo, and I still can’t rip my eyes and ears away from their nerdy pun-and-run musical humor.

The first vid I pulled up on the ol’ YouTube was titled “Mermaids,” and I had no bloody god-damned clue what to make of it. It was a strange dorky brew of uncool nightclub cliches, ukulele, and groan-worthy wordplay. But it all came across as gut-wrenchingly funny:

I had to have more, and the next vid I loaded up was the clincher. After seeing this double punch of philosophically-confused robots and a binary solo, I was a Conchord groupy.

Look no further for proof that comic timing is just as important as any other part of the joke. I mean, “Come on, sucker, lick my battery” wouldn’t have had nearly the same punch except that it was slipped in at just the right time before Bret launched into the Robot Boogie.

Octave-switching can also be especially funny, especially when combined with completely uncomfortable lyrics like:

Well sometimes It gets lonely and I need a woman,
And then I imagine you with some bosoms.
In fact, one time when we were touring
And I was feeling really lonely,
And we were sharing that twin room in the hotel,
I put a wig on you while you were sleeping,
I put a wig on you.
And I just lay there and spooned you.

Yeah, bro-mance is funny.

Of course you don’t even need words if you can summon the pure visual power of a 1980s angry Kevin Bacon musical movie montage, like Bret did. Seriously — who picks Footloose as a target for parody these days?

These hilarious kiwis have translated their stage show into an HBO sitcom, which just launched its second season last month. Now, I really don’t care to order up any premium cable channels, but I am ready topay for the two-disc seasone one set of Flight of the Conchords, which can be found on Amazon.com for just $20 and change.

Oh, and if you are reading this, HBO execs, look how great an advertising avenue YouTube is for your product. You’ll be getting money for me because some “pirate” posted your intellectual property for free.

Word-a-day anger in the American Midwest

FROM JASON’S LACK OF IGNORANCE – I am going to rant a little bit about people who are willfully stupid.

A co-worker of mine has been trying to expand his vocabulary by having a word-of-the-day sent straight to his phone, and I give him kudos for the attempt at self-improvement. A couple of weeks ago, though, he decided to see whether I  could define “ossuary” (a repository for skeletal remains), and I could not comprehend why he became so angry when I tossed out the answer in an off-handed way without much thought.

He’s brought me a new word each day since, hoping to stump me and getting more irate each time I give the correct definition. It was not the reaction I expected. Competitive, maybe… but actually furious?

I tried to head off his growing head of steam today after nailing “mimetics,” explaining for the fifth time that I’ve got a BA in English. After all, I’m still paying down on the $68,000 I paid to learn those words, I told him.

It didn’t calm him down.

His attitude is frightening. This is a guy — an adult — who finds affront at the very knowledge he is seeking to gain. I could not grasp his outrage that I would simply hold a piece of information.

I tried soothing him by explaining how I pick apart the roots of the word to discover how the word works, first stripping away prefixes and suffixes and then thinking about the (usually) Latin or Greek at the heart. That didn’t work.

I tried to water it down by telling him that “mimetics” is really close to “mime” and “mimeograph.” That didn’t work either.

This is a man who never seized on the idea that you could actually apply the information Mr. Harrigan taught in seventh-grade English, or that anyone could have enjoyed doing so. He refuses to believe anyone would pay attention all those years ago, or care to keep all that “useless book learnin’” locked away and ready to access.

He cannot see the attractiveness of routinely flipping to the Discovery Channel for a quick documentary on the pyramids at Giza or how coral reefs form, or that such a thing to me is as fun as a beer and a football game.

This is a man for whom learning is torture, something to be avoided unless it comes in the near-painless dose of a text message once a day. I just don’t understand that mindset — anything more is unacceptable. I tried imagining what it would be like to be incurious, and I was horrified.

This is the blatant and god-fearing anti-intellectualism of the American Midwest. People here aren’t afraid of the unknown; they embrace it. They’ve been taught that mysticism is good, that their lord is in heaven and in control, and I’ve observed that that kind of spiritual dependence extinguishes the burning need to know more.

These are people afraid to speak precisely for the fear of being labeled “gay.” They avoid interest for fear of being “nerdy.” They refuse to exercise their minds so their friends don’t see them as “stuck up.”

This is why Paul Blart: Mall Cop is number one in the box office. It is why I weep for the future and pit myself so defiantly against the trusting apathy of theism. It is why I am forming a habit of buying neat books I hope will hook the children my wife and I will someday have.

My mother had a very limited education, but she made a decision early to make sure I had easy access to books about outer space, life under the oceans’ surface, and the peoples of far-away lands. It worked. There but for the grace of Mom go I.

Wallpaper of the Week: Megatron and Optimus Prime

FROM JASON’S WALLPAPER FOLDER – I was fiddling around again with video editing and decided to show you my desktop, which is cubed out with Yod’m 3D, a French-language virtual desktop app that gives you four separate work spaces.

Linux users already have this functionality, and I don’t understand why Microsoft hasn’t done more to make it Windows-native; the ability to place different apps on different desks is tremendously useful, especially when working on large projects on a small, single monitor (I’m still in the dark ages with a 4:3 15-inch).

Anyway, two of the walls in the video above have already been wallpaper of the week, and I decided to post the third here as I am on a bit of a Transformers kick after watching the 1986 animated movie again (it looks amazing on the 42-inch plasma in my living room).

Like any boy raised in the 80s, my allegiance will always be to Generation 1. When Rodimus Prime stepped in, I largely stopped watching the cartoon, so I’m not sure if the tanked-out versions of Megatron and Optimus Prime below are cannon. Honestly, I’ve thought more than once about getting into the Transformers comic books, if only economics allowed. I hear they’re much darker than anything else in the franchise.