Good reads, bad radio

I've been out of action lately while tending to a pregnant wife and a kitchen in disrepair, but I'm back in the lineup beginning this week. While I've been behind in my writing, I've kept up in my reading, and have these gems to pass along:

-- Good gracious, have you seen what Chris Stangl is up to now? Chris presents The Ballad of the Hermeneutic Circle: An Essay on the State of Film Blogging, 2007 -- it's a richly illustrated comic starring the author and many key film issues of the year. The 15-page adventure comes at you in one page installments. Wow!

-- Alan at Burbanked has never been one to be confined by traditional blogging, but now he's really broken out of his template. Again re-working his site, Burbanked now takes advantage of every line of HTML to give you an overflowing page of info and humor. My Action Figure Mood Indicator is set at Stunned.

-- If you're not caught up with Thom Ryan's ambitious Film of the Year, don't ask for sympathy -- just head over there and read his 1941 entry for Citizen Kane. And if anyone over there gives you trouble, "have your man call him ... an anarchist!"

-- Joseph B. has some good picks for movies that freaked you out as a child. Joseph tipped me off that one of my freaky movies of old, The Peanut Butter Solution, is available to watch in its entirety on Google Video. I was able to watch it for the first time in maybe 20 years, and will have my thoughts on the matter up here later this week.

-- Stacie Ponder concluded her week-long look at the best of Amicus horror, with her take on Vault of Horror. As usual, there's no shortage of scary/funny screen grabs.

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Finally, I have some original horror to share with you. The following is a 100% factual transcript from a local radio station after they posed the question "can you name three Martin Scorsese films to win a $10 lottery ticket?" (All callers were 20-something males):

Caller 1: Ummmm, no.
Caller 2: Martin who?
Caller 3: No, sorry.
Caller 4: Let's see, The Departed, The Aviator ... what was that gangs film he made -- Teams of New York?
Caller 5: (sounding confident) The Departed, The Aviator, and ... I want to say, The Godfather?

By this point I was practically kicking in my radio while trying to navigate traffic. The sixth caller finally got it right, after which one of the DJs confessed he couldn't even name one of Scorsese's movies: "Didn't he direct Dog's Day Out?" he said, presumably referring to Dog's Day Afternoon.

Like I said, horror. The horror.