Top Hat Sasquatch

Joan Medford is desperate.  At only 21-years old, and a newly-widowed woman with a young son to raise in 1960s America, she doesn’t have a lot of options.  So Joan leaves the toddler to stay with her wealthy, scheming, barren sister-in-law, while she gets back on her feet.  This means taking a job as a cocktail waitress in a restaurant down the street.  She accepts the job’s shortcomings – the skimpy attire, the seedy customers, and the ugly underbelly of what some girls do to make a living – because she needs the money.  Luckily, she has the assets – a quick tongue, a nice figure, and enough moral flexibility – to bring home the bacon.  Before long she’s back on her feet and doing better than ever; definitely better than when her deadbeat, drunken husband was still alive.  Now if only she could get these pesky detectives off her case, who refuse to let the odd circumstances of the accidental death of Mr. Medford go with him to the grave.

At the bar, Joan attracts the attention of two men: the older, richer, sickly Earl White III, and the younger, poorer, slicker Tom Barclay.  While White gives her everything a woman needs, Barclay gives her everything a woman wants.  Torn between the two men and the two sides of herself, Joan must decide which is more important.  Unless she can find a way to have her cake and eat it too, of course.

The Cocktail Waitress is the last book of James M. Cain, author of classic noir novels such as Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce, and The Postman Always Rings Twice, among many others.  Although he was at his peak in the 1930s and 40s, Cain continued to have new books published up until and even after his death in 1977.  However, The Cocktail Waitress is a special case, in that it was an unfinished manuscript that lay around in various stages of completion, until editor Charles Ardai, a mystery writer with an impressive bibliography of his own, brought the pieces together and tried to mold them into a cohesive story.  And I’d say he succeeds.
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NC Winters is a California-based artist and he just released this awesome set of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle prints that are available for sale over at his website. I love having a lot of variation in style in my geek art collection, and NC’s prints would look great next to a lot of other TMNT geek art I’ve posted over the years.

He’s only selling 20 of each, so if you want to snag one you’ll have to keep an eye on his store. You can pick up Raphael, Donatello, Michaelangelo, and Leonardo for $40 a piece, or $100 if you’d like it mounted to a birch panel and resined.

I’m going to need to get a bigger office, I’m running out of wall space!

Hey Disney, want to bring back the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers and make them cool again? Hire Mike McCraw to turn his short, animated concepts into a new cartoon series and call me when they’re done.

Mike has animated the Black, Blue, and Pink Rangers so far and each one is full of action and pretty awesome. Next I’d love to see him tackle animated a huge Megazord doing battle with some over-the-top monster character.

Check out the other two after the jump.
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I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve never quite gotten into Animé. I consider myself less of a geek for not knowing all that much about this important niche of our culture. This new Star Wars-themed video may change all that.

First of all, it’s Star Wars so I’m instantly hooked. But there’s also the addition of some killer tunes by band Sleigh Bells. According to YouTube uploader SuperMulciber it was originally posted by a user named Otaking77077. He just added the soundtrack because “it went well together.” It certainly does. Many of the scenes seem to be perfectly choreographed to the music.

According to the folks at /Film, the animation was done by Paul Michael Johnson under that Otaking77077 pseudonym. Apparently it’s just a tease of more to come from Johnson. I certainly cannot wait for more.

Well that was unexpected. Leave it to Chris Hardwick to organize the return of Fraggle Rock and Ben Folds Five in a new music video for the song “Do it Anyway.” There hasn’t been any new Fraggle-related stuff in years, but this is pretty awesome. Check it out and you’ll see Rob Corddry and Anna Kendrick in there, as well as Hardwick, all jamming along with Gobo, Mokey, Red, Wembley, Boober, and Traveling Matt.