A New Beginning!

Hi all! This is Ben!!! It has been an incredibly long time...sorry!

First announcement! School is going good, kyle and I are both pretty busy with homework, but we manage and have had some pretty sweet hang out time with friends already. On our first weekend we did so much I can't even remember it all. Friday we started out just kinda hanging out and we ended up going to the tree house at night after a doughnut run and we jammed up there with our friends for a good 2-3 hours...it was a blast.

Saturday morning all of our guy friends made breakfast in the kitchens for the girls. It was a blast, we were rocking out to awesome music the whole time once again!

Basketball....eh, not fun right now, lots of conditioning.

Basically, right now we are back in the swing of things at school, and just having fun hanging out with our friends from Dordt again!

                                             the Swing thing

Oh, and I made GIFT! Which is our Sunday night service on campus, I am extremely stoked, I wasn't expecting that at all! God is Good! All the TIME!!!

Well have a good week!

Ben

TV to See: Chuck - "Chuck Vs. The Cliffhanger"

Watch this. It's got everything you could want: action, drama, romance, humor, and of course a cliffhanger.

TV to See: Community - "Paradigms of Human Memory"

Now I (Kyle) know what you're thinking. First of all, there hasn't been a blog in a while. My bad. Secondly, when there finally is a blog, I'm apparently just blogging about the same thing that Ben did. Now let me set the record straight. If Ben hadn't blogged about Community, I still would have done this blog. This is completely independent of his. I'm focusing on a specific episode, because when I see a really good episode of television, I want to blog about it. That's just the way I am.

So, thanks to Ben, I don't really need to explain this show. He already did that. Personally, I think Community is the funniest show on television right now (that I know of) and they are at the top of their game creatively. The show has become extremely good at doing parodies focusing on genres of movies and TV, while still maintaining character development and hilarious jokes, and this episode is no different.



For this episode, Community tackled what is an old sitcom standby: the clip show. Whenever a sitcom has built up quite a bit of material, sometimes the writers will just take a break for an episode and make a clip show: an episode which features various clips from previous episodes. That way the writers don't really need to come up with new material. Unfortunately, an example of this would be The Office, which resorted to a clip show last season. Shows will usually do this when they are a bit later in their lifespan, but Community is only in it's second season. And one other thing: all of the clips from the clip show in this episode were completely new, but played off like it was things we had seen before.

The episode showed us "flashbacks" of the group in ridiculous situations, like a western ghost town, a mental asylum, and various other locales. There were even scenes from previous episodes, but from the perspectives of others that we didn't see before. It also included jokes making fun of Glee, the NBC show The Cape, and jokes about people who make "fan videos" about the show on Youtube. But the best part of the episode is that it wasn't only hilarious, but it tied everything together and had some great character development as well. We got to see back stories for characters that will probably have implications for future episodes.

One of the many supposed "flashbacks".

Overall, I can't recommend this show enough. What makes it so great is how self-aware it is. If there is something that you could criticize about the show, then the first people to criticize it will be the show itself. It's smartly written, and always hilarious, and sometimes just plain awesome. If Ben's endorsment wasn't enough, hopefully this will convince you to check it out for yourself.

Community

Hola, it's BEN!

So, first off, Im going to tell you all about my day...it was really busy and really awesome. I am going to describe it using 5 words/phrases.

Class
Chapel
Ultimate Frisbee Win
Praise Team Practice
Watching Community

What I want to focus the blog on is the watching Community! Over the last couple months I have been watching this show and it has honestly become my favorite show. The characters are really funny and the plot of the episodes are always superb! The show is about a layer, Jeff, who recently lost his job because he was caught having no degree in law. He, Jeff, is now attended Greendale College, a community college and becomes friends with a group of friends referred to as the study group. All of the episodes focus around the members of the study group--which is very diverse and makes the show really funny. They have every type of person in this group both racially and characteristically--which makes the show that much more humerus. While watching the show I make the connection that the sense of humor is very similar to our groups sense of humor. Many of the jokes they use in this show I could see us using in a movie that we make as friends--which is why the show is so enjoyable for me. If you have never seen this show...I strongly recommend it, it is glorious in every aspect!

Here's a link to a funny clip from one of the episodes...



tootles,

Ben

So It's Come to This...

Alright, we haven't blogged in a long time, I'm sorry, blah blah blah, alright, enough. Now that we've got that out of the way we can get to the meat of this blog post.

 

There it is. Now onto the topic of this blog post. I (Kyle) am sure you have heard of this "song" called Friday by a 13 year old girl named Rebecca Black. Wait! I know, I know, I'm feeding the fire. But I thought it appropriate to weigh in on it with my opinion, since it seems to be everywhere.

I'm with her on that one.

So, I'm not going to post the video of the song because either you've heard it, or you should continue to live your life as you have been and you will hear it eventually. So anyway, here's my opinion:

The song is terrible. Yes, I think it's probably the worst song that has ever been this popular. But here's the thing that some people don't understand: the fact that it's so bad is the reason it is popular! There are people that seem to think that this song is everywhere because people think it's a good song. Now, I'm sure somewhere out there you could find someone that actually thinks it's a good song, but they would be in the minority.

This is the "So Bad It's Good" idea, and it's been around forever. Friday didn't invent this, it's just following in the footsteps of many other classic "So Bad It's Good" movies, music, television, and even video games. Here are some famous examples:

Troll 2: You probably haven't seen this movie (and neither have I) but you may have seen the most ridiculous clip from it. Just look it up on Youtube and you'll know what I'm talking about.

The 1966 Batman TV Show: Thanks Adam West.

American Idol (She Bangs, You Are My Brother, Pants on the Ground): This show is ripe with "So Bad It's Good" songs, performed by various people that have gotten famous for their terribleness.

"So Bad It's Good" has been around for a while.

That's it. Yeah, I kinda got lazy. There are a lot more, just look it up. So what I'm really trying to say is, stop complaining about Friday and how bad it is. We know. That's why we like it. If you honestly can't stand it, just be patient. It will go away in a couple of weeks, and then she'll release another song, trying to catch the same lightning in the same bottle, but she will most likely fail. Her 15 minutes of fame will be up. And in 30 years or so, we can all watch the video and laugh about it again. The End.

No surprise here. I'm pretty sure every song ever made has ripped off The Beatles in some way or another.

Back To My "Home"

Hello all, it's Ben, first of all, sorry it has been so long since kyle or I have blogged, it was busy right before break, and it will be busy now until the end of the year, so I apologize in advance if there are multiple days before posts. We will try our best to post as much as we can!

First, WE'RE BACK! To me, Dordt is becoming a second home. I love michigan, and everything about it. But there is just something about being here at Dordt that makes me feel like I'm at home as well.

There is one new thing that I have started. To Kyle's disliking, I have decided to learn guitar and I brought my acoustic guitar back to me at Dordt. I have played quite a bit now, for the last two weeks, and improvement is coming, but there is still much that I need to improve.

                            A Taylor Guitar, wish I had one of those!

Today, I didn't have any classes till 11 am because my first class was cancelled!!! I love it when that happens. The only downside of this is that I have to write a 20 page paper within the next 3 weeks for that class. YAY for PAPERS!!

The Bulls play tonight! Hopefully they can take the lead of the Eastern Conference again!

My bracket isn't looking good for March Madness, the only good thing going for it right now is I still have my final two teams--Uconn and Kansas, with Uconn winning the whole thing. Kemba Walker is by far the one of the best player in the NCAA in my opinion, which is why they have a shot, they've got a real tough road ahead of them though with SDSU and potentially Duke and Ohio St.

That is all for now! Have a great week!

May Christ be with you!

Ben

This is Kyle. Who else would be blogging about the Academy Awards? Ben? Pshaw.

Anyhoo, as many of you know, tonight was The 83rd Academy Awards! So I want to talk about some of the winners and what I think about them. Two things: I haven't really seen a lot of these films, so it's going to limit my commentary a bit. Secondly, that was it, I don't really have a second thing.

Let's get the big one out of the way. Best picture went to The Kings Speech, which also happened to win best actor for Colin Firth, best directing for Tom Hooper, and best original screenplay. So I should probably see this movie. As far as the best picture goes I know that The Social Network was a big contender, and I have seen that...so I'm cool. Also, it shouldn't win, and it would never win but how cool would it be if Toy Story 3 won best picture? That would be so awesome.

...has a sequel won Best Picture.

It did win, however, best animated film. No surprise there. Everyone should check out the other nominee How to Train Your Dragon too. It's surprisingly good for a Dreamworks animation movie, and I didn't mean that to sound like Dreamworks sucks, but they certainly not Pixar. (Dreamworks kinda sucks sometimes.) Toy Story 3 also took an award for Randy Newman's "We Belong Together" for best original song, but we can just pretend it was for "You Got a Friend in Me" since that was nominated in '95, but lost to "Colors of the Wind" from Pocahontas. Really?

Inception took away all of the awards it should have with best cinematography, best sound editing, best sound mixing, and best visual effects. It could have taken best original screenplay too, because seriously: Inception is way more original than The King's Speech, which is kinda based on, well, actual real events.

And I'm pretty sure this wasn't.

And the Social Network takes best editing (which I will admit that I have no idea why), best original score (done by Trent Reznor of the band Nine Inch Nails), and best adapted screenplay written by Aaron Sorkin. Could have gotten more in my opinion, but not bad. The screenplay was very very good.

Well, that be all my friends. There were plenty of other awards, but I don't have the time or patience to talk about all of them, and I bet you don't either. So I shall say farewell, and leave you with this: