When somebody gets hit in the nuts in a baseball movie, it is customary to laugh. When the plucky underdog wins in a baseball movie, it is customary to cry.

Back in my days as a Real World, Non-Movie Little League catcher, the opposite was often the case, let me tell you. Except that I very rarely won the big game, especially when I played for the plucky underdog.

Nut violence notwithstanding, it is abundantly clear that the famous Tom Hanks line from A League of Their Own is patently and deliberately false.

I just got through watching John Boorman’s 1981 film Excalibur (thank you Netflix). What a weird-ass movie. Not least because you get to see young Helen Mirren, Liam Neeson, Patrick Stewart (already bald), Gabriel Byrne, and Ciaran Hinds, most of whom were cast, according to IMDB, because Boorman wanted relative unknowns, so that people would focus on the movie instead of the actors. It probably worked well at the time, but it’s pretty hard for me to think anything other than “That’s academy-award-winner Helen Mirren wearing a sheet-metal bra! Patrick Stewart TOTALLY just hit that guy with an ax!” and so on. Video after the jump…

I know that I missed the time when it was socially relevant to talk about Crank Dat by about three months, but whatever. It’s the internet. And I think that the song deserves some digging-into. First, a little refresher course: Crank That (Soulja Boy) is a song by the Mississippi based rapper Soulja Boy Tell’em. Mind you, both the rapper (usually) and the song (occasionally) are reffered to simply as “Soulja Boy,” which kind of gets into the main thrust of my argument. Anyway, if you haven’t heard the song or seen the video, watch it, and prepare to be amazed.

If you look up Soulja Boy on wikipedia or whatever, you’ll find him listed as a rapper. And this is technically true. But I think the old-school term “MC” is far more appropriate. He’s catchy as all get-out, but you sort of want there to be a different word for what he does as opposed to what, say, Twista does. And lyrically, when you compare Soulja Boy to noted story-rapper Ghostface Killah…

I didn’t know about Eugene Mirman before he came through New Haven a couple years ago. His show alternated live bits with videos he had made. One of these, Eugene Mirman: Secret Agent, contained the memorable threat: “I’m gonna kick you so hard in the dick, you’ll cum fear.”

He now has made a parody of the blogfamous Tom Cruise Video.

Eugene Mirman: Scientologist [23/6 via Defamer]

“If you don’t want to exercise too much,” asks Dr. Morten Gronbaek, epidemiologist with Denmark’s National Institute of Public Health, “can you trade it for one to two drinks per day and be fine?” A study Gronbaek and colleagues just published in the European Heart Journal suggests the answer just may be yes.

Work Out and Drink Up [Time Magazine]

No sooner did I finish my weeklong series on Rambo than I came across this little corner of the blogosphere, and I think it, as much as anything else, helps me clarify why I bothered to do a weeklong series on Rambo.

Skynet –

Really excited to be working on the project! The Terminator line has been a tremendous success since its introduction, inspiring strong feelings of terror and hopelessness in our core demo (humans), and this new model ups the ante on all fronts. I’m a robot, and I’m scared of the thing!

First of all, kudos on having the savvy to round the model number up to 1000. Humans go nuts over powers of ten. However, I wonder if the whole “T plus a number” thing isn’t getting a little stale. Recall that the classic T-101 model became known as “Arnold” for some reason. If we don’t christen this new product something memorable, the humans will, and do you really want your $3 billion baby being called “Stabby McStabsalot?” Judgment Day wiped out a lot of things, but not the importance of branding.

Okay, let’s get into it! Here are three possible naming strategies:

This week, I’ve delved into the True Meaning of Rambo in preparation for his (brief) return from irrelevance. Today, I’ll close the series out with a quick look at two great characters Mr. Stallone originated — one has his own statue, and the other languished in condemnation for 20 years. We celebrate the one who feeds us dreams, and we condemn the one who shows us ourselves.

I’ve always appreciated the honesty of this song. Rather than the posturing and posing that characterized much of 1990s hip-hop, I always believed Daddy Mac and Mac Daddy wrote about what they knew on this track- no gangsta posturing, no “smacking bitches”, just the pure anxiety of two kids who overslept for school.

So let’s talk about the music. As you probably know, the score is by Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood (the musical equivalent of stunt casting) and it’s gotten a lot of press for that reason alone. But Greenwood has serious chops – this is one of the best scores I’ve heard in years. I’m sure it would have gotten an Oscar nomination, if the Academy hadn’t judged the score ineligible (apparently because Greenwood reused sections of a preexisting composition that he’d written for the BBC in 2004). A lot of my fellow film music nerds are pissed off about this, but I don’t particularly care… Greenwood doesn’t need the money, fame, or validation, and the score itself has received plenty of media attention already…