Heck Of A Guy

One of my buddies, Hippie With Tiara, is convalescing this weekend from being de-tonsilled.¹ HWT, disguised as mild-mannered Mrs. Science, nurtured not only Mr. Science² but also the Duke of Derm, me, and other of the Lost Boys during the first year of medical school, providing laughter, excellent tacos, a ready ear that was always available to us,³ and an incredible tolerance for medical school war stories and our (continuing) predilection for interjecting into conversations, typically without discernable provocation, exclamations culled from watching professional wrestling.⁴

So, as a token of appreciation and affection, this weekend edition of the Heck Of A Guy blog offers three web gizmos, selected for HWT’s amusement and diversion. Generous spirit that she is, however, I am sure she won’t mind sharing her toys.

Line Rider

Line Rider is especially addictive. (Remember the first time you were able to successfully play with a yo-yo? And then wouldn’t let go of it for three days? It’s like that.)

It’s simple: draw a line from left to right that slopes downward and that figure on the sled will slide down it. The full instructions are about three lines longer than that.

Take care, Line Rider can fall off the sled or tumble downward in a bottomless abyss if that’s the way the line(s) are drawn (intentionally or unintentionally). But, if the line-drawer is a way cool sort of dude, Line Rider can perform jumps and land successfully. That would look, oh, something like this:

To Ride The Line, slide over to
Line Rider

Mr Picasso Head

Hippie With Tiara is of the artsy-fartsy persuasion so Mr Picasso Head seems an appropriate selection. It’s Mr Potato Head morphed into Picasso-esque representations on a cyber-canvas, inspiring one to produce works of art such as this suitable for framing masterpiece:

Hey, give me a break. At least my Line Rider guy can do jumps. (Besides, look at the stylized signature. Heck, if Mr Picasso Head did nothing but produce those slick autographs, it would still be worth a recommendation.)

To explore your inner artist, go to
Mr Picasso Head

Movie Mappr

You take your Google Map thing and you smush it into your movie database thing and you get a thing that shows you where a movie was shot.⁵

If one plugs in “Kansas City, MO,” a randomly chosen city that happens to the home of HWT, this map is generated:

as is this movie listing:⁶

While the site’s aesthetics are a tad crude, the database is rich. One can also search by movie name to find the location, enabling one and all to learn, for example, that “Ground Hog Day” was filmed in Woodstock, IL, within five miles of Heck Of A House. Clicking on the red placeholders gives the name(s) of the movie(s) shot at that specific location. Entering “Risky Business” generates four locations, Chicago (city scenes), Niles East High School (school scenes), Highland Park (home scenes), and the Drake Hotel (duh). Clicking on the Highland Park marker then reveals that the North Shore bastion of suburbanhood was also the shooting site for Prelude To A Kiss, The Color Of Money, Sixteen Candles, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Ordinary People, Uncle Buck, Home Alone, Weird Science, and The Ice Harvest. Clicking on the movie titles also produces the year of production, the stars, and the opportunity to buy the movie at Amazon.

Since Mr. Science was an anthropology major, I’ll leave it to him to draw conclusions about the psychosocial implications of the kinds of movies made in a given area. The types of movies made in Highland Park, for example, don’t seem to have much overlap with those made in the Kansas City area (e.g., In Cold Blood, DysFunktional Family, Sometimes They Come Back, and, my personal favorite, Zombiegedddon).

Map your movie locations at
Movie Mappr

Footnotes

1. Which evidences my wisdom in choosing the pseudonym, “Hippie With Tiara,” over the contender, “Hippie With Tonsils.”↩
2. As part of his participation in the federal Witness Protection Program, “Mr. Science” has been rechristened “Lord Of Leisure”↩
3. Hippie With Tiara’s ready ear was attached to a sexy body that was admired conceptually by us but was otherwise available only to Mr. Science↩
4. I suspect that if one were to perform a statistical analysis of the frequency of occurrence in conversations of, for example, the phrase, “He’s biting his eye,” our group would be found in the 99th percentile.↩
5. Apparently, in the smushing, the “e” in “Mapper” is vaporized.↩
6. In Movie Mappr itself, the map and the listings are displayed side by side. I’ve separated them here for easier viewing. Also, the listing page is truncated in two dimensions here; there are several move movies listed that one views by using the vertical scroll bar and some of the longer movie names are seen only by using a horizontal scroll bar.↩