Sunday Brunch: "Heart's Desire" and building bike trails

Yesterday morning, I had the distinct pleasure of learning about and helping to create new mountain bike trails. I'm still a relative newbie when it comes to mtb, but you could say that I'm already hooked and the more I can learn about what goes into the sport, the better. It was a perfect morning for it, too, with warm temperatures and a good breeze to help keep the insects away as we worked in the middle of a fairly dense forest.

Amazingly, with the help of a few pros, the group of about ten of us managed to carve out around 100 yards of completely new trail in the span of an hour and a half. We worked with three main tools: pulaskis, McLeods and cutters. It helped that there had been rain a couple days before, as the ground was nice and soft without being too soggy.

It was good to get out and work like that, and to learn something new and relatively useful. I'm hoping to get out more in the future, both to ride and to build/maintain.

But, on with brunch! Today's offering comes courtesy of my good friends over at Blame Society Productions (the folks who brought you "Chad Vader" and other such gems). A parody of hair-rock ballads that is both horrifying and strangely compelling, this is the music video for a song by the character Rocker Jimmy Samson, from their "Morning Radio Mysteries" series of shorts. Enjoy!

We Got Film

The Capital Times has a piece about NFL player Chad Johnson filming a potential Super Bowl ad in Middleton on Tuesday. Which is, y'know, pretty neat.

"ProVideo, a Madison-based video production firm, makes commercials for GoDaddy.com, a Web site domain registration company, and was in charge of the Middleton shoot."

(side note: I wonder if this one will include scantily clad women growing more scantily clad as the ad progresses. Does Middleton's new status as the "#1 town in the US" mean they disallow sexual innuendo on their high school football field? Because that would be a shame.)

Now that we've finally gotten around to passing legislation to create funding and incentives for film companies to come to Wisconsin, this sort of thing is likely to start happening a bit more often (though a lot of the action so far seems to be in Milwaukee, which is too bad).

There are a number of independent movies recently filmed in the area and now looking for distribution and/or making the festival rounds, most notably "Madison," starring long-time American Players Theatre favorite James DeVita. For the super-independent fare, you can turn to internet superstars Blame Society Productions, who brought you the "Chad Vader" series. Hilarious horror more your style? Check out "Zombie Hero" from Digital Mad Videos or, and I'm a little biased here for being involved in the production but I swear it's completely awesome, "Massacre! The Musical" from Graveside Productions. No attention span? There's always Wis-Kino, the scrappy film making group open to anyone with a camera and a dream.

Before I leave you with the current "Massacre" trailer, I'll just sum this all up by saying that damn, this state sure has a lot of talent floating around, waiting for the harsh light of the national spotlight to fall upon its pasty features. I can't name all of the projects here, but you get my point. The coasts have their benefits, but seriously, stop hogging all the attention, eh?