July 29th, 2008, 1 Comment »
Apparently there’s a new phrase in town for TV shows and movies that have crossed the event horizon of just plain silly:
In recent weeks, a similarly ridiculous episode — in this case from the movie “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” — has produced a similar term, “nuked the fridge,” that is gaining traction online. A Google search comes up with 64,000 hits.
In “Indiana Jones,” the hero’s improbable achievement was to survive a nuclear blast by hiding in a refrigerator. Hence, “to nuke the fridge” means to introduce a wildly implausible element to a once-respected franchise, or more generally, to signal the abandonment of past standards of quality.
There are already battling websites: Nuked the Fridge and Nuking the Fridge. Two will enter, one will leave.
I’m not sure we really needed a new phrase, but what the heck? ‘Nuked the fridge’ is a suitable replacement, as it seems even more improbably and ridiculous than ‘jumped the shark’.
1 Comment »
December 26th, 2007, 9 Comments »
Everybody likes to make year-end lists. Here, for example, is a big schwack of lists organized by category. I was trying to think of a good topic for a top ten list, and this is the best I could come up with:
- Top ten Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals cited in my Twitter feed.
- Top ten titles for Mother Spears’s disappointingly-on-hold parenting book.
- Top ten photographs of my navel lint.
- Top ten matching outfits belonging to Argot, my level 48 Undead Priest in World of Warcraft.
- Top ten dodgy, kooky and illegal products I declined to market this year.
- Top ten Mediterranean beasts that bit or stung me over the past eight months.
- Top ten books I intended to read in Malta, but am now hauling to Morocco.
- Top ten books I didn’t write because I’m, you know, lazy.
- Top ten 2008 technology predictions, because I’m crap at them and everybody else does them anyway.
- Top ten top ten lists of top ten lists. Is that yak shaving or turtles all the way down?
For an actual list, I’ve been bookmarking all the movies that I missed this year.
9 Comments »
