The Elephantine Colossus fire of 1896

So apparently there was an 150 foot tall hotel built to look like a giant elephant in Coney Island, named the "Elephantine Colossus".

The elephant burned down in 1896. Fortunately it was abandoned at the time. This resulted in the greatest news illustration I have ever seen (pictured).

It was also at one point a giant elephant shaped brothel.

(source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephantine_Colossus#Rooms_and_attractions )

Yeah, I don't really write things here anymore

Now that the Thor's Hour of Thunder podcast occurs weekly, I tend to say my pop culture musings on the air on that show, so I haven't been writing new posts for this site.

This is probably for the best, since I tended to write for this site rather quickly and not proof read, so this often ended up being a blog as much about typos, as it was about advertisements.

One note about the previous entries that have embedded audio of the Thor's podcast in them, for some reason, unknown to me, blogspot has also disabled all the embedded audio files. So, if you have any interest in listening to that just follow the link below to go to the main site for Thor's (linked below).

If you have any thoughts about past posts on this blog feel free to email HourOfThunder (at) gmail dot com since I don't check this blog regularly anymore. I mean you could still simply comment on the post itself, but it would be you shouting into the darkness. (To paraphrase that video making fun of of twitter that I very much enjoy).

Listen to the Thor's Hour of Thunder here

Podcast Episodes 132 to 150

Oh my! I neneglected to post episodes of the Thor's Hour of Thunder Podcast on here for many many many weeks.

We do not talk about the muppets in any of these episodes.

 

Topics for these many episodes include:

Star Wars, Indiana Jones, James Bond Films, Back to the Future. Horror Movies of the 70's, Horror Movies of the 90's, Horror movies of the 2000's.

Listen to all that here: 

(player starts playing the newest episode, scroll to the right for older episodes.)

Podcast Episodes 129 to 131

Thor's: Star Wars Specials 

Listen here:

Download these episodes, past episodes, and subscribe via iTunes at the official site

hourofthunder.podomatic.com

The End of Reading

I remember seeing James Patterson doing ads for his  books were he spoke directly to the camera from back when he was younger and bearded, the ads were not great, but they were dignified and made his books seem like a bit of a big event, as far as disposable fiction goes.

Whoever convinced him to put on the world's cheapest pirate costume and stand in front of the same background from my high school yearbook photo, was, shall we say... ill-advised.

I don't know which version of this ad is worse, the one of Patterson embarrassing himself, or this one of the world's worst child actor delivering the same bad puns.

Its sad seeing Patterson slum it, but at least he is able to give this terrible ad the tone it needs. This kid is way too damn sincere and excited about yelling this stupid puns at my face.

(PS I came across this ad in the form of the one with the kid, and saw it while watching an episode of the late 80's television series Murder, She Wrote on The Hallmark Channel, so I am not sure who told Hachette publishing that it was a good idea to air an ad for a book aimed at kids, which was staring a kid and clearly marketed towards kids at 1 in the morning on a channel that is only watched by people over 80 years old during the day, and is only watched by me at night, but Hachette is the same compnay who decided to stop publication of the greatest movie magazine of all time, Premiere, so none of these events are really surprising.

Podcast Episodes 126 to 128

Thor's Hour of Thunder Episodes 126 to 128:

James Bond Special

(Parts 001 to 003)

Listen with these players:

Download these and past episodes on our official site here:

hourofthunder.podomatic.com

Download our James Bond Episodes from last year here:

Thor's Classic

Superman

It has been a while since I post anything on this blog on 9/11. I don't want to harp on a national tragic on my silly website where I talk about the Budweiser frogs, so I have tended to just not post.

But I have an episode of my podcast which I published without realizing the date, so if I'm gonna put anything on this page on 9/11 it seems like I should acknowledge the date first.

As I've said on here in the past, former City Paper Editor Duane Swierczynski wrote a great piece back in 2007 about his young son trying to understand 9/11 in the context of the World Trade Center appearing in the original superman film.

Read that article here.

I will be get back to being silly in the next post.


(photo of Superman: The movie via here.)