A few weeks ago, in co-operation with the Canadian Authorities, I was granted a supervised conference call with The Trailer Park Boys: Ricki, Julian and Bubbles. The call’s purpose was to discuss and promote their upcoming “Ricky, Julian and Bubbles’ Community Service Variety Show” gig Wednesday, May 9th at 7:30pm at the Keswick Theatre.

Due to phone visitation guidelines I had keep it brief, but it was great to hear what the boys were up to in Sunnyvale Trailer Park and they even dropped some news about possibly more Trailer Park Boys shows in the future.

A bit of warning this interview much like the boys is not for the easily offended, if you have seen the show you know what I mean. Tickets for the show are still available and can be picked up here.

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Welcome to this week’s Geek of the Week, where we highlight the fun and creative people of our city. This week, we’ve interviewed the amazing Hawk Krall – a very talented illustrator, food lover and writer.

So, Hawk. What’s your backstory, are you a native Philadelphian?

I grew up outside the city in Jenkintown and came to the city pretty often. Went to college in Brooklyn (Pratt) and lived there for a few years before moving back to Philly in 2001.

What’s your favorite part about the food scene in Philly?

When I first moved here, whether it was running good comics in the alt weeklies or putting sweetbreads on a restaurant menu, there was this idea with everything that “Philly’s not ready for that.. this isn’t New York..” but now it’s like the land of golden opportunity. So many of the people I’ve worked with over the last 10 years both art and food wise are opening their own restaurants and businesses and it’s just amazing to watch.

You’re a great illustrator. Do you have a background in art? How long have you been drawing food?

My parents are both artists so I was trained from birth, went to art school and have been illustrating for over ten years, at first mostly comics and humorous editorial illustration. I was working as a line cook and doing illustrations at night, and realized that combining the two would probably give me a better chance at making a real career out of it. (more…)

The folks over at SEOMoz will be hosting a (now fully booked) free event at the SEER Interactive “Search Church” on Thursday, May 10th. SEOMoz CEO Rand Fishkin and Wil Reynolds, Founder of SEER Interactive, will be leading the event which includes presentations by the local web marketing community of Philadelphia.

Earlier this month, SEOMoz announced the full speaker agenda after potential participants were invited to submit presentation pitches for review. The speaker lineup will feature several eight minute presentations by a selection of Philadelphia web marketers.

Topics will include link building, content strategy and web scraping amongst others. The speaker and presentation topics are as follows: (more…)

Dark Shadows is the newest film by Hot Topic auteur Tim Burton, starring his ever-present whipping boy Johnny Depp. This time the source material is the beloved gothic soap opera that featured the likes of zombies, werewolves, witches, warlocks and even time-travel.

Dark Shadows ran for 1,225 episodes and really didn’t hit its stride till about a year into its run when it introduced the vampire Barnabas Collins and a cult classic was born. There was already a film adaptation of the show made back in 1970 titled House of Dark Shadows, which featured most of the original television cast and was more of a stand alone condensed version of the Barnabas storyline.

Now Tim Burton is giving us his interpretation of the series. While I am looking forward to it, I am definitely cautiously optimistic.

We have 25 passes for 2 to a screening Monday, May 7^th at the Ritz East, want a chance to win? Simply comment with your favorite Johnny Depp film by May 4^th and 25 folks will be picked at random. Passes will go out digitally that Sunday, in the meantime check out the trailer below!

No cameras, camera phones, or other recording devices permitted in screening. Seating is on a first come, first serve basis. Theatre capacity is limited and passes won do not guarantee seating. (So please show up early!) Theater is not responsible for overbooking. Ticket holder and guest must enter theater together.

Our Masters of the Universe screening is coming up this Friday, May 4^th at The Troc and when it came to putting together another event, one thing I really wanted was a really rad poster.

I know a lot of people really liked the one we did for Scott Pilgrim and as a poster collector I wanted the kind of poster I would put on my wall for the event. I contacted local Philly artist Haunt Love, who does the posters for Exhumed Films. He was more than happy to help out.

Here is a time lapse of the process of creating the poster. I think its a great look into how these things are made. The posters were a very limited run so if you want to snag one, the best advice I can give is show up in costume at the event.  So enjoy the video and see you at the event!

This Friday, the Please Touch Museum is throwing an epic celebration of all-that-is Star Wars. After all, it is May 4th.

The museum is encouraging families to swing by the museum dresses as their favorite Star Wars characters, and enjoy tons of Star Wars themed activities through out the day. This includes:

•  “Padawan Academy” themed story times with favorite Star Wars heroes
•  A Far Far Out Dance Party in Hamilton Hall
•  Star Wars characters from Pennsylvania’s 501st Garrison Carida, as well as the Mav oya’la Clan of the Mandalorian Mercs Costuming Clubs will be making appearances for photos
•  Special End of the Day Imperial March lead by Star Wars villains

For more details on the special Star Wars day and for information on the museum, visit their official website. May the 4th be with you!

Please Touch Museum
4231 Avenue of the Republic (19131)
www.pleasetouchmuseum.org

It’s 2012. Penn Museum is celebrating the imminent end of the world by building sand castles.

Before giving away all your worldly goods and drinking strychnine-laced Kool-Aid, though, we recommend you check out the upcoming premiere of Penn Museum’s Maya 2012: The Lords of Time, an exhibition that will commence with the construction outside of 30th Street Station of a 25-ton recreation of famed Mayan monument Altar Q, located in present-day Honduras.

The sculpture will be made of sand, the only medium truly worthy of the enterprise—because it can crumble like your hopes and dreams before the onslaught of the apocalypse!

Artists Greg and Bandi Glenn are starting work on the sculpture today and aim to finish it by May 5, just in time for the public opening of the May 2012 exhibition. On May 3 at 5pm, visitors to the sculpture can meet a host of Penn and Honduran officials, including the Ambassador of Honduras, Jorge Ramon Hernández-Alcerro, Dr. Richard Hodges, Penn Museum Director; Loa Traxler, Curator of MAYA 2012; and the artists themselves, Greg and Brandi Glenn.

Visitors may not stomp on the sculpture, as it could precipitate the end of the world far ahead of schedule. Respect the sculpture, folks; no one has ever trifled with Mayan eschatology using sand before.

The original Altar Q was carved in 776 AD and depicts the kings of Copan, the site at which the monument is located, as the Mayan “Lords of Time.” The exhibition explores the rise and fall of Copan and Mayan concepts of time and the calendar.

Visitors can see artifacts recently excavated from the site and hear modern Mayan concerns for the future… if there is one.

Learn more about the exhibit at the Penn Museum’s official website.

Offices are places of work. They’re usually set up for practicality and function. They’re full of cubicles, fluorescent lights, and water coolers. The offices of an eCommerce vendor would seem to follow in that tradition, but WebLinc is no ordinary company. Based in Old City, the company has two offices on 3rd street both with interesting features that would bring out the inner geek of any jaded office worker.

Darren Hill was kind enough to show me around WebLinc’s offices. It turns out tailoring eCommerce solutions for clients is easier when there’s a ready supply of caffeinated beverages, arcade games, and Nerf guns. It doesn’t hurt being above National Mechanics either.

The office space above National Mechanics is devoted to WebLinc’s developers. Developers are programming geeks. These are the guys who write the back end code for e-commerce solutions. They’re also known to break out into Nerf gun battles. I was lucky enough to visit during a cease fire, but if anything went down I made sure to note the location of a Nerf shield to deflect any stray darts.

WebLinc’s other office on 3rd street has a storefront that looks like a demented butcher shop. It’s twisted and a little sick, exactly the look that Darren was going for in historical Old City. I always wondered what odd people occupied this storefront in Old City. It’s WebLinc.

This space houses mostly project management employees so there’s less of a threat of taking an errant dart from an over caffeinated developer. But there was a higher threat of cardiac arrest from trucking up all the funky stairwells. I am out of shape.

Darren explained how a lot of the features of the office are to instill creativity and productivity. The whiteboard walls are great for jotting down ideas or collaborating with coworkers. The red telephone booth rooms provide privacy when taking conference calls. The televisions in the bathroom? Those are for multitasking.

Based on what I saw, WebLinc’s digs give any red blooded geek office envy. Scope out some more pics in the Flickr gallery or in the slideshow below.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

I paused for a second the first time I ever heard the word “Paleoartist”, even in context, I had to stop and think about it. But considering the nature of what Bob Walters and Tess Kissinger, what would you call it? Bob and Tess are as knowledgeable of dinosaurs as they are skilled in their renderings.

When you meet them, they speak with a passion so strong that if harnessed for evil, it could darken the sky and bring about another ice age. When I swung by Bob and Tess’ studio, I thought that few people would ever know two of the world’s most brilliant and talented dinosaur artists reside in the heart of Fairmount. Behind some unassuming rowhomes, they’ve got their studio where they’ve fashioned together everything from the world’s largest dinosaur mural to the illustration that would later be the Spinosaurus in 2001′s Jurassic Park III.

The path to dinosaur art was one Bob started down at the age of four, when he saw the foldout cover of LIFE magazine. It featured Rudolph Zallinger’s mural of dinosaurs from the Peabody Museum. From then on, there was no turning back. For Tess, she took her love of art and science, and gravitated toward paleontology when she met Bob. Along the way, she even became good friends with the paleo guys at the Smithsonian.

Seasoned veterans in traditional fine art, they’ve since gravitated to doing their work entirely digital. As they stated themselves, the pair work at the intersection of art, science and technology — and I’m hard-pressed to think of a finer example than their stunning work depicting plants and animals long since departed from our world. (more…)

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Carving up a turkey

This week’s Geek of the Week is a man of varied interests, my pal Brian Lim.

Philadelphia foodies might know Brian from his food blog Bridges Burgers Beer, where he rambles about local nibbles, or from his work with Foodspotting as a Philly Foodspotting ambassador. Those driving in and out of thte city… well, you probably don’t know him, but he’s the gentleman who helps engineer those bridges your car zips over.

Bridges. Burgers. Blogs. Brian does a lot. Read on to learn about this geeky gentleman.

So when you aren’t busy at your day job, you run a food blog. Tell us a bit about it.

I started my blog, Bridges, Burgers & Beer in October of 2009. It was sorta created out of boredom. I like to eat, drink, and cook. I’m also somewhat of a bridge geek. I hoped to combine my passions for all those things in my blog.

You party down with the Philly Foodspotting community quite a bit. Tell us about that group.

I got hooked on Foodspotting a few years ago when my friend/fellow blogger, Amy Cao, started to work with them. Because I take photos of my food normally and it was a fun, neat way to find food, I figured why not contribute to Foodspotting.

Since then, a Philly Foodspotting community developed and I became one of the two Philly Foodspotting ambassadors. We hold a food eatup or crawl every month, open to everyone. (more…)

Meeting Evil, which opens Friday, May the 4th, is the new film starring Nick Fury Samuel L. Jackson and Luke Wilson. The official synopsis goes something like this:

When John Fleton, a depressed suburban family man and recently fired realtor, offers to help a stranger, Richie, with his car, John is sucked into a surreal, nightmarish murder spree that forces him to question everything about his life, his mode of behavior, and the very nature of evil…

We have 25 pairs of passes to the film that will screen 7:30pm on Monday, April 30^th  at the Ritz East. Want a chance to see Meeting Evil ahead of everyone else? Simply comment with your favorite Sam Jackson line by Sunday the 29^th and 25 of you will be picked at random to check the film out.

Just be sure to put your REAL name in the fields so I can add you and a guest to the guest list. Good luck and enjoy the trailer!

In 2008, when Iron Man premiered on movie screens across the country, did anyone really think four years later we would all be anxiously counting down to an Avengers movie this May? I know I didn’t.

But somehow Marvel Studios pulled off the impossible; they created five interconnected, enjoyable movies that show the beginnings of the film version of the Marvel Universe. And all that hard work comes to a head on May 3rd, when The Avengers brings all the heroes together for a knock down, drag out blockbuster spectacular.

Lucky for us, someone decided that being able to watch all 6 movies in one sitting was a great idea. So on May 3rd, you will be able to watch Iron Man 1 and 2, Captain America, Thor, The Incredible Hulk and The Avengers together in one theater. And in Philly, we actually have two options if a movie marathon like this makes you weak in the knees.

First, AMC Theaters will present all 6 movies starting at 11:30 AM on May 3rd. There are two locations you can see the marathon in this area, Neshaminy and Cherry Hill, and you get a special commemorative set of RealD 3D glasses (one of 4 Avengers themed designs). The whole shebang will cost you $40 and you will be one of the first to see The Avengers on the big screen.

Now, if you prefer something where you can get a meal and a drink while watching almost 14 hours of Marvel movie goodness, there is another option. Movie Tavern, located in the Providence Town Center in Collegeville, PA, is also running all six movies for only $35. The marathon starts at noon and, while you don’t get the cool 3D glasses, you can get a cold beer, so it’s up to you to decide what your priority is.

So there you have it; two different ways to experience the culmination of Marvel Studios road to the Avengers. Tickets are already selling out in some locations, so get you butt in gear, buy your tickets and yell “Avengers Assemble!”

AMC Theaters Ultimate Marvel Marathon
www.go.amctheatres.com/marvel

Movie Tavern Marvel Mania Marathon
www.movietavern.com/marvel-mania-marathon/2970