You may recognize the frighteningly earnest fellow on the left as the star of Act Your Age, the first short I played at Inventing Situations when it rose out of the ashes of HCT six years ago this month. Until I started shuffling the shorts a few months back, he was also the sign that we’d cycled through the rotation again.

Well, Kevin, Mike, and Bill have made the short the target of their latest on-demand offering at RiffTrax.com, and it’s a pretty solid and nicely priced effort. I’d like to think they chose it to honor IS’ birthday. Plus, if you’re like me and you don’t care for the divx player they use, you can also download the track from rifftrax and the movie from archive.org and synch them up yourself. Anyway, to honor the occasion, some brand spanking new grabs from the short will be playing on IS at 1 PM Tuesday the 5th – aka JoeCrow Day

To celebrate his part in bringing back the real live properly voiced Tom and Crow, if even for a brief segment, I’m declaring this Tuesday JoeCrow day at Inventing Situations. I’m trying to get the day honored throughout the capper community, but I may have moved too late on that.

To properly honor the day, drink whenever Joe tells you to. Tea-totallers and the underage may substitute hot tea for booze, but they have to chug it.

And since this is all happening on a release of the mst3k episode Giant Gila Monster, we’re showing the unmstied version at 8 PM that day.

p.s. the disc is also available in a limited single order pressing direct from Rhino, that ships on the 11th.

Update: The holiday has been picked up at hipsoda and Glitter’s told me they’ll be celebrating at the CPB too.

Back by unpopular demand, it’s the Inventing Situations Merch Shop! Now with a black design. If I ever get around to redesigning the site again, that might be the new font for the logo. I haven’t ordered mine yet, so you can still be the first to get one. And the classic gallery style shirts are back too, along with the mousepad, card, and mugs. If you send in a pic of yourself in an IS tshirt you can either get capped or put up in the ad topside on IS.

And on another note, there’s a capping section on the Cinematic Titanic forum now. Go over there and show ‘em how it’s done. I’ve even started a couple of threads. (p.s. check this thread to see how to register and login)

Don’t forget Tuesdays are still the days to get fresh grabs to caption here at IS. The first few have gone pretty well, despite the second and third happening on holidays where a lot of people might have been away from their computators.

This Tuesday between noon and midnight (eastern), we’ve got Bela Lugosi in color, our first episode of the Richard Deacon Show (known in syndication as the Dick Van Dyke show), Bela Lugosi (in glorious color), Popeye, and some sword and sandal nonsense with a hero who is not Hercules. He might be Sinbad for all I know. (The Spartans be different from the Athenians). And the usual bunch of fresh grabs from old shorts.

Of course, as I expected when I started this, real life has crept in and I may not get 12 hours of new grabs a week – would folks rather I made it 2PM – Midnight, Noon – 10PM, or just include more filler?

We’re starting 2008 with a double punch of goodness. On the first, we’re continuing our Tuesdays of newness. On the second, we’re introducing Four Star Theater at 8 PM – where we’ll be giving you a weekly blast of the top rated IS Playhouse grabs in the catalog, starting with the wigged out Seussian trailer for The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T and the Bonanza episode full of circussionists, The Abduction. I know what you’re asking. The answer is “last door on your left.” As to why Four Star Theater if the scale goes to five stars? Because there’s so little stuff with a five star rating, even rounding up. So, vote for more stuff and maybe we’ll upgrade to five star theater. Maybe even six. What’s more, I’m finally going to start showing one star and two star items less frequently.

[addendum]

Don’t forget, you can check the schedule to see what’s coming in advance, though Tuesdays will be usually only be a week or so ahead, since it’s basically whatever I manage to grab in a given week (plus new grabs for shorts, which don’t show up on the schedule.) Because Wednesdays is stuff that’s already been grabbed, riffed and rated, that’ll be listed farther into the future.