Ben Huh of Icanhascheezburger fame won two People’s Voice Webby Awards for Fail Blog. One award in the Weird category and one in the funny category. Expect more hilarity coming soon from new sites.
Fail Blog wins 2009 Webby Award
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Meet We Se: A Burmese Refugee Navigates a New Country, a short film by the Columbia University Journalism, won a 2009 Webby Award for video in the student category. Here’s a synopsis of the short:
Schoolteacher We Se arrived in New York from a refugee camp in Thailand in November 2007. He was forced to flee there after the Burmese army attacked his village and shot his father dead. We Se said his Christian faith gave him the strength to survive. Now he looks to God for guidance as he builds a new life in the Big Apple.
Learn more about the stories of Burmese refugees here.
Meet We Se: A Burmese Refugee Navigates a New Country
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Twelve-year-old Clara Ma from the Sunflower Elementary school in Lenexa, KS submitted the winning entry to name NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory rover. The sixth-grade student named the rover “Curiosity”. A NASA panel selected the name following a nationwide student contest that attracted more than 9,000 proposals via the Internet and mail. The panel primarily took into account the quality of submitted essays. The “Curiosity” rover is scheduled for launch in 2011. (kinda reminds us of Grace Moon wins Doodle 4 Google winner last year)
The following is the essay written by Clara Ma, winner of the Mars Science Laboratory naming contest. Twelve-year-old Ma submitted the winning entry, “Curiosity.”
Curiosity is an everlasting flame that burns in everyone’s mind. It makes me get out of bed in the morning and wonder what surprises life will throw at me that day. Curiosity is such a powerful force. Without it, we wouldn’t be who we are today. When I was younger, I wondered, ‘Why is the sky blue?’, ‘Why do the stars twinkle?’, ‘Why am I me?’, and I still do. I had so many questions, and America is the place where I want to find my answers. Curiosity is the passion that drives us through our everyday lives. We have become explorers and scientists with our need to ask questions and to wonder. Sure, there are many risks and dangers, but despite that, we still continue to wonder and dream and create and hope. We have discovered so much about the world, but still so little. We will never know everything there is to know, but with our burning curiosity, we have learned so much.
As her prize, Clara Ma flew from Kansas to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to meet and sign the next rover that will zoom millions of miles to Mars. She also got a VIP tour of JPL, along with her parents and sister. Inside the building where Curiosity is being assembled, Clara donned a “bunny suit” to step into the clean room and sign her name on the rover. Clara and her family also visited the Mars Yard, where future generations of rovers are tested.
Mars Science Laboratory rover “Curiosity”
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Food Party is can only be described by us as a demented version of Pee-wee’s Playhouse meets the Food Network. The show is a mind-bending, non-reality cooking show with Thu Tran as your hostess, a cast of unruly puppets as culinary aides, and a cavalcade of fictitious celebrities as surprise dinner guests.
Shot on location in a Pee-wee Playhouse-like cardboard kitchen as well as other foreign and exotic cardboard locations, each episode will or will not instruct you on how to prepare wild gourmet multi-course meals with ingredients you probably have on hand in your kitchen already, such as pretzel rods, eggs, narwhal lungs, bizarre plot twists, secret ingredients, and pizza. After all, you never know who might show up for dinner.
Although the Food Party was born on the Internet, it makes it TV debut on IFC tonite. In its television incarnation “Food Party” episodes run about 10 minutes each and make no pretense about offering any actual cooking advice. By contrast, the online episodes run about 30 minutes. You can see her earlier episodes here.
Food Party Green Screen Cookies
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More about Thu Tran
Thu Tran was born in Malaysia, raised in Cleveland OH, and presently resides in Brooklyn NY. She is also Vietnamese. Out of anything she could have studied in art school in Cleveland, she studied Glass.
Besides being a nationally exhibited visual artist since graduating from school, Tran has worked a variety of amazing jobs such as handyman assistant, plumber assistant, food delivery driver, freelance sculptor and illustrator, glassblowing assistant, and glassblowing instructor. Thu spent a good part of 2008 with Girl Talk, providing props and visuals on a 35 city tour of North America. She has also performed with art sports double-dutch team “Double Dutch will Take You Higher” and also currently performs as “Baby B” at Bad Brilliance shows.
Tran has been profiled by the NY Times, was recently named to “New York’s Most Beautiful People” list by Paper Magazine, and was recently awarded the Out of the Box Award at the 2008 New York Television Festival for her work on Food Party.
Santa Mesa won a lot of awards on the Asian American film festival circuit last year. See why it won so many accolades. Here’s the synopsis for Santa Mesa
After the death of his mother, 12-year-old Hector arrives in Manila to live permanently with his grandmother, Lita, a woman whom he has never met.
Shortly after arriving, Hector meets Sel, a neighborhood teenage girl, and Miguel, along with Miguel’s Barkada (street gang). Hector longing to find a connection to his new environment joins this group of petty hustlers in the hopes of getting closer to Sel, until one night Hector’s initiation takes a wrong turn. Hector’s clumsy actions get him caught while breaking into the home of Jose, a 59-year-old former photographer. Later, Hector finds himself having to work for Jose in order to compensate for his actions while keeping this secret from his new group of friends and his grandmother.Jose, a somewhat disconnected man, feels that he can pull Hector away from Miguel’s street gang by using him to complete daily chores around the house. With all this time being spent with Jose, Hector stumbles across Jose’s past. For years, Jose has been spying on his daughter, Rosa, who is unaware of her birth father’s identity. Oblivious to the “can of worms” Hector is about to open, he seizes this as an opportunity to repay Jose. He takes it upon himself to follow Rosa and reunite them. “SANTA MESA” is a warm tale about family values, love and friendship. It tackles life’s biggest challenge – growing up.
Pick up the Santa Mesa DVD exclusively on Amazon.com.
Santa Mesa Trailer
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Gran Torino with its Hmong cast is now available on DVD. You can pick up the DVD on Amazon.com
Gran Torino Trailer
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