Great book by James Patterson, with the help of two journalists. Full of Beatles trivia most people won't know. Not just about his death, it actually starts with him meeting Paul. Mostly vignettes, chapters are rarely over 4 or 5 pages, so can be consumed in bite- sized pieces.
☼
After some time, I've started reading from actual books again. Most of my long form reading has
gone by the wayside over the years whether because of deterioration of already meager
attention span or being inundated by short pieces on the internet. I've read some e-books
on my iPad, though, and find it convenient to do. I know a lot of people don't like it, but
it only takes a little while before you get used to it, and not having to deal with the
heft of a book or care about being in a well-lit room is a bonus.
One odd habit I find myself doing however, is periodically glancing at the top of the page.
It's only for an instant, and I don't have any trouble finding my place again, but it is
annoying. Like getting used to reading on a screen, getting used to reading on a printed
page again is taking a little time.
I hope before too long I won't automatically assume that the correct time is at the top
of the page!
☼
The late baseball great has been lauded and toasted before (and since) his death by all who
knew him or knew of him. I had forgotten one of his funny statements as color commentator
(should that be a word? Shouldn't one who comments on a subject be a commenter? They comment,
they don't commentate. But I digress...)
I searched the internet and found pages upon pages of lists of funny, profound, and sometimes
prescient remarks he'd made, but couldn't find anyone who quoted the one I'd heard but
couldn't remember. My bride was equally stumped, as she'd been watching the game with me
that was the source of our mutual chuckle. Between us it seems we have one person's
complete memory. One of us will supply the beginning of a thought or a line or a name, and the other will
have the rest revived in their gray matter and complete it.
A day or two later, She called me and gave me a rough idea that it was about a man on base.
Quickly it came flooding back. We laughed all over again.
It was probably October baseball, I know not what year. I'm afraid that the teams and the
player in question are lost forever as well, until the Internet coughs them up. I seem to
remember the runner was on second when Tim said about him,
He's a good runner.
Then he paused for a moment, and followed with,
Not a fast runner, but a good runner.
We looked at each other and wondered what other criteria were required for good baserunning
than being fast, and cracked up!
What would have made the statement perfect is if he'd been thrown out at third.
☼
I admit I spend way too much time on Twitter. I use a third party client by Tapbots called
Tweetbot. It blocks ads and had a lot of features missing from the original Twitter client,
though Twitter has, over the years adopted many of them, as well as those from other third
party clients such as Twitterific. I was comfortable using a familiar app, though, and
wouldn't have considered switching to another.
That option was taken away from me when, last week. Twitter changed the developer API so that
the links that third party clients used to connect to the data was broken. There was initially
no explanation for the change, but leaks have lately revealed that it was intentional and
permanent. Many people are unhappy about this development, many meaning millions.
It's not a surprising twist. The upstart apps deprive Twitter of its main revenue source,
eyeballs on advertising. The actual surprise is that it took so long to cut them off. From
Twitter's perspective, third party clients were always a bad idea financially. Had they
done this a long time ago they might have been more successful and hence worth more than
a formerly believed to be "genius" would have been tempted to pay for it. Now that the
company has shown preference to right wing extremists in the name of "free speech", advertising
revenue has taken a nosedive, so this is their only way to increase ad views. The shift toward
authoritarianism has also caused many to flee Twitter entirely to services like Mastadon and
Tribel.
The easiest solution, I've found, is using Twitter on the Web, using the Brave browser. It's
free, available on all platforms and it blocks all ads, including inline ads on Twitter and embedded ads on YouTube.
But, as things come and go, Twitter will not be around forever, so this may be a temporary workaround.
Hopefully this post will age well!
Maybe I'll cut down on my Twitter usage.
Tomorrow.
☼
I was high above the stage. There were no catwalks. We didn't have a scissor lift, if they'd
even been invented yet. I was about 18 feet up, on a 12 foot wooden A-frame ladder. Not a feat of levitation,
the ladder was on an 8 foot banquet table. 8 feet long. Only about 3 feet high. That table
was on another, identical one. I'd checked that the table legs and the ladder were locked. Two
guys held the upper table on the lower and four had a leg each of the ladder. On the top step
I could reach the pipe to hang the flags. They were enormous, and from there they
reached almost to the floor. They should look pretty impressive from the audience. Of course,
I had to tie them to the pipe in 9 places, 3 for each flag, so the ladder had to be moved 8 more times.
Of the rest of the crew, why was I the one way up here? Well, turns out it was my idea. Plus,
I was the tallest one there and we didn't have another table to stack.
I didn't think I had a problem with heights. We used to scramble up a third floor peaked roof
in high school to smoke dope after lights out. I was distracted from thinking about the
precariousness of my situation by the task at hand. Oh, and also the hallucinogens.
Around that time, my main criteria for whether to drop acid boiled down to whether I had any
obligations for the next two or three days. That is to say, my schedule was usually pretty clear,
even if my judgement wasn't. At my age, my prefrontal cortex wasn't completely developed, so
risk taking seemed normal and harmless.
So, high above the stage. Any way, the mission was successful, as evidenced by my writing this almost 50 years later and
having had many more opportunities, before and after, to end up in a body bag.
We met the band briefly during sound check.
The nationalities represented by the flags were for the three members of the band that was
to play that night. The two Americans were Tim Bogert and Carmine Appice, best known for
being in Vanilla Fudge, The Brit was Jeff Beck, best known for being... Jeff Beck. While BBA was
principally a hard rock band (Their most memorable hit was a cover of Stevie Wonder's song
Superstition, the original of which had Jeff Beck on guitar), throughout his career Beck took
elements of rock, blues, jazz and classical to create a sound that was uniquely his own. Over the
course of 60 years he performed with, or was sought by, everybody in the business.
On Tuesday he died of a suddenly contracted bacterial meningitis. He was 78.
That night's show was tremendous.
I don't remember how the flags got taken down.
☼
I think I was in the seventh grade when I was assigned to read a book from
the school library and write a report about it. I remember wandering around for
a while. The selections ran the whole range of K-8, and though I remember that
they used the Dewey Decimal system, I wasn't that clear on how things were laid
out, so I just browsed. I guess there was no rule against my writing about a
collection of short stories because I ended up pulling out a book that sort of
leapt off the shelf at me. It was a standard paperback, smaller than the
hardbound books that surrounded it. It could have easily been overlooked. The
typeface on the spine, however, was quite bold, black on white, and the title
was R Is for Rocket. I hadn't read much, if any, space oriented books and had
only a vague idea what science fiction was all about. I read a lot of books that
I got at home, subscriptions that my folks had gotten me, but mostly
non-fiction.
I think I swallowed the book whole. I don't remember the
report I wrote or how well I did on it, but I was... changed. I searched for
more books by the same author at school, and I think the next one I read was The
Martian Chronicles, followed by The Illustrated Man. From there I had to go to
the public library to get more, and a librarian there gave me some more authors
to look at. I gobbled up Verne, Wells, Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, Herbert, Niven,
Farmer, Chalker, Ellison and countless others, but one author was the beginning
of it all for me.
Yesterday was Ray Bradbury's birthday.
Happy belated Birthday, sir.
☼
I know it's not just our neighborhood, but I wonder how widespread the
proliferation of Little
Free Libraries is. Their website says there are 150 Thousand of them
worldwide, but knowing their geographic distribution would be interesting. If
you don't know what they are, they usually consist of a wooden box with a
shingled roof that looks like a little house with a glass-paned door in the
front where people put their excess books for others to take.
Around here there's at least one per block, and they get a lot of turnover.
Where I live there are a lot of educators, government employees, and healthcare
workers, so maybe our demographic favors this kind of thing. I take long walks
with the dog and stop at them whenever we pass. You can buy a prefab unit or a
kit from the website in several different designs, or you can build your own.
Not far from me is a custom built one that is a work of art, including a copper
roof with gutters and downspouts and lighting with a motion sensor after dark.
There's an app that'll tell you the location of some of the LFLs in your area,
though it requires registering them with the company, so the list is very
incomplete. If I wanted to immerse myself in statistics I'd take pictures of
them and mark the comings and goings of the books in them. Luckily, I don't have
that kind of time or inclination, just another in the long list of "wouldn't it
be interesting if..." moments in my life. Just too much typing, at any rate. If
I did I'm sure I'd learn a lot about my neighbors, both from the kinds of books
that are left and how fast they leave. More recent bestsellers and prize winners
of course move most quickly, but I'm also reminded of the time I learned of a
woman who bought a first edition Hunt for Red October at a yard sale for fifty
cents and sold it on eBay for $1500. I'm sure I've seen the like in my travels
but was oblivious to their value.
There are even variances among the different libraries. Some have a lot of
children's books, some more history than fiction, some heavy on DIY. Their
collections also vary over time.
What do seem to stick in my mind are books that don't move for long periods.
This not only tells a lot about the people who donated them, but even more about
the populace that finds them unappealing. The one nearest me is fairly well
distributed among genres and seems to do more business than many owing partly
due to a lot of foot traffic. A couple of books that stand out as being rejected
by the masses, at least on the small scale we're discussing here, are a copy of
The New American Bible and a biography of Newt Gingrich. In the former case, I
wonder if a different version of the Bible would be more in demand or if there's
just a saturated market. The latter may indicate the political leanings of the
neighborhood. What I don't know is if there's a way to post in the app or
another forum the books you've left or even just seen in a library to alert
people not browsing physically of their availability.
It's great to stumble upon a book you hadn't previously known about or one you
might have had in the back of your mind for a while. I've found a few, but more
importantly, it's a destination for some of the boxes of books in my basement
and garage. There's the added incentive of finding some books I'll remember as
being indispensable in my own library. When I put books into the library
nearby, I'll start notifying my neighbors on our block's FB page. Maybe that'll
be the beginning of something.
☼
Hard to express the anger and frustration today. Is this my country? Lots of work to do.
Oh,
and it's George Orwell's birthday.
☼
I just got a "Low toner warning" on my printer. It hasn't run out yet, and my wife printed
10 or 20 more pages since the message started for a rare event that required hard copy,
and I got a replacement cartridge for when it does. It's bugging me that I can't remember
when I bought the printer, but my wild guess is at least 5 years ago. The cartridge in it
is the one that it came with! The current page count from the day it came out of the box
is 422, and the cartridge isn't yet empty.
The printer is a Brother all-in-one black & white laser printer, and it cost $99.
The included cartridge is their low yield option, and I bought the same to replace it for $45.
You might surmise that I don't print a lot, at most a few pages a month on average, and
sometimes go more than a month without printing anything. This is because I have a variety
of screens I can look at things on, mark them up and sign them. I don't need color printing
for the same reason. And if you've had any experience with laser printers, it can sit idle
for a long time, and when you're ready to print, it roars to life and spits out paper.
On the few occasions when it hasn't, I've gone to investigate to find that there was a
firmware update that needed to be done. I'd prefer being informed that I needed the firmware
After my print job was complete, but that's about the only complaint I have.
When I think of the time and money I've wasted over the years fighting with dried ink
cartridges due to not printing often enough, I'm consoled by the fact that those days are
over. In fact, due to the interoperability of all of the various screen devices I'm printing
less and less as time goes by.
☼
Some years ago, internet companies with logs of the names of visitors would periodically and
for a variety of reasons get notified by scary government agencies with 3 initials that they
wanted those lists, or part of those lists, or maybe only one name and the information that
the company had on them. These were called National Security Letters. Part of the rules of
these demands were that the company wasn't allowed to tell anyone that the "request" had been made.
Some companies got around this by a Dead Man's Switch. They'd put up a web page in which it
was stated that they Hadn't received a Letter as of the date listed. They would update the
page with the current date every day, unless they Did receive one, so visitors to the site
would know. The practice may have not lasted long, because government lawyers have a tendency
to figure things out, given enough time.
An old friend from another coast called me the other day. It hadn't been that long since I
last talked to him, but we always have things to catch up on. His call, however, was one of
concern. He wanted to check that I was okay. I told him I was fine and asked what made him
think otherwise? He said it had been a while since the last time I posted on my blog. I
hadn't considered this secondary effect of the public outpouring of my odd and mostly boring
observations! So, once again, it seems that yet another thing in my life isn't all about Me.
Damn all these responsibilities.
I feel I must make excuses. Turns out unemployment doesn't create the quantity of free time
I'd have expected. I can't seem to get everything done in a day that I'd like. I'll try to
do better, but being a disappointment to others has followed me around since a very early
age, so, we'll see. At least I don't have advertisers to disappoint.
UPDATE: A funny (sort of) example of a literal Dead Man Switch is the website Is Abe Vigoda Dead?. There was a rumor started that he was dead because at some point in
the 1980s a producer asked to find an Abe Vigoda-type actor
, not realizing he was living
and working still (per IMDB). The website didn't need to be updated until he actually died,
and if you go there today (it's still active), the site, which had for so many years said,
simply, No
, has been changed to Yes
with the actor's dates. The difference with
an actual Dead Man Switch is that the previous example needed to be updated daily, while
Abe's only when he shuffled off his mortal coil.
☼
Sorry I missed Star Wars Day (by one), but you have to check out this link to a YouTube video about Skywalker Sound. It's a great insight to the complexity and importance of sound in all movies and TV, not just sci-fi. It just went up yesterday, and it already has two and a half million views. Made by Apple. Of course.
☼
Look, I really liked Casino Royale. It re-energized the Bond franchise. The black and white
fight scene in the beginning was great, as was the parkour chase in the construction site, as
well as the alterations to Bond's previous character failings (i.e. relationships with women.)
Still, there's at least one thing that bugs me about it.
Bond movies are action movies, and where they get bogged down is when they get too talky.
The first 15 minutes of Casino Royale have precious little dialog and it moves like lightning.
Once the card game starts, however, I wanted to go to the lobby and get some refreshments, like
meth or something.
First off, Texas Hold 'Em? In Montenegro? (Not, like, Monte Carlo?) And did they choose
that game to make it easier for people who watch poker tournaments?
Compounding the felony is having Mathis (respected Italian actor Giancarlo Giannini) EXPLAIN
what's going on to Vesper and the audience! If you've got to explain your movie, you're doing
something wrong. There would have been no difference if they were playing baccarat, which would've been
more according to the Bond canon.
All the
talk about Le Chiffre's tell
was unnecessary. The tell was visual. The attention of
the camera via a closeup would've established it in the audience's mind.
Other scenes were so much better. The shower scene, for instance, developed both characters,
and created a connection with the audience, with almost no dialog. Remember, back when the technology
constraint was lack of sound in the advent of the motion picture industry, they figured out
how to connect with audiences almost totally visually.
In other words, Show me the story, don't talk about it.
In future posts I'll show more examples of the techniques I admire and the ones that irritate
me in other movies. I could devote an entire site to the latter.
Hmmmm
☼
Dustin Byron Thompson, Capitol insurrectionist, was convicted today of
one felony and five misdemeanors. His defense was that Trump made him do it. I was only
obeying orders"
was what became known as the Nuremberg Defense at the war crimes trials
after World War II.
Very close to that claim might be called the Flip Wilson Defense. One of the comedian's
famous lines was, The devil made me do it!
Fascism needs followers in equal measure to enemies and scapegoats. Thompson's sentencing is
in July.
☼
In another example of legislation best left to professionals, Florida's Don't Say Gay law was
passed with language that shouldn't have ever left committee. A Group of Florida teachers
figured out the high degree of dumb in its language. In this
YouTube video, their "legaleze"
take on the law elevates the absurd to the sublime! You'll be in for a good laugh.
If you're going up against teachers, you'd better do your homework!
☼
Most depictions of our solar system give a totally inaccurate depiction of the relative
distances there. Many graphics I grew up with would accurately depict the order and
relative sizes of the planets, but all I remember about an attempt to convey distance were
in the order of "if the sun was a basketball, the earth would be a pea some number of
football fields away." (It was a long time ago, I checked and a number of sources say it was
a sesame seed 45 meters away)
Click the link above for a great infographic of the planets if all of them were exactly
aligned (an unrealistic aspect of the chart.) The scale is our Moon=1
pixel on the screen. click the little "C" icon in the lower right to have the map scroll
at the speed of light! It'll give you an accurate feel of how uncrowded our solar system
is, and by inference, how vast interstellar space is (check the note at the extreme right.)
☼
Younger people know Mulhare from his continuing role as Devon Miles in Knight Rider. Older
people know him from Von Ryan's Express and the ghost in the TV series The Ghost and Mrs.
Muir. The show was an adaptation of the movie with the same name starring Rex Harrison.
Most people remember Harrison from the Broadway musical and movie My Fair Lady opposite
Julie Andrews and Audrey Hepburn, respectively. What most people don't know is when Harrison
left the stage production, the part of Henry Higgins was taken up by... Edward Mulhare.
☼
When the movie about Jerry Lee Lewis came out, we went to see it. It was good, and my wife is a big Dennis Quaid fan.
Later, we were telling her mother about it. Almost immediately, she shut down the conversation saying that she didn't approve of him. Turns out she didn't even know that he'd married his underage cousin.
What she objected to was he played the piano standing up.
☼
So, it's the day after the Oscars. Let's talk about movies, not the Oscars, though.
You can go ANYWHERE else on the Web to read about the events of the show.
The entry title metaMovies
doesn't have anything to do with Facebook and their
co-opting of the words meta
or Metaverse
(credit to Neal Stephenson and his
novel Snow Crash), but rather has to do with movies about making movies. Specifically,
these three films:
The only disadvantage of the R2PC is that it's 22 years old, so pre-digital. It's a story
about a young man intimidated by all of the people he knows, seemingly, making movies for
submission to be considered for the Sundance Film Festival (in Park City, Utah.) It's a
humorous odyssey to find out how he would go about making an independent film. As such,
it serves as an instructional video on the equipment and resources necessary to make a movie
on actual film, packaged in an entertaining narrative.
Side by Side, while 12 years old, is still relevant as it tells through interviews of well known filmmakers, the
process and differences in working with film and digital equipment. The insights of these
experienced and acclaimed artists/craftsmen adds an extra dimension to the appreciation of
movies new and old.
Making Waves is about how complex and varied the techniques and technologies of sound
production are, also from the point of view of cinema visionaries. It shows how what you
hear on the screen is as complicated and important as what you see, sometimes more so.
What is really amazing is what people are doing with their phones as their main equipment
in making cinema and posting on the web on a variety of services. The cost of entry to the
movie making community is now available to anyone with a story to tell.
Check 'em out!
☼
I just heard that Steve Wilhite died in Cincinatti at the age of 74 on March 14th. Wilhite led the team at CompuServe that created the GIF file format, that made online photos possible over slow networks on slow computers with primitive graphic capabilites. It lives on today by virtue of its ability to display short animations, and crisp line art (think text in memes.)
Almost all of the billions of people online have seen a GIF file every day since Al Gore invented the Internet!
(oh, and you're pronouncing it wrong. That and the Al Gore comment reinforce my decision not to have comments available!) Apologies to DARPA and Tim Berners-Lee.
I just found out that Meta (Facebook) has a Vice President of Integrity. Wait, what? That can't mean what I think it means, right?
The New Yorker has announced the release of it's app for Android. I can't remember how long I've been using it on my iPhone, but it's been a long time. Why the delay? At the outset of smartphones, statistics showed that iPhone users spent more money on apps and services than Android users. There are so many Android phones out there that I'd have thought there would be relative parity by now, or certainly enough New Yorker readers with Androids to justify it. I don't know, maybe I'm wrong. I'd guess TNY would have been doing their market analysis on this, right? Maybe there are programming challenges with Android OS that made it difficult to have the features and mechanics they needed to have it match their iPhone app.
One thing's for sure, though. I'll never have the opportunity to compare.
☼
When I was little almost everyone had a phone, only not in their pocket. The vast majority had black desk or wall phones with rotary dials, most made (at least for US customers), by Western Electric. Oh, and the phone wasn't yours, it belonged to the phone company, The Bell System. It wasn't A phone company, it was The phone company, affectionately (or mockingly) referred to as Ma Bell. A lot of people wouldn't have been able to afford to buy a phone, so it was built in to the call charges. Even local calls cost money. Long distance calls were Very Expensive. To the modern listener it will seem crazy to imagine that when your phone rang, you answered it. There was really no home alternative, other than to ignore the loud bell that repeated till the caller decided you weren't home. Not too long before I was born there was a breakthrough new feature. If you turned the phone over, there was a knob that you could change the ring from loud to soft. The soft option was only soft when compared to how loud the loud setting was. There was no Off setting on the ringer, which probably gave George Orwell one of his creepier ideas. So, people were really conditioned to pick up the phone when it rang, because you had no way of knowing if it was important or not. Consequently, informal rules of courtesy grew up around the use of phones. I was trained from an early age never make a non-emergency phone call between 9 at night and 9 in the morning. Some people wouldn't answer their phone during that interval.
As there were no answering machines, businesses had answering.. people. Receptionists or secretaries (as administrative assistants were called then) would answer your phone, let you know who was calling, find out if you'd take their call, and what excuse to use if you didn't want to talk.
After the breakup of Ma Bell, concurrent with the development of cheaper phones, other devices became available like speakerphones, and especially, answering machines. The first were big, bulky and particularly expensive. We never felt one was important to have at home. If no one answered the phone because we were out or otherwise occupied, they'd call back, right?
One feature that was available had escaped our notice, however, and was a game changer. When someone called and the machine answered, it would, of course play the message to them that you'd recorded. Then it would allow them to leave their message. What we were surprised to discover that there was a volume knob that would enable you to screen calls! You could hear them as they were leaving their message, and pick up if it was someone you wanted to talk to.
We bought one that night.
It was funny that, sometimes when we picked up after recognizing a friend on the machine, they would harp,
You were screening my call!
It was hard to make them feel grateful that they were on the short list of people who we Would pick up!
☼
Give Me Liberty or Give Me Deathspeech
The invention of the VCR was revolutionary in several ways. Before it existed, if you wanted to see a movie, you either went to a theater or watched on your 19" or 25" TV (with commercials and typically edited to fit a time slot, and for language, sex, and violence), or watched one on HBO or Cinemax (also when they aired but with no commercials or censorship.) All the existing options were less than ideal at the time, but in retrospect, except for the theater, awful. Theaters were a huge deal back then, especially for the wide screen blockbusters, much like today.
The VCR brought the ability to see a movie anytime you wanted, and to pause it to get another snack or use the facility without missing something. The price of a movie was insane, however. Top Gun came to home video to the tune of $50, which at the time was a Bargain, relative to more niche titles, which approached $100. It wasn't long before the advent of the video store made home video affordable for all, that is, once you shelled out the money to buy an early VCR, which cost around $500 dollars minimum. The other advantage to rentals was you were probably going to see a movie once, and buying it was a real waste of cash.
I had wanted a VCR as soon as I saw them, but couldn't afford one. Several years later, after I got married, I brought the subject up again with my wife, but she didn't want to consider it. That is, until...
...A colleague who worked second shift started showing up to work on time. Previously, he'd always been 10 minutes late, and I mean Always. About the third day in a row when he showed up a little before 4 o'clock, my wife's curiosity got the better of her and she asked him. He said that he used to be late because he couldn't leave the house till General Hospital ended, just before 4. There was pressure from his superiors to stop showing up late, so the previous weekend, he'd bought a VCR so he could tape his afternoon soaps, which freed him to get to work on time.
You see, I never presented the other advantage of the VCR, which was unattended recording of shows. It hadn't been the primary focus for me, and didn't realize that it Was the overwhelming focus for my bride. She came home from work that evening and asked me if I knew VCRs could do that. I told her that it was implicit in the name Video Cassette Recorder, and explained how it all worked.
We bought one that night.
☼
The term that has fallen upon us for unqualified Republican candidates for office with zero experience in government is "Conservative Outsider." They have a leg up on sitting legislators and governors, etc. because they don't have a record that can be challenged. Not that it's important they don't, as their only role in their party is to obstruct proposals by Democrats. You can spot them by the verbal triggers that their proposed constituents will recognize, such as "woke mob" and "CRT", terms that either mean nothing or, at least, nothing resembling what they use them to mean.
There are two Republicans in Pennsylvania spending record amounts of money attacking each other in the long run-up to the primary. Neither of these guys knows the first thing about the Senate. One of them is campaigning to have Fauci fired. The scary thing is, the voters he is appealing to have no idea that Fauci's job isn't dependent on the legislative branch. One aspect that will be interesting will be if the mud they've slung at each other will be remembered at election time.
Whichever one wins will have huge recognition value over whoever wins the Democratic primary, who have just recently, quietly, started running campaigns stressing their experience and accomplishments. They say there's no such thing as bad publicity, just publicity. I really hope that's not true. The Senate, that was supposed to be comprised of the best, most thoughtful statesman who've risen from years of previous experience, already resembles a bunch of petty, venal, carnival barkers. Maybe a few could be shown the door marked "This way to the Egress!"
☼
A time when, historically, the frozen ground thaws, turning to mud. Ideal conditions for planting, erasing the scars of brutal winters, and creating a quagmire to immobilize the tracks of invading armored vehicles. Ukraine fights on...
Javelin anti-tank missiles are expensive, to the tune of (I hear) $40,000. That, however, is trivial compared to the price of a main battle tank, its munitions, and, especially, its crew. When not moving, as when mired in mud, it's a particularly vulnerable target, though Javelin can also track a moving vehicle.
And the Javelin destroys its target almost all the time.
It's said that nations use hindsight to better prepare themselves to fight the previous war. It appears that Ukraine's invaders may be doing a bit of that. Russia has been very successful through centuries of wars at repelling invaders on Russian soil. Did the Russian government think that by declaring adjacent territory to be Russian they would have the same success?
And an even better cost comparison would be how a single bicycle could grind the Freedom
Convoy
to a crawl in the streets of DC.
I wonder if the potholes are less of a problem than when I lived there, speaking of spring.
When I find something interesting to read, whether web surfing, Reddit, or Twitter, I keep the tab open to read later. The most are on my phone, which currently has 426 tabs open, and I keep housekeeping, closing the ones I don't need. I need to find a balance between the time I take to find the things I want to read and the time to take to read them!
☼
A page of declined invitations in the priceless website Letters of Note.
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When I hear a song playing that I don't know, I ask Siri on my phone, and almost all the time it tells me. The underlying app is Shazam that Apple bought a couple of years ago. Shazam as a stand alone app had been around almost as long as iPhone supported third-party apps.
If you lived in the bad old days, you'd remember when you had to wait till the radio station you were listening to finish its set of five or six songs before the DJ would tell you what had been played. Burned into my brain is the time I had to sit in my car in front of my house after returning from a movie in the evening, waiting for a half hour because I just had to know what song had been played 6 cuts previously.
As you can imagine, I'm not a huge proponent of "the good old days."☼
I was honestly surprised that was still a thing.
The people who are aware of Taika Waititi, the acclaimed Kiwi producer, director, writer, and actor, are used to his wild takes and genre bending. In his back catalog, however, is a gem of a heartwarming low budget film from 2016 he wrote and directed called Hunt for the Wilderpeople with Sam Neill and breakout debut of Julian Dennison. Check it out, you won't be disappointed.
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What type are you? I'm the soft-spoken reserved type. Unless you're expecting the truth. But it doesn't matter, because that's not what this is about. It's about typing. When I was in high school, we didn't have a typing class. It was a private school and they assumed you'd never need to know how. I brought a hand-me-down (from my brother) portable typewriter to college that I used with two fingers. I needed to type things out myself because if I paid someone to type it they'd have likely told me what I'd written was crap. Also, I'd then have had less money for drugs. I could write something out long hand faster than I could type, especially given all the typos (thank goodness for eraseable paper; I didn't know about correction fluid then, if it even existed.) The problem with long hand is that no one would be able to read it. It was like cryptography, but since even I couldn't have read it back to you the next day, there was no key. I had nuns in elementary school. Be glad you didn't have my knuckles.
Flash forward to my first PC. Nothing in my formal education could have prepared me for it. So, I went to the Big Chain Bookstore and got a couple of ten pound computer manuals. I put them next to the ten pound books that came with the computer and printer, and cracked the first one. In the Introduction was a simple message: "You are the weak link. You can only compute as fast as you can type." That was true even given the fact that that original IBM PC (another hand-me-down from my brother) wasn't very fast.
The next day, I went to the Big Chain Computer Store and bought a typing program. This was 1985 so downloading software wasn't a thing yet. It came in a box, with a 5¼ inch floppy disk and a manual that was, mercifully, less than a pound.
Anyway, I practiced a lot and got to the point that I type poorly and slowly, but I don't have to look at the keys! Maybe a couple of years of blogging will improve my typing, since twenty some-odd years of IT work hasn't. I can type really fast at two or three word clips, as that's all that's necessary in normal help desk and device configuration work. And it would be really nice if they don't increase my meds. My hands shake more now than when i drank 10 cups of coffee a day! I'd say thank goodness for autocorrect, but we know what a crock that is…
Attention-deprived aging adolescent Tom Brady has come out of retirement. He couldn't wait till after March Madness to announce it, because it was all about him. They should've given him a Critics Choice Award. What's a Gronk to do?
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Back before cable, when there were 3 networks, a couple of local independents and PBS, regular series
had 24-28 episodes a season. Seasons ran from September to May, without much of a hiatus for
Christmas or the football postseason. All summer long were reruns. Unlike in recent years,
there were no short tryout
series. There was rarely a mid-season replacement available
in case they had to dump a stinker after the new year. Less often was any original programming
in the summer. After all, people were on vacation, right?
We didn't get TV Guide, so we relied on the weekly TV schedule insert in the Sunday paper.
If there was an episode that was airing a rerun there was a little r
next to it. Before
a show started, my mother would ask if it was a rerun. If it was, she would ask what else was on. My
father would say, But we've never seen it!
, but that was her story, and she was sticking
to it.
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The first Macintosh computer purchased in the UK belonged to Douglas Adams (the second was Stephen Fry). In addition to the Hitchhikers Guide series of novels (and others), Adams made a TV series called Last Chance to See in 1989, with an accompanying coffee table book. He treks around the world to highlight various species on the verge of extinction.
Twenty years later (9 years after Adams death), a follow-up series was aired checking on the
same animals, this time hosted by his longtime friend Steven Fry. Interestingly, when Adams
was away making the first series, he had, as his housesitter,
...Steven Fry
Lots of Mac users have been hoping for a midrange headless Mac for years. The original Mac Mini seemed a disappointment to many as it was, at the time, the slowest desktop Mac. It has been steadily creeping upward, however, till a huge jump recently with the M1 chip. The base unit is $700, but you can crank it up with additional speed, memory, and storage that'll drive the price into a range where you might as well buy their brand spanking new Mac Studio with an even more powerful processor. Along with the Studio, Apple released a new 27" 5k monitor, also called Studio Display. At $1600, not a bargain, but there have been lots of complaints that there are no great alternatives out there. For perspective, in 1994 I bought my first 17" monitor. It was the days of picture tubes, and I got a SuperMac (3rd party company at the time) 1024x768 pixel resolution (a huge thing at the time) with a Sony Trinitron tube that cost about $1000. To drive it at "millions of colors" (24-bit) required a video card that itself cost another $1000. To split the difference, the 21" Studio Display of 2001 cost about the same, but the graphics card in the G4 tower was sufficient to drive it at max resolution. Note that those were prices at the time, not adjusted for inflation. These latest offerings make it possible to hit just about any price point imaginable.
With separate monitors and CPU devices you could mix and match a number of combinations. My guess is that there might be a long wait for the anticipated larger iMac which was rumored to be at least as large as the 27" predecessor that was discontinued this week. You could pair the new Studio Display with a Mini and get better performance than the previous Intel iMac, or a Mac Studio with Studio Display to get performance almost as good as a Mac Pro. If you wanted the current Mac Pro and didn't want to wait for the Apple Silicon version, but didn't need the $6000 Pro Display XDR, the Studio Display is a bargain!
Of course, much cheaper alternatives for monitors (& computers, for that matter, but I'm not going to get into that) exist. I bought a 19" monitor with the original Mac Mini for my kid's schoolwork and I continue to use it today, though it's mostly used as a server, so I'm not staring at it for long intervals, though for non video or photo work, it's fine. If you want high quality, you just have to expect to pay more.
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Been eating Entenmann's as long as I can remember. M & D would bring it home to go with Sunday breakfast.
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The Decoder podcast with Nilay Patel has Nilay interviewing the creator of the Raspberry Pi. A good listen.
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There was a commercial, well, short film (see below, 2.14.22) ten years ago or so promoting the soon to be concept of streaming services. It showed a couple checking in to a dilapidated motel in the desert. They ask what TV channels are available, and the desk clerk says, "Every movie and TV show ever made, anytime you want."
What the hell happened? I'd have traded flying cars for that any day. Unfortunately,
Hollywood discovered the concept of Artificial Scarcity. They extrapolated the concept
that, since physical goods are finite, digital goods should be, too, for the sake of
propping up their value.
When I was a kid, Disney would release their back catalog on about a seven year cycle to take advantage of the aging in and aging out of their target audience, old enough to sit still for sixty to seventy-five minutes, but not so old that they wouldn't want their friends to know they still enjoyed that kind of thing.
When the VCR came out, the studios were furious, suing to ban the technology. They continued
hating it when they lost the suits, and hated even more when the VCR was replaced by DVDs and
Blu-Ray. Disney came up with a way to maintain the event driven aspect of new releases with
the old as well. The studio would release the titles at different times for limited periods,
warning to get yours Before it goes back in the vault!
This was to occur in the same
sort of cycle as the theatrical re-releases.
What the studios really wanted was what they had before the era of home video. They wanted you to pay every time you watched a movie. They even contrived a flawed system of disk that you'd rent that would decay and become unusable after a couple of days. What future they built was a hybrid. You can rent some movies and shows, or own them for more money, but they also adopted the business model of HBO, subscribing to a service that had exclusive rights to their content. Without those subscriptions, you can't see any of that service's content. You can cut the cable now, but you'll pay more for access to all of the same content via separate apps, plus all of the services that weren't available over premium cable to begin with.
If you do cut your cable, at least you'll know that you're no longer financially supporting Faux News. That is, unless your internet is from a carrier that also is your cable provider, or most ISPs.
I wonder how they'd have screwed us over with the flying cars.
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I'm not a gamer. That is to say, I don't play video games. In the late '70s i was working in a bar when one day a video game machine appeared, which I thought was odd, as I hadn't thought it was that kind of place (in fact, that kind of place didn't really exist yet.) Anyway, that was Pong. I shoved a roll of quarters into it over the course of a couple of days with a couple of different opponents I worked with, did exceptionally poorly, and walked away and didn't look back. You see, eye/hand coordination had always eluded me.
So, I was unaware that I was about to watch a series based on a video game. I guess I was also unaware of how far video games had come while I wasn't paying attention. It was apparent that the production made use of a lot of graphic elements from the game, which were extensive, complex and beautiful.
The graphics are very good, finding a balance between a graphic novel sensibility, 3-D and line art. The cinematic effects are astounding, with creative camera work, lighting, and sound. Most importantly, the story is good, and the characters are developed to the point that you care about them. The drama that is created transcends the genre, much in the same way that Pixar did, and Disney before it. There's another season in the works, but I'd like to see more of this kind of quality. The bar has been raised!
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Remember the Doritos commercial campaign with Jay Leno? They all ended with him saying: “Munch all you want, we’ll make more!”
Movies are kinda like that. Now, Doritos are mostly all consistently perfect and delicious (unless you’re not stoned), and movies, well, not so much. Still, there are more great movies than you can probably ever see. You should never see a movie twice until you’ve seen all of the AFI Top 250 and the IMDB top 250 and the Oscar nominees from the beginning, or all the winners at Cannes, Toronto, Telluride and Sundance.
Well, okay, that’s ridiculous. What about those little gems, those profound masterpieces, those shlock time wasters you’ve unaccountably loved forever? Okay, okay, maybe you have to see Love, Actually at Christmastime (or Last Christmas, or The Night Before, or Scrooged, or Die Hard, or, haven’t you seen it Enough Already, It’s a Wonderful Life.) Maybe you need to revisit a romantic fallback when you curl up with your loved one anytime, like Same Time, Next Year, or The Notebook. Or say, you saw a movie you really liked that you didn’t think your partner would like, but it’s So Them, too, that you have to get them to see it with you. Not to mention the ones that slipped by unnoticed till years later, when it’s realized how great they were, and the ones from the same year that got all the laurels are largely forgotten.
On the subject of having seen movies many, many times, a confession: I think the movie I’ve seen more times than any other would have to be Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. Of course I was very young, and it came on local TV frequently. There are others, of course. 2001, for instance, or Blade Runner (any guesses what genre I particularly like?) but also:
Same Time, Next
Year
Thunderball
Catch-22
All is forgiven. Enjoyment is enjoyment, so time isn’t wasted (except when running out to see an anticipated blockbuster only to be disappointed), and even in the not so fast paced features there are often things you missed at first sight. If you’re a Marvel fan you often have to see their features multiple times to find the things you might have not noticed that might have an impact on later flicks in the series, or, conversely, boo-boos that you want to discuss on forum.
So back to seeing new things. I’m not suggesting that all the films on the big lists are for everyone. Not everyone is up for a Fellini or Bergman, but if you’ve never seen one, you should give each a try, anyway. Cherry pick the best movie lists, but look around for the types of things you think you’d like. Sometimes it’s a genre, especially something with a favorite actor or two. Don’t gauge quality on the basis of the rating given by the streamer, though. They’re weighted toward the people who like the genre. The huge number of highly rated horror pictures aren’t going to attract people not interested in horror. Likewise sci-fi, war movies, gangster flix and other types.
The only solution to this problem is longer lifespans, of course. More time to watch movies. Oh, except they’ll still be producing them faster than we can see them.
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Star Wars (the first one, but most of the others,too) was a huge let down for me. I know, if there was a comment section it'd be filling up with outrage. But here's the thing: I'd been anticipating the movie for years. It was the cover story of technical movie magazines, special effects magazines and sci-fi publications. It was being touted as EPIC. Shortly before it premiered, word got out that the decision had been made to simplify the plot so that they wouldn't exclude the kid market.
Several of my friends probably won't speak to me now. Those guys, it turns out, were kids in '77. I was in my 20s and had been looking forward to some sci-fi, but I got a space opera. I thought we'd graduated to true to life physics, like in 2001: A Space Odyssey. I'd grown up on bad science fiction movies and I didn't want to go back. You didn't hear explosions and blaster fire in a vacuum (you heard classical music, right?), and you have to deal with both gravity and the concept of "up."
In retrospect I can appreciate the special effects company they had to create to do things with models that had never been done before. The visuals got better with every sequel, and in some, so did the story, somewhat. Pauline Kael of the New Yorker gave a surprisingly positive review for The Empire Strikes Back. It all just wasn't the sci-fi that I'd anticipated. Sigh.
Hey you kids, get off my lawn!
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Who gets to keep the donation money?
Breaker,
ten-four, good buddy.
If I could still drink beer, I'd buy
Lviv's Pravda Brewery's brand when they go back to making it! I don't think I'd
drink their current product.
When they do brew again, they should keep the
label!
#StandWithUkraine
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Gary Brooker, known for his work in Procol Harum, among others, died on February 19th. (full bio on Wikipedia)
Shine on Brightly
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I used to go to movies and the theater as much as I could. This damn pandemic has put an end to that. I know a lot of people are going back, but I'm on a lot of immune suppressing medications, so I'm just grateful that I have a pretty big TV at home. Still, I wished I could have seen Dune and No Time to Die at an IMAX. Most movies are fine at home, but the big, anticipated blockbusters are the ones I miss seeing on a big screen.
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Speaking of pandemics, I guess there's one I can spend time with. Station Eleven is great drama. There's a podcast with interviews of principal contributers as well, which I also enjoy. Check 'em out!
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I used to play a lot of boardgames, in college and after, mostly military simulations from publishers like The Avalon Hill Game Company and Simulation Publications Inc. When working for a living (& having cats) eliminated the ability to play for days on end (and leave a board set up partially played; see 'cats', above), that pretty much ended. Over the years there were some family games that got some play, like Apples to Apples and Dixit and Cards Against Humanity.
A few years ago Andy, Chip and I had a lot of fun playing Pandemic at night after work, with Steve jumping in later. Unlike a lot of games, it's collaborative rather than a competition. As a group you're trying to fight outbreaks around the world. The gameplay is unique and complex, but the playing aids make it flow pretty easily. One experienced player can shepherd newbies through it so that by the end of a game, they've got the hang of it.
In a recent inability on my part to separate fiction from reality, I can't bring myself to play that damn game again. Too close for comfort?
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These days I do most of my computing on an M1 MacBook Air. It's got amazing battery life and enough power that I can do everything I need it for. I've got a 27" 2017 iMac in an office that desperately needs clearing out, but when I need that I usually just use it via Screen Sharing. My previous laptop was a 2011 11" MacBook Air. Even though I was crushed when they discontinued it in 2015, I couldn't justify replacing mine till it was unavailable. It wasn't for heavy lifting, but it was incredibly portable and snappy enough for my needs. I really loved that laptop and knew a couple of people who agreed.
When my wife needed a new computer, she wanted the (then) new 12" MacBook, in rose gold. It's compact (she still uses it), but initially seemed big compared to the 11", though 15% lighter. Now it seems small compared to the 13" M1.
With the rumor of a March 8 event, the pundits are speculating about processors, form factors, laptops, iPads, etc. A lot of the anticipation is for another MacBook Pro to replace the 13" that was discontinued last October. There's also talk of a new MB Air. It seems tough to really differentiate two 13" laptops like that. What I'm hoping for is, if there's to be a 13" MacBook Pro, they'd make an Air a bit smaller, if not an 11", maybe a 12". the power of the processor and the battery life would be a perfect addition to a more portable device that runs MacOS. It would be lighter than the 12.9" iPad with the Magic Keyboard Case. Anyway, that would be on my wish list.
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We've long been in an era of spinoffs, reboots, prequels and sequels, not to mention adaptations of books, graphic novels, comics, and even TV commercials (Ted Lasso, for instance. I imagine we only have to wait for Walter the cat to get his shot)! They make Broadway musicals of movies, movies of Broadway musicals, TV shows of movies, movies of TV shows and comic book series of all of them.
Not that I'm about to rant about the lack of original content, because there's tons of that, too. We have an embarrassment of riches in media these days. What intrigues me is the possibilities of giving a minor character in a previous film an opportunity to be the center of their own story.There's a lot to talk about in the Daniel Craig Bond arc, but one thing keeps coming back to me. In the Pierce Brosnan era, there was talk of spinning off Halle Berry's character, Jinx. It never materialized, though her character appeared in at least one Bond videogame. Wai Lin (Michelle Yeoh) from Tomorrow Never Dies was in pre-production before MGM axed it.
If ever there was a character in a bond movie that could carry a spin-off, or even a franchise, it's Paloma from No Time to Die, played by Ana de Armas. She's far removed from the typical Bond "girl", or Bond sidekick, for that matter. They lead you to think that she's so scattered and naive that she's bound to be just another casualty, but she surprises you with her expertise and humor, and she ultimately saves the mission with the air of a seasoned professional. The concept of under-promise and over-deliver comes to mind. My only complaint is her performance is so short. I think they could easily produce a vehicle that she could carry for the length of a feature. Maybe an origin story?
While I think about it, de Armas' character Joi in Blade Runner 2049, would make a good story, too!
Shut up, I'm not obsessed with her...
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Back when I was serving drinks, and too many to myself, once or twice I'd wake up in the morning and not remember how I got there. My bedroom was in the back of the house, and I'd hurry to the front to see if my car was parked on the street, not knowing if I'd feel better if it was there or if it wasn't. So, for that brief period, the car was both there and not there.
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Years ago, my friend Clif and I made the observation at work that there were some very entertaining ads on TV, but that we couldn't readily identify the product they were pitching. Therefore, it wasn't truly qualifying as an advertisement. None of the ones we talked about then occur to me now, but after every Super Bowl I reflect on what I'd seen.
If the Rocket Mortgage Super Bowl ad with Anna Kendrick hadn't been reviewed the next day as the best commercial of the night (by someone), I wouldn't have remembered who the sponsor was. I remember the story, and that it was entertaining, but not what it was selling, which makes it a flop as an ad, at least with me. Likewise, I couldn't tell you who the advertiser was in the one with Rebecca from Ted Lasso at the poker table, even though the penultimate raise was the product placement. For all I knew, it could have been a robot vacuum ad. No matter how good the material, if you don't remember what they were selling, it's just a short film. Some ad execs might argue that the effect might be subliminal, but I think they're just covering for their failure. This can, of course, be remedied by repeating the ad a zillion times, which would make me not only know what it is they're selling, but also actively avoid the product for having annoyed me. Rather, it makes me grateful not to watch much broadcast television.
Oh, and there was a football game, too. It was better than a lot of Super Bowls, but after the playoff games, there was no comparison.
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