Countdown and launch!
Keith Olbermann is back tonight on Current TV (which sadly only reaches 60 million homes in the US).
If you like Olbermann and would like the chance to see the new Countdown, how about pestering your cable carrier?
D.
Such a deal
Just bought a painting from my pal Kenney Mencher, who has a store on Etsy.com. I know how much Kenney’s paintings usually sell for, and believe me, these prices are a steal. Are these his harder-to-move paintings? I don’t know. All I know is, I found the one I wanted.
The Night my Dad Went Out for a Pack of Smokes
There are others I like, most notably this one and this one (which has the great title, Cohen Boybarian), but none that Karen and I could both agree on. Perhaps I’ll buy Cohen Boybarian for my office. I’ll have to sleep on it.
D.
Harmonica, RIP
Ferrets are heartbreaking. They only live five or six years and then they’re gone. Harmonica (the blond who “co-stars” in the video below — the undisputed show-stealer is our other ferret, Bueller) died in his sleep today after a brief illness that began with an infected eye.
Can’t help but think that if I weren’t sick with a cold this week, I would have been more willing to sit in the vet’s waiting room (which I was loath to do because of what I knew it would do to my lungs). Would it have made a difference? Who knows. My hunch is that these small mammals live and die depending upon their own health and genetics, and there isn’t much we can do about it. But I realize this is a self-serving theory.
Still . . . shouldn’t he have been able to fight off what seemed like a minor eye infection? Instead, he seemed to get septic fast.
I don’t think he was ever in any pain. Small comfort.
D.
A tale of two crucibles
Just a quick comment about two movies which are structurally similar, but one of which I liked well enough to watch twice, while the other made me flee the room in about 10 minutes.
They both involve obvious crucibles. I can’t recall which book on writing this came from, but the author argued that a good drama requires a crucible. The author defined this as an inescapable problem: seven shipwreck survivors on a life raft, a fortress that must repel the barbarian invasion against all odds, a ring that must be destroyed else a giant eye will, um, keep staring at us. You get the idea.
The good movie: 1408, with John Cusack starring as a writer who debunks ghost stories, and who spends a very, very long night trapped in a haunted hotel room.
The crappy movie: Devil, a story about four or five people trapped in an elevator. (Honestly, I can’t remember. Let’s see. There was Old Lady and Annoying Man and Mystery Man and Young Lady and Black Man. Okay. Five.) And one of them is the Devil!
Honestly, WTF? I remember when I saw this previewed in a theater, I asked myself, how could you possibly create a feature length movie about people trapped in an elevator and keep it interesting for all 100 minutes? Answer: they didn’t. It took me three tries to even get through the Wikipedia summary, and after doing that, all I can say is, thank heavens I didn’t waste a couple hours of my life on that.
It’s easy to say that one movie works and the other doesn’t based on “good” versus “bad” writing, but that answer is too general to be of much interest. What’s good about the good writing, and what’s bad about the bad writing? I think it comes down to characterization. Cusack’s character is interesting (if not completely likable) from the start, and he does become more and more likable as the movie proceeds. In contrast, the five people trapped on the elevator in Devil are either irritating or invisible. Please, can’t we have at least one likable or interesting character?
I’m sure it’s not the story that’s to blame. Both are legitimate crucibles. Trapped in a hotel room that is itself murderous, or trapped in an elevator with a Devil willing to kill, machts nichts. It could have been the other way around — Devil might have been the spellbinder and 1408 the snore-fest. Which tells me authors probably obsess over plot far more than they should. Characterization, that’s where it’s at.
I’d blather on but I have this summer cold, dig? And I still have a bit of a headache.
D.
toddler vids
Here’s something I pieced together from our home movies, covering babyhood to first day of Kindergarten.
Sis, who is the blonde girl?
D.
Diet update
Two months into the diet, I’m down about five pounds from my max weight. I’d like to lose another 14, so if I keep it up, I’ll be there by the year’s end.
My smart phone’s diet/fitness app (“My Fitness Pal”) charts my weight, adding a data point whenever I care to weigh in and enter my weight. It looks like a sawtooth mountain range, but the trend is generally downward.
What I think has been most helpful: bran cereals and bananas. Both are very filling, and for whatever reason, I don’t seem to tire of them. Apples work well too, but I get sick of apples after about two days.
Also important is sticking to the calorie limit (1700 per day). My Fitness Pal gives me the option to record the calories burned in aerobics (e.g. when I spend an hour on the elliptical trainer), and when I do, it essentially erases that number of calories from my daily total. Thus, if I were permitted another 800 calories for the day and burned 500 calories on the elliptical trainer, My Fitness Pal tells me that I can eat another 1300 calories. Um, no. I’m not sure why it doesn’t work that way, but for my body, it doesn’t. I see much better progress when I stick to my totals, exercise or not. I suspect the elliptical machine greatly overestimates calories burned.
I know a lot of people put great stock in drinking lots of water, but I find it doesn’t help with hunger. (Go figure!) On the other hand, I need to avoid salty snacks, because my weight almost always pops up a pound or more when I so indulge.
D.
Jesus and a tarantula
Because I’m still speechless. And tired.
and try to ignore the music on this next one. Beautiful spider, that’s all.
D.
New critters (with MORE NEW CRITTERS!)
Over the weekend, I attended an ENT meeting which had the singular benefit of being near one of our all-time favorite pet stores. I told Karen I wanted a new pet for Father’s Day, so I purchased two inexpensive snakes — snow corn snakes. Those of you who are on Facebook can see my snakes, but for now, here’s a photo I grabbed off the ‘net:
They’re a couple of mellow juveniles. Very easy to handle — a little fidgety, as are a lot of corn snakes, but not at all bitey.
Which is more than I can say for this bad girl:
(Another stolen photo. Sorry, but as I hope you’ll soon understand, we would rather not take our own photos of this one.)
This is the dreaded Singapore Blue (Cyriopagopus species) and I only say “dreaded” because I dread it, having seen it in action. The pet store manager, who is no stranger to tarantulas (having wrangled a few hundred of them for William Shatner’s breakout hit Kingdom of the Spiders), had some excitement herding the Singapore Blue into a deli container for transport. She reared, flashed her fangs, and lunged. Twice. When he finally maneuvered her into the container and put the lid on, she remained on her back for a good forty minutes.
Note: if a tarantula flips on her back, this is not a “surrender” position. Tarantulas are not dogs. If Cesar Millan mistook this for a “surrender” position, he would find soon find himself enfanged. (Which really, really ought to be a word.) The tarantula is protecting her most vulnerable aspect, her topside, and presenting her best weapon.
Everyone made it home intact. Tarantulas and snakes hate to travel, so I’m happy to report, so far so good. I’ll feel much better once everyone has had a good meal, and after the female moults successfully.
I would say that getting her out of the deli container was not nearly as exciting as getting her into the container, but frankly, I don’t know. Karen did the deed in the bathroom with the door shut.
D.
PS: And today, she received two new tarantulas, both Megaphobema robustum, for which she has had a jones for some years now.
They’re a bit skittish, as are most juvenile spiders, but their colors are just like this.
World of Warcraft, four years later
I couldn’t help myself. The craving was too strong. It’s just to sight-see, I told myself; the memories of Azeroth were as solid in my mind as real world vistas. And Best Buy, like any good pusher, was offering my first fix cheap: two dollars for a fourteen-day trial.
I had stopped playing for different reasons than Jake. My son, if I’m not mistaken*, stopped playing out of boredom. For me it was frustration. My main character, She-Witch**, had reached the level cap and had progressed about one or two levels toward the New and Improved level cap. I’ve always preferred to solo, mostly since when I team with others they get annoyed with my slowness, and soloing had become damn near impossible. I got tired of getting killed. I got tired of watching my leveling bar progress only a millimeter per hour, or something ridiculous like that.
But over the intervening years, my mind keeps returning to various areas of Azeroth and I’ve realized that I miss it. I won’t be able to take the grand tour as I would like to do, since my now-level-10 hunter troll would get her troll ass handed back to her in many of the medium-level areas, not to mention the high level areas where I imagine a passing mouse would kill her with a tail-flick. But I can still get a taste.
The environment has changed in a number of subtle ways. Jake and I were wondering how a seven-year-old game would manage to compete with the better graphics of newer MMORPGs like Rift, and the answer is, they’ve been updating it. Not only that, but they’ve been tweaking the game constantly, so towns look different, quests have changed, and whole areas are vastly modified thanks to the Cataclysm (which I haven’t bothered to learn the history of at the WoW Wiki). Oh, look, southwestern Durotar is a swamp! Cool!
Some things never changed. I still get challenged to duels by numskulls who have nothing better to do. Don’t they know that it’s all about leveling? And grinding is still grinding and will always be grinding. But even grinding has its merits. Let’s see, I could be killing quillboars by the dozens or I could be reading article after article on Cracked. It’s all a matter of what you’re in the mood for.
Will I purchase a full account once my fourteen days runs out? I don’t know yet. Maybe. It’s a question of whether I’ll get WoW out of my system, or, as with any junk physiology, WoW will have taken over my system.
D.
*He hates it when I misrepresent him in the blog.
**The name She-Bitch (not misogyny, I promise — it’s a reference to Army of Darkness) had either been taken or had been deemed inappropriate. I can’t recall which.