Month: March 2005

I see by touring around Blogistan that Blogger has had some problems the last day or two, which suits me all right since I’ve been genuinely too busy to post much. I just have a couple of goofball observations for today:

:: I don’t want to know what the goal of this search was. I really don’t.

:: I really really really hate the song “The Girl from Ipanema”. No, I don’t know why.

:: I just watched the new ABC private eye/caper show Eyes, whose pilot I found immensely entertaining and witty despite the lousy title. I’ve always liked Tim Daly, and the show features the return of A.J. Langer, an actress I’ve liked since My So-Called Life (Lord, ten years since that great show aired….)

:: The West Wing started this season incredibly weakly, but it’s gradually gotten a lot better and now it’s humming right along, except for the bit where they posit a pro-choice Republican winning his party’s Presidential nomination. Well, the show’s still a fantasy.

:: Yeah, that’s it for today. Thanks for checking in, and not droning off to sleep upon reading this.

Share This Post

PZ Myers links this entertaining transcript of an interchange between TV “journalist” Joe Scarborough and one of the doctors who examined Terri Schiavo. Scarborough basically gets his head handed to him on every single matter of fact he mentions, but I found this exchange particularly annoying:

SCARBOROUGH: You were there 42 minutes, Doctor.

CRANFORD: Yes, I was.

SCARBOROUGH: You are only one doctor that’s been there. And somehow, in your 42 minutes of observing her, you have all the answers and everybody that disagrees is dead wrong, I guess.

If anyone can produce a comparable transcript wherein Scarborough displays a similar amount of skepticism toward Senator Bill Frist’s ability to diagnose Ms. Schiavo without seeing her in person at all, I will eat my hat*.

* That’s a figurative promise, as I do not own a hat.

Share This Post

Via Michael Lopez I see that some high-school kids have been caught red-handed with a secret hideaway.

Maybe they’re just re-enacting their favorite scenes from That 70s Show, and the hideaway is their “set” for Red Foreman’s basement. Yeesh.

Share This Post

Well, if the birth of Elsa Ann doesn’t give Krista cause to start showing her years — hell, any years at all past eighteen, which is when I think she basically stopped aging — I don’t know what will.

But in any event, get thee hence to congratulate new father Aaron and new mother Krista on the arrival of little Elsa. Aaron and Krista are two of the finest people it’s been my immense privelege to number among my friends, and I have little doubt that they’re going to raise that beautiful baby into a lovely woman who will have really good musical taste and will take basically zero shit from anybody.

And remember what Toby Ziegler said to his newly-born twins. Babies are all right, because they come with hats.

Share This Post

Well, this is probably a new low for the Image of the Week: mining the Sunday funnies. But I’ve come to really love Get Fuzzy, and since we share our domicile with a particularly dumb cat, today’s entry struck me squarely on the funny bone. So here it is.

Share This Post

Via DPS, I see that David Duchovny is now blogging, and he seems to type a lot like he delivers dialogue. Look at the bulk of this post: one big chunk of text, without capital letters. It’s like what Agent Mulder’s FBI reports must have read like! (I wonder if that’s the real reason they assigned Agent Scully to work with him — his superiors were tired of reading his reports.)

And if you have any doubt that this is really David Duchovny doing the blogging, well, this audio post kind of settles it.

Which brings me to my Burst of Weirdness for this week: Rosie O’Donnell’s blog. I can’t make that up, folks, but if I had to envision a Rosie O’Donnell-authored blog, I’d have envisioned a “stream-of-consciousness incomprehensibility” format, which is exactly what she delivers. (OK, I admit it, when Rosie first started her daytime talk show, I fell for her “air of niceness”, since it was really a genuinely nice little Merv Griffin-esque talk show. But then she started turning overly political and mean, and once the show was off the air, she just turned back into the weird shrieking harpy. I think she started seriously going around the bend when she had Tom Selleck on to presumably allow him to promote some new TV movie or something, and instead attacked him for being in the NRA.)

Share This Post

If it ever seemed like the Road-Runner versus Wile E. Coyote cartoons followed their own rigid internal logic, well, you’re right.

(via Warren Ellis)

Share This Post

Paul of Aurora Walking Vacation has a goofy-looking meme up here. As he explains it:

The idea is to pick a blogger who’s journal you regularly read and make up ten things that you suppose could be true about that blogger. They don’t have to actually be true. They don’t have to be supported by any specific evidence. They just have to sound plausible based on what you know about that blogger. Just, you know, be nice.

Well, that just sounds like one of those fun things that could become terribly non-fun if a certain line is crossed, and that’s right up my alley! But I’m going to change the rules slightly: Instead of doing ten things that could be true about a single blogger, I’m going to come up with one thing that might be true of ten individual bloggers. So each item here will pertain to a different blogger. Or something like that. Here goes.

1. Lynn Sislo owns a pair of pet parakeets, one of which she named “Stabat” and the other she named “Mater”.

2. Before he met Krissy, the love of John Scalzi‘s life was a girlfriend he had in junior-high school who was named “Athena”. He’s spent years trying to keep Krissy from finding this out, lest she react with rage at the source of their daughter’s name….

3. Jostein has memorized the dialogue of the entire episode of Seinfeld when Elaine dated an avowed Communist. “He can do whatever he wants, Jerry! He controls the means of production!”

[HOLY CRAP! Transcripts of every Seinfeld episode, here! Wow-za!]

4. Drew Vogel‘s real source of anger at George Lucas is his unvoiced suspicion that R2-D2 is actually based on the Daleks.

5. PZ Myers, realizing one night that his Oxford-cloth shirt and chinos wardrobe wasn’t conducive to the Deliverance lifestyle he’d been praying for, decided instead to corrupt them by teaching them about Charles Darwin, and thus found his true calling.

6. Thomas Barnett is really just some guy who sits at the end of the bar that Sean visits every day after work for a few beers before going home to the twins.

7. Kevin Drum secretly blames some unnamed female blogger for the rejection of his application for Survivor a few years back, and that’s why he never links women.

8. Darth Swank began to suspect he had found the love of his life when, while on a date with his future wife at the Red Lobster, she looked down at her plate and exclaimed in dismay, “Hey! This place cooks the fish!” Later, when she whispered “Oh, Swank-i-san” in his ear while on a moonlight stroll in downtown Indianapolis, he knew he’d found her.

9. Andrew Cory sometimes wakes up in cold sweat after having scary dreams about working in a bookstore when the final volumes of the Harry Potter, Wheel of Time, and Song of Ice and Fire series are all released on the same day.

10. The Unsinkable Mr. Jones still hasn’t realized why the women of Washington, DC don’t find his pick-up line, “Hey, wanna see my Kevin Spacey DVD collection?”, particularly enticing.

EDIT: A couple of broken links are now fixed. Oops.

Share This Post

As I reported yesterday, we did in fact watch the first installment of the new Little House on the Prairie miniseries, and we liked it quite a bit. It wasn’t at all like the original NBC series, as we expected, but it would have helped get the old show out of our heads if the folks making the new show hadn’t cast as Laura a girl who looks about as close to Melissa Gilbert as you can get. I also couldn’t help but notice that Erin Cottrell, the woman playing Caroline Ingalls, is absolutely beautiful. I very much doubt that the real Caroline Ingalls underwent the journey from Wisconsin to Kansas to build a new home with her gorgeous, lucious sand-colored hair flying free in the breeze, but you know what? I’m fine with it. Anyway, the new show’s about as good as your basic decent family made-for-TV movie — it’s not Battlestar Galactica good, but we found it enjoyable.

Anyway, I was surprised that today’s Buffalo News didn’t take advantage of the airing of the new Little House to point out the Western New York connection to the books: Charles Ingalls (“Pa”, for you laggards who aren’t up on your Ingalls-Wilder) was born in Cuba, NY. This is a very small town in Allegany County, about seventy-five miles southeast of Buffalo. While it is no longer known just where Charles Ingalls lived during the six years or so that he lived with his family in Cuba, there are still descendents of his family living in the area. That’s pretty cool.

Cuba, NY is now known not for being Charles Ingalls’s birthplace but for cheese. And it’s damned good cheese, too.

(BTW, Laura Ingalls Wilder isn’t Western New York’s only connection to Americana literature. Mark Twain lived here for a time, too.)

Share This Post

There’s a thread over on the FilmScoreMonthly message boards right now that’s partly annoying and partly amusing.

It focuses on the music for the new film Miss Congeniality 2. Now, a standard procedure in film making is to use what’s called a “temp track”. What the filmmakers do is, before the time to actually score the film arrives, they assemble a “score” of sorts from various sources: cues from older films, bits of classical music, classic rock tunes or pop standards, whatever. This temporary soundtrack — “temp track” — is used by the film’s composer to get an idea of what the producers are looking for in terms of where they want music to occur.

However, in more recent years, the “temp track” has become a lot more important: it’s not just a case of “Here’s where we want some music”, but “This is what we want the music to sound like at this spot”. And since pre-existing film music is often used for temp-tracks, this is a big reason for the general homogenization of the film music sound over the last ten or fifteen years.

So what’s the problem with Miss Congeniality 2? As the initial post in the FSM thread reveals, much of the film’s temp track actually ended up being used in the finished film, so that during the end credits, those cues from earlier films are actually listed along with the song credits for songs used in the film. (The poster over on FSM provides details.) So the creative folks behind Miss Congeniality 2 (yeah, I know, there‘s a contradiction-in-terms) have basically dispensed almost entirely with the use of new music. Talk about laziness.

And yet — it strikes me as funny, in a way, that in a world where a film like Miss Congeniality 2 even gets made, film music fans really get their dander up about the music. Wow. But then, we’re talking about a segment of fandom where it’s not uncommon to hear that a spectacularly bad movie like The Final Conflict is actually a good movie because Jerry Goldsmith wrote the music.

Share This Post