Month: December 2011

Posted on

Your Daily Dose of Christmas

I used to watch re-runs of Little House on the Prairie quite often, and I still have a soft spot for the earlier seasons of the show, before it started going way over the top in later years. It was just such an earnest show. I vaguely recall this clip, which is pretty simple: a bunch of Walnut Grovians are snowed in at the schoolhouse. I don’t recall what strife prompts Charles to soothe the savage breasts of Walnut Grove by reading from Luke chapter two, but…well, Michael Landon was the William Shatner of family dramas.

Share This Post

Posted on

Sentential Links

Linkage!!!

:: Isn’t that breathtaking? This image shows a portion of a much larger complex which currently has over a dozen stars forming inside it. Several of the stars you see here are quite young, only a few million years old.

:: Can you blame them? 76 years later, we are still seeking answers when it comes to the question of life on Mars. Curiosity is the latest tool in that scientific quest to see if we are alone in the universe. One can’t help but wonder what our 2011 astronomy textbooks will look like when they’re pulled from a dusty shelf by future generations. (I’m feeling astronomical and science-y lately. I like it when this mood comes!)

:: There are lots of people who consider themselves “old” who yet were born in the age of microwave popcorn. I maintain you can’t really consider yourself old unless you’ve cooked Jiffy Pop on the stove. (I remember Jiffy Pop…and not at all fondly. It’s terrible popcorn.)

:: It it important that you compose, without delay, our Standard Opening Narration for Bill Shatner to record. It should run about 15 seconds in length, as we discussed earlier. (Wow!)

:: These characters haven’t just lost their race, their culture, their home, and their age to this adaptation. They’ve lost what made us love them to begin with. They’ve lost their souls. (I suppose I should watch Akira one of these years….)

:: How is it, for whatever reason, ST:TNG always manages its way into the upper echelons of science fiction lists despite the weight of its first season, an unbalanced second season and a good number of lemons to boot along the way?

:: That’s what I kept thinking about, watching that little flap of flesh. It’s one of those little things in our bodies that we are never really aware of, those small working parts that flick a tiny fraction of an inch, or release a certain chemical just when it’s needed, or do a thousand little things that they do day after day. Until they don’t. Because we are delicate things. We imagine ourselves to be strong or tough or even big, but we are not. We are made up of little, bitty, breakable things, only as strong as the weakest bit, and vulnerable in ways we dare not imagine.

:: My poor kitty was alone and terrified and dying and I wasn’t there…and now he’s gone. (These posts invariably make me terribly sad. I hate when beloved cats die.)

More next week!

Share This Post

Posted on

Titans 23, Bills 17


What it feels like to be a Bills fan these days, originally uploaded by Jaquandor.

Well, I don’t know if the Buffalo Bills are still “mathematically” alive for the playoffs or not, but it really doesn’t matter, because there is zero real chance they could get there. They’d have to win out now just to finish 9-7. Their play this last month, during which they have now lost five straight, has been disastrous.

The game was blacked out here at home, so I didn’t watch it. All I have to go on is stuff I read online, via Twitter and some other places.

For instance, I read that Ryan Fitzpatrick was wildly off target again, missing a lot of open throws. I guess that’s bad, but then I look at his stats from the game — 29 of 46, 288 yards, 1 TD, 0 INT — and I think, “You know, if my quarterback is completing over sixty percent of his passes and averaging ten yards for every completion and he’s not throwing any picks, then maybe he’s not really the reason the team lost.

The reason? The defense apparently couldn’t stop anybody today, which has been the trend for weeks now. They contained the Titans’ passing game, but got lit up by the running back, as usual. There were apparently some questionable tactical decisions by the Bills’ coaches — punting in Tennessee territory, for one thing — but I don’t know much about those.

This team really needs to do two things in the offseason: make sure all the good players are under contract, and then bring in a lot more talent. And yes, it’s all about the offseason up here in Buffalo. We’re good at talking about the offseason. Hell, to look at it one way, the Bills are in the midst of a twelve-year-and-counting offseason.

Sigh.

Share This Post

Posted on

Sunday Burst of Weird and Awesome

Oddities and Awesome abound!

:: I typically don’t like the “Pretty young people stranded somewhere with killers on the loose” genre, but I may have to make an exception in this case. What a hilariously wonderful idea for a movie!

:: As a guy, I thought it was the height of innovation when some restaurants stuck a cork board in their restrooms and tacked up the day’s sports page right above the urinal so we dudes had something to read. Now comes the next generation of urinal entertainment. Sometimes I tremble to realize that yes, this is the future. Somebody thought this up instead of inventing, oh, I don’t know, supralight drive or flying cars or lightsabers.

That’s about it. I can’t really top the urinal thing, anyway….

Share This Post