Wearing shirt collars turned up: cool looking, or goofy?
Something. On Television.
Some random notes on teevee I’ve been watching of late:
:: This is surely going to go down as American Idol‘s worst season. It’s been awful. Just awful. We’re down to the final 11 now, but even when they were in the final 24, it was clear that there were only two or three strong contestants and a whole bunch of singers ranging from “Meh” to “OMG please put down the microphone before you kill again”. And that was before one of the truly unique and impressive singers, Lilly Scott, was eliminated before she even got to the final 12.
If the job of those very highly paid judges is to pick the best singers before it gets to the “America votes” stage, how did they end up with such a bad crop? Were the asleep at the wheel? Is Simon Cowell trying to guarantee that Idol goes under in his last season?
:: Castle is now officially one of my favorite shows. I’m still not caught up on all episodes this season — I’m six or seven behind, but I’ll get there — but I just love this show. I love its sense of humor, the wonderful chemistry between Nathan Fillion and Stana Katic, the supporting players (both Richard Castle’s mother and daughter and the other cops at the precinct), the creative murders they solve, and so on. I also love the sly pop cultural references in the show, such as Castle dressing up as a “space cowboy” for Halloween (in the costume Fillion had worn on Firefly), and Castle’s comment when someone compares him to a teevee detective: “Well, the ones I’ve seen tend to be oddly obsessed with their sunglasses.”
Oh, and well — Nathan Fillion. And Stana Katic. Wow.
:: The Office still has lots of gonzo, funny moments, but I think the show’s definitely on the wane. It has strained credulity one too many times for me, and the character dynamics have shifted a bit too much for the show to go back to what it once was. The writers are giving it the old college try, however, by abandoning the “Jim and Michael as co-managers” thing and by giving Michael a new set of corporate foils to buck heads against.
I did like the episode in which Pam gave birth; it was a welcome return to Jim being the island of sanity in the midst of sheer craziness, and his exasperation as Pam enmeshed him in her own brand of insanity, when she is usually his sane partner in crime, was priceless. That episode also yielded what I consider to be one of the best lines in the entire run of the series, when, during a discussion of how Pam’s labor can be helped along, Kevin offers the sage advice, “Stick spicy food up her butt!”
:: Still liking The Mentalist, although not as much as Castle. I still would love to see Patrick Jane be wrong once or twice. But I could look at Robin Tunney all day!
:: As much as I loved the show in its original setting, I must admit that I have not been watching the “revamped” Scrubs. I caught a few episodes, early on, and…well, I don’t know. If they’d kept the show at Sacred Heart and rotated in new cast members every so often, as teaching-hospital shows tend to do, maybe it would have worked, but the episodes I watched struck me as a higher-quality AfterMASH.
:: Grey’s Anatomy is still all kinds of terrific. For one thing, the one character I loathed, Izzie Stevens, is gone. (I don’t like Kathering Heigl, the actress who played Stevens, either, but that’s neither here nor there.) The show’s predilection for having each character eventually sleep with each other character gets a bit odd at times, but what I really appreciate about Grey’s is the way the ensemble gets shaken up on occasion by the addition of a character here, a character there, kind of the way ER used to do things; but where ER would keep bad characters around for way too long, the Grey’s Anatomy producers seem to have a pretty good handle on getting rid of characters who just aren’t working as quickly as possible. I appreciate that. Grey’s is as strong as ever.
:: I’m almost hooked on The Big Bang Theory. Its timeslot is awful — it airs while I’m reading to the kid, so I miss a bunch of it. But what I’ve seen is awfully clever and hilarious.
:: The Amazing Race continues to entertain. The Celebrity Apprentice does too. What I’ve seen of Survivor does not. Somebody at CBS really wants to give that moron Rob from Boston a million dollars, huh? He’s been on The Amazing Race twice and Survivor three times now.
That’s about it. I’ve got some reruns to watch!
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Cool!
I’ve just discovered a cool feature in Chrome: if you do a “Find Text” search on a web page (using Ctrl-F), as you type the search text into the box, Chrome puts little markers in the scroll bar to indicate all the spots in the page where that text occurs. That’s neat! Thanks, Chrome!
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Very dangerous, the stairs….
Remember in the movie of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, when Gollum leads Frodo and Sam to the Pass of Cirith Ungol, which turns out to be a worn staircase of stone that seems to go straight up, more a miles-long ladder than a stair? I never figured that anything like that actually existed, but the other day — and forgive me, I can’t remember where I saw this first linked — I learned of the existence of the Ha’iku Stairs in Hawaii.
These stairs were built to service a low-frequency radio antenna during World War II. They’ve fallen into disrepair over the years, but they’re still there and accessible, if obviously dangerous. The wonders of this world are innumerable, aren’t they?
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Nice flying, but you still owe me a thousand credits for the dish antenna.
The Daughter and I watched Return of the Jedi last week, and I remembered a thought that’s occurred to me a number of times over the years when watching the movie. I know, we see Han Solo and Lando Calrissian do some awesome flying of the Millennium Falcon over the course of the original Star Wars trilogy, but even so, I’m not sure we always appreciate how difficult it must be to do the things with that bulky freighter that they do.
Here’s the asteroid field sequence from The Empire Strikes Back:
And here’s the Battle of Endor (just the space parts) from Return of the Jedi:
So what’s so abnormal about this? The Star Wars movies, all of ’em, are full of lots of great space flying and whatnot, from Anakin’s podracer all the way to Lando blowing up the Death Star II. So what’s so special about flying the Millennium Falcon? Well, look at the ship — where every other ship in Star Wars has its cockpit nicely centered, the Falcon does not. Its cockpit is way over on the starboard side (from the perspective of the pilot), so when flying it, ninety percent of the ship’s width is to the pilot’s left! Now, since the Falcon is originally a freighter, this probably isn’t that big a deal, when you’re using the Falcon as such — as a ship to ferry stuff from one planet to the next. But if you’re going to engage in high-speed derring-do in the middle of an asteroid field, or if you’re going to fly the ship through the superstructure of an enormous space station at very high speeds, to be able to negotiate those tight spaces while being instinctively aware of your ship’s lopsided design, well — that makes you an even more awesome pilot than anyone ever believed.
Clearly the Falcon and its class of freighters weren’t designed to be used in the way that Han Solo and Lando Calrissian use her, but as I’ve noted before, design and use aren’t the same thing.
(BTW, in ROTJ, does anybody else besides me ever feel a bit sorry for that last TIE fighter pilot? The one that follows Lando and Wedge all the way to the reactor core and then follows them almost all the way back out again before getting killed in the fireball that’s swallowing the Death Star II from within? That’s gotta suck. I’m sure that guy wasn’t even thinking of trying to shoot down the Falcon once he reached the core; he’s probably saying to himself, “Oh shit oh shit oh shit OK I did it once before I can get through this again oh shit God I wish that f***ing freighter would move his ass otherwise I could get the hell out of here wow it’s getting hot in here oh sh–!”)
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Finally
Sentential Links #199
One more to 200! Woo-hoo!
:: In the end, that’s the real problem with reboots; not only do they not really give the title a fresh start, they don’t really make it any more accessible. Within a year or two, the new continuity has its own backstory to wade through, and a few years after that, it’s just as convoluted and messy as the old one. (This is about comic book reboots and not cinematic ones, which I’m more well-versed about, but the concerns are still real.)
:: Today marks the Vernal Equinox, the date in which the amount of daytime and nighttime are equal, bringing to end the long dark winter nights, ushering longer sunlit days. It’s typically a time of celebration, but in the kingdom of Urland, the Equinox is a day of woe. Urland’s King Casiodorus long ago made a pact with Verminthrax Pejorative, the feared dragon that terrorizes his lands: The dragon will leave the kingdom in peace in exchange for a virgin sacrifice offered up twice a year on the Vernal and Autumnal Equinox. (Oddly, I wasn’t that big a fan of the movie Dragonslayer when it came out, even though I was ten and it was full of wizards and dragons and young heroes and all that stuff. The book sounds interesting, so if I ever run across a copy, maybe I’ll give it a look.)
:: Batman in the 70s wasn’t quite the always-wins, prepared-for-anything, can-take-down-God-in-unarmed-combat dude he became post-Dark Knight Returns. Nope, Batman could be taken down by you or me (provided we were, like, not completely out of shape and sitting in front of our computers). (You know, that was what tipped me from being undecided about Dark Knight Returns into not liking it. I just can’t believe that, unless he’s filled his utility belt with Kyptonite, that Batman could last eight seconds against Superman. Batman is, for all his training and toys, just a guy, and I can’t believe Superman couldn’t kick his ass with a single punch.)
:: “American Idol” is like the Academy Awards this year – a plethora of nominees but only two real contenders. (Sheesh, don’t get me started. I may not even bother watching the rest of this season. I already missed last week’s show owing to a school function for The Daughter, and I didn’t feel like I was missing anything. Thousands of people audition at all those stadiums, and the judges boil it all down to this group of crappy singers? And America votes Lilly off just before the final 12, when she was by far the most unique musician in the lot? Rubbish. I used to love me some American Idol, but my enthusiasm is seriously on the wane.)
:: I want more wood and brass in my life and less plastic. (I agree. And more light by burning flame!)
:: I’ve gone and bought a turntable. (Of course, I can’t go this retro, as I don’t have room for a turntable anywhere. But when I buy a new stereo, which will probably happen sometime later this year, it’ll still have a CD player.)
:: How else do you date a cute girl while wearing THAT shirt. (Boy Howdy….)
All for this week. Tune in next week!
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A quiz thing!
There’s a blog out there called Sunday Stealing that does nothing but provide quiz things. So I’m officially doing one of theirs. Hooray!
TEN TO START.
1. Are you single?
No.
2. Are you happy?
Kinda.
3. Are you bored?
Not right now.
4. Are you naked?
I like to keep readers, so…no. (Really! No.)
5. Are you a blonde?
No. But I was at birth, oddly enough.
6. Are you moody?
Sure.
7. Are you a lover/hater?
I hate loving. Or love hating. OK, not really, but I’m not sure what this means.
8. Are you hot/cold?
Right now I’m on the warm side. But I can cool off quickly.
9. Are you Irish?
Half. The other half is German.
10. Are you Asian?
Wow, that came out of nowhere. No, I’m not.
TEN FACTS.
1. Name:
I don’t give out my name.
2. Nicknames:
“Hey you!”
3. Birth mark:
A map of Poland, with its pre-1939 borders.
4. Hair color:
Brown, but graying rapidly. Just typing that answer saw three more gray hairs appear.
5. Natural hair color:
The one I’ve got now.
6. Eye color:
Blue or “hazel”, whatever the hell color “hazel” is.
7. Height:
5’10”.
8. Facebook Mood:
Errr…not sure.
9. Favorite color:
Purple
10. One Place to Visit:
Well, you can visit the State Penitentiary, but I don’t recommend it unless you know someone there.
TEN THINGS ABOUT YOUR LOVE LIFE.
1. Do you believe in love at first sight?
No. But I believe in overwhelming physical attraction.
2. Do you believe in soul mates?
No. That is to say, I don’t believe we only have one.
4. Have you ever been hurt emotionally?
No. Somehow I’ve spent 38 years on Planet Earth, interacting with other human beings, and never suffered the smallest emotional trauma. Yay!
5. Have you ever broken someone’s heart?
I hope not.
6. Have you ever been cheated on?
Lord, I hope not!
7. Have you ever liked someone and not told them?
Always! And never!
8. Are you afraid of commitment?
Yes. Wait until The Wife figures this out, huh?
9. Who was the last person you hugged?
The Wife.
10. Who was the last person you kissed?
The Wife.
TEN THIS OR THAT.
1. Love or lust?
Luvst. Mix ’em together, says I!
3. Cats or dogs?
Cats. Dogs are OK, but they mostly bug me.
4. A few best friends or many regular friends?
Both.
5. Television or internet?
Internet, which is where I get my teevee. We don’t even have cable. Don’t need it. (Hey, what if they had the Internet on television? They could call it WebTV! Gotta call the patent office….)
6. Chinese Or Indian?
Food? Chinese.
7. Wild night out or romantic night in?
Romantic night out, followed by a wild night in.
8. Money or Happiness?
Money, with which I will buy happiness. Yes, you can totally buy happiness. Don’t believe the naysayers!
9. Night or day?
Night.
10. MSN or phone?
Neither. E-mail or Facebook message. You can call, but I almost certainly won’t answer. I will call back, though. I just don’t answer my phone unless I’m married to you or the person I married gave birth to you.
TEN HAVE YOU EVER.
1. Been caught sneaking out?
No.
2. Been skinny dipping?
Yes, and I have photos right here. (No, I haven’t, and no photos, either. What kind of weirdo do you think I am?)
3. Stolen?
Yes, but either accidentally (as in the small item I forgot to pay for at the checkout, or the usual “swiping a box of paperclips from the office” thing).
4. Bungee jumped?
No. Would like to, however.
5. Lied to someone you liked?
Yes. I like you, after all, and some of these answers are false.
6. Finished an entire jaw breaker?
Yes. Don’t like ’em.
8. Wanted an ex bf/gf back?
No, because they were uniformly insane. (Except one, actually. She’s the one I felt bad about.)
9. Cried because you lost a pet?
Absolutely.
10. Wanted to disappear?
Absolutely.
TEN PREFERENCES IN A PARTNER.
1. Smile or eyes?
Smiling eyes.
2. Light or dark hair?
Any color hair is fine. Red’s awesome, though.
3. Hugs or kisses?
Both.
4. Shorter or taller?
No preference. If taller, not a foot taller or something like that.
5. Intelligence or attraction?
I’m attracted to intelligence.
6. Romantic or spontaneous?
Why are these mutually exclusive? Spontaneous can be romantic, can’t it?
7. Funny or serious?
Funny.
8. Older or Younger?
Either.
9. Outgoing or quiet?
Either.
10. Sweet or Bad Ass?
Sweetly bad-ass.
TEN HAVE YOU’S.
1. Ever performed in front of a large crowd?
Yes.
2. Ever done drugs?
Aside from alcohol, no.
3. Ever been pregnant?
I’m a guy, so….
5. Ever been on a cheer leading team?
No.
6. Ever Been on a dance team?
No.
7. Ever been on a sports team?
No. (Should have tried out for swim team in school, though.)
8. Ever been in a drama play/production?
I was in the orchestra for a couple of shows, does that count?
9. Ever owned a BMW, Mercedes Benz, Escalade, Hummer or Bentley?
Why would I want to? A car should get me from point A to point B, be able to play some decent music while doing so, and have enough room for my tools. And it shouldn’t cost a ridiculous amount to fill it (or require filling freakishly often).
10. Ever been in a rap video?
You gotta love these quizzes where questions come out of left field.
TEN LASTS.
1. Last phone call you made:
To dial my own voicemail. (Before that, The Wife.)
2. Last person you hung out with:
The Daughter. (Non-relatives: a friend from work.)
4. Last time you worked:
Friday.
5. Last person you tackled:
I sacked Tony Romo for an eight yard loss in the Cowboys’ third preseason game last year. (No, I didn’t. Tackling? Is there some slang definition of “tackling” I don’t know about?)
6. Last person you IM’d:
It’s been a really long time since I IM’d anyone. Odd, since I always liked IMing people as a means of communication.
8. Last person(s) you went to the movies with:
The Wife.
9. Last thing you missed:
I winged a large rock at the head of a rhinoceros, but missed. OK, no, I didn’t. I’m not sure what this means — I miss my mother in law, who died a year ago. Is that what this means?
10. Last thing you ate:
A banana. In a little bit I’m going to drink a Dr. Pepper.
That’s all she wrote!
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Arrrr!
We’ve just returned from attending the Buffalo Philharmonic’s “Family” concert this afternoon, which was “Pirate” themed. It was an entertaining hour, with musical selections that were all relevant to either pirates or the sea or both. They started with the overture to The Flying Dutchman by Wagner, although in what is starting to seem like an odd habit for the BPO, they didn’t play the entire thing. I’m not sure what all the abridging is about, over at Kleinhans, but it’s starting to get really disconcerting to hear pieces I know well and then note the absence of parts of those pieces. I suppose the rationale today was that it was a children’s program and the entire ten minute overture might lose them at some point, but…well, I’m a fan of playing the entire work, as I’ve noted previously.
Anyway, they did one of the Pirate King’s numbers from The Pirates of Penzance, a selection from Debussy’s La Mer, the storm from Peter Grimes by Britten, and a couple of welcome selections of film music: Captain Blood by Korngold and Pirates of the Caribbean, credited to Klaus Badelt but really written by Hans Zimmer. Everything was played with lots of vim and vigor by the BPO musicians (minus a few of the personnel, whom I assume must have been given days off as the orchestra has just returned from a Florida tour), even if conductor Joseph Young set some awfully brisk tempi and kept things moving a bit too quickly for my tastes. (A little rubato never hurt anyone, folks!)
The selections were played amidst a running storyline of sorts as Maestro Young tried to win over the guest “pirate crew” (played by members of a local college men’s choir) and let him onto their crew. He conducted a good portion of the program wearing an enormous tricorn on his head, which was nice. I keep waiting for the tricorn to come back into fashion, but I think it may be done.
Anyhow, it was an enjoyable hour at the BPO. These family concerts are fun. Now, if I could get the Resident Kid to get more enthusiastic about them! But Rome wasn’t built in a day, and I remember that when I was her age, going to orchestra concerts wasn’t my favorite thing to do, either. Took me a few years of playing an instrument before I decided I loved the idea of concert-going.
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So much awesome in one place!
I saw this photo on Flickr. I have no idea what the story is behind this, but it appears to be a bunch of people setting out on a long excursion involving bicycles. For some reason, they’re all wearing overalls. Bikes and overalls? Never thought to mix the two, but hey, why not? Cool!
(BTW, looking a bit through this fellow’s photostream, it appears he’s been to a lot of amazing places. I love travel photography, and there’s some awfully nice shooting going on here.)