I have now spent 41 years on this planet.
I’m starting to think that the Mother Ship isn’t coming back for me….
A few random opinions on some stuff
Random stuff!
:: Hey, Pittsburgh Pirates: I’ll be fine with it if you don’t quite make the postseason. But if you find a way to get to 82 losses after the season you had up ’til a couple of weeks ago, well, bite me!
:: Having watched Clint Eastwood several times as a presenter at the Academy Awards, I could have told the Republican convention organizers that he’s an awful public speaker. I could have. Not that I would have, because I think it’s just hilarious that the two biggest memes to come out of their convention was that Paul Ryan is a big liar and that Eastwood is a cranky geezer. You wouldn’t know that their Presidential candidate even gave a speech!
:: Hotel Hell is just kind of dull. It’s Kitchen Nightmares in a hotel. That’s it. I watch it, because I still fall into the “Watch anything Gordon Ramsay does” category, but…it wouldn’t break my heart if this show went away. What’s next? Hardware Horrors, in which Ramsay helps failing hardware stores? “I can’t believe it. It’s a hardware store, and not a single Philips #1 screwdriver to be had. This is simply dreadful…but I’m going to help them turn it around!”
:: It looks like I may be adding cucumbers to my diet. I’ve never liked them before. In truth, I’m not in love with them now, either, but their presence in a salad no longer prompts me to lift it out and hand it to The Wife. Weird. It’s like I don’t even know who I am anymore!
:: Words With Friends is more fun than it should be.
:: Today, on Labor Day, it was in the high 80s here in Buffalo Niagara. I accept these temps in July, and I tolerate them when they crop up in August, but I find the high 80s unacceptable in September. I am emotionally ready for overalls weather, so where the hell is it?! GAHHH!!!
That’s about it. Now that I’ve got all that off my chest, onward and upward!
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The New Hoodickey
I’ve been resisting the whole e-reader thing for quite some time, but I have now weakened.
My resistance started faltering last summer when The Daughter used some collected birthday money to buy her very own Nook, which she loves. I thought it seemed pretty cool, and I knew that the trend toward e-books was gathering steam.
Then, for Christmas, I bought The Wife a Kindle Fire, which she still uses every single day. It’s a great gadget, and I knew that the writing was on the wall. I decided finally that I wanted some kind of similar gizmo; the only questions were when I’d be able to afford one and which one I’d get.
I had no desire for an iPad, for both reasons of price and because I just don’t want to become an Apple cultist. I also did not want a ten-inch tablet, because I find seven inches to be the preferable size for my hand. I was impressed with the Kindle Fire, but I didn’t really want to be locked into the Amazon way of doing things, and I didn’t really like how that device has no provisions for adding storage via a Micro-SD card. For similar reasons I didn’t want a Nook Tablet. So, in doing my homework, I settled on the Samsung Galaxy 2 Tab. After saving up my money for a bit, I finally had enough to buy the thing…and it’s been mine for about a month now.
And it is fantastic. I love it.
My main reason for buying it was to have my first e-reader, and for that, it’s a terrific device. It came preloaded with a Kindle app, so I can use the Kindle store for e-books without actually owning an Amazon device. I also added another e-reader app for other formats; this I use for things like Project Gutenberg downloads (such as my unabridged The Count of Monte Cristo, through which I am now making slow progress).
The tab is also great for things like Facebook and Twitter, except that I cannot seem to share items on Facebook — the ‘share’ button isn’t even there. That’s weird. And I haven’t yet figured out things like cutting-and-pasting text and URLs, so I still have that to do. I also added a comics-reading app, because reading comics on the tablet is something I wanted to try. How do comics render? Well, I had to try a couple of different comics viewers before I got to the one I like the best currently (which is called ‘Perfect Viewer’). Yes, reading comics on a screen this size is a bit tough, but I liken it to reading digest-sized comics when I was a kid.
I also love the tab as an audio device. I’ve put a lot of music on it (I added a 32GB card as soon as I bought it), and I can also stream on it from radio stations on the Web, so it’s great for listening to music and stuff when I’m working on something else, like editing a manuscript.
I have little notion of using this device for writing. The onscreen keyboard works well, but I find that I have a habit of hitting the ‘M’ key instead of the space bar, and going back to fix errors isn’t the easiest thing in the world. The thing that bugs me the most about this device? There’s a touchscreen icon at the bottom for taking a screenshot. The way I tend to hold the device, I find it hard to always avoid hitting that icon and taking a screengrab.
It’s kind of frustrating right now in the tech world for people like me. I’m innately inclined to buy a gadget and then use it until it dies, and the longer that is, the better. This is increasingly unrealistic, as newer and better gizmos hit the market all the time. I know people who buy the new thing and ditch it less than a year later when the new thing comes out; I know folks who upgrade their phones every few months. I have no idea how long I’ll be using this tablet. I hope it’s a while, though.
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Luck o’ the Irish!
It’s St. Patrick’s Day! Here’s some stuff.
Wondering about the logistics of Darth Vader quaffing a beer? I assume he uses a straw through the grates of his mask. Or maybe he just has it in his meditation chamber, once he kicks back and takes his helmet off. Who knows…of course, I can’t help thinking that maybe some of his problems in life might have been better dealt with by doing some drinking earlier on than by doing a lot of brooding and falling in with evil Chancellors and whatnot.
:: I know, I know, everybody says “St Patty’s Day”. But really, if you do this, please stop! It’s St Paddy‘s Day, not Patty. Thank you.
:: “Danny Boy” is the cliche song for St. Patrick’s Day and for any gathering of Irish or Irish-minded folk, so much so that it’s nearly impossible to hear a fresh take on the song. For that, we need three incomprehensible Muppets.
:: You can never go wrong with John Williams. Here he is, teamed up with The Chieftains, for the End Credits of the Irish-emigration-to-America saga, Far and Away. It’s a really kind of silly movie, but I like it because it’s really earnest in its silliness.
:: And finally, I am absolutely tickled that this is on YouTube at long last. The great sitcom Cheers had a recurring storyline of sorts involving the battle of pranks and stunts between the gang at Cheers and the rival bar, Gary’s Old Towne Taverne. These episodes were highlights of every season, right down to the final season, when the war was finally won. Just great stuff…and my favorite was the St. Patrick’s Day episode, in which the gang arrives at the bar to find that the bar itself has been enclosed behind a cinder-block wall by Gary and his cohorts. (With Woody inside, by the way.) Still, Sam decides to keep calm and carry on, especially when the Irish band he’s hired shows up to work its musical magic. And then…this happens.
This scene (which I consider one of the great all-time sitcom scenes) was actually written by Ken Levine and partner David Isaacs, so Levine provides the entire script of the scene here. Just great stuff. Also of interest is that the guy playing Sean, the lead singer, is actor Maurice Roeves, who also played Colonel Munroe in 1992’s The Last of the Mohicans (the Daniel Day Lewis version), and a Romulan on an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. According to Roeves’s IMDb bio, he was born in Sunderland (in England) and considers himself a Scot!
:: Need a toast for tonight? Pick one from here.
:: And later on, I shall be happy to raise a glass to each o’ ye!
May all your souls be in Heaven a full hour afore the Devil knows ye’re dead!
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What if winter came, and nobody knew?
I find it kind of ironic that I’m re-reading George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire right now, given that one of the book’s main plot points is that winter is coming to the world in the books, and in that world, each season lasts for years. This is ironic because this winter in Buffalo is the mildest I can remember — we’ve had less than three feet of snowfall for the entire season, which is unheard of. We never made it sledding in Chestnut Ridge park because there simply was never enough snow up there to do it. There were, maybe, one or two storms that came through which dumped more than a few inches, and that was it. Ho hum.
What caused the mild winter? One hypothesis that interests me is the temporary effect of a volcano that erupted in Iceland last year. I think that the winter is too atypical to be chalked up to global warming, which may make winters such as this more common for Buffalo over the next century, but to have one winter like this suddenly appear seems too sudden to me to be blamed on a worldwide change in climate. However, I do once again notice that whenever we get a big snowstorm, I can count on hearing all kinds of people saying things like “Ha! It’s snowing! Global warming, my ass!”, but when an abnormally warm weather pattern comes along, I don’t hear anybody saying things like, “Hey, that Al Gore must know what he’s talking about!” That always amuses me.
Anyway, while I like winter, I do find myself a bit excited at the prospect of spring being actually pleasant around here, and maybe coming a bit early. Generally speaking, trees in Western New York aren’t fully green until late May, and March and April are generally wet and muddy and pretty depressing, to be honest. Spring here sucks, and I think that’s a big part of why winter around here gets such a bad rap: a hard season is followed by two months of yuck. Here’s hoping!
As I write this, I have windows open at twenty minutes to midnight, and a nice cool breeze is sweeping through Casa Jaquandor. The first real airing-out of the homespace after several months of winter is always a nice feeling, isn’t it?
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All I have to say about Daylight Savings Time
Whooooosh!
Wow, is it ever windy today! In fact, this whole friggin’ winter has been really windy. We’ve had spectacularly little snow so far this year, and now that it’s March, except for the odd late-season storm that we’re known to get, we’re very likely pretty much done with snowfall for this year. According to last week’s Buffalo News, we’ve had slightly more than 34 inches so far this year. Usually we’ve received more than twice that. A lot of people are happy about this, but I’m not…I like snow, and I like going sledding and walking in the snow at Chestnut Ridge park and other such places.
What I do not like is wind. I find wind incredibly irritating, because wind can pretty much render any set of weather circumstances unpleasant. High wind in winter is awful, because it makes the cold colder and more painful…but high wind in summer is just as unpleasant, because it makes it hard to do anything fun outside then, too. I’ve been to picnics when I’ve spent more time holding stuff down than eating; riding a bike in wind is just not fun at all; walking is drudgery, and I’m sure that jogging (which I’m planning on taking up when it warms up a little) isn’t fun in the wind, either. Back when I used to go kayaking, paddling a boat into wind was a lot of shite. And just sitting in the grass and reading is tough to enjoy when the wind is having its way.
This winter has been very windy…it’s felt like excessive levels of wind at least twice a week for three months, and I think we’ve had more Wind Advisories than Winter Weather Advisories. We’ve had a lot of days where we’ve sustained wind gusts of over 50 mph. And today we’re having another one. I would gladly take twice the snow we’ve had this winter in exchange for half the wind.
Although, I must admit that overalls can be fun to wear outside when it’s really windy. If you angle yourself correctly, the bib will fill with wind, like a little sail, and it’s like you’re being tugged around by the overalls. But aside from that…wind sucks.
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For want of a cell phone battery….
I’ve seen it happen to lots of people over the years…but it had never happened to me, until last night. I dropped my cell phone on the floor, and the battery popped right off.
Problem is, this happened at Shea’s Buffalo…in our seats, in the balcony. The phone dropped to the painted concrete floor. I didn’t even see the battery go off, but it did; I picked up the phone, and lo! no battery. This was before the show, and before the people with tickets in our area started really filling in, so I had an opportunity to look for it. The battery had fallen behind a seat in the row ahead of us…but since the seats up there are stair-stepped, it was hard to reach it. Worse, it was sitting halfway into a strange metal box underneath the seat.
This, we would figure out, was a heat register.
I figured I would just get down and try to fish the thing out after the show ended, so I ignored my missing battery while Les Mieserables went on. (Post on that forthcoming…suffice it, for now, to say that I gave my cell phone battery exactly zero thought for the next three hours.) But when the show ended, I let the people around us move out, and then I was down on hands and knees, trying to reach the thing. Trouble was, I couldn’t get my hands down in there — the squeeze was too tight. And my hands are by no means massive.
Meanwhile, a couple of nice people stopped by to ask if they could help me retrieve whatever it was that I dropped. I told them it was my cell phone battery, and one of these fellows — a young man in a very nice suit and who, I must say, has the tiniest hands I’ve ever seen on a grown man — gamely reached in to try and grab the wayward battery, which was balanced precariously on the brink of the heat register. I had high hopes…until I heard the telltale ker-chunk sound, and saw the expression on his face when he looked up at me. It was the look of someone whose next words are going to be bad news, such as, “Sorry, but your company is moving to Bangladesh”, or “Sorry, but we’ve just had a recall on the steak you just ate”, or “Sorry, but your battery just fell into the heating ductwork of Buffalo’s biggest theater.”
Oh well. I couldn’t be mad at the guy; it was a tough thing, he gave it his best shot, and he got down on his knees in a nice suit. Those are all things he didn’t have to do, and the damned thing was precariously balanced there in the first place. But now, my cell phone is a brick. We’ll be looking into either a replacement battery at some point in the next couple of days, or just upgrading our phones, as our current ones are about two years old. Normally I like to keep these things going for longer than this. I’m not one of those folks who gets a newer, nicer phone every year; my approach on electronics is to buy the best thing I can afford when I need one, and then use it until it dies (or until performance becomes unacceptable). But sometimes necessity forces its hand more quickly than at other times, and this is one of those times.
I wouldn’t mind just replacing the battery, but we’ll see. I wouldn’t mind a new phone, either!
(PS: not that any readers do, but don’t call or text me for now. Because I will answer neither!)
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When cats suck
I was dreaming about…something. It was a nice dream. I think I was a Viking, or a space cowboy. Something cool like that. But a sudden, insistent electronic beeping pushed itself into my dream. I wondered what it was…and then, even though it was the wrong time period for my dream, someone said, “Is that a car alarm?” This incongruity pushed me awake. It was 3:00 am.
And the beeping was still there.
“Who the hell isn’t resetting their car alarm?” I thought, thinking the beeping was coming from outside. But it wasn’t.
Now The Wife stirred. “What’s that?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I replied. But by now I was awake enough to realize that it was coming from inside the apartment.
I staggered out toward the living room, and the beeping grew louder. The Wife stumbled behind me. When I got to the living room, I homed in the sound…just in time to see one of the cats go running away…from our cordless phone’s base. Which cat? I couldn’t tell; it was dark. But there was no doubt: The beeping was the phone’s ringtone.
I haven’t heard that phone ring in so long that I couldn’t even remember its ringtone. We turned off the ringer on our phone and let the machine do all the answering three phones and eleven years ago, so I had no hope of recognizing the phone’s ringtone on first hearing. But I picked the phone up and silenced it.
Whichever cat that was, had managed to press the “Handset Locator” button. The one that, you know, makes the phone ring, so you can find it. How did that cat do this? No idea. Which cat was it? No idea.
Took me another ninety minutes to get back to sleep, though. And I had to be up at 6:00.
Stupid cats.
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Convening the Department of Random Complaints, Grievances, and Pithy Observations
Time to get some stuff off my chest!
:: If you are standing somewhere, talking to another person or a small group of persons, please look around. If you are standing within ten feet of an entrance to the place where you are standing, please move out of the way. NOW.
:: If you run into someone you haven’t seen in quite a while in a grocery store or a place like Target, don’t stand where you are to catch up. These kinds of places almost always have some kind of cafe or seating area now; go get a cup of coffee and catch up all you want.
:: If we’re going to have a warm winter with significantly less snowfall than usual, fine. But do we have to have 50+ mph winds every second or third day?
:: I don’t think it’s too much to ask that a retail establishment hours of operation as listed on the website actually match the hours of operation that are listed on the door. Nor do I think it’s too much to ask that a retail establishment actually abide by the hours of operation that are listed on the door, if there is a discrepancy.
:: If you want me to actually read in its entirety your long list of reasons why Obama is the worst President in American history, you probably shouldn’t lead off with “#1: He FAKED the assassination of Osama bin Laden!”. Save the crazy for the end. (A bit difficult, that, as the list was ninety percent crazy.)
:: News websites that lure me in with vague headlines piss me off. I’d rather see the headline “Actor Ian Abercrombie dies” than “Seinfeld Regular Dies”.
:: There are lots of tools designed for prying stuff. A slotted screwdriver is not one of them.
:: Slotted screws suck. Why do they even exist?!
:: I love it when a piece of equipment’s casing is secured together with seven or so Philips head screws…and a single tamper-resistant TOR-X screw. Because it’s fun having to use two drivers to open the cabinet up!
:: The only Presidential candidate talking about moon bases is the whacko moral-midget Newt Gingrich. And he’s talking about them wrong, anyway.
:: I’m rapidly tiring of an apparent retail trend to put teevees displaying video content everywhere. I almost never see anyone watching the video content. All the teevees do is suck up energy.
:: I hate when I take too long to write a blog post, and am thus late in getting the pork roast into the oven. To the kitchen!