Who’d have thought? Not only does the Mac OS run faster and smoother on an Apple computer, but so does Vista. Popular Mechanics also claims that for a good computer, they’re actually cheaper than PCs.
Should I have twittered that?
Froguts is virtual dissection software! Yay! You can do some of it online, but we have the subscription CD, which has more you can do, including a fetal pig — you have to pay to play for the fetal pig action. But online, you can try dissecting a frog, a squid, and an owl pellet — that’s vomit not poop, right?
It’s perfect for homeschoolers, kids who are interested in biology, and grown-ups who dig surgery.
Here’s an odd companion for Froguts — The Guardian has an amazing photo gallery of portraits done before and after death by German photographer Walter Schels and his partner Beate Lakotta.
It’s very haunting stuff that raises plenty of questions about the nature of our being — and tugs at very personal emotions about your own mortality.
Here’s a pretty good video by a Mass MoCA intern who scoured the streets of my town to answer the very important but entirely diversionary question “What is art?”
Nick Abadzis’ excellent graphic novel “Laika” now has an informational Web site if you want to further explore the creation of the novel, as well as the topic it covers. Abadzis provides lots of material covering the book’s conception and creation, and also includes some of his research into the material. Cool stuff that’s another good resource for homeschoolers interested in teaching about graphic novels.
Oddee has a good rundown of the 20 Most Fascinating Prehistoric Paintings. If you have an interest in art history, why not start at the beginning, you know? And then you can cross reference this introduction to the lovely and haunting ancient form with the excellent book 30,000 Years of Art and the intense and riveting series How Art Made the World.
There are all sorts of bits and pieces on YouTube, but I felt it was my duty to point out that there is one complete Rocket Robin Hood adventure up, Part One and Part Two.
The episode itself is apparently some sort of cult item among . . . somebody . . . because of its whacked out psychedelia. I was watching a documentary about William Castle the other night and thinking out it’s fun to rediscover something odd, but it’s pretty glorious to have experienced it firsthand.
And so it is that Rocket Robin Hood is not only one of my earliest TV memories, but one of my earliest memories entirely. Bits of the show and the music have stayed with me almost 40 years, even though I haven’t seen a damn bit of it until tonight.
So it’s odd to not only see this thing again that has lurked in the shadows of my consciousness for decades, but also . . . kind of enjoy it. Seriously, I sat through all 15 minutes of it and thought it was pretty cool. Actually, in comparison to what I had suspected all these years about the quality of the show, it was downright brilliant. Well, I mean, it didn’t make a lot of sense, but it was clever in a weird way and fun and it kept my attention and I liked it a lot better than Torchwood.
Over time, I have realized that one of my least favorite types of things to write — amidst a flurry of all the things you can imagine are my least favorite types of things to write and probably are — are music reviews. I like interviewing and writing articles on musicians and my work there pretty much runs the gamut of styles, and I certainly LIKE music, but there is a certain talent in being a music critic and I’m of the mind that is the weakest link in my review chain.
Since I tend to focus on reviews of things that I like rather than things that I don’t, what ends up happening is a rather long version of “This is really neat, I really like this, it makes me tap my toes and I don’t skip past it when it comes on the iPod.”
Sometimes there are tricks to a music review, the sort of arsenal that a writer calls on to go through the motions of writing something when they’re not passionate about writing it. If there’s some sort of history or context or cultural thingamajig that’s important to the music, then that’s always fun to write about. But if it’s just a review of the CD itself, in a vacuum with nothing else to talk about . . . ugh.
So in that spirit, I just wanted to jot down some of the most interesting things that have crossed my iPod wheel lately and the stuff I keep returning to most frequently.
The Wilders — good stomping bluegrass with some stylistic diversions
Babylon Circus — another fun French band, this time with a circus background
The Decemberists — after watching the performance DVD, I find myself going back to the original songs and beyond. They’re definitely a band to be re-absorbed and continually studied.
They Might Be Giants “Cast Thee Pod to the Wind” — it’s the fun and more experimental bonus disc to “The Else” and it’s got the fabulous song “Brain Problem Situation” on it, as well as a gorgeous live version of “Metal Detector,” a catchy updated version of “I’m Your Boyfriend Now,” and the herky jerky synth number that’s the third in a trilogy, “She Was a Hotel Detective in the Future.”
Something I don’t have: this comp CD of obscure Kid Creole produced projects. But I will, I will. I already have the Cristina stuff, but Gichy Dan? Don Armando? Oddly, it doesn’t include Elbow Bones.
And then there’s this fake video for the real new Madness song, which is off an upcoming album.
So says Popular Mechanics in their article which features the coolest of cool — Michio Kaku commenting on plot points. When Michio Kaku is getting speculative about your work, you have arrived.
And if “Lost” couldn’t get cooler in my eyes, Popular Mechanics uses the article to point out the unmistakable design similarities between the Large Hadron Collider in Cern and the Dharma Initiative Insignia.
In this accompanying question-and-answer session, producer Carlton Cuse says, “we’ve been very interested in these physicists who have been building this particle accelerator in the Alps, and there’s been a lot of debate and concern about what’s going to happen when they start smashing these particles into each other. People who are following that will probably enjoy some of the stuff that we’re doing in the upcoming run of episodes.”
Here Kaku speculates on the scientific possibilities of having to move the island, which was alluded to in the last episode — in fact, Popular Mechanics does a fun service in checking the science of “Lost” each week — as well as other shows and movies.
Obviously, the show uses real theories for entertainment purposes and adjusts them if needed for fiction — I’m just appreciative that the show actually takes this stuff seriously and works for some level of credibility in this area. I haven’t seen this much attention to real detail since — quite frankly — the original “Land of the Lost.”
With warm weather comes kayaking season . . . finally. This is actually our second of spring, but our first really great one, off the Connecticut River near Brattleboro, on the Vermont/New Hampshire border.
We have realized that kayaking in nature is delightful, but we also love sites with a bit of industrialism. This one had lots of bridges — seriously, kayaking under bridges is just an awesome thing to do, a simple pleasure in which you can really appreciate what’s usually just under your wheels — as well as some old, crumbly structures. Oh, and plenty of wild life. And an old insane asylum on one side.
But it’s the signs of man that are sometimes the most excellent part of a good kayak. It provides proof that they never seem to overtake nature, which is reassuring, and also allows the mind to daydream a little that you’ve landed on the “Planet of the Apes” or escaped from a domed city or something. It’s a little bit of urban exploration in rural surroundings.
We’ve now watched 15 episodes of the show “In Treatment” and have committed our viewing to about another 20 that I have sitting on a disc. I find it’s a show I like, but do not love, a show that holds my attention even as I acknowledge that it goes for the obvious rather than original — it all boils down to a show about tawdry liaisons and betrayals, just like any other night time soap, just in a shrink’s office.
And the people are angry at each other and that is how the tension is played out, just like in any other soap, though in this arena, people are angry because they don’t think their shrink is very good at what he does. Even the shrink doesn’t think his shrink is very good at what she does and spends most of his time caterwauling about that. It’s a show about tawdry liaisons and betrayals AND bad service that you are paying good money for.
But the most important thing the show is about is a half an hour. Yep, it’s a drama that is about a half an hour. That’s a rare thing. Jana informed me that she heard the average time spent daily watching television for adult Americans is five hours. Where do people find the time for that? We certainly don’t have the time to devote ourselves to five hours a day of sitting in front of a screen passively — we’ve got shit to do!
So when we take some time each day to force ourselves to sit in front of a screen passively, we’ve got about a half an hour. Do you know how much of that time is taken up by comedies? If you refuse to waste your time on game shows or home furnishing shows, comedies are all that’s left. Until “In Treatment.”
It’s that 30 minutes that makes me love “In Treatment.” And it made me realize that I probably would like A LOT more television shows if they were a half an hour. “Heroes” for instance — it only had 30 minutes of interesting stuff an episode anyhow. I think there are probably a lot of shows like that, ones that could benefit from 30 minutes sliced off each week.
Maybe this could be a service the networks offer to get more viewers — like they did with “Torchwood” in England, cutting episodes to make them more family appropriate and airing them earlier, though I can’t imagine that enticing me to watch “Torchwood.” Still, it’s the right idea.
Yay! It’s Shuffleboil’s coming out day! It’s been in the closet now as a personal blog for a little while now, but hasn’t admitted it to anyone. Now it’s plain in your face.
But we’ll still do our creative stuff here, too. That’s what it’s for, first and foremost, a place to put our cartoons and photography and whatever else we produce that we want to stick up here . . . I’ll still put reviews that appeared in the paper up here, still put interviews as I see fit. For all two or three of you out there who are concerned, Danger Brigade will continue to bring excitement to your mundane lives, imperiled as you are by war and depression.
But most of all this will give me an opportunity, once again, to bore people with my talk about Doctor Who. This series, the 4th of the new one, is so far a delight — and Catherine Tate has quickly elevated to one of my favorite companions, she’s just funny and ballsy and a real improvement over the sidekick junk from the last two series. And Tennant has been charming and hilarious, as he was last series.
The tone of the series itself is a little more like “The Sarah Jane Adventures” so far, and that’s a good thing. It’s just a fun way to spend an hour. I was a bit fearful after the Christmas special with Kylie Minogue, which I really disliked — I don’t mind silliness, this new series has a high incidence of silliness, but it wasn’t very good silliness. It was dumb silliness.The silliness has taken a turn for the better though and I unabashedly recommend the new series to anyone who likes funny shows about space monsters.
It’s actually this series that has made me embrace what is the eternal subtext of Doctor Who — it’s not about loneliness or alienation or godhood or the triumph of science or any of the other things that have been cropping up lately. It’s about monsters from outer space trying to conquer England. Seriously, that’s the theme of the show. Lovely!
Okay, I admit it . . . I’ve been unable to take the leap and bring Shuffleboil to its full final transformation because I’ve been on a slumberous cold weather track. If a bear had a blog, he would be me. But now the warm weather has peeked — it’s freezing friggin’ wet outside, so it’s not quite there — but that was enough to wake me up and get me itchy for activity.
Then I saw the Decemberists DVD and that enlivened me to want to say something more.
What one has to do with the other is apparent only to me, but here’s the thing . . . I keep meaning to start officially blogging here rather than put up various work, but small room of winter keeps my mind enclosed and such possibilities are always a part of that “I’ll do it later” vibe in my head. Many months back, I changed the course of this site — it had started out as blogzine sorta thing, but six months of was quite enough for me in my current situation and I longed for something more casual.
After that, I laid low for a while.
But here’s where the Decemberists’ DVD comes in — it was like a loud explosion in my house, but instead of a deafening boom, it was more like a slap in the face and a scream — “Dude! Wake up, it’s time to blog!”
And so I shall!
I liked the Decemberists’ DVD so much — I don’t have much fancy to say about it other than it made me gush. For one, it gave me an opportunity to get to know the band beyond Colin Moloy, who is the most popularly covered member, being the front man at all. It’s always nice to meet creative types I would have lunch with given the opportunity and the Decemberists are certainly on that short list, any one of them (Jenny Conlee YOU ROCK!) and it makes me even more fond of the band than I already was now that I know the other people better.
And then there was the music. There’s lots of music I like, but not as much that I admire. The Decemberists are a rich organization, their work is lovely, it builds on the past and brings it together with a lovely clarity looking back. The first song I ever heard from them was “July, July” and it was an ear worm that I didn’t want to go away — the next was “Lesley Ann Levine,” which enthralled me. When I heard “The Apology Song” off “5 Songs,” I knew that these guys were different from all the rest, much like I felt when TMBG did “Ana Ng” — I had suspected as early as “Don’t Let’s Start,” but finally it was plain to see.
Anyhow, their live performance of “Mariner’s Revenge” is the finest musical moment I’ve beheld since Jana and I saw Les Negresses Vertes waaaaay back in . . . 1989, was it? Anyhow, the Decemberists doing this live is just magic, pretty enthralling. It’s the sort of performance that reminds you that not everything’s lame.
Anyhow, welcome to the new/old blog.
Recently on NPR, I heard a news item about something I never would have thought would hit national news — Constable Ted Miller of Island Pond, VT. The news item focused on a rival for Ted’s elected position — a young guy without any police experience named Bucky. He promised to go to the police academy and get some if elected. Good for Bucky!
The NPR piece went into the story of Constable Ted somewhat, but there’s only so much that can be done in three minutes and the story of Constable Ted is legendary.
Last fall, during my week-long stay in Vermont, the Caledonian Record was abuzz with the tale of Constable Ted and his legendary overzealousness in regard to handing out tickets, citations, etc. Actually, we were warned prior to going up there by a cousin, who mentioned a gung ho cop to avoid. Thankfully, we were nowhere near Island Pond (though have been there on a couple of occasions before). Apparently, the board of selectmen in that town received numerous complaints about Constable Ted and they were beginning to worry that it was keeping people from actually visiting there and, thus, hurting local business.
In response, the selectmen decided to put up a red light next to stop signs that tourists often miss and Constable Ted often caught them missing to the tune of $199. My favorite part of the article I read was this: “Selectmen are in the process of buying a marked police cruiser for Constable Miller to use. As a result, Miller will no longer receive reimbursement for the use of his private, unmarked cruiser.” I think you get the picture about Constable Ted’s scam right there.
The basic complaint has been that Miller hands out tickets too quickly, ignoring the typical elbow room for warnings. In 2004, there were 1822 warnings and 1320 tickets, in 2005 there were 1365 warnings and 996 tickets, in 2006 there were 1662 warnings and 1224 tickets. Those numbers are pretty hard to work with to find a pattern and either absolve or condemn Constable Ted, but the paper ded report that Island Pond ranks number one in traffic violation revenues in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom and number 10 in the state! They made $71,000 from traffic tickets in 2006!
Miller himself was quoted as saying, “Should have sacrificing of public safety for the sake of recreation? I won’t do it. Do I affect business? I don’t know. But I do know that it’s safer to drive in Island Pond than it ever has been.”
Island Pond is like one main street and a cross street. Read the rest of this entry »
1. They say clowns are scary but the whole damn circus is creeping me out. It’s like some Tod Browning movie transported to Italy and featured teenaged slaves instead of midgets. Yep, just like a Tod Browning movie.
2. Bob the Builder’s nothing special. Rats can use tools as good as he can. For Pete’s sake, Japanese snow monkeys are edging up on him. Don’t even mention the crows. Please.
3. The Japanese people are peeing everywhere! Or at least in their road information centers, now being shut down amidst the stink of urine. “I didn’t even know these kinds of facilities existed,” one woman commented, though 20,000 full bladders a year think she’s kind of an idiot.
A while ago, I got well over a hundred e-mails from panicking people who were on the receiving end of virus-generated spam and decided to act out some silly cyber version of “It’s A Mad Mad Mad Mad World.”
It started obliviously enough with a few weird notices from some e-mail administrator somewhere that a message sent from the very exciting sounding “Hotel La Flor de Itabo” had been purged after a virus had been detected. After that, some guy named Dale replied to the original message with this rant — if it was handwriting it would have been scrawled on a napkin: “I told you that I had viruses set aside for people who continue to send me Spam mail. I only use these viruses against perpetual spammers who do not heed my warnings. My filter has just informed me that YOU have tried to infect me with a virus. I suggest you explain yourself before something unfortunate happens. I am a real estate travel writer and if this is the way you treat people then I feel it could be worth my while to investigate and then publish. Do you really want that?”
Briefly, I thought he was talking to me directly and I shivered at the thought of his investigative prowess and publishing capabilities. Then the incredulous replies to Dale began, including one that stated simply “sent to Interpol” and another from an Australian guy telling everyone to just get a Mac. It was quickly realized by two more respondents that a virus had affected someone’s e-mail and had automatically been sending messages to the people in his address book — perhaps we should refrain from shooting out “Reply All” responses and driving each other mad.
Unfortunately, the following messages were filled with righteous indignation, typified by Andrew, stomping his virtual foot and yelling, “I demand to be removed from this mailing list NOW.” Pretty soon, the editor of “Fly Fishing in Salt Waters” magazine was asking to be left out and eventually, Spanish language requests were showing up, though with English subject lines like “NOT SEND ME ANY INFORMATION,PLEASE.” The animosity piled up with the requests. “PLEASE TAKE ME OFF THIS FRIGGING MAILING LIST” pled one subject line. The sinister sounding Karl Van Horn, whose subject line described him as a “pissed gringo,” told the virus passer “I am in country next week and just happen to have some errands in your area. I think I will stop by and have a talk with your office.” Read the rest of this entry »
