Thursday, March 29, 2007

*sigh*

A fifty foot robot that looks like Michael Jackson will walk around the desert outside of Las Vegas, shooting laser beams.

Perhaps another celebrity will create a fifty foot robot of themselves to walk out into the desert and fight with it.

Clocks are in the air.

The latest in the current wave of absurd alarm clocks - The Wake n' Bacon.
A frozen strip of bacon is placed in Wake n' Bacon the night before. Because there is a 10 minute cooking time, the clock is set to go off 10 minutes before the desired waking time. Once the alarm goes off, the clock it sends a signal to a small speaker to generate the alarm sound. We hacked the clock so that the signal is re-routed by a microchip that in responds by sending a signal to a relay that throws the switch to power two halogen lamps that slow-cook the bacon in about 10 minutes.
So you will be awakened by a combination of the alarm sound and the smell of cooking bacon.

Or in my case,
a combination of the alarm sound, the smell of cooking bacon and my dog going completely insane.

Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Buying the New Yorker 1986 - page 87


"Relaxing, stress-reducing lifestyle of Scandinavians."

Pardon me for a moment while I wipe the spit-take off my monitor screen.

Helo Sauna has branched out into Steam and Infrared rooms. Not using that closet or bathroom? Let these guys at it and you can pretend that it will raise the resale value of your house.


I'm not entirely sure what the Great Books Foundation is up to but they seem to have most of their energy focused on teachers.

What an adorable classified help wanted ad! It is so evocative of a bygone age. The New York Foundling Hospital is still looking for help. Here is their spiffy new web page so you can upload your resume data as a word or .pdf file. O Brave New World! (Hey! That's a great book!)

And next, "Good Used Books," not Great used books. This looks like some fellow who spent forty years selling books and happily typing up a list of what he had and mimeographing it and mailing it out to the folks on his address list. Now we have the internet and this bookseller is most likely out of business and probably dead. O Brave New World!

Onto other topics -- Bagels! In the eighties American gentiles discovered bagels. The problem was - we didn't know how to slice the damned things. The result of this (I am absolutely not kidding by the way) is that in the Midwest there was a huge upsurge in hand injuries as folks tried to slice a bagel without really knowing what they were doing. To solve this problem, the market was suddenly flooded with all sorts of bagel slicing contraptions. Like this one. You think I'm making this all up? Take a look at the address -- LaCrosse, Wisconsin.

I spent a good deal of time at the website for the Rancho de los Caballeros to try to figure out what might have changed in twenty years. What do I find? Birdwatching! They have a nice big list of all the birds that you might see here - with the most common birds in italics. Now amongst the italicised birds? The Loggerhead Shrike!

Oh, Wikipedia? Can you tell us about the Loggerhead Shrike?
These birds wait on a perch with open lines of sight and swoop down to capture prey. They mainly eat large insects, also rodents and small birds. Known in many parts as a "Butcher Bird," they impale their prey on thorns or barbed wire before eating it, since they do not have the talons of the larger birds of prey.
I'm sure that trees full of impaled rotting animals help make the golf course a lovely and evocative place.

Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Larry "Bud" Melman

Although I was aware that Calvert DeForest had passed away, but I decided to hold off posting about it until I had a chance to see the mention on The Late Show.

Here is the beginning of the very first Late Night with David Letterman - showing DeForest firmly in place in the Letterman pantheon.

This just cracks me up

Monday, March 26, 2007

Breaking Down the Nervous Detectives - Nothing's gonna harm you, not while I'm around

The Sweeney - "Ringer" - January 2, 1975

I wracked my brain for a while trying to come up with a decent follow-up to my Comic Strip Project. I wanted to find something that had the same breadth (I do enjoy the tangents). So far, I have been unable to find something that narrow. So I cast wider.

As I discussed one of the episodes of the Comic Strip, I talked for a bit about my relationship with British Action Television:
Billions of years ago when I was young I spent half a year saving up for a book called "The ITV Encyclopedia of Adventure" by Dave Rogers. In those days before the internet, it cost $55 to get an import copy of a book that had a list price of £9.95. This book was close to 600 pages of wonders, television programs that I was quite familiar with (The Avengers, The Prisoner) shows that I had heard whispers of, but had no hope of ever seeing in my lifetime (Ace of Wands, Sapphire and Steel) and finally a huge number of programs that I had never heard of. It was like an entire other world was opening up. All of these things had been made and broadcast. Millions of people had watched them. And, of course, many of them had been deleted long ago. Lost forever before I had even a clue that they existed in the first place.

My heavens I poured over that book. I learned all about Man in a Suitcase and Special Branch, and when I, through the magic of videotape trading, was able to get blurry, washed out seventh generation copies of things like Kinvig and The Adventures of Sir Lancelot, I jumped at them.
I've gotten some response from that post. Between helpful friends and strangers, Internet shopping opportunities and Digital Cable, I am filling in the gaps in my UK television experience. And from that comes this latest series of posts. I'm just going to see what I can find and post on what I can see.

So anyway. To start.

In a former life, as I was working toward my MA in Literature, I annoyed a professor by taking these lines from T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land"
But at my back from time to time I hear
The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring
Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring.
to presume that Mrs. Porter was being busted by the Flying Squad.

It's horrific the sort of havoc that a bit of useless pop culture flotsam can wreak upon a helpless eight to twelve page essay.

Anyway, the bit of pop culture flotsam that I was aware of was The Sweeney, which I had never seen until I was able to catch the first episode, a little while ago.

Considering that it was sort of odd to be actually watching something that I'd been tangentially hearing about for decades, I was thrown by two things:
  1. Hey, that's the guy who plays Inspector Morse!
  2. The bad guy in this episode is played by Brian Blessed. This made an impact for two reasons. First, he was not overacting. So much. Until the end. Second, I was watching without looking at any background, but I knew that Brian Blessed had been on a big important British cop show that I had never ever seen, so I watched with the presumption that this was it. So even though he was quite obviously the baddy, I was ready for the twist ending to the first episode to be that he was actually another member of The Sweeney who had infiltrated the bad guys and the episode would conclude with him saying something along the lines of "I'm Captain Fancy of The Sweeney and you're nicked!" These hopes were dashed when Regan shotgunned him over the side of a quarry, at which point I loaded up the IMDB and realized that I was mixed up with Z-Cars. Still, it made the ending seem a bit less cliched - It's the double bluff!
All in all, it was a so so bit of television, but it's nice to have that shoe finally drop, and a good a place as any to start this off.

Sunday, March 25, 2007

Tell me about your day...

Here's a blog with a limited shelf-life - for Does Today Suck?, BoBo C. Tiberius is taking one of those "today in history" columns and ranking all the events in terms of coolness - yesterday was deemed "Cool" even though there were more historical events that he deemed "Bad." Luckily there were a lot of "awesome" birthdays to tip the scale back to Cool. (I've often wondered about these columns and how often they are rewritten - perhaps when he comes to the end of his run (he started about a month ago) he'll find that a day that was once Cool is Cool no longer. That would suck.)

Meantime I had a cool day yesterday. It was turn off your computer day, so I started off trying to write a quick silly post about how it was turn off your computer day and... whoops! Egg on my face. I had to turn the computer on to write it! Ha ha! I am a comedy genius!

I then realized that there would probably be thousands of posts saying the exact same thing. Some of them for real. So I refrained.

To help put your day in perspective I also offer this site. It doesn't have the intended impact on the weekend, though.

Hello Stig!


From th_esaurus

Wednesday, March 21, 2007

More Moore!

One of my most popular posts seems to be this one where I have a little fun with the Marianne Moore/Edsel connection. I'm actually rather delighted by this, as I'd presumed that she was out of fashion these days.

The other day, a kindly anonymous reader left a quick note to help improve the quality of the post:
Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Marianne Moore clocks in at the Ford plant":

andante con moto.

not adante.
Fair enough, I thought, and corrected it.

Then I started to think: I copied that list from Moore's listing on Wikipedia - so I checked.
Moore, a loyal Ford owner, submitted numerous lists which included: "Silver Sword," "Thundercrest" (and "Thundercrester"), "Resilient Bullit," "Intelligent Whale," "Pastelogram," "Adante con Moto" "Varsity Stroke," and "Mongoose Civique."
Bearing in mind that Wikipedia is not where one goes for definitive answers, I went to the source, which as fate would have it was a brief article in The New Yorker:


My anonymous friend was right!

I have now updated the Wikipedia entry to reflect this!

Thursday, March 15, 2007

Reading Hitchcock - "We shan't be worried by those silly old birds tapping at the windows"

Daphne du Maurier - "The Birds" (1952)

As another project, I've long wanted to read the source material that Alfred Hitchcock chose to make into films. The start has been held up by circumstance - I'd meant to read them in order, but the Book that inspired Hitchcock's first film, Oliver Sandys' The Pleasure Garden, has been so far impossible to find.

So I decided to go in no particular order. My first choice was "The Birds," for a number of reasons:
  1. I could get my hands on it.
  2. There's going to be more by du Maurier, so I figured that if I'm going to pick semi-randomly, I should spread them out.
  3. It's a short story, so I can finish it up faster.
And off we go:

Quick plot rundown:

A rural family manages to not be eaten by birds one day longer than just about everyone else in Europe.

What's different:

The location is moved from the California coast to the coast of England. While the film implies that the bird attacks are confined to a small area, the story makes it pretty clear that all of humanity is doomed. No Tippi Hedren/Rod Taylor meet cute love story.

What's the same:

Family trapped in farmhouse, being attacked by birds. Conversations in town about birds acting odd.

Are any of the set pieces in evidence?

The scenes of thousands of birds gathering on branches and watching the humans (the story explains that the birds don't attack at this point because they're gorged with, um, food from the night before). The scene of the children running from the school to their homes.

Bottom line:

Similar in spirit, but grander in scale and more crushing in tone.

And I don't understand why I sleep all day

Reasons for finding the lack of rain in umpty-odd Bond films interesting:
  1. The political sedition of the films during the cold war. (Bond is thought to be a paragon of "Western" virtues, but almost always operates in conjunction (so to speak) with representatives of Eastern bloc countries to thwart rampant super-rich capitalists. Bond's behavior as a conspicuous consumer is also suspect - note that he prefers vodka martinis - In the 40's and 50's, drinking vodka was frowned upon as it was supposedly evidence that one was a Communist sympathizer.) So I find the potential symbolism intriguing.
  2. This also points to the deals that the film producers made with tourist bureaus for location filming. You can't show off your exotic vacation destination in the rain.
  3. It also points to the self-imposed limitations of the formula. Since the silent era, rain has been a powerful dramatic image. The idea that it takes twenty-one films for them to consider using it indicates that they are not really thinking outside the box.
  4. I wonder if it is correct - I halfway recall rain in From Russia With Love and You Only Live Twice. I still don't have the inclination to check to see if it is correct. But I probably will now. (Strangely, I have for years never been able to watch a Bond film straight through without falling asleep. I blame this on a marathon weekend that my friends and I had in High School where we watched all (and I mean all - I had a copy of the Barry Nelson "Jimmy Bond" American fifties television version and the psychedelic train wreck Woody Allen version of Casino Royale) of them in order before going out to see the latest release in theaters. It's been at least a decade since I've tried.)
  5. It amuses me.

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Listening to the World - Abkhazia

As part of my never ending quest for things to watch and listen to, I've always been fascinated with foreign broadcasting. As soon as I was able, I've used the internet to dial up stations from whatever country seemed most interesting at the time.

So to start a new project, I've decided to have a listen to a station (or perhaps two or three, depending on how it goes) representing every country on Earth. In alphabetical order.

I'll be using this list from wikipedia, which currently has 245 entries.

The first on the list is Abkhazia. According to Wikipedia, Abkhazia is
a de facto independent republic located on the eastern coast of the Black Sea, bordering the Russian Federation to the north, and within the internationally recognized borders of Georgia. Abkhazia’s independence is not recognized by any international organization or country and it is regarded as an autonomous republic of Georgia.
The capitol of Abkhazia is Sukhumi and the next time you pass through town you can listen to Radio Soma.

Radio Soma is a mostly popular music station (they seem to mix in some jazz and traditional music of the area - there also seems to be blocks of Arabian pop and Classical). There isn't a stream ("Our music stream is not original neither sophisticated - it doesn't matter to put him into the web."), but if you click onto the "what's playing" link, you will find some mp3s that show off the range of music they put out. (The classical tracks that were up when I visited were quite good as were the rest of the more obscure offerings.) You can also listen to the news in Russian and a selection of advertisements.

It is a plucky looking little station. The website claims that they are housed in an abandoned toilet. I hope there's some translation nuance that was missed there.

All in all, I think we're off to a nice start.

odd factoid of the day

Cinematical says that Casino Royale "is the first film in the 44-year history of 007 films where it actually rains."

I'll take them at their word.

Thursday, March 08, 2007

I just can't stop adding those links

Eagle eyed readers will have noticed that a new section over on the right called "I'm reading this:" was added a week or so ago.

This is the feed from the shared section of my Google Reader account.

I was a bit wary of Google Reader at first, but I am finding that it is a handy tool for someone like me who keeps on subscribing to feeds willy-nilly (my current count is 152. And I've only been using this for about three weeks.)

One of the things that I don't like is that if I want to share a feed on a separate page (like the shared post page I have here), I can't rename it. So the page is loaded down with the title "Xenius' shared items." As I tinker, other pages might be forthcoming.

In the meantime, a few more links of the old fashioned variety:

Dartman's World Of Wonder is a jolly cornucopia of pop culture artifacts. Dartman has an excellent eye and some marvellous goodies to share (as well as a couple of jaw-shatteringly awful ones).

Ephemera is an incredibly detailed blog about collecting stuff - The proprietor, Marty Weil, actually goes out looking for all different sorts of people who collect whatever you might find that was made out of paper. Riveting reading, and if you have a collection of your own, you can get some good tips on storage and so forth.

Ironic Sans is a genius. This is his blog where he chucks all of his great ideas for all to see.

Jeff Norman is also a genius, but look at what he went and did to poor innocent Game Theory songs. This makes him an evil genius. Enjoy his Architectural Dance Society.

Curt is starting up a videogame company, and when he gets a chance he likes to get in some baseball.

NEVVER has a beautiful and simple concept: every day one image and one .mp3 file. Incredible juxtapositions.

Wednesday, March 07, 2007

A horrible thought

A comment on the quick post about the Stephen Fry talking alarm clock made me think of another possible variation:

What if there was some combination of that and Clocky, the alarm clock that you have to chase around the room?

Imagine the fun! Waking up to a tiny Stephen Fry running around under your bedframe saying something like "I'm terribly sorry to be causing you such distress on this lovely morning" as you try to kill it with a tennis racket.

I might not need coffee anymore.

+++++++++++++++++++

I notice from my "Blogger Dashboard" that this is my 600th post. Considering the subject matter, I find this hilarious.

Friday, March 02, 2007

Buying the New Yorker 1986 - page 86

Oh Oxford, you do get around. Just a bit ago, I was yelling about your Berkeley Exchange and here you are with another state university doing exactly the same thing. Did you think that you would never get caught? Tsk tsk.

Unlike Berkeley, the FSU portal to the University of Oxford's Continuing Education Summer Program has been shut down - all that's left is an International Law exchange. How bittersweet. Oxford, meanwhile, has its own Program portal. The Berkeley Program now has its 2007 course list up. The Berkeley and Oxford courses are similar, and have many of the same instructors, but they aren't the same. How odd.

Oh, and once more for you students in the audience: Don't presume that you can take these courses for credit - check with your adviser before signing up.

"A Vacation from vacationers." Boy, that sounds idyllic. I picture a tiny island with a few rooms; very small, so you can get that privacy. Then I get to the website and I see that the place is humongous. And how do you get away from vacationers? Well, it's because they cater primarily to business retreats and mega-weddings. This means that while most of the guests are off at the powerpoint teleconference or the pre-rehearsal dinner cocktail spread, you get the beach all to yourself. But don't relax too much -- they have a dress code! "Tee-shirts, tank tops, faded jeans, cutoffs and wearing of casual hats is discouraged in the lobby, restaurants or public areas of the resort." I guess that after a nice time at the pool, you have to sneak back to your room through the loading dock, you damn hippie.

Inca Floats had two ads in the 1996 runthrough, here and here. Somehow this ad makes me think that at this point they were a bit more bare bones. They started business in 1976, so perhaps we'll see them just starting out with their "fly to Peru and swim for it" Galapagos package.

Inflatable Dinosaurs! Wow! I was in college in 1986 and I will vouch. These guys were in roughly every other dorm room. (Some of them were in rude positions with each other.) Another bit of nostalgia: The Nature Company! This was a chain store that bridged the gap between the "I only buy little Schmedley toys that teach him something" crowd and environmentally minded New Agers. In other words, lots of:
  • Jewelry made out of irregular shaped polished rocks
  • Cassettes and CD's of waterfalls and bird noises
  • Solar powered gimcracks with labels that explained that their purpose was to teach about pressure or friction or something, but really you bought them because you went to the store stoned and you didn't have near enough money to buy the $400 plasma globe.
  • Dinosaur memorabilia.
The Nature Company seems to have gone out of business. Extinct. As I was looking for info, I found my way to this article about how a group called The Dinosaur Society "is dedicated to revealing and correcting inaccuracies in popular dinosaurabilia."
And the society is working with the Nature Company, [founder Don] Lessem says, to improve an inflatable T. Rex. The dinosaur’s not bad, but it says on the box that it could raise itself by its arms--do push-ups, kind of--which is impossible.
The Dinosaur Society seems to have closed up as well. It's extinct too. You can still buy inflatable dinosaurs from here. My last bullet up there originally read "Dinosaur Crap." You can buy that too, but not inflatable. Yet.

Now here's another surprise. Back in the day, Blackhawk films was the big supplier of movies on 8mm film. This is for all those folks who had home movie projectors and wanted to watch something other than Aunt Tillie hanging up the laundry. When home VCRs started being prevalent, Blackhawk switched their stock over to video. This ad looks like the last gasp of that venture. This site seems to be where the stock ended up. Take a look for more details on the history of the company and you can purchase newly struck old films on lovely old Super 8.

And the idea that they felt that the New Yorker readership would be most interested in The Little Rascals, of all things, cracks me up.

I want to see that guy skiing. There are no pictures of him skiing on the website.

I'd tell you more about Sunrise County Canoe Expeditions, but you need a login to see their website.

Enjoy a beautiful music video

"My Spies" by The Late Parade.



via DoCopenhagen

Thursday, March 01, 2007

Start the day off right

With your Stephen Fry talking alarm clock. I never thought that it would be possible to have such an uncanny blend of soothing and obnoxious.

I'm going to hold out for the "Bob Dylan singing Doctor Seuss" talking alarm clock.

I understand and wish to continue

These last few months I have been kicking around the idea of starting back on the blogging train.  It hasn’t been much of an idea, but never...