June 2006 Archives

In the bright light of morning, my previous entry on Aaron Spelling doesn't look like one of my better pieces, does it? I have to admit, I was forcing it. The ending especially... as if I could really sit through an episode of T.J. Hooker, even just to ogle one of my youthful lust objects. Right. No, the truth is that, while I've watched plenty of Spelling-produced shows over the years and felt like the man's death warranted some comment, I honestly don't have any deep fondness for any of his work. To extend that cheeseburger metaphor just a bit more, Spelling's shows are more like the McDonald's end of the cheeseburger spectrum than the huge, juicy, home-made, Jimmy Buffett "Cheeseburger in Paradise" end. They fill the hole when you're hungry, but when you really think about it, they don't even taste all that good. They were just there. Shows like Charlie's Angels and 90210 were just there, a familiar and inescapable part of the pop-cultural landscape, enjoyed but not treasured. Televisual Big Macs.

Moving on to other subjects that I actually know how to discuss, I just want to point out that I've added a couple of new links over there in the sidebar, both related to that LibraryThing Web site I told you about a couple days ago. Under "Obligatory Narcissism," you'll find a link that'll take you my personal catalog -- currently consisting of 102 entries with God-only-knows-how-many to go -- while the LibraryThing link under "Miscellaneous Coolness" will take you to the site's home page so you can set up your own account. If anyone reading this does set up an account and wants to share it here, just let me know and I'll post the link.

And finally, I noted a few days back that my photo gallery was going to be wonky for a little while in the wake of the server change. If anyone cares, here's what's happening: an upgraded version of the gallery software has been installed, which created a whole new directory in which to store my pictures. In other words, I've currently got two galleries, the old and the new. I've ported over all the stuff from the old gallery and am currently making sure everything ended up in the right folder, that all the captions and descriptions are there, that sort of thing. Also, as long as I'm puttering around, I've been uploading several all-new albums, which takes forever over my crappy dial-up connection. Long story short: I should have the new gallery up and running in a few more days. In the meantime, if you have a hankerin' to see what yours truly looks like, I believe the link over there in the sidebar will still take you to the old gallery.

Back later...

As long as I'm writing eulogies today, I may as well go for the trifecta and say a few words about TV producer Aaron Spelling, who passed away last weekend at the age of 83.

From Evanier, I've learned of another notable death: the character and voice-over actor Lennie Weinrib.

What's that, you say? The name "Lennie Weinrib" doesn't ring a bell? Don't feel bad, I didn't recognize it, either. But I certainly recognized his best-known role: the title character from the old Sid and Marty Krofft kid's show H.R. Pufnstuf. I wrote about Pufnstuf in this entry, and I won't repeat myself except to note that ol' Puffy was a pretty special part of my childhood, and I'm sorry to hear that his voice has gone silent.

Jim Baen, who founded the very successful publishing company that bears his name, passed away yesterday, some two weeks after suffering a massive stroke. Unlike many of the celebrities I eulogize here, I have no personal feelings toward or about Mr. Baen. I know his name, and I've undoubtedly read something he published, but that's about it. Still, I was moved by the tribute written for him by his friend, the science-fiction author David Drake:

Yesterday, I followed a link from Boing Boing to LibraryThing, this groovy online service that lets you catalog your book collection and share it with others. It uses tags like Flickr or MySpace, so other people can easily search your personal library and you can search theirs. Thus, the system doubles as a social network based around similar tastes in reading.

I thought the idea of a non-local catalog sounded like a good one -- I've got a database of my movie collection on my home PC, but if the house burns down, I lose the record along with the collection -- so I set up an account. So did one of my three loyal readers and frequent commenters, the inimitable Cranky Robert. Judging from the sporadic outages and slowdowns the site has been experiencing, so have a lot of other people. It's one of those full-blown Internet fads, I tell you! Everybody's doing it... so why aren't you? Seriously, if you own a lot of books, you ought to go check it out.

(Incidentally, if you go to my catalog, you will notice that I haven't yet entered very many titles. That's because, as my profile page notes, I have a huge library that's scattered all over the house, and, as with everything else I do, it requires time, of which I have precious little these days. Now that I think about it, maybe this wasn't such a good idea. The last thing I need right now is another fracking project...)

Just a quick one to note that Anne's and my friends, Brozinski and Puff Bird (better known in the Real World as Steve and Jennifer Broschinsky), welcomed their second child into the world last night. It's another boy. Steve describes him thusly:

8lbs 14oz, 21 and a half inches long. Dark hair and a Kirk Douglas cleft chin. Ian Bradford Broschinsky.

Ian Bradford... 'tis a fine Scottish name, laddie...

Hi, kids! Long time, no blog. Things have been hectic since the changeover to the new server. I am working on a couple of entries that I'll hopefully be able to finish and post later today, but in the meantime, and in honor of tonight's opening of Superman Returns, here are my results for the latest Internet quiz, "Which Superhero am I?"

Your results:

You are Spider-Man

You are intelligent, witty, a bit geeky and have great power and responsibility.

I don't know about the "great power and responsibility" bit -- unless you count my ability to hold up production on advertising materials because of a misplaced comma -- but I'll buy the rest of it. I may not be able to climb walls and swing through the concrete canyons of Manhattan, but I do share Peter Parker's affection for redheads. Still, I wonder why the quiz didn't assign me Green Lantern, given that the score is the same? I don't understand how these things work, I guess...

My three loyal readers (and you know who you are) may have noticed that Simple Tricks went unexpectedly missing yesterday. That's because my friend and webmaster Jack was switching the site over to a new server from the broken-down old ENIAC we've been using. He assures me the new hardware will be faster and more efficient on the back-end; I don't know if you folks out there in InternetLand will notice any difference, but you may see some improvements in load-up times or something.

So far, it appears that the transfer of the blog has been carried off without a hitch. Everything that was here before is here now. I think. If anyone notices any problems I haven't seen, please let me know. The photo gallery, on the other hand, is going to be in flux for a couple of days while Jack upgrades the gallery software and I perform some housekeeping I've been meaning to do for a while. I'll let you all know when that's back, too...

Oh, boy... this is bad. That dang Scalzi has just pointed me to a time-sink of unbelievable proportions: it's an online repository of old '80s-vintage music videos. Hundreds of them, enough to waste hours and hours looking at hair styles that, for some inexplicable reason, us thirtysomethings used to think were pretty cool.

Just a few of the interesting links I've run across today:

• Remember that gag video about how the iPod package would look like if it was designed by Microsoft? It seems that was created by Microsoft itself as an in-house presentation about the problems of branding and packaging. Details here.

• Courtesy of Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy Blog, a pretty nifty animated gif of Earth rising into the Martian sky. Naturally, this was assembled using photos taken by those amazing little Mars rovers. As Phil points out, "Everyone you know is in that picture, on that tiny mote of light." I find this humbling, and really, really cool.

• And finally, something that should come in most useful for you "workin' for the weekend" types, a German blog that demonstrates through photographs 1,000 methods for opening a bottle of beer. Prost!

Have a good night, folks...

Walking along Salt Lake's Main Street here in the heart of downtown, you pass a planter box about every twenty or thirty feet. These things are huge, roughly the size of the bed on a half-ton pickup truck; they each contain a mature tree and usually a nice arrangement of petunias or some other colorful but relatively low-maintenance flower. They're also capped around their perimeters with a marble ledge about a foot wide, and those ledges are at just about the perfect height for the average-height person to rest their hindquarters. So, let's review: you've got a nice, comfortable, flat surface under a shady tree in the middle of an urban area. What does that get you? That's right, a perfect invitation for those members of society who are, shall we say, less obligated to be anyplace during the day to park their behinds and watch the world go by. My lunchtime constitutional is not complete unless I get hit up for pocket change at least three times between my office and the next block up. On the days when I'm feeling generous, I pass out whatever coins and small bills I may have; other days, it annoys the hell out of me to be seeing the same old grubby hands attached to the same old pleading faces. And then there are other days...

Although tear-jerking, heart-warming tales of sick little kids are all over the Internet and I suspect at least half of them are probably bull, this one raised a genuine lump in this old curmudgeon's throat: last Friday, the Idaho chapter of the Make-a-Wish Foundation organized virtually the entire city of Boise to fulfill a young cancer victim's desire to become a superhero. Yes, a superhero, complete with a costume, a super-villain to pursue, and super-sidekicks to help out. The kid girl even got a phone call from Adam West, which is kind of silly when you think about it; a six-year-old wouldn't remember Michael Keaton's Batman -- or even Val Kilmer's or George Clooney's -- let alone West's. (West was no doubt cheaper than the other fellows.) Still, what a great gesture of community compassion. And just about the time I was ready to give up on the whole human species as a bunch of selfish jerks...

With rare exceptions, I'm not a big fan of modern architecture (or perhaps "post-modern" is the more appropriate term). Neither is Lileks, who I've quoted on this subject before. He and I are light-years apart politically speaking, but I think we share the same philosophy when it comes to buildings:

I've believed for some time now that we Americans are turning ourselves into a nation of infantilized wussies. Seriously. We worry constantly about achieving "closure" for every little childhood trauma, we dress ourselves in soft 'n' cuddly fleece outfits that resemble nothing so much as overgrown jammies (all they need are the sewn-in feet), and we're downright obsessed with safety. Cops pulling you over for not wearing your seatbelt, those obnoxious seals that have to be removed from all of our food and medicine containers, warnings on the sides of our coffee cups that the contents may be hot (duh!)... it's enough to make me want to run out and do something positively reckless, like run with the bulls in Pamplona or wave freshly baked cupcakes at the women coming out of Gold's Gym.

If you're at all interested in special effects in the movies -- the techniques that enable the Millenium Falcon to fly and Jurassic Park's T. Rex to run -- then you probably know who Dennis Muren is. If you don't, please allow me to introduce you: he was one of the founding members of Industrial Light & Magic, the company that grew out of the team George Lucas assembled to do the effects (FX) work on the original Star Wars, and he's since gone to help pioneer just about every major advancement in the field over the last three decades. He's worked on an astounding string of groundbreaking, FX-heavy movies. He's the first visual effects artist to be honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. And he also made a cameo appearance in Raiders of the Lost Ark -- he's the Nazi agent who glances out from behind the Life magazine when Indy boards the China Clipper to begin his quest for the Ark.

From the "We're living in the Future!" department comes news of a wild new "liquid armor" that could supplement or even replace the conventional Kevlar vests used by soldiers, law-enforcement officers, and anti-government wackos. At the very least, it could protect the unarmored limbs that kids are currently losing in Iraq:

"We can make thin layers of material for use on the arms and legs that remain flexible under normal motion, but become rigid and absorb energy when impacted by a ballistic threat or a knife," [researcher Norman] Wagner says.

Cool, cool stuff. Of course, science-fiction writers came up with this idea a long time ago, so this is really only a case of life imitating art... which brings me back to my usual question: where is my Skywalker-style speeder bike, anyhow?

This is pretty cool: astronomers have recorded a meteor impact on the surface of the moon. The resulting explosion appears as a white flash in the black-and-white video clip, looking to my eye like the dust speckles you frequently see in old movies. However, this particular dust speckle was about 10 inches wide, detonated with a force equal to four tons of dynamite, and left behind a crater 14 meters wide and three meters deep. Meteors hit the moon all the time, of course, but it's pretty wild that this one was actually captured on film. (Or tape, or a chip, or whatever...) Go check it out!

All right, it looks like we're going to give Andrew Sullivan a run for his money on this "view from the window" thing. We've just received some pics from Chenopup, taken from his home office:

Continuing with this whole "view from the window" motif, here's the awe-inspiring urban vista I can see from the Proofreaders' Cave, located high atop one of the glorious metropolitan skyscrapers in fabulous downtown Salt Lake City:

You may recall that last week when I posted up the photo of what I can see from my home office, I invited others to share their views as well. The Girlfriend has decided she wants a piece of that action, so here's what Anne can see from her apartment:

Sad news this afternoon for fans of fantasy art: Tim Hildebrandt, who, along with his brother Greg, was one of the most prominent book illustrators of the 1970s and '80s, died yesterday at the not-very-advanced age of 67.

As amusing as it was to learn of the former Captain Picard's fascination with female cinematic nudity, I find that I'm still looking for a reason not to re-create the famous stunt from The Poseidon Adventure (the original one, natch) by hurling myself out my office window and onto the skylight of the nightclub down below. I think I need some heavier ammunition to knock me out of my current funk... I need... the power of The Shat!

I don't know about you kids, but I've had a bad week. One of those butt-kicking, every-day-I-hit-the-ground-running, too-much-to-do-and-not-enough-time-to-do-it-in, my-pointy-haired-boss-is-talking-again-why-won't-he-just-shut-up! kind of weeks. A big, long, five-day gruel-fest of petty annoyances and mounting frustrations that has me thinking that maybe, just maybe, it was a bad idea for that primordial ooze to start assembling itself into proteins in the first place. In other words, I'm totally knackered.

So what do I need at the end of a week that has seen me gobbling Excedrin by the fist-full? If you said, "Irish whiskey," well, yes, of course, you're right, but I am still at work, so I'd better hold off on that option until later. In the meantime, how about a video clip of respected, dignified Shakespearean actor (and TV and movie star) Patrick Stewart telling an aspiring writer all about his own screenplay, a vanity piece about a man with the psychic ability to remove women's clothes? Ah, yes, that'll do nicely...

For some reason, YouTube won't allow me to embed this clip here at Simple Tricks, so you'll have to click the link above and go watch it elsewhere. Or, if that's too much trouble, you could click this one. Trust me, it's worth the effort...

As long as I'm posting photographs today, here's a real doozy (and one that I imagine will be of particular interest to Jen B., our resident geology buff, if she's out there):

In a comment on the previous entry, Cranky Robert asked if all you folks out there in InternetLand "could get a shot of the newly refurbished Bennion Scriptorium." Well, it just so happens that I have such a shot handy at the moment:

A couple weeks ago, political blogger Andrew Sullivan tried an interesting experiment: he asked his readers to send in photos of the view from their windows. The idea was to try and get more of a feel for who his readers are by seeing the places they call home. The experiment was an unqualified success -- he got hundreds of submissions, so many that his corporate overlords saw fit to gather some of the more interesting ones into an official feature on their website (for the record, my favorite shot is the final one, of a misty morning in the Hollywood Hills).

Never one to let a good Internet fad get away from me, I thought I'd do something similar and share with you what I can see from my home office. This inspiring vista is my back yard at the Bennion Compound; the shot was taken two weeks ago, on a drizzly Sunday afternoon. Click on it to get a better look. FYI, the green thing in the top foreground is an awning/gazebo thingie that shades my deck; the big grayish thing in the bottom foreground is the cover for my hot tub, currently drained and unplugged because it wasn't worth maintaining for the amount of use it actually received. As I said, inspiring, eh?

I intend to post up a photo of the view from my day-job office, too, whenever I remember to bring a camera into work. If anyone would like to share their views a la Sullivan's readers, feel free to send them along...

I don't know what frightens me more: the fact that the Internet has finally revealed its true purpose as the repository of all the pop-cultural detritus of the last 50 years; the fact that I love the first fact so damn much; or the fact that I get all warm and nostalgic over a TV commercial that I must've seen 52,432 times during my childhood:

So, federal anti-terrorism funding to New York City has been cut by 40% because the Department of Homeland Security says there are no icons or national monuments there. John Scalzi, a resident of Ohio mind you, identifies some of the "non-icons" DHS may have missed, including the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building, and the New York Stock Exchange, not to mention that big green lady out in the harbor.

Is there anyone left out there who really believes the Bush Administration knows what it's doing? Anyone?

Someone e-mailed the following list of Utah-centricities to me this afternoon and I found it sufficiently amusing to repeat here. Unfortunately for my non-Utah-native readers, it's pretty esoteric, so I've done my best to annotate the really obscure stuff. If you do live outside the Protective Dome that shields Zion from the rest of the world and you want to know what the heck a specific item is all about, just ask in the comments or e-mail me...

The bad news came down a couple weeks ago, but I was too disheartened -- and too distracted by other topics -- to comment at the time. It seems that my buddy Cheno's hunch was correct: the upcoming Star Wars DVDs will present the original theatrical versions of those landmark films in non-anamorphic letterboxed transfers based on 13-year-old masters that were originally prepared for the old analog-laserdisc releases. What that means, for those of you who aren't home-theater savvy, is that the video quality on the unf***ed-with editions will be better than your old VHS tapes, and it will probably be better than the bootleg DVDs that are floating around the 'net (which are all copies of the laserdiscs made with home-brew equipment), but it won't be up to the standards of even an average DVD release. You see, nearly all the DVDs sold these days are "anamorphically enhanced," which basically means they've been processed to look good on high-definition TVs. Without anamorphic enhancement, the theatrical versions will look pretty good but not outstandingly good on a regular TV, and lord only knows what my fancy new HDTV will make of them. Anamorphic enhancement isn't anything new or special; every major-studio DVD movie release of the last few years has got it. As many disgruntled SW fans have pointed out, the upcoming release of George Lucas' mid-90s flop Radioland Murders will have it. But not the 1977 movie that literally changed how Hollywood does business.