Premature Falluation
Posted on | August 13, 2008 at 11:33 pm | 3 Comments
This is going to be a short entry today. I spent most of tonight working on a longer entry for tomorrow. It contains a special surprise inside!
I’ve been getting this weird feeling the last couple of days that fall is here even though it’s the middle of August. There’s a crispness in the air that wasn’t there last week. When I go jogging in the morning, the temperature is about the same as it was the last few weeks, but it feels colder anyway. Cooler breezes? We’re actually supposed to dip into the low 60s for the high this weekend, which I’m pretty sure is atypical. We can usually count on days being in the 80s or even 90s through the first few weeks of September at least.
What’s going on??? (Please note I’m not asking Al Gore for an explanation; that’s too cliché.)
Another sign of the impending season change is that my commute is becoming slower and more crowded the past week or so. I guess now that summer is over, no one’s on vacation. Which leads me to my Pet Peeve of the Day: Other drivers. There seems to be more stupid people on the road than ever before. Today I got stuck behind a taxi driver awkwardly positioned diagonally in a turn lane who fell asleep and missed the left turn arrow. And then when I honked and he woke up, he somehow had the car in reverse and nearly rammed into me (out of error, not rage – I could tell he was embarrassed). And it seems like every day I see at least one accident on the way to work.
Pedestrians bug me too, even though I’m frequently one of them. Today I encountered the world’s slowest street crossers while trying to make a right turn on a green light downtown. They practically dared me to turn in front of them, but I didn’t. I swear, these were all fit guys in their 30s and 40s, and they were walking across the crosswalk like they were disabled or disaffected teenagers. Maybe they were early conventioneers. At least when I’m crossing the street, I do it as fast as I can. Mostly because I don’t want to get run over.
Good thing I don’t have any rage issues to work out.
Oh get this: Speaking of the Democratic National Convention, they’ve removed all the mailboxes from the downtown area, including the ones near my office, which is like miles from the convention perimeter. I think Al Gore’s behind it somehow. How am I going to mail my bills?
Latre.
Jogged Today: Yes (@ 62°F)
Songs That Came Up On The iPod While Jogging:
- “Miss Teen Wordpower” (New Pornographers)
- “I Don’t Exist” (Buzzcocks)
- “Hurricane The Heavy Heart” (The Celebrity Pilots)
- “Gotta Moon” (Trees)
- “Road Rally” (Anne Summers)
- “Fruit Nut” (XTC)
- “Forbidden” (Richard Barone)
Poignant Search Term Of The Day That Led To This Blog: “schlongs competition”.
Orders Regarding Bodyguard
Posted on | August 12, 2008 at 11:02 pm | 1 Comment
I know I talk up the Cartoon Network/Adult Swim show The Venture Brothers quite a bit, but I just can’t help myself. This week’s episode, “Orb” (watch it here while it’s still online), was the last one of the third season before the two part season finale. I continue to be blown away by the things they are doing with this show. It started off in the first season as a cute parody of the Jonny Quest-type Saturday morning adventure cartoons, with heavy doses of other pop culture satirization thrown in, mostly from comic books, but everything is fair game. (And though it can be nasty about it, it’s nowhere near as nasty as your average South Park episode – the creators’ fondness for their source material shines through in every scene.) And then something happened. Much like the comic book Cerebus The Aardvark before Dave Sim got all crazy religious and misogynistic, what started out as a simple parody turned into an exercise in universe-building and an exploration of deeper themes. Sure, the overriding theme (according to the creators themselves) is “failure”, but at least that’s something.
The first season of the show established the main characters and gave them some adventurous things to do. The second season fleshed out the characters and their motivations and flaws and started expanding the universe and setting up the rules. The third season, now nearly over, delves deeply into the back stories of nearly everyone involved (including their ancestors), to the point where flashbacks take up a significant part of each episode. It all seems to be leading to something, probably some major revelations (Why does The Monarch hate Dr Venture so much? What secret did Dr Girlfriend tell The Monarch at the end of last season?), but it could all just as easily be a gigantic tease. After all, a fourth season is already in pre-production.
This latest episode was so densely packed with plot and zippy dialog that I had to watch it twice to fully understand everything that happened. It had some astonishing scenes set in a 19th century steampunky past, featuring Venture ancestor Colonel Lloyd Venture and a congregation of real and fictional historical luminaries (including Oscar Wilde, Eugen Sandow, Mark Twain, and Aleister Crowley) meant to satirize The League Of Extraordinary Gentleman. It’s funny and exciting, but at the same time it resonates on a deeper creative level, especially in the tragic way the flashback ends. It not only sets up the moral conflict faced by Venture bodyguard Brock Samson (voiced by the always great Patrick Warburton) later in the episode, but it also hints at the origins of The Guild Of Calamitous Intent, the mysterious organization that’s behind most of what happens in Venture World (and whose modern day leader is an ever-popular chameleonic British rock star).
As with all good storytelling, at times I find myself getting a little bit too wrapped up in the characters and my interpretations of them, which makes it all the more impactful when my expectations get turned around. From the very first episode, they’ve portrayed the main character Dr Rusty Venture as a total dick. And yet, when I saw how he not only had to live in the shadow of his more famous/more competent father, but also how that father constantly subjected him to a bizarre form of child abuse (it’s not easy being a Boy Adventurer), it became easier to have sympathy for him. That’s been a major theme of this season. And then they have this latest episode, where Dr Venture not only shows joy at reliving some good parts of his past, but also ends up making the right decision for once… and Wow. They’ve given us a more intimate bit of universe building.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, there’s Venture’s arch-enemy The Monarch, a laughably pitiable supervillain who can never do anything right. From the beginning, I kind of liked him and rooted for him to actually have some measure of success in the Evildoing Biz. I cheered every time Henchmen #21 and #24 (whom Monarch describes as a combination of “expendable and invulnerable”) made it through another ridiculous mission alive. And then, this season Monarch does actually start to become somewhat competent and successful. It could be because of his marriage to Dr Girlfriend, but it seems more to do with him finally letting out his pent-up rage towards Rusty and the Venture Family. But then it starts getting really dark. Sure, Monarch has never been shy about killing people, but to see him cold-bloodily mow down that pathetic hero Dr Dugong (as well as others hinted at but not shown on screen) was a bit too much. Not to mention the humping-the-robot scene, which was funny but disturbing. All that empathy I had built up for the character started to dwindle away. Expectations dashed again. But I still get the feeling it’s all part of the larger story the creators are trying to tell, and they’re toying with my emotions on purpose.
I know it’s wrong to take a cartoon so seriously, especially one that’s so satirical. But the creators are obviously taking it very seriously and so must I. Instead of letting the joke run dry, they’ve extended the premise by constantly bringing in new elements and new revelations, and even playing around with (*gasp*) drama! Even when an episode isn’t that funny, it’s still very exciting to see how it plays out. So, I’ll be really interested to see how this season winds up over the next two weeks (”The Family That Slays Together, Stays Together”). I suspect there will be a major confrontation between Rusty and Monarch, but I have no idea where it will lead. I’m just along for the ride. Like little Rusty Venture following his father into the unknown.
Latre.
P.S. I must give props to the fans maintaining the Venture Brothers Wikipedia entry. Very detailed stuff!
P.P.S. Oh, and go out and buy or rent the first two seasons on DVD. You won’t be sorry!
P.P.P.S. Write Stephen Colbert and tell him to come back as the voice of Mr Impossible!
P.P.P.P.S. This show is definitely not for kids.
Jogged Today: Yes (@ 60°F)
Songs That Came Up On The iPod While Jogging:
- “Reminders” (Yuji Oniki)
- “Clean, Clean” (Buggles)
- “Blue Overall” (XTC)
- “Assoholic” (54-40)
- “Linus And Lucy” (Game Theory)
- “Jonathon Fisk” (Spoon)
- “I Don’t Believe You” (Al Stewart)
The Cursed Commute
Posted on | August 11, 2008 at 7:22 pm | 11 Comments
It was a bad day on Sixth Avenue. First, a man committed suicide on the road in the wee hours of the morning. When I got up this morning, I saw on the news that the freeway was closed while they investigated. It reopened by the time I left for work, but then a horrendous crash that killed another person closed the highway again. The accident occurred right after Federal Blvd, and by the time I got down there, they were detouring all cars, including mine, off onto Federal. I could see the aftermath of the accident and it looked pretty bad. One car was practically demolished. There was another accident around the same time on Colfax Ave, where someone was also killed. That street was closed down for awhile. Earlier in the morning, there was another crash on Colfax that killed two people. The driver had been fleeing the scene of a hit and run accident. Wow. The traffic gods must’ve really been angered today.
On a lighter subject, how come no one has commented on the new header images yet? I’ve increased the number of random images at the top of the blog from 10 to 25. Most of the original 10 were from my 2007 trip to Pennsylvania and New Jersey. In the new 15, I’ve added a lot of Colorado shots, as well as a few from Mexico and from my 2008 trip to PA. All were from digital pix that I took, some as recently as last week. Keep hitting that refresh button if you want to see all of them!
Latre.
Jogged Today: Yes (@ 62°F)
Songs That Came Up On The iPod While Jogging:
- “Give Judy My Notice” (Ben Folds)
- “One Way Street” (Spottiswoode & His Enemies)
- “Canvas Of Life” (Minor Detail)
- “All My Stars Aligned” (St. Vincent)
- “Drained” (Michael Penn)
- “Waiting for the Flood” (Love and Rockets)
- “Epitaph” (Camel)
Pet Peeve of the Day: I’ve started getting a lot of calls from survey/research companies. I don’t stay on long enough to see what they’re about, but I’m sure it’s political polling. I really hate election season.
Poignant Search Term Of The Day That Led To This Blog: “how to make pants with duct tape”.
The Pirate’s Breakfast
Posted on | August 10, 2008 at 4:58 pm | 5 Comments
Movie Review Sunday! I watched two discs yesterday.
The first one was A Dog’s Breakfast. This is a little low-budget comedy made by some of the Stargate Atlantis and SG-1 people during their hiatus from the show. I think I ran across it when Netflixing the new direct-to-DVD Stargate movies. If you look at the Amazon reviews for this thing, it’s obvious it’s the funniest, most entertaining movie ever. Five stars! Well, not really. Obviously there was ballot box stuffing going on there. It’s a cute little flick about an anti-social loner whose life is disrupted when his sister and her new fiancé show up for a visit. He doesn’t much like the new guy marrying his sister, and even hears a phone conversation from the fiancé implying that he means to do his sister harm, so the brother decides to do the guy in. From there, hilarity ensues. Well, not so much hilarity, as some chuckles here and there. It’s a very family friendly movie with all “violence” off screen. If you can’t guess the ending plot “twist” about halfway into the movie, then you’re just not paying attention. (For example, the sister seems totally unconcerned when her fiancé goes missing – hmmm, whatever could that mean?) By the time the detective shows up, you don’t need to be an aficionado of mystery novels like my pal Stockholm Sue to have this one completely figured out. The acting is serviceable, as you would expect from TV veterans. From watching the special features, it sure looks like everyone involved is really, really pleased with themselves and thinks they’ve made a new Citizen Kane or Pink Panther or something. Not really. It wasn’t boring and I don’t regret the time I spent watching it, but I got it from the library (well… N got it for me from the library), so it was a freebie. It’s not something I’d want to add to my DVD collection, if I was still into adding things to my DVD collection.
Then I finally watched a Blu-Ray disc of Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, the third movie in that increasingly overstuffed franchise. I kind of liked the first movie, although I thought there was a little too much of “now these people go here, now they go there, now some split off and go there and look for this, while these others go back to the first place” type of plotting (plodding?) which drove me crazy. The second movie had even more of that, plus more characters and more places to shuffle between, and more betrayals within betrayals. The third movie ups the plot confusion content even more. After awhile, I didn’t even care that I kept nodding off, because I’m sure it wouldn’t have made any more sense had I been hyper-alert. And at nearly three hours long, there’s plenty of time to snooze away. I noticed a plot inconsistency at one point, where one character was suddenly someplace other than where we had last seen her, with no explanation. I thought I missed something, but I went back and replayed some scenes after it was all over and it still didn’t make sense. Although it’s entirely possible I was asleep during some important point of expository dialog.
The movie of course excels at the acting and the visuals and the exciting action sequences (made all the more spectacular in HD), but that all doesn’t make up for the plot and characterization. Here’s hoping that if they ever revisit this franchise again, they go back to the basics. I don’t want to see Pirates In Space.
Latre.
Pet Peeve of the Day: Still dealing with character translations in old blog entries/comments… fallout from the WordPress upgrade.
Poignant Search Term Of The Day That Led To This Blog: “in this movie aliens control godzilla”. Ummm… I’ll say “What is almost every Godzilla movie ever made”, Alex! Love the way that search was phrased.
Meta Problems
Posted on | August 9, 2008 at 7:23 pm | Comments Off
Pet Peeve of the Day: WordPress upgrades.
Every once in awhile, I like to give myself a massive headache and upgrade the Wordpress software that underlies this blog. Actually, I’ve rarely had a problem with the upgrades. It’s usually pretty smooth, but it is time consuming, especially if you’re careful. But this time, I had problems that I don’t think were my fault. I upgraded from WordPress 2.2.2 to 2.6.
The biggest issue I had is that it wiped out all the names and slugs for my post and link categories. The categories were still there, they just had blanks for names and “2-2-2-2-2-2″ etc for slugs. If there’s no name, you can’t edit the name in WordPress. So I had to use PHPMyAdmin and edit the database by hand. Luckily, I had a backup of my database, so I knew which names applied to which category id’s. If you visited my site this afternoon and saw missing categories, that’s what was going on. No idea why that part of the database conversion didn’t work, but it doesn’t look like I was the only one who had that problem with the upgrade.
The other big issue I’m having is that it didn’t do character conversion correctly. Some instances of some punctuation characters, such as single quote, double quote, ellipses, etc got changed in text to unreadable characters. It looks like it was isolated to text that was copied/pasted into blog entries or comments, and luckily not ones that were natively entered using the Wordpress editor. So now I’ve got to go back and clean up all those. If you see something unreadable in an old post or comment, that’s what’s going on.
Okay, I did have one problem that was my fault. I accidentally deleted my wp-config.php file from the server, which is a big no-no in the WordPress world, and that was the one file I didn’t have backed up on my home PC. Luckily I was able to recreate the information in it without a big hassle. And this time I’m backing it up.
Everything else looks to have transferred okay. But if you notice any other weirdnesses, or you can’t post a comment or something, let me know. Thanks.
I’m reserving judgment on the new features of WordPress 2.6 until I have time to check them out properly…
Latre.
Jogged Today: Yes (@ 62°F)
Songs That Came Up On The iPod While Jogging:
- “Laughing” (R.E.M.)
- “Strange Season” (Michael Penn)
- “Crowded Room” (XTC)
- “A Lifetime”* (Better Than Ezra)
- “I Am A Mirror” (Alan Parsons Project)
- “I’m Tired” (Field Music)
* – Interestingly, this song is about hearing an R.E.M. song. Weird that it came up on the iPod on the same day as an actual R.E.M. song.
Poignant Search Term Of The Day That Led To This Blog: “how much rain did lakewood colorado get on august 8th 2008″.
I Don’t Think Eight Is That Lucky
Posted on | August 8, 2008 at 9:57 pm | 1 Comment
Pet Peeve of the Day: Being trapped inside a Boston Market while a torrential downpour floods the streets. ‘Round about 7pm this evening, heavy rains, lightning, and high winds pelted the metro Denver area, and it seemed like we were right in the thick of it. It started right after N and I walked into the restaurant at Speer & Grant. The streets were rivers and the intersections were lakes. We watched as cars tried to escape the parking lot, only to back away and try another route. Finally, it looked like it was letting up a bit so we made our escape. A few spots were dicey, but with a running start, the Prius made it through them okay. At least we didn’t get trapped in my car like other people did. Cherry Creek was very high and running very fast, and people had to be rescued from the water. So maybe I was lucky after all. After dropping my girlfriend off at her place, I decided to avoid 6th Ave for the drive home. The Lowell Street underpass is notorious for flooding in heavy rains. I took Colfax home, which was slow going, mostly because it was a bit jammed and people were just going slow. By then the rain had stopped, though there were still big puddles here and there. The west side of town didn’t seem to get it as bad as the east side. I got home just in time to turn my automatic sprinklers off.
Why is it always feast or famine around here? Either it’s too hot and dry and the mountains catch on fire, or we get these huge downpours. My sister was stuck in a similar downpour in Greeley a couple of nights ago, which also flooded the streets and trapped people. Why can’t we have just a gentle rain every day for a little while? Why, Al Gore, why??
I got nothing else to write about today.
Latre.
Jogged Today: Yes (@ 63°F)
Songs That Came Up On The iPod While Jogging:
- “We Don’t Bite” (Classix Nouveaux)
- “Man On Fire” (Bill Nelson)
- “Wishing Well” (Mission UK)
- “Space Jungle” (The Bongos)
- “Shades of Blue” (Steve Wynn)
- “Alone, Together” (The Strokes)
- “The Shyest Time” (Apartments)
Poignant Search Term Of The Day That Led To This Blog: “i think i have fiberglass in my hands and feet”.
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