Finally grokking YouTube

So far the lure of YouTube had been minimal for me, but I’m now in some fair danger of spending hours delving into its odd little jewels. Started when I was doing research on a song that I sing (called the Braes o’ Balquhidder), and I found this 1914 Alma Gluck recording that someone had put on YouTube. What a great way to preserve old recordings! And then from there I found this adorable tour of Bothwell Castle. “And all of this is on my doorstep, I have to say!”
I’m all teary, in a smaller-world, better knowledge management, yay for the Internet kind of way.

Eye-Watering Starfields, continued

In my previous post I lamented the eye-watering starfield background of a site devoted to the parallels between the mythos of Battlestar Galactica and the Church of Latter-Day Saints. I just found another one: a website I wish I could have delved into further, but was prevented by actual nausea because of its design. It’s this: http://www.phi-phenomenon.org/buffy. This site has some pretty amazing statistical analysis of how highly each episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is rated, broken out by character, director, and several other variables.
Firefox to the rescue: Firefox has a feature that strips out most page formatting. Just choose View>Page Style>No Style.
Phew.

(I watched a lot of Buffy while I was sick. I am blogging after midnight because my sleep patterns are all messed up again because of copious but irregular sleeping through this sickness/recuperation. And while I do appreciate that I’m accumulating major dork points for having even found the Buffy stats site, I’m again reminded that there are people with dork beacons far brighter than mine, because someone had to make this site in the first place.)

Mormon Conspiracy

I would like to retract my accusation that Netflix are a bunch of slackers for not telling me when Battlestar Galactica Season Three will be available. I think something much more sinister is afoot, far above the Netflix sphere of influence. Here’s my best guess:
Something went badly wrong with the DVD-burning process, and the series master files accidentally got inscribed onto golden disks instead.[1] So now instead of getting to see it on TV, we have to wait for it to be painstakingly translated out of some Caprican hieroglypic dialect using a pair of 3-D glasses (except, of course, for the first two episodes, which will be lost when the translator takes them to show to a financial backer). Once they are all transcribed, traveling pairs of actors wearing white shirts and black ties will cycle door-to-door and act the episodes out for us.
I’m not going to link to any of the “Battlestar Galactica/Church of Latter Day Saints Parallels” sites because the ones I could find weren’t very scholarly and/or had eye-watering starfield backgrounds. But when Baltar and Starbuck ring my doorbell, I’ll know I was right.

[1] Either that, or Universal Studios are a bunch of money-grubbers who have me thinking “boycott” because they’re not going to release Season 3 until after the Battlestar movie (called “Razor”, apparently) comes out in November. I believe this solely on the basis of reviews posted on Amazon.com. I would love to have some kind of press statement from Universal confirming or denying, but their website is utterly silent on the matter. I would get Will to TiVo the movie, except that I won’t want to see it, because I haven’t seen Season Three yet. Dammit.

Thought Follower

I’m a couple years too late for this to be brilliant, but: I borrowed what I thought was the 2005 movie of Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy from Phalen. (Turned out to be the tv series, which filled my at-home-with-a-cold-Tuesday much better.)
Watching Arthur look something up in the Guide was almost exactly like watching someone poke around on Wikipedia from their Treo. (Except for the bathrobe, of course.)

La Veuve Charmante

There’s something endearing about this, in an Eleanor Lavish[1] kind of way: The homepage for Veuve Clicquot champagne is in French. It presents the viewer with a dropdown menu to enter your country and birthdate, to screen out under-legal-drinking-age kids. Once I picked “USA” it translated the page into English; I just think it’s funny that you have to speak enough French and/or be online-savvy enough to know to fill out the dropdown to get your own language.

Sadly, the endearingness wears off almost immediately: A pretentious Flash site that took forever to load, even over a T1. (I guess people think champagne sites should be pretentious. I was looking for something that reflected the champagne we drank yesterday, which tasted of flowers and joy.)

[1] “It’s very naughty of me, but I would like to set an examination paper at Dover, and turn back every tourist who couldn’t pass it.”

My Noodly Appendage is all tense.

You know how I’ve been having wrist and arm problems lately (partly due to repetitive motion/poor ergonomics, partly due to excessive cat’s cradle)? Well, now I’m mad. The marathon stats reporting session yesterday tired out/tightened up my mousing hand. I know this because I only converted 14 Pastafarians. Oh, the shame. I should have to wear two eyepatches, or something.

(I was playing the Flying Spaghetti Monster game because right after I finished my piece of business plan draft , I got a piece of spam that said “Take a break! Play a game!” and I thought “Good idea!”, but of course was not inclined to play the game proffered in the email. Yes, it’s almost 8pm. Yes, I’m going home now.)

Mutant Super Power

As you may know, I have a mutant super power: being able to identify actors from one role to another, even through full-head Star Trek alien makeup or a 40-year age difference.
A slightly alarming variation just occurred: I’m watching the 1963 film Tom Jones. Susanna York[1] stars as Sophia Western. “She looks an awful lot like Samantha Morton,” I thought. I paused the movie to check imdb to see if they are blood relations. They aren’t.
But in the 1997 miniseries The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (which I have not seen), Sophia Western is played by…Samantha Morton.

[1] There do not appear to be any pictures of Susanna York circa 1963 available on the Internet, alas, so I can’t demonstrate just how eerie this is.

Sic transit gloria(2)

Candey Hardware is going out of business.
They’ve been open since 1891.
This is disorienting. Candey Hardware has been part of my professional universe for 14 years. In fact, now that I look at the map, they are literally the center of my professional landscape.
What’s a girl to do when she needs potting soil, or some keys, or some WD-40, or a knife for birthday cake, or a decent staple gun (not like the one Staples sold me once, for which they did not carry refill staples, but I digress)?
I guess I’ll be going to the True Value at 20th & P from now on, which is inconvenient. Just barely too far for a there-and-back-at-lunchtime trip.

(You kids today and your non-walking-distance hardware superstores. Get off my lawn.)