thunkgeek.com

Why does anybody still buy Full Screen versions of movies? I mean, DUH, come on! Do they watch them on tiny little TVs or something, cause maybe I could understand buying a full screen if all I had was a 5 inch screen to watch my movies on. In that case why are they buying movies at all? Save up for a decent TV first. I just don’t understand it.

In case anybody wonders why the rant, I just was looking at the Amazon.com Hot 100 DVDs and the full screen version of Love Actually was on there so evidently people must still be buying full screens from distributors other than Walmart, where I would expect to find such behavior.

We rented Spirited Away at the behest of Erica’s sister. I have never been into Anime before and while I know this movie is not typical of most anime, I thought it was absolutely beautiful. I added several other Miyazaki movies to our netflix queue and I highly suspect that Spirited Away will be going onto my wishlists. I don’t really know what to say about the movie other than it effectively puts you into a different world. The art is so incredibly realistic, and yet at the same time it has that sort of clarity that is only available in animation. Certain fleeting moments have burrowed down and made themselves comfortable in my memory and I don’t think they’ll be leaving anytime soon,.. like the image of the passengers having just disembarked from the train as Chihiro looks through the window. The stations platform is alone in a vast sea and the only means of leaving the platform is a staircase that descends down into the water. The story is mythical in quality and isn’t (in my view) one of the strong points of the film. I wouldn’t watch a live action movie with the same plot. I wish I had the chance to see this movie in a theater, though, because I would love to let it reflect back from the giant screen and just wash over me. It’s one of those movies that you should watch in a quiet, darkened room. It’s also one of very few movies that both my almost-four-year-old and I can enjoy at the same time. He spends the majority of the duration of most movies jumping around the room or yelling at the top of his lungs. He sits mesmerized while watching Spirited Away, even after having seen it four or five times in as many days now. There is something to be said for truly original, well crafted art. It affects us at a very deep and very universal level.

Don’t forget how to make those burgers from earlier tonight… mmm, boy! Quarter pound patties grilled to medium, nice and juicy, peppered and splashed with a few drops of Arizona Gunslinger (a brand I wholly endorse, not only because the distributor is a customer of mine, but because it is excellent. I first tried it over eggs at a cafe in Page, AZ and was hooked from day one. I am not a big hot sauce eater, but this stuff is good on almost anything. Check it out.), topped with thick slices of cheese and crisp bacon…. Let the cheese melt over a low flame while fire grilling slices of green and red pepper and red onion sprinkled with olive oil, salt and pepper. Stack said on a toasted potato bun, top with a touch of ketchup, mayo and mustard and wash it down with Cock and Bull ginger beer. (Cock and Bull is awfully hard to find, I might add, but worth the effort. It’s usually only mentioned in connection with the Moscow Mule, a vodka drink made famous by the owner of the Cock and Bull pub. I’m not a vodka drinker myself, but the ginger beer has got to be the finest I have tasted.) Ooo, doggy, that’s a meal.

You gotta love it when the problem you’ve been trying to solve is easily explained away by reading the documentation for a version of the software that was obsoleted approximately six years ago. Yeah. So, the mail filtering system seems to be working much better now that we fixed a little issue with our load balancer slowing down every single connection to a crawl. Arrrrghhh, I hate it when documentation is lacking.

Evidently I left an entry in draft mode when I thought I had published it. Check out “Daylight Squandering Time” on April 6th.

I don’t care what anybody said about it back then or what they might say about it now,… the Gibson/Zeffirelli Hamlet is an excellent piece of work. It was released on DVD just recently and we received it from Netflix and partook of it last Friday. Now I will be the first to admit that I have very little frame of reference when I say it is excellent. I have not seen many of the other film adaptations and I have never seen the play on stage. I read it in high school and that is about as far as my scholarly experience with it goes, but I love this film. In one of the documentaries on the DVD Zeffirelli mentioned that he wanted to have a Hamlet for this generation,… for my generation, and maybe that is why it resonates with me. I was 17 when it was released and I remember seeing it in the theater. It felt like it was for me. The really amazing thing is that, even though it’s been several years since I last saw the film, when we watched it the other night it still felt like it was for me. I love how Gibson played his Hamlet as a man of action. It’s easy to believe from this portrayal that there was nothing wrong with Hamlet before his father’s murder and his mother’s betrayal and I like that about the movie. He was just a normal guy whose life got pretty seriously screwed over. He wasn’t even going to do anything big about it until his father’s ghost explained exactly how dastardly the deed had been and asked Hamlet to avenge it. Hamlet loved his parents and to see his father die and his mother in effect throw the memory of her old life to the ground and stamp on it tweaked him in a fundamental way. In grand Shakespearean tradition of course almost every move Hamlet makes turns to his own detriment, resulting in the death of many more and dearer than just the King. It’s a gut wrenching story and when I watch it I can’t tear my eyes away. I can’t think of anything they did wrong. Guess I better add that one to my wish list over at Amazon.

For the pure sake of documentation, and since I haven’t posted in a while, I’ll just mention that I am still fighting the stinking spam filtering system. I can’t believe how much of my life is spent working on this thing… tweaking here, fixing there, rebooting as the case may call for it. I wouldn’t be surprised if the total percentage got close to 50% of every 24 hour day was spent working on or thinking about this thing. It’s getting nasty.

My almost 4 year old son just ran into the room and shouted, “I did it!” We naturally responded with, “What did you do?” And of course he said, “I don’t know.”

I’m feeling manly this morning because last night I wielded both a chainsaw, that most manly of saws, and a sledgehammer, that most manly of hammers. The project during the course of which I wielded these two instruments of manliness is less manly than the instruments themselves, sadly. My mother-in-law’s mailbox was being pulled down by the honeysuckle growing up around it, so we cut down a bunch of the honeysuckle and pounded in a new mailbox post, then capped it with a shiny new mailbox. “A chainsaw to prune honeysuckle?” you might ask. Yes, indeed, I might answer. The thing was about 8 feet tall and probably close to ten feet in diameter, the interior almost a solid mass of densely packed small branches and twigs. When I got there at about 8 pm her other son-in-law had been working at it with a small handheld pruning saw for about half an hour and barely made a dent. The chainsaw made quick work of it though. It is now about 4 feet in diameter and a foot tall. The new mailbox is in and functioning. Job well done. Next she wants to use some of the extra brick left over from building her house to build a little planter around the base of the mailbox. How very manly.

I’m still attempting in vain to recover from the effects of the insidious plot to screw up the human brain that is the switch from standard time to daylight time. My dad, who was raised in Arizona and didn’t experience daylight time till moving to Utah, expresses his disdain for the time change by referring to the winter months as Daylight Squandering Time. He also gave me the kernel of story I am about to enumerate.

On The Origin of Daylight Saving Time

It’s well known that the original idea for Daylight Saving Time came from Benjamin Franklin, though the exact thought process which gave light to the concept has, until now, been locked unseen in the dark recesses of American history. It seems Franklin was good friends with the chief of a local tribe of Indians and often would go to visit him when suffering a case of “inventors block.” Apparently the chief’s point of view, being of a different cultural background than Franklin’s, often helped dislodge whatever was confusing the celebrated inventor and statesman. Two minds are better than one, after all. Upon making one of his visits, Franklin discovered the chief lying on his mat, afflicted with a winter cold, covered in a worn blanket. Seeing that the chief’s feet protruded from the bottom of the blanket, Franklin, who was versed in the medical expertise of the day as well as he was educated in the ways of science, made the comment that the chief would never get over his cold because his blanket was too short to cover and warm his feet. The chief drew himself up onto his elbows and, after surveying the condition of his feet, with a twinkle in his eye said, “Legend say when heap big chief of distant past go hunting in winter and feet get too cold at night he cut strip from bottom of blanket and sew to top to make blanket longer, then feet stay warm.”

Franklin looked at him, bewildered, and muttered something unintelligible, then said his goodbyes and left.

One morning that spring, after the chief had recovered from his cold, he went to town with his son for some supplies and found much of the population wandering around with bleary eyes and stooped backs. When he stopped one of them and asked him what the problem was the man replied, “That crazy Ben Franklin…. I don’t mind ‘Early to bed, early to rise…’, but now he’s making us set our clocks forward an hour and saying it’ll give us more time to get things done during the day!”

With the same twinkle in his eye the chief responded, “Heap smart, that Franklin.”