Archives

Jan032007

New Toy

You may have already noticed that I’ve added a new feature to Simple Tricks and Nonsense. If not, take a look at the sidebar there on the right. You’ll need to scroll down a ways to see it, past the Quick Links module; it’s a “widget” that shows which DVDs The Girlfriend and I currently have on loan from Netflix. (We share the account, so the titles you see appearing there at any given time may reflect my tastes, her tastes, or our tastes. Try to guess which is which; it’s the fun new party game that’s sweeping the nation!) Kind of fun. Naturally, the three inaugural titles are a bit, well, uninspiring, but they can’t all be Wild Strawberries, can they?

I’m looking into a similar widget that will show off random titles from my LibraryThing catalog, and I’m also planning to prune down the Quick Links so you don’t have to scroll so far to see the widgets. Eventually, I’d like to change Simple Tricks to a three-column format and divide all the stuff that’s currently in the sidebar between two columns, but I haven’t had the time (and, to be honest, I haven’t yet figured out how) to do that.

In the meantime, enjoy my latest exercise in exhibitionism. Hey, I may not get around to writing reviews anymore, but at least you won’t have to wait a whole year to find out how I’m killing my free time!

[UPDATE: As promised, I’ve cleaned house on the Quick Links. I removed a bunch of blogs and journals that I read via Bloglines, as well as some sites that don’t update very often or that have outlived their usefulness. I don’t know if anyone other than me ever uses those links, but if I’ve taken away something you valued, just let me know and I’ll put it back.]

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Jan022007

For Your Edification

We briefly digress from our regularly scheduled end-of-year rambling to offer up the following bits of potentially useful and/or entertaining information:

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Jan022007

2006 Media Wrap-Up: The Audio-Visual Edition

Morning, everyone. Hope you’ve all recovered from New Year’s Eve by now. I’m getting there, with some help from the kind folks at The Coffee Garden down the street. Anyway, as promised, here is a quick look back at all the books I read and movies I watched during the year just ended. If you care, that is. Personally, I’m always curious to see where my tastes, interests, and whims have led during the past twelve. Sometimes there are interesting patterns to be found, moments when I was obviously obsessing on particular ideas and didn’t realize it; other times, it’s all an exercise in randomness, and that’s frequently interesting, too. At least it is for me. If it is for you as well, read on…

For the convenience of my three loyal readers, I’ve decided to split this topic across two entries this year. First up: movies!

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Dec312006

Looking Back: 2006

It’s that time of year when people start taking stock of where they’ve come over the last 12 months. In these parts, crafty (meaning they’re into crafts, not that they’re treacherous) housewives have already sent out their annual holiday newsletters cataloging how many extra-curricular activities their kids excel at. Journalists are putting together their lists of the year’s top headlines. And bloggers are looking back at… whatever it is that they do.

What I mostly do, it often appears, is watch movies and vintage TV shows, and read books. Actually, I do quite a few more things than that, but these activities loom large in my daily life; they’re also the things I tend to talk most about here on this blog. In keeping with this emphasis, I’ll be posting my annual recap of all the media I consumed in 2006 within the next day or two (see the previous installments here and here, if you’re into sort of thing). However, for right now, I’d like to say a few words in general about the year that’s winding down and what I’ve managed to do with it.

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Dec302006

Saddam

So the Butcher of Baghdad is dead. I’m sure there are people toasting his execution all over the world right now. A certain occupant of the White House is probably planning a party, and maybe his dad is, too. Maybe they’re even entitled to one. I, however… I’m not sure how I feel about it.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not shedding any tears for the bastard. He deserved his ignominious and unmourned death. But so do a lot of other penny-ante dictators around the world whose sole purpose seems to be finding new depths of depravity and cruelty to visit on their people. And therein lies my deep ambivalence about Saddam Hussein’s execution. It isn’t that I don’t believe he was a bad guy. I simply have never understood what made him so uniquely bad as to justify all the energy America has expended on him over the past fifteen years.

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Dec262006

Arg! Technology Sucks!

I’m thinking today that maybe it was a bad idea for our species to progress beyond vacuum tubes. Hell, I’m so annoyed with my various gadgets that the Industrial Revolution itself is sounding questionable to me. I’m sure that 18th Century farmers, shopkeepers, and blacksmiths rarely felt the need to hurl their tools through the nearest window. But, man, I sure do. Here’s why:

  1. The keypad on my cell phone has quite suddenly stopped working. I try to scroll through my list of contacts and the buttons either stick or are doing some kind of triple-action or something, because they won’t go sequentially from one name to the next. They’re leaping across six or seven names at a time.
  2. My crappy DVD player seems to think that a request to go to the “episode selection” menu on one of my new Star Trek: The Animated Series DVD is an instruction to go to sleep. I end up with a blue screen that says “Welcome.” This is not happening on any of my other DVDs, and the disc that’s causing the problem worked fine at The Girlfriend’s house last night.
  3. I’ve been having problems accessing Bloglines so I can catch up on what’s going on in the world.
  4. And, if all that isn’t enough, the CD I’m listening to is stuck in the middle of Prince’s “Purple Rain” and making an incredibly annoying “wha-wha-wha-wha-wha” sound. Yes, I’m still a pre-iPod Luddite who listens to music in the form of shiny silver discs instead of streams of data. Given the luck I seem to be having with high-tech stuff today, I may just go shopping for a hand-cranked Victrola…

[ADDENDUM: As if I didn’t have enough evidence for my argument that we’d all be better off if the quill pen made a comeback, my ISP seems to be having trouble keeping me online today, and Gmail is apparently too colossally cool for my antiquated dial-up connection. As the bimbo character (whose name I can’t recall at the moment) frequently remarks in Singin’ in the Rain, “I caaaaaan’t stanit.”]

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Dec242006

A Major Award, and Strangers on a Train

Friday was my last day of work for 2006. Not that much actual work got done, of course. The office closed at noon, and the staff was more eager to get to the company-sponsored Christmas luncheon than to finish up any last-minute projects. I do plenty of grumbling about my job — the hours, the stress, the clients, the sometimes ridiculously bad prose that I as a proofreader must try to make readable — but when it comes down to it, I think I work for a pretty cool company. I’ve had employers in the past who thought that bringing in a couple of five-dollar Hot ‘n’ Ready pizzas from Little Caesers was the height of holiday generosity; I’ve had other employers who didn’t do a damn thing for their employees around Christmas time. My current employer, however, rented out one of the hottest new clubs in Salt Lake City and provided a catered turkey-and-ham dinner, complete with an open bar and presents for everyone on the staff — genuine, useful presents, not just gag gifts or a coupon for a free slice of pie at some greasy spoon somewhere. Yes, I thought as I sat at a table with my fellow proofreaders, I have somehow managed to land myself a good job. After years of wandering in the wilderness, I found an oasis.

Or maybe I was just feeling good from all the Irish whiskey I drank. Did I mention there was an open bar?

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Dec222006

Bennion’s Favorite Christmas Songs

I have to be honest, I’m not a big fan of Christmas music. Actually, I’m one of those grinchy-scroogey curmudgeons that develops an uncontrollable shoulder-cringe and a twitchy eyelid every year right around November 1st — which is, not coincidentally, the same day that FM100, our local “lite hits” station, begins its two-month-long all-Christmas, all-the-time format. Now, you may wonder why this affects me in the least since I don’t actually listen to FM100. It’s the principle of the thing; just knowing that there’s a radio station here in the valley that’s pumping out not just one but two whole months of every imaginable recording of “Jingle Bells”… well, it just gets to me. Especially if I have to call The Girlfriend at work and spend any time at all on hold, because her employer’s hold music is, you guessed it, provided by FM100. Gack.
I think it’s the constant, unrelenting tidal-wave effect that really does it. If the Christmas music was spread out, just a song here and there with regular music in between, maybe I could handle it. But as it is, if you find yourself exposed to it, whether on some company’s hold-music feed or trapped in a department store somewhere, it just goes on and on and on until you want to strangle the nearest elf with a popcorn-string and then pour curdled eggnog into his open, staring eyes. I find almost the entire genre completely and utterly annoying. Almost. There is a small handful of Christmas songs that I do kinda, sorta like. Because, hey, even I am not immune from sentiment and warm childhood memories and all that crap. So, for your ongoing edification on that most important of all subjects — my personal tastes — here are Bennion’s Favorite Christmas Songs, complete with a little video treat at the end…

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Dec212006

The Funniest Photo I’ve Seen in Weeks

I just ran across this while I was surfing:

The true cost of remakes.

So typical. You do good work, attain some measure of fleeting fame, then slide into semi-obscurity when the money runs out. Twenty-five years later, you think you’re about to get your big chance at a comeback only to have your legs cut out from under you by a younger, flashier model. No doubt this photo was taken somewhere on Sunset Blvd., just to make the humiliation complete.

You know, something just occurred to me: I remember many people saying 25 years ago that the Cylon Centurions of Battlestar Galactica were obviously a rip-off of the armored Imperial stormtroopers from Star Wars. I never really saw the similarity back in the day… but it seems to me that the modern “reimagined” Centurions bear more than a passing resemblance to the Super Battle Droids seen in Episodes II and III. Hmmm…

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