Category Archives: Assorted Ramblings

Clean-up Efforts Continue

After a bit of procrastination, my efforts to Disenclutter™ the place are getting back into gear. I’ve been using Freecycle for a year or two, but that’s sometimes a little hit or miss, so it’s time to get creative.
Some of the stuff I’m getting rid of is a bit fannish, so for those items I’m trying a more focused effort. I’ve had one reply already from that effort, which is pretty good when you consider that particular section of the site generally gets just one or two visits per week.
The newest effort is an attempt to thin out some of the books I no longer read. Borrowing an idea from Marauder, I’ve signed up with the Paperback Swap site on the theory that I’ll be able to trade books I no longer read for books that someone else no longer reads. The first book goes out tomorrow, but I think I’ll wait until the clutter level has been reduced a bit more before adding anything new.

An Explosion of Bad Cooking

I’ve been having some trouble getting to sleep the past few weeks. Once I fall asleep, I sleep wonderfully, but actually getting to sleep has been difficult. As you might suspect, this tends to lead to a certain degree of difficulty in getting up the next morning, which means rushing through Wylie’s morning walk, eating a very quick breakfast, and praying that there haven’t been any accidents between home and the office. (Even during the summer, someone having the most minor of mechanical difficulties can back traffic up for 20 miles. During the school year, it’s a good day when the sea of brake lights only goes back 20 miles.)
So on Thursday night I decided to plan ahead and made a few hard-boiled eggs. Not the most filling breakfast, but combine it with a bit of milk and perhaps a granola bar and it’ll do the trick.
A couple hours later, just as I was getting ready to go to bed, there was an explosion in the kitchen. While I was trying to figure out what the heck was going on, another egg exploded, this time knocking the lid off the pan.
I’ll bet you didn’t know eggs would explode that way either, did you?

My Newfound Respect for Paris Hilton

There’s a phrase I never expected to find myself using.
As you might guess from a previous post or two, I’m generally of the opinion that Paris Hilton is just another drunken party-girl. (To be fair, the magnifying glass lens of tabloid sensationalism might leave some people with a less than entirely favorable impression of me too.)
But despite her rather shameless public foibles, recent events have caused me to raise my opinion of Ms. Hilton by a notch or two.
Not being much of a TV watcher, I missed the ad (now viewable on YouTube), but apparently John McCain released an ad drawing a negative comparison between Barack Obama and party girls Britney Spears and Paris Hilton.
So now comes the part where I end up with some respect for Paris Hilton.
Sometime in the past 24 hours, Paris Hilton released a short video responding to the McCain ad. It’s brilliant! Now obviously there were a few other people involved in writing and producing the video, but the fact that she not only responded to being included in McCain’s ad but also went along with poking fun at her own celebrity status… I have to respect her for that.
But there’s more. This short (1 minute, 51 seconds) video also includes the Hilton campaign’s proposed energy policy. Frankly, by addressing both long and short term needs, it makes a hell of a lot more sense than anything that’s come from the two major political parties in recent memory. (The fact that I generally don’t care for Paris, but like her plan more than those proposed by the Republicrats and Democans, should give you some idea of the esteem in which I hold those two groups. (If you’re not sure how high that is, I suggest you get some mining equipment. A shovel won’t get you low enough.))

I’m not entirely certain “President Paris” would be a good idea, but given the alternatives, maybe she could be Zaphod’s running mate?

Pop Goes the Icon

Marauder has been lamenting that his children won’t have the same appreciation he does for our generation’s cultural icons. And he’s right. Because it’s so well established in the overall pop culture, the line “Luke, I am your father” doesn’t have nearly the same impact as 28 years ago. One day Evangeline and Rachel will get to see Spaceballs and Darth Helmet’s revelation that “I am your father’s brother’s nephew’s cousin’s former roommate” will seem completely unoriginal (as opposed to the amusingly cliché status it enjoyed in 1987).
This got me thinking, what “iconic moments” were already part of the background when I grew up?
One that immediately came to my mind was the knowledge that “Rosebud” was a sled. I saw the movie a year or two back, but I’d known about the sled for a couple decades. Citizen Kane came out in 1941, so that wasn’t just part of the background for me, it was part of the cultural background for my parents too.
Another movie ending which was already part of the pop-culture background while I was growing up centered around the lines

Oh my God. I’m back. I’m home. All the time, it was… We finally really did it. You Maniacs! You blew it up! Damn you! God damn you all to hell!

I suppose it’s fair to say that the words themselves aren’t nearly as memorable as their context. They were shouted by astronaut George Taylor, while sitting astride a horse on the beach, immediately after he discovered the remains of the Statue of Liberty.
And just as Mel Brooks parodied the iconic “I am you father” revelation, he also parodied the final scene from Planet of the Apes.

What’s that coming out of her nose?
Spaceballs?!
Oh shit! There goes the planet.

What surprising revelations have you seen in the movies and TV that you wish the next generation could enjoy the way you did?

Marauder is a Jelly Doughnut

Marauder is undertaking to teach himself and his daughters Esperanto.
I’ll admit to a small curiosity about it. The main thing I gained from two years of Latin in high school and two semesters of Spanish in college is a healthy respect for anyone who can communicate in something other than their native tongue.
The key points I remember from Latin are, agricola is “farmer”, poeta is “poet”, insula is “island” and nautica(?) is a sailor (and also a brand of clothing). These are the only masculine nouns which end in -a, all the others end in -us. Also, there are a number of cheap phonetic jokes to be made from the verbs “to make”, “to give” and the number six. Their Latin counterparts are “facio”, “dixit” and “sex.” I’ll let you work out the approximate pronunciations on your own.
Likewise, in Spanish, when you wish someone a happy birthday, be darn sure to pronounce the ñ in “cumpleaños” and no matter how badly you screw up, never claim to be “muy embarazada” unless you’re due to give birth in the very near future. Aside from that, I can ask important questions such as “Donde es el baño?” but it’s not at all certain that I’ll understand the answer.
A few weeks ago, MC encouraged me to learn enough Chinese (I think it’s the Mandarin dialect) to say hello to her children. They speak Chinese at home, but it takes the kids by surprise to hear the language from a non-Chinese. I learned the equivalents of “Hello” and “My name is Blair” (the latter is phonetically similar to “Watch Out, Blair” which some number of people would doubtless point out is a fair warning) and when I said Hello to the children, I did well enough that they understood me and were suitably surprised. But when I later told MC that I’d also learned how to ask “What is your name?” and demonstrated, she collapsed in laughter.
So although I wish Marauder and the girls much success in their linguistic endeavors, for the time being I’m going to let someone else be the pastry chef.

The Dark Knight

This weekend’s outdoor temperatures and humidity were both unbearably high, so rather than do any yardwork on Sunday, I decided to spend the afternoon in a nice air-conditioned movie theater.
A lot of the commentary I’ve encountered about The Dark Knight has been about Heath Ledger as The Joker. Although some of his movies (most notably, Brokeback Mountain) got a lot of attention, I haven’t heard much talk about Heath Ledger. So I figured all the chatter now was probably due to some sort of “posthumous Ledger-mania” and didn’t pay much attention to it.
Going in, my expectation was that this would be “just another Batman movie”, and to a certain extent, that’s exactly what it was. What makes this one different though is that Batman wasn’t really the movie’s focus. Sure, there’s a lot of attention to how the Batman operates and all that (and lots of cool gadgets), but I really think this one was more about the Joker, Harvey Dent, and some of the other typically smaller characters and what motivates them. (Alfred, of course, has most of the best lines. “But I bloody well did tell you.”)
Definitely worth seeing.

Google Insecurity

I’ve recently switched to the new 3.0 version of Firefox, among my reasons, I was interested in some of the new security features. Logging into my Google account this morning, I got a first hand demonstration of how well it works.
Google Failed Security Certificate
Taking a closer look, the problem arises because I didn’t include the “www” at the beginning of the address, but Google could have fixed that a couple ways — probably the easiest would be a simple http redirect. (For example, try to visit http://dactylmanor.org/blair/zero/. I don’t have that set up everywhere, but it’s doable.)

The Book of Disney

So do you think you know the story of Jonah and the Whale? Much to my shame, all I knew about it was that Jonah was swallowed by a whale and then I start comparing it the story of Pinocchio. (I know a little more of that story, though I’m not entirely certain how Pinocchio got out of his whale either.)
Last year, Kate and Luke moved to Lancaster so Luke could attend seminary and lucky for me, on Monday, he posted a transcript of his first sermon, “Eeyore Goes to Tehran.”
Kate once described Luke as being the more “graphic” of their duo. At the time, we all laughed at the possible multiple meanings of “graphic”, but I’ve since come to realize that Luke fits quite a few of those meanings. Given that new knowledge, I was more than a little curious to learn what he was up to.
It turns out that “Eeyore Goes to Tehran” is a retelling of Jonah’s story, starring Eeyore as Jonah. The sermon puts the story of Jonah against a contemporary backdrop, but still manages to be thought-provoking. For that alone, it’s worth the read, the inclusion of Eeyore takes nothing away but instead keeps your interest. As a bonus, I at long last know how it was that Jonah escaped from the pelican whale!
I do wish I’d been able to see the delivery in person; but perhaps I’ll manage that when Luke delivers the story of “Piglet in the Lion’s Den.”