Lord, it was hot today. Walked out onto the back porch and was slightly baked by the convection currents. The thermometer suggested the heat index was 110 degrees.
I have a reasonable tolerance of heat, but be it psychological or physical, anything over 106 just hurts.*
So I hid inside and read. I watched a little television. I caught up on the site. Everything is up-to-date. The July photo gallery is current. Until very recently the photo gallery section was criminally behind. No more.
Also, I transferred a lot of video from blip.tv to boxes holding iframes here. Blip is great. I still use them, but I like to have them linked on the home site, too. So that got done.
Late in the afternoon, when it was only 92 or so, I took The Yankee’s bike to the bike store for a tuneup.
“You’re the guy that brought in the Felt, right?”
That’s right. Good memory.
“I fixed it. It will be ready on Tuesday.”
These are nice guys, they give good advice and have actually offered us a few freebies, but I hope they never run the world. Dropped my bike off late Friday. It was ready by late Saturday. I can pick it up on Tuesday?
I caught up on Falling Skies, TNT’s newest superlatively promoted summer program. Aliens invaded and they’re stilling kids. Somehow John Carter, who left ER to become a librarian and then a professor of history, must save them.
The acting is a bit wooden, but it is post-apocalyptic with optimism, and so that deserves a look. My rule of thumb for science fiction is three episodes. Intrigue me by then or lose me forever. I’m giving Falling Skies a fourth episode, but only because of Will Patton. Tomorrow night’s episode better give me something more. (I’m sure they’re all rushing in to re-write and re-shoot as they read this.)
I even cleaned off a bit of the Netflix queue. Watched it already? Delete. Indy film? You get a short leash. I nixed one this evening because, for the first three minutes there was no dialog. There was a lovely window shot, an introduction to two characters who just stared at each other and then a dream sequence. Three minutes worth of this. Gone.
I did watch One Week, which offers a grim scenario — you get a cancer diagnosis, decide you don’t like much about your life and then buy a motorcycle.
Even if you don’t care for the movie, the scenery is worth seeing alone. Beautifully shot film.
*When we got married the heat index was around 122 degrees. We were married outdoors. We are very smart.
I interviewed a former Heisman trophy winner this morning. Had a very nice chat. When I type up the notes in the next few days I’ll give you a little more insight into the piece, which is a freelance article I’ve been asked to write for a summer publication. So come back for more details on that later.
Hint: It was not Gino Torretta. He had a similar outcome to his post-Heisman bowl game, however. Like Torretta, it happened in the Sugar Bowl.
Much of the rest of the day was spent making recruiting phone calls, reading and grading. These things have seemed to take over most everything lately. But that’s fine. I enjoy talking with prospective students, though I get a lot of machines and write a lot of email. I do love to read. And grading is … well … everyone needs to have things graded.
This evening I visited the Galleria for the first time in probably a year or more. On Twitter I wrote, “Places I’ve been less crowded than this mall: Nevada desert, Belizian rain forest, Alabama library, IRS parties.” It was amazing how dead most of the place was.
Just for context, I worked there for part of my senior year in high school. A classmate helped me land the easy job of selling coupon books in those little mid-mall kiosks. You don’t antagonize people, you wait patiently for them to come to you. And the hourly pay, for a high school student, was extravagant. (I think I was making about $9 an hour.) Anyway, one night while I was not selling coupon books to the random passers by, a famous Southern winter storm descended upon us. Everything closed up quickly. This was like that. (Incidentally, that particular night, there was no snow if I remember correctly.)
There was no bad weather tonight, either. Just the economy, the Internet and people tired of malls, apparently.
I went looking for clothes sales. Finding none, I also left the mall.
Speaking of mall culture … Who’s ready for a third in Bill & Ted’s storyline? Besides Keanu, I mean.
“When we last got together, part of it was that Bill and Ted were supposed to have written the song that saved the world, and it hasn’t happened. … So they’ve now become kind of possessed by trying to do that. Then there’s an element of time and they have to go back.”
Ghostbusters III doesn’t look like a bad idea in comparison, now, does it?
The shrubs are trimmed. At least the ones in the front yard. You can’t see halfway down the side of the house or the lovely foliage in the backyard from the road, so they don’t exist. And, hence, they will be sheared to within an inch of their life on another evening.
But my, doesn’t the front look good. Except for the shrub right by the garage. It has an unruly spot. It has the bangs of a seven-year-old boy who wouldn’t sit still in the barber’s chair. And one along the side, where I sliced off the new growth to reveal … big odd holes in the shrubbery’s formation. It looks like the swamp scene from Flash Gordon. This terrified me as a child.
I think it was because Timothy Dalton is the antagonist.
The rest of that clip plays out after Flash tricks Barin into thinking he’d been poisoned by the evil creature with the hero climbing down the vines. Barin says to the fog “Oh thine chase is on! But I will use my resources poorly and pursue him myself, giving these fine green jump-suited fellows the early weekend.”
Then there’s more fog, some oddly pliant quicksand and then hawkmen. Just your average day in the yard, really.
That movie only made back about 80 percent of the original budget. They’ve probably made up the difference in licensing, syndication and DVD sales. Meanwhile, this is interesting: George Lucas had hoped to remake the original Flash Gordon (1936), but when he learned that Dino De Laurentiis had already bought the rights, he wrote Star Wars (1977) instead. Sam J. Jones, who played Flash, was last in front of the camera in 2007. Now he is the CEO of an international security company providing diplomatic and executive protection for high profile clients around the world.So I guess that worked out.
So, yes, half the shrubbery has been brought under control. The rest later this weekend. Brian showed up mid-afternoon. The storms followed soon after. And hail. We got hammered by frozen pellets of angry intention for about 90 seconds. It covered the yard.
It hurt my head. I’m just going to save that story and a few more pictures for Sunday.
Dinner with Brian and Shane, our realtor, and his Brian. We ran into two of The Yankee’s students at Niffer’s. We should really find a second place to eat.
We spent the evening staring at the radar. The Yankee knew what was coming: Brian would unveil his newest meteorological toys and have about 15 views between us. Everything missed us. Part of town lost their power, but nothing blinked at our blissful cottage. The bulk of the storm was well north, and then, late, some that hit to our west.
At midnight, as the threat of anything dangerous happening in our little corner the death toll was four ranging, from Oklahoma through Alabama. One small central Alabama town was digging itself out from a direct hit in the late hours and had several people missing. Tomorrow’s news already looks grim.
(Someone overheard me say that today and was apparently offended (or surprised). That was the one sentence I uttered, so they were offended without context, which is always amusing.)
So today we had breakfast at Barbecue House, where we could not yesterday. The place was more than slow late this morning. There were more people behind the counter than dining. But that’s Spring Break. The food is not taking off. Delicious as always.
The cable people had to come back out today. Last night we discovered a lot of pixelated programming had been recorded. There was a Les Mis special on PBS that The Yankee wanted to see and that was mangled so badly it hurt to watch. Shame, too, because what you could hear sounded great. And, then, the straw that broke the camel’s back was a ruined episode of 19 Kids and Counting. And you just don’t mess with the Duggars or they will show up and make you babysit.
So I walked out of the room for a moment to put a dish away and when I came back she was on the phone with the cable people, who helpfully booked an appointment for this afternoon, lest the Duggars hear about it and come visit the cable office.
And they mean business. Two guys came out today. Charter has been here so much, though, that they’re having to recycle techs. One of them had been here before.
He plugged up his tricorder to the cable, pronounced the numbers flatlined and then went outside to jiggle the wires, call a friend and have a sandwich. Do you really know what they’re doing out there? A second guy is inside and I am insistent that he explain everything to me — but in analogies I can understand (“So it is like water in a pipe, then?”) — and have no idea what the first guy is doing outside.
He comes back in after a few minutes with a few pieces of hardware in his hand. He has replaced some splitters. We now have the industrial strength Cabletronic 4000s, which is a step up from the 3000 series Crash-A-Lot model. It seems that we have now exhausted all of the possibilities for diagnosis, repair and replacement inside the house (they’ve been here approaching a dozen times in the last several months) and if this continues a systems tech will be airlifted in to examine things at the hub.
It sounds so ominous, but really, we’re just keen on a signal that plays audio and video, displays the channels for which we’re overpaying and keep a consistent Internet connection. (Though, to be fair, that last one hasn’t lately been a problem.)
They’re nice guys, these guys. They tell jokes. They notice the cat. We comment on the larger company and they spin tales about some of their better calls. The first guy plugged his tricorder back into the cable stream and found everything to be much better. Now we shouldn’t have a problem.
But there’s all kinds of problems you can have. Today I learned that, in addition to signal load, competing tech demands of phone/cable/Internet, rainwater and what your neighbors are watching, another thing that contributes to data transmission rates is temperature. It seems that when it is cold the insulation on the cable shrinks. That means less cable can get in your home. When the weather turns warm the insulation expands, letting cable in. When July gets here we’ll suddenly get a rush of things that couldn’t make it through in December, I suppose.
Drove to the grocery store for a few items today. We walked last night for two, drove today for two bags worth and yet we must still make the HEAP BIG trip sometime later this week. We think, though, we have this down to a science: farmers market for produce, Sam’s for poultry, Meat Lab for beef, sausage, eggs and bacon and Publix for everything else.
We planned this. We’re planners.
Saw a new item I hadn’t noticed before. I gave it a “Where have you been all my life?” moment:
There is a coco version too, apparently, which just seems evil. Don’t ask why one is OK, but another is not. I enjoyed more than my share of kid’s cereal (and still do on occasion) but the chocolate ones always seemed a bit over the top. Except for Cookie Crisp. There’s nothing wrong with that cereal except for their odd character erasures.
Speaking of cereal being erased. I read recently that Cap’n Crunch was going to walk the plank. (And now, who knows? Sad as that is, they’re just pulling on your heartstrings with the old graphic treatments:
Went to the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art tonight to see the documentary Awake, My Soul, which is about the oldest surviving form of American music: Sacred Harp.
It is an intriguing thing, mostly southern and western — which makes a great deal of sense as spelled out in the documentary — but growing across the country and, in several other countries as well. Most everyone interviewed for the documentary lives in Alabama or Georgia, however. They’re all very passionate and it makes for a nice documentary.
Raymond Hamrick, the first gentleman you see in the trailer has a great story, and is a marvelous storyteller. Doesn’t hurt, then, that he has been a prolific composer in the genre. He’s still working, in his 90s, six days a week in a jewelry shop in Georgia.
The history, reaching back to pre-Revolutionary America, was nicely explained. It moves into the work and perception of those who brought it to this generation and then those who would be the prominent contemporary leaders. In the midst of all that are the lost bridge between the 19th Century and those very aged devotees. Somewhere in all of that nostalgia and hope and loss all mingle together, powered by this incredible, powerful sound.
Much of this documentary makes sense to me, or anyone that’s ever been to a primitive style church in the South. I’ve never been to a Sacred Harp singing and I don’t know these people, but I know these people. The documentary touched on the people in this singing community that had died before or during the recording. There was a shot or two that lingered on some old lady, and then a comment by an old gentleman who’d lost his wife and those just sat on the room for a while, until the next joke came along.
Matt Hinton, one of the filmmakers, was there for a Q&A. No one asked why he didn’t put a joke immediately after the most solemn moment of the film, but they should have. Instead, he fielded very intelligent questions for about half-an-hour. One of his central points is the participatory nature of this style, as compared to the performance-based styles of modern music. That becomes quickly evident in his film.
I came home to dinner, a baseball game (Auburn beat Alabama 2-1, in Montgomery’s Capitol City Classic) and two other anecdotes that I’m keeping for tomorrow. You have to come back now.
Spent the full day in the office staring at the computer. There’s this to work on, that to read, the other to write and so on.
I did make this and uploaded it to Tumblr at some point in a small break this afternoon. Spencer Hall ran across it and offered up the warmest bit of pop analysis that a blog can offer on a 40-year-old freelance postcard design.
The problem was that things have changed since 1969. So I made the additions in that family portrait gimmick. Now all of those stares seem to make a lot more sense. Interlopers.
I’m steaming ahead through Robin Hood, the BBC version, as it plays along in the background while I do other things. This series is perfect for that. You watch the first six minutes, get the gist and tune it out until the resolution. There’s the problem, the fighting, something is stolen from the rich and the capture of someone. Then comes a moralistic dilemma, the rescue, the “curses, you evildoers!” moment and then the laugh at the end. Add in a little more fighting when necessary, move a few of the elements around to keep it fresh and have a nice day.
You know it is serious when he’s aiming his bow at someone. The guards here are more predictable than red shirts. They get almost as much dialog and they seem to fight just enough to allow the good guys to get away or are far enough away to take the occasional arrow.
I’ll finish the series up this weekend. It ran for three seasons, which is not unusual in the UK, where television programs are built shorter. Many of your favorite shows here would have benefited from that decision, too.
I’m watching this on Netflix, which is another of man’s greatest recent inventions. No longer does one need to get emotionally invested in a television show. Just wait until it comes out and watch it all in a rush. Chew it up as pastiche, especially in Netflix’s streaming format, and move on. The biggest thing is the HBO problem. They’ll license their programming for discs, but not for streaming.
HBO Co-President Eric Kessler went on the record as saying “there is a value in exclusivity,” and that people would “pay a premium” for it.
Co-president? Is that why they’re seeking to make their customers pay for their programming twice? HBO has their own service, still trying to gain market penetration. It seems they’re having the same fight they had in the 70s and 80s.
I grew up with HBO. I mean HBO and I grew up together. When we first picked up the channel on our cable system the churn rate was still high and they were celebrating becoming a 24-hour channel. The movies were still awfully repetitive, though, but hey, it wasn’t the Big Three. There were no commercials. It was novel. They had the coolest pre-roll maybe ever.
That still makes me want to watch a movie right now.
At the end of my days in undergraduate, though, money got tight and I just dropped my cable altogether. When I could afford television again I just went the basic route. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve missed HBO. And, happily, those have been supplemented by the inevitable DVD releases of their (usually quite good) original programming.
Netflix, meanwhile, has 20 million subscribers, as of today. It is an experimental way to watch movies. For the small monthly fee we can see everything, which really removes the risk. I’ve watched some dreadful things on Netflix, at least the first few minutes of dreadful things. I’ve also watched guilty pleasures as background sound. The Philadelphia Experiment did not age well, friends.
So now I’m watching Robin Hood on a computer. I can also watch it on my television. Next week I’m going to sit on a spin bike and watch a movie on my phone. We live in the future.
