Go to YouTube and enter ‘Planet of the Apes’ in the search box. Browse.
Enter ‘Terminator’ in the search box. Browse.
Type in ‘Land of the Lost’. Larf.
Go to retrojunk.com and waste time.
Go to Google and type in something like ‘24.5 kilometres in miles’ or ‘1 hogshead in litres’.
…and I’ve got diagnosed osteoarthritis in both hips so I figured, for Wetstock this year, I’d just go easy.
But my people do not go easy into that good night. And this was in the afternoon.
I didn’t run around too much with the general ruck and rumble of the water-gun fight itself, although I wanted to. Luisa came to be, with water balloons, in the upstairs john which is always a target as it is overlooking the backyard wetting-fields, and I went up to tag her, but I got suborned to her side. We got Jeff R. and a couple of young people who I’d just met that day, (and bravo for the next generation, God bless’ em), and we won the day. We did. We did so.
Reid, with a high-powered water-rifle, employed a ladder to climb up to the bathroom window, in spite of the absence of one of our dear family of friends, partly, in part I’m sure, due to a ladder accident a few weeks back, with a head thing. And Baby H. Jesus, Reid, what were you thinking? But since he didn’t fall. it was genius, and hilarious. And he pulled open the window nearest me and I took the brunt of his humid and humorous assault.
This was Simon’s first Wetstock, and he needs experience, God love’im, he’ll be three in November.
Later, in the round backyard pool, we did the traditional whirlpool, with two reversals. K. A.
As always, the company was great, the food was great and I look forward to several next years.
What’s hilarious, seriously, is, that right now, two days later, when I was expecting one or both hips to be almost literally killing me, WTF and NGOOHA, it’s my thirty year old chronic back condition that’s bugging me, not my hippage.
At this same age, my parents did not have this suite of experiences or concomitant consequences. But they didn’t have waterguns.
Seven words you won’t be able to say on TV anymore.
I will always laugh about Cardinal Glick.
(more…)
The A&E Andromeda Strain Remake
If nothing else, it’s got a good cast. Updated, it nevertheless follows the general storyline of the original movie and book (which I think stands up better than a lot of science adventures from the same era), and of course, there’s iPhones and cellphones and references to WMDs, North Korea and Homeland Security (how 1984 / Brave New World / THX1138 / Sleeper is that name anyway?).
You probably know that the action starts in the isolated Utah town of Piedmont, where townspeople find a recently fallen satellite and take it to the firehall, where they open it, exposing the entire town to an immediately deadly pathogen, killing almost everyone. Soon there are vultures.
What got me was a Ford commercial about 20 minutes in during the first episode. A couple is driving a Ford vehicle through a town identified on-screen as Piedmont. They see a vulture right beside them and they hightail it outa Dodge (Piedmont). Struck me as real tasteless.
& Et Cetera.1
There’s this Cialis commercial with a bathtub overflowing, a turkey burning in the oven, a dog scratching to be let out and a lawn sprinkler flooding the front yard. There’s a nice little Spanish ditty playing as we see all this.
The husband and wife run around and turn off water and save the turkey, but don’t let the dog out.
Since they’ve been off carpe dieming thanks to Cialis, shouldn’t they have first turned off the sprinkler and the bath, and turned the oven down? Or is Cialis just that compelling?
And it’s just plain irresponsible not to have let the dog out first.
& Et Cetera.2
Egad! CBC will be carrying Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune in the fall. Rest easy, all, though. Coronation Street is safe.
Over the last two nights, on Space (Rogers Cable 50, downtown) they showed a two-parter that took place entirely in the ‘Mirror, Mirror’ universe from the classic series.
There was the usual duplication of people in nearly identical capacities or roles (but working for the Empire not the Federation), and the link to our universe was the Defiant, which had been lured through a transverse spatio-temporal discontinuity (I made that term up) by the Tholians. They captured the Defiant, killed the crew and began to dismantle the ship which was technologically advanced.
Mirror Archer (no evil Cartman beard) and his crew captured the ship from the Tholians (no beards), and so on.
Scott Bakula’s acting was horrendous, but the show was good. Grim and sad, even the ending, but much more satisfying than the other episodes that I saw before I just stopped watching it.
Okay, score one (and only one) for Braga and Berman. Lucky dummies.
A few weeks ago I finally got both my computers back to where they were before the Christmas Crash (sounds like a Doctor Who episode, don’t it?).
My server is restored and running Apache/PHP/MySQL again. My databases are safe and my mediawiki installations are all perking. I have Google Desktop Search installed (and it is a magnificent blessing, let me tell ya), and I have started using MS Outlook’s calendar function since my memory is just Swiss cheese and old foam rubber these days. (I’d rather use Mozilla’s Sunbird, but it really, really sucks, sucks, sucks. Really.)
I reconstructed my web technology learning plan and then sat down to start up again, after all these months and I got sad.
It was like everything was finally all ready and all I had to do was sit down and apply myself and start learning. Easy-peasy, I do it all the time.
But nothing happened. I was not inspired, I was in fact, bummed.
I know, I know, all I have to do is give myself a shake, take a deep breath, hike up my pants and get down to business. I know that, and I will do it. But part of me is just waiting for the next time something critical goes up the fubar, because it will. The question is ‘how soon?’
Well, back to the old drawing board.
I was getting so sick of switching over to CNN during commercial breaks and hearing them dissecting every little aspect of every little primary and every little caucus and every little mouth-fart and every little tic and twitch and hiccup of the candidates, their staffs, the exit-polled, and the results, that I was hoping for different news, real news - an earthquake or a tsunami, maybe.
Well, Gott sei dank, I got a metaphorical one.
You’d think, I mean don’t you think you’d think, that if you were a Democratic politician in a high position, that you won partly by claiming the moral high ground during your earlier career and your campaign, that you’d know better than to schwanz a hooker on the public’s clock. Multiple times. I mean, vey iz mir.
Next thing it’ll be CBC and the Olympics. And the Olympics. And the Olympics. And no weeknight Coronation Street.
What a world.
Late the other night/early the other morning on TVO, I saw this National Geographic produced show about Greece’s Rion-Antirion bridge, the longest cable-stayed bridge in the world. And it crosses a fault line beneath the sea.
It links the two towns across the Gulf of Corinth, replacing an old ferry.
The construction techniques to earthquake-proof the bridge (as far as that’s ever possible) are fascinating and the progress of the construction is amazing to watch.
One of the coolest aspects of the whole plan is that the foundations of the piers on the bottom of the Gulf are not secured in bedrock (or even to bedrock) at all. They sit on many meters of sediment stabilized with huge steel posts driven deep into the muck, and then topped with several meters of gravel.
It’s a beautiful structure, too and looks very good and fitting in this, the Future.
I warned you about Google and Skynet, didn’t I?
Didn’t I?
I got this from Anneli, and as she said, ‘Fantasy Overload‘!
Wait for the ending!