Barkerburgh

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.

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.

So Tracy Barlow, after several months living with neighbourhood jerk Charlie Stubbs, the local builder, finally bashed his brains in with a bookshelf sculpture - he lingered for a while in hospital - and got arrested, all the time proclaiming her guilt but her love for him, even though we all know that she’s hated his guts ever since she found out about his fling with Maria from Audrey’s beauty shop down the street, which was convenient for both of them since Maria moved into Charlie’s old flat when Charlie moved in with Tracy in the Harris’s old house (which Charlie bought just to piss off Craig’s grandfather who was living there to look after Craig after his mother went to jail and his sister committed suicide after killing their father) , but after Tracy found out about the affair she started this long term plot/plan to make Charlie’s reputation among the neighbours even worse than it was after what he did to Shelley - who’s having his baby, but she moved away without telling him - by faking domestic disturbances and burning herself with an iron and letting neighbourhood good-heart and goody-two-shoes Claire think was done by Charlie, all the while denying he did it but smirking to herself every time, and of course Tracy’s family are supporting her, even her unrelated brother, Peter (her stepfather Ken’s son by a late ex-wife) and her usually fairly sensible mother, Deirdre and harridan gran Blanche, but not so much by her unrelated nephew Adam (Ken’s grandson through his late daughter, Peter’s sister, and Ken’s recently deceased arch-enemy, Mike Baldwin) and, of course, Claire totally believes that Tracy was suffering from battered woman syndrome - even though she wasn’t - and she’s starting a petition to get the charges against Tracy reduced to manslaughter and get her bail because she was denied bail due to the violence of her attack on Charlie (and maybe a flight risk too) , which pleases Tracy no end because everybody likes Claire and Tracy has no qualms about manipulating everybody and everything around her any way she can to get what she wants and has been doing so for the last few years ever since she came back to Weatherfield and Coronation Street.

Damn, it takes your breath away.

Inspiration! Vicky Pollard should be the Doctor’s new companion!

<br /><font title=”I made it up. ‘Vicky Pollard as the new companion?’ Phwoar!”>’You know Liz? Liz! Well, Cilla told me that Liz said that that slag Rose told her mum that that Shaniqua told Ricky that sometimes you-know that fat Madonna told Flavour-Hanif that she told him that she reckoned Rocky knew some slag who had a T.A.R.D.I.S. up her jumper.’</font>

Last night it suddenly occured to me that I have two working (apparently stable) OSs (Windows 2000 Pro and Debian’s Ubuntu Linux), powerful server side processing and a DBMS on W2K (php and MySQL, the same to be working soon on Ubuntu), three different browsers on W2K (Firefox, MSIE and Netscape 7), Firefox on Ubuntu, and pretty much all the proper manuals and documentation, in part thanks to Reid.

I experienced a feeling akin to wanting to be on a trip to Mars in a homemade spaceship. Glee.

What shall be my first project?

A little background. ‘Coronation Street’ used to be on weekday afternoons on CBC for years. Then they moved it to 7:30pm. Actually better for me. Then thanks to last year’s hockey playoffs and the Olympics, it disappeared for several months. I think that in the first nine months of 2005, we got maybe three months of Corrie. The Sunday morning back-to-back rerun of the previous week’s episodes was useful, when it was on, but it wasn’t during the Olympics. When Corrie finally came back, it was on at 7:00pm, which left my 7:30 timeslot open. What to watch?

Jeopardy.

Still with me? Wow.

So here’s the project. A web page produced on the fly by the server that will be a generalized browser version of this image, the Jeopardy starting board:

And one for Double Jeopardy, with the cash values per question doubled. Get it?

The category labels will only be “Category 1″ etc, though. I don’t need to know or input the questions for each category per episode, I will just need to click a radio button for Right or Wrong. This will be sent to the server, where the question’s dollar value, my answer etc will be stored in a table, and a sister table will tally my cumulative winnings, rightings and wrongings, by episode, date, time, etc.

I’m still designing the database in Java-based Freemind mind mapping software from sourceforge. What a great tool.

I figure it’s a little fancier than “Hello World”, which tradition I respect the hell out of, don’t get me wrong. But it won’t help me learn php and MySQL.

Last night was the best night of my life this week! (Except for last night with an episode of ‘Veronica Mars’ and an episode of ‘Hustle’.)

Had a nice little lunch at the Miller/Beaton home, where I’d left my baseball cap and cool shades after the annual bbq on Sunday. Luisa was there too, picking up Ronnie’s left-behind ‘Ender’s Shadow’ - Card should have stopped at ‘Dune:Nerd’ or ‘Battlefield:Whatever’.

Later it was a ripping episode of ‘Coronation Street’. Sunita found out that Dev has kids by pretty much all the other women who manage his corner shops all over northern England and live rent-free in the upstairs flat. Besides the fact that she’s married to him, she’s also pregnant with his twins. Now I knew this was coming because I get a newsletter from the future (here in Canadia we’re 7-8 months behind the UK, Corrie timelinewise…) but I didn’t know the set-up.

Then it was “Veronica Mars” and a satisfyingly creepy “Criminal Minds”, (but the Star TV magazine said there was supposed to be an episode of “Huslte” (sic), but it was some dumb rom-com about Tuscany), then it was the splendid thunderstorm.

At one point, I was standing on the back fire escape and counting the lightning flashes. For a little over five minutes there was a flash about every two seconds, with attendant dramatic rumblings. Highly satisfying.

The temperature and humidity dropped dramatically, of course, and that’s the story of how, with blessed Science’s help, I slept better than I have in a week or more.

Well, I’m hooked. I’ve got a pretty basic freeware application that lets you mark the cells for what they might contain and then tells you if you’re right or wrong once you start filling the cells in for real. So right now it’s kinda like playing Doom in semi-God Mode, so I’m happy.

With that help, I’m down to about half an hour per medium skill game (ie, 1 or 2 cells with 3 or 4 filled in and the rest with 2 or 3.) I’m sure it would take much longer on paper, which I will try eventually.

A little annoying when I’d rather finish a timed game of Sudoku than watch my TV shows, but whaddaya gonna do?

Fuck the hockey playoffs. Seriously. Rudely. With a wire brush.

Really. Christ.

1> ‘The Unit’ looks like a good show.

2> So does ‘Boston Legal’.

3> That poor kid in Detroit who the 911 operator told to stop fooling around with the 911 system…

4> I really should have been watching ‘Babylon 5′ years ago.

5> Dean Koontz’es’s book ‘From the Corner of His Eye’ is a good read, nicely constructed, even though hardly anything really plotty happens until about page 600.

6> ‘My Name is Earl’ gets funnier and funnier.

7> Venus Express!

8> I love this weather.

9> The last few episodes of ‘Battlestar Galactica’ have been kickass, except I missed it both times on Space this past weekend through bad TV viewing planning. I guess I need to take a course.

10> ‘Coronation Street’ is getting kinda wacky, but that’s good. It’s a little boring when things are normal.

11> Nancy Grace is a foul human being.

12> If I was taller, I could see farther in a crowd during an emergency.

Two weeks without Coronation Street because of the 400,000-tickets-shy-of-an-SRO Olympics, that’s why, you bloody stupid wankers!

“But then out of the turgid miasma of Television white-noise video, on the same night he lost Coronation Street for two weeks, there came what were probably the last four episodes of his beloved ‘Arrested Development’, and the blasphemous and heretical South Park episode about the Blessed Virgin Mary. He nearly nearly choked twice from laughing, lost his breath, and his throat kind hurts today a bit….and all is good.”

Thank God for Battlestar Galactica and that there are no sports in space. Nerdal responses to that last phrase go here, God love ya.