Month: October 2007

Sundry and various

Squirrel Spider Hybrid.  Very creepy photoshop – don’t look if you don’t dig spiders.

A buddy said, “I used to do scaffolding.  One of my customers paid his stucco workers half in cash and half in cocaine.  They worked like demons, man!”  Welcome to the Vancouver construction industry.

Deadwood has stolen my heart and p*ssed on it.  Keith Carradine interviews David Milch and it’s one of the most interesting and entertaining special features bits I’ve seen since Keira Knightley screamed “Oh, the horr-id filth-ay mon-kay!” in the Pirates of the Caribbean cast commentary.  Repeatedly.  Like, every time the mon-kay showed his ugly mug.

Work quote of the day.  “I know I suck; I just wish I was better at it.”

 

 

More Deadwood

Last night I watched some more Deadwood, which has bounced to the top of my addictions list.  How serious is it?  I’m OUT OF BEER.  I have been for multiple days.  One scene between Seth (Tim Olyphant) and Alma (the radiant Molly Parker) I pulled a Dru on about fifteen times.  The first five times, I just watched Molly.  The second five times I just watched Tim.  Then I noticed that the light was completely screwed up (when the camera was hard by Molly, there was no natural light except what was reflecting off buildings, and when the camera was hard by Tim, there was tons of natural light) so I watched the scene about another five times to try to figure out if it was a continuity error or whether it was deliberate.  I came to the conclusion that it was a continuity error, but it worked with the scene so they left it.  Then when I got to the end of the disk I watched again, because it has to be one of the best scenes ever in terms of dialogue and reaction shots.  It’s subtle, well scripted, adult and funny as hell.

The guy who plays Swearingen is a Machiavellian menace / Disney sappiness combo that continues to astound.  He gets multiple lines in every show that most actors would kill to get once, and when he gets the Gimp to fetch him a new brush to get the bloodstains off the floor I sat with my mouth hanging open, trying to figure what the hell would motivate him to do something so demeaning.  When I figured out his motivation I left my jaw to dangle.

Pulling a Dru, by the way, is from the second season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  Dru watches somebody get fried and she says, “Do it AGAIN! Do it AGAIN!” in a particularly childlike way.

Time to get going on the day.

I’ve had 123 views on the Tapioca Song.  I actually ran into Dances with Sheep in the parking lot the other morning and he said, “I was humming it in the car” and I said, “Yeah, try being the poor woman who wrote it.”  Because when I get the Tapioca Song stuck in my head, it’s because I’m working out a mass arrangement for Chor Leoni. Grandiose….  Foolish…. and entirely unpreventable.

Deadwood

This TV show is beloved by some and loathed by others.  I am definitely one of the fans, now that I’ve seen the first four episodes of the first season.  Tim Olyphant is cuter than a bug’s ear, in stark contrast to nearly everybody else in the show (okay, Molly Parker, the pride of the lower mainland).  Keith Carradine, who has a major part in the first 4 episodes as Wild Bill Hickock, before he’s shot (kudos for the director to not panning over his hand, the now legendary aces and eights) is absolutely brill; his voice alone is amazing and he bites off two word lines to splendid effect.

I am now going to watch the rest of the show, which has passed into history.  I told mOm not to bother.  The violence, unbelievably foul language (like, from ME, a comment about foul language), the rampant sex and drug use…. yeah, she’s going to stick with Fred Astaire….

mOm, in yet another demonstration of her supernatural cheerfulness, commented last night that if she does go on chemo (it is at this point by no means certain), she will look on it as an opportunity to lose weight.  May we all profit from her example.

The unexpected losses

Update to this post. 

 

I’ve been pondering the Storm Worm.  Since I’ve been thinking about a piece of software that is a ‘contiguous and not quite self-aware artificial intelligence’ for the last year or so as part of a fiction, finding out about the Storm Worm has made me very uneasy.

My first problem is direct and unequivocal – personally unpleasant.  I make a living from the inertnests.  The VOIP lines that carry the customer voices to me are dependent on the existence and functioning of the internet, which is beginning to look like another Ponzi scheme.  The contact management software is also web based.  Even if by some miracle we were able to switch back to ‘land lines’ after the internet crashes – and it will, and more than once – driving so many voices back to copper will put international telephony into turmoil.

My second problem is unpleasant for my children. Who will benefit from international telephony and the internet crashing?

Think about it.

Essentially, everybody who hates science; everybody who hates freedom; the buggy whip media; and the richest people on earth, who will be insulated from the worst of it. Theocrats, neo-cons, the super-rich and newspapers all have something in common now; imagine if they were able to bring porn, citizen journalism and science to its knees in a single stroke; imagine if various governments in the world were able to profit immediately thereby by locking up anybody they felt like with impunity because there was no one to report on it and the hysteria that surrounded the collapse of the internet made all geeks suspect.

I should have been name Cassandra, so filled am I with dire predictions.  It may be the Russian Mafia behind it… and I’d bet money that’s so – but like 9/11 more than one interest group will profit by the collapse of the internet.

What on earth can I do about it? Is there a silver lining?

Yet more awesome linkypoos

Finn Family Moominaddams
Cheese off your colleagues
Well, they have to live SOMEwhere.
Toenails and Forensics
Bigfoot video is 40…. I still think it’s a guy in a two part suit.  Why no feet?  Doesn’t the ‘rippling’ look like a costume folding?  Why the line right along the midsection?
If animals could blog….
These mushrooms are probably fake, but great for Halloween.
A GREAT language blog, hours of fun here.
Honest to God, I thought the kid would make an exit there and then.

Last night I dreamed

That my coworker RobofNine and I were uh, affected by a tornado which came ripping down 6th Ave in New Westminster.  I got hauled into the air, got a severe case of the whirlies along with getting wet and ass-freezing cold, and then got spat out onto the roof of a 12 storey building, deaf, ‘winded’ and scared out of my mind.  I leaned over the side of the building to get my bearings and watched Rob casually move his car out of the way of the debris.  That bastard always keeps his cool!