I can't imagine how this would work, nevertheless, I am intrigued

I wasn't motivated enough even to write a weekend update this past week, but I remembered I still have a few work pix that I was saving for a rainy day.  This was taken early in the morning about 3 weeks ago, on my regular cycle 14 on FM78.  I was amused by the sign on the side of the truck.

I had a couple of opportunities for an interesting photo or two today, but unfortunately I had left my phone behind because I was getting rained on.

However I still want to mention something that I just discovered today and which has a website with plenty of pix.  I had been by this place before, but the previous times I had seen it, there were no signs up saying what it was.  It looked to me like a big hole in someone's backyard that had been fenced off to make a mini-park.  I'm talking about the Robber Baron Cave, slap in the middle of a fairly densely-populated area on Nacogdoches not too far south of Loop 410.  If you drive down Nacogdoches and you don't already know it's there, you'll probably never notice it.

The Warrior's Way

Watched this movie yesterday.  I enjoyed it a lot and gave it 5 stars on Netflix.

It's about a 19th-century assassin (ninja) named Yang who has sworn to kill all members of an enemy family, which he does until he comes to the last survivor:  a baby girl.  He suddenly changes heart and refuses to kill her, instead taking custody of her and caring for her.  This makes him a renegade and enemy of his own clan.  He tries to escape them by leaving the Orient and coming to the American West.

He goes to the small, crumbling town of Lode, where a friend of his had previously emigrated to.  His friend has since died, so he takes over his friend's business of clothes washing.  The town is almost dead, in the middle of the desert and isolated much like the town of Lago in High Plains Drifter.  Lode is home to a dilapidated amusement park and is populated mostly by carnies and sideshow freaks.  And, like Lago, it is periodically visited by a gang of murderous villains who terrorize the townsfolk.

Also among the townsfolk is a young woman named Lynne whose entire family was murdered by the gang about 10 years previous, and in fact Lynne herself had appeared to be mortally wounded at the time but miraculously recovered and now wants to personally kill the gang's leader, known as "the Colonel," to get her revenge.  Lynne had been given some rudimentary sword training by Yang's old friend and Yang continues some further sword training with her after hearing her story.

Of course the Colonel's gang eventually reappears, leading to a climactic showdown.  However, a large squad of ninjas who have been searching for Yang and the baby girl also appears.  The climactic battle scene is quite the showdown.

Part Kung Fu (the TV series), part True Grit, part High Plains Drifter.  All live-action but combat was definitely imitating anime.  The far backgrounds (horizon, sky) appear to be CGI, giving it a somewhat fantastic feel.  Humor, violence, mercy, revenge, love, heartbreak...it's all in there.

Bob and Ray on "Crooning"

I had downloaded several old "Bob and Ray" radiio shows a few days ago and this clip was part of one show, so I put it on YouTube so I could share it. It struck me as very funny.

A collection of cool album covers

I do not own all of these, but this is a duo I heard about because of their Lovecraft-themed albums.

Nox Arcana is the duo of Joseph Vargo and William Piotrowsky.  Vargo is also a visual artist and he created all of this cover art.  Vargo was also previously involved with a similar group called Midnight Syndicate.

The music?  Well, Wikipedia calls their music neoclassical ambient.  Most think of it as "dark ambient" or "darkwave."  Instruments used are both electronic and acoustic, with some vocal choirs but almost never any lyrics.

Each of their albums has its own theme, and mostly to sort it out in my own mind, I'll go down the list here.  So this is a list of album titles followed by who/what inspired them.

Darklore Manor (2003) - Inspired by a "haunted house" near Salem, Massachusetts.

Necronomicon (2004) - H.P. Lovecraft.

Winter's Knight (2005) - Gothic Christmas/Solstice music, with some inspiration from Dickens' A Christmas Carol.

Transylvania (2005) - Bram Stoker's Dracula.

Carnival of Lost Souls (2006) - Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes.

Blood of Angels (2006) - A collaboration with Michelle Belanger, who sings on all tracks.  This album is the notable exception in having actual "songs" rather than instrumentals.  (There are other lyrical songs throughout the whole collection, but they rare).  Inspired by, and I quote, "ancient Enochian myths to tell a story about mythical Watcher Angels, who 'abandoned Heaven for a taste of mortal love.' According to the Enochian legend, the Watchers (also called Grigori or 'Fallen Angels') are celestial beings who were condemned to the earthly realm after uniting with mortals and sharing with them their mystical secrets."  So there you go.

Blood of the Dragon (2006) - Swords & sorcery tales and Dungeons & Dragons.

Shadow of the Raven (2007) - Edgar Allen Poe.

Grimm Tales (2008) - The Brothers Grimm.

Phantoms of the High Seas (2008) - Pirate lore and stories of ghost ships.

Blackthorn Asylum (2009) - H.P. Lovecraft.

Zombie Influx (2009) - A zombie invasion mixed with faux news reports a la the The War of the Worlds thing.  A collaboration with another musical project called BuzzWorks.

Winter's Eve (2009) - Another Gothic Christmas/Solstice collection.

Theater of Illusion (2010) - "An old theater haunted by a masked magician."

House of Nightmares (2010) - A old (haunted) manor house next to a cemetery.  Another collaboration with BuzzWorks.

The Dark Tower (2011) - Vampires.

Pretty good stuff, if you're into "neoclassical ambient" with a heavy emphasis on minor keys.

This is the video I was trying to create yesterday

Old church building

The video clip in the previous post was another from my phone, of course, taken last week at Sunset Station.  I tried to edit it with some humorous credits but for some reason Windows Movie Maker wouldn't save it.

So anyway here's an old church in the far background that I liked the looks of.  I mostly took the picture to remind myself because I thought I might put it in a story.  This was on the near southside, but I don't remember the street.

I have a few other work pix that I'll post soon, but I thought I'd spread them out into separate posts just to have something to do.

Train

One example of a comment I'll delete

A screen cap of a notification email for The Briar Files.

Good grief.

Weekend update (It's a Jeep thing)

Knocked a couple of shows off the Netflix queue today, taking it easy on a Saturday afternoon.

First was Hobo With a Shotgun (2011).  This is a ridiculously over-the-top vigilante movie starring Rutger Hauer, who is one of my favorite tough-guy actors.  The gunplay is completely unrealistic and the gore technology is pure splatterpunk.  Also for some reason they filmed it with a bunch of different weird color filters, so at times everything is green, other times blue, and sometimes...uh...there's a word for this I'm looking for...can't think of it right now but I mean almost cartoonishly garish and bright.  Shotgun fu, lawn mower fu, noose fu, switchblade fu, and manhole cover fu.  Actually I thought the thing with the manhole covers was quite clever.

If you want to see a fake trailer from 2007 for this movie, here it is.  It pretty much encapsulates the whole movie in 2 minutes.  NSFW.


The other thing I watched today was a documentary called A Film Unfinished (2010).  It's about a Nazi propaganda film about the Warsaw ghetto which was never finished and was found--in bits and pieces--over the course of many years in the Nazi archives after the war.  It was intended to show that Jews were living in a mixture of opulence and poverty in the ghetto--that is--some lived in opulence and crassly ignored those who were starving.  Of course, it was all lies and manipulation and the scenes were staged; anyone who failed to perform to expectations was beaten or killed.  Here's a trailer.



Some people might think they know enough about World War 2 and the aftermath.  I think this is a foolish position.  Many parts of the world are only a hair's breadth away from, and some have continued to engage in, genocides of various sorts.  The Earth's population as a whole still hasn't learned.  I highly recommend this documentary, but I will also warn that due to its graphic and realistic nature, it is absolutely not for children (just in case you're not smart enough to be aware of that on your own).  Next up on my Nazi propaganda movie list is Triumph of the Will.  I've heard a lot about it, but haven't seen it yet.

This past week I also finished up Star Trek:  Enterprise.  My old opinion that the writers just killed this show because they got tired and ran out of ideas was only reinforced by seeing the last season again.  I was especially annoyed by the two "mirror universe" episodes which had no overlap with the "our universe" characters.  Utterly pointless.  I've now begun watching Farscape, which I've seen some of when it was being erratically aired on Sci-Fi, and which I liked a lot.

Well, I traded in my old Ford Ranger this week.  It had 191,000+ miles on it, and had several problems, the most recent of which was the transmission was beginning to get funky.  My wife and I went to DriveTime yesterday and got a Jeep Liberty, a small SUV.  This one has a 4-cylinder and a manual transmission so it should get much better mileage than the Ranger did with its V-6 automatic.  I somehow reached 22 mpg one time with the Ranger; most of the time I got 19-20.  The Jeep is rated for 24 highway, and almost all of my driving is highway.  This is our third vehicle from DriveTime so I guess that says something about them (first, a Dodge Durango for my wife, which we wore out and traded for her current Ford Freestar minivan).  Oh yeah, one other problem with the Ranger was that the kids were having a hard time cramming themselves into it and I wanted something with room for them so no one had to climb into that back "extended cab" part.  I finally have an air conditioner again!  The a/c was one of the first things to go, about 2 years ago.  A couple of months ago the fan also stopped blowing so I couldn't even heat the thing on cold days.

Another thing I like about the Jeep is that "it ain't got no power nothin'," as one of my in-laws has said.  Mirrors, doors, windows, locks, seat adjustments...all manual.  This is my first Jeep, so we'll see how it goes.

The Big Dog

An animated gif that helps demonstrate how huge some stars are, here.

Scantily-clad, tattoed, fur-wearing, sword-twirling Russian redhead

Best post title EVER!!! NSFW.

Genius...

Art posters with the topic, "What if modern movies had been made decades ago?"  Found here, along with several others of a similar ilk.

How to listen to classical music

A 20-minute lecture/demonstration by conductor/pianist Benjamin Zander.  I have known for a long time that my biggest problem with listening to classical music is because my musical attention span is too short, having grown up listening to pop (which includes country), and the phrases are much longer with most classical pieces.

This is informative and entertaining, and quite funny.  I really liked the part about raising one's eyebrows to indicate a deceptive cadence.  That really cracked me up.  It reminds me of one time when someone at church asked me how I could hit the high notes when I'm leading singing.  I told them, "I stand on my tiptoes."  Which is partly a joke, and partly the literal truth.*





*But since I'm a tenor, hitting the high notes isn't that hard. The low notes are what really tear my voice up.

Oh... waugghhh!!! YEEEAAHHHH!!!

If you can listen to this without laughing, you might want to get yourself checked.

David Lee Roth's vocal track isolated from the rest of the song on Runnin' with the Devil.

Good link: CBS Radio Mystery Theater

I don't usually post unsolicited links that I receive by email, but this is an exception because I am definitely going to make use of it.  I have taken to listening to old radio shows during my afternoon commute home, and I recently was sent the link for a very cool site:  CBS Radio Mystery Theater.

Enjoy all 1,399 episodes of CBS Radio Mystery Theater old time radio free! You can stream or download old radio shows in MP3 format or copy radio shows to CD. We're big fans of Radio Mystery Theater and by offering shows from the golden age of radio for free, we keep the spirit of the old time radio alive!

Check it out.

Weekend update

This has nothing to do with the Mayan calendar, but I think it must still surely be a sign of the end times.

I got behind on my usual blog reading this week due to just being too busy and working more than I rightly should.  Also my internet service was out for a while last night, which was a real drag.  However it was back at full force this morning and I did nothing but rest today.  Finished watching the anime series "Claymore."  Well, I gave it 3 stars.  It started out with a halfway decent story and had some character development but the last half or so was pretty much just anime action without any real story.  I read up a little about the original manga, and I think it would have been better if they'd more closely followed the manga and maybe made 52 episodes instead of only 26.

My wife's grandfather passed away this week, not unexpectedly since he'd been in declining health for a long time and had spent the last year in a nursing home.  We inherited one of his few remaining possessions:  a 26-inch flat-screen TV that he'd purchased about 3 years ago.  So now I have a good TV in the bedroom, which is where I watch most of the shows that I like but no one else does (anime, for example).

The old TV I was using was the one I bought when I was truck driving, and it was a very small (15-inch, I think) conventional CRT model.  The color had gone off some time ago and all the reds had pretty much shifted out, which made some things look kind of strange.  For example, black & white shows were more of a purple-scale than a grayscale, and I didn't watch them.  I think the last B&W thing I watched before it went bad was Nosferatu, and that was quite some time ago.  So anyway, now I'm going to hit some of the old shows like the complete run of Twilight Zone.  I hardly ever watched the show when it was rerun when I was a kid so most of it will be new to me.

I did see the one with Charles Bronson and Elizabeth Taylor, the one with Burgess Meredith when his glasses broke, the one with the good-looking woman who was the weird one because everyone else looked like monster pigs, and especially the one with the doll.  You know which one.  That one gave me nightmares when I was a kid, probably because I already had a very strong aversion to any dolls larger than an action figure G.I. Joe.  I still don't like dolls.  They creep me out.  Also there was one with the guy who played Sargent Carter on Gomer Pyle that I remember spooking me quite a bit, too, way back then.  I think I also saw the one with Captain Kirk and the gremlin, but I'm not sure.  I did see the movie version with John Lithgow.

Also I just saw that Netflix now has the entire run of Rawhide, so I'm going to watch at least a few of those.  I've never seen any of the shows with Clint Eastwood and I've always wanted to see those.

Another nice thing about the new TV is that it's big enough that I can now read subtitles, so it will be much easier to watch the subtitled anime from Crunchyroll.  I might even watch "Le Femme Nikita" again now that I can read the subtitles.

Covers #3: Don't Fear the Reaper

First of all, I am aware that all of these versions, including the original, need more cowbell. There: I said it, so you don't have to. Now, can we all agree that the cowbell skit was a great moment in SNL comedy and move on with our lives? Thanks.

Some of these versions aren't really noteworthy except to help the exceptions stand out. Original Blue Öyster Cult, from Agents of Fortune, 1976. This is the longer album version, not the radio edit.