Well...I'm back

We had a big storm Saturday night/Sunday morning which knocked out our power for several hours and apparently knocked out our internet service as well.  At first, the woman I talked to on the phone checked our radio over the air and said something was wrong with it.  But then when the tech guy finally came out here today he said it was actually my router that had quit working.  Whatever.  Anyway, I've been without internet since Sunday morning and it was just restored today.  By the way, we got 7 inches of rain from that storm.  Yeah, 7 inches.  Fortunately, my wife dumped out the first 2 inches from the rain gauge when she got home from work on Saturday night so the gauge didn't overflow.

So anyway, in the past I had downloaded a bunch of stuff from YouTube for watching offline, so that I wouldn't have to deal with buffering pauses.  Most of it I had also backed up on CD so it wouldn't be filling space on my hard drive, and I dug out the old discs and watched some of the stuff since I didn't have internet.

I watched a couple of episodes of Stressed Eric.  You can still see all of these on YouTube; a user named AlienShame uploaded the full series and it looks like they are all still there.  I also watched all but the last episode of Police Squad!.  The last one was corrupted somehow, so I'll try downloading it again.

I also watched this.


Out of Mind:  The Stories of H.P. Lovecraft is a one-hour movie--possibly made for Canadian TV, I think.  It mashes together various HPL characters and story elements into a new story, interspersed with an actor portraying HPL speaking directly into the camera and using bits of HPL's letters to paint a portrait of who Lovecraft was.  It's about a modern-day man named Randolph Carter (an HPL character used in several stories) who inherits a copy of the Necronomicon from his uncle, Professor George Angell (a character from The Call of Cthulhu).  After reading the book, or parts of it anyway, Carter begins having very vivid and realistic dreams which place him in different HPL story fragments.  Eventually he dreams that he meets Lovecraft, or perhaps Lovecraft dreams that he meets Carter, or perhaps both.  I thought it was a pretty good film, and kind of amusing when Carter meets Lovecraft, while Carter is wearing a Lovecraft t-shirt.  "What am I doing on your shirt?" a bemused Lovecraft asks.  "Where I come from," Carter answers, "you've got quite a following...enough to put your picture on a shirt."  "How peculiar," says Lovecraft, then he invites Carter back to his house for some lemonade.  I thought that the actor portraying HPL did a really good job, although, of course, we don't actually have any film footage to show how HPL moved, or any audio recordings of his voice.  How unfortunate.

I also watched The Making of Twin Peaks, which I had downloaded from YouTube in full but which appears to have since been removed.  It's a 2-hour documentary that I think was included on the DVD set of the series.  I found it to be fascinating, especially the clip below.  I immediately became a fan of Angelo Badalamenti from the time I first saw the original pilot on TV, and have both volumes of the soundtrack plus the Julee Cruise album that was released back then, which overlaps and somewhat compliments the soundtrack albums.  The whole section on the music of Twin Peaks is much longer than this clip, and also includes comments from Julee Cruise herself (she's the petite white-haired singer in the biker bar in the TV show).



Here's another interesting clip that wasn't part of the big documentary.


Michael J. Anderson, the man in this video, has actually made a study of, and is an expert in, speaking in reverse.  For the red room dream sequences, everyone had to speak--and act--backwards, then the footage was played in reverse so that it came out forwards (that's David Lynch for you).  He had to teach everyone in these scenes how to speak in reverse.

By the way, the full series of Twin Peaks is available for streaming on Netflix, in case you never watched it.