Not quite that free, thank you

(Smirk)

Click to enlarge so you can read this.  I made a screen cap instead of copying and pasting because I don't want it to be spider-able.

Your H₂O company throws this big employee picnic every year, which I have never attended because I am an anti-social b*st*rd and I don't care to spend my day off with a bunch of people I'm stuck working with all week.  Also, last year we had mandatory overtime on the day of the picnic, so everyone in our department had to work first and then go.  Screw that.

Anyway, usually they rent one of the big parks in the city and arrange for all kinds of recreational activities for both kids and adults.  This year they decided to heck with that and just got super-discounted ticket prices to F**st* T*x*s.

As you can see, we have at least two certified scalpers among our ranks.  This has amused me greatly today.

Which one of these doesn't belong?

Click to enlarge.  I have my own answer as to which one of these doesn't belong, and why, but all answers are welcome.  Maybe there are multiple answers.

I think I somehow missed one thumbnail, but it won't change the answer anyway.

This is not logical

Top comment at YouTube: "i didn't come here looking for answers, but i left with many questions"

They can call it what they want...

But I call it:  48 Pictures that Prove the 90s Sucked.

Weekend update

My son had his Blue & Gold yesterday, which means he is moving on up to a full Boy Scout.  He had a rough patch there when he wanted to quit.  He said he was bored with it, although I suspect the reason was deeper than that.  Anyway, I half persuaded and half forced him to stick with it, and after last week's meeting he seemed to be revived.  I think he has more fun with it when I involve myself more.  So today we did an "engineering" project in which we made a "blueprint" of the house.  His den leader said it didn't have to be to scale, but there's no point in doing it sloppily, and it took us two sheets of graph paper taped together, but that sucker is to scale.  I think when he goes to Boy Scouts and gets to where he isn't constantly having to get something done to move up to the next level, he'll like it even more.  I wasn't able to be in Scouts when I was a kid, although I wanted to.  There was no organization where we lived, and we would have had to drive to another town for me to take part in it.  They did attempt it briefly one summer and I became a Webelos for a few months, but it never went anywhere.  I don't think the people trying to organize it really knew what they were doing.  I still have my old handbook, which I read from cover to cover more than once when I was his age.

Not much else going on here lately.  The weather has been nice, and this past week at work wasn't too bad with little rain and cool temperatures.  I got my numbers this past week, and I had 95 errors last year.  I don't have an exact number of total reads, but it's somewhere over 120,000.  My error rate put me at 14th in the department, or about in the middle.  They're going to a different method of ranking next year which considers more things than just errors.  They showed me that if we had been using that method for the past year, I would have been all the way up at #8--in the top 10!  So I'm hoping I can get even fewer errors this year--I already had a much better January than I did last year.  I also had 2 unscheduled absences last year (sick), so this year I'm going to try and schedule a "get well" day ahead of time if I feel myself getting sick.  I have plenty of what they call "personal leave" to use for this.  I get both "personal leave" and "vacation leave," which are two different things.  The vacation time has to be scheduled more in advance than personal time, and I can get paid back for up to 40 hours of unused personal leave at the end of the year if I want (otherwise it rolls over, and I've been rolling it over since I started).

Here's what I've been listening to via YouTube lately.  Arkona is either a folk metal or pagan metal (depending on who you ask) band from Russia, and they sing in Russian, but the music is so cool I don't really care.  The video below is one of their shorter songs and has some good examples of the folk instrumentation they use.  The title translates as "wall on wall," which is what that form of fighting is called, and is apparently a sport, I think.  Their lead singer, who calls herself Masha Scream, is one of the few female metal vocalists who both sings and uses death growls.  I don't think this track has any of her growling in it, though.

Worf, the punching bag

Of course, there was a good reason for this.  As a Klingon, he could take punishment that would kill a human.  So every time they went up against someone with superhuman strength, Worf had to be the one to get beaten up because it would have killed any other of the major cast members (excepting Data/Lore), and ST:TNG pretty much avoided the "red shirt" cliché that so afflicted TOS.*

I didn't mean to have two Worf posts so close together.  It just happened that way.



*I watched that Star Trek reboot recently, expecting to hate it, but I didn't.  I found it entertaining enough that I didn't consider it a waste of time, even though it leaned heavily toward the pastiche.  But the one "red shirt" scene really cracked me up.  As soon as I saw that guy, I told my wife, "He's dead."  "What do you mean?" she said.  "Just wait for it," I said.

I never had noticed this before

Poor Worf, he don't get any respect.

And yet, it moves

Click to enlarge.  I took several photos from my regular cycle 17 the other day, but most of them were for the video I'm planning.  This one is just because it creeps me out.  No one lives here.  The lot doesn't belong to either of the houses on either side of it.  Someone just uses it for storage.  (You can see the meter box at bottom left; except for a bad leak they had a few months ago, it never uses any water).  That statue is never in the same position.  I'm not saying it moves on its own, but...okay, I am.  I'm firmly convinced that this evil thing comes to life at night and roams the neighborhood, probably peering leeringly into children's bedroom windows.  It's evil!  EVIL, I tell you!

I don't like clowns.  Life-sized statues always kind of give me the willies.  A life-sized statue of a clown is just about my worst waking nightmare.  I always have the urge to scale the fence and run toward it with the hammer I have in my toolbox, except that I'm afraid I would make it only halfway across the lot before it turned toward me, eyes blazing and with a hideously friendly smile on it's face, and I would be found screaming senselessly and end up in a padded room on South Presa.

This is in a neighborhood off of Shane Road, not far from the "haunted" tracks.

TRAIN 2: The Crossing

I had to do a little audio editing/trickery for this one, which came out quite well and was enjoyable.  I'll have to figure out some excuse to do it more often.

I already have plans for making this a trilogy, but part 3 will be more ambitious.  I plan on filming about 2 minutes of "footage" tomorrow morning, in equipment-mandated 30-second increments, of course.

A video meme I just discovered

Here's a link to a good, and very funny, example.

Total Eclipse of the Heart (literal video version)

There are loads of these on YouTube, to find them just search for "literal video version."  I also watched one there for Aha's "Take On Me."  Boy, I can't wait to see more of these.

The 11 Doctors

Mental Floss has a good article running down the 11 canonical Doctors (Who, that is).

I think they forgot the "trusted companion"

Otherwise, great illustration. Forgot where I found this.  (Technically, the lightsabre isn't "supernatural help," but I guess it would otherwise be hard to illustrate the Force).

Another song from my childhood

This is one of those songs that has been lurking around in the backroads of my memory for a long time.  I liked it as a kid, but never knew who sang it or even what it's title was.  Yesterday I was thinking about it again, for some reason, and G00gled some of the lyrics and found it quickly enough.  (Leon Everette, "Hurricane").

But there was another one, a sort of country novelty song, that I've been looking for and can't come up with anything based on the lyrics that I remember.  It's a story about a boy named Leon Rhodes (I think?, maybe Leon Rose?) who played the bugle.  He went to church every Sunday, and the preacher there had an annoying habit of ending all of his sermons with, "Someday Gabriel's gonna blow his horn--I can almost hear him now."  So one Sunday morning Leon decided to play a joke on the preacher.

One day little Leon Rhodes took his beat-up bugle along
Climbed up in that hot church attic and waited for the closing song
Well, Reverend Jones ended his sermon in the same old way
Said a few words about Gabriel, cupped his hand up behind his ear
And he said,
Someday Gabriel's gonna blow his horn, I can almost hear him now...

At this point Leon blows a little tune on his bugle, and "it was so quiet you could hear a pin drop."  So Reverend Jones shakily repeated his thing about Gabriel, and Leon blew the little tune again.  Then it goes something like:

Well, the people didn't waste no time gettin' out of that spooky place
The preacher rushed down from the pulpit with a worried look on his face
About that time little Leon Rhodes decided to save his hide
Took one step, fell down through that ceiling and he landed by the preacher's side

The preacher thinks Leon is Gabriel and he shouts something that I can't remember, and then:

...and he ran out the big front door
Far as I know that man's still runnin'
'Cause he ain't been seen no more

Then it goes on to tell how Leon grew up to be a great bugle player, and the song ends with a trumpet solo on the fade-out.  I'm pretty sure it was a trumpet, not a bugle, based on how I remember it.  Anyway.

If anyone reads this and knows what song I'm talking about, please let me know who sang it and what the title is.

Raze all the buildings and sow the ground with salt

I took these a whole month ago when I was doing a partial route on the other side of highway 281 from my usual cycle 15.  This route sucks.  I had a partial on it again today, but a different part, and I was even more lost today that I was last month.  I mean this route really just blows bloody raw chunks.  I hate this route.  200 meters took me longer to do than my full route on the other side of the highway.

I had intended to take a specific photo of something today, but I got rained on all day so I didn't have my phone on me.

Movie review: Subspecies

I watched this a few days ago.  It had pretty good ratings on Netflix and since I have a penchant for vampire movies, I thought I'd give it a go.

Oh man.  The acting was terrible.  It was made in 1991 but the little imp-things were about as cutting-edge as Jason and the Argonauts.  I realize that the Argonauts' special effects were cutting-edge for 1963, but 27 years later you'd of thought they could have improved slightly.

I had some hopes it would be a pretty good movie, because it was filmed on location in Romania and was produced by a bunch of guys whose last names all ended in "-escu."  The "bad" vampire looked good--I mean, bad, of course--his horrific appearance gave me hope right at the beginning, but when he ripped off his own fingertips and strewed them around so they could transform into those imp-things, I lost hope.  I fell asleep toward the end but I'm pretty sure the good vampire killed the bad vampire.  In any case, by that time I just didn't care.

Also the love interest was kind of creepy because it looked like the girl and the guy (who was the "good" vampire, of course) were brother and sister.  There were some nekkid br34sts, but frankly they weren't impressive enough to make up for the movie.

And now there's, what, five of these movies?  Good grief.  I would recommend dubbing them all onto an 8-hour videocassette and turning it on just as you go to bed.  That way if you're lucky it will all be over with by the time you wake up in the morning.

I can't believe they're just giving this stuff away

I'm back

Bet you didn't even know I was gone.  My internet went down yesterday and a tech came out today to see what was up.  We figured out that apparently, when the last tech came out here to do an equipment upgrade, he hadn't firmly seated the coax cable into its jack, which resulted in some intermittent problems until yesterday when my daughter must have nudged it with her toe and popped it completely out.  Today's tech dude went ahead and added a few tweaks while he was here, most importantly locking my system onto the antenna with the strongest signal.

I found this article somewhat interesting:  10 Most Bizarre Cargo Spills.  A couple of times I hauled about 33,000 pounds of masa from Laredo up to a restaurant distribution place on the east side, and I bet that would have made an horrific mess if it had spilled.  So now you also have some trivia you'll never need:  the most masa you can pack in a 53-foot trailer is right at 33,000 pounds.

Once I was hauling 26,000 pounds of toilet paper (again, the most you can pack in a 53-foot trailer).  That was the time I got stuck in a Wal-Mart parking lot in Wyoming for 2 days because of a winter storm.  Everyone was sitting there bemoaning getting stuck there (if you're wheels aren't moving, you aren't making money).  I broke in on the CB and said, "Well, I'm hauling 26,000 pounds of toilet paper, so if anybody needs some, it's ten dollars a roll."  I don't know if anyone thought that was funny or not.

Another load with the potential for a big mess that I hauled was 30,000+ pounds of cat litter.  There was another time I had a load of 16,000 pounds of empty cat food cans.  Not a big potential for making a mess there, but it seemed funny to me at the time.  That was my first trip into L.A, actually an industrial subdivision called Vernon, which I learned truckers often refer to as L.A., L.A.

Then there was the time I had a trailer full of Betty Crocker brownie mix.  Cases and cases of it, although I don't recall the weight.  One case got torn during unloading, so they said, "This one's yours."  None of the individual boxes had been damaged--only the big case box itself.  So I brought a whole case of Betty Crocker brownie mix home.  I thought we would never eat all that stuff.

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.

Working

I'm working on a new "covers" post, and I'm finding a lot of covers for this particular song--and it's not "Yesterday." I think I'll leave that one alone. Maybe a dozen so far? I didn't count. Anyway, I'm not finished researching it yet. Maybe tomorrow.

Found knives

In the course of my job I often come across interesting items just a-layin' around.  For example, yesterday I was in a neighborhood where they were doing junk collecting and I found a box full of random Lego pieces that someone was throwing out.  I brought the whole box home, which to my son was like getting a late Christmas gift.  I sometimes find cash, although it's most often coinage or dollar bills.  On two occasions I've found a twenty and a five in close proximity, and once I found two twenties just blowing down the street one very windy day.  I had to chase one of them.

I've also found several knives, however, most of them are Chinese junk.  They have plastic bolsters, the blades are wobbly and the lock isn't positive.  I do pick these up but just throw them in my toolbox.  I wouldn't use them for anything but tackle box knives--by which I mean I wouldn't be bothered much if I accidentally dropped one in the creek while I'm fishing.

However, I have found two very good knives which I thought I'd show because one of them I found just today.

The upper knife in the photo I found last year sometime, and I carried it for a while even though the belt clip wasn't as tight as it should have been.  And then I snagged the clip on something and bent it even worse, which you might be able to see in the photo.  I haven't carried it since then, but if I can find a small enough Torx driver I can take the clip off and bend it back the way it should be.  It's a Gerber with an assisted-opening 3" semi-serrated lockblade.  It's a great general-purpose medium-duty knife, and I did use it several times to cut landscaping fabric that some idiots insist on covering their meters with.  The blade locks both opened and closed, with a button on the bolster that releases it.  So as soon as I can find a proper Torx driver, it will see use again.

The lower knife I found just today, and is a Swiss Army knife "Forester" model, if I read their website correctly.  The knife blade and the large screwdriver/bottle opener both lock.  There is nothing wrong with this knife except that it's missing the toothpick and the tweezer, and those can be replaced.  I do need to clean it up a little and apply a tiny squirt of Rem oil or two to smooth out the action, but that's about it.  I couldn't believe it when I saw this knife just lying in the street and immediately noticed the SAK logo on the bolster.  They sell on the Victorinox website for $42.  The blade and the saw are both still extremely sharp.  I've never had a SAK that failed to hold an excellent edge.

P.S.  And now I have TWO corkscrews!

Tarja Turunen

I'm still going through all my stuff, building up my big "general favorites" list for my phone/mp3 player and I came across one track today that prompted more special interest.  The video below isn't the track that was included on this particular Amazon sampler, but I think it's a good one.

Tarja Turunen is a Finnish classically-trained soprano who used to sing for a symphonic metal band called Nightwish (note:  also need to look them up) but has since gone out on her own.  Here's her official video for "Die Alive," which I like quite a lot.

 And just for kicks, here she is performing with a band who you may recognize.

The first electronic hacker

I found this to be very interesting.

LATE one June afternoon in 1903 a hush fell across an expectant audience in the Royal Institution's celebrated lecture theatre in London. Before the crowd, the physicist John Ambrose Fleming was adjusting arcane apparatus as he prepared to demonstrate an emerging technological wonder: a long-range wireless communication system developed by his boss, the Italian radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi. The aim was to showcase publicly for the first time that Morse code messages could be sent wirelessly over long distances. Around 300 miles away, Marconi was preparing to send a signal to London from a clifftop station in Poldhu, Cornwall, UK.

Yet before the demonstration could begin, the apparatus in the lecture theatre began to tap out a message. At first, it spelled out just one word repeated over and over. Then it changed into a facetious poem accusing Marconi of "diddling the public". Their demonstration had been hacked - and this was more than 100 years before the mischief playing out on the internet today. Who was the Royal Institution hacker? How did the cheeky messages get there? And why?

Read the whole thing at New Scientist.

And in hindsight, it seemed a very arrogant and condescening attitude from Marconi to claim "I can tune my instruments so that no other instrument that is not similarly tuned can tap my messages."  Especially since the first spark-gap transmitters blanketed huge swaths of the electromagnetic spectrum.

The work

I have been working on another installment of The Hunter Chronicles, which this time is set at Christmas-time, more or less.  Almost finished but I think it will require some work before I'm ready for it to see the light of day.  Less atmospherics in this one, and more action, along with some long-overdue character development and a glimpse of Hunter's true potential, which I referred to in a previous story but I don't think anyone really caught it.  But then, at the time I didn't want anyone to catch it, yet.  I'm also still looking for a good epigram for it.  Haven't come across anything yet.

For no particular reason...

"Dancing Bear" by The Mamas and The Papas.  This turned up on the phone today when I was shuffling some tunes, and this has always been a favorite of mine.  I like the sad, minor melody.  I don't know for sure what that low-toned woodwind is that plays through this song, but it sure sounds like a bassoon to me.

The back-up pocket knife

Since I had recently mentioned pocket knives, I thought I would post a photo of my back-up knife.  I got this one from some mail-order military surplus place many years ago and have hardly ever used it.  It's also made by Victorinox (the Swiss Army knife folks) but as you can see it's not a SAK.  This one was made for the German military, I don't know what era, and is a good knife as every Victorinox knife I've ever had is.  A standard blade, plus a saw blade.  The piece of metal lying alongside the saw blade is a metal cover for the saw.  I suppose they put that on there so you don't lose a finger when you use the bottle opener.  My biggest complaint about it is that it doesn't have a Phillips head screwdriver.  Slightly lesser complaints are no tweezer and no toothpick.  I think this is probably the only corkscrew I own.  It came with that lanyard rope that you see in the picture and I never bothered to remove it.  By the way, I used this knife when I was teaching some Cub Scouts how to sharpen a knife for their whittling chips.  Not that it has ever needed sharpening.  It keeps an edge like Mournblade.

And just for kicks, two other tools that are always at my desk.  Just above the knife is my good pipe tool which I use only here at my desk.  Outside I use other, cheaper and easier-to-replace pipe tools.  To the left is a Senior pipe reamer with the drill removed.  The drill is used to clean out the air passage in the shank.

My phone doesn't take really good pictures, but you can click to enlarge if you want to.

Stop-action nightgaunts

Along with a recitation of "Nightgaunts" from Lovecraft's "The Fungi from Yuggoth."  Pretty cool.  My only criticism is that I don't think the nightgaunts "faces" are as smooth and featureless as they should be.

Amusing and informative

The 25 Most Powerful Songs of the Past 25 Years, according to mentalfloss.com.  Interesting.  I would've never guessed #1.

Weekend update

I hope all my legions of readers had a safe and pleasant holiday season, although I guess technically it's not over until after the New Year.

By the way, I don't really think of the official New Year's Day as the beginning of the year.  I know it's the beginning of our customary calendar year, but I have a more pagan outlook on it in that I always think of the year turning over on the winter solstice.

We had a fairly good Christmas this year, except that there were a few fewer people at my dad's place because so many relatives are getting advanced in age and don't get around much anymore.  As for me personally, I got some money from my mom which I might use to buy a replacement pocket knife.  I somehow managed to lose my favorite knife--a Tinker model Swiss Army knife which my wife gave me for Christmas the year we were married and which I've carried always for the past 18 years.  It can easily be replaced, but there was sentimental value in the original.  I might upgrade to the Super Tinker which is still small enough to be carried in the pocket but which has a couple of extra tools.

I also received a gift card to Best Buy, which I've already spent via their website.  I kind of wanted to indulge in a game or two for myself for the Wii, but was reluctant to spend my own money on such a thing.  I was able to get two pre-owned games for the value of the card plus a couple of extra dollars.  One was Bleach:  Shattered Blade which I've had on my hit list since I got the Wii for the kids last year.  It got high reviews at Amazon and looks pretty interesting, with the ability to unlock extra characters who all have different powers and skills.  Also I'm looking forward to annoying the kids by yelling getsuga tensho! every chance I get.  I'm not sure if Ichigo's getsuga tensho attack is even in the game, but I'm going to yell it anyway.  Also, bankai!

The other game also got very good reviews:  Shiren the Wanderer, which is a "roguelike" fantasy role-playing game and which I found by searching for games that were similar to D&D.  I had to look up "roguelike."  I was aware that there had been a game called Rogue but I had never played it.  It basically means that there is a lot of randomization built in so that nothing is ever exactly the same twice.

Tonight I have been using YouTube to fully explore an album that I had bookmarked some time ago:  Digital Ghosts by Shadow Gallery.  I like it a lot.  They caught my ear because their song "With Honor" was included on a metal sampler that I downloaded from Amazon not long ago.  Progressive metal driven by guitars but with plenty of keyboards too, and good harmony vocals.  This is their most recent album, and the first since their original lead singer died.  So I'll have to go back and listen to some of their older stuff, too.  Here's "With Honor."

On second thought, get into things in cellars

Now that it's nearing the end of the year, I was looking through a list of free samplers at Amazon.com to see what I had overlooked. I found this one from 2009.

Back then I was still using dial-up, and although I did download some stuff, I had to be careful and pick and choose. So the multiple bad reviews of this one was probably the reason I skipped it. Today I looked over those reviews again and downloaded it for a trial listen.

Heh. The reviews cracked me up.  I especially liked the "cautionary tale." The sad thing is: I've heard worse. Not a great deal worse, but somewhat worse, yeah.

Here's the link, in case you want to experience it for yourself.

Cleaning out the phone

I thought I'd go ahead and clear out some phone pix that have been building up over the past month or so. Not all of these are work pix, but I'll file it under that category anyway.

This was taken somewhere on the east side on November 16.  I don't remember what street I was on.

This one is from Thanksgiving Day, so I must have been at my father-in-law's house.  I found it fascinating that Original Peanut Squares contains peanuts.

These two pix were from somewhere in the Great Northwest area of the city--probably in that area where all the streets are named Timber something.  I was stunned to see all this red as I was coming up the street and thought a real poinsettia freak must live there.  When I got closer I could see that it was all artificial.  P.S.  You can see the cover of their water meter at the bottom center of the bottom photo.  From November 28.

I took this one because, of all the people in my company of employment who should know that new vehicles in Texas don't have to get inspected for TWO years after purchase, it would be the woman who sends out the emails reminding people that they need to get their truck inspected.  I had taken this so I could send it in an email back to her to show her that my truck doesn't expire for another year, because I was tired of being bothered by her emails.  But then the next day they made paper printout copies of all these emails and handed them to us as if we were all imbeciles who didn't know how to check their emails.  I exploded a little bit, because every now and then I can't tolerate being treated like an idiot anymore (also, I had already notified several people both by email and by direct verbal communication about this).  So I don't think I'll need this photo anymore.

Now why would I take a photo of part of a gas pump at H.E.B?  Take a look at the slightly more close-up bottom photo for a hint.

Hayes Carll - "I'm Grateful for Christmas This Year"

One of these is not like the others

One of these just doesn't belong.

Let me put this very bluntly...

Go to hell, you treasonous bastard.  I'm sure Kim is waiting for you there.

And...Two of a Mind at The Forth Checkraise.

Chris Rea - The Road to Hell (1989)

Well I'm standing by a river
But the water doesn't flow
It boils with every poison you can think of
And I'm underneath the streetlight
But the light of joy I know
Scared beyond belief way down in the shadows
And the perverted fear of violence
Chokes the smile on every face
And common sense is ringing out the bell
This ain't no technological breakdown
Oh no, this is the road to hell

When music is the topic and I mention this album, invariably the person with whom I'm speaking has never heard of it.  Never heard of Chris Rea, never heard either of his two radio hits from this album.  And it's a real shame.

In 1989 I was listening to Austin's KGSR quite a lot, which is how I heard of this album and these songs.  I suppose if I had gone as far as Austin I might have found it in a music store there, but in all of Seguin, San Antonio, New Braunfels and San Marcos, there was nary a copy to be found.  Take a look at the top 100 hits of 1989 and what do you see?  Crap.  Pure, unadulterated crap (except maybe for that one R.E.M. song).  Just count how many times you see Milli Vanilli (Milli frikkin' Vanilli) on this list.  When it came to music, 1989 was a terrible, terrible year.*

Of course, it hasn't gotten any better.  Top pop hits continue to suck, but there's a good reason.  It's because even back then, 22 years ago, as Chris Rea tried to tell us, we were already on the road to hell.

Chris Rea plays slide guitar and has a voice full of the warmth and soft roughness of a dirt road in the summertime.  Once you hear it, you will not forget it.  He's from England, and he wrote one of the best Texas songs I've ever heard.

But no radio station in S.A. ever played it, so if you lived here back then, I'm sure you never heard it.  Unless you tweaked your antenna until you could pick up KGSR like I did.

Submitted for your entertainment

Tastefully Offensive, which I discovered recently and has made me laugh a few times. It's where I found this:

This had me laughing for a long time yesterday. Must be the psychopathic streak in me.

My new favorite Christmas song

From THE Joe Cartoon.

Must be new to the show

Anyone who has watched Bleach for any amount of time will know the answer to this one.



P.S.  The correct answer to this questions is:  whatareyoukidding?

The customer is always stupid

I was in a neighborhood off Woodlake Parkway today and, just to be clear, it rained quite a lot yesterday.  I got to one point where there was a big puddle in the street, and some guy standing in his yard looking fierce with his arms crossed.  He approached me and demanded:

"Who do I call about this?"  And his arm swept sideways to indicate the street.

"You mean the water?"  I asked.

"Yes!"

...(pause)..."It's rain water."

[Honestly, I know sometimes my answers sound dumb, but it's only because I'm so often stunned by preposterous questions.  What I really meant by that was, "gravity dictates that water in the atmosphere is drawn to the earth; gravity further dictates that water on the earth is drawn to the lowest available elevation--once there, when it can't get any lower, it pools."]

"I know it's rain water, but it's just standing there!"

"I don't know," I said.  "Public Works, I guess."  And I went on my way.

I can just imagine the laughter at the City of S.A. when he calls them up and demands they rebuild an entire street just so water won't puddle in front of his house.

I don't call this a pet peeve

Because that makes it sound like something I would enjoy being annoyed by.  I don't enjoy being annoyed by anything, and in fact this is one that always makes me want to slap someone really hard, preferably while wearing a chainmail glove.

From The Telegraph:

An avalanche of more than 100 apples rained down over a main road in Keresley, Coventry on Monday night.

The street was left littered with apples after they pelted car windscreens and bonnets just after rush-hour. 

The bizarre downpour may have been caused by a current of air that lifted the fruit from a garden or orchard, releasing it over the junction of Keresley Road and Kelmscote Road.

[...]

Jim Dale, senior meteorologist, from British Weather Services, said: "The weather we have at the moment is very volatile and we probably have more to come. 

"Essentially these events are caused when a vortex of air, kind of like a mini tornado, lifts things off the ground rising up into the atmosphere until the air around it causes them to fall to earth again.

Items falling inexplicably from the sky is my favorite strange phenomena.  Every time--every time--it happens, the first excuse the "experts" come up with is a "vortex" or "mini tornado" or some such thing.

And yet it was only apples.  No leaves, no twigs, no other items that could just as easily have been swept up along with the apples.  Only apples.

Every time I've seen a report of, let's say, falling frogs, it's only frogs.  The excuse is that they were swept up out of their element by atmospheric phenomena, and yet it isn't a rain of frogs and the water they were living in along with a bunch of small fish and other debris.  It's only frogs.

I'm not saying it isn't because of some unknown atmospheric phenomena.  It's just that the intentional blindness of these people to the lameness of their own excuses always stuns me.

Enterprise sounds

First read the comic so you know what sound I'm talking about.

Then download the sound here.

Vintage gun ad: Santa with a Stevens (1903)

Thanks to Brer via email.

Treasure found on Wake Island

12/5/2011 - WAKE ISLAND AIRFIELD, Alaska -- In a tale straight from an adventure book, personnel stationed at Wake Island Airfield in the mid-Pacific recently stumbled upon a vinyl record collection with an estimated value between $90,000 and $250,000.

 The 611th Air Support Group's Detachment 1 is now making a comprehensive effort to preserve the nearly 9,000 vintage vinyl records and ship them to their rightful owner, the American Forces Radio and Television Network in Alexandria, Va., according to Master Sgt. Jean-Guy Fleury, infrastructure superintendent, who took over the project from the former Detachment 1 commander, Maj. Aaron Wilt.

 No digging was required to access this treasure, as the records were cataloged and neatly organized on shelves in a small room on the second floor of the Wake Island Airfield base operations building. The door was conspicuously stenciled with the name of the radio station, KEAD, and a restricted area warning, which kept most people out.

 "That's a locked room normally, but people in my department have known the records were there for years," said Colin Bradley, communications superintendent with Chugach Federal Solutions, Inc. CFSI is the contractor that currently manages operations on Wake Island with the oversight of Air Force quality assurance personnel.

 "Because of the completeness of the collection, I assumed it was quite valuable. I have not run across a collection that well preserved or that intact in my career. It's a little time capsule," he said.

 The collection includes a variety of vinyl albums and records specially made for military audiences and distributed monthly by the American Forces Radio and Television Network, as well as some commercially available records.

"In 1942, the American Forces Radio Service was started to get American music out to the troops overseas," said Larry Sichter, American Forces Network Broadcast Center Affiliate Relations Division chief. "Some of the radio productions were original, like GI Jill and Command Performance, and have significant value."

link

Very interesting.  Read the whole thing.

I'll never have to buy another pair of blue jeans again

I just want to say thank you to all the S.A. rate payers for supplying me with enough blue jeans to last me the rest of my life.

I have five pair that I wear on a regular weekly rotation, so they're faded, slightly torn, etc.  One more pair that I wear rarely, only when I work a Saturday.  A few more that I keep aside for "special" occasions when I want to wear nice, new-looking jeans, and 10 pair in the closet that I've never touched.  I get measured for another 5 pair this week.

In the 4+ years I've worked there, I've worn out about 10 pair.  Some of them were old jeans from before I started this job.

I thought I had kept the dog attack jeans from my previous job, just to show people what they looked like after a German Shepherd had mangled them, but I must have thrown those away.  Or maybe my wife did.  She might have gotten tired of seeing a pair of ripped up jeans with my blood stains still on them carefully folded and put up on the closet shelf.

They planned on buying one of those "goats in trees" calendars, probably

I'm number 1!

GunXSword opening theme

GunXSword, or perhaps more conventionally for English, Gun/Sword, is a mecha anime that is similar to Trigun in that it mixes science fiction elements with a setting resembling the American Old West.  It's the story of a man named Van who is wandering the world on a quest of vengeance, looking for the man who killed his wife.  His primary companion is a young girl named Wendy who is searching for her long-lost brother.  I usually tend to avoid the mecha genre, but so far I've seen the first 17 episodes and the giant robot fights have been held to a fair minimum and I've been enjoying it.

This is another anime in which a powerful hero (or anti-hero) character is accompanied by a much younger and relatively powerless companion.  This is a theme which is used fairly often, in my experience, for example it is also used in Claymore and Samurai Champloo.

Another similarity this show has with Trigun is that the opening theme is not an abbreviated version of a previously existing song.  This opening theme was composed specifically for GunXSword and is simply titled "GunXSword."  The graphics on this version are not great, but it's the only one I could find that wasn't just a slide show collection set to the theme music. Keeping in my that this story is western-themed, I think you should easily be able to hear where some of the inspiration for it came from. The composer is Kōtarō Nakagawa, who has created music for numerous anime and video games.

Funny 502 error

Claymore opening theme: Raison d'ê·tre by Nightmare

Claymore is an anime series about incredibly hot woman/monster hybrids who go around killing human-eating monsters with very large swords.  It's is particularly about a single woman/monster hybrid named Clare who's on a quest for vengeance against an especially powerful monster that killed a friend of hers.  That's all you really need to know about it.  Sure, there are many more details to fill out the story, but that should be enough to get you interested.  If not, then fine.  The opening theme is another hard guitar-driven piece by the band Nightmare.  Here's a "clean" opening (all credits removed).  Note:  I can't get this video to finish on my computer, it stops just before the end.  I had to download it to be able to view the whole thing, but you should still get the idea.

I believe this falls into the "seinen" category of anime, that is, oriented more toward adults and older adolescents, without the comical facial expressions often used in shonen anime such as Bleach and Trigun.

More anime notes

There's a new Fullmetal Alchemist movie:  The Sacred Star of Milos.  Trailer:



Since the story was pretty much finished--thoroughly and completely finished--unless they jump forward several years and make a new story about Ed's & Al's kids, I don't know where in the timeline this could possibly take place.  But what the hey.

Also I read that there may be a Bleach live-action movie in the works, but it doesn't really excite me.  They couldn't possibly do justice to that series in a two-hour movie.  There's just too much "filler" (digression, arguments, flashbacks, counter-arguments, two-episode-long "life flashing before his eyes" death scenes, whatever).  And they'll never find people who look just like the anime characters.  I'd just be thinking "who are these imposters?" the whole time.

Had mandatory overtime today.  Got rained on quite a bit, which always puts me in a bad mood.

Another great article about introverts

Great article here:  10 Myths About Introverts.  #4 is especially one of the truest truths I've ever seen.  Next time someone asks me why I hate people, I'm going to say, "I don't.  I'm just over-sensitive to dopamine.  So **** off."

A few anime notes

Several months ago, Netflix lost streaming rights to a bunch of anime shows that were all distributed by a certain American distributor.  There were only two affected shows that I had in my queue, and I had never watched one of them, but the other was a favorite of mine and I noticed when it suddenly disappeared--we had just watched the first episode so my son could see it because I knew he'd like it.

Apparently the streaming rights have been reestablished because when I got home today, the shows were back in my queue.  So...Netflix now has Trigun again.

In other anime news, I read that someone is making a live-action Akira.  I got into the anime thing late, so I've never seen Akira.  For such a legendary movie, it sure is hard to find.

I've caught up on Bleach lately, watching the subtitled versions on Crunchyroll.  Finished up on episode #349 (which is about 100 episodes in the future of what they're currently airing on Adult Swim) and now I'll just wait a couple of months until they add more episodes.

I kind of wish Netflix would have Tokko on their streaming service.  I'd like to see the versions that were not butchered for broadcast on Sci-Fi.  They do have it on DVD.  I might get the discs sometime when I don't have anything else I'd rather see.

Other than Bleach, I've lately been watching Claymore and GunXSword, both via Netflix.  Claymore is a sort of human/monster hybrids going around killing demonic monsters with swords story (as is, by the way, Tokko).  GunXSword is, I guess, technically mecha (hardy har har--technically mecha?  get it?) which usually doesn't interest me, but in this one the human stories take greater precedence over the giant robot fights, so it's worth it.

Here's Bleach opening #15, which is the opening for the current series I've been watching. Sounds like a cool song, but unfortunately I haven't been able to find a full version of it yet. For some reason, every video of this one on YouTube is reversed. This opening shows all of Ichigo's family (his father and his two sisters--their mother died about 10 years before the series begins) followed by his high school friends, then follows that with a new group of humans-with-special-powers who he encounters.  The song is by Scandal, a Japanese all-woman band.

I did just notice that one of Ichigo's friends--Sado (Chad)--is conspicuously absent from his other friends.  However, he does appear briefly later on.

A couple of haunting tales

In audiobook form.  First, Snow, Glass, Apples is a twisted take on the Snow White story by Neil Gaiman.  If the voice of the narrator sounds familiar, it's because it's Bebe Neuwirth, who most people are probably familiar with as Lilith from Cheers.  Told from the point of view of the (allegedly) evil stepmother.

Next is "Murder Mysteries," also by Gaiman (part 1 and part 2).  This tale-within-a-tale is especially engrossing and leaves the reader (listener) with a sensation of haunting disturbance.

Both of these audio versions were from Seeing Ear Theatre, a project of the Sci-Fi channel to produce SF audiobooks.  This project has since folded (probably about the time they started showing frikkin' wrestling on "Syfy"*) but of course all the files are still floating around the internet in various places.

It goes in quotes on this blog, and I will use it only derogatorily until they change their name to something that doesn't look like urban slang for venereal disease.

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Zoidberg R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn

link