Doctor Who: The Pirate Planet

2012-11-16, 9:33 pm
Categories: Stream of Consciousness, TV

I am very tired, so here's another old Doctor Who review. Originally posted Brontoforumus, 2008-11-18.

The Pirate Planet is not what you expect either from the title or for the writer (Douglas Adams). The pirates are not of the traditional variety (though the leader has robot parts), are never referred to as pirates, and it is unclear until halfway through or more why the serial is called "The Pirate Planet".

But all that's part of a series of mysteries in the serial that are quite cleverly revealed. Some are obvious, others (why do gems fall from the sky right before the stars change?) are not.

Adams crafts a story with far fewer laughs than you would expect, but it's quite clever and plays out at a good pace, and features an interesting cast of characters (particularly the villains). As usual, he wears his environmentalist cred on his sleeve, but uses it in a way that makes the story interesting.

For $11, it's on the "worth owning" list.

That said, I have zero interest in watching the rest of the Key to Time Series. I've already watched 200 minutes of a collection quest; I don't really see following the remaining 450. Frankly, as much as I love Baker I think I'll take a break from him, maybe watch some more Pertwee or Davison.

Interview/Chunga

2012-11-15, 11:14 pm
Categories: Music, Politics

Interesting to hear him talk about the Libertarian Party -- I've always figured he was ideologically closer to them than either major party, but wouldn't be able to reconcile their total lack of empathy for their fellow man. Guess this confirms it.

New York, '88; another upload by tomtiddler1.

I hadn't set out to do another election video so soon after we got through the damn election, but what the hell, it's a pretty good interview.

Now, the concert video looks like the 1988 equivalent of a cell phone video, but what the hell -- maybe I'll give Chunga's Revenge a do-over at some future date. But it's not a bad rendition, for all that.

Samuel Adams Boston Lager

2012-11-15, 9:08 pm
Categories: Comics, Stream of Consciousness

So far this week I have closed a house, looked for work, shopped for cars, and picked the spot where I'm getting married.

Now that I am home, about the only damn major decision I intend to make is what beer to get out of the refrigerator.

And some shirts from Threadless I guess, since I need new T-shirts and Groupon's got a deal.

I'm thinking 8-Bit Blues and Halfling and Wizard. (I'm sorely tempted by the Mike Allred Monkey Around shirt -- and it's only $10! -- but it looks like it would be goddamn hot in the summer.)

Underground Merchandising

2012-11-14, 11:38 pm
Categories: Movies, Music

In the words of uploader and co-director Ed Seeman:

This three minute film was created by Frank Zappa and Me in the late 60's to illustrate the art of UNDERGROUND MERCHANDISING of his album FRAK OUT! [sic] It was the begining of our filming relationship that lasted two years and became the initial shooting for UNCLE MEAT. This opening was shot at the Garrick Theater in Greenwich Village.
I did all the shooting for the next two years with a silent camera so that Frank could score it himself.
To read the whole story check out my Zappa web site at www.edseeman.com/zappa

Hosiery: The Re-Brokening

2012-11-14, 11:26 pm
Categories: Stream of Consciousness, Tech

Welp, broke my computer again, sort of.

See, I've confirmed that the instability I've been experiencing with the ol' OSX boot is definitely due to booting it from GRUB; it works fine from EFI.

So I decided I'd give Chameleon another shot -- maybe another bootloader would be more stable? Worth a try, right?

'Cept I can't get Chameleon to work this time, and it fucked GRUB up so it won't boot anymore either. (Edit to add: Apparently an MBR disk can't have more than one bootable partition? Guess it's been awhile since I took that A+ test. So okay, it's easy enough to get GRUB working again, but it doesn't help me get Chameleon working.)

The good news is that Chameleon boots just fine from CD, so I can still boot OpenSUSE that way.

The bad news is that, for some damn reason, holding down "C" to boot from CD doesn't work anymore on my Mac, so I've had to stick the damn helper card back in to access the boot menu by holding down Option when I power up.

(The other bad news is that AVG Free decided to flag fucking rundll32.exe as a virus and delete it, but Win8 must have restored it automatically because it worked okay on a reboot. But that's all the Win8 I did today.)

Anyway. Hoping I can get this damn mess fixed tomorrow. Because I've got better shit to do than keep fucking around with bootloaders.

Salad Party

2012-11-13, 9:54 pm
Categories: Music

Since Denny Walley mentioned Johnny "Guitar" Watson as one of Zappa's early influences, it's only fitting to show this video of Frank, Dweezil, and a host of others jamming with him.

Pants

2012-11-13, 3:58 pm
Categories: Stream of Consciousness

So I bought a house.

Which you generally don't do right after being laid off, but I worked out an arrangement with my family.

Anyway. Among other things, it's an incentive to start getting rid of my crap.

I haven't unloaded any of my 1990's X-Men or Spider-Man comics yet, and I still need to mail those surplus Thundercats toys I said I'd give away a year ago. But today, it's pants.

I've mentioned before that I've lost a lot of weight over the past couple of years. I've had a 36" waist since junior high and I've recently dropped to 32. I've continued to wear comically oversized clown pants, partly out of concern that I'd gain the weight back and need them again, and partly because I hate shopping for clothes and have only gotten around to buying new pants a few at a time here and there.

Well, I've finally amassed enough pants that actually fit me to get rid of most of the 36's, so I spent this afternoon doing my best impression of Jared from the Subway commercials and determining which pants fall right off my waist and throwing them in some bags to donate.

Made plenty of space in my closet. Which is good, because my new closet is going to be much much smaller.

R&B

2012-11-12, 9:14 pm
Categories: Movies, Music, TV

Zappa and childhood friend Denny Walley talk about his early blues influences.

Another documentary from the Dutch station VPRO -- man, those guys must love him.

This one appears to be a 2007 doc called Frank Zappa: Pioneer of the Future of Music. At a glance I can't find any place to purchase it legally, which is a shame -- if you know of any, please let me know and I'll gladly link to the store.

Edit 2012-12-29: I've posted the entirety of the documentary.

Buggy Messes

2012-11-12, 7:37 pm
Categories: Stream of Consciousness, Tech

I had some harsh words yesterday for the EaseUS software for Mac. Mainly, it constantly locked up and didn't do much of anything.

I'm not quite ready to let EaseUS off the hook just yet, but I'm seeing that same behavior in a lot of programs now. At this point I'm pretty confident that, in setting my Mac up to run like a Hackintosh, I have wound up with a system that has all the stability and reliability of a Hackintosh.

Regrettably, I'm having much the same problem with MIUI, which I installed on my phone the other day (as something to do while I waited for diags to run on my Windows 8 drive). It's slow and it crashes like a motherfucker. I really think the monthly release cycle is a pretty poor idea; what we've got is bleeding-edge code (in this case Jelly Bean running on a phone that was never meant to support it) instead of stable code.

Which is a pity because there's really a lot to love about MIUI. For starters, it's the most paranoid OS I've ever seen -- its security settings are granular as hell; it doesn't just tell you what data your program is going to have access to at install time, it defaults to warning you at access time, too -- and giving you the opportunity to refuse.

Trust the Chinese to be thorough about who's listening in on them.

It also comes with a lot of mostly-pretty-useful programs out of the box.

Except that weather program. The one that thinks I live in some place called Temperanceville (and that's not autocomplete on me typing in "Tempe", that's the location it automatically set itself to), consistently tells me I have no network connection even though I have a network connection, and can't be uninstalled. I don't like that one very much.

So I don't think I'll be sticking with MIUI. I guess the question is whether I should just restore CyanogenMod 7 from backup, or try some other ROM.

Decisions, decisions...