Year: 2002

Over 230 channels locked out!

DOCTOR: I have something to say that may shock you.

WOMAN: Why, are you going to use smutty language?

Jayson McDonald, The Boneyard Radio Hour, Semi-Emergency Room

I’m somehow pleased that two of my favourite programs, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and C.S.I., and two others that I watch from time to time (Friends and Will & Grace) are among the ten worst programs on television (according to the so-called Parents Television Council <http://www.parentstv.org>). It’s a good thing these folks don’t get Canadian television….

Breaking the Silence

The world will soon be a better place:

In a whirlwind visit to Greece, the world-renowned Canadian recording artist Loreena McKennitt proudly presented a donation to The Hellenic Red Cross, received a gold award for sales of “Live In Paris And Toronto” in Greece, and started work on the research for an upcoming recording.

Quinlan Road

Loreena hasn’t recorded or toured for several years—her latest CD project was Live in Paris and Toronto in 1999, and her most recent studio release was The Book of Secrets two years earlier. Her return has got to be one of the best pieces of news I’ve received this year.

I heard your voice singing
Your eyes danced the song
Your hands played the tune
’Twas a vision before me.

Loreena McKennitt, The Old Ways

The Capitol

Mark Kearney, local historian, professor and trivia guy, has an article in this month’s London CityLife magazine about the Capitol Theatre:

The lobby doors are locked, but if you peek through you see bits of paper on the floor, two step ladders leaning against a wall, and some debris on the wine-coloured carpet that leads past the snack bar to the two cinemas inside. The box office window has a small crack, and the entranceway could use a good sweeping. … [N]ow, everything at the Capitol is as silent as the movies it used to feature…. [B]eauty and age are rarely respected in this business anymore.

The Capitol, née the Allen, is the site of what could be my ideal movie theatre. (See The Majestic.) Unfortunately I don’t have the cash or business acuity to make it work. But I can dream….

Step by step

The first thing I’d do is work on the sound. Correction: on the soundproofing. When it opened, the Allen was a single 1200-seat auditorium; in the mid-’70s, as the Capitol under Famous Players, it was split into two smaller cinemas. Perhaps movies weren’t played as loudly then, or maybe Famous just skimped on the renovation, but it suffers from what seem at times to be paper-thin walls. I’ve got a friend who’s an engineer specializing in acoustics, noise and vibration, and he could fix that up in a flash.

Continue reading The Capitol

Department of Redundancy Department

One of the consumer-tech chains up here—I think it’s Future Shop—has been advertising their products as the best in digital DVD technology. I’m glad the industry has finally upgraded from that analog DVD tech we’ve been putting up with for so long.

Please.

Using a computer to rent movies

Ordering a movie via digital cable is a pain in the ass (PITA). iTV has always been still-born service. Netflix works well because you can do all you ordering online on a well designed website via a computer. After you do that, the service runs itself. Interactivity belongs on the computer.

John Robb

I’ve got to disagree. With a capable interactive television system, ordering a VOD (or SVOD) movie is as easy as selecting it from a menu and entering your PIN. (I do this every day at work—it’s not some idealistic fantasy.) You don’t have to leave your sofa, let alone wait “2-4 days” for the movies to arrive in your mailbox. And you don’t need a dedicated computer, just the settop box you’ve already renting from the cable company. Netflix does have an advantage (currently) in that they’ve got a big selection of DVDs, but more convenient? Nuh-uh.

Bastards

My personal e-mail address was spammed for the first time today. I’ve got about 80 aliases on my mailserver that I’ve set up at various times in the past to communicate with potentially-disreputable parties, but someone I’ve communicated with personally has passed on my address—probably innocently—and now the flood is going to begin. As a result, I’ve spent the last 10 hours installing SpamAssassin and various other blocking tools.

SA looks like it will be useful, but I’m completely unable to get spamc to work from .procmailrc or /etc/procmailrc. The silly thing is that spamassassin -P does work, so I’m stuck with starting a new Perl instance for every message that arrives.

So you’re saying it wasn’t easy?

[E]verything was much harder to do than I imagined, despite the fact that I was already imagining everything would be much harder than I imagined. I mean, I began from how hard I thought everything would be, multiplied this by the usual you-know-things-never-go-as-planned factor, then multiplied this by a no-seriously-it’s-going-to-harder-still factor, and still came nowhere close to imagining the horrors ahead.

Michael Barrish

Living obituaries

obituary (əU’bItjUərI) A record or announcement of a death or deaths, esp. in a newspaper; usually comprising a brief biographical sketch of the deceased.

Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed.

Perhaps it’s just me, but the term “living obituary” seems… I don’t know, just wrong somehow, like you’re just waiting for someone to die. I came across it in the HTML source for Salon’s article on Stan Lee while I was writing my last entry, and it’s been bugging me ever since.

I don’t have a problem with preparing so-called “advance obituaries”. Everyone’s heard of the various occasions when a still-living celebrity’s obituary has been sent out over the wires—most recently, and perhaps most famously, Associated Press published Bob Hope’s obit accidentally, and the story mushroomed. What I don’t like is overloading the term (defined above) simply to refer to a profile, even if it’s one that hits “all the notes that standard profiles miss.”

“Brilliant Careers” is a perfect title for Salon’s series of profiles. But they’re not obituaries, living or otherwise.

’Nuff said

I’ve always liked the term “’Nuff said,” but never really had an origin or context for it until just recently when I was reminded that it’s a Stan Lee-ism. Which makes sense—one of the first comic books I can remember reading was an extended Spider-Man book (what these days would probably be referred to as a graphic novel) that I received from my parents when I had my tonsils removed. I’ve liked ol’ Spidey in general ever since, although I’ve really only started reading “The Amazing Spider-Man” regularly since J. Michael Straczynski started writing it.

This category is where I plan to post quotes with little or no comment. They will speak for themselves, just like Stan Lee’s line.

’Nuff said.