DVD pick: The Twelve Chairs

OK, from the get-go, this isn't a flick I either despised or am wildly enthusiastic about... it's just a pleasant way to pass an hour-and-a-half or so. It's a Mel Brooks flick, but not in the joke-a-minute vein I've come to expect after Young Frankenstein, Blazing Saddles, and later films... in part, that's likely because it's scripted from an existing story based in the USSR not too many decades after the Revolution. In brief, an ex-noble finds out from his dying mother that she stashed some jewelry in one of their old dining-room chairs they left behind during the Revolution... right after she told the village priest as part of her deathbed confessions. Naturally, chaos ensues.

As long as you don't go into it looking for a standard Mel Brooks farce, it's a nice little film... it even comes with a nice moral about stuff not being the be-all and end-all of life. It's not a great film, but I would still recommend making some room for it in your Netflix queue.

Computer Geekdom Milestones

It was an odd day, with two major computer geek milestones hitting at once:

• Netscape, the web browser, is being shut down. It's not the first browser I ever used, but was almost certainly the first third-party browser I used... and I haven't gone near it in years, thanks to Firefox, but it's still noteworthy.

• Perl, the scripting language, got a new release today... the first new release in five years, which is practically an eternity in computer time. It's a testament to how solid the language was, in spite of all the hate it garners (and I've given my share, to be sure). On the other hand, the new version looks to finally support "switch statements", something the language has sorely lacked... and, as an added bonus, it's more than just a simple switch, allowing things like regular expression matching and... whoops, got a bit too far into geekdom that time... :)

Merry *crunch*mas

I couldn't be satisfied with just scratching my car, nooo..... I backed up into the wall of a parking garage on Saturday, and it didn't look like much of anything happened. I look this afternoon... there's a whoppin' great crack in the back bumper, and it's come open. I'm guessing it must have been there earlier, but vibrated loose in the intervening few days. At any rate, it's not something the dealership deals with... lucky for me, there's an auto body shop not six blocks from my house. Unlucky for me, it'll be about $700 to get back to "good as new", supposing nothing more's wrong than the "bumper cover" breaking. Oh well, that much longer 'til I get a Wii, I guess.

Merry Christmas

Hope you all enjoy yourselves... I'm off to gather with my family. Be sure to tell me about any cool stuff Santa brought ya... :)

'tis the season... for insanity?

Boy, I don't know if it's the approach of Christmas, the approach of the full moon, the approach of the solstice, or some combination of the above, but today was not a day to leave the house. I thought it was bad enough driving around at lunchtime, what with the extra traffic... but this afternoon a co-worker was laid off (and imagine the fun of that, given when it is), and then some yahoo driving the wrong way down a one-way street came entirely too close to me for my comfort on the way home. I'm not one for "drowning sorrows" or any such... but you can bet I put that homemade Kahlua I got at the office Christmas party to use tonight.

Movie of the day: Sweeney Todd

I lucked out... a friend of mine caught wind of a sneak preview of Sweeney Todd, but had to work, and was kind enough to pass along his seat to me. I mentioned earlier about seeing previews of the movie, and how I was impressed by the visual scheme and so on... and that still holds. However... it's not the movie I hoped it would be. They ramped up the gore (which I pretty much expected), but they also toned down the humor (which I didn't).

It's like Tim Burton and company decided that, rather than darkly humorous, they'd stick with dark, and toss in a little humor once in a great while. Two examples come to mind... in the stage play, when the beggar woman gets treated nicely, she ramps up to cobblestone-whore mode in a flash, which you see no sign of here. Also, in the "Have A Little Priest" number, they dropped the verse referencing the General with or without his Privates... and, rather than being just a conversation between the principals, the song is sung while they're peering out of the windows of the pie shop, ghoulishly surveying the exact targets of their verses... takes the song from funny to downright creepy.

Worst of the lot, in my mind, was the guy playing Sweeney (Johnny Depp, I believe? I'm terrible with actor's names). In every other production I've seen, Sweeney is obsessed, but still able to function in society with limited aid from Mrs. Lovett, and possessed of a certain wry humor. Here, Sweeney is shown to be practically catatonic when not in immediate pursuit of his goals (which, I'll admit, they do play up nicely in the "By the Sea" number), and deadpan throughout.

Mind you, there were some fun bits... getting the gent who plays Snape in the Harry Potter movies to take on the role of Judge Turpin was a great call, and I swear I should recognize where I've seen the gent they got to play the Beadle, but I can't... which is a shame, he's got oily obsequiousness and viciousness down pat.

Final verdict? If you're looking for a gorefest, this movie will satisfy, and feel free to catch it in the theater. Me, I may well pick it up on DVD... well after it comes out, of course, and mainly to pair with the DVD of the Angela Lansbury version I've already got. For most of you... eh, it's a fair rental, if you can stomach the gore.

Time to open a BIG can of worms...

...it's time to talk Religion! I was raised Lutheran, but gradually drifted off into the camp of Agnostics. I've even joked that I'm a Militant Agnostic ("I don't know the nature of God(s), and you don't either!"), but I certainly haven't been pushing my world-view onto anybody else, mainly because the reward-for-effort ratio just isn't there to justify.

However, Christian, Atheist, or Other, I encourage you to take a look at this: 10 Things Christians and Atheists Can (and Must) Agree On. It's well-reasoned, doesn't bash on either side, and, best of all, includes several "macro'd" images, at least a few of which are chuckle-worthy.

New Toy

CompUSA is going away locally, so of course I had to go scavenging over lunch today... and that little white box above the keyboards is the main result.  Yep, it's a low-end Mac Mini... which I'm using to write this post.  I'm waiting for the newest OS to come in the mail from Apple at this point, and I'm going to have to pick up a new KVM switch to properly integrate it into my octopus of computer madness, but these are minor things.

...and best of all, I found the Terminal.  Yes, it's Unix inside, and I can ssh and vi to my heart's content.  This may well end up becoming a "portable" system for me to work with from home and one of my worksites.  Oh, I didn't mention that I might be working in more than one place now?  I'm not yet, but one of the "sister" companies laid off their (overpaid) super-tech... I'm not a betting man, but I'd wager that I'll be setting up a workspace at their office before the end of the year... which is no skin off my back, it's about half as far from my house as my "real" office... :)

Cleaning out cobwebs

So yeah, I got my annual viewing of Scrooge out of the way... and, having decided that anything mentally "intensive" for the remainder of the day would be bad, I picked up a book I had started some time ago, and had been sitting in my living room ever since. I had been teased by a friend of mine about how long that book had been sitting there, and I knew it had been a while... but it's entirely another thing to open up a book and find a card with a May 2003 postmark on it, knowing that was recently received when it got put to that use.

Funny thing is, I still remembered the gist of the story so far...

Awake

Normally, I'm a pretty low-key person, with emotional ups and downs like anybody else... lately, it's been disturbingly neutral. What I mean is, nothing "bad" has struck me as particularly unexpected or noteworthy, and the only real "good" has been the occasional brief laugh at an unexpected joke or image, with no real lasting after-effects. It's a state of affairs that might not be exactly "healthy", but, with a steady emotional keel, the mechanics of life (especially work) tend to be much easier... well, up to the past day or two. You see, while nothing felt particularly "wrong", nothing felt particularly "right" either... even the computer and video games I play in my off time lacked their usual allure.

Today, I'm working from home... I took care of the standard "maintenance" items from work in the morning, got myself set up to do some "creative" work in the afternoon, and... again, it didn't feel "right". I couldn't motivate myself to do the simplest thing that involved any active thought on my part. I was feeling a bit under the weather, so I figured maybe a quick nap on the couch might help, so I went to lie down, and... that didn't feel "right" either. Now, anybody that's dealt with me over an extended period of time knows how highly I value sleep... so, for a nap to feel off, something has to be terribly wrong. It was time for me to do a little bit of mental housekeeping, to see what could be troubling me so.

What came to me was this... the common thread between my work and my play of late has been activity. Not physical activity, certainly, but mental activity... plotting, planning, scheduling, monitoring... chaining activities together for maximum efficiency (though, thankfully, not much in the way of this age's scourge of "multitasking"). It's been years since I have routinely "lived in the moment"... heck, even petting my cats tended to be something along the lines of "I'll do this for a few seconds, then I'll go...". I tested my hypothesis with a bit of the old Ludwig Van that came on the radio just then... I laid there on the couch and did nothing but listen for about a half-hour or so.

The difference was immediate and enormous. It was like a fog lifted from my brain (although it still feels a bit "tender"), and, I swear, even my eyesight improved, though I know not exactly how that works out. Looks like I'm on the right track... and it looks like more books and DVDs in my mix of off time activities will be more than just a "good idea" to be ignored like in past days. In fact, I'm off to go watch Scrooge now... time to turn the rest of today into one of those "mental health" days other companies than mine offer their employees directly.

More Toons

After inflicting Pork on my older brother, he returned the favor with an old short by Terry Gilliam (of Monty Python fame) called "The Miracle of Flight". Catch it on YouTube here.

Pork!

From the fine gent that came up with BadgerBadgerBadger and Kenya, I present, for your viewing and ear-worming pleasure, Pork.

One... More... Turn...

A fair part of my life is playing games, especially computer/console games. Every so often, one comes along that entices me into playing just one more turn, taking on just one more task, until I find myself staggering off to bed in the wee hours of the morning, because I really need to get some sleep. Civilization (in its various incarnations) has always been that way, and does it reliably enough to most people that I've used it as a "Trojan horse" to inflict my sickness on other people. Puzzle Pirates did it to me for a while, with its odd combination of puzzle gameplay tied to "useful" goals in-game... and now, that deadly combination has made it to the PS2 and Wii in the form of "PuzzleQuest". I figured, for $20, I could give it a shot... and played the damnable thing for nearly 12 hours straight. If you're looking for a console RPG that you can take at a leisurely pace, this will do it for you... but it looks like you'll have to shell out $30 if you want the Wii version.