Grumble Grumble Coffee Grumble

What a lovely bunch of small irritations this morning.

I guess I have, if not an addictive personality, a tendency toward fickle obsession, to employ an oxymoron. The latest obsession has been a Tumblr site. I got an account because gee, everybody else seemed to have one. It got me out of a jam when I couldn’t embed a video here (and I find WordPress superior in every other way, so… what the hell?), I posted a few more pictures, a few more videos… and then it struck me.

Another of my petite fixations over the years has been movie posters. Well, any sort of pictorial movie promotion. Somewhere there’s a Cub Scout scrapbook which is full of nothing but movie ads clipped from newspapers. I recall I was really excited about The Dunwich Horror, young madcap that I was.  But int he digital age, this has led to my downloading scans of movie posters from various sources, and there they sat on my hard drive, occasionally glanced at when I was looking for something to illustrate my reviews, back when I wrote movie reviews.

Hey, I could throw a few up on this Tumblr thing!

And so it began. A few became quite a few, and quickly the rationale behind the whole thing. I discovered there is a limit to how many pictures you can post in a day. Then I discovered that it’s possible simply queue up posts and have them self-publish at regular intervals. I’ve been upping 20 posters a day with my snarky-ass comments, or the occasional compliment or complaint when my ass is not feeling particularly snarky. 10 in the morning, 10 in the evening. When I have time, I’ll queue up the entire day’s worth.

Clicking on “archive” at the bottom of every page yields a landscape of crap movie posters that I want for computer desktop wallpaper. Hell, wallpaper for my office.

Lat night, though, started up the dreaded “Maintenance” pages. They continued into this morning, off and on, as I attempted to set up the morning queue, in a maddeningly inconsistent manner. Probably the worst thing about this Tumblr obsession is it makes me late for work, which is not really that big a deal. If I clock in a half-hour late, I just stay a half-hour later. But I like the schedule, I like consistency. I could have just said, oh, I’ll just queue up more this evening, but nooooo, surely it will work this time, oh it did, now I can queue up some more BAH.

Otherwise:

I work at an Institution of Somewhat Higher Learning. I should not be fighting down the urge to tell the HR department that there is no such word as “inputted”.

At least I haven’t seen or heard anyone using “orientated” in at least, oh, 36 hours or so.

So I guess my attempt to purge negativity from my life has borne some fruit. Stuff like this would send me into a deep sullen depression, previously. Now I just sigh and get on with my life.

Well, there is this whole Prop 8 and “Ground Zero Mosque” crap, but that is stupidity on a somewhat grander scale than I can effect without nuclear weapons, so I’m not going to dwell on them right now. My nukes are in the shop, being tuned up.

August 17, 2010
Categories: Mindless Blather, Seething Impotent Rage . . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

Let Him Do It Instead

Like anybody needs help getting depressed in the morning. Mike Sterling, whose blog I’ve been reading for years, has embarked on a new enterprise, Estate 4.1, “Celebrating Web 2.0 and the part it plays in allowing user comments to improve the online news experience.” In other words, Mike goes where angels fear to tread – the comments sections of the Yahoo news sites – and posts the cream of the stupidity he finds there.  With links to same.

If nothing else, he quashes any temptation I ever have to abjure my usual firm stance on avoiding poisonous pools of idiocy, and actually sneak a peek in there. A temptation which inevitably leads to the ruination of any sense of bonhomme I may have managed to build that particular day.

So here’s to you, Mr. Sterling. You may be doing this for your own amusement, but you are providing a genuine service to mankind, by doing a disservice to the unkind.

(“Real People of Genius” music fades)

August 11, 2010
Categories: Mindless Blather . . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

Monsters… from the id!

Okay, so my wife is out of town for the week, at an education conference in Florida. They are definitely making sure these people get their money’s worth, as they’re starting out at 9am and going until 9pm. I’ve gotten to speak to her once, and exchanged text messages a couple of times. I miss her terribly. She comes home tomorrow night, when I’ll be performing, and doubtless by the time I get home, she’ll be trying to catch up on sleep. There is, at least, a better than even chance I’ll get to see her at some point Sunday.

So somehow, in all this missing my wife and wishing she were closer, my subconscious decides it needs to drag one of my old girlfriends into my dreams last night.

Now, I already know that my subconscious is a jerk. It likes to give me auditory cues when I’m asleep. For the past few years, it has been the doorbell ringing. I hate the sound of a doorbell. I fucking despise it. Were it not for the fact that my wife would inevitably disapprove of it,  I would have disconnected our doorbell ages ago. But I’ve started getting wise to the mechanations of the id; I learned to ignore it and go back to sleep at 3:30 in the morning. And I’ve started to apply the same logic to occurrences during an afternoon nap. If they’re a real person, they’ll ring again.

The wily Id has figured this out and has lately trotted out a new one: the sound my smartphone makes when my wife sends me a text message or an e-mail. It’s the Jetson’s doorbell, so the curse of that particular household “convenience” continues.

Then, last night. My dreams were filled with people turning around too rapidly and accidentally hitting me with their elbows; for some reason this was known as doing a “Jared”, so I can only assume my Id is  addicted to obscure inside jokes. The last person to do this to me was the aforementioned old girlfriend. and I gave her a hug anyway.

The elbow thing I can see… my left shoulder’s been killing me this week, an old injury that seems to need no trigger to reassert itself, it just movies in for a while when the fancy strikes it. The old girlfriend thing I can also see; I really, really miss my wife, and my subconscious is a jerk. It could have trotted out an image of her, or of any of the past girlfriends with whom  still have cordial relationships; no, it had to drag out the one who ripped my heart out of my chest and proceeded to eat it while absently sprinkiing salt over the gaping, still-bleeding wound. Yeah, that one.

Along with the doorbell, I would really, really love to disconnect that damned subconscious.

July 30, 2010
Categories: Mindless Blather . . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

Pause Button.

Wow, now that I’m done with this week’s work deadline, I find that it is not yet time to relax.

I have two shows in the next 36 hours. Have to take some folks to the airport. Shop for groceries. Return important correspondence which may (I hope I hope) mean more employment in the coming year. Try to finish repairing my old notebook so my son can use it while my wife takes her netbook to an education conference in Florida (yes, she’s one of the folks I’m shuttling). Also need to go to the grocery store. That at least has to be put off until I get the pay from the shows, so I guess that’s not an “A” priority.

I don’t blog over the weekend, and I probably won’t be doing much of anything else, social media-wise. In fact, I am considering actively withdrawing from every-bloody-thing this weekend except perhaps a book and some cartoons, because frankly folks – the air of stupidity and meanness that has typified what passes for conversation and coverage in this age went from merely toxic to positively carcinogenic this week. Comic strip artist Tom Tomorrow has Tweeted that he doesn’t want a Kill Switch, but a pause button would be in order, and I am actively going to use it before I get seriously ill again.

That said, have a nice weekend.

July 23, 2010
Categories: Mindless Blather, Seething Impotent Rage . . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

Deadline Blues

It happens, folks. Up against a deadline, got no time to urp up 500 words on flossing or suchlike. Instead, have the results of two minutes surfing on YouTube:

July 22, 2010
Categories: Mindless Blather . . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

Yep, I Got Nothing

And now for some clippings from a fuzzy mind desperately trying to come up with a blog post, because he swore to himself that he would:

I find myself this morning not In The Groove, but In The Middle Of The Road. I suppose I could have gotten more sleep, but I got a fair amount. Turned off the alarm clock at one minute to buzzing, had my coffee, had my breakfast. Showered, went to work. Looks like finals are over,a nd the college is now between summer sessions, as I got a peach of parking place.

Everything’s good, but not great.  Pretty much pain-free, except for the usual aches and pains of age overtaking an injured body. “Love Plus One” by Haircut 100 on Slacker kind of points this up. Nice, but not exceptional.

Yeah, you knew this day was coming. So did I. Nothing to talk about, nothing to really complain about.

Well, I did finally break down get a Tumblr site. Yeah, yippee, sez you. It’s kinda fun, and I appreciate the fact that the Tumblr dashboard has a timeline of the Tumblr blogs I follow. One of them, Comic Book Cheesecake, is celebrating their birthday by posting all their favorite comic girl art and cosplay photos, so I am either going to have a heart attack or get fired for the borderline NSFW pics. That’s about as exciting as this day will likely get.

And there is a very large part of me that considers this a good thing.

X is playing on Slacker now. That’s another good thing. But it’s followed by Yello’s Oh Yeah, which is a pity. I love Yello, and that “Oh Yeah” is the only song to ever get airplay is, to me, a great tragedy. Is it Ferris Bueller I blame for this? I believe so. And it segues into Nena’s “99 Red Balloons”, which goes to show you that no matter how bad it gets, the 80s will always find a way to  make it worse.

I should tell you now: I’ve got a two-day shoot coming up next week, and I will very likely go silent over those days. Lucky, lucky you. Julian Cope, kindly sing us out with “World Shut Your Mouth”…

July 9, 2010
Categories: Mindless Blather . . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

My Summer Reading is a Bit Beat Up

As I mentioned on the Twitter earlier this week, thanks to my local library, I am finally getting to handle one of those expensive Absolute DC editions, in this case Batman: The Long Halloween, and this thing in drop-dead gorgeous. Huge, at almost 13 x 9 and two inches thick, and the printing is flawless, the art running all the way to the edge of the page. The Absolutes seem to run anywhere from $75-$100 when new, which means I am likely never ever going to own one, but damn. If you’re going to lay down a number of Franklins to own a book, it should look this good.

So it sort of saddens me to see this noble beast the worse for wear. Way back when, after I had finished carving up the brontosaurus for the evening meal, I could look in the back of a library book, at the card in the little manila pocket glued to the back cover, a card bearing the due date, and see how many people had checked out the book. Or at least how many had on that particular card – who knew how many cards had been used in that book, but had run out of room and had to be replaced?

In the current modern of the library, that’s not possible – it’s all RFID chips and black magic. That’s a fabulous leap forward and I love it. I love being able to step up to a self check-out kiosk and be on my way in seconds. But it also means I have to ponder how many people have handled a book, without the possibility of ever knowing the answer.

The Long Halloween‘s very size works against it. The other great books currently in my loving care, a couple of the Fantagraphic’s E.C Segar’s Popeye, have a similar problem: at a daunting 14 1/2 x 10 inches, they’re an odd, ungainly size, and their once sharp corners are now blunted and bent. The spines are similarly cracked, and wobble slightly as the book is opened. Again, the modern library has to take a little of the blame for this; self check-in is the norm, with the patron depositing the books one-by-one through a night deposit-style chute. I can only assume there is scanner similar to the one at the self check-out, reading the RFID chip and amending the database. It’s convenient and fast, and once again, I love it… but it’s got to be rough on big books like these, especially when it’s repeated over and over again.

There’s really no point to complaining about this; the wear and tear on library books is entropy at work, an unavoidable fact of life, and the alternative – no lending libraries at all – is unthinkable. I’m considering mending the one torn page I’ve found thus far in Long Halloween, as even my usual fumble-thumbed attempt at repair will be better than the sure loss of that page at some point.

Added bonus: checking Amazon for the dimensions of the Popeye books finds them to be surprisingly affordable. Now if I could just get family and friends to start looking at that darned wish list…

July 8, 2010
Categories: Mindless Blather . . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

Reading Matters

I was awakened by a spirited round of cat rugby in the hallway outside my bedroom at 3am this morning. Being rudely awakened by  sounds remarkably similar to burglars rampaging through your house is not conducive of settling back down to sleep. It doesn’t matter if the sound was caused by the adult cat finally getting tired of the younger cat’s antics and slamming its head repeatedly into your door, and not a band of ne’er-do-wells looking to try out their new zip guns and gravity knives or whatever it is the hooligans are carrying these days. Sharpened thumb drives, I don’t know.

Going back to sleep being out of the question, it was time to enumerate what options were open. Ideally, I’d go back to sleep and simply come into work in the afternoon, my schedule is currently flexible enough for that; but no, big staff meeting in the morning. Oh, well. Might as well go in incredibly early.

This is going to be a very long day.

Got some reading done over the suddenly-free weekend. First of all, I finally found the Peanuts strip I was looking for. In The Complete Peanuts, 1950-1952, there it is, on Sunday, November 16, 1952. Lucy – who has gone, in less than a year, from wearing footie pajamas in a crib to totally jacking with people’s karma – for the first time jerks away a football, causing Charlie Brown to fly through the air and land on his back. In the very same strip, she then holds the ball so tightly that he trips over it. The dailies for the week following involve Charlie Brown losing at checkers to Lucy over and over again, until, when he finally wins, Lucy tells him that she let him win because she felt sorry for him.

And there it is. With an almost audible sound of shattering crystal, Charlie Brown’s spirit breaks. Oh, there’s still the Christmas strips, but it’s obvious he’s just going through the motions so no one will suspect, or they will fall upon him like jackals upon a wounded wildebeest. He’s just delaying the inevitable, of course. He will spend the next few decades in Hell.

No, weisenheimer, reading comics isn’t the only thing I do. It’s just a very large part of what I do. Compilations of comic strips present me with an incredible amount of content – it took me well over a month to get through Peanuts 1950-52. I was excited to find my branch also had the first volume of the Bloom County archives, but I’ve still got two volumes of Popeye to get through. It’s a damned nice problem to have.

But. Non-comic related stuff. Sort of.

I am currently enjoying the heck out of Seth Grahame-Smith’s How to Survive a Horror Movie. I’m pretty sure this material has been covered before, but Grahame-Smith covers it in a snappy, hilarious, yet extremely knowledgeable manner.  As the cover reminds us, he is, after all, the best-selling author of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. He even goes so far as to give pointers on how to tell if you’re in a sequel, and the “stop, drop and roll” of horror movie survival: C.R.A.V.E.N.: which stands for  Cover, Reconnaissance, Arsenal, Vehicle, Escape, and North – apparently the horror lessens the northier you go.

Here’s one of my favorite bits:

10 PLACES TO NEVER, EVER GO UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES

1.   Rooms lit by a single hanging lightbulb
2.   Rooms lit by nothing
3.   Any graveyard that isn’t Arlington National Cemetery
4.   Summer camps whose annual counselor murder rate exceeds 10 per cent
5.   Maine
6.   “The old ________”
7.   Hotels/motels that aren’t part of giant international chains
8.   Upstairs
9.   Downstairs
10. Any log cabin anywhere on the face of the earth.

Every page is drenched in stuff like that which keeps me nodding in agreement and grinning with recognition.

The other non-comic book is 101 Sci-Fi Movies You Must See Before You Die, edited by Steven Jay Schneider. Now, I dislike Top 10 lists and that sort of thing, but something like this I find irresistible, if only to find out if I can pass on with a clear conscience or not. It’s a fat little book, with an emphasis on the “little” –  it measures an almost square 6 x 5 inches. It affords each movie only four pages, and two of those pages are photos – usually a poster and a publicity shot. It’s dandy junk food reading, since in-depth analysis is impossible at two small pages, and it becomes an orgy of “oh, yeah, I’ve seen that“, which allows you to feel like you’re one of the in-crowd.

Well, up to a point. I like that the authors have made a point of finding movies throughout the history of cinema, and across international lines. It has so far nudged me that I haven’t yet seen the original Solaris or Stalker (aaaaa! Commie movies!), but exactly how I’m supposed to track down copies of obscurities like Paris Asleep and Who Killed Jessie? is beyond me. I guess that means I’m functionally immortal.

All these of course came from my local library. After years of not using it, I have taken to using the library system with a vengenace. Fort Bend County opened up a very nice, very fancy and very modern new branch a few months ago, a ballsy thing to do in a recession, even if it was partnered with my employers, the Houston Community College System. Then again, the city passed a bond issue that paid for the library quite handily, so the public support was definitely there.

So it gets a bit discouraging when you hear that Chicago’s Fox station did a story claiming that public libraries in this Internet age were a waste of tax dollars. But it gets heartening when Chicago’s Public Library Commissioners skillfully rebuts the story, and in fact – to use the Internetese – completely pwns it – and, moreover, the Fox station has the guts and professionalism to actually publish that rebuttal. Good for them, and good for the Commissioner. I’d send her flowers if I could afford it.

July 6, 2010
Categories: Mindless Blather . . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

Gettin’ all Sherlock Holmes on ya

First things first: despite misgivings, Lisa performed in the show last weekend. She did great, but was totally exhausted. Sugars generally staying under 200, which is a pretty dramatic change from her last few months, when any slight dip under 200 was cause for celebration.

While flipping through channels yesterday, found myself watching the last ten minutes of the Hammer Hound of the Baskervilles on a local station. Not my favorite version, but a good, solid one nonetheless. Cushing is a remarkably unsympathetic Holmes (he’s much more likable in the BBC series he did later), and Christopher Lee seems uncomfortable in the somewhat boring Baskerville role – but Hammer movies are pretty much always entertaining, and at the very least, pretty.

But what this did was kick my usual lust for Holmes back into my forebrain. I mean, I even sought out that gawdawful Asylum attempt to cash in on the Guy Ritchie/Robert Downey Jr. Sherlock Holmes, entitled, surprisingly enough, Sherlock Holmes. That link will take you to Chris Sims’ review of it, so I don’t have to dwell on it too long. I believe my reaction at the time of watching it was, “This is a movie deliberately designed to piss me off.” But let me quote Mr. Sims:

“Believe it or not, this was actually the first Worst of Netflix selection that I was actually looking forward to watching, for the simple fact that it’s got SHERLOCK HOLMES FIGHTING A DINOSAUR on the cover. Call me a man of simple tastes, but that is literally all I need to hear to get excited about something, and that’s before you throw in the sea monster and the dragon that are also pictured on the cover.”

Don't do it, man - you'll regret it!

Oh, if only it were worth that excitement. Now, there are some good points: they pull off a period movie on an obviously small budget quite well, and the acting is several cuts above Asylum’s usual fare. Gareth David-Lloyd’s Watson and William Huw’s Lestrade are particularly good. But the script is a pretty horrifying wreck, invents an entirely new brother for Holmes (when Lestrade says, “I talked to your brother,” I assumed he was speaking of Mycroft), and we find out Sherlock is not his first name, because David or whatever the hell it was wasn’t a good first name for a detective. It also would have been good if I hadn’t had to wait for the end credits to find out that the villain was supposed to be Spring-Heeled Jack.

We’re not even going to talk about how the history books have shamefully overlooked that London was attacked by a fire-breathing dragon in 1890.

The disc is at Half-Price Books. God help me, I should probably buy it.

Fortunately, what I did have to hand was a pre-viewed disc of the movie  whose coat-tails the Asylum job was attempting to ride: the Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes. I’d seen it in the theater, of course – this was one of the few offerings that could make me overcome my complete antipathy toward what movie houses have become and get me into a comfy stadium seat. I rather enjoyed it, and spent some time defending it to my friends who were getting huffy about the obviously disrespectful tone.

Again, as with his casting as Tony Stark in the Iron Man movies, Robert Downey Jr. brings some life lessons to his portrayal of the brilliant, on-again off-again drug addict Holmes (I still haven’t seen Iron Man II, so I don’t know if they’ve alluded to Stark’s alcoholism yet); they possibly went a bit far in deflating Holmes a bit, but I still find it within Canonical limits.

Hell, yes, I'd watch this movie.

Hell, yes, I'd watch this movie.

But what I came out of the theater with was a newfound respect for Jude Law, who is an incredible Watson. I generally find my opinion of any Holmes venture rests on the treatment of Watson, and Law’s is a crackerjack. Actors cast as Watson seem to tend to be older than Holmes, which I suppose is a conceit that started with the Nigel Bruce/Basil Rathbone pairing (though Bruce was actually three years younger than Rathbone). I’m not a hardcore Holmesian enough to pull out the character’s relative ages, but the more or less contemporaneous pairing of this movie feels right. And Law is the first Watson I’ve seen since Robert Duvall to play the limp, the result of the Jazeel bullet that put an end to Watson’s military career.

No, the only problem I have with the movie is the character of Irene Adler, who has somehow become the Victorian equivalent of Catwoman. Rachel McAdams is pretty enough, but seems dreadfully miscast; then, the character is not given that much to do. I am also sorrowful that the DVD is a bare-bones affair. I would have loved to find out how much research was done for the period, and those fabulous CGI vistas of a London over a century gone.

Inevitably, there’s a sequel in the works. They’ve certainly seemed to set up a Final Problem adaptation with the shadowy Moriarty a presence in this first film, but I dare hope for a Hound of the Baskervilles, in which Sherlock vanishes for the middle portion of the story, and Watson steps to the fore as the confident, capable fellow we all know him to be. Until Holmes shows back up and starts mucking things up.

"Did he actually say we fought a dinosaur?" "Well, I believe we now know who stole my drugs, old man."

June 14, 2010
Categories: Mindless Blather, The Wonderful World of Crap . . Author: drfreex . Comments: 3 Comments

I gave up on that years ago

At the very least, I found my wristwatch and wedding ring.

Attempts to return to a normal life continue; I’m back to trying to get through to the media relations folks at the Houston Zoo to shoot the footage I need for the second half of my July story. My hair did not get miraculously shorter (just thinner and grayer) over the weekend, so I need to take care of that. Yes, various utilities, I know you require my attention and money but I’ve been busy.

The oddest thing: despite, well, massive indifference among my peers, I’ve been itching to get back to my project of reading the entire run of Cerebus. It’s not so much indifference as Tweets to effect of “I gave up on it about (name of story arc)”. I know, I know, so did I. The exact point is kind of problematic for me, as I kept trying to get back into it. I’m about to start volume 11, Guys, and I know I’ve read parts of it, I can remember at least one bit with fair clarity, yet most of the stuff in the preceding two volumes were news to me.

The “I gave up on that” meme has been floating around in my life a lot lately. Most notably during the final season of Lost, when every mention I made of the show was almost inevitably followed by a sniff and a vaguely superior “Oh, I gave up on that years ago.” Well, (to channel Paul Lynde, who has also been in my life a bit much of late) good fer you. I guess you cured cancer in the time you saved.

What really brings it to a head was just before our last crapfest, when Dave had, prior to our arrival, been watching some box set or other of ‘Allo, ‘Allo, and I mentioned that ever since seeing Inglourious Basterds, it was impossible for me to watch a scene in the cafe without expecting it to degenerate into a bloody firefight. This gave rise to a universal, “Yeah, I haven’t seen it, I gave up on Tarantino a long time ago” chorus.

Okay, folks are entitled to their opinion. No, wait, folks are entitled to their informed opinions. “I gave up on that years ago” is not an informed opinion. My movie watching is full of instances of giving directors, actors, writers another chance, and it pays off. Brian DePalma usually gives me a rash, but The Untouchables is one of my favorite movies. So I think that ignoring an Academy Award-winning movie because you somehow associate the director with Pogs or Push Pops or similar embarrassing crap that you left behind when you grew up is just plain stupid.

Yeah, I expect this to bite me on the ass sometime in the future, when I get high and mighty about something in some media or  other. Probably when someone tries to get me to watch a Brian DePalma movie. And it will serve me right.

June 8, 2010
Categories: Mindless Blather . . Author: drfreex . Comments: 3 Comments

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