I learned the lesson so long ago that video rental stores were still a thing. Sometimes the most interesting movies are the ones that sit — one lonely copy — forlornly on the rental shelves. They’re almost lost among the popular movies with their dozens of copies. (Let alone the Big Hits taking up entire shelf sections.)
Movies imitate real life in many ways. The content versus popularity equation is no exception. Often, popular means shallow and bland — by definition inoffensive. (Almost always, greater appeal means less flavor or spice. No surprises.)
But that lonely outlier can be an unexpected and delicious meal!
Continue reading
9 Comments | tags: A Dangerous Method, Carl Jung, David Cronenberg, Helen Hunt, hysteria, Hysterical, iron lung, Keira Knightley, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Michael Fassbender, Samuel Jackson, Sigmund Freud, The Sessions, vibrator, video rental stores, Viggo Mortensen | posted in Movies
Early this year I wrote an article comparing how we store music in digital versus analog form along with a follow-up article exploring the contrast between them. There is another major consideration that predominates when it comes recording information these days. Quite simply: what are we going to record onto?
How many of you remember (or have even seen) eight-inch floppy disks? How about five-and-a-quarter floppies? Show of hands if you’ve ever actually used a three-and-half inch floppy? Some of you might not even know what a “floppy disk” is!
Not very permanent, were they. Now consider the Rosetta Stone.
Continue reading
35 Comments | tags: analog, analog recording, digital, digital data, digital format, digital recording, floppy disk, John Naisbitt, punch cards, punch paper tape, Rosetta Stone, Zip drive | posted in Computers
It’s bad enough that it’s winter and cold and dark and I’m stuck inside and my back is bugging me and I’ve got a major case of the seasonal blues.
The icing on today’s cake is the email from the ISP that supports my personal webpage. A large professional organization. (In point of fact, I’d give their support a C- rating at best, but the price is hard to argue with, and you get what you pay for.)
Were dommed I tales yu. “Literally” Dommed!
61 Comments | tags: doomed, misspelling, seasonal blues, spelling, you're, your | posted in Rant
What if, suddenly, you found you could not only read minds but change them? What if the eponymous hero of the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh was real, was two-thirds god, was immortal, and — from sheer boredom — had divided his powers of mind with you just so he could have a really good war between the eastern and western hemispheres?
What if you and your brother, both young students, went along on a wild drunken graduation party that spanned a dozen galaxies and were left behind on some primitive no-account planet as a joke. What if, as extremely long-lived energy beings, it was millions of years before anyone remembered and came back for you? What if — from sheer boredom — you’d illegally tampered with the minds of the primitive indigenous apes?
This Sci-Fi Saturday: two authors, two tales, two books each.
Continue reading
21 Comments | tags: Brenda Clough, Doors of Death and Life, Gilgamesh, How Like a God, paperback books, Parke Godwin, Robert Parker, science fiction, SF Books, Spenser, The Snake Oil Wars, thick books, thin books, Waiting for the Galactic Bus | posted in Sci-Fi Saturday
I have friends who are Hippie Earth Mother types. They tend to have in common a reflexive hate for non-hippie things, such as guns, nuclear power, genetically modified foods, and gasoline engines. It’s always something. Many of my programming geek friends have in common a reflexive love of Unix or a hatred of anything Microsoft.
To me, people with reflexive hates — or loves — just seem to beg for teasing, an education that certainty is dangerous, and that it’s good to not take things too seriously. (The education comes from repeatedly whacking someone’s sensitive spot and ducking, so it’s risky work.) Hot buttons one can’t be teased about lead to ugly territory: hurt feelings, broken jaws, bombs. I think it’s important to tease the deadly serious, is what I’m saying.
So I tease my Hippie Earth Mother friends that gasoline is solar power!
Continue reading
46 Comments | tags: Earth Mother, fossil fuel, gas power, gasoline, geothermal power, gravity, heavy, hippie Earth Mother, hippies, humor, nuclear power, solar power, wind, wind power | posted in Opinion
I’ve been watching the commercials for the upcoming live TV performance of Peter Pan starring Allison Williams as Pan and Christopher Walken as Hook.
Walken as Hook? That sounded wrong to me the moment I heard about it. I’ve loved him in everything I’ve seen him in, but I’m having trouble wrapping my mind around him as Captain Hook in a lighthearted musical comedy. The bits I hear and see in the commercials don’t do anything to help matters. His reading of the lines sounds wrong to me! The pacing and energy level don’t play well for me at all.
The question is: casting brilliance or casting mistake?
Continue reading
22 Comments | tags: Allison Williams, Brian Williams, Captain Hook, Christopher Walken, contrarian, curmudgeon, Mary Martin, Minnie Driver, musical theatre, Peter Pan | posted in TV
The post’s title is the name of a trope[1], and while you may not know it by this handle, you have probably run into it. Perhaps from someone combining the terms “old hat” and “just” — or maybe using the more continental “cliché” (ooh la la) about something once revered as ground-breaking. The trope arises from not recognizing the originator of ideas now in common use. For example, Airplane! and Die Hard seem lost among all the similar films that followed.
But this post really isn’t about the trope or the Seinfeld TV show. The title just makes a neat kick-off point and offers some connective tissue. I really do mean I don’t find Jerry Seinfeld all that funny. Ironically, I think the man is a comic genius, and I have high regard for his comic acumen. Yet his stand-up routines leave me cool.
So this post is actually about stuff I don’t find funny (and why not).
Continue reading
26 Comments | tags: A Christmas Carol, Abbott and Costello, blog, blogger, blogging, Charles Dickens, comedy, humor, humor blogs, Jerry Seinfeld, Seinfeld, soup nazi, sponge worthy, standup comedy | posted in Opinion
I did something special for #300, but I blew past #400 without really noticing. I had the idea of doing #404 on the “404 Page Not Found” error, but I’d already blown past that milestone, too. I’d pretty much decided to just wait for #500 and really uncork the champagne then.
And it’s all a bit muddled because there are also 29 pages here and quite a few posts on my other three blogs, so it’s not like I’m literally just into the 400s even on just blog publications. For that matter, I’ve been online since the 1980s — I’ve put a ton of stuff out there in three decades (including a personal website since 1998).
But still, this is the 409th post on Logos con carne.
Continue reading
2 Comments | tags: 404, 409, 418, 420, 429, Beach Boys, blog, blogger, blogging, Chevy 409, Formula 409, http error codes, RFC2324 | posted in Life
Quite some time ago a woman I’d met read me the riot act over my use of the “R” word. When talking about taboo words, one immediately hits the problem of whether to mention the forbidden word, and if so how and how often? A serious discussion can acknowledge the discomfort people have using a term, but usually must refer to it clearly at least once.
In this case the word was “retarded.” My use was descriptive, not pejorative, so I’m not entirely certain I was out-of-bounds. It seems like one of those fuzzy boundary zones where being respectful and polite gives way to being needlessly constrained by the overly sensitive.
But today I have a different ‘R’ word in mind.
Continue reading
13 Comments | tags: Christopher Columbus, football, Indian, Indians, National Football League, native American, NFL, Virgin Islands, Washington | posted in Opinion
Two things collided. I saw Leon Wieseltier on The Colbert Report and was enthralled by his view of modern social life. That moved a friend of mine to look for other YouTube videos of Wieseltier. She posted a good one that then moved me to look at more. Bottom line, I ended up watching a fair bit of the man last week. Still enthralled.
Meanwhile, after my last post about religion and atheism, a reader commented that she found the article so balanced she couldn’t tell on which side I stood. As an agnostic, that’s the goal. Yet, in one of the videos, Wieseltier expresses an idea that really grabbed me.
It has to do with on which side of what line I stand.
Continue reading
57 Comments | tags: Dualism, Leon Wieseltier, materialism, Monism, Philosophical materialism, physicalism, reality, spirituality, teleology, The Colbert Report, virtual reality | posted in Religion, Sunday Sermons
Logos con carne 