Billy the Martian

Yup! I got myself a new blackberry curve. Looks looks like it will work as a posting device.

I’m watching the pilot for Space:1999. I liked this show when I was young.

…..but the freaking pilot leads off with the caption:

THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON

SEPTEMBER 9th 1999

NUCLEAR WASTE

DISPOSAL AREA TWO

Haven’t these folks listened to Pink Floyd? DARK side of the moon? Jeez!

I’m watching an old Bond movie tonight: On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

Fun things I noticed:

Diana Riggs play the Bond Girl, who becomes the Bond Wife. Last time I saw this movie, circa 1978, I didn’t know who she was.

The cute comment at the beginning, where Lazenby as Bond watches Riggs run away from him after a tussle on the beach, and says “This never happened to the other fellow”, a clear reference to Connery, is DAMN FUNNY. Poor George. He did a fine job and wasn’t appreciated. Connery is a tough act to follow.

Later, Bond tries to resign. When he cleans out his desk, he toys with a bunch of things from earlier missions: the watch with the strangling cord from From Russia With Love, etc.

Pretending to be interested in his own heraldry, he learns the motto of the Bond family: The World is Not Enough. Always wondered where that movie title came from.

One of the girls Bond seduces watches him take off a kilt and says “So it’s TRUE!” Gotta wonder if he got a blue ribbon on it, too. Gotta wonder if the fact that so many people aren’t sure if the rumor is true means that the Scots aren’t getting laid.

The alert siren from Blofeld’s castle sounds EXACTLY like the alert in the game Half Life. What am I missing? Is that alert siren common somewhere, and I’m just late to the party?

Bond breaks a ski in the big skiing chase, and skis for a while on one ski. Never would have thought of the scene in “Better Off Dead” as a Bond homage. Very cool, both places.

Yum: Diana Riggs with her tongue sticking slightly out as she concentrates on her driving in the ice track race.

Amusement: the sound effect of tires screeching in the car chase scene as they slide around the ice track are the same as the ones you’d hear from a movie that has a chase on blacktop.

Shock: Her Majesty’s Government chooses appeasement of Blofeld as their approach to solving the problem. Don’t they know that appeasing terrorists is like throwing meat to the tiger while hoping that the tiger will convert to the lifestyle of the leaf-eater?

A freaking bobsled chase?  What could be better?

And the ending is such a downer!  This is a superb Bond movie.  Right now, I only prefer the new one, Casino Royale, to this one.  Wow.

Another gem from this Steyn book:

In a more culturally confident age, the British in India were faced with the practice of “suttee” — the tradition of burning widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands. Gen. Sir Charles Napier was impeccably multicultural:

“You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: When men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks, and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.”

For years, I’ve been trying to find a way to express the notion that unwillingness to judge another culture was just a form of intellectual moral cowardice.  If’n I were better read, I wouldn’t have to work half so hard at getting the right words out.  Thanks, General Napier.

(Put this on my livejournal account originally, but maybe it fits in better here. Apparently, I haven’t quite resolved the multiple blog issue yet.)

I’m reading Mark Steyn’s book, “America Alone”. There’ve been dozens of things that made me laugh out loud while alone — that’s my personal hallmark for when something is Really Fucking Funny.

…but this one takes the cake. I never noticed that the name for Kim Il Jong’s missile project is “No Dong”. That’s just fucking killer humor. I could hope that their codename for their nuke project is “No Bang” or “No Balls”…

Steyn mentions that the nutjob is eager to sell to other countries, and he forsees problems if the president of Sudan announces proudly to his people that he has No Dong….

Seriously, doesn’t this sound like something that should have been in Sixteen Candles? I’m sure Long Duck Dong’s brother is named No Dong, and somehow movie reality has bled in over here.

2006 Tuesday, September 12

12:24:14 AM
JACK BAUER never runs out of battery power for his cell phone. And he rarely runs out of ammo for his handguns. He must have more stuff in his pockets than ME. That means that the women in his life must mock him mercilessly for having “stuff” in his pockets, and he wears holes in his pants in strange places.

2006 Wednesday, September 6

1:13:03 AM
I’m glad I have a flip phone. JACK BAUER has a flip phone. I want to hang up with drama, too.

2006 Thursday, August 17

1:48:26 AM

Took the girls to see the second Pirates movie tonight. They’d already seen it with my folks. (I think the last movie my parents saw in a theater was Superman, with Christopher Reeves!) Both girls were excited about getting me to go to it. I was completely impressed by the thing. The scenes with the Kraken wrecking ships made me gasp out loud. Wild stuff.

2006 Sunday, August 13

12:15:43 AM

I wanted to see the meteor shower tonight, but it’s cloudy.

Forgot to mention: I finished Glenn Reynolds “An Army of Davids” today, too.

2006

Saturday, August 12

10:24:16 AM

Woke up early, and finished reading Ian Gillan’s autobiography, Child in Time. Surprisingly good story, and it covers more of his life than I thought — I had somehow assumed it was written longer ago than it was… It ends with Deep Purple recording “The Battle Rages On” in the 90s.

Don’t know what I’m going to do today.

Go shopping? Fix up DNS on VPS, and move some web sites?

(In case it isn’t obvious, I’m toying with blogging via a different program: viJournal, for the Mac. I use it for a personal journal, and I’m pretty happy with it.)

My dad took pictures of the TV when Aldrin and Armstrong walked on the moon. All of our family pictures were preserved as slides, and there were a pile of them, so we never got around to finding them. They were buried in boxes for years.

My sister recently had all the pictures and super-8 movies scanned. I probably first heard about these pictures 30 or more years ago, but this is the first time I’ve gotten to see them. (I was a huge NASA nerd as a kid, so these would have been quite compelling then.)

I liked this even better than the other one:

Greatest Hits Request Of The Week:
Even more telling than the human shields scramming out of town is the alarming failure of recent “naked protests” to get naked. Many of my fellow warmongers have mocked the nude protests mounted by the women of California’s Marin County, cruelly pointing out that many of the bits on show are excessively flabby and saggy. But I’ll take what’s on offer. If we have to have an incoherent, self-loathing “peace” movement, then women showing off their hooters in support of a culture that would stone them to death for showing off their ankles is about as good as it’s gonna get.

Oooh, this is good. Jabber needed this. Google just got behind Jabber as the protocol for Google Talk. This will make Jabber much more useful, since networks are useful in proportion to the number of folks using them.

Google Talk Available Early

P.s. If you give this a whirl, my Jabber ID is bill.ohanlon >at< gmail.com

This Steyn fella has a pretty sharp wit:

‘Peace Mom’s’ marriage a metaphor for Dems:

I got a big chuckle out of this:

They’re not children in Iraq; they’re grown-ups who made their own decision to join the military. That seems to be difficult for the left to grasp. Ever since America’s all-adult, all-volunteer army went into Iraq, the anti-war crowd have made a sustained effort to characterize them as “children.” If a 13-year-old wants to have an abortion, that’s her decision and her parents shouldn’t get a look-in. If a 21-year-old wants to drop to the broadloom in Bill Clinton’s Oval Office, she’s a grown woman and free to do what she wants. But, if a 22- or 25- or 37-year-old is serving his country overseas, he’s a wee “child” who isn’t really old enough to know what he’s doing.

Here’s a shot of my deer stand. It was originally built on a dead tree, but the tree has rotted and collapsed.

Technically, the name of this stand is “Dad’s Stand”, and given the source of the name, it should be promoted to “Grandpa’s Stand”, but since I’m the one who uses it first each year, maybe it’s correctly named.

I’m playing. Looks like Ecto thinks it can save my iPhoto pics to the blog. Let’s try it.

This is what happens when you hand the camera to Molly.

Deep Purple. We didn’t get up close.

Check out Plazes

It’s a location-based service. If you’re wirelessly connected, you can let your friends know where you are. Also helpful for people being stalked by scary bunny-boiling ex-girlfriends, but the price is right.

Real people talk this way?

tempt311: holla
tempt311: right on pimp daddy, i gots to go
tempt311: jealous
tempt311: so have fun with yourself
tempt311: hahaha
tempt311: oh, and keep it real
tempt311: peace

(These were all in response to a simple “hahaha”)

One of the things I got done recently was to use some good Applescript scripts to fix up my music collection. The names were all messed up, because I’d used different chunks of software to rip my CD collection over the past few years, and apparently I didn’t always do the right thing with MP3 tags.

Anyway, check out Doug’s Scripts if you’re in the same situation.