Blik

Neat little video done in the classic style. Really nice.

So I Got Lost On Youtube This Morning

I've got better, more important things to do today. But this particular losing of my mind made me ponder an almost imponderable notion.

The following video "explains" how MC Escher did some of his famous drawings. I'll be back after the video:



...me again. Yeah, that answers a hell of a lot. Could probably figure out how to do that in Photoshop and maybe win a few votes in an upcoming Fark contest. Whatever.

But back to that pondering of MC Escher - HE DID THOSE DRAWINGS WITHOUT A COMPUTER.

Taylorsville Dayzz

It's that one weekend a year where the neighborhood fills with people. OK, so that's not quite true - it's more cars than people. At least it's only one weekend a year.

Time was, decades ago, when I lived about three hundred yards from the Pacific Ocean. Literally walking distance. Just off Balboa Blvd. in Newport Beach. Those were some of the best times in my life. But we moved in just after school started in, oh, 1985. Little did we know what the crowds would be like come summer 1986. Moved some time that summer. But the memories live on.

Now here I am in a quaint, generally quiet neighborhood.

Except when we're Dayzzed.

- - I'll have some stills to post tomorrow; for now, enjoy the finalé from tonight's fireworks:

A Brief Respite

You know, the news media is a lot like life: you tend to pay more attention to whomever is screaming the loudest.

Take, for example, what the news media was paying the most attention to before Friday, March 11:

Charlie Sheen.

Now, with meltdowns galore, it's time to step back, take a deep breath, and use another meltdown to at least take some of the edge off.

From Fark this morning:

"I'm incapable of taking in any more information about earthquakes, tsunamis, possible nuclear crisis, etc... And while it's a WTF of the highest order, it turns out Charlie Sheen is the antidote."

Jennifer Aniston Sex Tape

Cristofori's Dream Revisited

At least once a day, someone on the intarwebs does a search for Cristofori's Dream, swearing the tune was in some movie or other. And finds my blog.

I wrote about that back in May of last year. Marilee and I, too, swear it was in a movie. But since this much time has passed, and people are still searching for it, suggests that it was not.

Well, gentle readers, I think I have solved the mystery.

It's not so much the tune, or the melody, but the nature, the style, of Cristofori's Dream theat gets people's attention. It's that "plinking" tone.

This, I feel, is why people think they've heard Cristofori's Dream before:


You be the judge.

Leave Me Alone, I'm Watching TV

Apollo 18?

Yeah, this'll get at least one reader's attention.

Off looking for cool pictures this morning, and happened onto a film site with unprotected directories. Unprotected in the sense that they're using an older version of WordPress software that has a - well, let's call it a bug. Bug in the sense that it's an undocumented "feature".

Ask me how you, too, can find this "feature".

Anyway.

One such picture on that film site is a poster for a movie I hadn't heard ANYTHING about, but it's supposed to premeire on March 4, 2011. Called "Apollo 18", the only thing that can be said about it - apparently - is from the tagline:

"There's A Reason We've Never Gone Back To The Moon"

The film's website - www.apollo18movie.net - isn't much help, and IMDB's site isn't, either. Under tight wraps, I suppose.

VERY tight wraps - not even an actor or director listed.

Maybe someone who's into nuking ET can find out more about this:

Ephemeral Films

Ephemeral means "lasting for a very short time." Or at least that's what it's supposed to be.

Years ago, when the technology of multimedia was in its infancy, I'd picked up a CD-ROM chock-full of short films of the instructional variety. Quite literally old-school, they were films shown in schools in the 1940's and 1950's. Obviously before my time, but I seemed to recall seeing some of them even in the 1960's and 1970's. Indeed they were classic, and although quite dated for the current generation, some of the subject matter is relative even today.

OK, so maybe not.

I misplaced that CD long ago, but re-discovered them recently in the On-Demand portion of the cable provider we have here locally. "Something Weird" if you'd like to take a look.

But they only have but a few selections, and you never really know what you're going to get month-to-month.

So rather than waiting for "Shy Guy" with Dick York to come up again, you can see it and more, really on-demand, via the internet.

Available at The Internet Archive - www.archive.org - is the entire "Prelinger Archive", the same outfit that had generated that CD-ROM of long ago.

Take, for example, TV commercials from the 1960's.

Take a look at that, and spend some counter-productive time checking out the other items.

But, being in the archive, it's no longer ephemera.

Time Traveler?

All abuzz on the internets today is the possibility that a time-traveler may have been in a Charlie Chaplin film from 1928.

Is the person carrying - and speaking into - a cell phone? Naysayers say no, as there weren't exactly any cell towers back then, or satellites for that matter. A mini-corder, then?

No one may ever know, but isn't it interesting that this should happen to be revealed during the 25th anniversary of the Back to the Future franchise?

This. Is. Not. Possible.

Dancing In The Movies

Very well-done montage of dancing scenes from the movies:

Ear Worms

Ewwwwww...

No, we're not talking about something akin to that thing that oozed out of Chekov's ear during that one Star trek movie. THAT was full of ewwww.

No, ear worms in this context are those songs that stick in your head - a good friend had the theme song for The Beverly Hillbillies stuck in his craw yesterday.

PsyBlog has an interesting post about ear worms here.

Hey, at least it wasn't Green Acres.

Amazing Grace - Only The Black Notes

My cousin sent me the link to the following Youtube video. When first I saw "Amazing Grace - Only The Black Notes", I had this vision of a song within a song - that Amazing Grace would somehow sound different, played with only the black notes - on a piano.

Although that wasn't the case, you WILL be amazed at this:

Old Spice-Y

So I don't watch enough of "regular" TV any more - mostly, it's HSN, QVC, and HGTV. And everything in betwen. That makes up only about six channels the cable system has.

Or so it seems, since there's nary a copy of my fingerprints on the remote.

So apparently a certain set of commercials portraying "the Old Spice Guy" is a hit on the interwebs. I couldn't say as I've never seen any of them, and they apparently don't advertise on those six channels.

But if they're anywhere near as entertsining as this parody of sorts from BYU, maybe I need to do some erstwhile remote-grabbing of my own.

Hope I still remember how to use it.

Summer Dayzz

Brilliantly Stimulating conversation Saturday night:

Marilee: "Are those explosions louder than they were last year?"

Me: "Maybe they seem louder because we're older."

There, I said it. We are older.

While I would have liked to have had fireworks pictures from the weekend at Taylorsville Dayzz, there aren't any since a) once you've seen one fireworks display you've seen them all, or b) I couldn't find the base plate for my tripod. Or didn't look hard enough. Maybe a bit of both.

And that's not the half of it. Every year we've watched the fireworks, we had the whole fam damily over to watch; this year it was just Marilee and myself. Oh, Taylor came out from the dungeon a couple times, but not for very long.

But some of those fireworks - not the more-for-show oohs and ahhs fireworks - but the shock and awe booming fireworks took us by surprise. The ones that echoed off the surrounding hills for-ev-er actually shook us to the core.

The best thing about the weekend fireworks spectacle had to have been from Taylor Friday night - we were sitting quietly in the family room when the first report was heard...

Me: "Must be ten o'clock."

Marilee: "Oh, the dogs!"

The dogs - all four of 'em - began a whimper/cry/what-the-hell-was-that chorus. It was all we could do to keep them still.

Just after that, he came up from downstairs...

Taylor: "Are those fireworks?"

Me: "Yes."

Taylor: "Are you sure?"

[crickets]

Taylorsville Dayzz

Yes, again with the double ZZ's.

It's the beginning of summer, so that must mean it's time for Taylorsville Dayzz. Real, fun, family entertainment just around the corner from the bs factory.

The Dayzz were live this morning on Channel 13 with the Beatles' tribute band and Big Buddah. Looks like it will be just as fun (and hectic) as in years past.

And fireworkzz tonight and Saturday.

I even hear there will be an [expletive deleted] over there.

The Empire Strikes Back - From the 1950's?

Virtual Green Screen

This four-minute video will change your perception of background activity on every TV show or movie you will ever see: past, present, and future.

This will blow your mind.

The Fourth Meal

This is NOT an ad for Taco Bell.

As you'll recall, last weekend, a classmate and I went to Pier 39, a tourist trap entertainment area in San Francisco. I got in some serious people watching, though the shopping was über neat.

Since we left the hotel before lunch, by the time we'd found a place to park and having to walk as far as we did, we were getting rather hungry, so we had lunch at one of the seafood-rich eateries there, at the Pier Market Seafood Restaurant.

Though there were other places to eat on the pier, this particular restaurant had the most decadent aromas coming from an open mesquite grill. Yum yum yummy.

And the clam chowder? Not being a connoisseur by any stretch, I do like my Pismo Beach clam chowder, and since this place was just up the road apiece from Pismo, I figured why not.

Don't miss it.

After gorging ourselves on the treats at Pier Market, and having bought the farm and then some while shopping, it was time to depart.

OK, so I haven't lived in California for some twenty-five years, and I realize some customs have likely changed in my absence. But for some reason, California has an additional daily meal I was not aware of; we only have breakfast, lunch, and dinner in Utah. Why, then, is California so special that the fourth meal is called...