But not without some more speculation on Gest’s bedroom life. Like I said when I first heard about David and Liza — “if you can’t be Dorothy, be Dorothy’s son-in-law.”
Monthly Archive for September, 2003
I love the International Herald-Tribune almost as much as I hate people like this:
Soli Shin of Manhattan is not waiting for lawmakers to act. She gave some thought to the ethics of file sharing after hearing of the lawsuits and took her own library of 1,094 songs offline, saying she knows they are aimed at people who “share” their music files with others. But she sees no reason to stop getting new music for herself.
“It’s really a great convenience,” Shin, 13, said. “If I like what I download, maybe I’ll buy it.”
Thanks for nothing, Generation Y! Who is her ISP? I think their IP addresses should be made available to PeerGuardian users. It’d be a start.
Windy City Mike explains how to get around Verisign’s SiteFinder convenience ad scambola. This works on OS X and would probably work on most Unix machines with little or no modification.
Ignore for a minute that the Little Rascals were born and made their
greatest fortunes years before Binney and Smith invented color, and
likewise ignore that Shirt Tales was an attempt to shoehorn a successful
post-invention-of-color greeting card franchise into another half-hour
adventure cartoon. If you can ignore these, then the talented
say,
SuperSeventies.com has a most bizarre tidbit as part of its feature:
At first it was about the repeal of Prohibition, and was called “December
5th, 1933.” Judy wasn’t pleased with that concept, though, and said that
the words were a little “too cute.” New lyrics were written, and the
melody reworked.
This immediately made me imagine a ragtime version on a tinkly piano
performed by a megaphone crooner. I wish I had a shred of musical
talent beyond knowing to use LAME instead of the standard iTunes encoder.
I’d like to set up a big-band to re-record today’s hits a la
big-band
style instad of sleazy lounge style. All too often, lately, the music in my
head is a Busby Berkeley-inspired set piece featuring thousands of
people frantically doing the Charleston to an interpolation of “Area
Codes,” or Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland singing “Magic Stick.”
[EDIT: found a better R.Cheese page, changed the link.]
I noticed the other day that the menu button on my cable remote popped up a new smaller menu in the corner instead of the screenful of various PPV, search, and box services buttons. A new button on this little menu, and on the full screen button, reads “OnDemand.”
When I first tried it, nothing was ready to go yet, but yesterday we got a letter from the cable company telling us all about it. Of course, as the ads indicated, we expected pay-per-view movies, but we did not expect cable shows to be available this way for free. It’s a good step toward making a TiVo less useful.
I gather they’re either still testing or they haven’t quite gotten the partners on board, because each of the cable networks contributes a few shows, and none of the shows I saw yet are first-run or current-season content [although not necessarily uninteresting — among other offerings, A&E’s section includes “Biography: Andy Warhol” and Comedy Central’s section features a few episodes of “Strangers With Candy”]. I didn’t explore the whole thing because I was getting sick of starting over and hearing the On-Demand music hook over and over [it introduces a preview broadcast that plays while you make a selection].
A few minutes ago, I navigated through the menus and weathered the nearly constant “Connection Timeout” errors that cause you to begin again from scratch, to make it to the BBC America section and choose Monty Python Series 2 Episode 2 [the “Spanish Inquisition” one].
The broadcast [can you call this a broadcast? it’d be more like a narrowcast] began with a two-minute ad for BBC America, which seemed to be geared toward advertisers or cable operators rather than viewers, dropping numbers like BBC’s three-billion-dollar programming budget. After this, they ran a BBCAmerica On Demand bumper, which looked a lot like the usual BBCAmerica station ID bumper.
The picture quality is very good but occasionally breaks up in much the manner the digital movie channels occasionally blank out and pixelize. It was particularly bad during one of Terry Gilliam’s segues, which may indicate high traffic or it may indicate a particular weakness — in the delivery system or compression codec — to crappy cutout animation.
I called, and a cable-company rep informed me that the taxes associated with the old-style scheduled PPVs apply to the movies you order with OnDemand, but not to the free TV presentations.
Tunekies.com [titled “The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer”] seems to have faded away, but fortunately Brewster managed to snap a photo before it ran out of steam. I have always kind of had a fascination with people who, unhindered by spellcheck, just sorta throw their thoughts out there, and this is one of those.
I was rooting for Big Lil [the woman in the Boy Scout uniform] to get the boot first, just to infuriate the BSA. There don’t appear to be any flamboyantly gay people in her tribe to cause friction with her, but maybe someone from the Drake tribe will come out once they merge.
The only contestant on any of these shows who is actually earning the prize money, in my book, is Matt, the titular mark on “The Joe Schmoe Show” on the network currently known as Spike Television. We have seen him kibitz, we have seen him sob, we have seen him stick up for the picked-upon gay guy. We have seen him beat-box and do the whitest Step routine I have ever seen. And we have only seen, like, three episodes.
If you get the urge to google the phrase “The Joe Schmoe Show,” be careful — one of the results is a news article that features a publicity photo that gives away who the last three contestants are — it’s probably not giving away too much to tell you that they include Matt.
Regal, the parent of UATC and a couple of other chains, released guidelines for appropriate content in arcade games located in their theaters. The usual suspects:
- Human-like characters suffering bloodshed and/or dismemberment.
- Graphic depictions of sexual behavior or nudity.
- Violence toward law enforcement officers or figures of authority.
- Graphically violent character deaths of any kind.
- Obscene or foul language of any kind.
- The promotion or glorification of illegal activity.
The only games that came to mind that would immediately be carted away banned from the typical theater lobby are the Mortal Kombat oeuvre, where characters get dismembered and/or killed all the livelong day, though I’m sure I forgot some game with a name like “Cop-Disembowelin’ Sex Workers DX+.” Midway doesn’t even have an arcade unit anymore because of games like Mortal Kombat 4 — the most recent MK game, Deadly Alliance, literally went straight-to-video — so I don’t know what games this covers. Maybe they’re just making it clear now, in case a Grand Theft Auto type game makes it to the arcade platform down the pike.
So you’re looking to get in on 2003’s hot new trend, watching bootleg movies
at home with your Mac?
Well, to start with, you have to get the films.
There are myriad ways of doing this, everything from
mlNet to
Gnutella. Some of the linked
utilities can utilize multiple networks.
Odds are you chose a film in DivX or XviD format. These formats are
known for their high quality, [relatively] small file size, and
cross-platform portability. You have several methods of watching these
files on your computer screen.
and VideoLAN will read these and
many other files out of the box [and if you’re viewing oneathem fancy
imported cartoons with the optional subtitles in a separate file, you’ll
need to use one of the above].
If you really like the Metal Look, you
can use QuickTime to play these files too.
You’ll need to install
and DivxDoctor to “pre-treat” each
movie so QuickTime will understand its soundtrack.
If you want to play the movies on your TV but don’t have a DVD burner,
make sure you have a DVD player that can play VCDs or SVCDs [VCD is
about the same quality of an average VHS tape, SVCDs are like a really
nice VHS tape]. You can
use MPEGWorks to convert
the files, then use
VCDBuilder to turn it into
an image you can burn with the desktop Disc Burner.
Alternately, you can buy
player that plays the DivX files off a CD or over your network, but
that’s kinda pricey still… what? I AM talking like a pirate. Oh, you
mean “Talk Like a Pirate?” I
remember that from last year, it was funny for a good five, ten minutes.
