The LunchJournal

Blue Bird
2000 - 2004



He passed away this morning. He had taken a turn for the worse in the past few days, looking ill and tired, but never lost his appetite (which fortunately means that he likely wasn't in much pain). When I saw him holding his bad leg differently last night and cuddling with and leaning on Fidget for support, I knew he wasn't long for this world. He was a sweet little bird.

(Sort of.)

The power company truck left without trying anything. The cat was too high up in the tree for their cherry-picker to reach.

The fire truck came back, and shot the cat with more water. This time they blasted the cat out of the tree, causing it to fall from a height of about four or five stories. Its fall was slowed by various tree limbs and bushes, and it appears to have escaped any serious physical damage.

So, um... hooray, I guess.

A cat has been stuck up a tree in the yard across the street since yesterday. The fire department came by a little while ago and has been trying to get it down. Their early attempts at trying to get it to climb down by swinging a tree trimmer at it were unsuccessful. Their second plan: Spray the cat with their high-pressure water hose so that it's forced to climb higher in the tree, all the way to the top. This plan also was not very good.

The power company truck is out there now. Maybe they'll have more luck.

I will keep everyone posted on events as they develop.

Quiet
I haven't been feeling very updatey lately.

Colorful
Tonight I walked into the store in order to obtain some food items, and saw Noby there. He was getting snacks and heading over to Tommy's. I went over there with him and, after the usual hour or two of trying to decide what movie to watch, we all watched Suspiria. I still have thick, dense colors permeating my brain.

Singing
The Lately David show this weekend went pretty well, and they're booked to play at W.C. Don's again in early October. Rusty and Carrie and Noby and cool new friend Angela all went, but Angela skipped out on most of the evening (the place was pretty smoky and some of the people there at the beginning were rowdy and annoying, so I don't blame her). In keeping with the study hall atmosphere of the crowd (if study hall had booze and cigarettes, that is), people at our table wrote notes back and forth and played paper football. We all left after LD's second set, but I ended up having to go back, getting there as they were finishing up. I had realized I had Tommy's keys, and he'd probably be needing those if he wanted to go back home afterwards. Apparently a better crowd came in while we were gone for the third set and we missed out on some fun stuff. (I was told there was this girl who got up on stage...)

Inbetween the acoustic gig at Bebop earlier that day and the show that night, there was an awful lot of following people around to various places all over town. But perhaps it's best not to dwell on all that.

Birds
Blue has been adjusting to his disability fairly well. He's learned to put some of his weight on the back of his foot (standing on it sort of like a human foot rather than the normal animal method of standing on the toes), so he's probably not tiring out his good leg as much. I am concerned that I'll eventually need to clip his toenails on his bad foot, since he won't be wearing them down like they would if he were gripping the perch with his foot. Fidget is treating him well. Bossy is unfortunately taking the opportunity to occasionally pick on him to rise in social status and cement the totalitarian rule of Bossy Bird as supreme evil overlord of all parakeets.

Here's a page with another wacky quote from George Lucas before he was apparently replaced by his evil doppelganger from an alternate universe. (Courtesy of the Wayback Machine, since the actual html version of the page doesn't seem to be there anymore, just a pdf version without the footnotes.)

The relevant excerpt:
In 1986 the purchase of the MGM film library by the television entrepreneur Ted Turner raised the issues of film protection in dramatic fashion. Turner announced his intention to apply digital colorization to one hundred old feature films and commented: "The last time I checked, I owned those films. I can do anything I want with them." Many prominent directors and cinephiles protested against the colorization of black-and-white film "classics," and the Directors Guild of America called it "cultural butchery." In 1991 Star Wars director George Lucas suggested that colorization was only, in fact, the tip of the iceberg:

The agonies filmmakers have suffered as their work is chopped, tinted and compressed are nothing compared to what technology has in store.... Unless the United States achieves uniformity with the rest of the world in the protection of our motion picture creations, we may live to see them recast with stars we never directed, uttering dialogue we never wrote, all in support of goals and masters we never imagined we would serve.

As I feared, Blue was diagnosed with a kidney tumor, likely cancerous. It's pressing up against a nerve, causing partial paralysis in his leg. He doesn't seem to be in pain, and he's eating well, so that's good. But there's absolutely no telling how long he has left. No more flying around loose in the room for him, since that would be pretty dangerous with just one good leg to land on. He'll be living out the rest of his days in the birdcage with his mate Fidget.

When I did those posters and flyers for Lately David, I had taken Noby's fancy digital camera that Tommy had been borrowing over to my house to transfer all the band photos to my computer. In all the rush to get the things printed out and ready, I had left the camera behind at my house, where it's been for a week or so, until tonight when I took it back to Noby. (I don't think he minded, and it's not like he didn't have those DVDs of mine for about a month, and I live closer and am home more often than Tommy is in case he needed to get it back anyway, but I did feel kind of bad about keeping it that long.)

Anyway, I took the opportunity the other day to grab some good photos of my birds, since I don't have many, and since Blue might not be around much longer:

( Look at the birdies )

Blue Bird has suddenly lost the use of his left foot. Can't tell for sure whether it's injured (which would probably be fixable) or paralyzed (which could be a sign of something much worse). He'll be seeing the vet ASAP. I spent some time today trying to make his living quarters more handicap-accessible. The poor little parakeet is getting around pretty well, but looks exhausted from the effort. (At least I hope it's just from the effort, and not something worse.)

On a brighter note, the BMT is back, and you should forget that stuff I had said about the hosts file, and delete the entry if you put it in there, as it won't work now if it is. (As if anyone actually bothered to try that.) As a side result of the server changes and my being unaware that anything was going on thanks to my using that shortcut to the site, there's now a weird alternate-universe BMT that exists in cyberspace with a couple of postings by me that do not exist on the actual BMT.

Here's what George Lucas has to say about how he feels about the recent colorization of some old Three Stooges shorts.

Here's another quote attributed to Lucas, who also had spoken out against the first attempts at colorization of films back in the 1980s: "I am very concerned about our national heritage, and I am very concerned that the films that I watched when I was young and the films that I watched throughout my life are preserved, so that my children can see them."

Here's a clip of Hayden Christensen replacing Sebastian Shaw as the ghost of Anakin Skywalker from the upcoming DVD release of Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi (the content of which has been leaking out all over the net recently):



Here's some other new changes that you can expect to see on the upcoming Star Wars DVDs that won't include the original theatrical versions (which Lucas claims no longer exist and will never be released on any film, video, or digital format ever again, unlike those hated Three Stooges DVDs that at least bother to include the original b&w; versions in addition to the new colorizations).

And here's all that other stuff that was changed a few years ago, just for some further perspective. Nothing's been colorized, though. That would be wrong and harmful to our national heritage and stuff. (You know, unless you count those scenes where colors actually were added and changed, like darkening scenes to change the apparent time of day or the coloring of R2-D2's blue panels in space scenes.)

(Posting some stuff here that I posted over at the BMT, but no one's read because it's apparently messed up.)

For anyone who missed Seth McFarlane's introductions for his favorite Family Guy episodes a couple weeks ago, you can download and watch them here. (Quicktime 6 required) They're pretty fu--crap--ing funny.

And you can download the pilot for his new show American Dad (being done in addition to the new season of Family Guy) here. (It's about 20 mb, and I haven't watched it yet, and won't bother trying to download until we get a broadband connection--which we actually will be sometime soon.) UPDATE: It looks like something's screwed up and their links to download the thing aren't currently working.

I put this together today, and they're now making their way around Jackson:

( For those of you trying to access the BMT: )

Well, I didn't have to worry about my crowd phobia at Metalfest this weekend. (Not that it was completely without an audience--maybe at most a couple dozen at the venue we were at during its most crowded moments.) And I didn't see any cameras, so apparently there won't be any video--at least not of the venue Lately David played at. They'll just have to settle for the nice photos I snapped of them. Despite all that, the event was still a pretty rewarding experience, for the following reasons:

1. Those girls who were there to see Fusion
2. Getting to see a bunch of bands play
3. The way those aforementioned girls were dancing
4. Meeting the guys from The Hype, who I'd heard lots of good things about and were pretty cool, and talking about some fun-sounding visual ideas for their upcoming CD
5. Those aforementioned girls dancing next to me* while the Hype played --especially that one particular one who pretty much every guy in the room couldn't take their eyes off of

*Not that I was actually out there dancing--those of us guys who weren't seated were mostly sort of standing and bobbing our heads to the beat, enjoying the music, while trying to not be too obvious about where we were looking most of the time.


Anyway, it was fun.

In other news, Noby came by yesterday to relay my Firefly DVDs back to me from Liza. He got to meet the infamous crazy barking dog that barks and barks and won't stop constantly barking at people. He didn't stay long.

Happy birthday, Liza!

My Cafeshops have recently been updated with a few things... mainly buttons and magnets! Now you can have ninjas attack your fridge! And wear buttons declaring your support for the evils of science! And Happy Milk!

I'll be hanging out with Lately David this weekend, as they play this Saturday in Jackson, Tennessee, at Metalfest (they're not a metal band, but apparently different genres of rock are being represented at the festival, despite its name). I'll be taking pictures and possibly dealing with my phobia of crowds while there. The event is supposed to be webcast, but apparently judging by some of their message board discussion, it may or may not happen live, so check out the Bekkerrock site on Saturday sometime before 5:15 central time to see if you can see LD playing online. (At least they say the cameras have been taken care of at least, so I'd assume that there will be video at some point.)

We'll also probably discuss promotion for the band's upcoming gig in Jackson, Mississippi, near the end of next month, for which I'll be doing some posters and stuff.

In nonmusical stuff that rocks, I just finished watching the second episode of Rescue Me earlier tonight (nowadays I tape just about everything I watch on TV--which isn't much--to view later at my convenience), and continue to love the show. It's pretty much the same show as The Job, which I loved. Only it's slightly more serious, and this time Denis Leary is playing himself as a firefighter instead of himself as a cop, and his impending nervous breakdown is accompanied by hallucinations of the dead people he couldn't save.

Sam Raimi is awesome. Despite being a big-budget Hollywood special-effects-filled blockbuster action flick, Spidey 2 is very much a Sam Raimi movie. Quite dark at times, but without losing that comic book-y feeling. I keep thinking back to that dark scene of Peter Parker walking away from the guy getting beaten up. Great stuff, and just over-the-top enough without going too far. I also liked how practically everything in the movie revolved around the themes of identity and fusion (both figuratively and literally).

I am kind of curious about the bit where we see Robbie cutting and pasting together the Daily Bugle's headline. It seemed like it was a deliberate anachronism, since I would think that no major paper would still do that sort of thing by hand anymore. If so, that was kind of a neat touch, since the movie does tend to have a somewhat timeless quality to it in places, capturing the feel of the glory days of the Spidey comics from a few decades ago.

My prediction: Spider-Man 3 is gonna be absolutely brilliant. Then they'll make Spider-Man 4 without Raimi (they'll probably get some Michael Bay or Renny Harlin or someone), and they'll probably cave to all the popular pressure to put Venom in it (Why do all the nutty fangeeks seem to like Venom, anyway? He's really not that interesting a villain, you know... Just a big angry monster guy who sticks his tongue out and keeps talking about eating brains--has Venom ever actually eaten anyone's brains? I don't seem to remember him ever even trying, but just talking about it incessantly.) and it'll stink to high heaven. Then they'll churn out more assembly-line sequels with fewer and fewer members of the cast returning until it becomes as bad as or worse than the Schumacher Batman nonsense.

But at least we'll get a good Spidey trilogy to enjoy out of it, and can ignore the rest.


Meanwhile...

I apologize if the recent posting of my spider solitaire scores has caused any anguish and frustration amongst people trying to challenge my ridiculously high win ratio. Spider solitaire with all four suits is incredibly difficult, and I'm apparently some kind of prodigy at it (I don't know how accurate the following figure is, but I've read that it's been estimated that only about half of all the possible card configurations are actually winnable), so be careful out there, and don't stress yourself out over it.

It should also be noted that, according to some quick calculations, the maximum number of points you can win the game with should be 1254. And that's only if you had the highly improbable luck of getting the cards laid out just right so that you could build each suit without having to move any card more than once (and without having to move any of the kings or the cards dealt in each new row--which couldn't contain any kings--at all). So I don't expect to be beating that high point score of mine anytime soon.

I've been neglecting my online presence here again lately, haven't I? Sorry about that. To make up for my absence, here's a wacky news story about a trailer park couple biting and throwing beer bottles and live alligators at each other. I can't decide which sentence of the article sounds the most ridiculous.

Not to brag or anything (because it would be a horribly lame thing to brag about anyway), but I finally broke past 40% with my Spider Solitaire win rate at the hardest difficulty setting earlier today.



(Of course, if the stupid program bothered to round up tenths of a percent properly, it actually would have read 41% a while ago.)

Check out the following spam I was sent. The site linked to has been shut down already, so I'm kind of disappointed that I didn't get to see whether or not they put as little effort into faking a Citi_bank/Citi-card/Citicard/whatever website as they did in trying to make this email look real. The other ones at least try to make the link look like it goes to some legitimate looking domain-name. I'm tempted to say anyone dumb enough to fall for this thing deserved to have their "D e b b i t" card info stolen...

From: CITICARD-ALERT* <NeilStowe@virtualg.com>
Subject: CITI_BANK EMAIL Verification

To_ veriffication_of your e_mail address_ click on-the link :

http://go.msn.com/HML/1/1.asp?target=HtTp://idsass40e.com*1010.da.rU/?8t4k4kqtiv3Q8QfTnzGfGBe25Qa7v0qj

and_submit in the_ smal| _window_ your Citi-group_ D e b b i t full Card Number and *PIN* that you use_ in local_Atm_Machine..

By the way, I know how to use the HOSTS file to block individual domains, but is there any way to use it to block an entire set of domains? Like, say, everything ending with ".ru", for instance? Lately I've been feeling the urge to look into doing that.

(Bah. Looks like it doesn't work with wildcards, after all. Oh well.)

James Marsters said in a recent Australian talk show appearance that Joss Whedon has plans for a series of four TV-movies featuring various Buffy & Angel characters, and that he would agree to do a Spike movie.

Here's the transcript, and the relevant quote follows:
"And, um, it was weird, because I was doing some ah just basic work for the show, voice over stuff and filling in bits and he came up to me and he’s like ’Man I really like your work and I’m hoping that you’re still interested’ And he’s, he’s kissing me butt! And I’m like ’What are you doin, Joss?’ And I told him, I said, ’Joss, stop it. Three lines, fifty lines, lead role, whatever you want man, call me. I’m there for you, because frankly, you’re one of the best writers I’ve worked with.’ And ah, he said he wanted to do a Spike movie. TV movie. But it’s also contingent upon other characters. He wants to do four TV movies and one of them is Spike. But, and so I said yes, right, immediately, I’m your bitch. (everyone laughs) But I don’t know if the other people signed off on it. So it may or may not happen not because I didn’t sign off on it. But it may not really sell as a single project."

Sounds interesting if they manage to go through with it. And maybe it's a way to finally do that Giles spinoff they've been teasing us with for years. It's interesting that it's supposedly a single project, but four separate movies, apparently focusing on different characters. It'd be nice if they pulled off something like the episodes "Fool for Love" and "Darla", with each of the movies being a separate story, but intersecting with the others.

Today's Something Awful update has an uncharacteristically serious (but still pretty funny) article about Morgan Spurlock's documentary Supersize Me. I haven't seen the movie, but like my friend Rusty, I've been wondering what the big freaking deal is supposed to be about it. (I mean, seriously... How is showing a guy eating nothing but McDonald's food for a month and getting ill from it supposed to be some kind of revelation? Does any sane person really think that McDonald's food is all that good for them in the first place? Does no one remember anymore how their parents told them that eating too much of even a good thing could be bad for them? Maybe my thought processes are simply too grounded in things like logic and the scientific method to appreciate the supposedly ground-breaking experiment.)

Now I've seen some defense of the movie saying that the whole eating at McDonald's for a month is just the filmmaker's hook, and the point of the movie is more about the general unhealthiness of what people are eating in America (which is just something else worthy of another big "well, duh"). Okay, maybe that's the case. But why then does every interview or article I've seen or read with Spurlock seem to focus solely on the eating nothing but McDonald's food aspect? And even if it really is just the movie's "hook," that doesn't excuse the fact that it still seems like a pretty stupid one if you ask me.

I suppose I'll eventually watch it when it comes out on video, just to see for myself if there's anything more to it than what it sounds like (or at least if I can get a chuckle out of the stupid stunt aspect of it, like the Jackass comparison in the Something Awful article). But if anyone who has seen the movie can explain to me in the meantime if there really is anything more to it beyond the shock factor of how bad fast food is for you, or that I'm missing something that the various articles and interviews have neglected to mention and that it isn't as simple as it sounds, then please feel free to tell me.