FlasshePoint

Since N got back, we’re trying to catch up on DVDs that we both want to watch. While she was gone, I watched a lot of noisy, violent movies, but now it’s back to the dramatic quieter flicks.

This weekend we watched two features. The first one was Doubt, which is about a scandal at Catholic school in Brooklyn in the 60s. Since I went to a Catholic school in the 60s, I have an interest in such stories. (My attendance at said school was fairly uneventful, aside from developing a great fear of nuns and their punishing superpowers.) I have to say it was one of the most beautifully filmed movies I’ve ever seen. We weren’t even watching the Blu-Ray, just a regular DVD on the PS3, and the colors and detail were amazing. I really believed we were watching Brooklyn from a bygone era, although it looked more like the 50s than the 60s sometimes. The Oscar-level performances by the three leads (Philip Seymour Hoffman, Meryl Streep and Amy Adams) were all brilliant. The story was enthralling, but I think we wanted a bit less ambiguity in the ending. I’m not just talking about the resolution to the central mystery of the story. The final scene, especially the final line, was a bit too abrupt. And even though the cinematography was excellent, the movie still felt a bit claustrophobic and insular, no doubt because of its genesis on the stage.

The second movie, Wendy and Lucy(which I keep wanting to call Wendy and Lisa), felt even more isolated. This despite the fact that most scenes are outdoors, including some in the woods. It was filmed in Portland Oregon, which was standing in for a smaller Oregon town. It’s about a woman, Wendy, played by Michelle Williams, who is having a very bad couple of days. She’s trying to go to Alaska with her dog Lucy and has just enough money to make it, but then things start going wrong, including her car breaking down and her losing her dog. This could have been a more interesting character piece if they had actually gone into the background of the character and told us how she got to this state. But instead it’s more of a short “slice of life” story, one small chapter in the middle somewhere, with no real beginning or end. The whole thing is pretty sad and depressing, but somehow appropriate for watching in bed on a Sunday morning. Williams did a decent job with the material, and the few scenes were she got really frustrated, angry, or scared hinted at what her performance could’ve been and where a more interesting story could’ve gone. Too bad we don’t get to see that story.

Administration Note: I’m avoiding including pix in posts lately until I figure out what I want to do about a new WordPress theme. The fewer pictures I include, the fewer posts I potentially have to go back and edit if I change themes.

Latre.

Pet Peeve of the Day: Waning support for the PlayStation 3.

Poignant Search Term Of The Day That Led To This Blog: “special k has changed from original flakes”.

Videogame(s) Played Since Last Blog Update: inFamous demo (PS3), PlayStation Home.

Finally got around to upgrading my WordPress installation for this blog from 2.6 to 2.8. I really hated 2.6, and it looks like 2.8 is a lot better, especially in the post composition department. Upgrade was smoother too – I had database problems with the last one. So far it looks to me like the only thing that isn’t working is the Flickr Badge Widget, which doesn’t appear to be compatible with 2.8. So no random photos from my Flickr stream on the main page for now. If you find anything else that’s not working, please let me know. I hope to play around with changing the theme soon, but I don’t know if I can ever get away from Cutline because of the specific way it does images. But that’s another story.

Also upgraded my 1st gen iPhone to OS 3.0. Looks pretty cool so far. It added a “Voice Memos” icon to my home screen and pushed my “Messages” icon to a screen by its lonesome, so that necessitated totally redoing my screen real estate, which is something I needed to do anyway. Glad to see that copy/paste works, though I haven’t played with it much yet.

And since I upgraded to from WordPress 2.6, I could now finally install the upgrade to the WordPress iPhone application. Finally, no more pesky badge on the “App Store” icon!

More reports from the field as I play around more.

Latre.

Synchronicity. It’s not just the title of an old Police album. It’s a universal force.

The other night, I finally got around to watching the DVRed season finale episode of How I Met Your Mother. At the end of the episode, they had a song playing over the last few scenes, as these sort of shows do from time to time. The good old “End of the Episode” musical montage. Rescue Me does it on practically every episode. Anyway, the song playing sounded very familiar. Sounded like a New Pornographers song, but one I didn’t recognize. I surmised it must be a song from NP lead singer AC Newman’s latest solo album Get Guilty, which I had downloaded from eMusic but only listened to once so far.

So after the show I went into iTunes to look up the song, but I wasn’t getting sound out of the computer. I had redirected the audio through my Logitech Music Anywhere USB widget so I could listen to iTunes on my living room stereo earlier in the evening when I was reading. In order to hear anything, I had to restart iTunes. But I didn’t want to do that just then because I was syncing/charging the iPhone. So I went to bed and decided to just pursue it in the morning.

Cue the next morning. My iHome clock radio alarm goes off at the usual time. I have it set to wake me with my oldest iPod, which I have set to shuffle play. Guess which song it played? Yep, the very same AC Newman song from the Mother episode. This is out of some 3300 songs stored on the iPod.

The title of the song? “Prophets”.

Latre.

Pet Peeve of the Day: The grocery store only having yellow bananas and no green ones.

Poignant Search Term Of The Day That Led To This Blog: “why is there always somebody else”.

Videogame(s) Played Since Last Blog Update: None

I think it’s about time we started using Twitter in more original ways. My high school buddies and I used to get together with a typewriter and drink beer and pound out a story, each person writing a paragraph or so and leaving the protagonist in an awkward position for the next writer. (This is also known as a “round robin” story.) Eventually, the story would devolve into inanity, but it’s fun to see what other people do with your lead-ins. Some of you may remember we had a “chain song” contest on the Reign of Frogs website many years ago. I think those pages are gone now. We got a set of lyrics from our loyal fans but never ended up actually recording a song with them.

Anyway, I’m thinking the rules of the Twitter Chain Story will be something like this: I compile a list of people who are interested. I’ll write the first tweet of course, which will be the opening line(s) of the story. Then we’ll go down the list in order and the next person has to take up where the previous one left off. You must submit your tweet using your own Twitter account. When you have submitted your tweet, please ping the next person in the list (which will be maintained somewhere on this site), via a direct message or separate tweet or whatever. In order to convey as much story info as possible in a single tweet, there should be no @replies or anything else cluttering up the tweet aside from some common hash tag I’ll decide on to identify the tweet as part of the story, and possibly a sequence number for sorting out the order. Suggestions on the format would be appreciated. When we get to the end of the list, we start all over again at the top. I’m thinking that if it’s your turn and you don’t submit your entry within 24 hours, then you lose your spot in that cycle and it goes to the next person in the list. Maybe we should jumble up the list occasionally so that you’re not always following the same person. The story will end when a majority of the people involved deem it necessary. I’m unsure if we should let additional people join after the story has started. All Twitter rules and terms of service must be followed. Let’s try to keep it relatively clean.

Does that make sense? Anything I’ve missed? If you’d like to participate, or have any better ideas of how this might work, please submit a comment to this post. Be sure to include your Twitter username if you wish to participate. (Obviously you must have a Twitter account.) Please also include your real e-mail address in the specified box. It will not be published and no one but me will see it, and I won’t give it to anyone else or spam you. It will just be used for me to send out administration info about the project or to prod you if it’s your turn and you’re slacking.

Latre.

Here’s yet another attempt to get back into this blogging thing. I’m going to skip the lists of exercising songs for now. Suffice it to say that I am going to the gym whenever I can (3-4 days a week) and I still listen to an eclectic array of random tunes from my iPod nano “fast tempo” playlist. Just yesterday, it decided to play three Cinerama songs in a 45 minute period. Since most Cinerama songs seem to deal with cheating on your partner, I choose not to listen to the message the iPod is evidently trying to send me.

Anyway, I was on vacation last week, and actually traveled for the first time in a long time. The experience of getting to place to place itself was actually fairly pleasant this time. We flew Southwest Airlines to Philly like last year, but this year I understood that you have to do the online check-in and print your boarding pass at home in order to get decent seats on this non-seat assignment budget airline. Although I screwed up the timing for the flight out and did the check-in 23 hours before the flight instead of 24, and so we ended up in the high “B” boarding group. But N and I still got seats together on the full flight, so that was nice. On the flight back, which was just me alone, I didn’t have Internet computer access, but was able to do the online check-in on my iPhone through Southwest’s mobile site, and then printed out the boarding pass at the airport bag check kiosk. This time, I got into the high “A” group, but since there weren’t many people in the low “A” group, I was one of the first people on the plane. The flight wasn’t anywhere near full and I had a row all to myself. I was surrounded by babies in the front and across the aisle, but they were all well-behaved and quiet.

Southwest is growing on me, even though I still don’t like not having assigned seating. The people are always pleasant and they keep things moving fast. Not charging for checking bags is definitely a big plus, as it makes the flights even cheaper compared to other airlines than they already were. There’s no meals on the flights, but at least they’ll give you pretty much infinite packs of snack crackers and such if you whine even a little bit. I don’t miss having a TV screen, as I prefer to spend flights reading. And the seats are fairly comfortable – N thinks that the legroom has gotten bigger since last year.

For a rental car, I took InfK’s advice and tried Priceline.com this year. That worked out very well. Not only did I get a much better price than if I had booked directly, but also the company turned out to be Hertz, which I’ve never used before. Of course they didn’t have an economy car like I booked, so they upgraded me free to a brand new Mercury Sable with Sirius XM satellite radio and a GPS navigator system – both a first for me. I could get used to that kind of luxury. The automatic seat positioning was cute but not all the accurate. I think it kept automatically resetting the side rear view mirrors also, which was annoying. The GPS came in handy on the 2.5 hour drive up north and worked pretty well. My only complaint is that sometimes it wasn’t quite as explicit with the voice directions as I’d like (for example, not always specifying whether you should take the “north” or “south” highway exit if they were both on the same side). And on the drive back to the airport, it had me take a route that had me paying higher tolls than if I had just went the route I was familiar with. So the lesson there is Trust With Caution.

The one glitch I had with the car was not figuring out exactly how the headlights worked immediately. I think I drove out of Philly at night with only the parking lights on for a little while. Luckily it wasn’t too dark yet. Dang American automobiles and their impenetrable foreign hieroglyphics!

Latre.

Pet Peeve of the Day: The AAA application for the iPhone refuses to validate my membership number.

Poignant Search Term Of The Day That Led To This Blog: “most irrational phobia on record”.

Videogame(s) Played Since Last Blog Update: Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars (DS)

Still alive. Still very busy. Still working a lot. Still not sleeping. Still totally stressed. Lots and lots of transitions hitting all at once. Really not feeling the blog thing any more (or even Twitter), which I knew would happen once I stopped daily posting. At least N has been all moved in since the beginning of the month, and I am managing to get back into the regular gym workouts.

I wish I had gotten some pix of the family of foxes living in my neighbor’s yard, but they vacated before I could get a decent shot. I did get one video, but you can’t see much in it.

Latre.

Songs That Came Up On The iPod While Exercising Since Last Blog Update:

• “I Got You” (Split Enz)
• “Sorry” (Youth Group)
• “Weathered and Torn” (The Dream Syndicate)
• “Sweet Creature, What’s Your Name?” (Anton Barbeau)
• “Artists Only” (Talking Heads)
• “A Summer Wasting” (Belle & Sebastian)
• “Strangest Things” (Longwave)
• “Camaraderie” (Ian McNabb)
• “Do It” (Buzzcocks)
• “I Love You” (Barenaked Ladies)
• “6′1″” (Liz Phair)
• “Can’t Take The Heat” (I Am The World Trade Center)
• “Gift” (Curve)
• “The Well and the Lighthouse” (Arcade Fire)
• “Someone Else’s Friend” (Shake Some Action!)
• “Not About You” (Jonathan Coulton)
• “Snakes with wings” (Bill Nelson)
• “Get In Or Get Out” (Hot Hot Heat)
• “Love Is Only A Feeling” (The Darkness)
• “Ego” (The Sounds)
• “The Fall Of The House Of Usher: II. Arrival” (Alan Parsons Project)
• “The Light Pours Out of Me” (Trotsky Icepick)
• “Meeting the Remarkable Men (Show Me the Hero)” (Harvey Danger)
• “Tissue Tigers (The Arguers)” (XTC)
• “It’s Now” (Imperial Teen)
• “Stuck Between Stations” (The Hold Steady)
• “Praise The Lord” (Poi Dog Pondering)
• “Lovely Little Swan” (Close Lobsters)
• “The Dead We Wake With Upstairs Drums” (Bill Nelson)
• “Dark Wave” (Stephen Malkmus)
• “You Never Know” (Goldfrapp)
• “The Beginning (Week One)” (The Features)
• “500 (Shake Baby Shake)” (Lush)
• “Rocks Off” (Loud Family)
• “Relive The Magic…Bring The Magic Home” (Reggie and the Full Effect)
• “The Mask of Shame” (Steve Wynn)
• “Astronomer” (Trotsky Icepick)
• “Morning Star” (Fastball)
• “Walking With the Beggar Boys” (Elf Power)
• “Twin Cinema” (The New Pornographers)
• “Dancing With Myself” (Nouvelle Vague)
• “Blowin’ Smoke” (Arcwelder)
• “#37 (Feels So Strange)” (The Greenberry Woods)
• “Promise” (Violent Femmes)
• “Thank God” (The Maggies)
• “Hole” (Penelope Houston)
• “Destination Anywhere Else” (Shalini)
• “The Stranger” (Elf Power)
• “Uh Oh Hello” (Elefant)
• “Stranger on the Bus” (Berlin)
• “The Ghost of You Lingers” (Spoon)
• “Something Happens” (Mighty Lemon Drops)
• “Control” (Alphaville)
• “Real Cool Time” (The Feelies)
• “Rumour Sets The Woods Alight” (The Records)
• “She Can Do What She Wants” (Field Music)
• “In Passing” (The Lemonheads)
• “Starry Eyed” (Cinerama)
• “The Way We Get By” (Spoon)
• “I Often Dream of Trains” (Grant-Lee Phillips)
• “‘Cause It’s Love (Saint Parallelogram)” (Robyn Hitchcock)
• “Pre” (Relay)
• “She’s Slipping Away” (Stranglers)
• “You Were Beautiful” (Material Issue)
• “Ofor1″ (Poster Children)
• “Sunburst” (Lloyd Cole)
• “Magnetism Made Me Do It” (Bill Nelson)
• “The Time Machine (Dr Evil Austin Powers Mix)” (Alan Parsons)
• “Close…But” (Echobelly)
• “Top Banana” (Palomar)
• “Harness And Wheel” (The Kingsbury Manx)
• “Stray Dog And The Chocolate Shake” (Grandaddy)
• “Annie” (Elefant)
• “Aound the World” (Ho-Hum)
• “Angry People” (Barenaked Ladies)
• “The Breath in My Father’s Saxophone” (Bill Nelson)
• “Too Bad” (Girls Say Yes)
• “Find the River” (R.E.M.)
• “Two Yous” (Drop Quarters)
• “Modern Love Is Automatic” (A Flock of Seagulls)
• “Love’s Not A Competition (But I’m Winning)” (Kaiser Chiefs)
• “It’s Gonna Rain” (Violent Femmes)
• “Finished With Lies” (They Might Be Giants)
• “Fluke” (Mates Of State)
• “1995″ (Luna)
• “24/7″ (Hugh Cornwell)
• “Your Daddy Don’t Know” (The New Pornographers)
• “Oh Christien” (The Greenberry Woods)
• “Love And A Bucket Full Of Holes” (Bill Nelson)
• “You Or Your Memory” (The Mountain Goats)
• “Chymepeace (an ending)” (Bill Nelson)
• “Like Egypt Was” (Michael Penn)
• “Why” (Elefant)
• “Horrorshow” (The Libertines)
• “Wysteria” (Bill Nelson)
• “Nightclub” (Gay Dad)
• “Me Next” (Cinerama)
• “What I Say And What I Mean” (The Like)
• “I Miss My Life” (The Maggies)
• “The Strangest Things” (Hail Social)
• “Heavenly” (Possum Dixon)
• “Water on the Brain” (Flamingoes)
• “L’Amour Looks Something Like You” (Kate Bush)
• “(Gatekeepers Opening) Asu no egao no tame ni” (Yumi Matsuzawa)
• “A Simple Request” (Gene)
• “Pull Yourself Together” (Hefner)
• “Oh My Golly!!!” (Pixies)
• “Sean Penn Blues” (Lloyd Cole)
• “In Our Darkest Hour” (Phantom Planet)
• “Rubbish” (Luxuria)
• “Decatur, Or, Round Of Applause for Your Step-Mother!” (Sufjan Stevens)
• “Johnny Feelgood” (Liz Phair)
• “Adventures in Modern Recording” (Buggles)
• “Here Come the Warm Jets” (Loud Family)
• “Waking Up to You” (Hefner)
• “Frozen” (Ho-Hum)
• “Vermillion” (Mercury Rev)
• “Cruel Reminder” (Heatmiser)
• “Open Car” (Porcupine Tree)
• “IDK” (Relay)
• “Persimmon” (Poster Children)
• “No Reaction” (Absolute Zeros)
• “Roommate” (Don Dixon)

Weird how a Robyn Hitchcock song played right after Grant-Lee Phillips cover of Hitchcock’s “I Often Dream of Trains”…

Pet Peeve of the Day: When the local channels forget to “throw the HD switch” and I record a show expecting it to be in HD and instead get standard def and the black bars on all sides.

Poignant Search Term Of The Day That Led To This Blog: “heathenism resort, mexico”.

Videogame(s) Played Since Last Blog Update: I actually finished Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia (DS) and have started on Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars (DS). It’s been forever since I’ve played an PS3 games, but I think that’s because anytime I turn on the TV, I feel the need to get through my huge DVR backlog.