December 01, 2007
Red Dwarf Fan
Saw this car in the Circuit City parking lot next door to Hotels.com:
Takes some 'nads to put "Smeg Head" on your Mini.
Posted by Steven at 05:08 PM | Comments (0)
November 19, 2007
My Doctor Meets Alanna's Doctor
Alanna found this missing ten minute special on Dr. Who that fits between the last and next-to-last scene in the final episode of the third season of Dr. Who. Peter Davison and David Tennant team up for a few minutes to create an interstitial that is hilarious in how it maps the latest Doctor onto fanboys. (For those still puzzling the entry title: Peter Davison was the Doctor when I was watching Who back in 1983, and Tennant is the Doctor today.)
Joe Bob sez, "Check it out!"
Posted by Steven at 12:05 AM | Comments (0)
July 21, 2007
New DLP TV
Last Saturday our eight year-old Toshiba TheaterWide SD TV finally gave up the ghost. For the last year, the screen has been flicking in size, which hinted at a failing transformer. The CRTs inside were long burned in and out of convergence, and the image has been soft and fuzzy for several years. It was not doing well.
Anne and I decided to go ahead and take the HD plunge, and on Sunday I bought a Samsung HL-T5676S DLP screen. The unit is 56" diagonal, and less than a foot deep. Perched on an Ikea stand with wheels, it just fits in the large space we built in 2003 for the TV.
Our <$100 Samsund DVD player has an 1080i up-converting mode, which plays through an HDMI interface to the DLP TV. The picture quality is staggering. We watched The Lord of the Rings and it felt like being in the theater. The first movie I watched on it was 2001 and it was stunning, too. The DLP artifacting is well hidden with several technologies in the TV that try to mask the hard edges of DLP pixels. It works!
Hooking up the new Canon XH-A1 camcorder in Component Input and watching footage taken on it is also just amazing. You can really see the quality of the Canon camera in native 1080i on this screen.
I also tried my MacBook Pro on it using a DVI-to-HDMI converter. The result? A 1920 x 1080 pixel digital screen! Just incredible.
About the only thing that looks poor on this display is the ReplayTV shows I record in 2Mbs mode (Standard). I'm moving all my show recording to 6 Mbps (Fine), but at a loss of 66% of the recording time :-(. Also dissappointing: no Comedy Central nor SciFi Channel shows are offered in HD, so I'm in no hurry to upgrade.
Posted by Steven at 02:11 AM | Comments (1)
July 26, 2005
Battlestar Galactica (2004) Out on DVD Today
 | Ron Moore's spectacular remake of the 70's warhorse Battlestar Galactica is on the shelves -- only at Best Buy -- starting today. The 13 episodes from the first season, in their original UK format (essentially, different opening titles, the same as the 2nd season's) in anamorphic format (1:1.77) in one $50 kit. Extras include cut scenes, but no commentary. |
Joe Bob sez, "Check it out!"
Posted by Steven at 04:07 PM | Comments (0)
June 22, 2005
Red Shirts Want Egoboo, Too!
This is just amazing to me. I mean, they parodied it on Galaxy Quest, but I didn't realize it really happens. Star Trek bit players are now commanding $20 an autograph at Trek Conventions. What a world.
Posted by Steven at 05:48 PM | Comments (1)
May 18, 2005
Frank Gorshin Passed Away
Frank Gorshin, most famous in my generation for portraiting The Riddler in the 60's version of Batman, passed away today.
Posted by Steven at 04:37 PM | Comments (1)
New ReplayTV
We added a second ReplayTV unit for $40 (after rebate) and only $7/mo. (second unit discount). Now we can capture even more copyright material, and skip the commercials in it, too!
On the same note, Penny Bailey sent me this:
Posted by Steven at 02:06 PM | Comments (2)
May 16, 2005
Gumby Recognized
Art Clokey may be bringing Gumby back in the digital age. Salon has a news wire story about this. Joe Bob probably doesn't say, "check it out", but I do.
Five decades after Gumby first captured the nation's imagination, the little green guy and his chums are starring in a new art exhibit - the first in a series of events to mark the 50th anniversary of the television icon's creation and launch his comeback."Gumby and Friends: The First 50 Years" attracted fans of all ages at Saturday's opening at the historic Lynn House Gallery in Antioch, about 45 miles northeast of San Francisco. Creator Art Clokey, now 83, signed Gumby figurines at the two-story exhibit, which featured photographs, toys and other memorabilia.
"Gumby is an icon," said Diane Gibson-Gray, 49, executive director of the Arts and Cultural Foundation of Antioch, which is sponsoring the monthlong exhibit. "He's a cultural icon that many of us grew up with. And there's another wave coming. There's a whole new generation that's going to embrace and love Gumby as much as I did."
The Antioch exhibit is the first event planned this year to commemorate the 50 years since Clokey made a short art film called "Gumbasia," featuring clay animation set to jazz music, that inspired the beloved television series that debuted a year later in 1956.
Posted by Steven at 08:36 AM | Comments (0)
March 09, 2005
Spamalot!
 | Check out NPR's review of Spamalot. This I gotta see ... David Hyde Pierce as Sir Robin. Possibly the best casting ever. |
Posted by Steven at 05:07 PM | Comments (1)
The Python Effect
NPR has a column on a grown-up teenager's obsession with Monty Python and why it matters.
But it hardly matters. It was Python -- early Python, the really off-the-wall BBC stuff -- and soon my high school friends and I were totally hooked.There were six Pythons and there just happened to be six of us: the band president, the track star, the rock 'n' roll wannabe, the guy voted "Most Intelligent," and Jim and me. I'm not going to describe Jim. Just think of an old friend whose past antics still make you laugh though you haven't run into each other in 25 years. For purposes of this discussion, that's Jim. I'm you.
Python quickly became the constant comic soundtrack to our senior year of high school. And when the big-screen collection of the BBC sketches, And Now for Something Completely Different, came to a Cleveland State University film festival, we drove into the city and got our first taste of a college-style Friday night.
Then Monty Python and the Holy Grail arrived. It is, for my money, the funniest film ever made. It's certainly the most rewarding to share with friends of a like disposition. The combination of lowbrow slapstick silliness and highbrow literary, political and historical satire remains an irresistible combination.
Then somebody bought the screenplay in book form, and within a month or two, we were able to recite most of the lines. (And we also realized that there were acres of hilarious scenes that didn't make the final cut. The shavings from that screenplay are wittier than 95 percent of the material that passes for film comedy today.)
But to teenagers growing up in the Cleveland suburbs, it really was more than entertainment. In some inexplicable way, the Python crew helped us meet the serious business of fast-approaching adulthood with a proper sense of the absurd.
"It's endearingly silly," Eric Idle says of The Holy Grail. "It has a freshness and a simplicity which is rare. I think it has some of the same charm as A Hard Day's Night: young men ignorant of what exactly they are doing but totally confident about it."
I totally understand this obsession. It was like watching Vonnegut Jr. novels come to life. Amen!
Posted by Steven at 05:05 PM | Comments (0)
February 16, 2005
JMS Proposing To Save Star Trek
Joe Straczynski, creator of Babylon 5, has written a series "bible" and is challenging the fan base to deluge Paramount with fan mail to back the idea.
Last year, Bryce and I sat down and, on our own, out of a sheer love of Trek as it was and should be, wrote a series bible/treatment for a return to the roots of Trek. To re-boot the Trek universe. Understand: writer/producers in TV just don't do that sort of thing on their own, everybody always insists on doing it for vast sums of money. We did it entirely on our own, setting aside other, paying deadlines out of our passion for the series. We set out a full five-year arc.
If anyone can save Trek, it's Joe.
Posted by Steven at 10:41 PM | Comments (1)
February 11, 2005
Battlestar Galactica Renewed
The SciFi Channel has ordered a second season of Battlestar Galactica.
I expected the rehashing of this series to be just plain awful, but Ron Moore's Battlestar Galactica is a brilliant retelling of the tale. Set forty years after the events in the original version, but with the twist that the Humans beat the Cylons instead of succumbing to them, it picks up the original theme of the last humans fleeing a wave of cybernetic death.
However, the nausiatingly Republican themes of "trust, but verify" (peaceniks are always losers) and the obvious mapping of Soviets as Cylons, along with the goofy pseudo-Christian and Erik Von Däniken plot lines made the seventies version un-watchable. Moore turns that on its head: the Cylons are the religious fundamentalists. The computer is enemy in this new series. The main characters are played very differently, with some obvious shakeups like a female Starbuck. Don't miss James Olmos as Commander Adama ... he's almost perfect for the role. The computer generated effects are light-years ahead of Dykstra's post-Star Wars work, and they look jaw-droppingly good.
Moore has done the impossible. He took a joke that colloquially was called Cattlecar Galactica and revived it, updated it, and even twisted it around the original series, to make a fantastically better version.
Posted by Steven at 12:17 AM | Comments (2)
February 08, 2005
Comedy Central's Distraction
I've been catching the odd episode of Comedy Central's Distraction and I gotta say, it's pretty damned funny. This is one of the purer UK imports (outside of BBC America) in that they have the real British MC, and they do damned outrageous things to the contestants. Sure, sometimes it's humiliating but the premise is clever, and the quizzes are often cleverly dastardly.
Posted by Steven at 10:03 PM | Comments (0)