I don’t review movies much anymore but I’m offering a quick one for The Martian:
Go see it.
Based on the self-published book of the same name, this is a smart, funny and even touching movie that is grounded in believable science, telling the story of an astronaut stranded on Mars and the effort to rescue him. The cast is diverse and enjoyable, the script respects the intelligence of the audience and the visuals are as lush as you’d expect in a Ridley Scott film.
If you happen to buy an HP PC you may find a slip of paper inside the keyboard box with a warning about the keyboard. You may think it’s the usual warning about carpal tunnel or something but no, it’s a warning about breaking the keyboard.
Keep your dirty alien hands off our keyboards
The two handy tips, summarized:
To prevent breakage, don’t bend the stand legs back until they break. Also, to avoid car accidents, don’t crash your car.
Apply light pressure when using the keyboard. This implies that it’s possible to type with enough force to break the keyboard. Either these are very flimsy keyboards or HP imagines anyone using them will pound the keys like an angry villain with super strength*.
The best part, though, is the hands. Those splayed out appendages are like a Rorschach test. One glance and they look like pine air fresheners you’d hang on the rearview mirror, another glance and maybe they are tree trunks or deformed octopi or alien claws.
Since it is impossible to type without putting some kind of downward pressure on the keys, the illustration can be interpreted as telling you to not use the keyboard for typing. This would certainly keep it the legs from breaking. A good warning, then.
* based on my experience using keyboards in public–with many a broken leg, missing, stuck or wobbly keys–I think there may in fact be a lot of villains with super strength out there typing away
Upon review it looks like 33 posts will not break the record for most posts in a month, as I went temporarily insane in July 2009 and wrote 38 posts back then. Thirty-three posts will rank #2, though. I’m #2! I’m #2!
Here are some stats for the site. I imagine sites with real traffic probably have similar stats, just with six more zeroes at the end of each number.
1,239 posts (including this one)
31 pages (most of them are not publicly viewable)
22 comments (mostly me asking friends to make sure comments were working)
31 tags starting with the word “random”
5,231 blocked malicious login attempts
3,239 spam comments blocked by Akismet (I checked and there is an actual comment in my spam queue. Usually they get swept away before I ever see them. Here is the comment in full: “The posting a blog will be thinning out it is chicken wings promptly. Your current crank out up may be a okay style of doing it.” Chicken wings promptly is not a bad idea, I say. Thanks for the suggestion, spam comment!
This is the 32nd post I’ve made in September, with at least one post written every day. I openly admit some days inspiration has not only been lacking, it has built a colony ship and headed off to the outer reaches of the universe without so much as a “Good luck, sucker!”
One of the difficulties in posting every day has to do with my work/home routine. I usually don’t post until after I’ve finished work, come home, had dinner, relaxed a bit by doing a little web surfing, reacquainting myself with how awful the world can be through the web surfing and then being too mentally tired and/or defeated to write much of anything that wouldn’t be a litany of complaints or rants. I’m trying to avoid complaint posts because as I’ve mentioned before, they are mostly uninteresting, even to the person doing the complaining (it’s more therapy than anything).
I’m going to write a few more spammy posts, though, because I want to set a personal record for the blog. It will be especially ironic that the month with the most posts (in ten years of writing on this blog) will also be the month I had a day with zero hits.
As the 2015 Federal Election enters its fifth year, two items to note:
I received my voting card. I can vote. I’ve been told where to go and how to get there. Yay.
The Conservatives are gaining, the NDP have slipped and the Liberals are right there in the middle. Statistically it’s a dead heat between the three parties. A lot of Canadians are apparently quite intolerant, more racist than expected, swayed by fear, hate science, easily manipulated and my old favorite, consistently willing to demonstrate the ability to vote against their own best interests. To these Canadians I say again: please don’t vote. Ever.
On the plus side, the last day of September has been pleasantly sunny and warm.
Peter Buck, the artist formerly known as the lead guitarist for R.E.M., has released his second solo album, Warzone Earth. Like his first solo album, this one is only available through indie record stores on vinyl. It’s the perfect gift for hipster dinosaurs, which I assume is the demographic here.
Perhaps we should be grateful he didn’t cut his teeth on the 8-track cassette.
For a good long spell one of my favorite ways of developing a short story was not to think of a neat idea or character but rather to come up with a title and then fashion some kind of story to go with it. This is not a great way to produce rich, nuanced tales but I got a few decent ones from some rather dubious titles. “Learning to Die” is a simple play on the song “Learning to Fly” (Pink Floyd or Tom Petty version, take your pick) and that turned out nicely. I was going to offer another example or two but I seem to have forgotten the names. Yes, that’s it.
On the other hand, here are some titles so bland or plain terrible I have yet to turn the overwhelming majority of them into stories and hopefully never will. These are examples of what happens when brainstorms are more like intermittent showers. I’ve added notes for spice, variety and to in some tiny way justify another list post.
The list is honking long, so continue reading after the break.
I think Stephen King may write faster than I can read. From a Buick 8 is another of his novels that I did not read upon release and have gone back to years later, in the hope that I can eventually catch up to his output.
I’m undecided on the outcome of that.
From a Buick 8 is old school King as far as that goes–it’s classic horror, with a scary unknown thing at the heart of the story, and ordinary people pushed into extraordinary circumstances–but it’s well-crafted old school King.
As with Christine, a classic car is at the center of the shenanigans, this time a Buick Roadmaster abandoned at a gas station by a driver who disappears shortly after arriving. Unlike Christine, this particular vehicle is not haunted, it’s possibly from another dimension. The story focuses on Troop D of the Pennsylvania State Police, who impound the car and keep it in a shed out back of their barracks. Weird things happen in that shed, ranging from strangely diving temperatures to funky purple light shows and the appearance of things that live, briefly.
King starts the story in 1979 and flips back and forth between then and the present (2002, when the book was published), juggling the time periods effortlessly, shifting between first and third person as he does so. Hanging the story’s heart on the bereaved son of one of the officers killed in the line of duty provides the emotional core and King makes it pay out…then things get even more funky and weird when you think everything is about wrapped up.
While From a Buick 8 is not a deep or profound story, it’s a smooth, effortless ride (sorry) that expertly plays off the innate creepiness of so many toothy-grilled cars from the 1950s. Recommended for King fans and for anyone who enjoys an uncomplicated horror story.
After discussing it with a Trusted Source™ who has provided feedback on some stories, I’ve elected to tackle a rewrite of Stop That Cow! as the first major step in my renewed effort to get this collection out the door and into the wild, where it will be savaged by werewolves and witches and people who thought they were buying an underwear collection.
The same trusted source also felt Hello? was unworthy of the collection in its present state and after some discussion I came to the conclusion that a rewrite would involve too much work to be a worthwhile investment. The list of stories now looks like this (and is subject to further and possibly whimsical) changes:
Now that the days are growing shorter, colder and wetter, it seems the perfect time to resume running. I am tentatively planning my first run after two months of recovery for next weekend (October 3-4). It will be a 5K, I will jog at a timid pace and I will emerge uninjured. Or else.
If you search for “cat” on Google, you will get approximately 1.67 billion results. In general if you search on Google or other search engines you will get more results than you could ever reasonably look though. They may not necessarily all be quality results (hit 1.67 billion on “cat” may prove unsatisfying) but you will find more than enough to satisfy your needs.
However, it is surprisingly easy to yield few results, quality or otherwise, on things that may not seem particularly obscure, especially if they pre-date the Internet, which the first 30 years or so of my life covers. This means my nostalgic reminisces often rely on my memory or fabrications of memory rather than actual mementos of the past as captured and chronicled on the web.
For example, there was a fudge bar I liked as a kid. I vaguely recall the packaging and that it was just called “fudge” or something. I can’t find it online. All I have is my dusty memory. If I could find it online, who knows, there may even be a modern version I could purchase, to truly immerse myself in the past when everything except clothing and hairstyles was better.
Actually, I just did a search and I’m reasonably sure it was Cadbury’s fudge bar, which is indeed called Fudge. None of the images are of the version I enjoyed in 1975 so my point still sort of stands, mostly. More importantly, I have an incredible urge to stuff my face with fudge.
