I'm sure you wonder why I bothered downloading the UK episodes instead of just waiting for them to air in the US. Four weeks isn't that long of a wait after all. Why did I do it? A large part of that was your promo department. Good job making the worst clip ever for next week's episode, one that ruins the cliffhanger set up by it. I'm sure that will help your ratings.

Love,

Zzyzx

moonlitlake asked me for some help computer shopping. Every time that I thought about helping her to get a shiny new Vista box, I felt kind of gross. I steered her towards an iMac (which I helped to set up) and she loves it. This is why I was scared to ever go Mac. Now I hate Windows.

...of course the iMac being in the house for an hour meant that Mel wanted one too...

Current Music: Neil Young & Crazy Horse - ARC

This hasn't been a good week for McCain. First Iraqi Prime Minister Makiki endorsed the idea of a withdrawal timeline which makes it kind of hard to argue that that's naive. Now, his attempt to get press coverage away from Obama's Berlin speech by having one of his own on an oil rig to promote drilling is having a couple of snares. First, there's the small matter of a hurricane in that area. Even if things there are OK, Louisiana might not be the best place to talk about oil right now as, err, there was an oil spill on the Mississippi in New Orleans.

I haven't seen natural forces reject something this hard since Coventry. Sorry McCain, God says no.

Current Music: Stereolab - We're Not Adult Orientated

He loves to get us going:

We've started to talk as a foursome... as doing some more stuff again... rekindling the Phish thing. There's a lot of talk about that, and there's no specific plan so I don't have anything more to say about it, but I think there's a good chance of it - pretty soon...

And I think there will be plenty of time in our schedules to do other stuff - and for me that'll be this band, and maybe some more movies...

Current Music: Grateful Dead - Greatest Story Ever Told

Nothing like writing a 17 page column on my day off, but if you're really bored today, here's something to read. This is one of the few times where I'm happy with what I wrote (or at least parts of it... rereading it today makes me want to edit a few sentences where I did the reusing a word thing that I'm prone to), and a lot did happen there, so I figured I'd let people know.

Current Music: Suzanne Vega - The Queen And The Soldier

...is that Horning's Hideout is local. We hit and ran NWSS this weekend and had a blast. I need to write up my column now but I have a few photos (largely of my friends and the trees/peacocks because I was loving the Hideout this weekend) if you want to look at them.

I just watched the US cut of Turn Left and they cut out one of my favorite parts.

( Grrrrr )

One of the plans for our honeymoon next year was to see the Tennant/Stewart version of Hamlet which - according to the RSC website when I checked a few months ago would be playing in August 2009. Oops, that was a bad script on their end. It ends in December. Oh well, I guess we can try to fit in a trip to Wales to try to crash the set of the show instead ;)


...I guess that's what I get when I go by some vague descriptions instead of actually researching something.

Current Music: Grateful Dead - TLEO

Somehow I was the one person to get in this morning and get the update without bricking my phone for like an hour. Having played with it a little bit, well it's damn cool. The NY Times app looks incredibly useful. It's all of the functionality of the newspaper without having to carry it around with you. It's the first time I've really enjoyed reading a paper on the phone. Good job.

The app that's really impressed me though is Shazam. It's completely and utterly useless but I just can't stop playing with it. What does it do? Have music play in the background and open it up. It'll figure out the song details from the noise, grab it, upload that to a database, and tell you what song is playing. Great if you're walking through a mall and, for some reason, a good song is playing. In reality, it's just something that's cool because I can't believe this technology exists. Until recently, the only way those album database things worked was through a hidden ID code; now we can identify songs even through background noise? That's a huge AI upgrade.

Current Music: Love And Rockets - An American Dream

I have a bunch of shots online now but the one below is my favorite. The light was coming from behind which meant that Mel had to lighten it (which made it washed out), but it's still actionriffic!