Contrition and Linkage

Man, I really have been a bad blogger lately. I don't even have an excuse. It's pretty much just a combination of busyness (working lots of overtime, having a friend over last weekend, etc.) and, I dunno, apathy. I'll try to do better in the near future. Really. Or at least to update a bit more often; I don't ever promise quality.

Anyway, for the moment, have some more random links.

The Firefly Season 2 Project: An "independent production company" is exploring the possibility of resurrecting Firefly in some kind of on-demand format. You can drop by and take their survey if that sounds like a good idea to you.

The Daily Kitten: Kittens! Daily!

The Religious Affiliation of Comic Book Characters: Because I know I know people to whom this is interesting and useful information.

What's Undependable About Plants?


You are Pa'u Zotoh Zhaan. You are deeply spiritual,
and may enjoy meditating in the nude. You
are peaceful at heart, although if provoked,
you can turn murderous. You can be a lover, a
sister, a confidant, and a comforter. People
trust in you for the balance in their lives
when things get out of hand. You're very
dependable... especially for a plant.

Which Farscape Character Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

Uh...

Where the heck did this week go?

Some of His Stories Were Very Good.

You scored as The Seventh Doctor (Sylvester McCoy). You loved the Seventh Doctor best. The stories weren't so good, but he had Ace and a fab umbrella. The Seventh Doctor (Sylvester McCoy) 75% The Ninth Doctor (Christoper Eccleston) 56% The Fourth Doctor (Tom Baker) 50% The Sixth Doctor (Colin Baker) 44% The Second Doctor (Patrick Troughton) 44% The Eighth Doctor (Paul McGann) 44% The Fifth Doctor (Peter Davidson) 31% The Third Doctor (Jon Pertwee) 31% The First Doctor (William Hartnell) 25% Which Doctor Who are you? created with QuizFarm.com

Random Linkage

I don't remember how long it's been since I did one of these posts, so clearly it's been too long. Here ya go:

What Is It Like to Be a Robot?: Somebody's dissertation on the depiction of artificial intelligences in SF films. I've only skimmed a bit of it so far, but it looks interesting.

William Shatner sings, er, performs "Rocket Man": There. Are. No. Words. Don't eat or drink anything while watching this, I beg you. I very nearly needed a new keyboard.

Penn Jillette podcasts: Man, I love this guy.

I'm Just Glad I Didn't Wait Until the Spring.

Oh, man, I think I just found Vir's mom.

I was out in the back yard hacking down vegetation, because I've been seeing the cracks in the walls spreading and getting worse again (including a hairline crack in my new stucco, grr), and I strongly suspect part of the problem involves tree roots. In the course of my hacking, I pulled aside a bunch of dead weeds, and there, nestled in next to the fence, was a dead cat. It looked exactly like Vir, only bigger and, you know, dead.

It was a little bit distressing, to be honest.

Up, Up, and Away!

After multiple delays, the New Horizons mission is at last on its way to Pluto. Hooray! Now we just have to wait a decade or so for it to get there. (Man, I've had road trips like that.) To help pass the time while we're waiting, here's an interesting article on the naming of Pluto that a friend sent me a while back.

Apparently I'm in More or Less the Right Spot...

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Your personality type is RCUEI

You are reserved, moderately calm, moderately unstructured, moderately egocentric, and intellectual, and may prefer a city which matches those traits.

The largest representation of your personality type can be found in the these U.S. cities: Reno, Tucson, New Orleans, Norfolk, Austin, Washington DC, Albuquerque/Santa Fe, Portland/Salem, Greenville/Spartanburg, Minneapolis, Denver, St. Louis and these international countries/regions Iceland, Greece, Argentina, Czech Republic, Belgium, Kazakhstan, Poland, Netherlands, Spain, Croatia, Sweden, Slovenia, Norway, Hungary, Indonesia

What Places In The World Match Your Personality?
City Reviews at CityCulture.org

Blogger! You're Back!

Man, it took me all day to be able to post that last entry. Actually, more than all day, since it's now the 16th, isn't it?

You know what would be nice? If Blogger would post to their status page when they're down. Maybe with an explanation and a little word about what they're doing about it... Too radical a notion, do ya think?

Catch a Falling Stardust

NASA's Stardust probe has safely returned home with its cometary samples. Apparently it made a real pretty fireball coming in, too, which is always a bonus. They're going to be using a distributed computing approach along the lines of SETI@home to analyze the samples. No word yet on how you can volunteer, though, at least not as far as I can see.

This is looking to be a good week for NASA, as the New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt is set to launch on Tuesday. They're billing it as "the first mission to the last planet," which, all debates about Pluto's planetary status aside, really is quite an exciting thought.

OK, This Is Way More Entertaining Than It Has Any Right to Be.

Ten Top Trivia Tips about Betty!

1. Betty is the sacred animal of Thailand.


2. The first American zoo was built in 1794, and contained only Betty!


3. Betty can smell some things up to six miles away.


4. When provoked, Betty will swivel the tip of her abdomen and shoot a jet of boiling chemicals at her attacker.


5. A cluster of bananas is called a hand and consists of 10 to 20 bananas, which are individually known as Betty.


6. Betty can't drink - she absorbs water from her surroundings by osmosis.


7. American Airlines saved forty thousand dollars a year by eliminating Betty from each salad served in first class.


8. In a pinch, the skin from a shark can be used as Betty.


9. Olympic badminton rules say that Betty must have exactly fourteen feathers!


10. Betty can pollinate up to six times more efficiently than the honeybee!

I am interested in - do tell me about
herhimitthem

Mommy! My iPod is Scaring Me!

Now that I've got the new iPod all loaded up, I thought I'd test out its opinions and its fortune-telling abilities by revisiting a couple of amusing memes. If you haven't seen these before, the rule is that you hit "shuffle" on your music-playin' machine of choice, and interpret the oracular results. Which are as follows:

iPod Eightball

What do you think of me, iPod?

Answer: "Gimme the Prize (Kurgan's Theme)" by Queen

OK, it either thinks that I deserve a prize, or that I'm a raving egotist. Or possibly that I look like Richard Moll.

Will I have a happy life?

Answer: "Circle" by Sarah McLachlan

Hmm. Judging by the lyrics, I'm inclined to think that's a "no."

What do my friends really think of me?

Answer: "When You Are Old and Grey" by Tom Lehrer

Geez, I'm not that old!

Do people secretly lust after me?

Answer: "Sound and Vision" by David Bowie

I'll take that as a "yes," I guess.

How can I make myself happy?

Answer: "Taxi Ride" by Tori Amos

I don't know. I've never had a taxi ride that made me especially happy yet.

What should I do with my life?

Answer: "Shame" by Orchestral Manoevers in the Dark

Gee, thanks!

Why must life be so full of pain?

Answer: "Joe Falcon's Waltz" by BeauSoleil

So it's Joe Falcon's fault! Who the heck is Joe Falcon?

How can I maximize my pleasure during sex?

Answer: "Godzilla" by Blue Oyster Cult

Hee! It is really kind of sad how much I'm giggling right now.

Will I ever have children?

Answer: "Resonance: Homage to the Ancient One" by R. Carlos Nakai

Is it telling me I'm too old?

Will I die happy?

Answer: "The Memory Teller" by Mark Ayers

I'm not sure what that means. It's up to me whether I remember my life as happy or not? Hey, I'll buy that.

Can you give me some advice?

Answer: "Stranger to Himself" by Fairport Convention

That's pretty cryptic advice.

What do you think happiness is?

Answer: "Dun Ringill" by Jethro Tull

I don't even know where that is!

What's my favorite fetish?

Answer: "Smells Like Nirvana" by Weird Al Yankovic.

It's true. I do have a bit of a thing for Al.

iPod Ching

Song One - The problem at hand: "Run for Your Life" by the Beatles
Sample lyric: "I'd rather see you dead, little girl, than to be with another man."
Interpretation: I have a crazy homicidal stalker! Eeep!

Song Two - Your feelings on same: "Union Strike Folk Song" by Lisa Simpson
Sample lyric: "We'll fight to the death, or else fold like umbrellas."
Interpretation: I'll mightily resist the stalker! Or else I won't.

Song Three - The environment in which you operate: "Summer Rain" by U2
Sample lyric: "You won't live any longer, but it'll feel like it."
Interpretation: Well, it's not literally summer where I am. Or rainy. So I suppose this song is some kind of metaphor. And I don't think it's an encouraging one.

Song Four - Immediate action to be taken: "I'm Your Gun" by Jethro Tull
Sample lyric: "And just remember, if you don't mind, it's not the gun that kills but the man behind."
Interpretation: Apparently my immediate action is to be shot. OK, this is starting to creep me out. Damned Beatles. I blame them for starting this.

Song Five - Likely outcome: "Stereotomy" by the Alan Parsons Project
Sample lyric: "Silent knives dissect me and I feel no pain"
Interpretation: *crawls in a hole and hides*

I Am Loaded Up and Ready to Go!

After several days of nearly nonstop activity, I have at last finished transferring all of my music to the iPod. (Did I say 4,000 songs? It was actually just over 5,000. Whew!) It's entirely possible -- likely even -- that a few tracks have slipped through the cracks here and there, but if I notice something is missing, I can always re-rip it later.

By the way, speaking of ripping... JenBen, your advice on how to get the copy-protected files onto the iPod worked perfectly! Many thanks! (Although no thanks to Apple for making me jump through all those hoops. Grr.)

Anyway, it is now at last time to retire the faithful little Rio Karma. Farewell, Karma! You were a good little machine, and held up under a ton of abuse, until, uh, you didn't any more. I was going to post some final stats on the Karma in tribute -- most-played songs, that kind of thing -- but the poor gadget's in such a fragile state that it dies when you touch the buttons. So I shall simply observe a moment of silence, instead.

By the way, you know what's really sad? My immediate thought right now (other than "My god, I feel bleary") is "Now it's time to go out and get some new music!" Aargh.

WHO USA

OK, it turns out there is a reason why the US release of Doctor Who has been pushed back: they've finally made a deal with the Sci-Fi Channel to broadcast it here. For that, I suppose I can wait. Not patiently, mind you, but I can wait, because the thought of my fellow Americans being able to watch this show on TV, without jumping through any quasi-legal hoops, delights me. And you do want to watch this one, guys, trust me, if you have any bent towards science fiction at all, whether you're familiar with the classic version or not. (Or even, as I've said before, if you thought the classic version was a bit too cheesy and tuned it out. The new episodes have kept the spirit of the original pretty well, but they do lack the unconvincing rubber monsters and such.) It'll be starting in March, the website says "Friday nights at 9.00pm." I assume that's Eastern time.

Now, let's just hope Sci-Fi doesn't screw it up.

Social Inadequacies

Between my earlier ranting about copy-protection on music and my recent deep disappointment at how region-coding issues are keeping me from my Doctor Who discs, I've come to a sort of insight as to why these kinds of restrictive measures are so damned frustrating. Part of it is the obvious annoyance at the idea that, having bought and paid for a song or a video, I'm being hampered in my ability to enjoy it how and where and when I like, possibly to the point where the inconvenience outweighs the enjoyment. (Someone recently compared it to buying food that you're only allowed to cook in certain brands of microwave.) Part of it is being treated like a criminal in a particularly egregious guilty-until-proven-innocent kind of way. But there's another dimension here, too, that I've only just begun to articulate in my own mind, which is that this stuff actually robs the material of a lot of its value, because a large part of the desired experience from music or TV shows, for me, at least, is a social one. And DRM is all about not sharing. So is region-encoding, in a slightly different way.

Examples? Sure. Here's the things that have led me to start thinking about this...

1) So, the new Doctor Who series is not being broadcast in the US, and, in order to see it, I went to lengths I don't normally go to (and which, frankly, are quite a bit more involved and annoying than turning on my TV set). Why? Well, partly because I'm a both a huge Doctor Who fan and a not-terribly-patient person, and the idea that this stuff was out there and I wasn't allowed to watch it was more than I could bear. But that wasn't actually the main reason. The main reason is that I know lots and lots of people in the UK, and they're all watching it. They're watching it, and talking about it, and posting about it all over the net. I want to be a part of that. I want to do the internet equivalent of standing at the water cooler saying, "Ooh, did you see when...?" and "What did you think of...?" and "I wonder what will happen next!" I don't want to be left out of that, to be the person who can't join the conversation, doesn't get the in-jokes, and has to leave the room (or hit the back button) when the subject comes up, in order to avoid spoilers. (And if you hang around the right places on the internet, I guarantee you, no matter how well-meaning people are, they're going to end up spoiling you for something unless you see it right when it comes out.)

2) So, yeah, I have a multi-region DVD player and could buy the Region 2 discs from the UK. But that means the only place I can play them is my living room. Which means no bringing discs with me when I go to visit my sister, squealing "Oh, you have to see this!" and staying up for an exciting all-night marathon, as I've done with shows like Farscape. It means no getting together for video nights and watching the discs with my friends, since several of said friends are deathly allergic to cats and simply can't hang out in my house that long. And it means no loaning out the episodes to recruit new fans, which is a fun and satisfying experience (and generally, by the way, results in people who go out and buy more DVDs).

3) And then there's music... OK, come on, I know every single one of you, at some point or another, has shared music with friends, legally or otherwise. Why do you do it? Is it to save your friend a few bucks for a CD? Or is it more likely to be something like, "Hey, I've been listening to this great band, check it out!" or "This song made me think of something..."? Music is great stuff. Music has the power to entertain us, to move us, to make us think. And when something does that to us, we want to tell our friends. We want to share. But you can't share a song just by talking about it. And, much as I love my friends, there are very few of them whose musical tastes I trust enough to instantly go out and spend money without first getting a sample. But, you know, there are a lot of bands I've bought music from -- sometimes quite a lot of music -- because a friend sent me a track or two, or put something on a mix CD. Music I would never have bought otherwise, because it's not stuff I've heard on the radio, and I don't live close enough to a lot of my friends for them to physically play a CD for me. And that's part of the social value, too: being introduced to new things and finding new things to enjoy with people.

It seems to me that a lot of the argument in favor of strong copyright-protection restrictions boils down to the idea that the primary reason why anybody would want to copy a song or download a TV show is simply to avoid paying for it, so that all the music and film industries are doing is preventing theft, like installing one of those detector thingies at the exit to a department store. I think that argument falls down on several points, but one of them is that they're not just preventing theft, they're actually lowering the value of their product to the consumer. The fact that I can't play my Napster songs on my iPod (meaning that, effectively, I'm not going to listen to them at all) is an obvious example of that, but I think the lowered social value is also a real effect, albeit a more subtle one. I have this idea that we're sort of expected to sit in darkened rooms enjoying our various media files all by our lonesomes, or, at the very most, expected to cluster around one TV or computer for a night of wholesome family entertainment. But this is the 21st century. My family and friends are scattered all over the world, and the internet is the television in our collective living room. (And the stereo, for that matter.) If I have a great song I want my sister to listen to, it's perfectly legal for me to play it for her if she's in the room with me. Too bad she lives in Oregon. I guess I'm supposed to buy a plane ticket? And heaven forbid I should want to get together to watch a TV show with my friends in the UK...

I Want My Doctor Who!

I've been eagerly anticipating the release of the US boxed set of the new season of Doctor Who, having made a supreme effort of will and not purchased the discs as soon as they were available in the UK. Well, it looks like good things do not come to she who waits, or at least not when they've been promised, because the release has been delayed. No word on 'til when, but it seems they are not coming out on Feb. 14th as originally promised.

*sniff* I will be a lonely geek on Valentine's Day, with no Who-love...

iPod Update

I've made it through "N"! 3,133 tracks down...

Facing the Music

Well, my new hard drive came today, so the lengthy business of transferring my entire music collection has at last begun! And, oy, is this going to take a while. Fortunately getting the disk set up was a snap, and it works absolutely fine. It's also a bit faster than I was afraid it was going to be, given that everything has to go back and forth by USB, which is nice. I've got everything copied off my Karma (mostly, anyway, but I'll get to that in a minute), which didn't actually take long, and I've begun the process of converting all my ogg files to MP3, which, while time-consuming isn't at all difficult.

The only problem I've run into -- and it's something of a doozy -- is that it turns out there's a snag transferring songs from the Karma if more than one song has the same name. Which a lot of them do, either because songwriters weren't feeling terribly original, or because I have multiple versions of the same song, or because I have more than one copy of the same version on different albums (e.g. greatest hits compilations). It only saves one of 'em (whether because it's overwriting or because it refuses to overwrite, I don't know). This means that I'm going to have to go through all 4,000+ songs on the thing looking for duplicates and saving them with different filenames. Oy.

But, however slowly it's going, it's going. I now have lots and lots of tracks on my iPod that start with numbers, symbols, and the letters A and B. Only 24 more letters to go!

Here We Go Again With That Meme Thing

Current clothes: Dark gray sweats, black t-shirt from Mt. St. Helens National Monument, white crew socks, black sneakers.

Current mood: Pleasantly relieved, since the things I was ranting about earlier turned out to be pretty much OK, after all. There's something to be said for getting all annoyed about something, only to have the source of your annoyance evaporate completely. Sort of like that old joke about banging your head against a wall because it feels so good when you stop.

Current music: I was listening to the first Sopranos soundtrack on the iPod last night, since I bought that CD very recently and it was still sitting on my hard drive. Good album, and, I gotta say, I think the iPod does have slightly better sound than the Karma.

Current annoyance: Again, my annoyance levels have subsided dramatically since the last entry. I am still mildly annoyed, though, by the fact that Netflix sent me an incorrect disc in my last batch of West Wing episodes. What was supposed to be the third disc of season 2 turned out to have episodes from later in the season on it instead. What's especially annoying about this is that I can't even watch the other, correct discs they sent me, because they all come after the missing one, and I want to watch 'em in order. So, once again, I have to wait for them to get the returned disc and send me the right one. Sigh. The honeymoon between me and Netflix is so over. I'm also annoyed by the way mechanical problems at work keep putting us further and further behind. I try telling myself I get paid by the hour, anyway, and really don't care how much progress we make, but, sadly, it keeps not quite being true. Stupid work ethic.

Current thing: I dunno. Getting annoyed about random things, I guess.

Current desktop picture: This picture of the TARDIS all decorated for Christmas. I actually didn't find this one until after Christmas, but I guess it's really time to take it down now.

Current song in head: "Bad Karma" by Warren Zevon. 'Cause I've got a bad Karma, see? Um.

Current book: Till We Have Faces, C.S. Lewis' much less famous fantasy work, based on the myth of Cupid and Psyche. So far, it's good, though I admit my enjoyment is marred a tiny bit because I keep wondering if Lewis is going to suddenly hit us with the Hammer of Allegory and convert all the characters to crypto-Christianity or something. Which is probably completely unfair.

Current video in player: A short while ago it was Sci Fi's Dune miniseries, which I bought on tape ages ago for like five bucks and never got around to watching. I figured it was about time I did, but the first ten minutes bored me thoroughly, so I turned it off. I figure I'll save it for the next time I'm sick and want something to watch while I'm lying on the couch feeling crappy. It seems like a good bet for that, actually: long and slow, and since I already know the plot, I won't have to worry about being mentally with-it enough to be able to follow what's going on.

Current DVD in player: Most recently, that West Wing DVD that turned out to be the wrong one. Sigh.

Current refreshment: Nothing at the moment, but there's some ice cream in the freezer calling my name.

Current worry: That there will be problems with all this disk-adding and music-transferring stuff, I suppose.

Current thought: Ice creeeeeam...

Undeliverable?!

Aaargh! Two things that have just really, really pissed me off... 1) I was trying to send some e-mail on my non-gmail account, and I was doing so, the goddamned kitten launched himself across the room and landed on my keyboard with all four paws, making all kinds of things flash and beep and do other disturbing things. And after I'd removed him and tried to send the e-mail, it kept prompting me for a password (which it never does) and then telling me that it couldn't connect to the server. It may be that this is entirely coincidence, as they have been doing some work on the servers lately. Maybe the mailserver went down at the same instant the kitten attacked or something. But I'm still able to get mail, so I have a sad suspicion that it's something that happened on my end, and I have no frelling clue what it might be or how to fix it. Aaargh.

Which leads us to 2) I know I'm receiving mail on that account, because while I was trying to figure out what the hell happened I got a message from Amazon saying the external disk drive I ordered, which was supposed to be coming roughly today, and which I have been impatiently waiting on so I can get on with my iPod-loading, is returned to them as "undeliverable." No explanation, just "undeliverable." My address was right, so the only thing I can figure is that the UPS person tried to deliver it while I was a asleep (which I am during the day, as I'm doing the night-shift thing at the moment). Now, here's the thing. Twice this week I was awoken by a UPS person ringing my doorbell, and twice I made it to the door just in time to find a package in my doorway and a UPS truck sitting outside getting ready to take its leave. If they had my disk drive one of those times, along with the iPod stuff (one package was the machine itself, one was the carrying case), I'm really pissed off by the thought that they didn't bother waiting long enough for me to even get to the door, let alone coming back when I made an appearance before they'd actually driven off. But even then, they're supposed to try to deliver it three times. I find it hard to believe they made three attempts, given that the doorbell always wakes me up. Moreover, it's been traditional for UPS to leave a notice on the door if you're not home and allow you to come and pick the package up at their office if necessary. Thirdly, I see by Amazon's tracking page that the damned thing is only listed as having arrived in Albuquerque on the 6th, meaning there's no damned way they've made three delivery attempts with it. Now I've got to re-order the thing, and wait, and either go through much, much more hassle trying to transfer my music without enough disc space to hold it all at once, or hope my stupid dying mp3 player doesn't die completely in the meantime.

You know, I think maybe I'll call UPS and complain.

[Added, about two mintues later: Oh, wait. That wasn't my hard drive. That was the duplicate order I got from them when it looked like my brother-in-law's Christmas presents got lost in the mail. The first package did show up eventually, and I sent it back. Whew! OK. Urge to kill... falling. Now if I can just get my e-mail to work.]

No Spoilers, But...

Does it say something bad about me as a person that I was laughing my fool head off at the end of tonight's Battlestar Galactica?

Pod Person

Well, I am now the proud owner of a 60 GB video iPod. Yay! It seems like a pretty good little machine, fairly intuitive to use, I think, once you've figured out how you're supposed to do that weird thing with your thumb. It's missing a few features I liked a lot about my Karma (including the ability to play a random list of music for a pre-specified period of time, which I'm really gonna miss unless I can figure out a way to get the same effect), but it possesses a few nice ones the Karma didn't have (like an automatic pause when the headphones get yanked out, as mine have a tendency to do). It's a bit bulkier than the nicely compact Karma, but I got a very nice carrier for it, with a belt clip, so that should be fine.

There is something I'm very, very pissed off about, though, which is that I have music on my hard drive which I bought a while back on Napster, and iTunes will have absolutely nothing to do with it, because it has copyright encoding. Yes, that's right. I am not allowed to listen to music which I bought and paid for on a device which I bought and paid for, because the frickin' record labels assume that I am a criminal. Well, you know what? I have a pretty good history of paying for music even when I could easily have gotten it illegally for free. Seems to me, though, that it's hardly worth being law-abiding when obeying the law just gets you punished. iTunes sure as hell wouldn't have had any problem with illegally downloaded files, because they don't come with all these insane DRM restrictions, do they? Congratulations, music industry! Between this and the Sony debacle and all the other shit you've pulled lately -- including an insultingly accusatory "Don't Steal Music!" sign on my iPod when I opened it -- you've convinced me that being law-abiding, in this case, is stupid. Also that I don't owe you any respect, because you clearly have none whatsoever for me. (And I'll tell ya, if I'd realized this fact ahead of time, I very possibly wouldn't have bought the iPod at all.)

Ahem. Anyway, now that I'm done with that rant... I still have to transfer all my music off the Karma and onto the iPod. (Fortunately, Rio, at least, didn't assume I was a low-down dirty thief and is quite willing to let me do this. No, wait, this time I'm done with the rant. Really.) In order to help me do this, I have, um... Spent still more money I really couldn't afford. It hasn't arrived yet, but I've also bought myself a 200 GB external hard drive to supplement the tiny, stuffed-to-bursting one on my PC. I figure it'll make a nice repository/backup for the entirety of my music collection (which won't all even fit on the PC, not unless I delete, well, lots and lots of stuff I'm not gonna delete), as well as large video files and so forth. So the plan is, once I have the hard drive, to dump everything from the Karma onto it, convert all the ogg files to mp3 -- I did find what seems to be a decent program for that -- and load it all onto the iPod. It'll be time-consuming, but it shouldn't be too difficult, and then we're in business! Unless, of course, iTunes decides that more of my music collection is stolen. Bastards.

I'm Sure You're All Just Shocked and Stunned.


You're a scientific intellectual.

What Sort of Intellectual Are You?
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Time For Some More Random Linkage

Cute Overload: You will be utterly overwhelmed with the cute! In a good way, honest. (And the kitten crawling on the laughing woman's shoulder looks exactly like Vir when he was littler. Awww!)

Doctor Who Theme Repository: More variants on the Doctor Who theme tune than even I want to listen to.

Miss Snark presents "true excerpts from stories submitted to Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine": They're so painful to read that they actually take on a certain twisted beauty.

"We Broke a Crash Test Dummy! That's a Red Letter Day!"

Man, I love Mythbusters. Those guys have the world's coolest job. Well, OK, it's not a job I'd want, because I'm mechanically inept, and a complete weenie to boot, but, man, it's fun to watch. They fire chickens out of canons! They trash cop cars by remote control! They put tinfoil in the microwave! And they're clearly having such a ball doing it that it's impossible not to get caught up in the enthusiasm.

Plus, Adam feels almost eerily like he might have been assembled somehow from a composite of a bunch of people I went to college with, and their folklorist has the same set of Star Trek beanie critters as I do sitting on her shelves.

It's also great to see a show on TV that takes a scientific, skeptical, hands-on approach to folklore, urban myths, "news of the weird" and, you know, that stuff that "everybody knows." Especially when there are so many shows that are cheerfully willing to present any old uncorroborated bullshit as if it were self-evident fact. There was, in fact, an excellent interview with these guys in the most recent issue of Skeptic magazine, which is what led to me tracking down the DVDs in the first place. Definitely recommended, both the magazine and the DVDs, though the latter are kind of hard to find. I had to order them through The Discovery Channel Store.

'Nother Year-End Meme Thing

A while back, I did this "blog year in review" meme, in which you string together the first sentence of the first post of each month, for whatever mild entertainment value stuff like that gives you. And I started out doing it wrong, taking the first sentence of the last post instead. The results actually were much more amusingly coherent, but I figured I'd have to wait until December was over to do it properly. Well, December is now over, so here's the result:

You know what's really starting to annoy me? You know what really sucks? Man, flood insurance is expensive. Here we are: the latest batch of weird, wacky and interesting search requests that have brought poor misguided souls to this blog. I really can't even pretend these are happening weekly, can I? The first space shuttle launch since the Columbia disaster is scheduled for my birthday. You've all seen this news item about the discovery of a "tenth planet" by now, right? I've just been looking at some of the coverage of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. A friend in New Zealand just pointed out this utterly wonderful listing on an NZ internet auction site: an unfinished time machine for sale. Oh, and before I forget... Excellent news! Well, here we are in the waning hours of 2005...

That does kinda seem like it represents the distilled essence of my blog, doesn't it? And, eerily, if you squint really hard, there almost seems to be some kind of a plot...

The Year in Books

Since it's sort of become traditional for some insane reason, I hereby present the complete list of all the books I read in 2005. Total number of books for the year, if I've counted correctly, is 125, which is signficantly up from the last few years, over which I've pretty consistently been coming up with a year-end total of 93 or 94. I seem to be reading a somewhat higher proportion of non-fiction these days, as well as a lot of Doctor Who books... And if there are other trends discernable from this list, I haven't noticed them.

Anyway, for your perusal (or possibly just for my own amusement):

2005 Books

Going Postal by Terry Pratchett
Freedom and Necessity by Steven Brust & Emma Bull
Gun, With Occasional Music by Jonathan Lethem
America (The Book) by Jon Stewart, et al.
Venus on the Half Shell by "Kilgore Trout"
Tales of the Slayer, Vol. 1 by Greg Rucka, et al.
The V Book by Elizabeth G. Stewart & Paula Spencer
The Ship Who Sang by Anne McCaffrey
The Know-It-All by A.J. Jacobs
Dolores Claiborne by Stephen King
The City of Ember by Jeanne DuPrau
Emotional Design by Donald A. Norman
Corpse Marker by Chris Boucher
Terminal Cafe by Ian McDonald
Chicks 'n Chained Males edited by Esther Friesner
False Memory by Dean Koontz
The People of Sparks by Jeanne DuPrau
Peace on Earth by Stansislaw Lem
Lemony Snicket: The Unauthorized Autobiography by Lemony Snicket
The Creatures of Farscape by Joe Nazzaro
The Martian Child by David Gerrold
Zodiac by Neal Stephenson
Brothel by Alexa Albert
Blameless in Abaddon by James Morrow
Knight Life by Peter David
Life of Pi by Yann Martel
The Onion Ad Nauseam: Fanfare for the Area Man edited by Carol Kolb & Robert Siegel
Station Rage by Diane Carey
Blink by Malcolm Gladwell
Finn Family Moomintroll by Tove Jansson
Farewell Horizontal by K.W. Jeter
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass
The War of the Flowers by Tad Williams
Casualties of War by Steve Emmerson
Surfing Through Hyperspace by Clifford Pickover
The Universe 365 Days by Robert J. Nemiroff & Jerry T. Bonnell
Moominland Midwinter by Tove Jansson
The House Next Door by Anne Rivers Siddons
Naked Pictures of Famous People by Jon Stewart
Headcrash by Bruce Bethke
The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde
Why Life Speeds Up as You Get Older by Douwe Draaisma
Wizard for Hire by Jim Butcher
Candide by Voltaire
Eastern Standard Tribe by Cory Doctorow
So Many Books, So Little Time by Sara Nelson
Echo of the Big Bang by Michael D. Lemonick
Dork Covenant by John Kovalic
Doctor Who and the Talons of Weng-Chiang by Terrance Dicks
The Shining by Stephen King
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke
Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner
Moominvalley in November by Tove Jansson
A Plague of Pythons by Frederik Pohl
Every Living Thing by James Herriot
Camp Foxtrot by Bill Amend
A Sudden Wild Magic by Diana Wynne Jones
The Turing Test by Paul Leonard
Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies edited by Mark C. Carnes
Timescape by Gregory Benford
The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook: Work by Joshua Piven & David Borgenicht
Knight of the Demon Queen by Barbara Hambly
Make Love!... the Bruce Campbell Way by Bruce Campbell
Climbing Mount Improbable by Richard Dawkins
The Alienist by Caleb Carr
Endgame by Terrance Dicks
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J.K. Rowling
Strange Tales from the Nile Empire edited by Greg Gorden and Bill Slavicsek
Has Your House Got Cracks? by T.J. Freeman, R.M.C. Driscoll, & G.S. Littlejohn
The Annotated Brothers Grimm by Jacob & Wilhelm Grimm (annotated by Maria Tatar)
Godbody by Theodore Sturgeon
Spin by Robert Charles Wilson
The Greedy Bastard Diary by Eric Idle
Sewer, Gas & Electric by Matt Ruff
Father Time by Lance Parkin
Dragonstar by Barbara Hambly
The Child That Books Built by Francis Spufford
Simpsons Comics Big Bonanza by Matt Groening, et al.
Carry On, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse
Mammoth by Richard Stone
The Warrior's Apprentice by Lois McMaster Bujold
Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion by Terrance Dicks
Don Quixote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
The Democratic Genre by Sheenagh Pugh
Creatures of Light and Darkness by Roger Zelazny
Escape Velocity by Colin Brake
The Genius Factory by David Plotz
Bone Dance by Emma Bull
The World's Worst by Mark Frauenfelder
Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay
Cats for Dummies by Gina Spadafor & Paul D. Pion
The Godwhale by T.J. Bass
Seance for a Vampire by Fred Saberhagen
Digital Soul by Thomas M. Georges
Foxtrotius Maximus by Bill Amend
Mental_Floss Presents: Condensed Knowledge edited by Will Pearson, Mangest Hattikudur & Elizabeth Hunt
Thud! by Terry Pratchett
The Dolphins' Bell by Anne McCaffrey
Broken Music by Sting
Earthworld by Jacqueline Rayner
Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman
Everything Bad Is Good for You by Steven Johnson
The Beginning Place by Ursula K. LeGuin
Doctor Who and the Masque of Mandragora by Philip Hinchcliffe
Thinner by Stephen King
Cat vs. Cat by Pam Johnson-Bennett
The Eternal Footman by James Morrow
The Italian Secretary by Caleb Carr
Comm Check...: The Final Flight of Shuttle Columbia by Michael Cabbage & William Harwood
Vanishing Point by Stephen Cole
Do You Speak American? by Robert MacNeil & William Cran
The Penultimate Peril by Lemony Snicket
The Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle
Bait and Switch by Barbara Ehrenreich
The Avram Davidson Treasury by Avram Davidson
ShrinkLits by Maurice Sagoff
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Doctor Who and the Planet of Evil by Terrance Dicks
The Snow Queen by Joan D. Vinge
Around the World in Eighty Days with Michael Palin by Michael Palin
Absolute Zero Gravity by Betsy Devine & Joel E. Cohen
The Stonehenge Gate by Jack Williamson
In Search of Ancient Ireland by Carmel McCaffrey & Leo Eaton
Eater of Wasps by Trevor Baxendale