Ummm...

Yes, I do remember that I have a blog. It's just it seems like, lately, every time I think about updating my internet connection goes out or I get distracted by something shiny, or...

Oooh! I just got e-mail!

Free Offer! Act Now! Or Don't, Whatever.

I vaguely recall, uh, someone I know mentioning they were thinking about getting a subscription to Netflix, though I can't for the life of me remember who. I may actually be imagining it. Anyway, they sent me this coupon for a one month free trial and invited me to send it to people. (Their usual free trial period is two weeks.) I'm not going to randomly spam people with Netflix coupons, but if anybody actually wants in on this offer, let me know, either by e-mail at happynova at gmail dot com, or by leaving a comment here with your e-mail address, and I'll forward it to ya.

Here's the fine print:

Quantities of this special offer are limited. Free trial valid in the 50 United States and its territories and possessions only. This limited introductory free trial offer expires 5/09/2006 subject to continued availability and cannot be combined with any other offer. Limit one per household. First-time customers only. Internet access and valid payment method required to redeem offer. Netflix will begin to bill your chosen method of payment for the plan selected at sign-up at the completion of the free trial unless you cancel prior to the end of the free trial. DVDs out-at-a-time vary by plan. Our most popular plan, 3 DVDs out-at-a-time, is $17.99 plus any applicable tax. Your Netflix subscription is a month-to-month subscription cancelable at anytime. Click the "Your Account" button for cancellation instructions. No refunds or credits for partial monthly subscription periods. Delivery claim based on nearly 90% of our subscribers being within one-day postal delivery zones. Please visit www.netflix.com/TermsOfUse for complete terms and conditions. Netflix reserves the right to change terms and conditions at any time.

I So Do Not Think So.

Which MASH Character are you?

You are Charles Emerson Winchester, III!
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Testing...

Dammit, Blogger, publish already!

I Think They Found "Reverse."

So, I know many of the people who actually read this blog have probably seen this bit of news about a proposed new Star Trek movie already, but:

J.J. Abrams is becoming the next Gene Roddenberry.

Paramount is breathing life into its "Star Trek" franchise by setting "Mission: Impossible III" helmer J.J. Abrams to produce and direct the 11th "Trek" feature, aiming for a 2008 release.

Damon Lindelof and Bryan Burk, Abrams' producing team from "Lost," also will produce the yet-to-be-titled feature.

Project, to be penned by Abrams and "MI3" scribes Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, will center on the early days of seminal "Trek" characters James T. Kirk and Mr. Spock, including their first meeting at Starfleet Academy and first outer space mission.

Man, every time someone thinks about doing a new Trek project, they haul out this Starfleet Academy idea again, and it never becomes any less of a bad idea. In fact, it seems to me that it's only become more obviously a bad idea. I can just imagine someone saying, "Hey, I know! Let's do the Starfleet Academy thing! Being a prequel, it'll have all the continuity disadvantages of Enterprise, with the added bonus of recasting beloved characters who have become inextricably linked with the actors who originally played them!" Except, of course, what they're probably actually thinking is, "American movie-goers only want movies about sexy young people, so for Star Trek we need sexy young people... in SPACE!" Sigh.

Personally, I want a Deep Space 9 movie, if we have to keep flogging this poor dead franchise at all. But I've long since become resigned to the fact that that's never gonna happen.

Blowin' in the Wind

Aargh. I forgot to close the window in my computer room when I left for work today, and when I got home my entire computer desk was covered in grit. Sometimes I hate New Mexico.

Another Open Letter to Vir-Kitty

Dear Mr. Catto,

Please stop biting through the wires on my headphones. This is really the last pair I wish to buy for quite some time. Also, every time I plug the damn things in and fail to get any sound out of them because you've been masticating on them, I instantly assume my iPod is broken and panic. I do not enjoy this at all.

With love and annoyance,
Your long-suffering human

I Can See Clearly Now...

OK, so, I went back to the optician and got my eyeglass frames adjusted again, and I think they're actually feeling pretty comfortable now. Hooray! That's one item from the "bad" list crossed off. I hope.

The Good, The Bad, And The Whiney

Once again, time passes and I find myself neglecting to update this thing for a few days. Well, let's see... There've been good things and bad things.


Good Things:

I went up to Albuquerque on Sunday and visited a couple of different friends and their families. Had some scrumptious Easter dinner, saw some people I hadn't seen in a very long time, and afterwards went to see V for Vendetta, which was pretty good.

New Doctor Who episode in the UK! And, yes, I got my hands on it, though it took a bit of doing this time. Kind of a dumb plot, but loads of fun anyway, and, man am I looking forward to the rest of season 2 (or 28, whichever).

I've been very productive lately. Got a whole bunch of stuff crossed off my to-do list this morning.

The Sopranos disks from Netflix that I thought were lost in the mail came today after all. Which means that I now have Sopranos episodes to tide me over until I get my next batch of Lost. Yay!


Bad things:

Meeting people I hadn't seen for years only serves to remind me of the fact that we're all getting older and some of us (aka "me") haven't actually done much of anything with our lives. Which leads to mild existential angst.

My wireless internet connection keeps flaking out on me. I had somebody out last week to adjust the antenna -- for which they're going to charge me at least forty bucks -- and it seemed much better, but it must not be secured properly or something, because every time the wind blows my connection starts doing the hokey pokey; it's in and out and all over the frelling place. Per Murphy's law, of course, it seems to reliably get windy whenever I have something important to do online, or am attempting to download a large file. (Ahem.)

Part of the reason I have so much time to be productive in is that I keep waking up too damned early. Which means I start craving a nap right about the time I have to be off to work. Sigh.

My new eyeglasses are still driving me crazy. I've had the frames adjusted like five times now, and there isn't anything obviously wrong with them, but no matter how I try to position them, they're either uncomfortable on my nose, or making the muscles in my eyes and face ache, or seem just plain undefinably wrong somehow. At this point I'm kind of hoping that if I keep 'em in the nose-comfy but face-achy spot the muscles'll eventually give up fighting it and I'll be OK. I can't figure out if I'm tensing up because I'm subconsciously afraid they'll slip down my nose or what.

And now I feel like I'm coming down with the tiniest beginnings of a scratchy throat, and I do not need to be sick. So, uh, wish my immune system luck, will ya?

Oh, Look. It's Yet Another Stupid Quiz. Yay.

Who is Your Alter Poet?

Your alter poet is Thomas Stearns Eliot. For you, life rocks pretty hard!
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OK, That's Not What I Would Have Expected At All...

You scored as 3rd doctor. 3rd doctor 75% 4th Doctor 42% 9th Doctor 33% 2nd doctor 33% 1st Doctor 25% 5th Doctor 25% 7th Doctor 25% Davros 17% 6th doctor 8% 10th Doctor 8% 8th Doctor 0% a Dalek 0% What Doctor Who character are You? created with QuizFarm.com

It's Random Linkage Time!

Tardisodes: These are little preview snippets the BBC is putting up for each of the new Doctor Who episodes this season. The one that's there now is for the season opener, which is airing in the UK this Saturday. Pretty cool.

Also for the Who fans, there's Dead Ringers' "Christmas Day at Doctor Who's", which is easily the cleverest and funniest Who parody I've seen in a visual medium since "The Curse of Fatal Death". (This does, I suppose, have a potential spoiler for US viewers still watching the first season of the new series, but only if you've been living in a cave as far as production news goes.)

Here's a good article on the experience of watching TV shows for the first time on DVD. Personally, I find said experience about a thousand times better than watching on TV, but I totally feel the writer's pain when it comes to the "loss of social currency" issue. I'm really wishing the rest of the world had, like me, only seen the first four episodes of Lost so far, because, dammit, I want to theorize madly about what's going on without people giving me those annoying "Ha! I know things you don't know!" looks.

Online Etymology Dictionary: An interesting reference site explaining the origins of words. Because some of us like that kind of thing.

Apparently I'm Some Kind of Vulcan Angel.


Find your CelestialChoir

This Again? Boy, Time Flies...

Current clothes: I'm still sitting around in my Pink Floyd lounge pants and my big black pocket t-shirt and my Homer Simpson slippers, sipping my morning coffee. Ah, life is good.

Current mood: Pretty relaxed.

Current music: Most recently, Gift Wrapped: The Best of the Arrogant Worms.

Current annoyance: It's taken me the better part of two weeks to get to the point where these new eyeglasses don't bother me much any more, and they still feel a little strange.

Current thing: Attempting to shake off a moderate case of laziness and inertia.

Current desktop picture: Meercats! (At least, I think those are meercats.)

Current song in head: None at the moment, but I've had The Talking Heads' "Lifetime Piling Up" running in and out of my head for over a week.

Current book: The Republican War on Science by Chris Mooney. Oooh, I'm getting all political in my old age. I blame George W. Bush and one too many episodes of The West Wing.

Current video in player: Most recently, the Doctor Who episode "The Deadly Assassin". Which is a good episode, despite the strangely redundant title.

Current DVD in player: Disc one of season 1 of Lost. I was intending to wait until I finished season 4 of The Sopranos before I started on this show, but Netflix is sending me things in strange orders again, so I guess I'm watching them both at once. I've only seen the pilot episode of Lost so far, but it was enough to definitely make me want to watch more. It's very well made, with an excellent premise, a good set of characters, and a lot of elements that really hold my attention and make me want to stay tuned to see how they play out. I do have to say, though, that as far as the characters go, I'm having a little trouble keeping them straight as of yet. I've had to give them all descriptive nicknames, as I slowly figure out what they're actually called. I'm pretty solid on things like Competent Doctor Guy = Jack and Large Likeable Guy = Hurley, but I have no idea whether people like Asshole Guy and Woman Who Needed CPR have even been introduced by name.

Current refreshment: Coffee! Ah, the sweet, sweet water of life! *slurp*

Current worry: That engineer guy was wrong. There are cracks in my floor. You can now see that there are, because there are places where the tile is also cracking, and one spot in particular where a bit of tile has chipped off to reveal a smallish but very definite fissure. Aaargh. I'm still pretty sure the house is in no serious structural danger, and I can think of a whole host of reasons why it's entirely possible that the patterns of soil movement under my house might have suddenly changed in the last year or so (including an extended period of drought), so I hold out some hope that perhaps things will settle down (er, so to speak) and the damage won't get much worse, and I can sort of ignore it for a while. One way or another, though, this is going to mean some expensive repair bills somewhere down the road, especially if I ever want to sell the place. Which is, indeed, worrying.

Current thought: I keep forgetting to point out that Maximum Verbosity passed its 4th anniversary last week. And I didn't even send the poor blog a card. Tsk.

It's a Good Thing I Moved to a Bigger House, Because I Have to Keep Putting in More Bookshelves.

Today marked one of my favorite annual events, the local Friends of the Library book sale. This year's haul:

A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay
Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy
The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder
The Dead Zone by Stephen King (thus fulfilling the unwritten rule that I have to end up with at least one King novel per book sale)
On the Road with Charles Kuralt (which I initially grabbed thinking it was Kerouac instead of Kuralt, but that's an embarrassing enough blunder that I decide to adopt some kind of "no, really, I meant to do that" attitude about it)
The First Man in Rome by Colleen McCullough

You see, I was good and limited myself to only six books! I actually am doing a pretty good job of sticking to my self-imposed book-buying quota, and I believe that massive To-Read Pile of mine is shrinking, albeit very slowly. And since, this being the exciting event for me that it is, I've made a habit of blogging my purchases, I thought I'd take a look back and see what I actually have and haven't read from previous years. So...

2002:

Bought: 13, Read so far: 6

2003:

Bought: 16, Read: 9

I seem to have missed 2004, or else maybe I just didn't blog about it. I think I was working nights and slept through it or something.

2005:

Bought: 6, Read: 5

So, hmm, that's... 20 out of 35. Any bets on how long it's going to take me to read all of the current batch?

Hellblazer Dude

So, I finally got around to renting Constantine. It actually wasn't bad, all things considered. Decent-ish story (although I think that's mostly to be credited to the original comic), excellent FX, a lot of random cool moments... But, I'm sorry, no matter how hard the movie tries to convince me -- and it does try -- my suspension of disbelief is in no way elastic enough to stretch so far as to accept Keanu Reeves as John Constantine. Just... no.

At one point, very early on, I found myself muttering, "Geez, he couldn't at least attempt to do the accent?" Which was immediately followed by me answering myself with, "We should all be very, very grateful" and suppressing a shudder. Oh, and Keanu? For gods' sakes, speak up! Stop frelling mumbling! If I turned the volume up high enough that I can actually hear what you're saying, everybody else is too damned loud! Sheesh.

While I'm Waiting for My Laundry, A Couple of Memes

	Thee	Summer Day	Score
Name	Betty (72)	Sunday 2nd April (97)	0 : 1
Loveliness	Lovely	Lovelier	0 : 2
Temperature	98.6° F	60° F	1 : 2
Lease	34.76 years	0.59 years	2 : 2
Complexion			3 : 2
Betty is more lovely, and probably more temperate, than a summers day
Compare Me To A Summers Day

And, speaking of summer's days:

Go to Wikipedia and look up your birthday (e.g. 12th May). Post three events, two births and one death in your journal, including the year.

Three Events:

1772 - HMS Resolution, under the command of Captain James Cook, set sail from Plymouth, England.

1923 - The Hollywood Sign is officially dedicated in the hills above Hollywood, Los Angeles. It originally reads "Hollywoodland " but the four last letters are dropped after renovation in 1949.

1977 - The New York City Blackout of 1977 lasts for 25 hours and results in looting and other disorder.

Two Births:

1940 - Patrick Stewart, English actor

1942 - Harrison Ford, American actor

And One Death:

1974 - Patrick Blackett, English physicist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1897)

What the Kids Are Listening to These Days

I've been listening to the Dandy Warhols' Thirteen Tales from Urban Bohemia, which I just got yesterday, and while I haven't listened to the entire album yet, so far it really kinda kicks ass.

Which leads me to thinking... I think this may be the first time in my life when I've actually liked music that was cool and popular while it was actually still cool and popular. (The Dandy Warhols are cool and popular, right? I certainly keep hearing about them everywhere.)

See, I spent my teenage years mostly listening to bagpipe music and the Wrath of Khan soundtrack on continuous loop, because I wouldn't be caught dead being shallow and ordinary enough to listen to the kind of music the popular kids listened to. When I started college, thank goodness, I finally got over myself and discovered a heartfelt liking for the music of the 80's just in time for it to start giving way to the music of the 90's. I didn't care much for the whole grunge thing and still honestly do not understand the appeal of Nirvana, but I was finally starting to relax and sort of accept the whole 90's sensibility just about the time it, too, was on its way out. But the music of the 00's, as a whole, is actually proving strangely agreeable to me. To be honest, I'm not sure quite how I feel about that. I've never been accused of having cool tastes in music before, at least not for any mainstream definition of "cool."

Also, bizarrely, I find that the older I get, the more acceptable I find Heavy Metal. Is it just me, or is that completely backwards?

Thinking Perky

Aaargh, I managed to get about two whole hours of sleep today. Right. I am going to pretend that simply didn't happen, and force myself to feel rested via the power of auto-suggestion. Also coffee. Wish me luck.

Kitty Pics!

Several people have asked for more recent pictures of li'l Vir-kitty. Well, just for you, guys, I finally got that roll of film developed! So here we go...

This is Vir at about six months:



Here is is poking his little face out from under my recliner. Awww!:





Vir and Nova are buddies, and enjoy freestyle Kitty Wrestling:

I'm a Travellin' Gal. Slightly.

Your Travel Profile:

You Are Well Traveled in the Northeastern United States (57%)

You Are Somewhat Well Traveled in the Western United States (32%)

You Are Mostly Untraveled in Canada (20%)

You Are Mostly Untraveled in the Southern United States (8%)

You Are Mostly Untraveled in Western Europe (7%)

You Are Untraveled in Africa (0%)

You Are Untraveled in Asia (0%)

You Are Untraveled in Australia (0%)

You Are Untraveled in Eastern Europe (0%)

You Are Untraveled in Latin America (0%)

You Are Untraveled in New Zealand (0%)

You Are Untraveled in Scandinavia (0%)

You Are Untraveled in Southern Europe (0%)

You Are Untraveled in the Middle East (0%)

You Are Untraveled in the Midwestern United States (0%)

You Are Untraveled in the United Kingdom (0%)

How Well Traveled Are You?

I could have had a slightly higher score, I think, if I'd been willing to count cities I'd only driven through without stopping. But I figured that probably shouldn't, under the same general principle of having only been in the airport.

I Am a Master of Space and Time!

I wasn't feeling very well for much of the weekend. I had another attack of that whatever-it-is that seems to hit me every so often, where I'll maybe get a scratchy throat and some stuffiness (OK, more stuffiness than usual -- damned allergies), but mostly just feel completely drained of energy and vaguely sick-ish for a day or two before it's pretty much gone. I tend to imagine it's my immune system successfully beating off a full-blown cold, for which I'm grateful, but it's still annoying. And one of the annoying parts of it was that after I called in sick to my night shift on Thursday, I proceeded to fall asleep on the couch around midnight. Which threw my sleep schedule off completely, as I'm still on graveyards this week.

So last night, I'm sitting in front of the TV -- Apparently Farscape is on at, like, 1:00 in the morning on WGN. Who knew? -- trying desperately to stay awake and not succeeding very well. "Oh, come on," I told myself. "Just another hour or so. Make it until 3:00 and you can sleep." So I got up, sat down in front of the computer to check my e-mail, and suddenly realized the clock on the computer said 3:00. I tell you, it was like magic. It was like I'd developed some wonderful ability to alter the flow of time. It was cool! It was, of course, the change to Daylight Savings Time, which I had completely spaced on.

Personally, I loathe the whole concept of Daylight Savings Time. The life of a shiftworker is hard enough without the clocks in the external world changing on you, too. But for once, it seems it's actually worked in my favor. Whoo-hoo!

And it's now 1:00 PM, and I only have to be awake for another 19 hours or so. I can do that.