And I Did Try to Teach Myself Klingon Once, But I Gave Up Because It Kinda Hurt My Throat...

I think The Onion is making fun of us. (Says the person who has, in fact, been known to have three-hour internet-based conversations about the story arc of Blake's 7.)

Look Out, She's Passing Around the Baby Pictures!

I've posted a new picture of my nephew over on my website, for anybody who actually cares about that sort of thing. It takes a little while to load, but of course, in my opinion, it's worth it.

Blogger Heard From

Ah, there we go! It never fails, as soon as I run out of patience and start publicly bitching about something (like not hearing from tech support), that's when it either suddenly fixes itself or finally gets taken care of. Yep, when I checked out Blogger Control today, I found that they have now gotten around to looking at my complaint. According to them, it's not just me, it's a known bug that's affected other people as well, and it is on their to-do list (their exact phrase in fact). Their little blurb describing the bug lists it as "priority 2," which doesn't sound that bad (unless they've only got two levels of priority). It's annoying that there's no fix for the problem -- even public bitching doesn't seem to be working -- but, OK, I can be patient...

Yo, Blogger!

I'm still having strange problems with my archive links... Sigh. I reported the problem using the "Blogger control" system, as directed, but it's been just about a week now, and I've had zero response. My issue shows up as "unreviewed," which I assume means that nobody's even bothered looking at it. Anybody out there who's been using Pro longer than I have know whether this kind of response time is normal or not? I understand that the Blogger folks are probably massively busy, but a simple acknowledgment that my issue was at least on their list of Things to Do would be nice. Admittedly, the problems I'm having now aren't quite as bad as the problems I was having before I upgraded, but I'm kind of starting to think that maybe "Blogger Pro" is a little bit of a misnomer...

Good Discs, Everyone!

Well, the plan that involved getting up off my lazy ass and doing something other than watching DVDs all day has pretty much fizzled out, I'm sad to say. Although that fact has at least had one benefit: I've now finished watching through all the Futurama Season One DVDs. Man, what a cool show that is: terrific animation, great jokes, great dialog...

Most pitifully appropriate quote:

Leela: "It's clever, it's unexpected."
Fry: "But that's not why people watch TV! Clever things make people feel stupid, and unexpected things make them feel scared."

Or such is the case with TV execs, anyway, which easily explains why Futurama got cancelled. Sigh. Ah, well, at least I have lots more discs to look forward to... Including, doubtless, a bunch of episodes I managed to miss due to Fox's bizarrely random and unpredictable choices about when to air the show.

Incidentally, the first season discs are well worth picking up. There's a commentary track on every episode, and they're almost as much fun as the episodes themselves. They also confirm something I had long suspected: that the people who work on Futurama have a much better understanding of actual science than, say, the writers of certain Star Trek spinoff shows I could name. Case in point: when they had an episode which featured aliens watching transmissions of a 1000-year-old Earth TV show, they picked a star for them which actually is about 1000 light-years away from Earth. Come on now, I cannot possibly be the only one who thinks that's really cool!

Currently...

Hey, it has been about a month since I've done this, hasn't it?

Current clothes: The same Star Trek t-shirt I was wearing when I answered these questions back in August. Jeans. White socks. Black sneakers.

Current mood: Sort of "eh."

Current music: Currently in the stereo at home is Jim Croce's Photographs and Memories.

Current hair: Short, kind of messy.

Current annoyance: Various stupid things involving the phone company. Ask me later about my experience last night with my mother's phone number and the pizza joint...

Current thing: Like I said, lately it's mostly been lying in front of the TV like a great big lump of inanimate matter.

Current desktop picture: Still doin' the Farscape screencaps. This month it's a bizarre shot of Scorpius playing the drums from "Won't Get Fooled Again," an episode which has often (and with considerable justification) been described as "Farscape on acid."

Current song stuck in head: The theme song to Futurama, which I recently turned to after having finally run out of Angel.

Current book: Sir Apropos of Nothing by Peter David.

Current video in player: The tape I left in to catch tonight's Farscape rerun so I can disseminate it to all my deserving Farscape converts.

Current refreshment: Nothing at the moment. I had some mint tea a little while ago.

Current worry: None I particularly feel like sharing...

Current thought: I love the theme song to Futurama!

Anybody Got Any Motivation They Wanna Lend Me?

Well, this was a longish weekend for me, and I still got pretty much nothing accomplished. Truth to tell, for the last week or so, I just haven't seemed to have any energy or ambition at all. I don't think I've done much of anything with my spare time but lie around on the couch like a great big lump watching Angel and drinking endless cups of tea. Which, now that I think about it, was actually kind of nice. But it's probably time I got up off my butt and did something useful...

Ah, what the hell. Maybe later.

"I Seem to Have Moved the Wall!"

Hey, check out this short-but-funny Farscape bloopers video featuring Anthony Simcoe (D'Argo). I particularly love the way he keeps doing the D'Argo voice during the whole wall thing...

I Don't Know About You, But I Sure Don't Feel Like I've Saved Anything...

I hate Daylight Savings Time. I'm half-convinced that it's really an evil conspiracy on the part of morning people. Yeah, OK, maybe it made some sort of sense back when we were still an agrarian society, but in today's electrically-lit world, it's become pretty pointless, don't you think? I don't mind the "fall back" thing all that much, even if it has occasionally meant I've been stuck working for an extra hour. At least that takes you in the natural direction your body wants to go. But this "springing ahead" stuff sucks, especially as, per Murphy's law, it always seems to happen when I'm coming off the night shift. Like, gee... now. Stupid evil morning people.

For the Comics Fans

Here's a really good National Public Radio interview with comics author Alan Moore, in which he has lots of interesting things to say about The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, characterization, comics as a medium, and the difficulties of adapting works from one medium to another. For the record, I'm not a huge comics fan in general, but Moore's stuff is absolutely brilliant, and I recommend it highly if you haven't discovered it already.

Happy Blog-Day to Me!

Stick a candle in a cupcake, guys, because, believe it or not, today marks the 1-year anniversary of Maximum Verbosity! Who would ever have thought that I'd find an entire year's worth of inane blatherings to blog about? Well, OK, maybe that's not actually all that difficult to believe...

Looking back into the murky depths of the archives, I see that my first post here (well, OK, my first real post, as opposed to the one that basically said "testing") was mostly on the subject of music in TV commercials. Ah, yes, it's good to know that I was addressing the hard-hitting issues of the day right from the very beginning!

We're Going to Pluto!

According to the latest Planetary Society newsletter, funding has been approved for a space probe mission called New Horizons whose purpose will be to investigate the planet Pluto and the Kuiper Belt (a collection of icy objects orbiting the sun in the general vicinity of Pluto which may well provide important clues to the early history of the solar system). This is very cool, because Pluto is the one planet in the solar system which so far has not been visited by human-made spacecraft, something that has always seemed to me to be rather a sad oversight. More information on the project, as well as lots of interesting facts about Pluto and the Kuiper belt, can be found on the New Horizons website.

And Today's Link Worth Checking Out Is...

Here's a nifty website I've recently discovered via my referrer logs: All Consuming. This nicely-put-together site presents for your perusal the results of a script that crawls around the web looking for blogs which have links to books on Amazon.com, from which it draws up lists of "what the weblog community is reading at the moment," complete with links back to the blogs themselves so you can see what they had to say. It's also got a feature that will let you set up a list of your own current reading and display it automatically on your blog... Which, OK, I probably wouldn't use, because it'd be too much of a pain to keep it updated, but it's kind of a nice idea, nonetheless.

Bringing Home the Friday Five

1. How many houses/apartments have you lived in throughout your life? Oh, geez, a lot. Let's see... I'm told we lived first in a trailer and then in an apartment when I was a small child, but I don't really remember either of them. The first place I remember living is a row house in Merchantville, NJ. Then, when I was between 3rd and 4th grade, we moved to a duplex in Pennsauken. Between 9th and 10th grade, when my Mom got married for the second time, we moved into a split level in Cherry Hill. Then I left for college, during which I lived in two different dorm rooms... I guess those count. Halfway through college, I moved off-campus and into the sprawling, ramshackle, psychotic-roommate-infested House of Insanity for a year. After that, my then-boyfriend and I moved into an adobe hovel where we lived for a year. After that we moved into a nice, new, far-too-small apartment for, gee, another year. Then his dad bought us a trailer, and we lived in that for a couple of years, I think. Then we split up, and I moved out and rented my own trailer. I lived there for a few years until my mother convinced me that if I was going to live in a trailer I should at least own the damn thing and talked me into buying the one I'm living in now (thanks to some helpful financing from the Bank of Mom). So, wow, how many is that? Thirteen, I think, unless I've miscounted somewhere. That means my lifetime average is something like a move every two and a half years (or, actually, a little bit less than that). Yeesh.

2. Which was your favorite and why? To be perfectly honest, I don't think any of them have exactly been idyllic places to live. Which is fine. I've always been more interested in having running water and a roof over my head than in living in a dream home. I kind of liked the Pennsauken house, I suppose, and the Cherry Hill one would have been fine if it weren't for the hideous decor, but they both had one major flaw: I had to share them with my family. And, dearly as I love them, sharing my living space with them was, um, not well-suited to my personality, let's put it that way. Oddly enough, in many ways, my favorite from that list -- and I'm stressing "favorite" here, as opposed to "objectively best" -- was the single dorm room I had my sophomore year in college. It was a pretty big room for just one person, it had a nice hardwood floor and, because I didn't have a roommate, I had two desks and two sets of bookshelves all for my own. I decorated the place with posters and clippings and such over pretty much every square inch of wall space, which was actually kind of cool, in a slightly visually overwhelming sort of way. The people living in the dorm with me were friendly fellow geeks who didn't generally party too hearty at inconvenient hours. And to top it all off, I was about thirty seconds from all my classes, which was convenient as hell. Having to share a bathroom with everybody else on the floor was a drag, though. And the fact that I was right next to the dorm's common room wasn't a whole lot of fun, either, considering that the wall between my bed and the communal TV wasn't nearly as thick as it should have been. Truth to tell, I probably couldn't stand to live in a place like that now, but at the time I thought it was terrific... probably because it was the first place I ever had all to myself.

3. Do you find moving house more exciting or stressful? Why? Stressful. Very, very stressful. For one thing, I've just got too damned much stuff, and moving it all is just a real pain in the ass. For another, there's always a zillion little annoying things you have to attend to any time you move. Did you get all the utilities hooked up? Have you filled out all the change-of-address forms? Do you need homeowner's or renter's insurance? Do you gotta buy furniture? Are you actually going to be home at whatever random time the cable guy finally decides to show up? I hate that kind of hassle.

4. What's more important, location or price? I'd say it's a tradeoff between the two. I mean, I don't want to live way out in the middle of the desert or something, but it'd hardly be worth having a house right across from work if it was going to bankrupt me, would it? I'm actually a bit farther out of town now than I'd really like, in fact, considering that I prefer to walk instead of drive much of the time, but the trailer park I'm in now is cheap enough to just about make up for it.

5. What features does your dream house have (pool, spa bath, big yard, etc.)? Oh, it would definitely have one of those giant bathtubs. Actually, the last place I lived did, but the water heater was so small that you couldn't fill it all the way up with hot water, so it was worse than useless. You know, heck, while I'm dreaming, let's make it a jacuzzi bath. Yeah, now we're talking! First and foremost, though, my dream house would have a library. A huge library, actually capable of holding all my books. After that, everything else is pretty much incidental.

Sadly Enough, I Almost Wouldn't Be Surprised to See Some of These on Next Year's Lineup...

Check out teevee.org's spoof of "reality" TV shows, featuring such cutting-edge programming as American Embryo, The Most Dangerous Game and Animal Fight Club. Painfully funny stuff.

It's Google Time!

Yes, that's right, it's time once again for a look at the wacky search requests that bring people to this blog! I know you were all holding your breath in anticipation, so I won't keep you waiting any longer:

"ran out of clean underwear": There are really three possible solutions to this problem: 1) do some laundry, 2) go without, or 3) go buy some new underwear. Sad to say, I have myself sunk to 3 on at least one occasion, but I don't believe I have ever yet been desperate enough to resort to 2. Anyway, hope that helps.

trash pics mental hospice: Do mental patients produce more interesting trash than the rest of us, I wonder? Are there lots of battered, threadbare Napolean hats and badly soiled straightjackets?

Betty: Just a helpful googling tip: providing a last name makes it much easier to find the person you're looking for!

blackadder beard -spain: Actually, I understand perfectly well why they decided to exclude the word "Spain," since there's a Blackadder episode called "The Queen of Spain's Beard," and obviously they weren't interested in that. What I can't figure out is why anybody was looking for info on Blackadder's beard.

white socks nude: Put some shoes on those nude socks immediately! Geez, children could surf by this blog, you know!

oregon scientific disc jockey: Somehow, I can't help but read this as "a disc jockey in Oregon who plays songs about science," and, man, I want to hire this person!

eyeball tattoos: Eww! Oh, they meant tattoos of eyeballs... I hope.

scarran stat: Unconventional medicine in the Uncharted Territories: "Nurse, the patient is freezing to death! Get me a Scarran, stat!"

Hopeless fangirl politics: Well, the "hopeless fangirl" part is undeniably accurate, but I do generally try to avoid meddling in politics.

What kind of tape recorder does john crichton use: Damn, it's a Farscape trivia question I don't know the answer to! I am shamed.

emptyspace idiot's guide: You'd have to be a complete idiot to need an instruction book for empty space, I would think.

SCARE TACTICS SHOW IS CROSSING THE LINE SCI FI: No need to shout. I'm completely with you on this one.

Oh, Dear God, It's Another Stupid Quiz!


you are agent smith from the matrix

And What Movie Villain are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

Cool. I'm an AI in sunglasses.

State of the Blog

I think I've got the blog template looking OK now. At least, it looks fine in IE. I'll have to wait until I get home to check it in Netscape. If anything looks weird to anybody else, please let me know! I do know that there's some funkiness going on with the archive links (some of them are missing, and some of them go places other than where they're supposed to), but that's nothing I have any control over. I've let the Blogger folks know about the problem, and now that I'm a cash-paying customer, they should actually listen to me. I hope!

DVD Overdose

Yippee! My Futurama Season One DVDs arrived today! And so did my copy of the Special Edition of Star Trek IV, for that matter. I'd been looking forward to both of those for quite some time, especially the Futurama discs, which only just came out about a week ago. Of course, it immediately occurs to me that I do, after all, still have most of Season One of Angel to watch, as well as three more Blackadder discs, both V miniseries, an entire season of Doctor Who, about half a dozen Alien Nation episodes, and, oh yeah, three movies. Oh, and about two seasons worth of Deep Space 9 episodes, too, though those are tapes, not DVDs. Actually, you know, now that DS9 is starting to come out on DVD, I'm seriously considering trying to unload all those tapes on ebay and switching my collection to discs instead. Yeah, yeah, I know, if I had any capacity for advance planning at all, I would have held off on buying the tapes in the first place... Oh, and speaking of tapes, it suddenly occurs to me that I've got a bunch of Doctor Who episodes on tape that I still need to watch. And a bunch of Forever Knight episodes. (Man, there's a series that I really do wish would come out on DVD.)

I so need to just take a couple of weeks' vacation time and spend it chained to my TV set until I'm caught up. Of course, I seem to keep saying that, and so far it pretty much just keeps not happening... Sigh.

A Work in Progress

I'm still working out a few problems with my blog template. It's not helping that Blogger doesn't appear to be working very well today, either, at least as far as getting me to the page where I can actually work on my template goes. Anyway, if you drop by here and the page looks kinda funky, well, bear with me, OK? Nothing's ever as easy as it sounds like it ought to be when you start out...