Jun

13

Universal AuthorTracker.

Filed Under Print Media | Leave a Comment

To keep track of what I’ve read and what I want to read, I use All Consuming and Goodreads. Both services work moderately well at making suggestions on what to read, with All Consuming focused on strangers’ suggestions, and Goodreads focused on friends’ suggestions. But neither, for some reason, has a service along the lines of HarperCollins’ AuthorTracker.

I would love to be able, after I’ve told Goodreads that I found, say, Black Butterfly, The Financial Lives of Poets, Shades of Grey, Never Let Me Go, Catching Fire, and Chronic City to be pretty fucking good, to be able to tell Goodreads that I’d like to be notified as soon as Mark Gatiss, Jess Walter, Jasper Fforde, Kazuo Ishiguro, Suzanne Collins, and Jonathan Lethem publish subsequent works. Doesn’t this seem like a no-brainer?

Jun

13

Bruschetta.

Filed Under Humor | Leave a Comment

Not being an Italian speaker by any stretch of the imagination, I had to look up to make sure I’m not mad in believing that “bruschetta” is pronounced “brus-ketta.” Apparently I’m not mad.

Which makes a recent Not Always Right entry particularly amusing. For the uninitiated, Not Always Right has world-weary retailers, waiters, and call center operatives dealing with frustratingly annoying and particularly stupid or obtuse customers. As in, mantra notwithstanding, the customer is Not Always Right. And usually, they’re relatively amusing diversions.

But this particular entry has a waiter delivering “bru-SHET-ta” chicken pasta, being chastised by his customer that she ordered the “bra-SKET-ta” pasta, the waiter redelivering the same dish and referring it to the same patron but this time calling it “bra-SKET-ta” pasta, and the waiter submitting the story to Not Always Right as a way of laughing at the customer for her stupidity behind her back. A neat twist on a familiar conceit? Or a mistake on the part of the publishers?

Jun

13

Sunburn.

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Living West of the Cascades, with its nearly omnipresent comforting cloud cover, I’m highly conscious of the effects of that big yellow fireball that sometimes appears in an otherwise blue sky. On the rare occasions when Madame Sol and her Hot Fusion Orchestra insist upon being heard, I’m slathering the SPF 45 on my pasty white skin.

Only, being a lazy creature at heart, I often only apply to the body parts that have been burned in the past. Neck backs, arms, and face. The past experience, however, has little to do with the burn-ability of the skin on those body parts, and has everything to do with blocking. That is, given the activity with which I am engaged, where is the sun going to be pointing? With hiking and driving being the most common engagements, the answers: neck backs, arms, and face.

Guess what happens when the recreation takes the form of kayaking in the Sound? Say hello to red legs.

Jun

12

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

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Critics’ universal acclaim for The Umbrellas of Cherbourg piqued my interest. The premise–a broken, simple love story in a French town starring very pretty people and entirely sung–elevated my desire. The completist in me, and my quest to see 1001 specific movies before I die, as well as every Cannes winner, knocked things up a notch. And Netflix offering Cherbourg for streaming sealed the deal.

Unfortunately, however perfect a film may look on paper, it doesn’t always work out. Yes, Cherbourg is an entirely sung. In French. The cast, including Catherine Deneuve, is extremely attractive. The lovers are of course star-crossed and complications involving mothers and alterna-wooers develop. The film ends on a down note. The use of color is majestic. All pluses in my book.

And yet…there’s something rather dull about Cherbourg. The tics are predictable, but slightly off. The chemistry between the characters is weak. None of the songs stood out. Everyone’s a little too meek, fatalist, unexpressive, and, well, sad. The singing is absurdly soft and without the sort of strength and purpose that tingles the back of my neck. The story drags out with one too many “should I wait a little longer” conversations between Geneviève and her mother. And the sing-every-line conceit, which ought to be refreshing, gets a little grating after a while.

All in all, not worth watching, frankly. Which surprised me and disappointed me. I expected with a set-up like that, if it was going to be bad, it could at least have the decency to be a monumental failure. But it ended up a small, nervous little film that should have been forgotten long ago. Ugh.

*1/2

Jun

6

Kansas City soundtrack.

Filed Under Film, Music | Leave a Comment

I’ve never been that much of a Robert Altman fan. I found Nashville to be an inconsistent, muddled mess; The Long Goodbye to be a tad too self-aware and, well, auteuristic in the Godardian sense; The Player to be a masturbatory train wreck; Popeye screechy and pointless; Gosford Park thoroughly dull; and A Prairie Home Companion at once a pale imitation of the radio program and a faintly mystical affair. And you know how I feel about mysticism.

I enjoyed Short Cuts–especially because I ended up having to watch it covertly after my father expressed disapproval with Jennifer Jason Leigh’s filthy mouth and ordered it shut off–and MASH well enough, I suppose. And I found “Tanner ‘88″ to be wonderful, although I suspect most of its wonder came from Garry Trudeau’s involvement than anything else.

So why do I keep watching Altman pictures? I suspect it has something to do with one of my favorite albums: the Kansas City original motion picture soundtrack. Now, Kansas City wasn’t that great a film, with an over-dark aesthetic, an unintriguing and cloudy kidnapping and political corruption plot, and a dearth of worthwhile female characters in what is ultimately a female-character-dominated film. But Kansas City has some of the best jazz I’ve ever seen performed on film. And as I understand it, Robert Altman actually had a hand in the concept: taking some of the best musicians of the 90s–Joshua Redman, Craig Handy, James Carter, etc.–and asking them to interpret the 30s pieces. Honoring the past, but working within the present. Lovely. And because so much of the film takes place in The Hey-Hey Club, and because the musicians are playing famous 30s jazz musicians on screen, the film gives the music a prominence and power that would not have been present had it been simply an after-the-fact background soundtrack.

Now I realize Hal Willner deserves most of the credit for the album, and I shouldn’t keep going back to the Altman well again and again expecting what I expect. But I just can’t help myself.

Jun

5

I’m not handy.

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When we bought the house, the guy that inspected the place to make sure it wasn’t a money pit told me that the piece of plastic that had been installed between the tub and the floor wasn’t really the best choice for keeping moisture from fucking with the subflooring, and suggested a silicone caulk instead. As a project that ultimately might need doing, the recaulking of the bathroom made it on to the list at 87 with a bullet, then utterly failed to get done for nearly a year.

Today, while I was trying to clean the bathroom so that we could replace the shower liner that had developed a pink mold of some sort, I got it in my head that the plastic strip should be removed. I pulled it up quickly, and then discovered that I was at a loss as to what to do next. Rooting around in my “tool box,” I discovered that we actually had white silicone caulk and a caulking gun. Of course, what with my general lack of understanding of even the simplest of tools, I couldn’t figure out how the damned thing worked. Well, I analyzed it for a while, I saw that the trigger would push the plunger forward slightly with each squeeze, and that the tube of caulk appeared the right shape to go into the barrel. I even figure out that the little hole in the handle would work nicely to snip off the end of the tube and that the little metal wire that was attached to the bottom of the barrel would no doubt puncture some sort of inner seal.

What I couldn’t figure out is how to get the plunger out of the way so that I could put the tube into the barrel. I kept trying to pull it back–which, incidentally, was the right impulse–but the end of the plunger kept getting caught at the end of the barrel. I watched a video or three on YouTube to try to figure it out, to no avail. Eventually, I concluded the damned thing was busted. Only I remembered that the last time I messed about with caulk, I had the same problem, and when I looked at the replacement caulk guns in the Home Depot, they all had exactly the same problem. What the fuck?

What the fuck turned out to involve unscrewing the end of the plunger, pulling the damned thing back, then reattaching. Why couldn’t I figure this out? I’m not handy.

Jun

4

Wireless is disabled.

Filed Under Science & Technology | Leave a Comment

For the Ubuntu users out there who have recently downloaded Karmic Koala and have inexplicably found yourself unable to connect to any wireless network, with NetworkManager actually graying out the “Enable Wireless” option so that the box remains permanently unclicked, and have spent hours trying to remember your terminal commands to reinstall drivers, etc. downloaded using a mothballed Dell with XP, because by G-d you can’t not use the series of tubes in trying to solve this problem and all the ethernet cables have mysteriously gone missing, help is on the way:

In my case, it was as simple as hitting Fn+F11. The F11 had a little blue wireless networking symbol thereon. Damned power saving feature.