Author: David

Over-educated Curmudgeon, Bit-Bucket Tuner and Budding Brewmeister.
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Early Gifting

Well, we opened the door a few decades ago when we instituted my Wonder Woman’s family’s tradition of opening Christmas presents on Christmas Eve. Slippery slope and all that. I slept in today (late night, got up early after a short nap and went back to bed before 5) and lo and behold! Son&Heir was around and really eager to open presents super early. OK, so Noon passed (barely) and we were opening presents for those of us who were… present. Son&Heir liked his stuff (especially the “stocking stuffers” as my Wonder Woman knew he would when she found them). And I? How was it for me? *sigh* I had thought I had family trained to standard, the standard being, “I have what I need. Focus on other folks.”

Son&Heir apparently believes in a sort of insidious disrespect of my values that precludes any cavils from me. My Wonder Woman kinda bent the standard by giving me a Moleskine cover and display protectors for a Kindle/Kindle Fire. “OK,” methought, “I can put $$ back for a Kindle/Kindle Fire. It’s not as though it’s not on my list anyway.”

Opened Son&Heir’s present to me. Yeh, you guessed it. “Well, when we got a couple of pallets of them in at work, I just figured… ”

Sucker punched me, he did. Xmas gifts are supposed to flow one way in my mind. Oh, well. At least he knows CPR. *heh*

Thanks bubba. Good one. I’ll get you back, though. 🙂

And, apologies, sweetheart, but I may not get much more detail work done on your Christmas present today… 😉

No, I’m not posting this with the Kindle. Sensitivity and size of the keyboard on the thing is something I need to become used to before I’ll be doing much of that. But I am listening to one of the Christmas albums I have stored on my Amazon Cloud account via the Fire. Nice sound from the speakers for such a small device, but simply wonderful sound via the ear buds I’m currently using. I’ll post other comments on the device later, perhaps, as I become more familiar with it. One thing: I don’t view the WiFi-only limitation as a limitation, and given the fact that I can store an unlimited number of mp3s as well as an unlimited number of other media purchased from Amazon on my cloud drive, I don’t view the storage limitations as anything that will concern me.

OK, so the Fire’s Silk Browser appeared to completely suck at displaying web pages. Found the fix here, in case a reader here has the same issue (only half a page displaying, other half blank screen). It seems Amazon customer service knows about the issue and has a workaround ready to go… for those who will look it up. I wonder how many folks will instead just say, “This sucks” and return their device, though. Amazon needs to push a fix for this.

OK, so I was planning on connecting a lil compy connected to the living room stereo to stream Xmas mp3s from my Amazon Cloud storage. The Kindle’s easier. Connected via the headphone jack. CLICKed on Music, my library of mp3s popped up, Bob’s your uncle. Nice. Currently playing the short list of Il Volo’s Christmas songs mini-collection (Silent Night; Panis Angelicus; Christmas Medley: Jingle Bells Rock / Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow / It’s The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year; The Christmas Song; Stille Nacht). I can definitely tell the boys have had extensive coaching in English pronunciation, though their native Italian vowels and consonants do sound through.

OK, just watched The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2009, the Swedish version) on the device. Used ear buds after the first few minutes. Big difference. Good flick, true to the book. Even the physical settings were very close to my imaginings from the book’s descriptions. And, it was a good movie-watching experience on the Fire. Amazon may actually have found a way to get me to pop for its Prime service.

Even better: all three Stieg Larsson books have been filmed by the same folks with the same cast. Watching “…Played With Fire” now.

…and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest. Three movies that faithfully represented Larsson’s powerful novels. In fact, because of the format, the movies may have told the stories slightly better, in some ways, as Larsson’s narrative sometimes bogged down a tad. Oh, there were large portions that were excised–whole swaths–from each of the books, but the material that was excised just leaned the narrative down to Lizbeth Salander’s story a bit more. Well-acted, directed in such a way that the direction was almost unnoticeable. Very well-done. And by the end of the third movie, I was picking up more and more of the Swedish dialog, even noticing where the subtitles elided over material that I had caught.

A very enjoyable experience. Thanks, Son!

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Down to the Wire

The kitchen redo for my Wonder Woman’s Xmas present is getting close–well, apart from repainting the kitchen cabinets… again (just done this summer, but still ;-)). Below see an almost finished “coffee shrine” replacement for the former coffee brewing nook. Needs some trim finishing out and the new surface for the cabinet, etc., isn’t fully painted yet, but most of the rest is done, and I even got the dining room painted the new wall color, first tested out on the south wall of the kitchen.

OK, so I also don’t have the plate rack installed for the dinner plates. It’ll come.

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If The Zero Wants a New Running Mate…

…as an upgrade from the intellectual prowess of Cwazy Unka Joe Biden, I think I can scare up a bag of hammers (although a sack of $h1t would be a more appropriate upgrade).

Just tryin’ to help the guy out here.

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One Reason the Hivemind Hated Him

‘S’all right, Ronnie, the same kind of people hated Him, too (1; 2).

Meanwhile, idolatry strikes again as the National Christmas Tree becomes the National Obamassiah Tree. Hmmm, seems I’ve read about something similar happening in Jewish history…

Yeh, yeh, I know the decos on the National Xmas Tree aren’t all about The Zero, but no one’s been able to find one about Christ or even Christmas on the thing so far, so…

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Yee-Haw…

(Wake me when it’s over.) 😉

They really should have titled it, “Cowboys and Outlaws and Indians and… Alien and BEMs*,” but I imagine it would’ve taken a bit to work that onto a marquee.

Just watched the DVD. Not bad for a B- Movie quality script, A and A-minus cast and special effects that shared “best parts of the show” with some horses and a dog (apparently named “Dog” *sigh*).

All-in-all, very nearly worth the $3.27 it took to rent the thing, though I’m not quite sure it was worth the time spent watching it. Although, I must admit it was moderately amusing trying to predict when Daniel Craig’s hat would change from brown to black and back again… in the same scene, often as not. Oh, there were bunches of continuity issues and lame sound effects to go along with the amusingly B- script, so I suppose it was worth the time to watch, just so I could have things to sneer at.

So, would I watch it again? Not sure. I do have a weakness for weak movies, so I might, even given my distaste for “re-runs” (“Seen it” is a phrase my Wonder Woman sometimes tires of hearing *heh*).

The music for the sound track wasn’t bad, and the “making of” bonus material was quite interesting. In fact, more interesting than the movie itself, for me.

*Bug-eyed Monsters

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Why I Don’t Trust the Mass MEdia Podpeople Hivemind, #2,386,562

N.B,–not providing links. If you can’t manage to get to the Drudge Report on your own then there’s no hope for you. 🙂

Drudge headliner:

Expand the graphic (just CLICK on it) to also view the link text in the upper left hand corner that reads, “SOLDIERS STRIP, STOMP WOMEN…”

Now, Matt Drudge is pretty much THE editor for internet news conglomeration and generally shows the most balanced, eclectic offering from all points of view. As such, he’s several orders of magnitude more “fair and balanced” than FoxABCNBCCBSMSNCCNN, etc. But I still think he misses the boat on this one.

First, look carefully at the picture, or better yet, this larger version (again, CLICK to expand):

Now, I’m not disagreeing with the characterization offered by the widely-proffered terms, “brutal” and even perhaps “vicious” but the “reports” offer mostly editorializing and downplay the context to the point that no one reading the linked articles can have any way of telling what the women featured in the photos were really doing prior to the sob sister photos. One report has women “beaten” with “poles” when all I could see were standard (for many police and security forces in that part of the world) batons. And the primary Drudge link to the story “Brave women of the Middle east… ” etc., has its lede culminate with, “a man kicks her with full force in her exposed chest.”

I look at that picture and don’t see a man kicking the woman “with full force in her exposed chest.” Indeed, the person preparing the kick/stomp in that photo appears could actually be a woman wearing non-standard garb that shares only the headgear with the men in uniform dragging the woman (from where, why?–we don’t know because the story doesn’t provide that context). Since every other person in every photo I’ve seen of the events (this and other) who is supposedly a member of the military is obviously a man and in uniform, I honestly do not know what to make of what appears to be a woman out of uniform (but in an odd combination of lilac tennies, non-standard cammo and some sort of vest that doesn’t match the other uniformed persons standing around), wearing only one piece of gear that looks similar to the soldiers’ gear… being labeled as one of the soldiers and as a man.

There were other photos that were less ambiguous (though still presented out of context with inflammatory language captions), which is one reason the anomalies are so glaring in this one.

Why use this photo and caption and comment on it with such inflammatory language, while completely ignoring the anomalies and glossing over or completely eliminating the context? Because it fits the narrative the Hivemind wants to present.

Was army response brutal? Well, duh. Armies are for breaking things and killing people. Was it inappropriate? From the information provided (and yes, I watched the video at the end of the main link from Drudge), there’s no way for any honest, thinking person to be able to tell. At least the “horrors” *cough* shown in the photos and video were extremely mild for an Islamic culture.

Skepticism whenever exposed to the Hivemind is not just healthy, it’s become an essential survival response, IMO.

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Exceedingly Fair* Fare

Those of you familiar with the tune (Holst’s CRANHAM) will automatically hear the words it’s usually associated with**. For those who don’t *sigh*, well, there’s always Google… or, here ya go.

The tune always reminds me that it really needs an artist (no, not what passes for an “artist” with the typical recording industry exec, a real one) to make it work for me with Christina Rossetti’s words, especially since singing the tune with the last verse of Rossetti’s poem is problematic. The meter of the tune and the meter of that last verse do not marry well, you see. But, Tine Thing Helseth makes me forget all that.

An absolutely beautiful performance. It’s from her Christmas album, My Heart Is Ever Present. It’s a strong argument of the presence of imago dei in real art.

I could listen to this all day long.

* Continue reading “Exceedingly Fair* Fare”

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An Improvement to Look Forward To?

Clearly, if we had people like this in Congress and the White House, it’d be a massive improvement in talent, intelligence and wholesome contribution to our society–especially if this were how they spent their time instead of engaging in plots to convert citizens into subjects.

Unfortunately, a less-talented outlaw mariachi version of this is what we may have to look forward to as the highest standard of “feddle gummint” rulers within a couple of decades.