Category: Fun Stuff

Perhaps it’s because I was in awe of my paternal grandfather’s inventiveness, resourcefulness and all around handiness, but every time I see a dumpster, trash pile, yard sale or just something sticking its head out of the corner in the garage, I begin wondering what I can do with whatever is available, what treasure is hiding in other people’s (or even my own!) trash.

OK, an example from today: for the life of me, I couldn’t find my sunglasses. Not where they belong, so I’d obviously taken them off and laid them down somewhere they don’t belong. Duh. But it was a bright day today and my eyes just do NOT like too much sun. So?

I had an older pair with broken temples. Bummer. One temple broke and I (naturally) repaired it, but when the other temple broke and I didn’t have time to repair it before going out, I simply picked up another pair (cheapos, but surprisingly nice to my eyes). So… repaired the other temple, right? Wrong. I did something… different.

1. Trimmed both temples to same length–the length of the unbroken piece on the most recently broken side–and sanded the broken/trimmed bits smooth.
2. Attached a cheap eyeglass retention chord–you know, the kind that you imagine librarians use to hang a pair of reading glasses around their necks. (*heh* Don’t tell my librarian Wonder Woman about that imaginary librarian, mmmK?) It’s adjustable via a bead, so that’s handy. Used some self-curing natural rubber tape to tidy things up.

Hmmm, these things now stay on better than they did when new, and I didn’t have ’em fall off my hat once (the place I normally store sunglasses when inside somewhere or whatnot), cos they hang around my neck. The lil bead also keeps ’em firmly in place when I need them, nice and tight, just right.

Hacking discarded stuff to be better than new, at least for some uses, is just too much fun, you know?

Still. Always. *heh*

My lil Kindle Fire is a trap. As I’ve noted before, via the Amazon Prime videos, I’ve watched a lot of TV shows I’d otherwise not have watched, particularly quite a few British shows. In general, they’ve all beat the pants off the usual fare on cable TV around here. Some, though are just barely better.

Midsomer Murders. What to say about it? *sigh* Very good programatic instrumental music, and on the Fire, with a good set of headphones or ear buds, the sound in general is amazing. All the tiny sounds of the really quite interesting environment–passing traffic, birds, background conversations, etc.: wonderfully reproduced.

The sets and locations are gorgeous, very interesting, lush. And the video is very beautifully done.

So, production values: superb, in general.

But. The plots are pedestrian ripoffs of the typical English village mystery murder story. *meh* Often, the acting is really overdone–a fault in direction, IMO. And some of the details are pretty poorly executed. Depictions of blood are particularly transparently stage blood (I’ve made and used enough of it–and had even more experience with the real stuff *heh*–that the telltale look is really grating at times) poorly applied in unrealistic manners. Settings depicting places that have been ransacked or where fights have supposedly occurred are often clumsy as well.

And then there are the anachronisms and especially the chronological issues that arise when large time offsets are depicted in preview or flashback scenes.

Altogether, these sorts of things reduce what might have been an A- show to a B- or even C+ in my estimation. Sad, really, but I’ll keep watching it, because even a C+ beats the heck out of most other TV that’s available, and the music and visuals are worth it, anyway.

But still… only four episodes per season?!?

Another minor quibble, but this applies to any streaming video from time to time: pixelating, etc., when there are some pipeline issues. But, eh, notaproblem, really.

Sometimes, I run across a bit of descriptive narrative that is so tasty that I am compelled–compelled, I say! *heh*–to savor the thing again and again, eating the self-renewing tidbit up in tiny bites, over and over. This is the meat of one such tasty tidbit:

He’d never been in this room before; this was where they took people who had done things that were just short of murder or robbery, a darkly somber room that left no doubt in the prisoner’s mind that he had trespassed on at least five of the Ten Commandments.

…just short of murder or robbery, of course. *heh* But that still leaves eight commandments…

That’s just too good. Economical, evocative, expanding the scene on multiple levels. Fun.

Update: ‘nother one; this one is from a John Lambshead short story, As Black As Hell:

Chaos theory insists that a single flap of a butterfly’s wing in China can change the direction of a hurricane in the West Indies, sparing one island to devastate another. This may or may not be true. Certainly Chinese butterflies continue to irresponsibly flap, giving absolutely no thought to the welfare of their relatives in the Americas.