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Those Frustrating Brit Mystery Shows

You know the ones I mean: generally well-acted, pretty darned good (as in superior to most cable fare on US TV) production values, great music and sound, scenery and settings to die for, interesting faces and voices, etc. OTOH, pretty predictable plots, lots of evidence why Britain used to be “GREAT Britain” (with tons of pointers for those who want to emasculate the US as well *sigh* ) and far too much use of “classic” whodunit camera techniques. And what’s with the stupid four-episode “seasons”? That’s pretty crappy, guys. Just sayin’.

So many good things hampered by a few glaring faults. Better than what I can find on cable TV, though.

Still… Positives include Inspector Lewis, the spinoff from the long success of the Inspector Morse books and the series. Sometimes I want to say, “Take Inspector Lewis, PLEASE,” but usually it’s really quite good on the whole. An example: the theme music. Just wonderful stuff, but I could swear one motif in the theme is outright “borrowing” of a Beethoven motif. That in itself is only to the good, of course (heck, I’ve “borrowed” a motif here and there for development into something else, myself), if I am correct (just noticed it–yeh, I’m kinda slow *heh*–and haven’t replayed the section I’m thinking of in my mind’s ear, but it seems so at first thought), but, regardless, that it even evokes such a thought is an indication of the quality of the music.

And that reminds me: it’s probably time for my quarterly refreshment of Beethoven’s oeuvre in my mind’s ear (it used to need refreshment less often for memory replay, but my mind’s ear just ain’t what it used ta be, ya know? :-)). Fortunately, just about every recording of every Beethoven work I’ve been able to lay my hands on is now stored on my Amazon Cloud Drive (as well as available to load en masse onto a pocket-sized mp3 player) and accessible to listen to almost anywhere on multiple devices.

So, thanks to the prod from Inspector Lewis, I’ll be “seeing” the aural landscapes of Beethoven’s mind’s ear a bit more directly over the next couple of weeks’ time. Thanks, Robbie.

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Why Did the Politician Survive a Fire?

Too many feathers; not enough tar.

(Now, that’s just bad planning.)

Actually, the post title could be an existential cry of pain. “Why, WHY, WHY did the %$#@!% politician survive the fire?!?!?” (Where “%$#@!%” is a statement of a theological probability *heh*)

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As Long As I’m Having Fun…

…being disgusted by M$’s “No, You may NOT easily turn off the Metro interface in Windows 8 and MUST use your desktop/notebook as though it were a kiddie tablet,” approach, I decided to (finally) get around to in stalling ReactOS in a VM.

Pretty nice. From the page linked above,

ReactOS® is a free, modern operating system based on the design of Windows® XP/2003. Written completely from scratch, it aims to follow the Windows-NT® architecture designed by Microsoft from the hardware level right through to the application level. This is not a Linux based system, and shares none of the unix architecture.

The main goal of the ReactOS project is to provide an operating system which is binary compatible with Windows. This will allow your Windows applications and drivers to run as they would on your Windows system. Additionally, the look and feel of the Windows operating system is used, such that people accustomed to the familiar user interface of Windows® would find using ReactOS straightforward. The ultimate goal of ReactOS is to allow you to remove Windows® and install ReactOS without the end user noticing the change.

It pretty much works as advertised in that lil blurb, even in its Alpha development stage. Oh, installing sound drivers, etc., is a bit of a pain, but no more so than in many previous versions of Windows and less so than in most. Sharing folders bi-directionally in the Host-Client relationship of the VirtualBox setup of ReactOS doesn’t work well, but for most things I have plenty of workarounds for that.

It’s pretty nice; an experience that’s kind of halfway between Win2K Pro (the best desktop Windows pre Win7, IMO) and XP (the second-worst desktop Windows pre-Vista, IMO *heh*). Now, let’s just see how Vistart works (or doesn’t) in ReactOS… 🙂

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Is M$ Trying to Kill Its Desktop Market?

OK, so my experience with the Windows 8 Beta last Fall wasn’t all that positive. Heck, I was offended by the crappy Metro interface and disgusted by the steps backward into less usability in the “Desktop” interface. But, glutton for punishment that I am, I downloaded and installed a copy of the Windows 8 “Consumer Preview” (just another beta).

*ack!* The Metro interface is still just as annoying in a desktop/notebook environment and the “Desktop” interface? Worse. Less usable than the Developer Preview last Fall! Heck, I couldn’t even (as easily) get the hack to turn the Metro piece of crap off to work in this version… Not that it makes such a difference since the “Desktop” interface is less capable and user-friendly than the Win7 GUI. Heck, it’s even worse than the recent Ubuntu Unity GUI, and that takes some real effort to accomplish, as at least that GUI is usable!

Is M$ trying to lose the desktop and notebook market?

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Kitchy or Just Dumb?

Not a lot to choose from between the two, and not much wiggle room at all in labeling this creepy idea. If I were to see something like this in real life, I’d be sorely tempted to dope slap a couple of “idjits”:

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“Balance” from the Hivemind

So, the usual Hivemind and barking mad leftards are in an uproar for the blowhard Limbaugh’s characterization of a confessed libertine as a “slut”.

“slut: noun an immoral or dissolute woman”

Seems fair. In my opinion, it closely resembles (closely resembles” as in “seems to be a perfect fit for”) Sandra Fluke’s own confession of her “need” to have a Roman Catholic educational institution finance the means for her to have “protected” sex when, where and however she pleases with whatever (and however many) partners she can get to have sex with her.

Seems like she confessed to at the very least “needing” to engage in sluttish behavior to me.

So what’s the problem? It’s “discourteous” or “ungentlemanly” or some such thing according to standards rejected by the Hivemind and associated barking mad leftards? Not as applied to their own speech standards which approve of publicly voicing rape fantasies and worse about such people as Sarah Palin and Laura Ingraham, while calling them by much, much more vulgar, even obscene, terms.

Of course that’s the problem. Their “standards” are simply this: “We can say and do anything we damned well please, and anyone who disagrees with us can say only what we allow them to.” If that were not the case, then Hivemind members like Keith Olbermann, Bill Maher, Mike Malloy and a rogue’s gallery of others would have been tarred, feathered and run out of the business long ago. Sample a little typical “rational” and “civil” discourse from the Hivemind’s Malloy, as but one small example of thousands:

Get that. Malloly celebrates the deaths of tornado victims and mocks religious beliefs he deems to be held by people in the so-called “Bible Belt”–which happens, in his tirade, to coincide with the locations of most of those killed by recent tornadoes.

Typical of the nasty, hate-filled, hate-spewing leftard Hivemind. In fact, it’s so normative that people are largely inured to it, it seems, and simply accept their hate-filled spew as normal speech. Have someone push back with an accurate description of an anointed, manufactured hero/ine of the Hivemind, though, and there will be hell to pay, as the blowhard Limbaugh discovered.

BTW, Rush Limbaugh a “blowhard”? Yep. Anyone who will apologize for simply speaking what would seem to the truth to any rational observer is a blowhard.

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Not Entirely, but…

…it does seem as though the way things are trending that all the shows worth watching will eventually be limited to Brit TV. Spy seems to be another one that’s worlds and away better than anything on American cable TV. Sadly, only six episodes. I’ll have to wait for the Fall “season” for more.

Oh, well. Time to cancel the TV portion of our cable subscription? Have to examine the package discount, but maybe.