brykmantra.com

Quick birthday wrapup, starting with some of the cards:

This was the first birthday in recent memory that I’ve actually gone to work, but since I’m vacation-day-poor these days, I had little choice. Besides, the reason I usually take off is so we can go to a huge blockbuster movie, of which, for about the past decade, I’ve always been able to find one opening on my birthday.

Last year, for example, was the granddaddy of all such premieres: The last Star Wars movie ever opened on my 50th birthday.

Is that a cosmic coincidence or what?

It’s not all Jedi’s and roses, though; two years ago, the epic premiere was the big steaming pile that was Troy; at least in 2003 it was X-Men 2.

But this year, duty called, and besides, I wouldn’t have been able to comfortably sit through a three-hour movie.

Anyway, The DaVinci Code is getting some pretty disappointing reviews — the Dallas Morning News review headline said, “OPUS DULL” — but we probably would have seen it anyway, and fairly enjoyed it. It had Tom Hanks, after all, who seems to be universally liked, at least in our house, which is all that counts really, plus Ian McKellen (so if you didn’t like this movie, you could just at least pretend he was playing Magneto working undercover, setting up a really esoteric subplot which will figure into next week’s X-Men movie), plus Paul Bettany (the doctor from Master and Commander, yay!), looking like he fell into a big barrel of flour.

So you see, there’s something in it for everyone.

Bonus points: It’s controverserific! It’s blasphabulous!

Instead, though of the usual routine, though, I worked (well, sort of) until 2:30, and later we ate at Jinbeh Japanese Steakhouse, where, in addition to the entertainment value of the flying knives and ginger-oil fireballs and the Amazing Acrobatic shrimp tails, we also got into a nice conversation with a couple at our table.

Bill and Claire were their names, insurance claims professionals who came here from Michigan four years ago, and my wife mentioned that besides the fact that this was my birthday, it was our first outing since my surgery, and of course, dark human curiosity being what it is, the were eager for more details, so we regaled them with the thrill-a-minute story of how my wife fainted and broke her ankle within minutes of seeing me for the first time after surgery, which is also a sure bet to astound and mystify.

Afterwards, Karlyn offered to take me to Best Buy and buy me a birthday present; we went and browsed, but we didn’t actually get anything. I told here that I already have more stuff — especially computer related stuff, after my recent Ebay binges — than I have time to put to use. She feels bad that she didn’t get me anything this year, but I reminded her that, back in February, when I splurged on my MP3 player prior to going into the hospital, that it was my early birthday present to myself, and that I couldn’t ignore that fact and ask for more presents just three months later, because that kind of commitment is what separates us from swamp animals.

Sometimes it’s the ONLY thing.

Anyway: It was my birthday, now it’s over, and we didn’t do much out of the ordinary, but after the past few mnths I’ve had, I’m just glad to be alive, so the birthday part is really incidental.

So much for a quick wrapup …

… yada yada yada yada, Happy Birthday to meeeeeee …

Okay, that’s enough, move along, nothing to see here …

Hey, it worked so well last night, so let’s see if we can knock this one out in only five minutes:

1. If you’ve tried to leave a comment and it hasn’t showed up yet, it’s because the comment-spam bastards have succeeded where the trolls have failed: I’m having to have ALL comments held for moderation. Please be patient and I’ll approve yours soon.

It seems some of those spam jackasses have launched a massive attack — dozens of comments each for sleazy online industries like casinos, mortgage lenders, and dubious “pharmacies”, and they’re hitting lots of blogs.

There’s a special place in Hell for those people (probably right under Hitler’s outhouse), but in the meantime, they’re motivating me to install antispam measures, and after that I’ll remove the moderation requirement for you humans.

2. I got my laptop on the wireless network! Finally! It’s running Windows 98, so everything you try to do is like pulling teeth, but I haven’t been able to get the wi-fi working on it for over a year. So I finally sprung for name brand equipment (all of it Netgear), on Ebay where I got it cheaper, and everything fell into place.

It figures that I finally get ready for backyard computing on the same day that our temperatures are becoming entrenched in the 90s or higher and will stay there during the days for at least the next 4 months.

Anyway, I promised a shoutout to the Ebay seller that sold me the wireless router when I got it working, so here’s a big ol’ HELLO to Dulciprajna!

3. We had visitors from the High Holy Corporate Office today, including the Number Two Person In Charge, so I took the opportunity to tell her that I really, really like our health insurance company (United Health Care). A year ago I was indifferent, but now, seeing how they covered my surgery and hospital stay without a single hiccup, I’m really, really grateful for how they take care of us on the big things.

4. I got gas in my wife’s car tonight, because that’s just the kind of guy I am. While I was getting in the car, her rear view mirror fell off, plus the back of the driver’s seat scalded my back, because, as it turns out, my wife never uses her windshield shade any more because it’s falling apart.

So I made an extra step at Auto Zone for a new shade, and some windshield mirror glue, becaue that’s just the kind of guy I am.

But I have to try again tomorrow, because couldn’t get the mirror to stick to the glass.

Because that’s just the kind of guy I am.

5. Okay, this isn’t wrapping up in the short time I had hoped, so let’s wrap it up with a link to my post from a year ago today, and you’ll see what I’ll have going on tomorrow …

Let’s see if I can sum things up really quickly:

I got my used wireless router today and, with some difficulty, got it working — although I’m still having trouble getting on the net wirelessly on my Win98 laptop; I stayed dedicated to my evening lung walk tonight, even though it meant missing the first 15 minutes of Lost; speaking of Lost, Sawyer came up with two great nicknames for Kate and Hurley: Pippi Longstocking and Grape Ape (Ha! Grape Ape!); I finally thought to look for episodes of my newest favorite show on YouTube tonight, and sure enough they were there!

Finally, 2 things: Today at work I was on the giving end of our periodic Passing of the Shirt ceremony, after being in possession of it for just short of a year; remind me to go into detail.

And finally: Re American Idol tonight: Worst … Final 2 … Ever.

I mean, I like Taylor, I think he’s a really nice guy, but still …

I first heard this yesterday on NPR: BBC News was supposed to interviewing an expert named Guy Kewney for commentary on the recent Apple Computers vs. Apple Records trademark ruling, but they grabbed the wrong “Guy” out of the wrong reception area:

(Click here if you can’t see the embedded player.)

You have to admit the “expert” did a better job at improvising that a lot of us might have.

Bonus points: This is pointing out another crack in the veneer of the infallibility of news organizations in general: Some sources (including NPR) said that the fake expert was at the BBC to interview for an IT job, which would have made him at least partially qualified to answer, but others have said that he’s a cabbie who was waiting on a fare.

Either way, you can see the interviewer begin to stammer repeatedly before cutting to a remote reporter.

More bonus points: In reading up on this, I learned a new phrase of British mockery: “The wrong kind of snow”:

The wrong kind of snow is a euphemism for failures in British railway transport. During a snowy period in the early 1980s many railway services were cancelled despite the recent installation of highly sophisticated Norwegian snow-clearing equipment. The spokesman for British Rail called on by the BBC to explain this problem lamented that it was “the wrong kind of snow”.

That reminds me of a comment I heard a few years ago, that the U.S. Department of Defense doesn’t want to develop a better mousetrap, it wants worse mice.

Ha! Worse mice!

1. It was 10 years ago today on Seinfeld that George Costanza’s fiance Susan Ross died from an infection from licking envelopes — because George insisted on getting the cheaper kind, which turned out to be deadly.

The only reason I bring this up is that one of my acquaintances on Flickr, a devotee of bad album cover art, has started a Flickr pool to commemorative this ill-fated fictional character, and has invited me to join.

I don’t have anything to contribute, but hey, I couldn’t resist joinining … ha!

2, Grey’s Anatomy had their 2-hour season finale tonight, after the warm-up episode last night, so that makes for a powerful block of TV. I’m glad Callie is staying with George (mainly because we wouldn’t see her character as much if they broke up), but Meredith is even more annoying because she can’t shake Dr. McDopey.

But: Dr. Bailey was wonderful as usual, and Boston Public’s Loretta Devine made another great appearance as the wife of the chief of surgery. I’m glad she’s at least a semi-regular.

3. I’ve been working on my silly video project again tonight, and I’m really getting into it. Tonight I designed title cards for the closing credits; it’s been over a year since I did it for the training videos I produced for work, but I’m getting back into the hang of it pretty easy.

Tomorrow I’ll finish the cards, then try to finish the video footage. So far, two of my video editing programs don’t have any capability to run footage backwards — you’d think that would be standard! — but I’ve still got a couple left that I can try. If all else fails, I know that my four year old JASC Animation Shop 3 can reverse video, but I’m not sure how well it will fit in with what I edited in Sony Vegas.

Oh well, it’s still coming together nicely. Hopefully I can tidy up one of my music experiments and lay that down as a soundtrack by the weekend.

Okay, so instead of composing a coherent post, here’s a quick outline of what I’m doing instead tonight, which is basically trying to congeal all my diverse creative energies into some kind of tangible result.

As I was saying to my wife this morning as we were discussing our different creative approaches (do you have that kind of discussion with your significant other? Just another way in which I consider myself lucky) that while most artists feel stifled by any kind of creative constraints, however minor, I thrive on limitations. The fewer creative options I have, the better.

See, my creativity is like a gas, like helium; it needs the confines of a balloon to be released into. Otherwise, it dissipates into the air.

To rephrase: The quickest way to neutralize my creativity is to tell me to do anything I want.

So here I am, with so many creative tools at my disposal, and so many story concepts to work on, and I’ve been immobilized.

So in the past couple of days I’ve been trying to work to counteract that tendency: Today I’ve been polishing and expanding a very short stop-action animation I did a couple of years ago, and I’m hoping to have it complete — with music and title cards — by the end of this week.

Also, I’ve always had trouble getting some of my creatively talented co-workers to help me think of which projects to work on, so, in an effort to kind of jumpstart a joint project, I’ve come up with an overall project name whose acronym incorporates a veiled reference to the name of the company we work for.

And if none of them come aboard, well, that part of the acronym can stand for something else even more appropriate to the video projects I plan to work on.

By the way, the name came to me on my lung-walk Friday evening; it’s amazing what a doctor-ordered stroll around the area can do for your creativity.

Anyway, like I said, I felt that I needed to just finish something, even if it is a goofy little piece of fluff, and get it uploaded to YouTube, just to get past my mental creative block, and to get some public feedback, and to inspire some friends that I plan to approach to join in.

So I chose this old animation over the hours and hours of old MiniDV tapes I have lying around, and over throwing together new footage, and now we’ll just see where my freshen editing skills lead my brain after this.

Maybe it’s the fact that for most of two months I wasn’t able to do much besides watch TV, but for some reason, as you may have noticed, I now have a fascination with video (plus, posting vids is easier now with YouTube’s embedded player, and a whole lot easier than rambling on endlessly, which I seem to be doing now …)

OKAY SO ANYWAY: I found this on Gigglechick, and I’m mainly posting because my wife will get a kick out of it:

(Here’s the the full page link in case you have trouble with the embedded player.)

It’s pretty funny, and I can overlook the fact that he gets a lot of stuff from the 70s and 80s out of order, but except for The Twist, he completely skipped the 60s. Come on, where’s the Monkey? Where’s the Watusi? Where’s the Swim, the Jerk, the Frug, the Mash Potato, the Surfer Stomp, the Pony, and the B0ney Maroney?

The Sixties were the Golden Age of rock dancing, with new dances springing up like the newly popular hemp plants.

One major reason for the sudden flourishing of new dance styles, besides the fact that rock was now 10 years old and ready for a new direction, was due to the booming popularity of surf music and beach parties, and the fact that dancing on sand necessitated less stepping around and thus more upper-body gyration.

And the next thing you know there’s a whole generation of dirty hippies hopped up on reefer and jerking around like a bunch of wild animals.

And the guy in the video above left out that chapter entirely.

Oh yeah, much better to spend a whole 20 seconds on ‘N Sync, right?

Anyway, you can read up a lot more about about modern popular dances at StreetSwing.

And so much for using video to avoid endless rambling …

Here’s another example of why I’m so fascinated with YouTube these days: You can easily find most videos that you’ve liked for years, but weren’t sure where to find any more, like this old 60s video of Leonard Nimoy singing “The Legend of Bilbo Baggins”:

I mentioned and linked to this video a couple of years ago on my old blog, but now I don’t have to dig out that old link. I just go to YouTube and search, and, Bonus! I also turn up cool things like this high school stop-action animation set to the same music:

You can even find stuff that’s totally unrelated, except in name (“Bilbo Bouncin’”), but that’s still pretty funny:

And finally, we come full circle to Nimoy, in the non-Hobbit “Star Trek Cribs” from G4TV:

I still can’t find the Viking Kittens on the site, but it’s only a matter of time …

(UPDATE: Here are the page links, in case the embedded viewers are not showing up for you: Bilbo Baggins (Nimoy), Bilbo Baggins (stop-action), Bilbo Bouncin’, and Star Trek Cribs.)

Some quick things:

1. If you haven’t been checking out G4TV’s coverage of E3 like I suggested, you really should, especially if you play video games.

Yesterday they had previews of the upcoming Zelda game, and it looked sharp.

2. This is big TV week, of course: Last night was the next to last Lost of the season, and man of man was it good: We got some real answers, Claire’s “psychic” appeared in someone else’s flashback, and the show returned to the mystical undertones that made it so much fun early on.

Tonight were the “supersized” finales of My Name is Earl, and The Office. I was out on my lung-walk so I haven’t watched Earl yet, but I saw most of The Office, and let me just say this: The inevitable finally happened, in the final minutes. About time.

Also, Steve Carrell’s character still needs a railroad spike through his skull. Now more than ever.

3. This one for my own future reference: Two nights ago there were a couple of tornadoes in the next county over, killing three people and obliterating 50 houses. This is Texas, so we’re fairly used to this sort of thing, but it’s still unsettling to have it hit so close.

In fact, it was 36 years ago today that a tornado killed 26 people in Lubbock, close to my hometown — just two weeks after another tornado took a huge bite out of Plainview, which was even closer to me.

At the time I had a pen pal in London (named Ingrid, BTW), and after I told her about our weather adventures, I think her preconception of people in Texas was less of cowboys on horses, and more Dorothy’s family running for shelter in the Wizard of Oz.

4. Also for future reference: Yesterday we had our twice-annual tour of our Japanese distributors — only two days after moving into our new offices, so of course it was total chaos … (Hey Vickie, remind me to tell you about the little meeting we had today about something yesterday; you’ll get a good laugh. But let’s use our home email addresses … )