brykmantra.com

A few quick notes before my birthday is over: Thanks to everyone who left birthday wishes in the comments of the previous post; and this would be a good time to say that I recently started having to moderate all comments, not because of any stalkers or comment-flamers, but because of the damn stupid spambot bastards. I intend to implement some more of the spamproofing tools, but until then, your comments won’t show up until I notice that they’re waiting for moderation. … It was a good birthday, as birthdays go. I went to see Spiderman 3, while my wife was at work, and I was so underwhelmed that I left about half an hour before it was over — I just felt like my time could be spent better elsewhere. … And that elsewhere was at home, meeting my wife so we could go out to eat at my favorite type of birthday restaurant, a Japanese steakhouse. Then we came home and I worked on my garage computer for a while, then I took a bunch of pictures of my birthday cards and stuff, which I uploaded to Flickr, so check ‘em out. I also uploaded a bunch of pictures of Molly and Bristol, so check those out if nothing else. Some of the shots of Bristol are particularly nice … That may not seem like much of a birthday, but remember that I’m just skimming over quickly here … A had a nice birthday surprise, BTW: I noticed in my visitor logs that I’ve gotten traffic from Wired Blogs — it turns out that they used, and gave me credit (and a blog link) for one of the photos I’ve had on Flickr: It was a picture of one of my mom’s medical monitors from her stent surgery in December of 2005, and they were using it in an article about when former Attorney General John Ashcroft was in the hospital! Pretty weird, huh? Anyway, I got credit for it, and it’s the most prominent use to date (out of about four instances) of my Flickr work by other people — and four uses is also not bad for somebody using a five-year-old Sony Cybershot … Also: Another birthday present for myself (we don’t usually get each other major presents, since we can buy our own much better) is some music software, as I mentioned last week. I’ll talk more about that when it comes in on Wednesday or so …

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that, as an early birthday present, I bought myself the DVD-ROM with over 50 years of complete issues of Mad Magazine. That has to have been the best 50 dollars I’ve ever spent: Not only is the humor and the artwork great entertainment, but it’s also a detailed time capsule of the history of the last half of the 20th Century. It also happens to be, for me, an album of the times from my junior high and (most of my) high school years. I had forgotten about a lot of the news, music, and entertainment items from back then, but it’s all coming back now … and I’ve only browsed through a fraction of the issues.

More to the point, though, I picked these two covers to highlight today. They’re both June issues, but they were released in May. The top cover was the first issue of Mad as a humor magazine, instead of the comic book it had been in its first three years of life, and that issue came out the same month that I was born. Coincidence? In fact, a lot of major things happened in the months leading up to or following my birth: The retirement of Churchhill, the death of Einstein, the beginning of the Daley dynasty in Chicago, Ray Kroc opening his first McDonald’s, the introduction of the polio vaccine, the opening of Disneyland, the premiere of Gunsmoke. the signing of the Warsaw Pact — I hereby credit my existence for the good stuff, and absolve myself of any responsibility for the bad.

ANYWAY: The lower issue here, the Clockwork Orange parody, was released in the month that I turned 18 and graduated from high school.

It is shown here only for reference; anything that happened around that time, for good or ill, was completely independent of my presence on this planet.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

ANYWAY: Tomorrow (Saturday the 19th) is my birthday. Please try to remain civilized and law-abiding during any celebrations in my honor.

Thank you in advance.

1. Last night my computer stopped booting up normally, but at least it went to safe mode, so I wasn’t worried about loss of data. A system restore did the trick. (FYI, it was a Roxio app that was the culprit.)

2. I stopped being ticked off at that, but started again at something else: I have to work Sunday afternoon! Of all weekends!

3. So why did I say, “Of all weekends!”? You’ll know on Saturday …

4. It was on the 20th of April that I started back, at least temporarily, to blogging every day. I wanted to do it for at least the rest of the month (mission accomplished), and, if possible, for a full month (until this Saturday), and I just have to post two more days to do that.

Why this Saturday? Again, you’ll know then …

Just when I start to get optimistic about this country, something like this happens: Melinda Doolitle, the best singer ever on American Idol, didn’t make the final two.

The show is officially a sham.

No offense to Blake, or especially to Jordin, both of whom would have made excellent winners in any other season, but for Melinda to not win or even come in second is a travesty.

Simon Cowell was shaking his head sadly when the decision was announced, and I know what he was thinking: Nobodoy will ever take the show — or this year’s winner — seriously.

My wife and I are both nauseous; Melinda isn’t just a singer, she’s a force of nature. She deserved better than this.

We’re fairly sure that she’ll still do well professionally, but it’s ridiculous that she doesn’t get to wear the title, too.

This rapid-fire thing has worked well, let’s see if we can waste less than 5 minutes on this tonight:

Jerry Falwell died today; say what you will about him, but compared to some of those other guys, the hypocrites (Jimmy Swaggart) and the nutjobs (Pat Robertson) and the attention-seeking blowhards (Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton), I think Falwell’s heart was almost in the right place. Too bad his mouth wasn’t always so wise … How about that Melinda on American Idol, huh? No matter what kind of music she sings, she blows me away. I hope she’s the next Aretha + Tina + Whitney X 10. … Lost season finale tomorrow! Man oh man oh man! … I haven’t been trying my Sonar 5 demo. because I’ve been tweaking some old songs on Kinetic 2 — I’ve discovered a way to manipulate the marimba sound into a fuzzy lead guitar sound! Ha! My wife says, “It’s a shame you haven’t gotten your $60 worth out of that program.”

She’s being sarcastic.

Wonder where she learned that from …

A few things:

We had yet another thunderstorm tonight, with fierce winds and good-sized hail, and the alley running full with water. We’ve actually had more storms in the area lately that have gone around us, but we’ve still gotten hit a lot. I’m actually glad that we’re having a soggy spring, because our summers always tend to be really hot and dry. We need our reservoirs starting out full … Heroes is on — woo-hoo! Only one more episode until the season finale, and I hope they break Sylar down into his component atoms … By the way, one of the other senatorial candidates on that show is Kate Snow — the same name as the co=anchor on Good Morning America. Coincidence? Also: The sword repairman that Hiro went to see tonight was named Mr. Claremont — Chris Claremont was the Marvel Comics writer famous for revamping and resurrecting the X-Men franchise in the mid-Seventies. Again: Coincidence? In this case: I think not. … I downloaded a demo for Sonar 5.1. It’s actually 6.0 that I’m looking at buying, but this will give me a good idea of what I’m working with …

Okay, see y’all tomorrow …

Thanks to everyone who have left kind comments on the music I posted a couple of days ago; I realize that it’s not great as music goes, but it’s got a nice positive sound to it, and it’s still just part of my practice efforts. It’ll probably be a while before I have something I’m really proud of. For any of you who haven’t listened to it yet, here’s a warning that I’ll be taking the link down soon, so you might want to act quickly … The Survivor season finale was tonight; I used to really be into that show, but it’s gotten to be the same old thing, so we hadn’t seen a single episode of this season before tonight. I was glad to see an all non-white final four, and an all-black final three, and I was glad that the 54-year-old Asian computer engineer did so well in the challenges. It might have actually been worth watching this year. … Wait, back to the music: Hey Kim, are you familiar with Cakewalk Sonar? I’m thinking about buying it, and I thought maybe you’ve seen it in action, or heard about it?

And finally, here’s another video from Acceptable.TV: A user-created “series” called L33t Haxxors (that’s hackspeak for “Elite Hackers”). It’s pretty good, because they make fun of every bad movie cliche about computers (a lot of them from “Hackers”, appropriately enough, so watch and enjoy:

Several quick things:

I was surfing between several movies tonight on cable: League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Lord of the Rings 3, Kill Bill 2, The Big Lebowski, Cold Mountain, SNL, and, now, Wild Wild West. They always put the interesting stuff on all at once. … Speaking of SNL, tonight they had one of the funniest lines I’ve heard anywhere in a long time: (On the Fringe Candidates Presidential Debate) “And from the Black Vampire Party, the Reverend Hershel P. Chocula.” Heh! That is funny on so many levels … We watched Music & Lyrics tonight; it was surprisingly not bad … And finally: Speaking of Cold Mountain, Have they run out of American actors to play Americans? We’ve been seing example and example of this over the past year, and now there’s this apparently straight-to-video (or barely in theatres, because I’ve never heard of it) feature starring two notable non-Yanks Liam Neeson and Pierce Brosnan. I’m mentioning Seraphim Falls only because my wife likes Brosnan, so she can click on the link above and watch the trailer, which looks interesting.

And American.

Thirty-seven years ago today, three things happened: The Beatles released “The Long and Winding Road”, which would be their last U.S. #1 single; an F5 tornado hit Lubbock and killed 26 people; and actor Nicky Katt (Boston Public, Boiler Room) was born.

Was this just some kind of freaky coincidence? Yeah, that’s what they want you to think …

Seriously, though: I remember what I was doing that day, the day Lubbock got hit. I was living 50 miles away, finishing up my freshman year in high school, and about halfway through Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes.

I read it by candle light that night, in my aunt and uncle’s basement, when our electricity went out.

I never finished the book, and never read it after that night.

It was spooky enough as it was, and after that night, I was too creeped out to go back to it.

Have you got any weird memories like that?

I keep talking about how I don’t have time to blog because I’m working on music, but I never have anything to show for it.

So, here:

Listen to this song, please (you might have to right-click, then left-click Save As), and kindly leave a comment.