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The good news is that the rain has stopped, but tonight we’re going to have our first freeze, so I had to make some time this afternoon to move my aloe plants into the garage. That was some chore since four of them are in huge pots and weigh in excess of fifty pounds. I raised all of them from “pups”, and it’s amazing to see how big they’ve become. I could have over 60 plants in pots if I would just de-pup the bigger plants, but I haven’t done that in the last couple of years. I’ll try to get around to it in the spring.

Back in June when we saw Pirates of the Caribbean 3, there was some projector-alignment problem on one of the reels (the part where they’re navigating ice floes, I believe. It was fairly minor, but it stopped the movie for a few minutes, and enough people raised a stink about it that the good people of Cinemark Legacy gave us all free passes as we left the theatre.

The passes expire on Monday and we still haven’t used them, so we’re planning on going tomorrow. We’re tentatively planning on seeing I Am Legend, with Perfect Holiday and This Christmas as Plans B & C, respectively. (And please note, for diversity acknowledgment purposes, that all three of these movies have predominantly African-American casts. Our fourth choice, American Gangster, starring Denzel Washington, has no matinee showings, otherwise it too would be in the running.)

Anyway, our tickets say “Rain Check” on them, so we’re not entirely sure that films marked “No Passes/Discount Tickets” will be eligible to use the Rain Checks; in that case, I Am Legend will be out of the quesion, but we still have the other two choices.

Whatever result, it’s a good thing that we didn’t use the tickets until after I became unemployed; it’s great to have a no-cost entertainment option.

Since posting the “I’m a Beeeeee!” video a couple of days again, I’ve been fascinated by the number of stop motion “flying” videos on You Tube; here’s a small sampling.

At about 8:20 tonight, there was a loud knock at our door — it was the local water department, telling us that there was a water main break around the corner, and that they would be shutting off water to the whole block in about 30 minutes.

We rushed into action: I washed the dishes (my wife had just made a batch of brownies), then filled pitchers and buckets with water. She got her nightly bath out of the way, then emptied the bathtub and refilled it so we would have an emergency reservoir. Plus, we already had a couple of cases of bottled water in the garage; also, as luck would have it, I loaded up on hand sanitizer early this year when it was on sale, so we’ll be able to keep out hands clean during this temporary shutoff.

It also helps that we’re able to put things in perspective: We’re thankful, first of all, that we’re not the water crew, having to work in the cold and the pouring rain; it’s been raining off and on for the past 24 hours, and it hasn’t let up all even. We appreciate what those guys are doing to try to get the neighborhood back online, waterwise.

We’re also lucky this week that we don’t live in Oklahoma, just a hop and a skip from here, in global terms; most of the state has been paralyzed this week with ice storms and power outages.

So we’re happy to flush with buckets and brush our teeth out of a bowl, and ride out this minor inconvenience.

I saw a great movie trailer on Attack of the Show today for 10,000 B.C., by the director of Independence Day (which was sort of epic, but very stupid) and The Day After Tomorrow (more epic, much less stupid).

This new movie looks more epic still, and could still be really, really stupid, but could also be really cool.

It’s like Quest for Fire meets The Mummy meets Ice Age 2 meets Apocalypto, with a little Ten Commandments and Cleopatra and Road Warrior and Aliens and Raiders of the Lost Ark and 300 thrown in, just in case it’s not blockbusterish enough.

Okay, so it does look like it could be just a tad and a half stupid, but with just enough really crazy crap going on to make the fun part of your brain overpower your logic center and sit on it while the fun part eats popcorn.

Just the massive-woolly-mammoth-stampede-over-the-pyramids alone does it for me.

Anyway, I was hoping to find a video I could embed, but I could only come up with a link, so just quit complaining, click here, and watch this incredible movie trailer.

And to make up for not having that video embedded here, here’s more totally different stuff, starting with this 10 seconds that’s a lot funnier than you would think it could be: “I’m a bee!”:

On a totally unrelated note, here are some NBC Fall Premiere promo commercials from the years 1966-1968, including two for a brand new series called Star Trek and one for The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (and if you’re a fan of NCIS, you can get a glimpse of what “Ducky” looked like 40 years ago!):

I’m totally having a flashback right now; and I really need to find one of these for Get Smart.

My wife and I have been getting more serious about music this past year, especially in the area of using electronics to make music — me with my Cakewalk software, and she with her keyboard (excuse me, I mean electronic piano).

Now she’s at the point where she wants to use her Boss BR900CD Recording Studio (pictured above) that she bought about two years ago, but which has been a formidable mother-duck to learn how to operation.

So this weekend we decided that today we would sit down and watch the instructional DVD that came with the unit, and try to learn how to operate the beast.

It was a challenge, since the Australian accented instructor talked a mile a minute, and everything was a tidal wave of jargon, either musical or technical. Fortunately, we were able to glean enough vital information (my sequencer software experience helped, for my part), so that she was able to knock out a quick recording of a Norah Jones song tonight.

There’s still a lot to learn, though, so I have the feeling that we’ll be schooled on that monster for some time to come.

Anyway, click here to see the much larger view, in all its fine detail.

Three news items from friends, ranked from gladdest to saddest:

1. This isn’t actually news, but I had mentioned that Yay Kim was participating in National Solo Album month, and, for a limited time, you can download and listen to her finished work!

I listened to it last night, and it’s great — you wouldn’t know (if you didn’t already) that she knocked the whole thing out in just a month.

2. I don’t know if I’ve told you about my friend Nick back home. He and I had been friends since we were babies together in the church nursery, then I moved away, and for the last 20 years or so I’ve only seen him when I go home to see my mom.

Ten years ago last April, he was diagnosed with Multiple Myaloma and given six months to live. He eventually beat the cancer through a combination of chemo, radiation, and bone marrow transplant.

Then the cancer returned, so he beat it again. Six months has turned into almost 11 years now.

Still, not everything is totally peachy; something unexpected has happened:

Early this morning, his house burned to the ground, and he and his family escaped with only the underwear they had on.

Bet that’s not what you thought I was going to say, is it?

But anyway, my mom says they’re all okay. His parents have a big house, and lots of people in town are pitching in to help.

First order of business: Getting everybody some pants.

Then, shirts.

Seriously, though: He’s taking it all in stride, and compared to two bouts with cancer, this is probably nothing to him.

Dodging death is his specialty, it seems.

3. Our good blogging pal Pamibe‘s sweet chubby little dachshund Zoe passed away late last month, and she wasn’t even ten years old.

And you know us: Somebody losing a pet, even if we’ve never met the person or canine in question, is often sadder than when a close friend loses a family member, especially for my wife.

Because let’s face it, dogs are better than people. It’s a proven fact.

Anyway, go check out little Zoe’s pictures, read her memorial, and grieve with the rest of us.

I couldn’t post anything else today, because nothing else could compete with this:

Seriously, click here to view the larger version in its full glory.

How would you like to encounter that in a dark alley?

Yes, that’s right, three things:

1. One of many great lines by Tina Fey from tonight’s 30 Rock:

“I call the movie ‘Risky Business’ ‘Risky It’, because ‘It’ means ‘Business’!”

Another great line, after Alec Baldwin says, “We’re not colleagues, we’re lovers,” she says, “Ooh, I’m uncomfortable with the word ‘lover’ — unless it’s between the words ‘Meat’ and ‘Pizza’.”

2. The New York Times had an article today about all the wacky-named website names that have popped up in the past year: “Doostang. Wufoo. Bliin. Thoof. Bebo. Meebo. Meemo. Kudit. Raketu. Etelos. Iyogi. Oyogi. Qoop. Fark. Kijiji. Zixxo. Zoogmo.”

Ha ha — “Thoof”!

I supposed they just threw in “Fark”, which has been around for about 10 years now, just to demonstrate how clueless the Lumbering Dinosaur Media (LDM) is after all this time, but they do have a point: Every combination of letters that actually spells something is already taken.

Heck, why do you think I picked a meaningless compound-word anagram of my name for my own blog five years ago? Because there was nothing left that’s not stupid.

3. And finally, just because I can’t go a day with video, dogs, or Christmas, here’s a Pomeranian Christmas video!:

Okay, the Christmas spirit is finally starting to kick in — with an emphasis on starting. Let’s give it a little jolt with a mess of holiday videos:

I mentioned last week how TV commercials are a great resource for discovering new music, so here’s a nice song on the new Target ads:

Yes, 12 Days of Christmas is one of the most annoying songs, but it gets a lot more tolerable when it’s done in animated-Bollywood style:

And speaking of things that were barely tolerable for years, but are pretty hilarious when given a contemporary spin, check out how much the ancient Charlie Brown Christmas improves when the voices from Scrubs are dubbed in (Bonus points for having Linus as Dr. Cox!):

Hey, remember the old “Band-Aid” Do They Know It’s Christmas Video? Can you believe it’s been 24 years? Good times …

I’m proud of myself: The first time I saw the new AT&T Wireless – Gingerbread Christmas commercials, I recognized two of the voices as Steve Buscemi and Norm McDonald. (Dang, I’m good.) I couldn’t find an embeddable video, but you can click here to watch it.

And finally, since this is International Ninja Day, here’s are three Ninja Christmas videos!:

As I’ve mentioned before, I subscribe to the email alerts from the campaigns of all the major presidential candidates, Democrat or Republican (but not Kucinich, let’s not go nuts), so I was amused when this appeared in my Inbox from Joe Biden today:

Wow, I’d pay money to see that!

But it’s probably just one more of those empty campaign promises …

Here are a bunch of mostly unrelated things, many of them I’ve been saving up for a while, waiting for a chance to post unrelated things …

So here we go:

I didn’t post this with my last post because the video part isn’t much — it’s just the end credits of the video game Portal — but what’s important is the excellent song, “Still Alive”, sung by Ellen McLain (a voice actor in Portal, as well as the other two “Orange Box” games) and written by Jonathan Coulton, who also wrote the song that became the theme for the G4TV animated series, Code Monkeys.

Anyway: “Still Alive” is excellent, so run the video and listen to it:

Speaking of good music, we’ve been watching The Next Great American Band on Fox (mainly because there’s not much else TV on on Friday nights), and except for the mediocre “artists” they make the bands cover (especially Billy Joel and Rod Stewart), it’s pretty good. We’re especially impressed by Light of Doom, a hard-rocking group of kids with a great work ethic and a healthy respect for the classic rock acts.

Hey Spook, Here’s the business we should have gotten into: Selling tumbleweeds for $25 a pop. This woman was learning HTML a few years ago, and had to pick a subject to build a test site around, so she constructed a fake tumbleweed-selling site, offering the rolling shrubs at $25 each.

That is, it was fake, until people (Yankees?) with more money that sense started sending in orders …

Now she’s making a good living at it.

Maybe you can figure out how to sell sandstorms.

Remember, target Yankees.

One interesting by-product of the writer’s strike is the fact that the Tonight Show is showing reruns from Leno’s first year on the job. It’s interesting seeing Jay with dark hair and wide lapels, trying to make Johnny Carson’s old formula work.

His current strategy fits him much better, standing closer to the audience, and interspersing the monologue with skits and props.

Carson’s routine wouldn’t work for everybody — in fact, there were a lot of times it didn’t work for him.

What are the odds that Evel Knievel would die of something as mundane as diabetes and idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis? He spent almost half his life doing crazy dangerous stunts, but death couldn’t claim him during that time.

Just goes to show you: You never can tell …

Do you have too much time on your hands? This person does: Cowscapes.