For the first time in many years, I’m very satisfied with how things went in yesterday’s election. For the first time in many years, I don’t feel like I went to the polling place to piss in the wind.
More later. I’m gonna scoop up my cats and go to sleep now.… Read more
Willie Nelson says we have a lot to learn from horses, and I find it very difficult to disagree with the man. I get to spend a lot of time with a number of horses who have been spared the slaughter yard, and I can’t name one of them who qualified as “problem children.” The reader responses below the main article are alternately touching and (IMHO) mind-bogglingly unenlightened. The one person who said that old, crippled or unruly horses need to be sold to slaughter is so far from seeing the point of the legislation that I’m not sure they can find it with a map. This legislation prevents kills for food, or sale for foreign kills for food. It does not rule out humane euthanasia with the assistance of a veterinarian in the event that the animal can look forward to no quality of life. (And yes, you do bury them, out in the pasture.) The legistlation does not cast aspersions on other cultures that consume horse meat; it just ensures that the United States won’t be contributing to that particular market, which is as much as we can do.
I never thought I’d be getting behind Willie Nelson on the political spectrum, but this is one case where I feel the man speaks truth. Your mileage may, of course, vary, but in that case, you need to come with me sometime and feed some big fuzzy faces.… Read more
The release date for the Doctor Who soundtrack is December 4th; there are more details here. This will conclude what’s actually been a very good music year for me – for someone who sits out most everything that actually charts these days, I’ve still been picking up a lot of music this year. (Which, by the way, the L.E.O. CD I mentioned a while back is excellent, definitely worth the wait, and even better than the streaming samples would lead one to believe.)
Sorry I’m running late on theLogBook.com site update for this week; this morning I had a killer fever kick in and all of a sudden, if it was attached to my body, it hurt. I wound up taking one of the pain pills I was prescribed on Saturday, thinking “I’ll get up again around 2 o’ clock and finish the update.” Nope, I didn’t get up until it was time to go to work. I still need to ship out recent eBay wins, and a small piece of paper tells me that a shiny round thing containing the elder Mr. Finn’s latest opus has arrived, but these things didn’t get done today. :-/
I got a spam in my e-mail tonight that isn’t even worth joking about; it entreats recipients to join the craze that is currently seeing “two blogs started every second” because they could be “blogging for dollars!” 🙄 I would go into why this isn’t going to work, but then I realized: I wrote that editorial over seven years ago. (In fact, you can see it right here.) At the time, the subject was quick-start web sites to sell more or less generic merchandise, but the same thinking is just as applicable to this situation: now we’re going to run into a bunch of spammy blogs (as if there aren’t already enough of those around, just aggregating feeds from other sources) that have no reason to exist other than that their creators have been misled into thinking they’re going to Get! Rich! Quick! If you’re going to blawg all over the place, do it because you enjoy it. If you can reap some ancillary benefits from it beyond that, cool, but there has to be a reason for it to be there – and a reason for people to want to read it, because after all, they’re the ones who are supposedly supporting you.… Read more
I woke up this morning with a godawful splitting sinus headache. That’s more than just a little bit unusual, because I don’t do sinus headaches. Not like this one, anyway – not the kind the runs from your temple down your jawline into your teeth. So off to the doctor we went – my wife took the day off to celebrate her birthday, and I felt like I was ruining it. I had gotten her a gift already, but I’d spent the past week fretting over whether or not she’d like it. Let me hit the pause button on the headache and tell that story first.
The Sasgami Salami Story
For over a year now, my wife has been going ga-ga over the very idea that there’s a tactical space combat sim based on the Honor Harrington universe. The problem with that game, however, was its price tag: in the vicinity of $80 for a hex-map-and-dice-and-markers type game. Until that is, I found the Honor Harrington Saganami Island Tactical Simulator on eBay. (For those not familiar: Saganami Island Academy = the Honorverse’s Starfleet Academy for all intents and purposes.) Only I found that game through a typo on my part – I typed “Herrington.” One item did show up though: “HONOR HERRINGTON SASGAMI ISLAND SIMULATOR.” 😆 I’m not sure anyone else ever saw that listing, and I was able to reel it in for a little under half price.
Fast Forward To A Week Ago
…when the thing actually arrived. It wasn’t shrinkwrapped, so I thought “Hey, perfect opportunity to peruse the manual. If one of us already knows how to play, we don’t have to spend all night going over the rulebook.” Wrong! This is a game for dead serious space warfare geeks – the supposedly simple one-page rule summary sheet reads like something written by an aeronautical engineering major. Actually reading the detailed rules is even more daunting. I’ve never before in my life encountered a game that required calculus. I got nervous. This wasn’t a game. This was homework.
Meanwhile, Back At The Ranch
After going to get some good drugs prescribed for me, including Allegra D, which truly screws with my head, we did the only sensible thing to do in this situation: we went shopping. We had a little bit of money to blow, so with cash in hand, we hit Books A Million, Hastings, and a few other places. At Hastings we picked up a couple more games that caught our fancy: Man Bites Dog, an amusing card game which lets you put together random news headlines that are just wrong in so many ways (Amazon link here
Rewind To The Store
While looking at “local interest books” on our shopping trip, I spotted a book titled “Steamboats And Ferries Of The White River.” Only I apparently didn’t see that at first, collapsing into giggles because I had read it as “Steamboats And Ferrets”. This became the cue to abandon the shopping expedition and head home because evidently the cocktail of prescriptions I was on was really messing with me. On the way to get on the interstate, we got caught in a mini-traffic jam, toward which I directed the following bizarre comment: “Get a move on! Are you gonna be a steamboat, or a ferret?” I guess you kinda had to be there.
Very Funny, Scotty, Now Beam The Rest Of Me Up
Another thing we both fell in love with was one of this year’s Star Trek christmas ornaments, the classic Enterprise transporter pad. It has some built-in lighting coolness to illuminate a very nice miniature diorama of the transporter pad, with Scotty, Spock and Kirk standing on the pads. Only the store display model had no Kirk. It had Kirk’s feet. “Where’s Captain Kirk?” my wife asked; I glanced over at a Star Wars Episode III ornament which was also distinctly missing someone north of their boots, and suggested that maybe he was chillin’ with Obi-Wan. Fortunately, we were able to get a complete one! 😆
We still haven’t played “Sasgami Island” yet, because I haven’t been able to get a degree in applied physics tonight, but damned if Man Bites Dog isn’t fun. My wife also picked up a book and a magazine today, but overall, this reminded me of my birthdays when I was growing up – sure, a few clothes here and there, but by and large it was all fun stuff. I’ve been officially informed that this was the Best Birthday Ever, and now I think I understand why my mom used to do birthdays the way she did.… Read more
I’m sitting here in the newsroom, glancing up at the three TVs that are always on, monitoring the major local stations, and see a promo on KNWA (the local NBC affiliate) for a site called “PreserveLocalTV.com”. The sound is down on that screen, but my interest is piqued, so I go to that site to have a look see.
Go ahead and click on the link – you’ll see what I see nearly every Sunday morning: a big pile of horse crap. Basically, the Nexstar station group (which owns KNWA and one of the Little Rock stations, and currently runs the local Fox station while it takes a suspiciously long time for the group that supposedly bought that station to take control of it) is arguing for a relaxation of FCC station ownership rules, contending that “A media monopoly today is impossible,” and that “less local news” could result. Nexstar’s nebulous and selective interpretation of what’s at stake here is dangerously misleading. Some time back on Not News I wrote an article about what we stand to lose with media conglomerate ownership sucking up small-town broadcast stations under one homogenized umbrella. The current newscast on Fort Smith’s Fox station, populated and produced by talent from KNWA, is a good example of the problem. Sure, you might see a couple of different faces at the anchor desk than you’d see if you just watched KNWA’s news itself, but editorially, it’s the same product.
Sounds to me like KNWA wants to hold on to KFTA (the current Fox affiliate). By operating and controlling the Fort Smith Fox station and the Fayetteville NBC affiliate, each of which is seen via cable in the other’s nearby market, you essentially have two Nexstar stations versus one Hearst station, one New York Times station, and a couple of indies with no news. That isn’t preserving local TV. That’s one company trying to spread its own influence. (If Hearst attempted the same thing, which they have in some markets, even though I work for that company, I would be against it in that context as well.)
I wish I could say nobody is fooled by Nexstar’s ploy, but this comment on that site’s feedback board is proof that people are going for the knee-jerk okeydoke, just like Nexstar hopes they will. This fellow in particular doesn’t even appear to know who’s really playing the game, let alone what the score is:
To our “fearless leaders”(?) in Washington: Stay out of broadcast regulation. Specifically, re: The squeezing out of medium and small market tv. We want our local news brought to us by small stations not owned by a handful of super-companies. Keep your miserable fingers out of our local airwaves. DO I MAKE MYSELF CLEAR????????
You want your local news brought to you by small stations not owned by a handful of super-companies? Then you definitely don’t need to be gobbling up the propaganda Nexstar is feeding you, bub.
Give it up, Nexstar. Just operate your one station in the market – kinda like the rest of us have to. You don’t get to double-dip.… Read more
I got, and responded to, an e-mail from a reader recently and asked him if it’d be cool for me to post his questions and the responses here, because I figured they’d be of interest to…well…someone. Maybe.
Has “Dr. Who at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop” folded? The last release of which I know is “Devil’s Planets” and that was what, four years ago? I am really eager to hear “State of Decay” which should logically be the next release in volume five.
The last anyone’s heard out of Mark Ayres, who tirelessly does the restoration of the Radiophonic Workshop material for CD release and for inclusion as isolated music tracks for the classic series DVDs, the Radiophonic Workshop CDs have been in limbo pending a larger reorganization of BBC Music (which is also supposedly why we haven’t gotten a Murray Gold soundtrack from the new series yet – something which it’s interesting to note isn’t available for pre-order yet). Another thing to consider is that the classic series DVDs are selling many, many more copies than the Radiophonic Workshop soundtrack CDs, so the market reality is that the BBC is going to have Mark directing all of his energy to restoring soundtracks for DVD; we might still get CDs out of it later as an ancillary thing, but with all of the isolated music soundtracks that we’re getting on DVDs, I wouldn’t be completely surprised if we’ve seen the last of the CDs.
Since “Survival” is a bootleg, chances are I’m not going to see it advertised for sale anywhere.
The Survival bootleg, like the other three “unofficial releases” I reviewed a while back, are nothing to write home about, in terms of either packaging or sound quality. The Survival CD is especially bad because it’s kinda like the soundtrack to part 3 only – not even the whole story. Given that Survival is (IMHO) one of the better Sylvester McCoy stories that hasn’t made it to DVD yet, I’d lay good odds that we’ll be seeing a Survival DVD, complete with a decently remastered isolated music track, in the next 18 months. I’d just wait for that.
Was “Delta and the Bannermen” ever released as a bootleg?
Bits of Delta And The Bannermen are on the 25th anniversary album, but if there’s a bootleg out there, I haven’t seen it. (That doesn’t mean that such a beast doesn’t exist, just means that I haven’t seen it!) Again, this score exists in its entirety, so it’ll wind up on DVD eventually.
Any other Doctor Who soundtrack questions? I’m not the expert, but I do play an expert on TV. (Well, kind of. It’s an unbilled guest appearance. As a voice-over.)… Read more
More video fun for you – an all-inclusive Doctor Who title sequence with something for (and from) everyone!
… Read more
