Man, why today, of all days? Here I was setting up for my annual viewing of An Unearthly Child part one too. Here’s a link to an admittedly Who-centric obit that I just posted.
Thank you, Verity, and rest well.… Read more
This look from Evan pretty much says it all about how I feel today: completely wiped out. … Read more
Man, I’m getting domestic in my old age. Not only did I feed Evan and change him all day, and not sleep a lot, but I whipped up some dinner for Jan before she got home (a rather tasty white cheddar rotini with broccoli and chicken thingie that I kinda hammered together) and some dessert (extreme chocolate brownies for her, chocolate-peanut-butter brownies for me). For my dinner, I finished off a pasta salad concoction that I threw together around lunchtime. Nobody’s starving in this house on my watch.
In the past 24 hours, Jan’s only had to worry about one feeding and one diaper change while I napped at around 9:30 tonight. I got up at about half past midnight to find that Evan’s mom had snuck off to her bed with him, but when he woke up for a bottle, she was strangely happy to hand him back over to me. 😆 He’s back in his crib now, with an Obi cat keeping his feet warm. The roaring winds have cooled things off drastically, so I have the little guy under a couple of layers of blankets, which he kept kicking off until Obi helpfully laid a single arm across his feet. (I tried to get a picture of this with the night vision setting on my camera, but it just didn’t turn out.) News flash: Evan smiles for daddy, and smiles for mommy, and smiles really big for Obi. He wuvs his kitty. I’d bet a substantial amount of money that his first word will be “Obi”.
I’m not sure what to do about Xena’s adopted kitten. I didn’t see that coming at all. We’re expecting a hard freeze tomorrow night, so I’m not sure how this is going to work out…Xena may like the little white and grey kitty, but the supreme council of housecats hasn’t signed off on the interloper.
The talk shows have hushed up with the advent of the WGA strike; soaps’ll be next, and then weekly shows. For those wondering what the writers are really demanding, J. Michael Straczynski explains it all for you. Granted, he simplifies things a great deal, but it’s about eight cents, folks. Not eight cents on the dollar, but eight cents per unit, which is a much smaller figure in the end. His post doesn’t address the internet/new media end of things, but I’m hoping he’ll tackle that one soon.
Hopefully no one’s put off by this week’s truncated update to the site; we may have to figure out “something else” with the episode guides, which are normally weekly bread and butter, if I can’t do better than this. One thought that has occurred to me is to present episode guides like not-every-week features – present them only when the season is completed. I’m not too sure about that though. theLogBook isn’t grinding to a halt just because I’ve got a giggling bundle of joy, but obviously there’s going to be a little bit of rearrangement of priorities here and there, and him keeping me up with hours and hours of binky blasts – which, by the great big grin on his face I see when I go to fix it, I’m convinced are absolutely intentional – instead of sleeping sure doesn’t help. 😆 … Read more
My wife, bless her heart, became a lot less picky in her viewing habits while she was pregnant and in the first six weeks after our son was born, while she was at home recovering. I’ve already mentioned her propensity for watching E!, but another viewing habit she’s picked up that drives me up the wall is Nancy Grace. Oh. My. God. I can’t stand Nancy Grace. I know she’s got a fan base that would no doubt argue that she’s just dealing with the issues in a straight-talk, shoot-from-the-hip style (which seems to be the defense of any ultra-conservative or ultra-liberal media figures these day – “you just don’t like it because I’m telling it like it is!”). I’m not saying that any of the cases she discusses on her show deal with completely innocent, blameless people, but whatever happened to assuming that innocence until guilt is proven? Some of the topics discussed tonight dealt with folks who seem pretty reprehensible, but all the same, they’re still awaiting trial, and there’s Nancy, going off with little gems like “Who knows what else this guy has done?” Who knows indeed, Nancy? Nobody on your show does. But in the meantime you, a TV host who supposedly has a legal background, are speculating wildly in a nationally broadcast forum in a way that’d get your butt chucked out of any court in the land. (I was about to say that she ought to know better, but oh, look, maybe she doesn’t.) What all of that worst-possible-case-scenario gossipmongering is doing to the jury pool, I have no idea….but apparently there’s nothing to stop us from speculating a bit, is there, Nancy?
I know she’s all about victims’ rights, and that’s fine. Let’s not forget that until a jury hands down a verdict, the accused have rights too. And once again – and this is a fight I had to fight numerous producers, reporters and even news directors on during my years in the teevee news biz – it’s not the media’s place to do the prosecuting. Someone please yank this appeal-to-the-lowest-denominator lunatic off the air, and don’t let her go back to trying to pass herself off as some kind of journalist without reminding her that her job in that role is not to throw people to the lions and wait for the faithful to send up a cheer.… Read more
Exciting pictures of Doctor Who’s new Sontarans from the BBC. (Hey, they said it, not me.) Apparently the main Sontaran is played by Christopher Ryan of The Young Ones fame, who also played a different critter in The Trail Of A Time Lord in 1986. I just dunno, for the first time a new series “update” of an original series creature has me kinda scratching my head and wondering if they’ve missed the mark. We’ll see how he looks on the screen.… Read more
…because that’s probably all you’ll be seeing after Thanksgiving and well into next year at this rate.
It’s kinda funny, everyone who’s still trapped in teevee land is going into November sweeps, and here the Writer’s Guild of America is, going on strike for the first time since 1988. I remember that year, and I was “into” the behind-the-scenes machinations of TV enough at the time to be aware of the strike. That probably says more about the state of my life at that point than it does about the state of TV, but I remember the glut of oddball specials and dismal variety shows that the networks had to fall back on during that summer, and it was a mess. We didn’t have “reality TV” as such back then (and with a few shining exceptions, I think our cultural lives were richer for it; this was back before more people were interested in voting on the next American Idol than there were interested in voting for the next President of the United States).
The thing is, my wife and I were talking tonight, and we were really able to count on one hand the number of scripted shows we follow that will be affected by this strike. Now, let me say this – in principle, I’m behind the WGA on this one. The studios are putting the screws to union writers any way they can, whether it’s in the area of new media (i.e. webisodes), residuals for DVD and paid download (i.e. iTunes) usage of scripted shows, or just forgoing scripted shows altogether, even when the “non-scripted” stuff is just as scripted (just not by folks whose paychecks have to cover residuals and pension). But the number of shows we follow that would actually be affected by the strike is pretty small – Heroes, Lost, The 4400, Dead Zone…maybe Stargate Atlantis (though my enthusiasm for that show hasn’t just bottomed out, it’s hit rock bottom hard enough to leave a crater)…and then…after that…oh, wait. We’re already in the process of getting over network TV as we know it. … Read more
David Tennant + Peter Davison? Sign me the heck up. Already got a DVD cover on hot standby:
Grab your own copy of the cover here if you’re so inclined (or just want to gawk at my insomnia-and-E.S.-Posthumus-fueled Paint Shop Pro dabblings). I literally used the only still photo the BBC has provided so far (and then that one from the Sun too), so design greatness it ain’t, but it’s just a tad more epic than the original “two guys standing there” publicity shot. 😆 I’m really looking forward to this. If they’d managed to shoehorn Sylvester McCoy into the same little special, I’d be happy beyond belief. But this’ll do nicely. Davison and McCoy were my favorites among the original Doctors, and I don’t care if he has put on a bit of weight, Davison looks great. (I wish that when people looked at me and said “you’ve put on a bit of weight,” I was looking like that guy instead of the fella in the mirror.)
It’s official: despite the glut of CDs I’ve played for him, from Scott Joplin to Vangelis to Moody Blues, Evan’s officially approved darn-near-guaranteed-to-work sleepytime CD is a “baby mix” I assembled for him, whose playlist goes thusly:
(The Raymond Scott tracks are basically the entirety of Soothing Sounds For Baby Volume 1, the Hot Butter tracks are all from Popcorn, and the Radiophonic Workshop stuff is all from BBC Radiophonic Music. The Neil Finn track is from the Rain soundtrack.)
So…in other words…Evan’s got a thing for kinda trippy experimental electronic music from the 1960s and ’70s. But man, does that mix knock him out like a tranquilizer dart. Now, I know that he’s not gonna remember any of this stuff, and that these early “preferences” of his will wind up in my memory only, but that music is now inextricably linked with my son in my mind. I also donated the little light apparatus to his room that once powered my glowin’ Dalek; it simply projects its patterns straight onto the ceiling above his crib now. And he seems to dig it – until the colors shifting and the music lull him to sleep.
If he was older than, say, a month, I’d say it’s time to break out some Floyd.… Read more
Well, a little preamble here. My wife has been home now, either madly pregnant or madly mom, for almost three months. In that time, she’s begun to watch an inordinate amount of E!, which – from my own observations in passing through the room – has got to be one of the most inane, disposable, worthless channels on the cable lineup. I can see taking in one episode of True Hollywood Story now and again, maybe once a month if there’s a good one on, but sitting there watching it non-stop? Jesus. Discovery evidently isn’t putting seasons of Deadliest Catch on DVD fast enough for us.
Anyway, I’ve gotten to see a number of promos lately for something called “Keeping Up With The Kardashians”, and surely I’m not the only one who hears that title and immediately makes the mental leap to these people instead. Now that’d be an interesting reality show – talking about the good old days of the Bajoran occupation, comparing notes on torture techniques, and sanding down those pesky neck ridges. That’d almost make more sense. Who the heck are the Kardashians? Maybe this is just the sound of me being older than dirt, but isn’t a prerequisite of celebrity that people recognize you on sight or on mention? Who are these people? Sorry, E!, but you’re cheating. You don’t get to invent celebrities just so you can build reality shows around them. How Truman Show is that?… Read more
We had a pretty loud storm tonight, but there was more fanfare about it on TV than there was actual storm. (It had raised all kinds of hell in Tulsa, though, so it was worth at least watching the TV coverage to keep an eye on it.) One big clap of thunder woke Evan up. This was also one of the first times in months that Xena came into the house. I’ve gotten to where I let her sit out rainstorms out on the side deck, but when we’re talking hail and worse, yeah, I’m a softie, the dog gets to come in. Naturally, she crashed out, Olivia played with her tail, Obi slept next to her, and she stood guard over Evan. Everybody loves the little guy.
Today was one of those days where I just didn’t have the brainpower to do anything useful, and was leaving the Avid powered down for the whole day (the first tornado watch was popped on us before noon), so I did a little bit of just-for-the-sheer-heck of it design work, and joined the ranks of those who do fan-made Doctor Who DVD covers. Rather than do the 37th cover for some well-known episode that hasn’t even officially been released yet, however, or a “fantasy football” cover for a lost story, I decided to go way off the beaten path: I thought I’d do a DVD cover for a fan film. I altered the basic template a bit and added the now-standard “From the world of BBC-TV’s Doctor Who…” wording that accompanies spinoff productions like Big Finish’s Dalek Empire audios, and came up with this:
(You can download the full-res printable version here. The nifty 3-D mockup abo0ve was generated by an insanely useful program called Imandix Cover, which you can download free here.) While I’m happy with the intent of the artwork, the actual execution is just a bit crap – since it was all done with screencaps from the DVD itself, the main artwork, when you look at it really close up, is very pixellated. Still, I’d like to think I wasn’t a zillion miles off stylistically; I’ve posted it to the forums at Outpost Gallifrey, where I’m sure that my assessment of “crap” may be confirmed very quickly. 😆 But not to be dissuaded, I’m already working on another cover, this time for a series of irreverent “I Love The ’80s”-style documentary segments that aired in 2003. So if I want to burn these to DVD, I can put a cover on the DVD that’ll look something like:
I tried to be a little more…well…artistic with this one. K-9 and the time vortex are screen grabs, while the TARDIS is a 3-D model that I rendered myself. I’d like to tackle Shakedown: Return Of The Sontarans soon, just because…well…it’d be kinda relevant at the moment. 😉 For giggles, I ran my old Countdown To Looking Glass cover through Imandix, which didn’t like the dimensions and chopped some of the artwork off:
…oops. Guess I need to take that one back to the drawing board before I go too far into Who territory. Though ironically, I still like the CTLG artwork better than either of the Who pieces.
Also on my to-do list: an official Doctor Who DVD cover for Olivia vs. the Dalek. 😆… Read more
Today is Columbus Day. (Well, what’s left of today at any rate.) I thought about it a bit, and I recalled that on Columbus Day last year, my wife and I did a marathon 26-hour round trip to northern Illinois and back to pick up an Avid system that I’d won on eBay. Getting that machine home and operational was what emboldened me to escape from the TV station grind, which has something to do with why, this Columbus Day, my wife and I are again spending a great deal of time in each other’s company, taking care of Evan. It’s funny how many cycles and circles one can read into this whole thing if one wants.
We also watched some Burn Notice today, finally getting caught up with the whole show. It’s an interesting little series, that one, and hey, it’s got Bruce Campbell, so it can’t be all bad. I’m not sure I’m as googly-eyed over Gabrielle Anwar as everyone else who’s seen the show seems to be, but hey, that’s just me. In some ways, Burn Notice is also dangerously informative about…well…how to do certain things. MacGyver, it ain’t.
Evan’s doing okay; the other day while I was watching him sleep, I glanced at his hand and he had a little “live long and prosper” thing going. I thought it was pretty funny, if accidental, but there are certain members of the family who go around mumbling stuff like “don’t get him started on that geeky Star Trek shit” who probably wouldn’t be as amused. Much more interestingly, I’ve started introducing him to music. Some time back I picked up all three volumes of Raymond Scott’s Soothing Sounds For Baby, and they’ve proven to be a big hit with Evan. He’s completely mesmerized by that stuff. Most people filed Raymond Scott as a footnote under “the guy who actually composed a bunch of the stuff that Carl Stalling adapted for the Warner Bros. cartoon music”, but Scott was also a great innovator of electronic music in the early to mid 20th century. In some ways, he was paving a road that others such as the BBC Radiophonic Workshop would follow, messing around with purely electronically/electrically generated sound. Soothing Sounds is one of those experiments; it’s all very electronic, but it’s also just about hypnotic. It’s repetitive, a bit of highway hypnosis for the ears, but gradually more complexity is introduced and then phased out again to keep things interesting. Evan laid on my chest, and if he wasn’t almost asleep, I could see in his eyes a sort of mental “Processing…” progress bar – what is this? I hope this was just the first of many, many listening sessions for us. Music is simply one of the greatest things there is about being human, and I look forward to sharing more of it with him.
I’m working on a mix minidisc for him, with a random playlist, consisting of the Raymond Scott material, as well as other electronic music that I went back and listened to and found stuff in a similar vein – again, the early BBC Radiophonic Workshop music (reviewed here) and a bit of Hot Butter (reviewed here) and Famicom 20th Anniversary music for good measure, with a smattering of Bedtime With The Beatles too. A little something to stimulate and soothe at the same time. I’m sure there are folks out there screaming “Why not classical?” I’ll get around to that in due course, fear not. I can comfortably go from Radiohead to Rachmaninov in a single sitting, and eventually it’s my hope that Evan will have at least as broad a musical palette, if not more.
Oberon snuggled up next to Evan the other night when the little guy was being colicky. He rubbed all over Evan’s hands, sorta like if you don’t pet me, I’ll pet you! Evan didn’t mind; it didn’t distress him any more than he already was. I just thought that was incredibly cute. Obi’s gone from being the goofy cat to being the goofy cat who’s proving to be an incredibly loyal companion to someone he’s just met. We couldn’t have deliberately picked a better one.… Read more
