• Hot Off The Presses - Music

    OOH! OOH! Me! I wanna go: An early warning – we’ll be singing

    I want to do this. I WANT TO DO THIS. Let’s do this, you mokes. This is your official invitation to Songs of Good Cheer, the holiday singalong that my colleague Eric Zorn and I are hosting for the 13th straight year. Sorry for mentioning Christmas in October, but there are a lot of hyper-organized holiday lovers out there who make plans long before the last leaf falls. So here’s everything you need to know to join us. We hope you will. Who: A band of first-rate musicians from the Old Town School of Folk Music whose instruments include banjo,…

  • Clan: McTiVo

    Annoying: VH1’s show viewer’s repeated adds, Twitter app, bling

    I’m currently watching an older series of VH1’s “Celebrity Rehab,” and aside from the “can’t look away from this trainwreck aspect,” there are several annoyances. Repeat commercials. Sometimes the same spot is repeated 4 times in a row. I started out watching last night using Firefox, and at one point the playback just stops on a black screen after several repeats. I’m now trying to watch using Google Chrome, just as an experiment. The Twitter app (login in the sidebar of VH1 pages) auto-posts the first time, saying “I’m watching and chatting about #[show name] – join the conversation at…

  • Movies

    Kung Fu Panda 2 A Rousing Extended Tale (Pun Intended)

    We saw Kung Fu Panda 2 yesterday, and it was a joy to see a sequel that extended the original story so seamlessly and with such generous emotional satisfaction. Ebert liked it too, but thought the 3-D version detracted. Based on that assessment, we saw the “normal” 2-D version, and liked it very much indeed: “Kung Fu Panda 2” is exactly as you’d expect, and more. The animation is elegant, the story is much more involving than in the original, and there’s boundless energy. I enjoyed it as fully as I possibly could, given the horror of its 3-D. The…

  • Blogs Wot I Read - Books - Geek Out! - Hot Off The Presses

    It’s Not A Weasel: Fuck You, I’m a Marten Meme Involves My Friend Tammy

    Sometime next year I’ll get around to blogging about our wonderful recent vacation to the Olympic Peninsula and Seattle – one of the most fun things was dropping in on my friend Seattle Tammy at her store, Books on 7th, in Hoquiam Washington. You can even BUY BOOKS FROM THEIR ONLINE STORE, and I happen to know they just got in a big consignment of old cookery books… Turns out Hoquiam is now famous after a recent incident with a deceased member of the Family Mustelidae put them on the international news wires, and LOLmarten images went viral. “We’re not…

  • Clan: McTiVo - Home Improvement

    The Dearth of Blogging

    Who has time to blog? Not me, apparently. I think about potential blog posts all the time, but never at a time when I am both connected to the Internet and able to use it (two very different things, especially given my office’s policies). On the weekends, for months now, I’ve been shirking. Well, ya basta. I’m constantly reading news and blog posts about politics, and shaking my head with dismay at the sheer… blind arrogance exhibited by many Big Name Pundits on both sides. Truth be told, the folks on the conservative side, with a few shining exceptions, all…

  • Clan: McTiVo

    Making Light: Babylon 5 Rewatch

    Ooooh. A worthy topic, will enjoy following this. In the world of science fiction TV, Babylon 5 is generally considered the first of the modern* story-arc series. It’s a genuine departure from the “Wagon Train to the Stars” paradigm that Old Trek created. I don’t think we’d have had Buffy The Vampire Slayer and the Battlestar Galactica reboot without it and Deep Space Nine to convince the studios that genre audiences had long attention spans and an appetite for moral complexity. For me personally, Bab 5 was the the TV series of my mid-twenties. I watched it as I settled…

  • Clan: McTiVo - Religion - SciFi/Fantasy - The Life of Riley

    Resolutions Not Meant To Be Broken If I Can Help It And Not Force-Fed Chocolate

    Isn’t this a boring blog? Isn’t it? My life’s not really this boring, it’s just that I rarely take the time to write a full-bore flat-spin blog post anymore. I fall back on my old standbys, Google Reader (shared news) and my various Twitter accounts. I can’t catch up on blogging during the work week for going on 3 years, so every now and then I do a big “here’s what’s been going on” catchall. Yeah, boring. And I haven’t even really done a big London mixed-grill slap-up bang-up, either. The pictures are still on my hard drives – the…

  • Clan: McTiVo - Religion - SciFi/Fantasy - The Life of Riley

    Resolutions Not Meant To Be Broken If I Can Help It And Not Force-Fed Chocolate

    Isn’t this a boring blog? Isn’t it? My life’s not really this boring, it’s just that I rarely take the time to write a full-bore flat-spin blog post anymore. I fall back on my old standbys, Google Reader (shared news) and my various Twitter accounts. I can’t catch up on blogging during the work week for going on 3 years, so every now and then I do a big “here’s what’s been going on” catchall. Yeah, boring. And I haven’t even really done a big London mixed-grill slap-up bang-up, either. The pictures are still on my hard drives – the…