Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

To amuse me while I amused the cat I’ve been catsitting (not Veronica’s extra-large Kitty, but Dr. Deb’s extra-small Siamese), I watched the restored version of the 1937 Frank Capra film Lost Horizon on DVD. The Film Site has a spoiler-filled review, but suffice it to say that this is a standard utopian tale in which everyone is good and happy merely because everyone is good and happy, and the answer to all the obvious objections Our Hero raises is a naive “why?” from Our Heroine.

But it’s pretty for 1937, and Our Hero (Robert Conway, played by Ronald Colman) manages to enliven the dull talky parts with his awestruck gazing and general sense of wonder. The action scenes at the beginning and end were also helpful.

The alternate ending wasn’t a big change, but one of the other DVD features described the original framing sequence and the experience of filming at 24°F in a huge refrigerator (because Capra wanted to see the actors’ breath). One thing I didn’t learn from the extras was that Our Spunky Supporting Actress was supposed to be dying of consumption. A little coughing and six months to live says lung cancer to me.

Lost Horizon was not a success, and is remembered today mainly for its stupendous budget and the loss of the original print due to our oppressive copyright laws. It was based on the book of the same name by James Hilton, which is remembered mainly for allegedly being the first paperback ever published (Ballantine, 1939?). It’s still in print.

The story of crazy writer Daniel Rice begins with this eBay auction. TNH reposted the listing in a more legible form. Although she was unreasonably polite about the amateur’s hopeless efforts to sell an unfinished manuscript for $150,000, he responded with enough craziness to get himself disemvowelled.

Not surprisingly, his auction expired without any bids being made. He’s cut the asking price to $125,000, added paragraph breaks, and a bonus psychotic break over Making Light poster Greg Ioannou at the bottom. Check out the new auction here. You have only 4 more days to come up with the $125,000 to buy this gem.

Being unable to write is a sure sign of being unable to write, yet every day I see people posting gibberish to LiveJournals, writing lists, or forums—gibberish proclaiming their latest novel projects or their countless entries into the slush piles. Spelling can be fixed, but it’s a little late to learn how to form an English sentence when you have three alleged children. My advice to Mr. Rice is to find a new hobby.

CTV reports a real eruption is likely at Mt. St. Helens:

“There’s a very good chance there’s going to be an eruption … (and) there’s a good chance it’s going to involve magma at the surface,” Tom Pierson, a U.S. Geological Survey official, told reporters on Saturday.

See her blow her stack almost live at NNAnow.net. Here’s the alert, and SpaceWeather reminds us to be on the lookout for a volcano-induced blue moon.

The Keep is the Alien vs. Predator of horror: Nazis vs. Vampires. I wanted to read something by F. Paul Wilson, and this was one of the few on the library shelf that wasn’t a sequel to something else. I don’t want to give away the ending, but suffice it to say that it strays into Highlander territory when the mystery of the eponymous keep is finally explained.

On the plus side, it was a page turner and a quick read. On the minus side, one of the main threads of the novel is the alleged gradual corruption of a main character by the nameless evil which dwelleth in the keep, and it failed. Yes, the character got corrupted, but the process wasn’t gradual enough for me to catch it. Somewhere near the end of the novel, uncorrupted character A says to uncorrupted character B see how so-and-so was slowly corrupted by the nameless evil which dwelleth in the keep? and B replies yeah, tragic that. (I’m paraphrasing here.) The corruption wasn’t sufficiently distinct from stupidity for such an important plot point.

Also on the minus side is the Nameless Red-Haired Man who dwelleth nowhere. I call him the Nameless Red-Haired Man because the author referred to him constantly as the red-haired man. Why he didn’t go with ‘redhead’ and give him a pseudonym earlier on is beyond me. Nameless spends much time approaching the keep, then hanging around the keep, without ever becoming a full-fledged character. Of all the cast he is the least fleshed-out, even though it’s clear from his first appearance that he’s a main character.

Our Heroine got the most fleshing-out, although she was also a stereotypical good guy in certain ways. Her attitude was both too Victorian and too modern for her background, but she overcame those handicaps by having plenty of specific characteristics and feelings. Her father and the two German officers also did well, especially in the beginning.

Overall, I’d say that the author was working at cross purposes with the supernatural horror. It wasn’t clear whether the Nameless Evil killing Nazis was all that evil, whether it was supernatural or natural, whether it represented Evil or Chaos, and why Chaos was worse than Non-Chaos. I was interested by the story, but I wasn’t horrified. I’ll have to try a medical thriller of his next time.

Survey of the day: Outboard Brains for Mac OS X, an old survey article from MacDevCenter.com

I was happy to discover that my Amazon problem is not all in my mind—they really do have extremely annoying Javascript focus code on their site that shifts focus to an Amazon page when I don’t want to look at it. For I while I just blocked Amazon completely using PithHelmet 0.7.2a for Safari, but that’s a brute force solution.

What I really needed was a Safari plug-in that would turn off only the offending javascript (since nobody these days can live without Javascript), or barring that, one that would turn Javascript off just for the offending websites. PithHelmet 2 is supposed to be able to do both.

Unfortunately, as has been reported by many users at VersionTracker, PithHelmet 2.0.1 is a buggy swamp. It has an obscure and counter-intuitive interface (both the annoying menu and the new preference panel), it slows down page loading, it doesn’t import rules from previous versions, and it forgets its own settings. It refused to load the included Python script designed to demoronize Amazon, though the promise of that sample script was my main reason for installing 2.0.1 despite the bad experiences reported in the VersionTracker comments. Maybe I needed some sort of Python compiler. That wasn’t mentioned in the documentation—but usability was clearly not the hallmark of this release. At least the option to turn off Javascript for Amazon.com did seem to work.

I saw all these problems in the few minutes I ran it before downgrading to 0.7.3. On the bright side, it did turn on the Safari Debug menu for me, and left it on after the downgrade. Since PithHelmet has gone from freeware to shareware, I hope Mike Solomon will start treating it like real mac software—that means providing real documentation and an intuitive interface. (Hide the regular expressions, at least!)

Since I canned the above entry, PithHelmet has gone up a subversion to 2.1. The changelog claims it’s faster and that some of the preference bugs have been fixed, so I’m giving it another try.

Someday, somehow, Amazon will be demoronized.

I discovered the phenomenon of catblogging recently at Classical Values. Since I’ve been catsitting Veronica’s cat (”Kitty”), I have an excuse to catblog. I have no pictures of Kitty; he’s so hefty he’d probably eat all my bandwidth anyway. (I noticed while feeding him that he was off the weight chart on the back of the cat food bag.)

So here are some links instead:

• Obsidian Wings’ obligatory catblogging post
• Instapundit catblogs
• Sharp as a Marble catblogs enough to have a catblogging category
• Medbroadcast reports: Northern Mexican state recruits cat army to combat rat hordes
• Cat User’s Manual and more cat humor.

I knew this quiz looked familiar when I saw Dennis’s results on Classical Values. Last time I cheated, but now I have a greater appreciation for LotR characters so I’m posting the real results:

Check out the harvest moon tomorrow night. Thanks to Space Weather for the link.

As the Apple Turns discusses the recent loss of “talkie with the big flying things” in LA:

According to Techworld (which in turn cites an LA Times story from a week ago), the Windows-based radio system for an air traffic control center in Southern California took a three-hour coffee break recently, leaving “800 planes in the air without contact to air traffic control.” But hey, how dangerous could that possibly be?

I heard about the failure, but not that it was Windows’ fault. I should have known. As the Apple Turns looks toward the Windows future:

…while we’d never wish a midair plane crash on anyone, part of us can’t help but suspect that if anything can get the Windoid lemmings to consider that “hey, maybe this operating system kindasorta sucks rocks out loud,” it would be a fiery hail of twisted, screaming metal and black and red body parts pummelling the tarmac at LAX. Will a near-miss or two be enough of a wake-up call? We sure hope so.

If that doesn’t do it, maybe the radioactive glass crater will do the job. Somehow I suspect even that won’t work unless by chance a Windows-guided missile takes out Redmond.

Definition of the day: misottawy: 1. The antipathy that Canadians, especially those furthest to the east and west, feel toward their federal government. Also called “Western/Eastern/Northern alienation.” 2. (By extension) Distrust of a government, particularly a government at a great geographical distance from its subjects. [Langmaker Neologisms]

Last week, the Florida State Supreme Court struck down Terri’s Law, the Bush-backed (no, not that Bush—the other one) bill to keep a brain-damaged woman alive despite her husband’s continuing legal efforts to starve her to death.

Although Terri left no living will, I think she’s a good example of why a living will is meaningless. Terri has left the building, and this is now a fight between what her parents want (the new, brain-damaged but not quite vegetative version of Terri) and what her husband wants (his wife dead). We can assume that the new Terri is incapable of a desire to die, since suicide is a pretty high-order concept. I don’t see any reason to treat her the way the former inhabitant of her body would have liked. We don’t generally kill people because other people want them dead, whether the other people are relatives or former residents. Suicide is illegal for the competent; why allow it to the incompetent?