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Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Category: Life

  • Adaptation Consideration

    I had time to kill last night, between finishing “game night” (came in a strong second at “London” and kicked Mike’s ass at “Stone Age”, hah!) and starting on some client work, and didn’t feel like being On The Computer. So I put in the first disc of my recently-acquired set of the BBC/A&E “The Scarlet Pimpernel”.

    Now, I’d last watched the show when it first aired back in the late 1990s and remembered (vaguely) that it was a cheesy, breezy little adventure yarn. You know what? It still is, and it hasn’t aged as poorly as I might have expected. Richard E. Grant is still a brilliant lead, playing the Bruce Wayne / Batman dichotomy as well as anyone could ask. Elizabeth McGovern is still pretty, somewhere under all that pancake makeup and somewhat-ratty wig. Buckles are swashed, entendres are doubled, and so forth.

    The Internet, of course, begs to differ. Apparently what I watched last night is “atrocious.” You see, liberties were taken with the source material. Heaven forfend! So-and-so wouldn’t behave like that! They killed whats-his-name! After all, the only good translation of novel to film is a completely and totally literal one, right? I mean, really now. Those “Lord of the Rings” movies clearly suffered from the loss of all that dratted Bombadil-ish and elvish and hobbitish poetry & song every dozen pages, right? Right.

    Now I’ve made the Tolkien nuts mad at me. I can live with that.

    There are some gripes with “The Scarlet Pimpernel,” but they’re mostly just quibbles, regardless of how you rate Liz McGovern’s acting talents. (Seriously: The vitriolic posts I’ve seen online almost all mention one or more failings on her part. Does she have a history of drowning kittens and kicking puppies that I didn’t know about? Because, sheesh.) One scene comes to mind involving the sharpening of a guillotine, which is supposed to sound ominous (scrape, scrape) except the stone’s being dragged across the broad side of the blade instead of anywhere near the edge. Weird details like that, where someone just wasn’t paying attention, jar you from time to time.

    But, you know what? The good guys won, the hero rescued the girl, love triumphed over evil, yadda yadda. Some days, that’s all I really want.

    (Yes, there’s a rant coming later about the current state of modern high fantasy novels. Hint: I AM SICK AND TIRED OF GRIMDARK. STOP IT.)

    So I’ll be watching the other discs in my boxed set, even if I have to do it alone. I’m okay with that.

  • No Pain, No Loss

    Speaking of numbers?

    Push-ups completed this week: 41

    Sit-ups completed this week: 11

    I started a morning exercise routine this week, and yes, I’m starting small. I figure on doing ten push-ups and five sit-ups per morning until that gets (relatively) easy, then move to some combination of more of those activities and another activity yet to be selected. The idea isn’t to turn this into some massive workout or use this as a weight-loss program; I just want to get my body back to a place where I can do things again without becoming winded way too quickly or just plain being too weak.

    Unfortunately my abdominal muscles flat-out gave up after the second day of sit-ups. Wednesday’s attempt was accompanied by “OW OW OW.” Which scuttled my push-ups as well. Since then I’ve been starting with the push-ups since I know I can do those. My sit-up attempts yesterday and today were met with a big fat “NOT HAPPENING” from the abs.

    I think they’re on strike.

    There’s talk of putting in a workout space into the office expansion (yes, we’re expanding again). This might be a good thing, as I can’t afford or schedule a proper gym. (Nor would I want to deal with that environment, really.)

    So. There’s me, trying to get a bit healthier. Yay?

  • By The Numbers

    This post marks 2000 entries to the journal.

    On June 26th this journal will be effectively 11 years old. Now, we achieved this partly by importing some back-dated entries from the previous website, but there you have it.

    We’ve racked up nearly 4000 approved comments, and let’s not speculate on how much spam we’ve deleted in over a decade.

    It’s worth mentioning that since posting dropped off precipitously after I lost my job with Entercom six years ago, the bulk of these 2000 posts took place in the first half of this site’s existence. C’est la vie, I guess.

    I have more content queued but when I noticed in the WordPress Dashboard that there were 1999 posts in the system, I figured I should mark an occasion somehow. And here we are.

  • Year Four of Quacked Panes

    I don’t always have much luck with this particular method, but apparently what it took to shake off several days’ worth of deep blue funk was to hunker down and get some creative work done. What this means for you is that Year Four of Quacked Panes kicks off Monday, both comics for next week are already queued, and I whipped up a new banner image.

    Considering that I was starting to worry that I’d lost my webcomic mojo, this makes me feel much better about things…

  • Litmus Test Services

    I’ve often said that I should hire myself out to organizations, advertising agencies, or major corporations to vet their proposed media campaigns, domain name choices and so forth. The deal is simple: If at any point in your presentation I start to giggle like a teenaged schoolboy caught looking at naughty pictures, you should rethink your strategy. Here’s an example, and if you’re averse to a certain… ah… kind of language I recommend that you stop reading and go look at disapproving rabbits or something instead.

    So! What crosses your mind when you see the following domain name?

    cumcpdx.org

    Don’t worry, it’s actually safe for work. I’m not linking to them because I’d rather not have someone checking their referer logs and coming (ahem) after me for what could be considered a bit of mockery.

    And if you don’t understand why all the fuss… congratulations, you’re probably a nice, normal, well-adjusted person. What’s that like, by the way…?

  • I’ve seen better days.

    I spent all day Sunday in what felt like a sleep-deprived fog, even though I slept reasonably well Saturday night. I figured something must have gone awry during the night. This morning, as I tried to prepare for my work day, I found out what. And promptly notified my boss that I’d be staying home for the day on account of not being able to keep my insides inside.

    I then curled right back up in bed and slept for another five hours, racking up nearly twelve hours of sleep. Now, I don’t sleep during daylight or with loud noises outside very well, so that tells me something about the state of my body right there. Also? I didn’t even feel properly hungry until almost 3pm.

    About which, by the way: Eating some cheese & crackers didn’t go quite as well as I’d hoped. More’s the pity.

    Later I’ll be trying some ramen noodles and passing the time watching bad movies or something along those lines. I can’t concentrate well enough to read a good book (again, more’s the pity) nor handle three-dee activities like (for instance) most video games. I don’t get bored, but I am annoyed that my go-to “leisure” activities are denied me today. I’ll manage, though. I always do. (Hello, MediaMonkey and my 60-gigabyte music library!)

    At least the rain has scoured much of the pollen & other allergens from the Portland air. For this, I am grateful.

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