Best Quote Ever

Last night's daily show featured an extended riff on a Bernie Goldberg response to a Jon Stewart depiction of Fox News hypocrisy in complaining about people generalizing in attacking them. Goldberg attacked Stewart's audience as unsophisticated, and Toppington von Monocle in the audience (white gloves [edited to corrected typo], monocle, teacup, top hat, etc.) quoted and translated the following (well, the first/last line of it anyway):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catullus_16

NSFW, perhaps. Young'uns reading my blog, have fun! It'll be educational.

Best of all, the content of the verse is apropos, even!

ETA: If the precision of the language involved and its ultimate etymology doesn't tell you something about the True Evil that lies in the heart of Ancient Greek Civilization and philosophy and its Roman offshoot, well, it's because you haven't been paying attention.

reruns

I've been feeling very under the weather lately, either the cold got worse or I got another one.

In any event, I've been watching Netflix Instant Queue stuff, specifically, Dead Zone Season 4 and 5 episodes. A number of observations. First, it's like Sanctuary mined this show for actors -- Christopher Heyerdahl tried to burn John Smith's house down in "Panic" and Agam Darshi makes an appearance in "Articles of Faith". And that's not counting all the Stargate actor overlap (Don Davis perhaps the most conspicuous, but also Colin Cunningham and probably others). [ETA: Speaking of Cunningham, he showed up as the creepy husband in that episode of Sanctuary with the infected woman and the weird love triangle involving Henry.]

Second, part of what I liked about the show was its homage to old movies and Hollywood cliches -- but I like what NCIS does with those things (or, for that matter, Bones) a whole lot more. And one of the things that annoyed me about the show at the time is much clearer now: it had plot problems. All the time. Cutting land lines in 2005 or 2006 just didn't make a lot of sense.

Finally, this is the first time I've switched between watching Netflix stuff on the Tivo to watchign on my laptop and back. Boy, howdy, does that sync last watched location rock. I think I'm a little surprised that idea didn't get patented. Or maybe it did? It is a little odd, however, experiencing the parallel between reading kindle content and watching netflix content.

ETA: About that patent:

http://www.faqs.org/patents/app/20090259711

Apple is attempting to patent that idea; filing date was April 11, 2008, which is not obvious from that URL. If you want the real information, go here and enter the patent number:

http://appft.uspto.gov/netahtml/PTO/srchnum.html

But the resulting URL is beyond junky.

I tracked this down via some bloggy coverage of it, I think at engadget, but the coverage was from 2009 which of course was after netflix and/or the kindle was already using the idea. Someone much brighter than me will have to figure out just when one of those two applications started using the idea, and whether it was before or after the filing date of that patent.

ETA Several days later: Martouf just showed up on The Dead Zone as a cult leader! Ok, JR Bourne. But whatever.

anxiety on wheels

T. lately has been wanting to ride his bike to run errands. At times, this does not work out so good, like when he suggests we go get gas while we're on the bikes. Uh, no. He also is not very interested in bicycling to a playground and then playing on the playground. He'll ride there, but he doesn't want to play when he gets there. So the current favorite is bicycling to the grocery store.

The store is not very far away. If you know where we live and you use google maps to find directions, the route we take is obvious, altho we ride on the sidewalk so it isn't as obvious where we have to cross the street and of course not all the significant driveways are marked. There _are_ sidewalks the whole way, so the major heart attack inducing moments are the crosswalks where we switch from one side of 111 to the other, and where we cross 27. The first time we did this, I was incredibly reluctant to try the trip at all; the whole thing felt a lot like teaching a too-young-kid how to make a campfire or fire a gun or use a knife. Yeesh. I heard myself hollering slow down slow down slow down walk walk walk watch for the people watch for the cars stop stop stop stop STOP NOW! The second time was better. I don't think we were ever in any particular danger. We were _highly_ visible and not moving that fast and, as I have said repeatedly, we were _always_ on sidewalks or within marked crosswalks. If someone had hit us, they would have been clearly in the wrong.

I had to sit down for a long time after the first trip just to calm down. This second time was okay. And it is nice to not have to push, pull or pedal T.'s 40+ pounds. But I do sort of wonder how long it's going to take for me to acclimate to this slightly under a mile each way trip.