Rated E: For Everyone

What level of education is required to read your blog?

I came across this little website that judges blogs. At first I thought it was a bit superficial, but I thought I'd give it a go. In the end, it seemed to rate the blogs I enjoy most at a rather high level, so I thought I'd put a bit of a plug here for it. And while I'm at it, I should probably use it on us.

May I be the first to congratulate us here at honeygarlic.blogspot.com on our rating at:

Consider what this means: Our blog is not cryptic, and our target audience is wide. (Although, admittedly, I'm a little insulted. I'd be more insulted if I actually posted on it from time to time.)

Now, if you'll excuse me, I must rate the other blogs I read! (And judge my other blog.)

--
D. Phillips

I'll stop with the comics soon. Really.

I'm reasonably sure I've pimped xkcd before, but it's worth mentioning again for their most recent comic (click for biggerness)



I really, really, really like this comic. I am also really, really, really afraid about what that might say about me as a person.

--Ryan

(P.S. For bearing all my talk about comics, expect two completely different entries over the weekend.)

The History of Peanuts (Part III)

(It's better than nothing, right?)

Where we last left the Peanuts gang, it was late 1952 - Lucy had made her first appearance, joining the cast of Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Schroeder, Shermy, Patty and Violet.

We'll kick off the next set with a reference to Charlie Brown's trademark shirt...


...but think, Violet - if you were tired of it in 1952, how tired of it were you when he wore it every day for another forty-eight years?

There were some differences between early Charlie Brown and the character he ended up becoming. Take a look at this!


I'd say I agree with Charlie Brown's thinking there, except that I now only use erasers OR pencils for Scantron cards, and rarely even use pens. I will admit that I probably couldn't get by without the 'backspace' and 'delete' keys.

Hey look! It's furniture that looked ultramodern in the fifties!


...and looks anywhere from "out of date" to "retro" by today's standards.

In the meantime, Schroeder continues to hone his piano-playing skills...


Another explanation would be that he only plays pieces written in C major (or A minor), with no accidentals. But that seems unlikely.


Really, Lucy? What was so hard about "his head is next to something roughly the same shape and size, I'll pretend to confuse them!"?

And the last strip of this batch...


Apparently Charlie Brown was mean back in the day. That is, way back in the day. So far back that they apparently had 'plaid' ice cream.

--Ryan

How I learned to stop worrying and love technology

So it's now been four and a half days since I made a post, apologizing for not blogging more and saying I'd make it up to you. My plan was to post the next chapter of The History Of Peanuts (it's better than nothing, right?) on Friday. Obviously I didn't follow through on that.

Why not? Well, I got sick. Not deathly sick or anything, but worse than a common cold, bad enough that if I didn't start to do something about it, I'd probably be stuck in bed for the better part of a few days.

So, Friday night (and part of Saturday), I did something about it. I stuck myself in bed. Voluntarily. The idea being that I'd be more likely to get over the bug if I wasn't doing anything.

Of course, lying in bed and I do not generally go well together. I haven't done it with my laptop since some point in the summer, and with a book...well, never. So the question became...what can I do?

And then it occurred to me - I have a lot of movies and TV shows on my external hard drive. I should watch them. Of course, if I'm potentially going to be drifting in and out of sleep, I don't want to have a laptop that could potentially fall to the ground. So I should take advantage of some of my other technology.

Here's what I came up with:


(MS Paint is all anyone ever needs for photo-editing.)

1) Nice big widescreen monitor. Ordinarily it's on the big desk, but I moved it to the counter - my bedroom used to be a kitchen - so I could see it better from my bed.

2) Once the sun even *starts* going down, it's very rare for that light to not be on. However, there's no way I could look at the monitor and the light without any trouble. So light goes off, and lamp next to my bed (which I more or less never use) goes on.

3) Computer is ordinarily against the far wall, gets moved to edge of desk so that all the cords can reach where they need to go. I've actually kept it there ever since.

4) Nice speaker that was moved along with the monitor.

5) This is my sock. I didn't realize it was part of the picture.

6) Wireless keyboard and mouse. There's no #6 on the picture, that's because I kept them on the floor next to my bed.

So basically, I had a great view of my monitor, with great sound, and the ability to change what I was watching (or surf the web, although that was straining my eyes) without getting out of bed.

I should get sick more often.

--Ryan

(P.S. DayQuil will get me over any illness, ever. If I somehow got rabies, the bubonic plague, or lepresy, I would immediately rush to my bottle of DayQuil. Unless I was planning on going to bed soon, then it would be NyQuil.)

Get Smart International Trailer

An international trailer has been released for Get Smart.

Here it is:

This shoepod looks quite good!
:)

Heath Ledger has died...

...and if that's the first you've heard about it, I'll be amazed.

Also, I don't care. In the least. I'd never even heard of the guy until today (although I have apparently seen one or two movies he acted in).

But more importantly, it's nice to see that the media is giving his death a lot less coverage than, say, Anna Nicole Smith's. Not because ANS deserved more coverage, but because the deaths of B-list celebrities shouldn't be the most important mainstream news stories. Leave that to the entertainment news, and print an obituary, but, seriously, why should we care who will get custody of Anna's kids?

Final thought - as morbid as this sounds, the biggest effect Ledger's death has had on me is that I've read some great praise for his work in the upcoming Batman movie, and now I'll probably go see it.

--Ryan

Time is an illusion; lunchtime doubly so

Long time no blog...I'll do my best to make up for it.

So lately, I've been re-reading the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy books (three down, two to go) - and while doing so, I've been struck with a realization. There was a movie based on the first book a few years back, and from what I remember of it...it wasn't that good.

Really, when the best parts of a movie are the opening montage (dolphins doing tricks set to a song called "So Long And Thanks For All The Fish") and the trailer for Chicken Little (not really part of the movie)...I think it's safe to say that the movie can be labelled a disappointment.

Now, this isn't just some fanboy complaining "They added stuff that wasn't in the book and took out stuff that was, how could they do something so stupid?!?". Of course they had to do that - a movie containing everything that was in the first book would probably have gone a good six hours. Similarly, there is no way in which the book could be condensed down into a normal-length movie, and still be decent - it doesn't have subplots.

So, Douglas Adams (who did a lot of work on the movie before his death) and the other writers added some subplots - the Arthur/Trillian/Zaphod love triangle, the Galactic police chasing after the heroes, and the appearance by John Malkovich.

And with the addition of those subplots, you had a great book turned into a below-average movie (medicore before the subplots). Not really anybody's fault - the plotline of the first book works terribly as a movie, unlike, say, the second or third books.

I also can't really make any excuses for leaving out the Monty Python-esque scene with the philosophers interrupting Deep Thought - ("I demand that I am Vroomfondel!" "It's all right, that's a fact, you don't need to demand that." "I am Vroomfondel, and that is not a demand, it is a fact! What we demand are solid facts!" "No! Facts are precisely what we don't demand!" "We demand a complete absence of fact! I demand that I may or may not be Vroomfondel!" etc.). It's one of my favourite passages in the book, and one that, at least in my opinion, should translate well to film.

However, most of my favourite parts of the book are little asides which add nothing to the plot - the super-intelligent shade of blue, the 'fetchingly redesigned' interior of the Heart of Gold after use of the Infinite Improbability Drive, Ford's argument for Arthur leaving his house (if everybody assumes he'll be laying in front of the bulldozer all day, he doesn't actually need to be doing it), and so on. It would be nearly impossible to throw these into the film without using the narrator - who already seemed to be getting too much screen time - and turning the movie into something of a book on tape, with pictures.

So, yeah, there's my blog for the day. If you haven't read the book, you should. If you haven't seen the movie, you should. If you haven't done either, I'd suggest seeing the movie first, that way it won't seem like a let-down after the book.

And if you know anything about a sequel, a movie based on The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, please pass it along.

--Ryan

Smorgasbord

A smorgasbord, to the best of my understanding, is a sort of buffet of food - all sorts of food. I don't have any food for you, but here's all sorts of thought and opinions.

-The revitalization of downtown and downtown-ish Brantford continues. The Price Chooper Plaza (I don't know of a real name for it) now contains a free-standing Blockbuster, which is a lot nicer inside than I'd have expected. (By the way - Ocean's Thirteen, good movie, better than Twelve, still not as good as Eleven.) Williams won't be opening in the plaza part for a few months yet, and last I'd heard, they haven't found tenants for the rest of it.

In the meantime, down at the other end of what I call 'greater downtown' - where Dalhousie ends and Colborne becomes two-way - has a new building going up next to the McDonald's. Anyone know what that's about?

-The Toronto Blue Jays pulled off a big trade this week, sending away Troy Glaus (four years removed from being one of the best third basemen in baseball) and receiving Scott Rolen (ditto). People who like to read into statistics have already come up with conclusions saying that the Jays got the better/worse end of the deal...I really don't think it matters much.

-Staying with sports, anyone remember my quest to find a new hockey team to root for? I was clairvoyantly convinced that the Leafs would be awful this year, so I was after a new team. I can't say I've picked one team that I would call 'mine', but if I had to pick a favourite, either Buffalo or Colorado. Not that I'll go out of my way to watch either of their games, but if I am watching their games, I'll cheer for them.

-Speaking of things I've meant to be following closer, American politics. I've decided that I'm hoping Obama wins the Democrat nomination. I haven't looked into it nearly enough to say that I'd even vote for him, but out of the major front-runners in both parties, he certainly *seems* like the most likely to bring about the major changes that need to be made in American policy.

-I've mentioned before that I love the concept of the All-Starr band - Ringo Starr and a bunch of other rockers getting together and doing a world tour. Here's another nice clip for you - did you know that the theme song to the Drew Carey Show ('Cleveland Rocks') was actually a cover version? It was originally sung by a 70s British band named Mott the Hoople. Here's a video of MTH lead singer Ian Hunter, Ringo, Howard Jones, Roger Hodgson (of Supertramp), Greg Lake (of King Crimson as well as Emerson, Lake and Palmer) and a couple people I don't recognize, performing what surely must be the only hit song about Cleveland. Maybe even all of Ohio.

-If you've never heard of the board game Diplomacy, do yourself a favour and look it up.

-Finally, if anyone knows of anything newsworthy happening in the K/W area this weekend, I'd love to hear about it. Have to take some pictures for a class, and the best idea I've had thus far is 'Ranger game'.

--Ryan

Also based on a true story!

I find I'm doing these too often, and I'm afraid of flooding honeygarlic.blogspot.com, so I set up something here for anyone who cares. (No one? Ouch.)




Yes, this was based on a true story. In actuality, the only think I heard was "I don't think he is!"


--
D. Phillips

... based on a true story...

I'm learning how to use the Adobe Suite. Given I'm already familiar with the layout of the older Macromedia Flash, Adobe's done well to not change much. Adobe Illustrator is pretty good too! And Microsoft Scanning and Photo Wizard... could be friendlier. I also like this Adobe Soundbooth, but I didn't use that for this comic. (Maybe next time.)

But enough about me. Here's my adventure!



Yep. Good times.

--
Dan

The story of the badly-clogged drain

Back before Christmas, our shower drain clogged. Immediate attempts to rectify this situation - mostly involving Drano, a toilet plunger, and a reshaped wire coat hanger - met with utter failure.

Figuring rightly that this wasn't an immediate concern - the only person to stay in this house over the holidays uses the other shower - I took no further action before heading home.

Upon returning to Brantford on January 6, it was clear that the situation had not magically resolved itself over the three weeks I was away. (Drat.) Ignoring the clog was no longer an option, calling a plumber would be expensive. Enter...



Liquid Plum-R Foaming Pipe Snake! Why was it, that when I was going down the cleaning products aisle, this was the drain cleaner that caught my eye? Well, the bottle is an odd shape - it actually contains two different chemicals, which are not mixed until poured down the drain. Also, it was on sale.

One bottle down the drain...there was an improvement. The water I used to flush down the cleaner now drained in approximately 24 hours, whereas before, it had been nearly a week. (Rarely have I ever been excited over a drain needing 24 hours to work properly.) A second bottle went down, and the time was decreased to 'less than overnight'. Finally, I poured down my third and final bottle, and had success. Huzzah! The drain was once again working properly!

And the punchline? Three bottles of Liquid Plum-R Foaming Pipe Snake cost me under ten dollars. A plumber would have charged much, much more.

So thank you, Liquid Plum-R, for doing what a toilet plunger and coat hanger could not.

--Ryan

The History of Peanuts (Part II)

(NB #1: I will be blogging about a lot more than Peanuts over the next while, don't fret.

NB #2: What does NB stand for?)

So, I mentioned the other day that I'd be going through the entire history of Peanuts, and posting strips I found reasonably funny for one reason or another. My initial plan was to do one post per year, but as I'm finding quite a number of strips worth blogging, it'll probably be about 6-8 strips per post.

Note that you can click on each full-strip for the correct size.

The first batch starts off with proof that five-year-olds had a much larger vocabulary in the fifties than they do now...


Really, I like to think I have an above-average vocabulary, but even I had never heard the word 'truism' until this past summer. Peanuts didn't stop at that, though, also make jokes that I can only see understood by musicians...


In the meantime, the "words today's kids wouldn't understand" trend continues with Snoopy's first-ever thought bubble...


While Snoopy has finally learned how to communicate his thoughts, Charlie Brown is grappling with a problem of his own...


Seriously, I didn't even know the 1890s had a nickname - much less one that, in a different context, could also be used for the 1990s.


Today, on the other hand, kids don't really want to do either of those activities.

Let's finish off this post with an eerie parallel to how most of you feel about this blog...



--Ryan

<3!

Ryan made a comment the other day that I should post a blog entry instead of pacing around bored. So, here!


I was in a loving mood today. This is the creative result:




Of course, after an hour of getting my computer to work properly with my scanner, I was feeling a little less heart-felt. I mean, what is the human mind but a series of equations and chemicals? The emotion "love" can probably be described in terms of numbers, and those numbers are probably pretty insignificant. Perhaps love is so small that it is less than four. No! Less than three!




--
Dan Phillips

<3

The History of Peanuts (Part I)

I would like to begin my history of peanuts with a quote from Wikipedia. "The peanut, or groundnut (Arachis hypogaea) is a species in the legume family Fabaceae native to South America, Mexico and Central America. It is an annual herbaceous plant growing to 30 to 50 cm tall. The leaves are opposite, pinnate with four leaflets (two opposite pairs; no terminal leaflet), each leaflet 1 to 7 cm long and 1 to 3 cm broad."

...wait, that's not right. I'm not giving you the history of those peanuts.


That's more like it. How many of you can honestly say you never read Peanuts comics as a kid, or watched the TV specials? Despite the fact that you probably haven't given Peanuts a second thought since Charles Schulz passed away eight years ago, how many of you wouldn't still recognize Charlie Brown, or Snoopy, Lucy, Linus, Sally, Pig-Pen, Schroeder, the minute you saw their picture?

Peanuts was started in October 1951. Here is the first strip:


I have recently, *ahem*, come into possession of digitized copies of this strip, and in fact every Peanuts strip, from 1951 to 2000. Obviously it's going to take me a long time to go through them all...but in the meantime, I'll sporadically make posts here with some of my favourites - be they the first appearance of a beloved character, a surprisingly funny joke, or a strip which I can make some sort of witty comment about. First batch should be up within the next few days.

--Ryan

Get Smart Cast Interview

The main cast of Get Smart, upcoming comedy starring Steve Carell and Anne Hathaway, has been interviewed by Coming Soon:


Steve Carell



Anne Hathaway
Maxwell Smart (Steve Carell) and Agent 99 (Anne Hathaway)will fight against KAOS in your nearest theater starting Friday, June 20.
:)

All I need is a TV show, that and the radio

(I can show you, I can show you, some of the people in my life.)

Yesterday I promised you that I'd pimp some 'smart' TV shows. I'm not about to break that promise.


Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip had all the ingredients for success. It was created and (mostly) written by Aaron Sorkin, the man behind the successful show The West Wing. It was quite clearly an intelligent show - the pilot episode showed Judd Hirsch ranting about the sharp decline in quality of American television - and it had a cast well-known enough (starring Matthew Perry) to appeal to the average viewer.

Studio 60 was one of the most-looked-forward-to shows of the 2006/2007 television season, and the first few episodes really didn't disappoint. But as ratings started to drop a bit, NBC pressured Sorkin into focusing less on the behind-the-scenes aspect of a Saturday Night Live clone, and more on the romantic relationships between its characters. Once it started doing this, it seemed like the message Sorkin wanted to get out was being lost, and it was quickly turning into just another primetime drama. However, Sorkin managed to highly politicize the final few episodes - although he also included a storyline featuring a jeopardized pregnancy, and thinly-veiled shots at his being forced to include it.

On what basis can I call Studio 60 'smart'? Well, they told us that they were smart. Then they told us again. And again. And again. Et cetera. Somehow, this didn't take away from the quality of the first few and last few episodes.

In the end, Studio 60 was cancelled, because there weren't enough people watching it while it was intelligent - and once they dumbed parts of it down, it wasn't good enough to satisfy the original fans.


Going back a few more years, The Mole was another 'smart' program. How can I call this one smart? Well, MENSA is full of smart people, and they once called it "the smartest show on television". I'm not really in any position to argue with that now, am I?

The Mole was a reality show - and while I hear your growns, at least hear me out on this one. The premise of the Mole was that a group of people - ten in the first season, fourteen in the second - were working together to complete tasks, which would earn them up to a million dollars. However, one of the contestants was a 'mole', picked by the producers to sabotage the rest of the team. At the end of each episode, the contestants took a quiz on the identity of the Mole, and whoever scored the lowest on the quiz was 'executed' (i.e. taken off the show).

Part of the fun of the show was simply picking a favourite and rooting for them to win, but there was also the intrigue of viewers trying to figure out for themselves who the Mole was. It was a really fun show, and I still have most of season two on VHS tapes somewhere.

Of course, the ratings didn't really agree with my assessment - and in an effort to boost them, ABC introduced 'Celebrity Mole'. They clearly stretched the definition of 'celebrity' for this one, as I just looked at the player lists, and for each season of Celebrity Mole (there were two seasons), I recognize the name of exactly one person. Since the celebrities weren't as smart as the carefully-chosen participants in the first two seasons, and they were mainly out to get their name back into the public consciousness, Celebrity Mole was nowhere as good.

Do you see a pattern here? Two great shows, both very intelligent (despite Studio 60's self-righteousness, it was intelligent)...and neither with enough people to watch them. Going back to my rant from yesterday, it goes hand in hand with what I suggested about people not wanting to focus on their television set and have to think about what they're watching.

On a similar note, CBC is introducing a new series next week called 'The Border'. I don't know a lot about it, other than the fact that they've committed far more resources to it than they do to the average show, but I'm looking forward to it. The preview I read in The Record the other day made it seem as though the show will actually look at the social and political dilemmas faced by border guards (racial profiling was given as an example), rather than just be a drama that happens to take place on the Canada/US border. So I'll be watching, and maybe I'll be able to add The Border to the above list before long.

--Ryan

On my TVC-15, oh oh, TVC-15

(Transition . . . transmission . . . )

On occasion, I hear people talking about how "stupid" television is these days. These same people will point to shows such as America's Got Talent, Don't Forget The Lyrics, and pretty much anything on FOX to back up their opinion.

Despite the tone of that previous statement, I don't disagree with those people. There is a lot of stupid television out there, and thanks to the hundreds of new channels which have sprung up in the last few years, there is a lot more stupid television than ever before.

However, the people who complain about all the "stupid" (quotes being used interchangably to distinguish my perception of stupid from others') television are overlooking two points:

1) There has always been stupid television, and

2) There's nothing wrong with stupid television.

As far as the first goes...well, there HAS always been stupid television. Yes, "American Idol" is just us watching people sing, not always well. But was "American Bandstand" any different? Is "Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader?" really any more intellectually-objectionable than "The Sonny & Cher Show"? Were "Hee-Haw" and "Laugh-In" smart? Have I made my point yet? Sure, television isn't exactly smart these days, but it never has been!

And as for my second comment...when not taken off the air by writers' strikes, I watch The Office, I watch Scrubs. I enjoy both shows, but I would never classify either of them as "smart". They're both very funny (and despite what some may say, the character development in both is very paint-by-numbers), and they're great for giving my brain something to do while it rests after a strenuous day of classes. Neither of these shows should be considered smart - that doesn't mean, however, that they're not good.

So the obvious question: why is there no smart TV? I believe that it has something to do with the nature of the medium itself. Unlike print, television can be consumed by a crowd - you can't have five people reading the same copy of the same book, but you can have them watching the same program off the same TV. And if people are doing something together, they're likely to start discussing it - which, with television, means producers have to keep their productions moving at a rapid pace, so as to not have the consumers distract themselves.

Additionally, we have now seemingly been brainwashed into believing that television is something you are meant to sit in front of for fifteen, thirty, sixty minutes at a time, turn off your brain for a bit, and enjoy. In that context, it's almost impossible for smart programming to survive. Those who do want to present an intelligent message in an audio-visual environment generally prefer another form - that of the documentary, which requires intense concentration for a prolonged period of time.

I wasn't intending for this to become a rant about television. I was planning on sharing information on a few good television programs which I WOULD consider smart - but I guess I'll do that tomorrow.

1280x768

(You see, this post is about my resolutions for 2008, and that's my computer's screen resolution, so, uh...yeah. It made more sense in my head.)

Once again, it is that time of year when people make promises to themselves about things they'll do differently over the next 365 days. As I don't need to lose weight, will never get into shape, and for once have grades above where I want them, I can't go with any of the usual pledges.

So I've wracked my brain looking for some good 2008 resolutions, and I'm writing them here so there's a written record I can look back at in December. Unless I forget about it.

1) Keep a running diary of my life. I really don't care if people think of it as a 'diary', 'journal', 'log', or whatever. It'll be me, every day, writing down what I did that day in a Notepad file (so as to resist temptation to print it/turn it into a spreadsheet that shows just how boring my life is). No thoughts for the future or anything like that, just a record of what I did. Exciting, eh?

2) Watch more CBC. Yeah, I know that sounds stupid, but half my professors constantly talk about how we should get our news from multiple sources. My primary source, by far, is CTV - and if I'm going to pick up a new source, it'll be a lot easier if it's also televised.

3) Be friendlier. I don't really have the "party mode" that a lot of other people seem to; consequently if I'm at a party, I'm noticeably one of the quieter people there. I tried changing this at a gathering last week, and talked to people I ordinarily wouldn't have (a few I'd never talked to before in my life, despite going to high school with), and enjoyed it enough that I'm going to try to keep it up.

4) Figure out how the sink in my bedroom keeps attracting hair, despite it not being hooked up to any water, and thus never used.

5) Learn the Charleston. This is fairly unrealistic, but I resolved to do it a few years ago, and never did. Maybe 2008 is the year.

Not a bad list, I might even be able to accomplish half of it.

--Ryan