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...and looks anywhere from "out of date" to "retro" by today's standards.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