Courtesy of Adam Baldwin

Suspension of Disbelief

Erik Evan has compiled a list of The 50 Laws of Science Fiction Physics over on his Kunochan blog. Absolutely worth reading.

Here's a taste:

Doctrine of Hostile Alien Tourism: when technologically advanced spacefaring aliens initiate a war or invasion against the Earth, their first strategic maneuver will be to destroy a number of famous human landmarks, usually ones with no strategic or defensive value.

Everybody's Doing It: My Favorite Movies from 2009

C'mon, it's all the rage! Everyone wants to know what everyone else's favorite movies of the year were. And I'm sure you have been checking this blog at least daily wondering what Maria's favorites were. Wait no longer. Here they are.

Since we hardly go to theaters because of a) being broke and b) having children of too many different ages and interests to go together, I saw exactly 2 movies in the theater this year.


So my top 2 movies were: Star Trek and District 9. I liked STG and I LOVED D9.

Can I count movies I saw this year that didn't come out this year? I can? Oh good. This year I saw Voices of a Distant Star on DVD. I do not do anime. Master K does, and cannot figure out why I am not interested in it. But I Netflixed Voices of a Distant Star on the recommendation of several people whose opinions I respect, and loved it. It's animated, but not anime, if that makes sense. It's a poem of a film, not very long, and while it has a sci-fi setting, it is a poem about two people separated by time and space and what happens to their love. I cried and cried. I give this one a Five Hankie rating.

I re-enjoyed Aliens after a long time away from it. We have the extended version with all the deleted scenes and I don't like it as well, but I can cover my eyes and say lalalalala during those scenes and just let the story unfold as I remember it.


Some others:
Gran Torino Clint Eastwood swearing a lot and showing that he's really soft-hearted in the end.
Let The Right One In A darling baby vampire. In Sweden.
[Rec] FAST ZOMBIES!
The Fall Lee Pace being sexy, tortured and a little twisted.

And in television:
The Wire: The Complete Series (Barry and I went on an all-five-seasons binge during which not much else got accomplished around here)
Flight of the Conchords: The Complete First and Second Seasons (indescribable and hilarious)

I'll post my favorite books from 2009 another day.

Chuck Returns!

Catch the Laserdance bit at the very end. I need more Chuck.

Netflix - Now in Cedar Rapids

We were served out of a Netflix distribution center in the Twin Cities for some time, and I loved it because we would get our movies in 1 day after shipment (though it took 2 days for a returned disk to get back there). Then they opened a Des Moines center and everything slowed down to 2 days each way. Go figure. Then things improved, and lately it's usually a day each direction.

I just noticed that my envelopes now have a Cedar Rapids address. It will be interesting to see if the speed continues to hold with this new center. I read an article on the way a Netflix distribution center operates and it's an amazing example of an efficient combination of human and machine (a cyborg, if you will) labor. The slowdown has always come from the postal service.

CORRECTION: HackingNetflix says that center has been around since !!2005!!. So it's not new, it's just new to us. Interesting.

The Browncoat is Back!

Abbyshot Clothiers is back with a licensed replica Browncoat. See it here. Is it my faulty memory or has the price actually gone DOWN? It's now $359. Of course it's no longer custom sized and it's cowhide, not deerhide. But it looks wonderful. And of course I want one. And of course I won't get one, at least not till Barry is out of college.

If you start at www.realbrowncoats.com you can take a ridiculously easy Serenity trivia quiz that will make you at least smile and want to watch the movie AGAIN.

My brother as Dr. Horrible

I love it! My sister-in-law custom made the lab coat from that ubiquitous Matrix coat pattern that lots of people start with. Didn't she do a great job?

And the Death Ray looks strangely familiar.

Castle/Firefly Squee

YESSSS! It's the Coat!

Gratuitous Living Room Pictures (because I want to)

I worked on our living room a little more this weekend, moving a couple of bookshelves in there. It's not a large room and there is very little blank wall space, so we are pretty limited on arrangements. We traded a couple of rocking chairs for a second Kroehler Ko-Dav loveseat from the 19-teens or early 1920s and now I'm happy with the way it looks. It's a cozy, comfortable room. No television. When we moved to this house I said NO TELEVISION IN THE LIVING ROOM. If I hadn't decided this right from the first I could never have made it stick. Now it's the place for reading, sewing, and talking, and sometimes for lying on your tummy and putting together a jigsaw puzzle in the middle of the floor. I love this room.

We don't have all the original window and door trim, and replacing it has been an expensive experience, so we're doing it a little at a time, hence the trimless windows. That maple floor is original and had never been stripped until we did it. Shawn Leppert was extremely happy about that beautiful, untouched floor!

Interceptorizer! It works!

Things I Have Learned From Watching The Tudors

1. It is always sunny and warm in England.
2. All English people are gorgeous.
3. In the 1500s, Velcro must have already been invented, because people's clothes came off with amazing ease and speed.
4. Nobody in 1500s England was ever hungry, nor did any of them do a lick of work in their lives.
5. All English artists and musicians are gay. Or at least bisexual.
6. In the 1500s, people could teleport from one location to another, crossing continents at the summons of their king, cardinal or Pope in a matter of moments.

Stay tuned. I'm only beginning on Season 2 and I'm sure I will learn much, much more.

How could I not know about this?

Watch Now: Secrets of the Gobi Desert

Peter Dinklage will be Tyrion Lannister!

"But of course," you say. "Wasn't he the obvious choice?"

Well, yes, he was... though he is not how I picture Tyrion, he has the acting chops to pull it off.  Tyrion is a very complex character. I think he's my favorite character in A Song of Ice and Fire. I get the shudders at the very thought of bad casting for this series that I love. But so far, so good. I usually think of Dinklage as a very serious kind of guy, but he can be funny, too - and it's Tyrion's wry sense of humor that makes me love him so much.

Check out the news story at The Hollywood Reporter.

Cuttin' the Cables

Well, not literally. We have cable TV (the very basic broadcast channels, not even CNN), cable Internet and cable telephone service. Here in the boonies, there is no TV signal to speak of, so if you don't have cable TV, you don't have TV. All told it's about $120 a month. I just called up and canceled our basic broadcast TV service which will save about $25 a month. We watch everything online anyway, or we stream it through Netflix. (Master K is currently working his way through all the seasons of Red Dwarf.) When we all counted up how much time we actually watch television, it was not $25 a month's worth of TV time. And when President Obama preempted Chuck last night, it was the last straw.

Just chipping away here and there at the budget, trying to identify what really enriches our lives and what doesn't. We need the cable Internet for my work, and even now that we are past the introductory special on cable telephone, it is still saving us money.

Showing the Love for Netflix

We joined Netflix in December of 2005. We have suspended our membership twice, I believe; in fact, I think we out-and-out canceled it the first time during a family budget crunch and when we went back a few months later, we were amazed to find that they had saved our queue and we were able to jump right in again. We have been very pleased with our membership, though depending on how busy we are and how tight funds are, we have bounced up and down in different membership levels. Netflix was how we found Firefly, and Battlestar Galactica, and now we're working our way through The Wire.

Netflix will have its 10th birthday this September. With the addition of streaming video to the computer, it became an even better value; with the addition of streaming to our XBOX, and thus to our flat-screen TV, it has become a really remarkable deal for this family. We still get disks, but most of our watching is Watch Instantly on our TV. We have a few shares - like, maybe, 3 - of Netflix stock, and it has stayed steady and high through all this Wall Street mess. Part of what we think makes Netflix work so well is the customer service. We send our disks to the nearest center which is in Des Moines. They get our disks overnight, ship them right out the same day, and then it takes 2 days for the disk to get back to us. If we get a bad disk, we just click a few buttons on the website and they send us a replacement immediately without a fuss. We have misplaced a disk twice, and each time, they said they would not make us pay for the disk this time. (Each disk was eventually found and returned.)

Here are two interesting articles I'd like to show you:
How Netflix Got Started: Netflix founder and CEO Reed Hastings tells Fortune how he got the idea for the DVD-by-mail service that now has more than eight million customers Interesting how the initial response rate to the free trial was 80%! How many startup companies can say that?
Netflix: Streamers Rent Fewer DVDs That's true for us, certainly. We are on the 2-at-a-time-unlimited plan. Sometimes we'd like to have more disks available, but we don't really need them, and there's plenty else to watch on Stream Instantly.

HE SAID IT!!! (squeeeee)

Jayne Cobb: "She's starting to damage my calm."
John Casey: "You're starting to damage my calm."
Maria: *faints*

Edited:  Um, actually, I think maybe he said, "HE'S starting to damage my calm." Now I must watch the episode again. Ah, what drudgery.

Madame B, Bureaucrat Extraordinaire (an Evil League of Evil audition)

Most of the ELoE applications I have viewed have been a little hard to take, but I liked this one.

New Kitchen Windows, New Kitchen Contractor

Lovely big hole in the wall there, isn't it?

We have new windows in the kitchen as of today: New, nonleaky, nondrafty, pretty windows that stay up when you put them up and stay down when you put them down.

We also have a new contractor, Les Goetzinger from our sister church, Evangelical Church of Peace down in Crooked Creek. Frog and Wonder had planned to do our kitchen, but it took us a long while to get our act together, and by that point they had tons of work. Then we heard Les was available to take on some work sooner rather than later, so we asked Frog and Wonder when they would be able to get to us, and they were actually relieved to find that we had an alternative. So Les it is.

He's a finish carpenter/cabinet maker by trade, and comes highly recommended.

I'm typing this while watching Claire Bennett hiding from Sylar in the season premiere of Heroes. Bruce Boxleitner is guest starring? Huh?

Live Smart, Eureka

I just love these.



See them all at Hulu.com.