Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Jrand74]

DRPANNI - I watched the TCM year end Memorial....and Doris isn't included!  I don't know who to email, but it is a shocking oversight!  They show her movies all the time.

[MBarnum]

To DR Jane and DR Jay: Yes, and Yes! And Jay, you just cracked me up! LOL!

[MBarnum]

For those DRs who lived through the late 70s and early 80s, I am surprised that you were not aware of Cameltoe-ism! LOL! It seemed to be a unfortunately common thing back then in women's jeans!! Uhg!

I guess that is one of the good things about today's baggy, loose fitting jeans!

[Tomovoz]

I think there is an OZ lurker out there!  Welcome. Or are you just a friend of Dot. (Over the Rainbow and not down Under)

[Matt H.]

Another vote for DREAMCHILD, a haunting and beautifully done film.

[Jrand74]

Hmmmmmmmm I don't know from DREAMCHILD....another HHW discovery for me!

[Tomovoz]

I shall have to look around locally for "Dreamchild". Sounds like a must see.

[Matt H.]

Natalie Portman is in my opinion just dreadful in the first two STAR WARS films, especially the second one where the dialogue she has to say and the goo-goo eyes she has to make to the forgettable Hayden Christiansen are embarrassing to say the least.

However, I understand she's the best thing about CLOSER, so maybe she's a better actress than I've given her credit for being. No one has emerged from those STAR WARS prequels with any glory.

[Matt H.]

Happy to say that at the gift swapping tonight, I finally came home with the Julie Andrews/CINDERELLA. I was thinking I was going to have to order it for myself tonight after I got home. Glad I'll have it to look at tomorrow, and I can erase the recorded-from-PBS copy that's been on my DVR for the past few weeks.

Also got THE BOSTON STRANGLER, COME BACK LITTLE SHEBA, I COULD GO ON SINGING, and one more whose title escapes me at the moment.

[Dan (the Man)]

During an impromptu trip to the Cherry Hill Mall today, I decided to use up a gift certificate I got from my niece for Christmas.  I picked up the LOTR:ROTK extended set and then spotted a Jack Benny set which I couldn't resist.  Five DVDs with 24 episodes (there seems to be an abundance of New Year's themed shows.)  I'm not sure if the show with the little girl playing Jack's violin is included.  After watching To Have And To Have Not on TCM tonight (during which I fell in love with Lauren Bacall again), I watched two of the Benny shows and laughed myself silly.

[Dan (the Man)]

Welcome to the very lovely new DR La Joilie Femme!

And Tomovoz, great new avatar photo!

[Tomovoz]

Thanks DtM. Recycled from this time last year!

[JoseSPiano]

Good Evening!

I didn't do too much damage at Macy's tonight.  Not much at all.  There were actually quite a few "temptations" tonight - I seemed to notice more things on sale, and, as it turned it there was some more stuff put on sale today, so...  I ended up buying a nice chef's pan for my brother, Jay, as a sort of combined Christmas and Birthday present.

Then came the show... What a show we had tonight.  When I got there, the tech crew was running around all over the place.  Apparently, the sound board just would not turn on when the soundboard operator got there at 6:30.  So they had to swap it out.  Of course, the big wrinkle was that the soundboard they were using was brought down from George Street, and any spare ones they had at Arena were totally different models.  After much swearing, running around, and reprogramming, they got the new board up and running by 7:30.  However, due to the differences between the boards, the board op was more or less running the show on the fly tonight.  And she did a great job!  The only thing they weren't able to get patched in correctly were the backstage and band monitors, but according to the people in the house, everything sounded fine from where they were.  And it was kind of nice playing "deaf".  We all had to listen to each other carefully, and the conductor also had to turn up his ears a bit more tonight too.  -Just when things start to get comfortable...  *As a reward/consolation, the theatre management opened up the intermission bar after the show for the crew and cast - first round of drinks was on the theatre!

...I didn't stick around for the free cocktails - feeling kind of tired after the show.  I just headed on home, and I've been trying my best not to snack on too many of those Filipino sweets my brother brought back from San Diego.  Must resist... Must resist...

[Tomovoz]

My New Year's Eve viewing will be LOTR ROTK. I'm looking forward to the extra scenes.

[JoseSPiano]

On the way in to the show, I heard an interesting piece on the news in relation to the horrible tsunami and its aftermath.  Apparently, they have not found any dead animals.  Not even a dead rabbit from the report I heard.  The theory is that the animals sensed the coming danger and headed further inland for protection.  Interesting...

However, having the death toll pass the 100,000 mark today has been very sobering and sad.  And just the fact the death toll is rising by the thousands as opposed to the tens or hundreds... It's just unfathomable.

[Joey]

Hello everyone! I've had a not so eventful past few days but at the same time I haven't found as much time to get online.

My most exciting news tonight is that my marathon pretraining is going well. I ran 3 miles tonight in 30 minutes as opposed to about 2.5 miles in a half hour last time I ran. It's a lot different than I expected it to be, but what is ever like you expect it to be? It's just a lot of fun and so far I am very glad I decided to do this.

I went to see Meet the Fockers with my parents tonight and it was nice to get out and see a movie and just be able to laugh. I will unfortunately be unable to be at the big party tomorrow as I will be about two hours away at a friends house. She is spending the year in the Americorps and she has a short break for Christmas. Several of us are going to go up and just have a really good time. I haven't seen her since the beginning of the summer so it will be nice to catch up.

[Jrand74]

When you get ready to watch I COULD GO ON SINGING drMATTH, let me know, there is one line of dialog I can NEVER hear or understand.

[Jrand74]

Great story, DRJOSE.  Technical people are so under rated by so many people - until something like that happens.

I have run sound and lights and sometimes sound AND lights - and it is a science!

[DERBRUCER]

I heard an interesting piece on the news in relation to the horrible tsunami and its aftermath.  Apparently, they have not found any dead animals.  

Here is the AP Story:

Did Animals Sense Tsunami?

Thursday, December 30, 2004

YALA NATIONAL PARK, Sri Lanka — Wildlife officials in Sri Lanka (search) expressed surprise Wednesday that they found no evidence of large-scale animal deaths from the tsunamis — indicating that animals may have sensed the wave coming and fled to higher ground.

An Associated Press photographer who flew over Sri Lanka's Yala National Park in an air force helicopter saw abundant wildlife, including elephants, buffalo, deer, and not a single animal corpse.

Floodwaters from Sunday's tsunami swept into the park, uprooting trees and toppling cars onto their roofs — one red car even ended up on top of a huge tree — but the animals apparently were not harmed and may have sought out high ground, said Gehan de Silva Wijeyeratne, whose Jetwing Eco Holidays ran a hotel in the park.

"This is very interesting. I am finding bodies of humans, but I have yet to see a dead animal," said Wijeyeratne, whose hotel in the park was destroyed.

"Maybe what we think is true, that animals have a sixth sense," Wijeyeratne said.

Yala, Sri Lanka's largest wildlife reserve, is home to 200 Asian Elephants, crocodile, wild boar, water buffalo and gray langur monkeys. The park also has Asia's highest concentration of leopards. The Yala reserve covers 391 square miles, but only 56 square miles are open to tourists.

The human death toll in Sri Lanka surpassed 21,000. Forty foreigners were among 200 people in Yala who were killed.

My own amateur opinion would be that some of the animals may have a hightened sensitivity to earth motion and may well have detected the underlying earthquake.

der Brucer

[DERBRUCER]

The Washington Post details my livestock dilemma:

Backyard Battle With Furry Thief Planted a Seed
By David A. Fahrenthold
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 26, 2004; Page C01

In the beginning -- before Bill Adler Jr. became an author, a self-help guru or a guest on the "Rosie O'Donnell Show" -- there was a confrontation between man and squirrel.

On one side of the window was Adler: former lobbyist, fledgling freelance writer and proud new owner of a bird feeder.

On the other side was a gray squirrel. Lounging inside Adler's feeder. Eating the birdseed.

"The feeder was not for the squirrel. It was for the birds," Adler remembers thinking that day in 1987. "So I got mad."
...
That squirrel launched my writing career," he said. "I guess I shouldn't have been so mad at it."

To understand Adler's story, it is important for those who don't feed the birds to understand how those who do feel about squirrels.

They aren't cute. This crowd knows that squirrels are capable of impossible leaps, upside-down dangles and other ninja moves in order to raid bird feeders.

They also know that squirrels do not share with birds: They are furry thieves, driven beyond decency in their all-consuming quest for the next nut.

"They're in the same family as rats and mice," said Steve R. Runnels, president and chief executive of the 20,000-member American Birding Association. "They just look good."

Over the years, some birders have just given up and accepted them. Some have waged their own campaigns aimed at confusing, frightening or frustrating them into eating the neighbor's birdseed instead.

"Feed 'em or defeat 'em," said John Schaust, chief naturalist for Wild Birds Unlimited, a chain of birding supply stores.

Adler, who would come to champion the "defeat 'em" camp, grew up in Manhattan, barely aware that squirrels existed. Then he moved to the District, quit his job in politics and set up a home office in his apartment in Cleveland Park.

He bought a feeder to entertain himself. And then the squirrel showed up.

Trying to get rid of it, Adler banged on the window. He sprayed the wall with slippery Teflon. He built a fortress of old Perrier bottles around the bird feeder. He waited in ambush with a child's dart gun.

None of it kept the hungry animal away for long.

After a while, it struck Adler that there was a larger principle at stake here.

"If we can't outwit squirrels, who have brains the size of walnuts, how can we ever get a man or woman to Mars?" he said. "It's a matter of pride."

Adler interviewed experts and spent a few mornings crawling around his yard on all fours. He wanted to see the feeder from a squirrel's perspective, he said.

He used this insight to write a book. Among other tactics, the book recommends putting plastic shields, called baffles, around feeders and smearing the area around the feeder with a squirrel-repellent mixture of Vaseline and red pepper.

To this serious advice, Adler added a leavening of humor. Dig a moat around your feeder, he advised. Fill it with piranhas.

"Build a special cannon," the book counsels in another section. "It'll be about 10 feet long and six inches wide and will fire cats. Aim this catgun directly at squirrels."
...

der Brucer (who has noticed that while the squirrels are raiding the bird feeder, the birds swoop down and pluck corn kernals off of the squirrels' cobs while other feathered friends are flying off with the squirels' peanuts.)

[JoseSPiano]

And then there was this bit of news too:

Scientists: Quake may have made Earth wobble
Wednesday, December 29, 2004 Posted: 2:44 PM EST (1944 GMT)

Scientists believe that a shift of mass toward the Earth's center during the quake caused the planet to spin 3 microseconds faster and to tilt about an inch on its axis.
     
LOS ANGELES, California (Reuters) -- The deadly Asian earthquake may have permanently accelerated the Earth's rotation, shortening days by a fraction of a second and caused the planet to wobble on its axis, U.S. scientists said Tuesday.

Richard Gross, a geophysicist with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, theorized that a shift of mass toward the Earth's center during the quake Sunday caused the planet to spin 3 microseconds, or millionths of a second, faster and to tilt about an inch on its axis.

When one huge tectonic plate beneath the Indian Ocean was forced below the edge of another "it had the effect of making the Earth more compact and spinning faster," Gross said.

Gross said changes predicted by his model probably are too minuscule to be detected by a global positioning satellite network that routinely measures changes in Earth's spin, but said the data may reveal a slight wobble.

The Earth's poles travel a circular path that normally varies by about 33 feet , so an added wobble of an inch is unlikely to cause long-term effects, he said.

"That continual motion is just used to changing," Gross said. "The rotation is not actually that precise. The Earth does slow down and change its rate of rotation."

When those tiny variations accumulate, planetary scientists must add a "leap second" to the end of a year, something that has not been done in many years, Gross said.

Scientists have long theorized that changes on the Earth's surface such as tide and groundwater shifts and weather could affect its spin but they have not had precise measurements to prove it, Caltech seismologist Hiroo Kanamori said.

"Even for a very large event, the effect is very small," Kanamori said. "It's very difficult to change the rotation rate substantially."

[Panni]

DRPANNI - I watched the TCM year end Memorial....and Doris isn't included!  I don't know who to email, but it is a shocking oversight!  They show her movies all the time.

It's a fickle business (show, that is). I'll ask around about who to e-mail.

[Panni]

Good to know that so many DRs think highly of DREAMCHILD. I'm going to try and hunt down a decent copy. I have a not so great cassette dub.

[Panni]

Saw SIDEWAYS tonight. Interesting that a number of younger people (20's) I've talked with are not blown away by it. I really do think it's a movie for people who've lived life a little. Aged like a good wine.
Great performances. Excellent script. And funny. Bittersweet, but really funny.

[Tomovoz]

I've been searching for Dreamchild. Found a store in Melbourne that lists the video on its rentals so shall investigate next week.
Have a friend who works around the corner from the Video shop - that's what friends are for.....(A "Night Shift" reference - for those who remember whence the song really came!!)

[bk]

Ten minutes and then the fnal notes of 2004 will be up.

[S. Woody White]

Der Brucer wanted me to tell everyone that I discovered roasting beets this year.

Silly boy, he forgets how I was roasting them in the toaster oven back in Long Beach, well before we moved.

(But I did discover saucing them with a combo of orange juice and Dijon mustard tonight.  Yummers!)

[S. Woody White]

Even I'm not sure what a "fnal" is.  

[George]

Okay, I hate to admit that it's taken me this long to get to it, but I've finished the "first act" of BK's very own "Writer's Block."  So far, I love what's been written and the writing style.  I'm about to find out what's going to happen next!

[George]

I read the first half in one sitting...no breaks!