derekl_1963 | Entries tagged with tv

Just a random thing I came across on YouTube - a promo for the miniseries Shogun... Which started my lifelong interest in Japanese culture.

No Tivo or pause buttons back than, and VCR's were just barely starting to be widely available... So, every night at 9PM for a solid week I parked myself in front of the TV, and took bathroom breaks only at commercial breaks. (Which is how I saw Battlestar Galactica too!)

All in all, an excellent weekend!

Saturday got to spend all day out in the shop, knocking out all but the final steps of the current project. Ralph is coming over today to help with those steps, they're tricky and something I've never done before.) In the evening we went over to a party at Brenda's bosses' house, and had a blast. They used to do a lot of staff parties, but those have tapered off. I hope they go back to do doing them.

When we got home, watched a little TV while Brenda cleaned the piggies cage... Oh Brother Where Art Thou, from the scene in the radio station where we first 'meet' the Soggy Bottom Boys to the scene with the Sirens;

I wasn't feeling to good Sunday morning, all day at the workbench on Sat (and that bench is too low) plus standing around for hours at the party did a number of my back. So, it was mostly light housework and hanging about.

In the afternoon we met a bunch of folks at the theater to see Hunger Games.

It turned out we were the second shift - as our group was waiting to go in, another whole bunch of our friends was just coming out. :)

Over all, it was pretty a good. A nicely done adaptation, with decent acting and characterization... The art director however should be taken out back and shot. In the first half hour/forty five minutes (up to the start of the Games) he managed to cram in/recycle so many SF visual tropes that it really took away from the movie itself. Afterwards, we all went over to Azteca for dinner and chatter about the movie.

Back home, once again, in time to clean the piggies cage while watching TV and then to bed... Another movie this time - Rear Window, which I've never seen. (And I love Jimmy Stewart!) So, we recorded it on the Tivo to watch later,

I've been meaning to post more of these, so I might as well start even if the weekend was mostly boring. :)

Saturday, Brenda went over a friends to do scribal stuff. So I spent the day mostly running errands and doing some stuff around the house. Also got a photography project started, started planning another, and spent a couple of hours diving in my archives. The project I started is taking a photograph of the same area of the sky using the same camera settings at the same time (noon) each day. Mostly clouds so far...

Sunday, another scribal day for Brenda, a class down at Dame Tammlyn's that she came back quite enthused from.

I started poking around in my shop... It's amazing how cluttered it has got, despite not spending much time out there last year. But, with June Fair projects in the offing I need to get it cleaned and organized so I can get a head start if the weather permits. (The shop is insulated now, but most of the projects are finishing and refinishing and I need to be able to open the windows for those.) I didn't get as much done because on my first break, I came back in the house and MIB II was on and I got caught up in it. It seems my subconscious decided that even a crappy movie was a better idea than cleaning the shop.

Nicked from

beamjockey... a stop motion re-creation of the opening sequence of Jonny Quest.

Jonny Quest Opening Titles from Roger D. Evans on Vimeo.

For comparison, the original cel-animated version:

I was BIG into Jonny Quest when I was a little... But sadly, when

brenda333 gave me the complete collection on DVD for Christmas a few years back, I found that it had not held up well at all.

I rarely do the fanboy sqeee!! thing... but oh Lord if they do this right, the motion picture industry is forgiven for all it's past sins in raking through the past for franchises to resurrect: UFO - The Movie

The intro for the original series:

This was one of my all-time favorites as a kid - eclipsing Star Wars and even briefly doing so to Star Trek (TOS of course... the movies and TNG were far off in the future back then.)

Tivo suggested we watch this Saturday night... so we did:

The politics haven't survived well, but otherwise not a bad movie. I even managed to (mostly) surpress my annoyance over how the movie mangled Curnow and Chandrasegarampillai's characters.

Curiously, when the movie was over and we went back to live TV, whatever channel it was on was showing the tail end of Apollo 13.

Watching it I caught an error I hadn't noticed before - when they jettisoned the LEM, the CM retained the probe assembly. In actuality, the probe assembly is jettisoned with the LEM so that if the astronauts need to escape the CM after landing the probe isn't blocking the top tunnel. A minor, but geek-annoying error in what is still a dang good movie.

Flipping through the channels Sunday night, we caught the last forty five minutes of the 1981 version of Clash of the Titans:

Which has not held up well over the years... I recall liking it back then, but thirty more years of SFX development have not been kind to the reality.

A sad day for cooking shows - practically the only good one not on PBS takes a bow: Alton Brown calls an end to 'Good Eats'.

I know I've commented about bad children's TV here before, but this one takes the cake I think...

No, this is *not* a spoof... it was an actual TV show.

Friday:

Guys wooworking day in Seattle with Joel (

abrahe ). Hit Woodcraft's annual woodworking show, Crosscut Hardwoods, and Rockler doing to 'tool and wood drool'. The show wasn't quite a good as years past (lower travel budgets for manufacturers?), though I'm tempted by some of the classes they had on offer. Crosscut had some really cool boards, and we joked about holding them up ("Two guys last seen southbound on I5 with a U-haul full of mahognany, cherry, and walnut".)

Lunch was beer, pizza, and hot wings at the Pyramid Alehouse.

We also swung by Uwijimaya since we were in the neighborhood because I wanted to look at Nabe pots because that's a style of cooking I'm curious about. Ugly (really ugly) Nabe pots were cheap, decent looking ones ridiculous expensive. Result, I picked up a book on Haiku and didn't pick up any pots.

By the time we got back to Tacoma, rush hour traffic was in full swing. The choice between hanging out with Joel & Peggy & Kate or hanging out in traffic was a no-brainer.

Saturday

Back to Seattle with

brenda333 for the Northwest Tea Festival at the Seattle Center. Much, much fun. Tasted many excellent teas and had lunch in Center House (decent fish & chips). Lesson learned: Get the tickets for all the tasting session we're interested in early - they went pretty fast. Afterwords, watched kids playing in the fountain and got some great photographs.

While we were in Center House I perused the display of potential future plans for the Seattle Center. Almost all of them involved outdoor space, outdoor lawns, outdoor theatre, Opening one wall of Center House to the outdoors... Um, guys... Seattle. Fifty five degrees and raining on the Fourth of July. Fire the LA based consultants dudes!

Off to Southcenter to fight traffic and look at [camera] tripods, then dinner at Old Country Buffet in Lakewood before returning home. (I so wish they'd open one up here.)

Sunday

Mostly quiet hanging about the house.

TV:

Watched the premiere of Law & Order: Los Angeles which we'd Tivo'ed... I like the characters, not so much the style which was more in line with Law and Order: Criminal Intent which I don't much care for. We'll see how it goes. We also Tivo'ed the US premiere of Law and Order: UK from BBC America - it will be very interesting to see how that goes.

Browning some meat for tonite's Culinary Guild potluck, and I stepped into the living room to turn on the TV for background noise and to distract me from messing with the meat. Turned out that that it was on the Jerry Springer Show... and now I know the answer to the questions "how much Jerry Springer is too much?".

One Episode

And a hint to Bimbo #3: People who grew up in the Czech Republic and only came to the US "last year" do not have Georgia redneck accents and speech patterns. Hint to Jerry Springer: C'mon is your audience really dumb enough to believe Bimbo #3? (Actually, I don't think I want to know the answer to that question.)

Turn it up to ELEVEN!

Sitting here, sick and miserable - comparing my varied symptoms and worrying that they don't quite match whatever symptoms I think I should have for what I think I have.

I've been watching waaaaay too much House recently.

Current Mood: sick

I was flipping channels earlier and came across the last few minutes of The Princess Bride. I stopped flipping as by definition there couldn't be anything better on.

Following links from a discussion on Usenet, and apropos to the discussions here this week (and well worth a read)...

The Six Freakiest Children’s TV Rock Bands.

It's pretty sad they had to reach into the 80's for the sixth, surely there must have been another truly freaky one in the same (early 70's) timeframe as the others? I seem to recall that such 'Prefab' bands were pretty popular among Saturday morning fare back then.

Ah, the poor kids of today with their entertainment available 24/7 on cable. They'll never know the joy of waking up on Saturday mornings and knowing that today is cartoon day! OTOH, they'll never know the annoyance of being yanked from their one day to do chores, or because Mom and Dad had plans for the day, etc...

Growing up in a big family was fun on Saturday morning though - it was ever an argument over who got to pick the cartoons. My mom, ever practical, solved this be creating a chore list we rotated through on a weekly basis and whoever was on dishwashing duty that week picked the cartoons on Saturday morning.

I almost typed 'controlled the remote', but remotes were pretty unusual back in the early 70's and we never actually owned a TV with one while I was growing up. I don't think I/we (that is Brenda and I actually owned one until the mid-late 90's.

fugazi2112 provides a list of TV shows and suggests that one bolds the shows one has seen more than three episodes of.

( My list is behind the cut. )

Tonite, as part of it's month long series of Christmas specials, ABC Family aired Dr Seuss's The Lorax. I don't know about you, but I have never considered heavy enviromental propoganda be to part of Christmas. (A variety of other morality plays - yes. But not enviromentalism.)

Decidely odd. One would have thought that coming up with 25 such shows with a direct Christmas theme would be fairly simple.