fine whine

Intent is three quarters of something or other. I've been meaning to mention this for at least two months but haven't done so for no good reason.

I've renewed Lee Goldberg's book of Unsold TV pilots at least twice. It was one of the shows that caught my eye, and only now do I share it with you.

But before I do that, let's see what you can recall. I found the story of a pilot about a former astronaut who had become super intelligent by way of some solar happenstance.

Heat vision and Jack, you say. Not so, I say. What follows is the unfiltered truth (i.e. the exact entry. Please don't sue me!)

55. Northstar. ABC 8/10/86. 90 minutes. Phillips/Grodnick Productions and Warner Bros. Television. Director: Peter Levin. Executive Producers: Clyde Phillips and Dan Grodnick. Producer/Writer: Howard Lakin. Music: Brad Fiedel.

Originally titled The Einstein Man, this stars Greg Evignan as an astronaut who, while on a walk outside the spaceship, is zapped by a solar disturbance. When he gets back to earth, he has superhuman powers--and a superhuman mind--that's triggered by sunlight. But if he gets too much direct sunlight--without the protection of special sunglasses--he'll literally explode from overload. So, like his predecessor "The six million dollar man," he becomes a secret agent. Mitchell Ryan is his boss, Deborah Wakeman is the scientist who works with him.

Cast: Greg Evigan (as Major Jack North), Deborah Wakeman (Dr. Allison Taylor), Mitchell Ryan (Col. Evan Marshall), Mason Adams (Dr. Karl Janss), David Hayward (Bill Harlow), Sonny Landham (Becker), Robin Curtiss (Jane Harlow), Richard Garrison (Agent), Steven Williams (Agent), Ken Foree (Astronaut).

So yeah, Ben Stiller and Jack Black might not have been as original as they thought. So what?

The book's an interesting read albeit an out of date one. I've had a lot of experience with failed pilots and misunderstood shows, having seen everything from the failed Journey to the center of the earth to the Charming family thing and shows about robot girls and fathers from space.

Heck, I was even part of a focus group/feedback thing once wherein I watched bits of TV shows and then answered phone questions about them. It devolved to a screenshot, a pitch and a bunch of smilie faces and I was supposed to say which face represented my reaction.

I mainly went with the "face that is neither happy nor sad".

Hey, I was seven or eight at the time.

It was only drizzling tonight, but the clouds had opened up this afternoon and dumped forth upon us a bunch of rain with a whole lot of rumbling thunder. So it was vaguely appropriate that we watched The day after tomorrow tonight.

Well, I needed a good laugh anyway. Jessica's a weather nut and a closet disaster movie junkie, so it was pretty much tailor-made for her. I thought it was a bit heavy-handed and preachy, though the effects were rather impressive.

The wolves, though, just weren't convincing.

Overall though the movie felt somehow lacking. It had some good actors in good performances but the plot seemed to exist merely to justify the spectacle. And that wasn't enough. I cannot imagine that in twenty or thirty years we'll look back as lovingly on this as other spectacle movies (e.g. 2001).

A while back I watched another effects-heavy movie, Resident evil. I thought it wasn't too bad, given what it was. I've never played any of the video games on which it was based (except for a couple minutes of the aborted PS1 lightgame disaster Resident Evil: Outbreak, once) so I can't really say how close it was to the source material but it certainly looked like it could be. The mission overview bits with their 3D-rendered flythough of the complex looked particularly video-gameish and in fact reminded me of the loading screens between levels of Die Hard Arcade (Dynamite Deka to those in the know) but more animated and high tech.

Boy, I miss Die Hard Arcade. Now why doesn't somebody make that into a movie? Oh yeah, they did, but the other way around, you could say.

Back to Resident evil, though. It was silly and light, but had some really nice bits in between the cumbersome and distractingly annoying scenes of flashback (that did have their reason for being there; I just didn't like them). In particular I enjoyed the laughable hallway of doom sequence with its razor-sharp laser beams (the culmination of which is pretty much ripped directly from Cube, though Cube's budget and production constraints necessitated less high-tech special effects for the cutting-into-tiny-bits 'gag'.

I also liked the somewhat unique attempt to explain the zombies, the so-called T-virus that undoubtedly belongs to the video game.

The rest was pretty cheesy. Okay, it was quite cheesy--but I enjoyed it much more than Brainscan. Will I borrow the sequel from the library sometime? Sure. I'll just keep my expectations low.

Once again, though, it was a movie with a secondary plot. In this case the effects and production design didn't drive the movie completely, but the film couldn't have been made without them. I much preferred 28 days later... as a film with zombies, more for its fleshing out of the characters than its flashy effects.

Flashy effects accounted for most of the thrust of Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind, and I liked it. Sure, a lot of it was old school trickery of forced perspective and the like, but it stands that this is a movie heavier on effects than plot. Again, I liked it for the same reasons that I couldn't really like the former two movies. Does that make me a hypocrite, an integrity-free man? I think not. In general, I think that special effects should serve the plot, not the other way around--but I am willing to make exceptions.

What's the fastest way to get to the hospital? Stand in the middle of the road.

Today was something of a rough day for me. That so-called joke was courtesy of me, circa some fifteen years ago.

As I go slowly through the boxes of my childhood stacked in my "computer room" I've come across a number of odd and interesting things. I found high-bounce balls that have cracked. I found incomplete model cars. I found a great many bookmarks, none of which I have ever used more than once. I found plastic knickknacks and puzzles that I'd forgotten and discarded. I found a tape recorder missing several crucial pieces. I also found a couple cassette tapes that were immediately obvious as to their contents.

You see, my parents had given all of us kids tape recorders (and some inherited creativity and imagination) and the desire to use them at an early age. There are probably ten or fifteen cassette tapes floating around bearing our youthful voices in pseudo-comedic sketches and fake commercials.

Well, this particular tape was mostly me solo, and as I listened to it in the car I was not impressed. The twenty odd minutes I heard along the way to the used games and movies place were downright horrible, replete with horrible timing, transparent voice imitations and 130-in-1 Electronics Kit sound effects. Did I mention that most of the "funny" stuff was cribbed from elsewhere, including, if I recall, a number of bad joke books.

Hence the joke at the beginning of this; it's the only thing in the entire forty-odd minutes that made me laugh.

Forty-odd minutes is a long time to be just listening to a cassette tape, and I was in fact also driving at the time. You see, earlier today Jessica and I were out on a mission to get some shelving (and groceries) and maybe even a broom handle (mission accomplished!) whereupon we also went a bit out of the way to drop in on a used cd/dvd/video game place. I had a coupon for getting a free whatever if I bought another whatever of equal or greater value, so I figured I'd give it a shot.

Passing up a nice set of EPs by Belle & Sebastian (because I could find nothing else near it in price to get for free) I finally settled on The Simpsons: Road Rage and Gauntlet: Dark Legends (yes, yes, I know, Scott) for the PS2 for well under the price most places would charge, so I bought them.

It wasn't until I got home that I opened the cases and realized the discs were still at the store. Color me embarrassed.

I'd also not brought along the two Blockbuster rainchecks we had for The day after tomorrow and Man on fire (neither of which I'd be likely to watch if not for the fact that they're free).

So I ate some food and headed back over there to pick up my games. I'd grabbed the cassettes as an afterthought, realizing it'd be easier to listen to them than surf the radio through the north side of Columbus.

So I already feel like an idiot for not checking the games. I always check stuff like that. Always, always. I even look in the ones I check out at the library. Evidently I'd neglected to do so this time. Anyway I was feeling like an idiot and listening to the high-pitched voice of young Mike, whom I could just picture huddled over my little boombox with the box of miscellaneous pieces (which would provide the sound of breaking glass or an automobile crash) and Electronics Kit at hand. Too bad I hadn't prepared any funny material, because this stuff was painfully unfunny. There have been atrocious Saturday Night Live sketches that caused people to gouge out their eyes to stuff in their ears that were better than this.

Let's just say that my self esteem was not at an all time high.

The store clerks remembered me and found the discs, sending me on my way with a bonus five dollar coupon for my troubles.

I was so touched by their kindness, or annoyed by my lack of comedy, that I forgot again to stop by Blockbuster. Monday's not even until tomorrow.

So today Jessica forwarded to me an email about the bunnies of angryalien.com. It was probably new to her but I'd been there so long ago (and even remembered watching their rendition of Jaws with the actual theme music, not its replacement) but it was nice to revisit a funny site like that.

Rewind to a couple days back when (Gawker scion) Screenhead.com links a couple days ago to a graffiti repository, filled with examples of stencils, tagging and whatnot. I immediately thought of Banksy, British street artist extraordinaire who'd I'd stumbled across not too long ago myself. Naturally his name (and site) soon was passed around the so-called blogosphere.

Before that there was a boingboing post about a site sighting wireless towers that were concealed or disguised, just days after I'd found a company building them (whilst searching for pictures of saguaro catci, I kid you not). I sent the link to BB and got a brief credit and minor traffic spike. Woo hoo. It stands that I was there first, for what that matters.

Recently I've also stumbled across Paul Davidson's blog post about the classic AIM bot "smarterchild" which I'd been shown back in college days when people in my classes were programming clones of it. Admittedly the post in question had the gist of "I'm sure I'm the last guy to find out about this" but still, I am left feeling that I was somehow ahead of things without gaining any advantage over anything.

So, the real question (other than "do I spend too much time like this?) is, "Can I leverage this into making money?"

Or merely, "Who cares?"

So apparently today is Bosses' Day, according to the people who make and sell Bosses' Day cards. Being one to not pay attention to fabricated holidays such as this, I naturally had forgotten it.

Monday, by the way, was Canadian Thanksgiving.

Tuesday my boss found her position eliminated. I've been picking up her workload and mine and chilling out in meetings since then, but I guess I don't need to get her a card.

I still do have a boss, but it's not the same, you know?

It's Sweetest day tomorrow, I've heard. This too I'd forgotten. I can only hope Jessica forgets again, though it was she who reminded me.

I may be sending my next entry from the doghouse, ha ha ha.

That's a joke of course. We don't have a doghouse.

So I was searching around for some sort of information on what happened to GeoURL, the proximity database for sites and pages that worked based on so-called ICBM coordinates. A GeoURL tag on a page would lead to all the other registered places nearby.

Inevitably this was a bunch of LJ and DeviantArt people, but not always. Lots of sites were slowly adding themselves to the database, and then...

GeoURL closed for renovations.

Well, that's a fine how-do-you-do, you might say--if you speak in the manner of folksy, down-home characters commonly played by William H. Macy in movies.

GeoURL being down mainly means that I don't have an easy way of knowing what DeviantArtists and other online folks have set up shop nearby. I suppose I'm okay with that, since I don't really like dealing with people in real life anyway.

Anyway, every now and then I'd make half-hearted attempts to track down any information at all about the ongoing status of GeoURL's so-called renovations. Most of the time I found only other half-hearted attempts and no answers.

This time around, though, I hit something similar to paydirt. On an email list dubbed Geowanking, one of the head honchos, Joshua Schachter posted this:

I'm looking for a new home for it, still. It needs a rewrite for
performance reasons and has considerable bandwidth and CPU
requirements...

Well, at least now I know. Nearby that information was a link to A2B.cc, which "offers a very similar service" amongst other things (by which I mean a search engine and GPS software and more).

I've only been playing with it a little bit but I've already added this page to it. I can't see much reason why anybody else wouldn't want to do the same with their web stuff.

Of course to really get the full experience I need to get some GPS equipment. Christmas is coming soon, after all.