Monday, September 22, 2014

So this happened....

We adopted a retired racing greyhound.

A dirty secret: I have never been around dogs much at all, having never owned one, and therefore I have always been very uncomfortable around them. I'm a cat person, through and through; some part of me deeply sympathizes and even empathizes with all the Crazy Cat Ladies out there. Dogs are mysterious beasts to me.

But now, we have one. His name is Hurricane. No, that name does not make me less nervous about this whole thing. I'd quite frankly be more comfortable with a fat bulldog named Wilbur, but that just wasn't in the cards.

As I write this, he's been "our dog" for, oh, an hour or so. I'm sitting in my library while he whines from inside his crate. I guess we'll figure this out. The Wife and Daughter are really excited. I'm just thinking I'll hang out over here for a little while. I expect dogs will be like kids for me: actually having one will make me fine with the one we have, but I'm unlikely to be comfortable with others.

So, here's Hurricane.






And here are Lester and Julio not being all that cool with Hurricane quite yet.



This ought to be one of my more interesting autumns, eh?

Sunday, September 21, 2014

Sentential Links

Linkage....

:: If you are going to use a game as a delivery vehicle for a movie, then this is how you need to do it: You need to make a proper movie. I am irritated to the point of intolerance with games that interrupt our playtime for movies that are bad, poorly-paced, cliche-ridden, ham-fisted, utterly predictable, filled with glaring plot holes, tonally confused, boringly shot, and completely tedious[2]. The reflexive defense is, “It’s just a game, you’re not supposed to worry about the story!” Which is kind of my point: If the story doesn’t matter, then why are you wasting my time with it? Why did you waste money making this crappy thing that you didn’t want to make and I don’t want to watch?

:: Simmons is confusing death with music that just isn’t meant to speak to him. Each generation creates music that is relevant to that generation. The fact that Gene Simmons is not feeling the same emotions or dealing with the same issues as today’s teenager doesn’t mean the current music is any worse than when he was giving the world classics like “Love Gun” and “Christine Sixteen.”

:: Now, every time my wife starts to get down on her artwork, I can tell her, damn it, Svengoolie likes it, and so do Elvira, Jaime Murray, Ashley Eckstein, Pandora Boxx and Bruce Campbell, to name only a few.

:: The main innovation of The Three Musketeers (1973) is that it’s a comedy. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone – after all, the novel itself is very, very funny. But I was still a bit shocked at how completely hilarious the film version was. I was in stitches most of the time I was watching – and apart from a few wince-inducing moments, I was mostly laughing WITH the movie rather than at it.

:: We very nearly woke up in a different world, kids.

:: His handwriting is a fingerprint. It says: “Him. And him only.”

:: It’s been a great four weeks. If you were a part of it, thank you for being part of it. (I look forward to reading Mr. Scalzi's book...and hope that a future tour brings him closer to Buffalo! Come on, Mr. Scalzi! We don't have cooties up here! And depending on which way the wind blows, our city smells like Cheerios.)

More next week!

Sunday Burst

A few things for your consideration:

:: Liam Neeson's global reign of violence.

:: A brief history of the dominion of the awfullest of apples, the Red Delicious.

:: Daily rituals of great writers.

More next week, if I'm so inclined....

Saturday, September 20, 2014

A Very Public Service Message

With delurking week pretty much over, I'm resetting comments so anonymous comments are no longer allowed. This is purely an anti-spam thing.

Resuming life as we know it....

Instaweeks!

Time to disappear again down the photographic rabbit hole!

Let's get the Flummoxing Felines out of the way first, shall we?







And then there's some recent food and such. The Daughter nagged me into deep dish pizza (I already don't make it all that often because it's fairly labor-intensive, and I make it even less now that The Wife is on a gluten-free diet and this is a virtual memorial statue to gluten):



Ramen with fried egg. I only have Ramen a few times a year, because of the salt. But I do love it once in a great while. (Hey, you know what makes Ramen really awesome? Having it with some buttered rye crispbread on the side. You dip the rye crisp into the broth and it's heavenly. That's a combo I learned from my father, way way way back when. To really be emotionally authentic, it has to be the round rye crisp, with the hole in the middle. It comes wrapped in paper and you break off the piece you want. Not the nicely-cut rectangular rye crisp! That gives you the right flavor, but shapes matter, folks!)


I really love sugar-sweetened Dr. Pepper. It's pricey (almost four bucks for a four-pack), but it's a bit of a luxury. Just awesome stuff, though.


Labels on Asian food products make me happy.


The coming of fall means the reappearance of candy that isn't easy to find other times of year, like Oh Henry bars.



The Daughter also confronted her first day of tenth grade with the requisite enthusiasm.



Fall is coming quickly! September was, like the months before it, cooler than usual (after an odd burst of hot weather to start the month). As the weather starts to turn cool, my fascination with the sky usually fires up a bit. I love the sky, and my normal shift at work starts each day when the sky is often doing some amazing things....







I don't want the earth to feel neglected as I look up at the sky a lot, so here's the ground.



I continue to do stick-figure doodles in my occasional free time at work. I make no claims to the genius of xkcd, but it's a good way to make a few little points here and there. For instance, there's a trope that shows up in fantastic fiction now and again that irritates the hell out of me:


(I'm looking at you, The Dark is Rising sequence!)



Diagramming the wisdom of Kenny Rogers:



I'll be posting a review at some point, but this one sentence perfectly sums up my love of science fiction in general and my admiration for the series The Expanse in particular:


Patience, grasshopper!


I didn't care for this book:


Our next door neighbors are doing construction on their house. Looks like they're adding on so their elderly dad or dad-in-law can move in with them. It started with the removal of a couple of trees that would have encroached upon their house's expanded footprint. Which meant...lumberjacks!


And let me tell you, folks, it's always fun to listen to guys like this talk. No swearing, just a funny run of comment through the job. At one point, a fellow who has climbed thirty feet up and is cutting branches off shouts down, "Uh, I think I cut the wrong thing!" Whoops.

My next car will likely be something bigger than my current Buick Century sedan (although not monstrously huge, just a bit bigger). Still, if I had money right now, I'd find this jalopy enticing. It's sitting at a VW dealership just down the road.



I sorted my washers and bolts. Actually, I didn't sort all my bolts, just the quarter-inch, twenty-count thread ones, because that's what I use the most at work. This is exciting shit, folks.



Here's a screw I ran up against at work. I have a set of bits for tamper-resistant screws, which are basically normal screws with really oddball heads so they're tamper-resistant simply by virtue that very few people own the drivers to budge them. This thing was even too obscure for me, though. I got it off using needle-nosed locking pliers and a lot of salty language. I don't recall what it was on, but there was nothing about the gizmo that screamed out "Holy shit, we gotta keep the riffraff from removing this screw! Grab that center-pegged pentagon screw! That'll stop 'em!"


I knocked off one major project at New Casa Jaquandor: replacing the dining room light fixture with something better. The old fixture was a perfectly nice fixture, but it was misplaced. It wasn't well-suited for hanging above a dining table, being a low-hanging fixture with a single halogen lamp that shone straight down, casting a fairly small pool of light on the table instead of illuminating the room. No such problem with the new fixture, which is (a) awesome, and (b) so bright that the next big project will be converting the existing switch to a dimmer.




And, of course, there's the usual stuff of my life...writing, overalls, writing in overalls, et cetera and so forth.
















And these last, because even though I've posted them here already, I think I'll need them in the future: