I have been using WordPress since I first started this on the at the time nascent commercial offering of their CMS on wordpress.com in fall of 2009, and it has changed a LOT in that interregnum.
Not long after I created the original site on their hosted site, I wanted to move it to a self-hosted site. This was my first foray into shared hosting solutions (I used Media Temple, who was acquired later by Go Daddy) and I spent a lot of time tweaking it.
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I am not sure who recommended it, but the title that came across was Knives Out. I had just finished the Peacock original, “Poker Face” that was absolutely delightful (seriously, it is worth starting a trial to binge it, it is that good), and the director of Poker Face had just released a new movie on Netflix (Glass Onion) and I wanted to watch the original, so I wanted to rent Knives Out. I ended up buying a copy, and I am glad that I did.
Set in the northeast, it begins with the birthday party of the patriarch of the family, an author of not in the genre of mystery. Clearly the author isn’t enjoying the party (for reasons that become evident later), and after the party begins to wind down, he finds himself in his room with his private nurse (played by Ana de Armas) where she makes a mistake in administering morphine, putting Thromby on a direct path to an OD. Naturally she can’t find the safety dose of Naloxone in her kit. Thromby, a facile creator, hatches a scheme to keep his trusted nurse from being blamed.
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The start of 2023 brought some activity to Tralfaz that tapered off after I created another site Sweatyspice first as a way to get familiar with Substack.
But from January 1 2023 to when I drifted away, I posted 28 times. I covered topics around guitar playing, the signal chain, some gaming, and some dishing about falling and getting stapes in my scalp that led to purchasing an Apple watch.
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I know that a lot of people watch Christmas movies during this season. I have my favorites, including “A Christmas Story”, “Life of Brian”, and “Die Hard”.
This year, we watched “It’s a Wonderful Life” the classic with James Stewart. I last watched it as a child, probably 45+ years ago, so I really had no fond reminiscences of of this movie.
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Upfront Matter: To quote the illustrious Sterling Archer, “2018 can eat a big bag of dicks.” Seriously, this year has been trying by many measures. As I look back, there are some nuggets of positives, sprinkled among the shit-sandwich that was the year 2018, but by and large, I am going to be glad to see it in the rear view mirror. (more…)
Currently in the queue on Netflix is the “Vietnam” by Ken Burns. I just finished it, and, like all the Ken Burns targets, it is outstanding.
It starts well before the common story (with advisors ramping up through the early Kennedy administration,) back when the real drama started with the French trying to maintain its hold on its Indochina colonies after WWII. The French were abysmal stewards of their colonial properties, ruthless, and exploitative to the extreme of the indigenous population. However, their strength sapped, they turned to us, and our paranoia of the spectre of communism leaking out of the USSR and China realm, took the bait. (more…)
Two weeks ago, we adopted a sweet little girl who proceeded to have some accidents on our carpet. She was (and remains) timid, and the stress of the new home, changed food, and her anxiety led to first diarrhea and then piddles on our carpet.
While the carpet was sell used when we moved in (at least 8 years of heavy, rental use), we we kept it, and have had it professionally cleaned a couple of times. Fortunately, we weren’t expecting perfection, and the traffic areas are pretty grungy (closing in on 2 years since the last deep clean). (more…)
I have been a life-long, avid consumer of Science Fiction. The bug really took root when I was in high school, and I was bitten hard. Heinlein, Asimov, Herbert, and other titans of the genre were my apetite and I voraciously devoured them all.
There were some authors that I attempted to get into, but at the time, and for many years after, I struggled to appreciate. One was John Brunner, whose Hugo Award winning “Stand on Zanzibar” is an example. It took no fewer than 4 attempts to get past the first 40 or so pages, the type and style of telling of the story just failed to grab my attention. But then I did read past that, fell in love with the style, and it remains one of my favorite novels of all time, one I reread fairly frequently. (more…)
Last year, one movie that I really wanted to see was Valerian (full title: “Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets”), a film by Luc Besson, who made one of my go-to SciFi movies, “The Fifth Element”. Known for making movies that are visually stunning, blending humor and action, and a penchant for strong female characters, I thought this couldn’t go wrong.
Alas, I didn’t make it to the theaters to see it, and I kept checking for it on Netflix and Hulu, without any satisfaction. Then when I got a spot bonus at work with Amazon gift cards, I went to it on their site, and instead of dropping it into my shopping cart, I noticed that it was available as part of my Prime membership. Cool. (more…)
One day, a long time ago, I began watching Forensic Files on Netflix. It started as a way to kill time, something in the background, but since it had 9 “collections” of up to 70 episodes each, it took quite a while to get through it.
The premise is each episode is a crime (usually murder, but not always), and how forensic and scientific evidence helped capture the guilty parties, sometimes after years of the case going cold. (more…)