Standing On Boxes

Everyone and their grandmother appears to be using the internet right now. They must be watching a boatload of streaming media. Why don’t they just watch TV like the rest of us?

The Tonys are tonight. Tried to watch them (research for a story mostly), but I’m not really an ‘awards watching’ kind of person. I frankly find televised awards shows to be boring and tedious. I turned off the sound after 30 minutes. And turned the TV off after 2 hours.

Sure, Neil Patrick Harris (NPH) can be amusing but that only goes so far. It felt like it was 60% commercials from the network ‘hosting’ the show and related enterprises, and 20% awards being given, and the remaining 20% being chunks of music/dance from the shows up for the awards to keep the audience entertained.

Sure, it’s a chance for the people “of” Broadway to celebrate the best of their art of the previous year (We all remember that the Tony’s are awards given only for plays/musicals/whatever actually on Broadway. Right? However Broadway is defined. Off-Broadway, and Off-off-Broadway, and other live theater collectives have their own awards – though I’m not sure how many of those get the full bore broadcast of network TV.), but I can’t get that excited about them myself.

Very brief sexist moment. The Maxim 100 is out. Those celebraters of female objectification over at Maxim magazine have come out with their annual list of the “Hottest” female celebrities (as defined by them).

In a brief moment of SOMETHING, Couldn’t resist taking a look at the list. This being the Internet, it had tiny thumbnail pictures.

Hmm…

Recognized 44 of the names on the list. Recognized less than that of the faces, going by those thumbnails.

The other 56? No clue.

Surprised at how many aren’t “Pop Tarts of the Moment” (aka This year’s contenders for Britney Spears/Lindsay Lohan’s tarnished crown as paparazzi target.)

Not sure which is worst. Recognizing that many (mainly actresses who’ve been in the news or movies/TV shows I’ve seen over the last 5 years or so) or not recognizing so many.

Am I no longer hooked into the pop culture zeitgeist? Am I turning into a pop culture dinosaur?

Is there anyone out there?!

Supposedly, there’s a massive attack against WordPress sites going on. Thousands of PCs in a botnet slowly chewing away, trying to hack WordPress sites to add them to their botnet for some future nefarious purpose. One of those brute force, guess your ‘admin’ user’s password kind of hacks. So far, I don’t appear to have been hacked. We’ll see.

Not sure if that was the problem with my blog, Yahoo isn’t saying what the problem was. Might have been just coincidental.

This blog has been almost unaccessible, by me anyway, for the last week. Not sure what’s up but Yahoo (yes, it’s hosted on Yahoo. Seemed like a good idea at the time.) seems to go thru phases where everything is slower than molasses for their hosted sites.

Not sure if they are trying to case people away… but I’m seriously contemplating moving to another hosting solution if this doesn’t clear up. I don’t think Yahoo will care about losing my few bits of silver.

(It’s mainly the blog. Direct access to my stories seems okay. Mostly. I suspect someone forgot to feed the gerbils running the database server the blogs run on. Or one of them died. Or somebody who really hates Yahoo is doing a DDOS against them (that would explain the slow response time (Which they acknowledge is happening to some people on the YSB Status page))

So, now that Easter 2013 is one for the history books (I wonder if anything exciting, out of the ordinary happened this year?)… All those Bible/Jesus psuedo-documentaries have returned to storage and we’re back to aliens, UFO retreads, and such (A lull before the onslaught of Memorial Day themed docudramas?).

Even a rebroadcast of one of those ‘The Real Vampires’ faux-documentaries (Though they’ve removed the production date from the channel guide so we don’t know how old this ‘stuff’ is, I suspect it’s at least a decade old since they refer to a case of someone thinking they’re a vampire getting stoned and slaughtering their family (back in 1996) as if it were current.)

Thinking people are really vampires is so last decade. Now-a-days all the cool ‘kids’ believe in aliens. And Vikings.

(Do you think you are a vampire? That’s okay. I don’t, but I’m sure there’s some self-help recovery group/chat forum for you out there on the Internet to ‘help’ you deal with it.)

It’s Easter ‘weekend’ out there isn’t it…

That would explain the wall-to-wall episodes of ‘Life of Jesus’ type shows on assorted history and culture cable channels. And other Bible-themed TV shows.

I’ll spare “you” my yearly rant about the commercialization of another religious holiday. Just wander by any toy store or Wal-Martus and look at all the candy and cheap toys for children to help them celebrate such a holy event in appropriate style.

As we all know, when a certain religious figure came back after 3 days away, he brought back with him lots of cute little bunnies, decorated eggs, pastel colored mini candy bars and baskets filled with colored grass. Right? Right?

The whole meaning of Easter is… chocolate rabbits.

I guess it could be worse.

The local Party store could be selling costumes of Jesus, his apostles, a bunch of Roman soldiers, and other residents of Israel in the 1st century AD (Maybe even a Crusader or two to round things out…).

Luckily, Easter isn’t a holiday known for partying –  like Saint Patrick’s Day (A minor religious holiday itself completely overrun with people drinking green colored alcohol and dressing in green outfits to show their appreciation for Irish culture, like the classic leprechaun and Irish Barmaid.) – so no drunken rabbits peeing on the White House lawn or TP’ing churches, etc.

I haven’t gotten real comments from real people in years (Were’d y’all go? Sniff…) and I’m tired of deleting spam that squeaks thru the spam filters. So I’ve turned comments off.

If you think you should be allowed to post comments (Spammers not included!) ? Let me know and I might turn them back on.

Except, of course, that ‘off’ switch was only for future post comments. Argh! Had to go back and turn them off for existing posts.

There’s this commercial for some online Hipster store (I thought it was Target the first time I saw it, but it’s not. Maybe the same Ad company as the one who did those dancing colorful people ads for Target? I think it was Target.)

Some guy (lazy bum!) is in bed. He hears a car horn, jumps out of bed, runs to the window and Yikes! it’s his sister/girlfriend/female friend come to visit. He looks around his apartment, grimaces, hits something, and grins when that something turns into a hipper version of whatever it was. SO he runs around his apartment slapping things, making his apartment look hipper, ending with himself, looking like a happy, scruffy Hipster.

But, I don’t think he should really be so happy. One of the things he turned into something else? His alarm clock. Which is an iPhone in a dock! And, now, it’s a cheap plastic clock. He’s going to be a bit upset when he can’t find his phone!

Now, one could read a lot into this. Maybe he won’t care because the iPhone is no longer a hipster kind of gadget? Maybe the iPhone is no longer a sign of hipness?

Personally? I think the commercial is bright and cheerful. But… an alarm clock is not a substitute for a phone.

Slow out here on the blog tonight. Not sure if it’s my web host, my browser (Chrome seems a little faster than Safari), or my ISP. Whatever it is, from my end of things getting here to the blog is slow, often painfully so. Getting to my fanfic pages (which are not being server up by my blog – they’re static pages) seems to be okay.

Hmm… almost anything blog related that runs a PHP script seems to go slowly. Maybe someone needs to wake up the server?

Keep an eye on that calendar! The 2nd half of Season 7 of neo-Who starts on March 30th, 2013!

With a new companion for that “Madman in a Box”

We’re speaking of Doctor Who, of course.

Spoilers if you haven’t seen the Episode “Dinosaurs on a Space ship” (new Season 7(2);)

Read More >>

Apparently there was a ‘Toy Fair’ or two somewhere in the past couple weeks (London? Germany? NYC?)  and LEGO showed off new Super Hero sets (among others) with mini figures for Iron Man 3 . And pictures leaked. One of the sets includes Pepper Potts (Based on a scene in the movie – parts of which can actually be seen i the trailer at Marvel.com.). And a few others of course.

Other mini figure tidbits (from a show report or two) – New Superman set with Lois Lane. Lone Ranger sets. A pirate ship for Lord of the Rings.

Not out until May. Something to put on the wish list.

So, it’s Super Bowl weekend, and I’m watching rugby on BBC America. (Waiting for an episode of Top Gear to start actually)

I don’t know anything about rugby but it looks sort of like the mutant offspring of soccer and American football. Except without the armour (football) and an odd shaped ball (soccer).

And size-wise the players seem to be somewhere between the skinny/fast soccer players you see in the World Cup, and the huge guys in football. So, do they play it because they are too slow for soccer and too tiny/normal to play in the NFL ?

Lots of running around, like soccer (except they mostly throw/carry the oblong ball) and lots of pile-ups like football.

Hmm…

Another way to put it – soccer is like guerrilla warfare, rugby is like infantry maneuvers, and football is like armored divisions clashing.

Huh. “RBS Six Nations” tournament? Do they call it a tournament in rugby? Any way – the guys in the white uniforms (England?) won (It was England vs Scotland). The trophy is an odd looking thing – like a large, old coffee pot with three handles that’s been silver plated.

Next week – France vs. Wales (I didn’t realize BBC America showed anything other than Doctor Who and Top Gear! (Just kidding.)) Must be just highlights or rugby isn’t as commercialized as football.

And I’m not talking about the meat based product in a tin can (I like the Black Pepper and Bacon varieties myself. In moderation.)

For the past couple month I’ve been getting comment spam for assort clothing objects (t-shirts, shoes, sports ear, etc.).

All comments to my blog (Here, here, here!) are moderated. So spam isn’t getting thru. I’m assuming the spam is being inserted by some bot that doesn’t go back and check because… I would think they would notice that NONE of those spammy comments ever end up in my blog. Ever. And never will if I can absolutely help it.

So – go away Spam Bot!