Category: Life

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Whew! We took a few days off for our second anniversary and drove out to Las Vegas last weekend. Neither of us gamble, so it might seem kind of an odd choice, but there’s something else Vegas has a lot of: shows.

In four days we managed to see Avenue Q, “Pirates 4-D” (a cheesy 3-D pirate movie with Leslie Nielsen that even Eric Idle couldn’t save), a museum replica of Tut’s tomb at the Luxor, Cirque du Soleil’s Zumanity, Star Trek: Borg Invasion 4-D, an impressionist exhibit at the Bellagio, Excalibur’s “Tournament of Kings” (a Medieval Times–like dinner show), Rita Rudner, Treasure Island’s pirate show, and the Shark Reef aquarium at Mandalay Bay.

We also got to see how much Las Vegas had changed since the last time we were there, back in 1998. The hotel we stayed at last time (the Holiday Inn—we were college students on a budget) has been bulldozed. Several gigantic hotel/casinos have opened on the strip, and more off.

And for some reason, I don’t remember noticing all the mountains in the distance last time. Maybe it was too cloudy or hazy, or maybe it was just that we stayed off the strip this time and weren’t surrounded by buildings.

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There are certain ideas that I find completely acceptable in the context of science-fiction, but completely looney in the context of actual science.

Take, for instance, Erich von Däniken’s premise that gods were really ancient alien astronauts. It’s an interesting idea, but it’s way out there in terms of science. It assumes that (a) myths are historically accurate, (b) aliens exist, and (c) low-tech humans couldn’t possibly have created things like Stonehenge, pyramids, giant stone heads, etc. Not to say it’s not possible that aliens visited the planet in the distant past—just that comparative mythology and architecture aren’t exactly compelling evidence.

On the other hand, I have no problem with the concept in science-fiction. It’s the basic premise of Stargate. The movie and early seasons of SG-1 focused on Egyptian mythology and technology, and in subsequent seasons of the show, just about every ancient legend has turned out to have an alien race behind it. It also figures into the backstory of Babylon 5, with the Vorlons having visited nearly every known race in ancient times, insinuating themselves into local religions and engineering telepaths over the course of centuries.

(via Sclerotic Rings and *** Dave)

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This morning I looked north and saw a narrow band of mountains sandwiched between two layers of clouds. The first place I could stop to take a photo, the lower layer was mostly blocked by hills, but you can still see it.

Two cloud layers, with mountains visible between them.
Click to enlarge

As a bonus, this turned out to be nearly the same shot as one of the photos I posted under Snowblogging four weeks ago (reposted here):

San Gabriel Snow (from a distance)
Click to enlarge

The lighting isn’t as good in today’s photo, since it was overcast, but you can really see the effect several weeks of one-day-a-week rain have had on the hills. They’ve gone from brown with splashes of green to green with splashes of brown!

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I love Netflix. I love their selection. I love being able to just make a list of movies I’ve been meaning to watch, and see them show up one by one. But the queue model doesn’t work so well when you want to watch a specific movie now. That’s where you need a retail store, or download-on-demand.

One of our local movie theaters is running a series of “Flashback Features”, and this coming Wednesday is Young Frankenstein. I thought, given the number of references, if would be fun to watch Son of Frankenstein before we went. No time for Netflix, and Blockbuster didn’t have it, so I decided to try a local video store.

You can find all kinds of things at local stores. Blockbuster might toss something that doesn’t pull in $X/month, or doesn’t fit their market research. Shelf space at a Blockbuster is precious. They stock lots of copies of new releases. They keep their aisles wide. And they store movies face outward, so each title takes up more space. A local video store will cram as many movies as they can onto the shelf, spine-outward, sometimes laid sideways on top of each other, and they can add more shelves until they run up against fire regulations. The space freed up by tossing an underperforming movie is nothing compared to the possibility that someday, someone might rent it. This store had videotapes that were still in the oversized boxes that went out of style in the late 1980s!

The downside, of course, is that they probably won’t have enough staff to keep this larger selection sorted. The S section at this store consisted of at least eight shelving units with four or five shelves each. I found all sorts of movies I’d forgotten about or never even heard of in the first place (there’s a Skulls III? With Glory?). If I’d been looking for a random movie to watch, it would’ve been great, but I was looking for Son of Frankenstein. By the time I gave up looking, I figured there was no point in asking a clerk whether they had it or not. Even if they did, I’d still be stuck searching through 40+ shelves.

Not that Blockbuster gets it right all the time. I noticed an anomaly in the Horror section today:

Horror shelf at Blockbuster, featuring... Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo?!?

Although given what I’ve heard about Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo, perhaps Horror is the right category for it.

In the end, I called up my parents and asked if they had a copy of Son of Frankenstein. It turns out they did, so the whole thing dropped out of the realm of commerce and into the realm of borrowing.

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There are some things that no self-respecting Something Positive reader wants to see, and this recipe is among them:

Choo Choo Sandwich Recipe

Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook (classic reissue)Poor Choo-Choo Bear! Disguising yourself as a pitcher is one thing, but being turned into a sandwich? Alas, such a sad, sad fate for everyone’s favorite amorphous kitty.

(At least the sandwich probably won’t be as pink as Slashdot’s OMG Ponies! theme.)

Source: the Better Homes & Gardens New Cook Book : (1953 Classic Edition), page 297.

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Every once in a while you see something that gives you the feeling that yes, you’re living in the future. I got it the first time I saw Wolfgang Puck’s self-heating coffee at the grocery store. I also got it when I saw this:

Laser-guided paper cutter

I mean, how can you go wrong with a paper cutter that has a laser sight?

A few weeks ago, Warren Ellis wrote about “detecting outbreaks of the future” and possibly setting up a website for “future hunters.” His latest Bad Signal mentions setting it up at the currently-defunct DiePunyHumans.com. This kind of stuff should fit right in.

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