When we walked into the theater we noticed several seats that were marked “Reserved for DBOX Customers” and so we simply avoided them and sat elsewhere. This cinema has stadium seating so you could really sit anywhere, except right up in front, and have an enjoyable experience.
The movie started, everything was going according to plan, trailers, opening credits, then the movie itself. Nothing exciting or untoward until the first battle scene. The loud noise from the speaker system was joined with a tactile vibration and a rather annoying single-note throbbing sound. Turns out, it was these DBOX seats. Someone apparently paid for one of them to be activated and it was making a hell of a racket. It was so unsettling and disturbing that it almost ruined the movie for me, except that the movie kind of ruined itself, sort of. It was unpleasant, to say the least.
This DBOX thing is the latest cash grab from movie theaters trying to make a buck. They screw you for concessions (there are two definitions for concession, yah) and then there are all the other little add-on bits, like the difference between primetime and matinée prices, which I will admit has been around for quite a while, but it’s still a cash grab, all the way to the most recent worthless misadventures in cinema:
– IMAX and IMAX 3D
– 42 FPS Projection
– Real3D
– DBOX “Feel Around” Seats
Each of these things is fluff. The 3D doesn’t really add anything more than eyestrain and cluster headaches, IMAX is just a double-sized screen and new projectors, the 42FPS schlock that Peter Jackson is trying to hawk is just as useless. One thing I will give 42FPS, when Peter Jackson uses quick-cut-scenes in his dialogue pieces in his movies, you can feel the crisp tight jarring all the more than you could with lower-FPS presented movies. The latest bit of movie-time bullshit is this DBOX crap. Seats and shake and throb, little more than magic fingers for movie seats. It’s the collision of sex toys and movie making that I never thought I would witness in my lifetime. It’s loud, it’s distracting, and it damages whatever movie it’s paired with.
I left the theater glad I only spent $10 bucks for two people, but bent that I had to endure exposure to this cash-grab DBOX bullshit.
What’s the answer? Now that movies take only one to two months to come out on BluRay or DVD, there is something to be said about just waiting around for them to hit Netflix, RedBox, or hell, even a video rental shop and just popping it in at home.
The only reason to go out to the movies is to actually GO. It’s a special space, it’s dark, lots of strangers, there’s a spectacle and you might just lose yourself in what you’re watching. Now, with all this assorted bullshit surrounding the experience you want, making it worse I would argue, it ruins the “going out to the movies” specialness. Not only is it distracting and unnecessary but the collateral damage from some of these fluff bits (like DBOX) just ruins it for everyone, and it adds more price and distance between the movie-going-public and these cinemas. For an IMAX 3D movie, with DBOX seats, with 42FPS projection, a soda, popcorn, perhaps a box of candy for two, you are starting to breach the $100 mark of obnoxiousness.
So what’s going to happen? Cinemas will add more bullshit and the public will eventually erode away. It’s like trying to grab a handful of sand, the harder you squeeze, the faster the sand runs out of your clenched hands. They will have priced themselves out of business with all this extra fluff bullshit. Then, because nature and capitalism abhor a vacuum, there will be new movie theaters without concessions, with a shoestring staff and plain projectors and people will flock to them because that’s what they are after. Not the fluff, but the movie. If things go from bad to worse for the economy, this could be the exact thing that kills the cinema for good. Movie makers will just switch to the “Direct to BluRay” channel and skip theatrical releases altogether.
Day One Migration
My Day One Migration is moving along well. I’m grabbing low-hanging-fruit and copying in those posts from my old LiveJournal that didn’t have comments attached to them. I’ve decided to include comments as one of the most frequent commenters on my LiveJournal was my dearly departed friend Ryan. Seeing his words on my LiveJournal help bring him back to life, if only in a very small way, but they are important to me as are all the other people that I love. So far, with some original Day One entries, the copied in Notes from Facebook (Where my blogging went between LiveJournal and Day One) and LiveJournal so far I have 547 entries, spanning 327 days with items spanning back to 1999.
Once I have everything moved over in Day One then I can search more easily and look at different posts and maybe repost some things from my old LiveJournal that I think are either still relevant today or at least entertaining enough to share once again.
Responsibility
I took Scott to work this morning for Barnes & Noble’s after-Christmas doorbuster sale that starts today. I pulled in to my driveway and parked my 2007 Santa Fe and was fiddling around cleaning things up and I put a check that has Christmas money on it behind the visor. When I opened the visor everything that I had put there, mostly just coupons that were expired all came tumbling out and all over the place. No big thing, so I start picking up whats in the car and since I had the drivers door open some of the slips fell out onto the driveway. I got out of my car, bent over and started picking up the debris, as I’m not one for littering. I looked up and at a sharp angle back at my car and my eyes settled on the rear passenger window and the interior light was on, I noticed something out of place and opened the door and looked closer.
The ceiling mounted handle for passengers to enter and exit was pulled out on one side and hanging drunkenly askew. I looked all around it looking for damage, perhaps something pulled out of the frame or something else and all I saw was the screw that held it together lolling in it’s case as part of the handle. I opened the case with a fingernail and the screw shuffled out and onto the floor in the rear drivers passenger side. I went inside, searched high and low and found a serviceable phillips head screwdriver in the basement and went back outside. I reassembled the handle and screwed it back into the frame of my vehicle. I tightened it up and then went around to the other handles and tightened them up too. All in all, not a huge problem.
But what does bother me is that this happened to someone who I had in my car, a friend, and they didn’t report what happened to me so I could take care of it. I don’t know who used that handle, and I don’t know if it failed while they were using it or if they used it and then it just jostled apart, but those sort of things don’t just happen on their own. Ceiling mounted handles like that just don’t shimmy until they run out their screws and just fall on the floor. What bothers me is that nobody noticed and nobody thought to draw my attention to a problem with my car, just use it and if it’s broken, ignore it – that way maybe they thought to escape responsibility for their actions? How do I know? It’s not like I would have dragged them to a repair place and made them pay for damaging my car – it was just a screw, easy fix. It’s not really the severity of the damage either that upsets me, it’s that nobody took responsibility for it when it happened.
I can’t assign blame and perhaps the person who broke it doesn’t know they broke it, therefore nobody is to blame. It does strike me that people in general are rather unobservant at least, if a handle seems jiggly or shaky perhaps you should tell the owner that there might be a problem coming down the pike? Car handles, especially those ceiling mounted ones are supposed to be firmly affixed to their assemblies. Perhaps I ask too much of people to notice such things.
As it is, there are new rules for being a passenger in my car. I value my car and I’m still making payments on the vehicle, so since people won’t grace me with responsibility or even basic observational reports I will have to insist that all use of the ceiling handles be forthwith out of bounds. You will have to enter and exit my vehicle without them and if you can’t do that, then you should find some other vehicle to use. My car is important to me as is it’s value and it not being broken. I also will be making regular inspections now to ensure that my vehicle is respected by those that I transport with it, because nobody is observant enough or respects me enough to let me know when things are falling apart.
It’s a sad statement that I have to do this, but this isn’t the only mystery damage I’ve had to deal with either. Someone or something put a foot-sized hole in the drywall in the upstairs and never thought to even mention it until I discovered it later on. That was fixed many moons ago, but either I’m plagued with an occasional poltergeist who is out to mildly irritate me or I have someone in my midst who lacks the basic respect and responsibility of being an adult. One of those is more likely than the other. Since I don’t know who did what, I can’t address this open letter to anyone in particular. Know that I find your lack of respect, responsibility, and observation to be cowardly and shameful. Don’t come forward and don’t take the blame for it now, but in the future, and for anything else you may accidentally damage, think upon these words and be an adult.
Knackers
So, a secular humanist goes to Midnight Mass and the holy water basin doesn’t burst into flames. Yeah, Catholics are weird. Also, someone changed all the words, came up with really odd “Carols” and apparently Michigan Catholics are really quick on the sacraments. But I enjoyed myself. Lots of up and down. Some genuflecting, which I skipped out on. Also, a lot of fear. I reflected during midnight mass and this is what I came up with: original sin created a context of inescapable failure. We’re never good enough or ever without sin, because of this pesky sentience thing we’ve got, so in a way, since there is only fail, being rotten is kind of expected. We’re wretched and hopeless, because we’re always bad and there is never any chance to win. At all.
With the game rigged in this fashion, no amount of love, forgiveness, or (and this is the best part) mercy will ever be well spent on the awfulness that is humanity. Or at least, that’s what’s being packaged up and sold.
What if humanity was good from the get go? What if we judged ourselves when we died? What if God is in every single thing, the good and the bad. The grace and the sin. What if sin is meaningless? What if we don’t have to always be losing out? Always afraid, needing to commit blood sacrifices or cannibalism in order to assuage our guilty consciences?
Then again, that’s picking a fight with Genesis. Perhaps it’s the best thing, the most adaptive thing to leave all of this mess for the Catholics and Christians to figure out and I can go back to feeling better about myself as a secular humanist. I don’t need God. I like Jesus, think he’s a fine fellow and a knackers teacher, but that’s as far as I’m gonna go with that. I don’t have sin. Sin is stupid.
Ta-dah! I feel better already. Knackers! 🙂 Merry Christmas. 😉
1532 Long Road, Kalamazoo Michigan: Christmas Explosion
Last night we did our annual driving around the city looking at the great works that people established in their front yards and attached to their homes. Some places were quaint with just electric candles in the windows, going for the tasteful bit, while others had lights, light-netting, icicles, gutter-lights, or even more elaborate Christmas displays. There were many houses that had the inflatable Christmas displays but nothing quite as bombastic or over-the-top as the folks who live at 1532 Long Road in Kalamazoo, Michigan. This entire section is a rich neighborhood, and the house where the WMU President lives is just a stones throw away. If you are going to go large, and you have the real estate for it, you might as well do it. The people here? They did it. They did it in SPADES.
This is my first video that I’ve posted to my blog that I’ve taken. It’s not bad or too shaky and halfway through I read a sign which has a nice message on it. I hope you all enjoy.
[jwplayer mediaid=”2183″]
Nuts.com
My love affair with dates actually only started when I ordered as part of a tapas brunch one of the plates being “bacon-wrapped dates” which was wonderful when I tried it. This event was being held at a work function far away, one of our spring get-togethers for a database system I manage for Western. After we all returned from the event that exposure to dates stayed with me and I went looking for them locally. I found that Sams Club, of all places was selling the “Bard Valley” brand of Medjool Dates. I started buying the bins of them and enjoying the dates as snacks during my breaks at work. When I got them from Sams, they were listed as a “Seasonal Buy” which in my mind meant that Sams wasn’t going to permanently carry them, that they could sell out and not be restocked and I’d be left high-and-dry without any way to procure my favorite treat. I’ve written about this before, especially the prices for these treats in another older blog post, Sticker Shock. I knew that Sams would eventually stop carrying them and I’d have to find another vendor so I went online and found Nuts.com. They sell sample size bags, and then pound and multiple-pound bags of everything they have for sale and their prices are just as competitive as anywhere else except for Sams. While Nuts.com can’t compete for price with Sams, they can over quality. There is something about the dates from Nuts.com that make them far better than the ones from Bard Valley. They seem fresher, fuller somehow, better.
When I put these Medjool dates on my Amazon wishlist one of my beloved family members sent me a gift box of them from Nuts.com. Of course, Nuts.com has more than just dates – I can also highly recommend their Turkish Figs. The figs and dates are a great combination together. The dates have pits, so you must be careful eating them, you just can’t chomp away on a unpitted date unless you hate your teeth, but the figs are almost all edible, except sometimes for the stem which is a little too hard to chew sometimes. The prices are quite excellent at Nuts.com, but where everything gets in trouble with them is shipping and there is no way around it. I think if a bunch of people ganged up in one big order from Nuts.com you’d be able to defray the cost of shipping that way, otherwise it’s only meant for a treat when you can afford the cost of the produce plus the extra shipping charges.
If you have a sweet tooth and like Fig Newtons like I do, you can save yourself a lot of needless calories and enjoy a healthy wholesome snack by going to Nuts.com. Your local Sams, or even a health-food-store might carry Dates, but the prices will blow your head off.
Chunky Pork Shoulder Ragu
Today I started on one of our favorite meals, Chunky Pork Shoulder Ragu. It’s from a wonderful cookbook titled “The Italian Slow Cooker” by Michele Scicolone.
This recipe is on page 67 and it involves browning a pork shoulder in olive oil, some onion, fennel, sage, rosemary and quite a bit of tomato. Then you place it all in your slow cooker for six hours. At the end of that time the pork shoulder comes out falling apart. You just need to transfer it to a pot, attack it with a fork, and it falls apart without much effort.
Here’s a photo of it about three quarters of the way through:
Chunky Pork Shoulder Ragu
At the end I cooked up a bit of Rigatoni pasta and used it as a substrate for this Ragu. Altogether a wonderful meal, and yes, it made leftovers.
If you don’t have this wonderful cookbook in your collection I can recommend it at least for this recipe. I’ve included a link to B&N, so buying it there will go a long way in fighting the scourge of Amazon.com. 🙂
The Forum Comic Crashed and Burned
When I’m on vacation I have lots of free time and so I start coming up with ideas for blogging. The biggest challenge I have is balancing these moments where I have lots of free time and can blog prodigiously versus those times when I am so busy I can’t possibly blog. It’s either feast or famine. There are times when I wish services like Plinky had some sort of tracking ability. I hate the idea of having to keep a list of what Plinky prompts I’ve taken up as blog assignments and which ones I haven’t and the site doesn’t seem to have that as a capacity. Is there anyone out there who would like me to write about specific items maybe? I just blog about what occurs to me or things that are remarkable in my Pocket queue.
I’ve been kicking around several ideas including more work-related blog posts, especially when it comes to getting things accomplished, using our ticket system, and running a help desk in general. I think that will take more planning because I have to tread carefully. Work tends to get rather picky about what I write and share, and there has been heavy drama time in the past and I’d rather not have to deal with that malarkey again if I can help it.
I also have to remind myself now that my blog is all paid and all bottomless. I can share pictures and even video all by myself without having to deal with YouTube or any of that “passing under the eyes of a censor” kind of thing. Then again, I don’t think that recording video would be the best thing – but maybe so – I’ll really have to come up with things worth talking about if I’m going to do that. Unless I open up to Q&A and swing the doors wide open for anonymous Q&A.
So many ideas… thankfully I have a lot of time to plan and put these things in operation, or not. 🙂
Julia Child Inspired Macaroni and Cheese
Tonight I decided that I would make something that I am quite fond of,
and something that I came up with all by myself, as far as I know. This
recipe for Mac and Cheese creates a different dish than the other Mac
and Cheese dishes I’ve had in the past and it’s quite good. I’m an
ardent believer that anyone can cook, even those who do not think they
can or should. Everyone Can Cook.
Here’s how I set it up:
Ingredients:
2 1-pound boxes of Cavatappi Pasta (hollow corkscrew shaped pasta, uncut
elbow macaroni essentially)
4 cups of milk (any kind, probably good at 2%)
4 tbsp of Butter
6 tbsp of AP Flour
At least 1 pound or more of any kind of cheese you like
Procedure:
Boil the pasta until al-dente and drain and put aside. Get a deep
saucier, they are halfway between frypans and dutch ovens. Warm the
butter with low heat until it starts to bubble, just gently bubble. Then
add the AP flour in one shot. Stir like mad for about 2 minutes. Pour
milk into 4 cup plastic measuring cup and microwave for about 3-4
minutes (watch as milk can boil and take off on you and make a hell of a
mess) right before the milk boils and expands, take it out and pour it
all in the saucier on top of your roux (which is what the flour and
butter did together) and stir that for the next 4 to 5 minutes, bring up
the heat, and stare at it, boil is coming. Once the milk starts to boil,
add salt and pepper, a pinch and a few grinds of both. You now have a
finished Béchamel Sauce! Now you can augment it. You can add anything
you like to this sauce, it’s like culinary velcro. It’ll accept a huge
amount of cheese, various different kinds of cheese, whatever your
little heart desires. Start with about a pound, more if you like cheese
a lot. I wouldn’t go beyond 2-3 pounds of cheese. The sauce can also
accept any herbal additions, like Thyme or Parsley or even Sage if you
like. Rosemary is nice, but it’s really quite twiggy and resinous so
unless you got a huge hankering for Rosemary, keep that out. You could
also sweat-and-brown onions or garlic or even shallot. Keep in mind that
onion can take an insane amount of punishment but it’s cousins cannot,
garlic and shallot are very quick, say 20-30 seconds of sauté before
they are toast. You could even go with raw garlic or shallot, as they’ll
work their magic once they get to the oven. With the drained cooked
pasta, mix that with the cheese sauce in another bowl, prepare a
properly sized vessel for baking and spray Pam on it first, that’ll help
keep it from sticking to the surface later on. Get that oven up to 350
degrees and throw the mix in the vessel into the oven for half an hour.
When it comes out the top will be lightly browned and bubbly. If you
want more brown, leave it in longer. Timing is flexible as long as your
temps are right – if your oven doesn’t have an over thermometer, stop
reading, go to the market and get one right now.
It makes enough to feed two for almost a week. Four for half a week. Six
for two days. Eight to Ten well, say goodbye to it. 🙂
That’s it, that’s dinner. A little salt and pepper, maybe some garlic
salt, celery salt, or seasoned salt and you’ll be on your way. If you
are afraid of your sauce breaking (which is to say, falling apart into
oil, water, and assorted debris) don’t be. You’re cooking the entire
thing and the Béchamel has no time to fall apart. You can add various
other small amendments if this is really a huge concern for you. Ground
mustard, about 1-2 tsp is good to keep the fat and water together and it
doesn’t contribute any unusual flavors. If you are working with really
freakishly mishmashed cheese selections you might want to look into
adding Sodium Citrate to the sauce. This chemical additive can help keep
different cheeses integrated and it doesn’t affect flavor, appearance,
or edibility. Tread carefully, as sodium citrate is the path to
Velveeta. Now you know how velveeta is made, hah.
One thing to say, the roux made in the first steps is Julia’s roux. One
thing that I do is monthly or so I take a stick of butter, weigh it by
gram scale, and then cook it down until it’s bubbling and then add the
exact same weight of AP flour to that and cook for 2-3 minutes. You
don’t want to see it get any darker than white to blond to “yellow corn
kernel” color, and yes, for a roux the color is VITAL. White and yellow
are good, brown or red is good for other things, not anything like this.
Once it’s all cooked and unmercifully whisked transfer it to a bowl and
wrap it up and throw it in the fridge. You now have the worlds most
perfect thickener. It’ll thicken anything. It’s flavor neutral and very
handy. Just scrape a little out with a fork and you’re all set. The
applications are endless. You can make lump-free gravies, sauces, soups,
stews, or anything else that needs a little thickening power – just add
a little at a time and stir like mad. One thing about roux made with AP
Flour is that it only reaches maximum thickening power when the water
it’s in reaches a boil. Also, since it’s wheat flour and tossed with
water you will have a minute but present amount of gluten there. So if
you don’t like gluten, this isn’t for you.
If you try this recipe and like it, please leave a comment. I think
anyone can make this dish as it’s very forgiving if you make any
blunders. The only real OMG place is that roux in the beginning. A dark
roux will crap out on you and your Béchamel will either not form or
half-ass form and the color will be off and there will be more caramel
notes in the final dish. It’s still edible, but, just be careful of that
color.
Good Luck!
Sharing
I ran into an inconvenience with the current way I share socially
online. I have established a new workflow. Short messages still end up
going to Twitter, and if I feel like they are worth sending to Facebook
I use “Selective Tweets” to push that single tweet forward into
Facebook. For longer entires I write them up in Day One no matter if
they are public or private and then save them there and then share them
via email if they are public with my WordPress blog. If they are private
matters, they simply get shared with Facebook with a default stringent
security setting so only the right people can see those posts.
The email routine actually has been hit and miss to start but now it’s
working out quite nicely. First I migrated my blog from WordPress.com to
Wordpress.org. This is just me moving stuff from a companies site (.com)
to the domain that I own with Scott (windchilde.com) and I figure since
I’m paying for it anyways I might as well use it. Plus the switch over
to the windchilde.com domain also allows me unlimited storage and
unlimited bandwidth so I can share photos and videos without having to
worry about running into any storage caps or having to pay for extra
storage when I’m already paying for a pretty good deal with the host
that runs windchilde.com. I originally started with WordPress.org and
figured that Jetpack, which is a feature crosstalk package between
Wordpress.com and WordPress.org, extending some of the things that I
liked about WordPress.com around my installation of WordPress.org for
free. One of those options was “Post by Email” which gave me a
gobbledegook address at post.wordpress.com. That feature never worked
for me. It was supposed to be turn-key but it fell on it’s face. So I
turned to plugins, which are how you can extend WordPress.org sites, but
not WordPress.com sites. The company keeps a tight lid on things like
that where the “DIY” system is far more flexible and accommodating. I
downloaded the plugin called “Postie” and configured it to use a POP
account that I created on the windchilde.com domain and got that all set
up. There were a wee bit of growing pains regarding how to set
Categories and Tags in the email posts that I was making out of Day One.
What I had was a rather clunky Evernote note with the copied text from
my WordPress Category page so I could refer to that to pick and choose
which category I wanted the email post to go into. This was a mess. I
thought about it for a while and when I was done working out at Anytime
Fitness it struck me in a eureka moment; Why not just use TextExpander
to do the heavy lifting? So I started TextExpander on my MBP at home and
it came up, loaded the settings from my Dropbox (neat) and I created a
new snippet, called it “Categories” and set it’s trigger to be “;cat”.
Then I loaded all my categories from WordPress into a bracketed
pull-down list that TextExpander enables you to make on-the-fly so once
I’m done with Day One editing, I can save the entry (also is stored in
my Dropbox, yay!) and then click Share, Email, and then with the open
email I can just type in the trigger for each category I want to add and
I don’t need to remember to go to Evernote to get the list, or risk a
typo screwing everything up. Using Categories this way is really
convenient and tags are a snap to add as well.
Every once in a while I like to plug software that really works for me.
I plug the tarnations out of Mac, of course, as it’s the platform that I
can actually get my work done on. The apps that run on the Mac make the
rest of it work oh-so-well. Day One is a magnificent personal journaling
app. It’s private and password protected on all my devices and stored on
my Dropbox so I don’t have to screw around with backups or restores or
worrying that my entire Journal may just flit off into nothingness if my
MBP or a flash drive decides to play dumb on me. Plus Day One has
in-built sharing features, so I can share via Email, Twitter, or
Facebook if I want to. WordPress.org is not really software that runs on
my Mac, but instead runs on a host. The host I use is iPage.com and they
do a competent job. Setting up a WordPress.org site is embarrassingly
easy, mostly just a handful of clicks and you get a starter email with
the address you should use and your username and a temporary password. I
started to use WordPress because I left LiveJournal when the Russians
bought SixApart, the company that runs LiveJournal. Not that I have
anything against russians, but I’m not a huge fan of my words in that
place, it’s a personal thing. WordPress.org also enables commenting and
stats collection and automatically publicizes on it’s own to Twitter and
Facebook and Tumblr so I don’t have to futz around and create links to
my blog posts after the fact – WordPress does it for me.
Day One stores everything, WordPress stores my public lengthy stories,
Facebook stores my private lengthy stories and Twitter and Facebook
handle the rest – the tiny stuff. It’s all held together by Dropbox,
TextExpander, Day One app, my host, WordPress.org, Twitter, Facebook,
and Tumblr. It seems complicated and it is rather too-involved, but this
way I can write freely without having to concern myself with
self-censorship or exposing the wrong people to the wrong kind of
information. This way it’s all compact and interrelated and convenient.
So far, this is great for me and it’s how I am able to “have my cake and
eat it too”, which I’m a huge fan of in general.
All these products that I mentioned are either cheap or free. Nothing
cost me an arm or a leg, even the host, when you spread the cost over a
whole year is a pittance. I could even help friends and family set up
their own WordPress.org blogs on my host if they, and Scott, agreed. So,
if you think some of this would suit you and Scott’s good with it, just
let me know.