Category: Fun

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A good night for vampires…

Boo!Last night, Annette went to an event for the undergrad English majors club (really, literature majors club), so Will and I had a “Daddy/Will night” event: we went to see the classic silent film Nosferatu at the Michigan Theater in Ann Arbor. A silent film, you ask? Yes, but with orchestral accompaniment, which included things like this weird wind sound effect machine, lots of other percussion, and, of course, the theater organ. And as an aside here: this is one of those reasons why I like living in this area and why we probably will be moving to Ann Arbor eventually, that it is possible to see classic silent films with music as a special event at a place like the Michigan Theater.

Anyway, it was a dark and stormy night, so that seemed to be a perfect atmosphere for seeing one of the classic (perhaps the classic?) horror/vampire film. Lots of other people thought the same thing; the place was about 2/3rds full, including the balcony.

How was it, you ask? Well, for starters, it was less than scary, which probably suited Will just fine. I’m sure the horror effect was in part diluted by the giggling junior high boys who sat behind us. But beyond that, the melodramatic and dated acting and not great special effects didn’t instill fear. I guess it was scary 80 or so years ago.

But it was still pretty cool to see, at least for me. There’s a ton of stuff in this movie that has been repeated over and over again in countless other movies, and it is one of those things that anyone who has even a remotely serious interest in film has to see. Again and again even Will was able to point out when a “famous scene” came on the screen. And the music was very cool too.

I’d say go see it yourself, but it was a one-shot deal. I guess I would say instead that you should go see another one of the other silent films they show there once in a while.

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Daily photo project

This morning via yahoo, I came across this “daily photo” project. There’s a video at the site that shows a time-lapse of this guy’s self-portraits over the last seven or so years, from the time he was 22 until now. I’m not sure, but this seems like a pretty, um, self-involved thing to me. And it doesn’t so much show off the process of aging as it shows the changes in this kid’s hairstyles. Still, it’s kinda cool….

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The D-List Live

Annette and I just got back from seeing Kathy “The D List” Griffin at the EMU Convocation Center. A good time for one and all; a few highlights here:

  • Boy, does she ever say “fuck” a lot– and lots and lots of very funny bits that are not appropriate for the family reading I try to promote here.
  • Griffin’s bread-n-butter for her perfomances is making fun of celebrities. Folks covered tonight included Andy Dick, (long and funny bit about one of his drunken performances), Tom Cruise, John Travolta (she talked about Scientology for a while), Larry King, Star Jones and The View in general, Paris Hilton, Mel Gibson, the Olsen (or Olson?) twins, Lance Bass, and of course, her “favorite gay,” Clay Atkin.
  • She told a pretty funny story about walking out of the Emmys that may or may not be true. Actually, that’s kind of true for a lot of what she had to say: clearly, there’s some “embellishment” for comedy purposes in all of her stories. But hey, that’s comedy.
  • Basically, Griffin’s act consists of her talking pretty fast about all kinds of stuff for about two hours. It seems to me to be completely off the top of her head, though I suppose that’s why they call it “an act.”
  • We had really good seats– third row. But that wasn’t that much of an accomplishment really because the crowd wasn’t that big, like maybe 1,000 or so people. And lot of these folks were kind of a freaky lot.
  • We looked it up when we got home, but while at the show, Annette and I both wondered about Griffin’s age. It turns out that she was born in 1960, but she actually kind of looks older than that. She’s pretty open about having had “work done,” but there was something odd about some flappy skin on her neck.

Anyway, like I said, a good show overall.

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The next/new TV (or, still seeking the “true” HDTV experience)

As loyal readers will recall, our TV up and died on Friday night. Oh, and just for a point of correction/clarification to that previous post: Annette actually doesn’t need my help to make web sites, and the problem she had was more complicated than I was trying to suggest. I was just trying to be funny, not an ass.

But it is true she doesn’t care that much about the TV. She certainly doesn’t care as much as Will and I.

Anyway, here’s a recap of our TV odyssey (which I had meant to post several days ago, but things got busy around here):

The first thing I did last Saturday morning (well, after I messed with the dead TV to make sure it was truly dead) was lift it off of the living room floor and haul it out to the curb. And here the first seed of my future TV purchase was planted: that sucker was darn heavy, and I’m too old and too out of shape to be hauling around a 70 pound + awkward appliances, especially when they end up dropping dead on me. We needed a lighter TV.

Shortly after that back-breaking experience, Will and I went to his soccer game. (And btw, it was a good game because Will’s team tied and didn’t lose.) I was talking to one of the parents who is an electrician at an auto plant around here and describing the dead TV situation to him. He ran me through a series of questions which I found mostly comforting because they were obvious things I had done (I checked a different plug, I tried turning it off and on from the TV itself and not the remote, I tried it after letting it sit for several hours, etc.). But it was also somewhat discomforting because asked me about things that I couldn’t have possibly checked (“Did you voltage meter to check if you were getting power at the switch?” What the hell is a voltage meter? I thought).

In the end, this guy was telling me stuff that made me think that I probably could have had this TV fixed, but a) I would have had to pay someone because I wasn’t about to open the set up myself, b) that would have cost me more than the set was worth, and c) it was still reviewed as a piece o’ junk.

Anyway, whether or not I should have just gotten the set fixed was kind of a moot point because when Will and I got back from soccer, the TV I had put on the curb was gone.

So it was time for a trip to Costco, which I have found to always be the best deal on electronics and “big ticket” items. It’s been several (well, three or four) years since I’ve done any TV shopping, and I discovered something: right now, there are only two kinds of TVs on the market in the size we were after: kinda cheap (like around $300 or so) and kinda expensive (like $700 ++). This is because everything is moving to HDTV. I wasn’t looking to buy an HDTV; on the other hand, having had recent bad experience with the kinda cheap variety of TV, I wasn’t looking to repeat that experience either.

After confering with Annette over the phone, we decided to get into the HDTV world on the low-end of things. I thought our shopping technique for this was kind of clever. She was off doing school work at Bombadill’s (local coffee shop) and did Google searches for me on particular brands for about a half hour. I gave her names and model numbers and she looked up reviews. This process eliminated some crappy TVs and then pushed us toward what we bought, a Sharp 26 inch LCD HDTV. We found great reviews online, and as far as we could tell, Costco beat the pants off of everyone on the price.

Anyway, took it home, easily lifted it out of the box (I don’t think it weighs even 30 pounds), hooked it up, prepared to be “blown away” by the HDTV experience.

Well, not quite. In fact, without the right box from the cable company, the quality of the TV was kind of strange. We were watching something Sunday night that featured some close-ups of people talking, and it was like their faces were cut up into different pieces.

But these problems were soon solved with a trip to our local Comcast store for the HDTV box– and while we were at it, we decided to get the DVR feature that allows you to record programs and such. It took me the better part of a morning to figure out how to hook the damn thing up– reading the instructions, calling Comcast, making a trip to Circuit City for one kind of cable I didn’t need, making a trip to Radio Shack for both advice and another cable I didn’t need or buy. And I did get it to all work.

So, how is the “HDTV experience?” Is it worth it? Well, yes and no.

First off, it’s a nice TV, and I really like the fact that I can pick it up and move it around without freakin’ killing myself. “Normal” TV looks good on it. When it comes to HDTV, I would say that the picture quality is quite obviously better, though I don’t know if the difference is worth the money. Besides that, most of the stuff that we tend to watch around here– Comedy Central, The Food Network, E!, Cartoon Network, etc.– isn’t broadcast in HDTV. In fact, the offering of things that are broadcast in HDTV are kind of on the slim-side of things.

The other thing is it seems to me that HDTV as a concept is a potentially never-ending money pit. It reminds me of stereo components from my youth. When I was in both Circuit City and Radio Shack, the dudes (and it’s always dudes, isn’t it?) were trying to sell me the more expensive cables or the more fancy connectors or whatever. The line was always something like “to get the true sense of the quality of HDTV, you will need to buy one of these.” Given that I’m already hundreds of dollars into this set-up already, thanks but no thanks.

Anyway, overall I have to give it a thumbs up. It’s not as cool as the HDTV projector set-up my friend and colleague Jim K. has in his basement (26 inch TV? Try 10 FOOT TV!), but it works well for us. In fact, I think I might watch something on it right now….

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“The Last Unicorn” (Or Bill HD’s 91)

I appreciate that this is kind of an inside joke about Bill’s 91 in golf earlier this year (a round that was gifted to him by a unicorn), but I thought others might enjoy this super stupid video. Boing-boing described it as being like pepto for your eyes. Indeed.

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Delayed Dan Bern Post

This is very late because of various things going on here in the last week or so. Anyway:

Annette and I had a lovely evening out last weekend to go and see a Dan Bern concert at Ann Arbor’s “The Ark” on Friday night. Who is Dan Bern, you ask? Well, he’s kind of “alternative rock meets folk rock singer” of a sort of guy. There’s a picture here– I took one at the concert with my cell phone, but it was pretty lame so I thought I’d link to a “real” picture from Bern’s web site.

Somewhere a number of years ago, I came across Dan Bern’s CD (a self-titled release), and I have to say that it remains one of my favorite CDs in my collection. So, I found out that Bern was going to be in town and a) I immediately went out and tried to buy more of Bern’s CDs (I bought Breathe and My America II) and b) I listened to these Bern recordings before the show– to get ready, doncha know.

Anyway, Annette and I had a lovely meal and then went to the show. In brief, Bern’s show was an example of how and why it almost certainly always worthwhile for anyone reading this to go and see a concert put on by someone who puts on– oh, I don’t know– 300 gigs a year. Because here’s the thing: I don’t care how you feel about Bern’s music or even that type of music. For pure “perfomance value,” you’re better off with the likes of someone like Bern than about 90% of the people on the radio nowadays.

It wasn’t a very crowded show, and that’s even in the Ark, which isn’t exactly a huge theater venue. Most of the folks there were probably about our age and temperament, though there were a few somewhat younger types. There was one table of groovy young young people right up front, and they were a bit of a show in and of themselves. One of them, a white girl with dreadlocks (and btw, white people– dreadlocks is really not a good look on you), was passed out in her chair by the end of the show. Another got a little too into Bern’s last song, Jerusalem (and to the extent that Bern has a “big hit,” this is probably it, though I actually prefer the song “Marilyn” on this album, which he didn’t sing). There’s a lot of cool lyrics in this song, but the passage I will reproduce now for the purposes of the story later on is toward the end of the song:

I spent ten whole days in Jerusalem
Mmmm Jerusalem
Sweet Jerusalem
And all I ate was olives
Nothing but olives
Mountains of olives
It was a good ten days
I like olives
I like you too

Anyway, this particular extra-special fan didn’t so much sing along as shout along, and since she was right up front and we were all in a small space and she was really loud, she kind of succeeded in drowning out Bern and the two guys who served as his band. I think everyone was a little disconnected on that one.

And then there was hat girl. After the show was over, I was waiting around for Annette to get out of the line in the women’s room, and there was this young woman– like sophomore or junior in college tops– clutching a cowboy hat. She was telling anyone who would listen (including me) “It’s his hat! It’s his hat!” Indeed, it did look like the hat he was wearing at the beginning of the show.

“Well, you should probably give it back,” I said.

“Oh, I will, I will. I want to meet him and give him back his hat. It’s his hat!” She was an attractive girl and didn’t look disturbed overall, but her eyes had a little bit of that crazy look to them.

“Uh-huh.”

“I love Dan Bern! I want to meet him. Look at this, look at this!” and she showed me the cloth or hemp choker necklace she was wearing; it had these green things in it. “Olives! Nothing but olives! See? I made that!”

“Okay…” and that’s when Annette came back and it was certainly time to go.

All in all, a great evening out, one not quite as weird as these toward the end of the show events might suggest.

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TC Weekend, Sept/Oct 2006




TC Weekend, Sept/Oct 2006

Originally uploaded by steven_d_krause.

I’m super-duper pooped from a great weekend up in Traverse City, but I thought I’d post a little something about the whole whirlwind of a trip. Kind of in the order of the trip, but also in the order I remembered it:

  • We drove up there in pretty crappy rain, but by the time we got up there, it was just kind of grey.
  • Big BIG ups to our hosts with the mosts John and Karen. John and I were in the comp/rhet program at BGSU together way back when. He and Karen were just very generous and kind and just a ton of fun. Too much fun on Saturday night, but that’s a whole different story.
  • One of our missions was to check out the cabin/house that my side of the family (well, really, my parents) are going to rent next summer. It looks like it’s going to be as cool as this web site suggests.
  • Drove around, went to the beach (see above), saw changing leaves, talked textbook publishing and teaching and stuff, went to Cherry Republic, bought cherry ketchup after much encouragement from John and Karen.
  • We ended up at a very nice restaurant, getting a table after all the homecoming dance kids cleared out. Will was pretty sleepy by then, and the nice folks at this restaurant let him stretch out on a booth bench. They even got him a little pillow.
  • Stayed up way too late Saturday. And I don’t know if it was a good idea to have three different bottles of wine open at the same time….
  • Toured around this morning on Mission Peninsula, hiked a little, looked at pretty views a lot, had a little lunch, and then said our farewells.
  • Not much to report about the drive back, but we stopped at a very cool veggie and fruit market, which included this amusing sale of water-logged golfballs.

Not a lot of pictures, but the set from this trip is here.