Cheerful Curmudgeon

My good friend Bert just purchased a farm in Enville, TN and opened his blog, Farmer Bert. I have always been a bit concerned about Bert’s, er, stability (he is my friend, after all) and his first blog posting, Twisted Reason I want to be a Farmer has certainly done nothing to alay my fears. I’m not sure if the video is live sculpture or sheep dance but whatever else it is, it is undoubtedly the most original use of sheep that I have ever seen… and never imagined. Head on over to Farmer Bert’s site and watch the video. It is safe for work unless your cube-mates object to loud laughter!

On a gorgeous spring afternoon, Becky and Derek and Cindy and Geoff came over for dinner and entertainment. Unbeknownst to them, the entertainment was a new copy of BUZZ! Quiz TV for our PS3. The preview video looks hokey but the game is amazingly fun and goofy. Sony hit a wonderful balance between insulting and funny that had us all practically rolling on the floor the whole evening.

Up to four people (or teams) can play at the same time. The game comes with four special wireless controllers, each with a large, red buzz button and four smaller, color coded buttons for answering multiple choice questions. Just add batteries.

You can pick your character (that’s me, on the left) and the sound of your buzzer (I’m partial to the train whistle). Then gameshow host Buzz orchestrates the whole thing in purely delightful manner. You don’t want to be low man on the point totem pole unless you relish Buzz’s attention. With 5,000 questions, and tens of thousands of user-contributed on-line quizzes, there is plenty of bafflement for all ages and plenty of chances for everybody to show off. Derek, though, was the big winner, going home undefeated (just barely); I’ll get him next time, I’m sure!

I have even created a few quizes of my own. You can try them online, even if you do not have a PS3. Trust me, though, it’s much more fun with all of the nuttiness of the game than just answering the questions in your web browser.

Some videos just should not be made. But once they are, you just cannot get that darned theme music out of your head. Do you remember the MacGyver TV show? Watch this if you dare:

My stepfather is clearing out things he does not want any longer so about 25 of my old friends moved in last week, including these vintage Peanuts books:

Passover is here again (starting tomorrow at sundown) which raises the age old questions: Did I buy enough matzoh to last a week? If I bought too much, what will I do with it? Fortunately, Michelle Citrin and William Levin have answers for us.

Researchers have found a strong correlation between newborn feeding patterns and the seemingly immutable “night person” or “morning person”  patterns which govern our adult lives. Dr. Emily Erudita of the Hatch Institute of Mamalian Studies reports in today’s issue of Pan Generational Physiology,

In a study of 1,063 adults, 97.2% of the “night people” had been fed in the evening as newborns. Furthermore, 97.6% of the “morning people” had been fed in the morning as newborns. The remaining approximately 2.5% may have been fed during those periods but conclusive evidence was not available due to failing memories on the parts of the only living adult relatives and a lack of timestamped photographic records.

Dr. Erudita has announced her imminent departure from the Hatch Institute and will be founding a company to provide infant betrothal services, guaranteeing that no married couple need ever be mismatched again.

My sister-in-law gave me about the goofiest gift I’ve ever received, a Play and Freeze ice cream maker. Now before I continue, I need to tell you a little bit about me and ice cream. Me and ice cream, we’re buddies. We’re together pretty much as often as we can be. I got down with ice cream real good when my second son was first around. His brother and his mom and I would haul him over to Fritz’s and we’d all indulge, just to be social, you know. Then we’d take the boys home and toss ‘em in the tub and wash off the ice cream that they didn’t quite get all the way into their mouths.

My mom would tell you, if she blogged which she never saw the point in, that I’ve been seriously involved with ice cream since way before that boy came along and made us all go to Fritz’s so often. Mom loved to tell how I got my tonsils out nice and peaceful like because the doctor promised me all the ice cream that I could eat when I woke up. You know what? As soon as I woke up, I was asking for ice cream and I wasn’t at all interested when some know-it-all nurse said that I was supposed to wait. Mom told it that I made such a fuss that they gave me chocolate ice cream just to shut me up. It worked.

Me, I’m still carrying around most of my ice cream. I keep it tucked safely inside the beltline of my pants. Except, that is, for the part that don’t fit inside the beltline of my pants. I carry that ice cream around with me too, just not quite so neatly tucked away.

Play and Freeze Ice Cream Maker

I kinda suspect that my sister-in-law knows about me and ice cream. She’s seen the two of us together and she knows how much ice cream don’t tuck so nicely inside my pants. So anyhow, she dropped this Play and Freeze ice cream maker on me as a present. Candy and I brought it home, filled it up with heavy cream and sugar and a bit of vanilla and some coffee and rolled it back and forth on the floor for half an hour or so and whoa baby! out came some bodacious frozen goodness!

“How good was it?” you ask. 800 calories of goodness in each bowl. But never mind that. It don’t matter no how.

Thanks, Bets. Perfect gift!

P.S. I know that Fritz’s has frozen custard and not ice cream and I don’t care. When I look down and can’t see my toes, it don’t matter.

I couldn’t resist this test from Blogthings: What’s Your Life’s Mission?

You Are the Artist

You are unique and inspired. You aren’t happy unless you are making art of some sort. Almost anything can be a catalyst for your creativity. You find the whole world stimulating. You have beautiful visions, and you’re good at expressing them. You like people to see what you see. You also have an inventor’s spirit. You’re always thinking up new ideas and concepts.

Science is just plain cool. Check out the Ruben’s Tube (a surefire favorite if you are into flame and music) and the Non-Newtonian Fluid (if you are worried about burning down the garage).

Candy and I have talked about building or buying a home theater computer (HTPC) for years. We have a pretty nice home theater including a projected HD picture that is almost 100″ diagonal and fairly impressive 5.1 sound. This gear works great for DVDs and HD-DVDs (yes, I picked the wrong horse in that race) but, being me, I want more. I want to be able to listen to all of my music on it, including the tracks that I buy from emusic.com and I do not want to mess around with CDs. (Isn’t it amazing that, back in the Dark Ages, I used to be annoyed when I had to flip an LP over every 15 to 20 minutes; now I am annoyed that I have to change CDs every hour.) I have gazillions of digital photos which I would like to enjoy in the comfort of my den and in a more share-able form than my laptop screen. I even have a small collection of digital video which, like the digital photos, I want to see bigger than my laptop screen.

I have noodled, off and on, with building an HTPC from open source projects such as MythTV and Freevo and Medibuntu. None really hooked me. The technology is still so new that you need a pretty carefully crafted recipe of hardware components to make it all work well and the chore of concocting the recipe and then locating all the right parts was too daunting. Worse, I was afraid that I would end up with a system that was so complex that only I could dependably run it.

I even considered buying a pre-built system with Windows Vista Home Premium. My friend, Steve, has one and it is a beautiful thing: everything just works. In my den, when it is time to watch a movie, I want to turn the equipment on and simply watch the movie. Three things put me off of this idea, though. I do not want a whole computer in my den. I certainly do not want to mess with a keyboard and mouse. And I do not want to pay as much for a HTPC as such a system would cost by the time I bought hardware which included a Blu-ray player, a video card with HDMI output, and a sound card with optical output.

Given this state of affairs, I had given up on getting a HTPC, figuring that I would revisit the idea in a year or so.

Candy and I are narrowing in on our tenth wedding anniversary. As a present to ourselves, we decided to replace our HD-DVD with a Blu-ray player and that meant that I got to play one of my favorite games: comparison shopping for electronics! I was completely surprised to find many reviews like CNET’S Best Blu-ray Players from January 28, 2009 which rank the Sony PlayStation 3 at the top of the list.

This list consists of the best Blu-ray players on the market and the bottom line is clear — the Sony PlayStation 3 is by far the most recommendable Blu-ray player available today. There are a few caveats — the PS3 doesn’t have analog multichannel outputs or an IR receptor — but they’re overshadowed by the fact that you also get a high-def gaming console and media streamer. Some home theater die-hards will insist on a standalone player, but everyone else should stick with the PS3 until standalones cost much less and perform comparably.

Beyond the basic PS3 system, I needed add only one accessory: a “real” remote control for playing movies so that I would not need to fiddle around with joysticks and a gaming remote. Sony sells a DVD remote control which looks surprisingly like the remote for any other DVD player; it has all of the right buttons in familiar places and with familiar labels. At $20, this was a no-brainer add-on. Read the rest of this entry »