Disorderly Content

I have no interest in reality TV. None. Well, Mythbusters, but I think of that more as educational (as in "We take all these insane risks so you won't have to") than reality. No, I've never watched more than a small piece of an episode of reality TV. And here's an excellent demonstration of why not.

What follows is a video of James Franco and Mila Kunis reenacting a scene from The Hills, a show I know about only because of the discussion on the TV Guide podcast. Yes, I do listen to people talk about reality TV, but only because they're entertaining about it (more entertaining than the shows themselves, I suspect), and because they also talk about scripted shows and movies.

Anyway, here it is, courtesy of Television Without Pity's Telefile, the latest blog to join my already overloaded collection:

I have a weakness for odd combinations, like that Baptist church and RV park I encountered in Austin, Nevada. So imagine my delight when I finished ordering my Nikon D300 from Ritz Camera (no shipping and they pay the sales tax!) and was offered an add for Dave's Gourmet and his collection of Insanity Sauces. Especially when I clicked through and discovered this gem: Hot Sauce & Garden Spray. It's like using pepper spray to season your food, or a taser to jumpstart your car. Except it's real!

...or at least, you hardly ever get more than you pay for. Case in point, the brown truck guys. After my recent experience with model photography, I went out and ordered a couple of radio transmitters for next time, the better to take advantage of the lighting setups provided by the other participants. Being naturally frugal (those who know me can stop laughing any time now), I opted for the cheapest shipping option, the UPS "we'll get it there in a week or so", if the slug doesn't get a hernia" option. The shipper is in New York, so I didn't think much of it. Until I remembered it was close to the delivery date and checked the package's status on the UPS site. Turns out my package arrived locally on the 23rd, where it stayed in their warehouse until being released late last night for delivery today. So they could have gotten it here days ago, but instead they let it occupy valuable warehouse space so people who bought the higher speed (and higher priced) option don't have to feel like such tools. As for me, I guess I'm grateful they don't have a "slower than slugs" option. I mean, there's a principle at stake...

In honor of my South Bay Blogger friends (who are the only ones on the planet who might find the title of this post funny), I have to share the strangest bit of video I've seen in a long time. Safe for work, but not if you're Golden Girls intolerant:

A Golden Girls credits makeover

Somebody stop me before I drive into San Francisco on a post-Thanksgiving Saturday. Bad plan.

Today was the performance of the Reduced Shakespeare Company's production called Completely Hollywood (Reduced) that I'd booked back when the tickets first became available. Sadly, there was no need to book right away; there were plenty of seats to be had. But not sadly was the show itself, which was a whole lot of fun. And it would have been fun even if I wasn't called up on stage to be an extra in the great movie blockbuster that makes up Act II. If you like... well... it's not improv, but it's not completely scripted either. It's scripted that feels more like improv, if that makes sense. Anyway, go. You'll be glad you did.

But getting there was definitely not half the fun. Traffic in San Francisco totally sucked. And the Union Square Garage was full. I ended up at another garage a couple of blocks away, which fortunately had a ridiculous number of levels: I ended up on the 9th floor. Good thing I gave myself plenty of time to get there, get parked and get settled in.

Now I have to decide whether to get a ticket for the other show they're doing on this SF run. It's the Bible show: The Complete Word of God (Abridged). It's been called blasphemous, which sounds just my speed. But do I risk SF weekend traffic again?

As I may have mentioned here a time or two, I'm an enthusiastic photographer. I'll shoot pretty much anything that will sit still long enough: scenery, buildings, food I pick up at the farmer's market even if I have no idea what to do with it once I'm done taking its picture. About the only subject I don't shoot is (are?) people. To be honest (which I'm sure makes you wonder what I've been doing up to now), people make me nervous. Especially women. Especially pretty women. Who are, by a strange and unfortunate coincidence, the ones most likely to end up on the other side of the camera.

But model photography has always interested me, both as a skill to be mastered and because, well, it's an excuse to spend time looking at pretty women. (Yeah, I'm shallow.) So when I heard mention of a group in the area that puts on monthly mixers for photographers and models I signed up. And then did nothing for months. I even almost went last month, but chickened out at literally the last moment. Which I almost did again this month, but somehow talked myself into walking in the door, paying my ten dollars and seeing what it was all about. And, as with most things that scare me, discovered there really wasn't anything to be afraid of.

In three hours I shot 250 pictures of a dozen different models, experimented with some different settings, took advantage of lighting equipment brought by other attendees, learned a lot and had a fine time doing it. I can't wait to go back and do it again, a little wiser and, knowing me, with even more newly purchased equipment I won't know how to use. Le plus ça change, as the French say.

Update 11/25: It only took a week, but I finally got a few of my better (or less worse) shots up on Flickr. If you're curious, you can see and comment on them in my new ModelMix set.

If you've tried to read, well, pretty much anything lately, you've likely noticed that good copy editors have been replaced almost entirely by software. And software... let's just say it's no smarter than the people who write and use it. Hence the video below, about which I will say no more, except to thank Ali on my friend Barry's forum for telling us about it:

I wasn't one of the first to install Leopard, Apple's latest and greatest edition of Mac OS X, but I wasn't that far behind either. So far the experience has been fine, aside from the incompatibility of a package I use to sync my Mac (and iPhone) calendar with that horrible Outlook stuff we use at work. (Yes, I do work. Kindly get that smirk off your face.) And I've been enjoying the idea of Time Machine, an incremental backup feature that lets you go back to any prior state of your files. Notice that I said it's the idea I'm enjoying; I haven't actually had to rely on it to undo one of my accidental erasures.

Anyway, the drive I'm using for backups isn't nearly big enough for the job. So I decided to head down to Fry's to see what I could get in massive storage. And a little while later I was home with a 750 GB (or 3/4 of a terabyte, which is the way I like to think of it) Maxtor hard drive, which, by the way, is less than half of what I paid for 60 MB not so many years ago. Well, maybe it really is so many years. I'm old, you see...

So I plugged in the drive and tried erasing it. No luck; it failed to complete. Then I installed the software that came with the drive, which I suppose I should have done first. No better. Then I looked at the manual. (Yeah, I know.) Which told me to do exactly what I'd been doing. Finally I went to their website, searched the knowledge base and discovered that they have a leetle incompatibility problem with Leopard. Ah, if only I'd bought and installed the drive before I upgraded. Of course, if I hadn't upgraded, I wouldn't need the drive to run Time Machine...

So now I wait. Hope it doesn't take too long. I'm still waiting for an update to that Que 60 GB drive I bought that wouldn't work right on 10.2. Or was it 10.1?

Update 11/24: I think I'm so smart. And then something happens that makes he rethink. Like now; I've been checking the Maxtor site for a fix for my Leopard problem. No luck on that particular problem report, but another related report suggests that the problem is Apple's. More to the point, it offered a solution, and one I really should have thought of for myself. The problem you see is with the Disk Utility in Leopard; it can't format the drive, but if you could go back to an earlier OS and format it, Leopard could use it without difficulty. Yeah, I did think of that, but didn't think further since I don't have a Mac running an older version. But what I should have realized is that there's a copy of Disk Utility on the OS install disc. All I had to do was boot my Mac from the Tiger install DVD and run Disc Utility there. Took a very few minutes and now I have my 3/4 terabyte drive happily backing up my data.

Last weekend was my annual pilgrimage, wherein crazed fans from a surprising number of countries converge on Beautiful Downtown Burbank to celebrate Scaperdom. This was supposed to be the last Farscape convention, what with the show ending production a couple of years ago and the organizers claiming to lose money on the deal. (Which may or may not be true; do they lose money or do they just not make enough to satisfy them? Either one would be fair. I'd just like to know.)

Anyway, since it was to be the last con *snif*, quote a few attendees from prior years made the effort to attend, as did some old and new fans who hadn't yet been Burbanked. The result was that we had a bigger crowd than in recent times. And a good time was had by all; in four days I never managed to turn on the room's widescreen TV or crack open my laptop. Heck, aside from sleeping (which I did little) and showering (which I did enough of, to the great relief of those around me), I spent all my time amid Scapers.

Which made the return to Real Life a rocky one, you may imagine. And the thought that I won't have that experience for whole 'nother year has me bugged. Good thing our Vegas trip is only a month off...