Happy Slip: "Mac Beautiful"

Christine, nicknamed "Happy Slip", sings: "Mac Beautiful".
A pretty, and pretty talented, young woman singing a love song to a Mac, slightly tongue-in-cheek, gotta love it.

Don't miss her other videos, they are hilarious.
Brains, humor, and looks. I want to marry Christine. How about it, Christine? Before you decide: I have that Mac you sing to... the top-of-the-line Mac Pro tower model. With 6 GB memory and a full terrabyte of hard disk space. And... a 30 inch Apple Cinema display. Come over and play with it.

Comments on Leonardo DiVincio

Tom Charity wrote about Leonardo DiCapricio:
"Gangs of New York and The Aviator had an awful lot going for them, but by common consent, neither felt as essential as, say, Raging Bull, or GoodFellas."

I guess. Personally:

I tried Raging Bull recently. I got twenty minutes into it, and I got so sick of low-brow people yelling at each other that I had to drop it. I mean, come on. (The same is true for many films of the period, like Mean Streets.)

Goodfellas I didn't get. I didn't see the great interest, just as I don't see it with The Godfather. And it's not that I don't like the gangster genre necessarily, The Sopranos is one of my favorite TV series.

Gangs of New York I may get around to seeing. Though I hesitate, for the idea of gangs of poor boys struggling in old-time NYC turns me off. (Though not as much as a love story taking place on the a sinking ship. I'll watch Mexican soaps for a year before I'll watch Titanic.)

The Aviator I loved. I thought Leo was good, the visuals were amazing, and I am still punch-drunk from the double wammy of Cate playing Kate. O mama, such beauty, such style.

Leo was awesome in What's Eating Gilbert Grape.

A manual

Pascal posted this in his usual "kindness with a twist of lemon" style:

Blog commenting instruction manual.

See these three choices on the top right, just below the space for your comment?

• Blogger
  
• Other
  
• Anonymous

Click on "Other", then pick a name, any name you like, just choose something you'll remember so you can use it again next time. Write it down if you have bad memory (like me).

Then post as usual, and savour the noble pleasure of having shown "netiquette", a.k.a. fine manners online.

Also, remember that pressing "Shift" plus that key next to "return" allows you to type a quote in a fraction of a second. It's used to separate what YOU say from what others said earlier and which you're just repeating as a reminder. It's very helpful if you want to be read!

Ain't life pleasant with just some very simple effort? :-)

"Decepticons"

I have just decided that "Decepticons" is my favorite song ever.
Get that and more great music for free at the musician's site ugress.com

Yourself

"The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself."
- Friedrich Nietzsche

The Iliad on speed

You never heard Homer so... hyper. (Click on "hear sample".)
(They've posted the audio sample at the wrong speed. Just a little low-brow humor here.)

iSee, iWant, iParody

Here is a fun page with fictional Apple design products.

Not only are many fun or funny, but they are often really beautifully made. I would love to have some kind of clue how the heck people make such art from nothing. I couldn't even begin, and I'm supposed to be an artist and computer savvy.

The iWatches remind me of an article I wrote years ago, I hope you like it.

Ligth/love

Apropos our talk about light and love, Ian sent me this quote:

The sun never says to the earth: 'You owe me.'
Look what happens with a love like that, it lights the whole world.
-Hafiz

Tactile Pro keyboard

I love my Tactile Pro
And I have already ordered version 2, mainly to make sure I'll never have to be without a good keyboard.

Zex and zex and zex and zex...

Once at a party I gave a monologue as an overwrought psychiatrist. Whenever he mentioned sex he would go into auto-feedback in his Austrian accent: "zex and zex and zex and zex..."

When he needed a member from each gender from the audience to demonstrate how relations work, he walked around (a bit like Groucho Marx) and felt everybody on their chest to determine gender. One lady covered hers in a hurry, but a friend of mine was in stitches, probably she had predicted that I would zero in on her because she has a very nice figure...

So he got the two people up in front, and he asked them to hold hands, and then to smile at each other. He said: "Zat vas ze foreplay..."

I forget how it all ended, but fun was had.

Customer service serve only customers

You know how customer service is with big companies? Well, here is a funny little story.

Having my business on the web, I don't want to be without a Net connection for even a brief while, so I have two different broadband connections.
At least I thought I did, but when my primary one started getting flaky, I noticed that my secondary one did not seem to work at all.
First there was a very odd web page saying that service would resume soon, and some blaming game between big companies explained, companies I never heard of. Then there was no connection at all. And this seemed to go on, so I finally got impatient and contacted the provider, Bulldog Broadband, to find out why this was so.

They couldn't find me in their system, so I gave more data, and so on and so forth with no results. I was very patient.
Then I decided to check into the built-in web server on the wireless modem I got with the service. And I noticed that the username for loggin in was "fast4". And I remembered: I was a customer of a company named Fast4.net, not Bulldog Broadband! I had decided to change to Bulldog, but it never actually happened for some reason. I decided to forgive Bulldog for not finding my customer file.

Looking through my email archives, I found out that Fast4 has actually not billed me for months... I still have not found out what happened to that company or my account with them, but here is the last exchange between me and Bulldog:

Me:
"... Ooops, sorry, I don't think I have an account with you..."

Bulldog Broadband:
"Thank you for emailing us. Unfortunately we are unable to find your account with the details you have provided. Please can you supply us with your order reference number (BDOL) as this is necessary to verify your identity and access your account, in line with Data Protection Act regulations."

John Farr

Here's the blog of John Farr. It is unusual.
I've known John long. A very spiritual, intense, and honest person.

Regular readers of my blog will recognized these sentiments of John's:
"SOMETHING is going on that everyone can feel, an involuntary affirmation of a mighty, mighty force.
History is nothing... The whole world is nothing. Yet everything is A-OK. That’s what’s coming through right now. It’s all OK."

New poetry collection

The Painful Poignancy of Desire: An Introduction to Romantic and Postromantic Poetry
by Claudia Moscovici

I have long been a friend of Claudia's and a supporter of her postromaticism movement. A couple of years ago, I published a few of her wonderful poems, get them here in PDF format.

Noted feminist scholar Claudia Moscovici is a professor at the University of Michigan, and has published several books on feminist theory and women's sensuality, including Erotisms and From Sex Objects to Sexual Subjects.

Jeffery

A post on Light by Laurie Jeffery.

Asterix & Obelix: Mission Cleopatra

I am not even sure why I rented Asterix & Obelix: Mission Cleopatra, I had so little hopes for it after the dreadful first live-action Asterix film. But I'm glad I did, for it turned out to be a terrific film.

For one thing it has Monica Bellucci as Cleopatra. She is just a gorgeous woman, and the really skimpy outfits she wears in this movie make me think it was not aimed at a kids audience! It's actually surprisingly sexy, and she is not the only really pretty woman in the film either.

For another thing it is very funny, not just keeping many of the original jokes from the graphic novel, but also introducing many new ones, surprisingly successful.

And last but not least, the film looks fantastic. This is not your father's French movie, this is a big budget feature, and it looks like it. The set designs, the landscapes, the costumes, everything is pure eye candy. I'm not kidding.

Warmly recommended.
(If you get the DVD with two versions, watch the original French version, the English-language one has 20 minutes cut from it, and is not well dubbed.)

If you are very interested in technical data about specific DVDs, I found this entry on this astounding site.