Signal boost: the rule of law matters.

LeVar Burton has a blog. And a Twitter feed. And a GRAY MOUSTACHE. Geordie cannot have gray hair, people. This is just not OK.

...Damn, I feel old.

I hope everyone's had good holidays. After a mandatory (use-'em-or-lose-'em PTO days) three-week vacation, I'll be back to work Monday, and I wouldn't really mind having longer off...so long as I still got paid. Ah well.

pyrodon and I got each other a Roomba for Christmas, and it's pretty much the cutest robot ever. Does a good job cleaning the floors, too. My folks got me a Fuzebox kit, which I promptly built, and then bricked by trying to load a too-large demo. I've ordered a different programmer cable, so I think I should be able to reburn the bootloader and get it working again. And if that fails, I've ordered a replacement chip, so one way or another it'll be back to functional. It's a great little project, lots of fun to solder up. And my brother got me a shaving set from The Art of Shaving (though curiously not one listed on their site — it has the things that come in their carry-on kit, plus a nice handle for Mach 3 blades, but came in a box like their starter kit), with pre-shave oil, badger brush, shaving cream and aftershave balm (as well as a razor). For those of you who shave your faces, I strongly endorse this product and/or service. (Though I don't particularly care whether you give TAoS your money; but a badger brush, good shaving cream or soap, and some kind of pre-shave oil and after-shave lotion, are worthwhile investments.) Best. Shave. Ever.

Happy new year, all! I hope 2009 is for all of you an improvement over 2008.

Whatever you do or don't celebrate, I hope you all have a wonderful day.

First of all, the little songs the Roomba plays when it turns on or turns off or docks with its charging station are adorable. Good job, iRobot.

Second, ( don't click if you haven't played Fallout 3. But ) Bethesda gets big points for making a joke only people who are two kinds of nerd will get.

I mean, I've been watching the polls, the commentary, 538, etc.; I've been paying attention.

Yet somehow, until that CNN ticker went over the top, I just didn't believe it.

Holy fucking shit, y'all.

Holy fucking shit.

I guess it came out almost a year ago — I could have sworn it had been less time than that — but as I'm just lately getting around to listening to it, wow, Bruce Springsteen's Magic is really good.

For some reason, I'm completely fascinated by Tiny House Blog.

In other tiny-things news, here is an adorable, extremely tiny toad.

Merlin, hunter and ritual disemboweler of rodents, my brother's kitten eleven years ago with the giant paws, mightiest cat I ever knew, has gone out of the world.

We were down at my folks' place this weekend, and learned that a couple of weeks ago, he went out, as he always did, but never came back. They searched up and down the street but found nothing — that's no surprise, as Merlin was always smart about cars. We always joked, even after one got my mom's cat, Copper, that a coyote wouldn't stand a chance against Merlin, who was huge and took no guff from anyone: though his meow was high-pitched and tiny, his purr and growl were low rumbles you could practically feel from across the room. It may not be true, or even remotely likely, but I like to imagine he faced down a coyote and gave as good as he got, and each fell back with mortal wounds, and went their separate ways to find a quiet final resting place.

The thought that never again will my parents get up in the morning to find small, glistening organs meticulously arranged on the deck saddens me inexpressibly.

Any of y'all know anything about Crate's V-series tube amps? They any good?

If you're ever 1) in New York City, 2) male, and 3) in possession of facial hair you wish to be rid of, I very highly recommend a place called "The Shave of New York," on Elizabeth St. in Nolita. Fantastic traditional barbershop straight-razor shave, hot towels, assortments of brown glass bottles with hand-written labels, complimentary cognac, 1940s music, the whole deal. The barber looks like he belongs in a saloon in 1850, and he does a superb job. Next time I go down I'm going to have to spring for the "Ultimate" shave.

Very good weekend with my brother and S. down in Brooklyn, much beer and whisky was drunk. Also trains are awesome. Remind me never to fly anywhere that's within a ten-hour train ride. (But please, Amtrak, put wifi on your trains! If bus lines can do it, so can you!)

And now pyrodon is home from her month in Indiana. So things are looking up.

(Or so these things are called, these days, when they take place on a blog. So I guess this is an LJeg?)

If anyone out there has TiVo or other DVR capability and would be willing to record ABC Evening News tonight and tomorrow, I'd really appreciate it. Either tonight or tomorrow, they're doing a segment on jellyfish, and my dad's supposed to be in it. I don't know (and I guess neither does my dad) which night it'll be on, but that segment's the only bit I'm interested in. If someone can get me that segment in digital format, I shall consider myself in that person's debt, to the tune of at least a six-pack.

Update: it's not on tonight. Maybe tomorrow.

So yesterday I went up to Burlington and hit Macy's, Nordstrom, Lord & Taylor, Sears and Kohl's, and also the Marshall's and Filene's Basement in the Arsenal Mall, and found exactly zero reasonable gray pinstripe suits in my size, let alone two-button, side-vent and not stupidly expensive.

Today I headed out to the execrable "Natick Collection", and if that failed was going to try going back to Burlington, where there's a Men's Wearhouse, and/or down south to the Westgate Mall. After Macy's, Sears, JC Penney, Lord & Taylor, Neiman Marcus and Nordstrom in Natick, I was not feeling heartened, and was close to giving up and getting the Alfani suit I found at Macy's, which wasn't really what I wanted, and didn't seem to be great quality, but was closer than anything else I'd seen. But, there's a Filene's Basement near there too, so I figured I'd try that first.

And, lo and behold, a pretty nice Joseph Abboud suit in my size, in a very good gray with faint pinstripes, at a reasonable price, with side vents...and three buttons. After some consideration and trying it on, I decided to get it anyway. It's a nice suit and looks good on me, and as much as I prefer two button suits, if that's the only problem with it, well, I can live with that. Need to find a local tailor and get the trousers finished.

So, total suit disaster averted. I'm sure you're all quite relieved.

So I thought to check my other suit jackets and sportcoats, and sure enough, there's a small hole starting in the elbow of my second oldest suit, and on the other two suits and my two sportcoats, the right elbows are getting worn down and shiny (even on the navy suit, which is practically new!) So either all Bank's products are shit, or — which, sadly, is probably more likely — I have been in my ignorance not taking proper care of them. This is both depressing, and has troubling implications for my finances.

Some days I sure wish I weren't so stupid.

This has been a pretty spectacularly shitty day.

( pointless, frustrated ranting you might as well skip )

I don't even wear T-shirts¹, and I'm pretty tempted by this.

¹I mean, I do, but they don't have pictures or text on them, they're plain white, and they stay under my real shirts.

I've finally gotten the pictures from Prague uploaded to Flickr.

pyrodon has been gone a week and a half now, visiting her folks in Indiana and helping with their longterm house construction project. She'll be getting back sometime in the first week of September, just in time to start school.

I tried to buy beet seeds today, but apparently you have to know at the very beginning of the season exactly what you'll be planting throughout the spring, summer and fall, because by midsummer nowhere has seeds anymore. But for dinner tonight I had a pork chop, and some of the chard (of which there is still a ridiculous amount, even after taking my folks the preponderance of it last weekend), sautéed in butter and a little crushed red pepper. Very tasty.

One of the first discussions I had with adaptively, back when we first met, was about Hellboy. In particular, I thought that Guillermo del Toro had done an admirable job of adapting plot and characters from a complex and subtle book, modulo the necessities of format and accessibility imposed by Hollywood, and she quite vehemently disagreed. However, having seen Hellboy II last night (and also having reread several of the books lately), I have to conclude that perhaps she was just foresighted.

When books (or comics, or whatever) get turned into movies, I don't get upset if they alter the plot, cut things out, rearrange timelines, etc., to make it fit a movie better; in the case of things like comics, I don't mind at all if they just make up new stories, or retell origins in a different way. I don't mind if they cut out some characters, or even if they turn some of the less central characters into a single composite. That's part of adaptation, that's fine. Yes, I disliked the Lord of the Rings movies, but emphatically not — frequent snide comments from my various interlocutors to the contrary — because Jackson failed to adhere precisely to every detail of Tolkien's story just as it was written, or because not all the dialog was verbatim from the books.

What gets me steamed about movie versions of books is when important characters do and say things in the movie that simply don't fit: that, as they're written in the book, they wouldn't do or say. Any book good enough to be worth making into a movie has well-defined characters with distinct and recognizable personas; when they act or speak in "out-of-character" ways it's jarring. Merry and Pippin aren't pure comic-relief buffoons; Saruman isn't an idiot; Denethor is subtly mad, not a raving lunatic; Hellboy isn't a dimwitted, attention-seeking thug; Abe Sapien isn't a squishier, more lovesick C-3PO, clueless in the ways of the people around him; Liz Sherman isn't a cardboard cut-out stereotype of The Emotional Woman; Johann Kraus isn't a fucking jerk.

In short, even though the visuals are very nice, don't see Hellboy II. It sucks. I'm really surprised and disappointed that Mignola cowrote the story for this piece of crap.