Lee.org

This was originally a “page” on my blog that I updated from time to time. But I like using the chronological format of a blog better now. Be sure to check out the Reading, Watching, Listening category of this blog!

––––––––––––––––—

1-18-12: I know I haven’t updated this list in a long time. But I just found a show worthy of adding. Just this moment in fact. I just finished watching season 3, episode 12, of Breaking Bad, titled “Half Measure”. (don’t skip to it; you’ve got to watch from the beginning) The show is a tight and twisted moral drama. The moment when Walt hears about the executed kid and knows exactly what is happening hit me like a freight train. A moment of certainty of morality and action like that is rare and powerful.

11-21-08: Stargate Atlantis (I’ve seen most episodes so far. It’ll be sad when the show ends at the end of this season), Heros 1st and 2nd season makes good television.

6-18-06 Justice League Unlimited, 24, Nip/Tuck.

1-29-06 update: Since I’ve moved to California, I haven’t had a television set. That hasn’t stopped me from watching the television programs I enjoy. TV is starting to go through the same upheaval that music has been experiencing for the last 10 years from peer-to-peer file sharing revolution.

I use TorrentSpy, Azureus  and its RSSFeed Scanner plugin to get just about all the broadcast programming I want.

Since I’ve been busy living the Vida Cali, I watch less TV.. but here’s my list of favorites:
– The Colbert Report
– The Daily Show
– Scrubs
– 24
– Nip/Tuck
– Mythbusters
– Malcolm in the Middle

I was happy to be able to catch up on
– Dead Like Me
– Greatest American Hero – The show is much worse than I remembered :-( But I’m glad I got to see it. Especially the pilot episode. (which still sucked, but I’m still glad I saw the “creation story”)

The only shows I haven’t been able to catch are
60 minutes – I can’t find a torrent for it on Torrentspy :-(
Bullshit – I can’t find a tor…. wait. I just found a torrent with season 1-3. [Click] I should have it in a week.

—-
Recently, the cable TV cartel has been fighting legislation requiring that they unbundle their programming. It’s just been unbundled for them. Clearly, a new business model for television must emerge.

3-1-02 update: Tivo hasn’t changed the way I watch television, it has fundamentally changed what television is. Dare I use the phrase “paradigm shift”? I dare.

2-12-02: I got Netflix for xmas. I just started up my subscription. I don’t know how much I’ll use it between Tivo, school and work.

Current Favorite shows:

Joe Millionaire– I’m completely hooked. It’s just so real. I can so project myself into Evan’s shoes. It’s wonderful watching and learning about human psychology with this fishbowl. And I am so angry that Evan got rid of Melissa! How can he hope to live happily ever after with either Zora or Sara?!?!

Rough Science– Still. This show is so much fun and so stimulating!

Nova: Hitler’s Lost Sub – It brought the history of this sub to the present. Three divers lost their lives in the late 1990’s during a personal quest to find out the history of this sub. The sub sank off the coast of NJ in 1942. It was a very intense program.

The Veteran’s Project – Since my Dad was here and he loves shows about WWII, we watched a lot of those shows. The format of this show is very simple. A veteran narrates a 1/2 hour slide show of his war experience. Most of the photos and video clips are of him, his buddies, or his group. The show is only on bi-weekly, 8-8:30am Sunday mornings on the History Channel.

11-14-02: Favorite TV programs: Rough Science, MST3K

6-28-02: More or less in order, here are the shows that I have in my Tivo’s Season Pass Manager:

Movie & Darkstar – TJIC recommended. Someday I hope it comes around on the tube
Babylon 5 & Strife – The very last episode I need to complete my set!
The Prisoner – After seeing about 10 episodes now, I can see the shows lacked consistently good writing. But some episodes, like “Many Happy Returns” blew my mind.
Angel – Shara is a bigger fan than I, but I don’t miss many episodes
Evolution – An excellent educational mini-series
Buffy the Vampire Slayer   – Shara is a bigger fan than I, but I don’t miss many episodes
Marx, Groucho – I hope I hope I hope “You Bet Your Life” comes around again!
Chaplin, Charlie
Penn & Teller’s Magic and Mystery Tour – I’ve been a fan of theirs for years. Smart guys. Real.
Enterprise – Ick. How did this schlock get here? Shara?
60 Minutes – I Tivo the boring articles, but there aren’t many
Jackass – I’m magnetically drawn to this! It’s far more consensual than America’s Funniest Ball-Busters
Scientific American Frontiers – Yup
Mystery Science Theater 3000 – It’s more fun watching and heckling along with friends. But I don’t have any to watch it with now :-(
Just Shoot Me – When I get around to watching sitcoms, which isn’t too often, this is one I like
60 Minutes II –
BattleBots – Carnage without the meat.
Scrubs – I really like this show a lot. The Scrubs world spins off to the left while the solid ideas hold it right in place. My kind of show.
Nova – Sometimes great topics, sometimes fluff.
Ebert & Roper – Usually pretty good movie reviews. I’m a little partial to Ebert
Sex2K – Infoporn ahhh
Modern Marvels – A good history show
Crank Yankers – I dunno if I’ll keep this on the list. It’s kinda funny….
Harrison Ford – More Shara’s pick than mine
Humphry Bogart – More Shara’s pick than mine
Kenneth Branagh – More Shara’s pick than mine
Insomniac with Dave Atell – Good Everyman entertainment
Friends –
Inside the Actors Studio – sometimes very insightful guests speak
Southpark – Southpark is always insightful
Star Trek: Voyager – slightly less offensive than Enterprise. Good “fall asleep fast” TV
Travel Sick – I dunno. The show has possibilities but I don’t like the omniscient narrator forcing our hapless hero to do gruesome tasks.
Lexx – The pinnacle of stupid sci-fi. I eat it up!
The Practice – I saw an episode or two and I’m trying to get interested in it
The Daily Show – This is honestly really good news! I get more news from these guys than most other sources!

I give Thumbs Up to a bunch of shows that I’m slightly interested in watching:

EGG: The Arts Show –
The Man Show – Unrepentant, unabashed
Ripley’s Believe it or Not –
Mad TV –
Sportsnight –
The Simpsons – Society’s mirror. I’m disappointed when they do random wacky things instead of insightful wacky things. But I guess they have a lot of shows to fill.
America’s Funniest Home Videos –
Iron Chef – Oh, the spectacle of it all!
Victory Garden – I like the old host better. And I like Norm better than Bob Villa
The Osbournes – OK, so I watched a few. It’s only because my sister forced me to! Really!
Junkyard Wars –

Phew! That’s a long list!

Babylon 5 – I watched it from the second season til the end. I appreciate it because it has so very few plot holes, has a contiguous universe, and nice storyline. One of my few concessions to obsession in my life is that I taped (and still have) -every- episode. Of course, I don’t do anything 1/2 way so I got an SVHS tape player for the task. So now I have 120 hours of B5 on 60 tapes… Now what do I do with them?

Xena: Warrior Princess – She can beat me up anytime
You Bet Your Life – with Groucho Marx. He was an absolute genius! Have you ever gotten to watch this show? He Ernie Kovacks – another genius, and a Hungarian to boot!
Mystery Science Theater 3000– Heckling a bad film is one of the purest joys there is in the world. These guys have raised it to a high art!
The Prisoner has a certain allure
Mr. Wizard. I watched Mr. Wizard a whole heck of a lot from middle school all the way through college.
Universe with Walter Cronkite. I looked back for this one and was really surprised to realize that it just ran for two summers. It really had an effect on me. Walter rocks.

Music videos

• Sledgehammer- Peter Gabriel
• Take on Me- a-ha   That’s not to say that I’m an a-ha fan, but there is this one moment of… oh heck, if you’ve seen the video, I’m sure you know what I’m talking about.

I saw Bellflower tonight with Laurie at The Roxie. Three times, it was not what I expected.

The quotes I read in the trailer are 100% true:

“I laughed, I gasped. I felth touched by the warmth. I marveled at how real it all seemed and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it” – Film.com

“Hallucinatory. Bellflower practically jumps off the screen.” – Rolling Stone

“A weird mix of John Hughes and Mad Max. One of the most trong and stylish critiques of the idiocy and confusion in young manhood since Fight Club” – MSN

“Bellflower is an explosive, outrageous, and dynamic first film that lives way outside the margins of what we call indie film today” – Hammer to Nail

“It is fucking intense. (director) Glodell threw me under the tires and I came out with grit and true catharsis.” – Me

See this film. I could try to warn you that it isn’t what you expect, but it wouldn’t do any good. Your mouth will still lie agape as mine was.

I have literally have worn that beard.

I’ve been rewatching the miniseries Frontier House from PBS. Man, it’s incredible!

This show came out at the beginning of the Reality TV craze in 2001, but this is real reality, which is much more powerful than any made-up game show beauty pageant popularity contest. The program answers the question, “What was life really like for Montana Homesteaders in 1883”. Answer: It was hard, really hard, dangerous, scary, trying, rough, frustrating, beautiful and sometimes immensely rewarding. And we get to see it all first-hand! This is what “reality TV” exists for.

Frontier House is immensely engaging, revealing of so many facets of life, affirming, and true. I’m only half-way through the series but I can’t recommend it highly enough. Rent it on Netflix or ask for it at your video store. If you live near me, let’s watch it together!

Here’s the start of the show on Youtube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfUgTWJ4ngE

Saw Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows part 2 last night. Completely awesome. See/read what came before or you won’t get it. I think seeing it in “Digital Projection” at the Daly City Century 20 was good, the cinematic effects were just so…. real. 2 weeks after opening, the theater was full, and everyone in the audience was over 30. Curious.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – 3 hours of kinda bland character study with 1 neat twist. Meh.

Grandma’s Boy – juvenile, funny male humor. I liked it.

40 Year old Virgin – I was expecting juvenile, funny male humor. There was a bit of that, but it was much better than that. Very enjoyable :-).

UHF – Ouch. Weird Al has learned a LOT about entertaining people after this film

Anvil! The Story of Anvil – Holy crap, these guys love music. An honest documentary about the real life Spinal Tap.

Mega Shark Versus Giant Octopus – there are 60 seconds of awesome and 2 hours of them poking you in the eyes with a stick. Watch the awesome here.

Eddie Izzard: Definite Article – stand up show. He completely rocks. You should watch more stand-up. Seriously. Funny.

The Passion of Joan of Arc – I always thought I was missing out on something awesome by not seeing this 1928 “classic”. I watched most of it and completely couldn’t get through it. I totally don’t get why this is a classic.

City of Angels – Started pretty good, went way downhill. :-(

Demetri Martin. Person. – Funny stand up is always funny and puts me in a good mood. I like funny standup.

The Gates – the story of Christo and Jeanne-Claude installing The Gates in New York City. Good stuff. It’s amazing how much perseverance it took them to get this piece to happen. Pretty awesome. But then I like big awesome art.

Iron Man 2 – Wee!

High Fidelity – Certainly classic John Cusack.

Idiocracy – After all the hype some friends gave it, I though it was going to be as awesome as Zoolander (wow, that is an awesome movie… just earlier this week a friend said offhandedly “Oh, the files are in the computer!” and I laughed so hard). It isn’t. It has it’s moments, but only a few.

The Princess Bride – watched again at a house party with friends, brought my holocaust cloak :-). This is still a near perfect movie.

The Sopranos – I’m most of the way though the last season. What a powerful show.

I made it a triple-feature in Daly City tonight. Limitless, The Adjustment Bureau, and Hall Pass. 3 fine Hollywood films.

I just got an Android phone, AT&T Samsung Captivate SGH-i897.

What are the essentials for this phone? Here’s what I’ve got so far to change the phone from PITA to awesome

Google Voice – ($free) to avoid the ancient “You have 2 new messages. To listen to your messages, press 1” and replace it with visual voicemail on my phone and computer. Installing it was ridiculously easy after spending an hour hunting on the forums. I went to my (pre-existing) google voice account online and clicked Settings | Voice Settings | Activate Voicemail next to the description of my phone. I typed a few characters into my phone to enable forwarding and Tada!

Touch Calendar Free – ($free) so I can look at my entire calendar at a glance. I can’t navigate around it smoothly but it’s better than the default calendar

RealCalc – ($free) stupid Samsung put the buttons on their calculator in the wrong places! It’s stupid! RealCalc has the buttons in the right places and a lot of bells and whistles that don’t get too in the way

Hi-Q MP3 Recorder – ($3.00) the built in voice recorder sounds like crap and has a mediocre interface. This one is a lot better.

Screen Filter – ($free) The phone is blindingly bright at night. Even at the lowest brightness, it is an excellent flashlight. It is dangerously bright when trying to use the GPS in the car. Screen filter works well to put some kind of “software filter” in front of the screen. Sometimes it turns itself off but it mostly works great.

No fix yet – The AT&T Samsung Captivate (SGH-i897) has 4 buttons at the bottom of the screen. Actually they are “soft” buttons with no tactile feedback. Well, after 3 seconds of inactivity, they turn off, making it impossible to find the buttons in the dark! I don’t have a fix for this yet. I heard of an app called something like “Keep the Lights On” or some such but I lost the reference to it and I have to root my phone to install it. PITA.

I’m still not ready to switch to Gmail as my primary email but it’s working well enough. I’m not switching because: 1- last week the gmail at the office was running slow a while due to Google’s fault. 2- Also last week Google switched our office’s Google Docs interface to something newer and betterer. I wish they had asked/told us before doing that!! I don’t care how new and exciting the new whatchamacallit is, not mentioning that things will be changing freaks me out. It reminds me of the absolute power they have over my email.

NoLed – ($free) when you miss a call, there is no blinking light on the phone telling you that you missed it. Uncool. NoLed fixes that. It might draw too much battery, the jury is still out.

3G Watchdog – ($free) It is difficult… impossible to tell what apps are doing on the phone. They could be downloading porn, burning up your monthly data quota. This should tell me if that happens. The ethos of the platform is pretty much that programs can run in the background whenever they want. That kinda freaks me out.

Battery Graph – ($free) I’m a program to keep track of my battery usage because I haven’t really figured out what drains the battery the most. Some users see 5 hours of battery life, some 30. I really really want to have 30 and not have to think about it.

Installing programs is nerve-wracking because so many apps want access to my data. Does Facebook need access to my Contacts list? If I give that cute new game the power to read and write to the SD card, will it be able to steal data and send it to Russian spammers? The “community” is no help because as of yet, I haven’t come across any group that has recognized malware; there is no procedure for dealing with malware!

The places to look for help appear to be (in decreasing order of usefulness)
http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/
http://androidforums.com/
http://www.xda-developers.com/
http://www.appbrain.com/
http://www.androidcentral.com/
http://www.androlib.com/ ??
http://www.samsung.com/us/support/owners/product/SGH-I897ZKAATT

So, dear reader, what am I missing? Comments welcome.

On these long flights for work I get to see a lot of movies. Here’s the tiny reviews of my latest flight.

She’s Out of my League – sweet, funny, and hopeful! (if just a little crass… But then that’s part of it)

Prince of Persia: the sands of time: really cool and eyepopping action

The A-team: only saw 20 minutes, a little too “noisy” for watching on a plane, shaky-cam, noisy soundtrack

500 days of summer: homey, real, lyrical like a ballad, don’t get the wrong idea but I found it a little disturbing how honest it was.

I saw Avatar in 3D at the Metreon with Stacy. It’s pretty, awesome, and pretty awesome.

Totally beautiful,  sumptuous  visuals,  gorgeous realization of an alternate world. And the aliens are totally hot!

I should write more about it but I’m short on time. So here’s bullet points:

the first 1/2 of the movie hurt my eyes with the 3D, maybe they were pushing objects forward of the screen with the effects instead of behind the screen? The 2nd half had less issue with this. Coraline was crisper in 3d, but that was at the Alameda theater and done with real claymation.

CGI or costumes?! Wow, it’s really hard to tell. Must have been both.

They got the helicopter sounds wrong! The most common flying machine in the movie is this totally awesome looking “scorpion gunship”.  Each of the 2 “wings” has 2 co-axial counter-rotating 3 bladed propellers in a ducted fan. So it would sound a lot like the “woooooo” of a jet engine. Maybe with a bit of resonance, like “wooowooowooowooo”  But the sound effect they used is that of a regular  2 bladed helicopter, going “Tuh Tuh Tuh Tuh”. Every time I heard the sound (which was a lot toward the end with all the crashing and smashing of those machines!) I cringed :-(

Ooo, pretty!

I can imagine it being worth seeing it in IMAX. But there were no good showtimes at the Metreon :-(

Yup, the 3D movie experience has saved modern cinema from being outmoded by large screen televisions in peoples’ homes.

Exploring the world reminded me of this fantasy book I read that had lots of word-play with real magical hangman trees and steaming bread trees… Argh, I don’t recall the name!
Update 3-14-10: Xanth!

I was introduced to this absolute gem at Noisebridge 5 Minutes of Fame last night. A fantastic 8 minute piece showing a taste of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton with a decidedly novel approach. And the story is the thing.

local version:

Play All is Love – Curt Smith.mp3

(locally archived) (Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License) (this track from Amazon.com, at no cost)

Update 3-7-10: It is now $0.89 on Amazon. I have “purchased” it anyway because, wow, this track keeps resonating in me! If you love this track, buy it.

I wrote on Curt Smith’s website (of Tears for Fears fame)

Curt, Thank you so very much for this song.

I found All is Love when browsing around for for Zoë Keating’s music. I’ve played it 50 times in the last week on your website. It hits me at a very deep level and I don’t know why. Every time the song ends, I get this slow lost feeling, as if I had been on my way to somewhere beautiful and then, despite trying to keep it in my memory, I slowly forget how to get there. So I find the page and hit play again. That’s all I can do. I don’t know what you’ve stirred in me but it’s worthwhile to explore.

Thank you for the message in this song. I look forward to the album release.

Curt writes about the song

Click here to listen to “All Is Love (featuring Zoë Keating),” Curt’s first new solo material in nearly two years. It will be released on January 24. 2010.

Smith is releasing “All is Love” via his KOOK Media label as a standalone single, which will be available in digital format from AmazonMP3, iTunes, CD Baby, thesixtyone and other online retailers.

Smith met guest artist Zoë Keating online. “I was looking for a cellist to play on the track and heard about Zoë through Twitter. I watched a few of her performances on YouTube and thought she was fantastic and innovative.” He sent her the in-progress tracks, and a month or so later she hand-delivered her cello parts to a Tears For Fears concert outside of San Francisco. The two will perform in concert, as a double bill, on March 23 at renowned L.A. venue Largo at The Coronet.

“All Is Love,” began life as a demo track for a television pilot theme song (the original version, called “Halfway Home,” streams on Smith’s website). While the pilot didn’t get picked up, Smith liked the musical idea he’d begun, and reworked it with longtime collaborator Charlton Pettus. In a departure from his usual lyrical themes of longing and loss, All Is Love’s anthemic chorus (“When every mother’s loving every son / When all is love, there’ll be love for everyone”) looks forward with hope to a time of peace and calm. “I was inspired by the 2008 U.S.presidential election” says Smith “The verses are about the negativity of all the advertising, whilst the chorus invokes the inspiration I felt about positive change.”

Like Smith’s previous solo effort “Halfway, pleased,” he’s releasing “All Is Love” under a Creative Commons license. The license Smith uses allows others to freely share, perform, and remix his work,so long as the uses are non-commercial, Smith is credited, and any derivative works carry the same license. “I’m a big fan of Creative Commons,” Smith says.”It’s a no-brainer as far as I’m concerned. It affords you the opportunity to set the ground rules of how people can use your music upfront.”

Background vocalists on “All Is Love” include singer-songwriters Michael Wainwright (who opened for Tears for Fears on its 2009 U.S. tour) and Jason Joseph, as well as Pettus’ daughter Georgica. Charlton Pettus and Smith share writing and production credits.

Smith plans to play several Los Angeles-area solo gigs in 2010, working around a busy schedule of Tears for Fears concert tours taking place in Australia, New Zealand, southeast Asia and the U.S. EastCoast. He’ll continue to release new tracks as he completes them, with the possibility of compiling them into an album when he’s got enough material.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Lyrics to “all is love (featuring zoë keating)”

Written by Curt Smith and Charlton Pettus

Look what you’ve done
You’ve blown it all
On vanity and sympathy
See how you run
A pot of gold
And a bleeding heart to go with it

Chorus:
When all is love
And the hurt is gone
We’ll all reach out
To touch someone
When every mother’s
Loving every son
When all is love
There’ll be love for everyone

Look what you’ve lost
Innocence and faith
And save yourself at any cost
Here’s what you’ll find
When the bottom drops out

Chorus

Close your eyes and it’s gone
Don’t look down till it’s over
Hold on tight, everyone
We’re halfway home

Chorus (repeats)

When all is love
When all is love
There’ll be love for everyone
When all is love
When all is love
There’ll be love

Look what you’ve done