We’ve had the second storm of the season that, in the past, would have been a blizzard. Instead, it’s 60 degrees with high wind and heavy rain.
The power went out this morning and the utility doesn’t have an estimate when it will be restored. I fired up the portable generator and recharged my phone, which is now running as a Wi-Fi hotspot for the new laptop PC.
Yes, the garage floor needs to be resurfaced. It’s on the list.
On the MOVIES! channel, now back on Boston OTA TV, I was intrigued when catching a bit of High Time, from 1960. In this Blake Edwards farce Bing Crosby, showing his age, starts college 30 years too late. Rodney Dangerfield would do the same thing in the 1986 remake.
Just knowing that Tuesday Weld and Yvonne Craig are in High Time was enough to pull me in, but seeing Bing in drag made it a must-see. Thanks to some fan’s hard work, it’s available in HD CinemaScope splendor on YouTube.
I’ve just started watching it, with the opening 20th Century Fox fanfare that will forever be associated with Star Wars. I had to laugh when Bing was assigned to Davis Dorm, because that’s where Denro and I met at Westfield State.
I’m only two degrees of separation away from Blake Edwards. I’ll explain later.
This is my new Lenovo laptop PC, but with a 14″ screen. Not being an Apple product it can’t be cool, but Lenovo tries.
Buying it required me to abandon my “never spend more than $300 on a laptop” rule. But it was a good deal for a 14-inch laptop with a partial aluminum case, an Intel i7 CPU and 16 GB memory, with a touch screen and lighted keyboard. USB-C charging was something else I wanted, which HP doesn’t have yet. The 2-in-1 feature, turning it into a tablet, wasn’t of special interest.
I was surprised to see that its dimensions, except for thickness, are almost identical to the old HP ProBook 11 G2 with its 11.6-inch screen. The ProBook has something that, along with optical drives, is extinct in laptop computers. It has a VGA connector. This makes it perfect for the 4:3 projector that I sometimes have set up in the living room. It’s a 2005 model purchased as new-old stock for $65, plus $10 shipping.
Viewsonic PJ656 XGA projector on a 60″ 4:3 screen
The Lenovo’s 2200×1400 IPS LCD screen and out-of-the-box color accuracy are exceptionally good. The sound of the speakers is impressive for a laptop, but audio is directed to the porch’s 10-year-old Sony Bluetooth speaker. It was an early product supporting Qualcomm’s proprietary Bluetooth codec, aptX.
Not too many changes were needed in Windows 11 to make it behave the way I want. Something about Windows 11 I don’t like is that support for aptX, which is found natively in Windows 10, has apparently been dropped.
As I said, I was looking for something Disney-related on YouTube. I didn’t find it, because Disney’s official online copy of “Steamboat Willie” not only looks terrible, it’s the censored version.
Here is a complete, uncensored copy, in much better quality. It appears to have been taken from the “Mickey Mouse in Black and White” DVD.
Mickey enjoys piloting the boat, but he isn’t the captain and he’s put to work. Instead, he sneaks his girlfriend on board and proceeds to goof off, not doing his job while having fun torturing animals. After the end of the cartoon Mickey probably made Minnie peel the potatoes.
The great Ub Iwerks was the lead animator, even the only animator, on the earliest Mickey cartoons. It’s safe to assume that Ub also designed the original Mickey. This PDF about “Steamboat Willie” at the Library of Congress was written by the late Dave Smith, who was Disney’s first archivist.
After years of Congress bending to Disney’s demands to extend the “Steamboat Willie” copyright, as of January 1 it will finally be in the Public Domain.
