Author: DOuG pRATt

Der Bingle in Davis Dorm

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.

Being An Elf to Myself

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.

Steampunk Mickey

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.

https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/steamboat_willie.pdf

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.

Be Careful What You Lick or Click

Here is an example of where AI software could be of some direct benefit, but it has yet to be applied. At least I hope not, otherwise we’re already in big AI trouble.

I’ve been looking for something Disney-related on YouTube, and this ad appeared.

Watch the Barbie movie… for free?? Gosh, it must be a Christmas promotion or something! It can’t be a scam, can it? I mean, Google allowed it on YouTube, right? But, just in case, I’d better check the official Barbie movie site.

Hmmm… there’s nothing there at all about watching the movie for free. So where is that YouTube ad coming from?

BULGARIA?? RUN AWAY………… !!!

Fireplace Burns

This photo from Christmas, 1939 was taken in the living room of George Burns and Gracie Allen, with their adopted children, Ronnie and Sandra.

That is the second photo of the Burns living room I have seen. The first was the one my mother had. It was taken in late 40’s or early 50’s.

Mom’s dear lifelong friend Ted, who was gay, was George and Gracie’s personal secretary for almost 20 years. After Gracie died in 1964, George financed Ted’s successful interior decorating business.

In 1996, when my parents were preparing to retire in Arizona, Ted, who was retired in Tucson, took my mother house shopping. One of her visits had to be postponed because George Burns had died, and Ted was in charge of the memorial service, as well as some matters of the estate. After my father died, the Sun City West, AZ house I sold in 2018 was the one that Ted helped my mother find.

Rodney Theodore “Ted” Montague on the left, with a boyfriend

Facebook AFU

Weirdest damn problem. Facebook is working on my Verizon phone over Verizon FiOS Wi-Fi, but Facebook isn’t working from any browser on three different PC’s, connected over the same router. Extremely strange, and it isn’t a browser vs. app issue, because Facebook’s Windows app is likewise blank. And it isn’t a DNS problem.

C:\Windows\System32>nslookup facebook.com
Server: Fios_Quantum_Gateway.fios-router.home
Address: 192.168.1.1

Non-authoritative answer:
Name: facebook.com
Addresses: 2a03:2880:f172:81:face:b00c:0:25de
157.240.245.35

Doesn’t appear to be a routing problem either.

C:\Windows\System32>tracert facebook.com

Tracing route to facebook.com [157.240.245.35]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

  1     6 ms     5 ms     6 ms  Fios_Quantum_Gateway.fios-router.home [192.168.1.1]
  2     8 ms     7 ms    18 ms  lo0-100.bstnma-vfttp-354.verizon-gni.net [96.237.232.1]
  3    13 ms    57 ms    16 ms  b3354.bstnma-lcr-22.verizon-gni.net [100.41.13.102]
  4     *        *        *     Request timed out.
  5    15 ms    17 ms     9 ms  65.208.14.250
  6    13 ms    16 ms    15 ms  po101.psw02.bos5.tfbnw.net [129.134.32.39]
  7    10 ms    16 ms    15 ms  173.252.67.53
  8    39 ms    17 ms    18 ms  edge-star-mini-shv-01-bos5.facebook.com [157.240.245.35]

Trace complete.

The outage is widespread, apparently on the east coast, and it’s also on MacOS. Facebook on Google Chrome on my phone is also a no-go. I never received a code for 2-factor authentication. It’s as if Facebook is now restricted to their phone apps.

Update: The service is back. All I did was refresh the Facebook page for the umpteenth time. This time it came up. Whatever was wrong was totally on Facebook’s end.