Author: DOuG pRATt

Declan McManus and Robert Zimmerman on Stage

Dylan and Costello in Worcester, MA

My buddy Dennis and I saw and heard Bob Dylan and Elvis Costello Tuesday night. “Live on stage!” as the ticket says. The seats weren’t cheap, but the second row never is.

Costello was in fine form for his 45-minute warm-up to Dylan, and his voice was in stunningly good shape. Dylan’s voice, sorry to say, wasn’t in such good shape. But still, he put on a great show, with an eclectic selection of songs, and an absolutely top-notch band.

Dylan has been bitten by the marketing bug, because the ticket came with this promo badge and a lanyard to wear it…

Dylan and Costello in Worcester, MA

…and also part of the package was — to my astonishment — a real, working, totally analog pocket watch in a leather pouch!

Dylan and Costello in Worcester, MA

Maxwell. Lois Maxwell.

Lois Maxwell, memorable as Miss Moneypenny, the secretary for M, James Bond’s boss, is dead at age 82. I’ve spliced together scenes with Lois from the first three Sean Connery movies — Dr. No, From Russia With Love, and Goldfinger. In the next post I’ll feature Lois in the last three Connery movies, which are in a different aspect ratio.
[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/OCT07/LoisMaxwell1.flv 448 270]

Correction: Maxwell was 80. The radio report I heard while writing this post gave her age as 82.

Hot Links Stink

I’m being hotlinked. Argh. I knew it would happen eventually, and for still pictures I don’t care. But videos are another matter.

Hotlinking is when a Webmaster uses a picture or video from another site, by referring to its absolute address, rather than taking it by downloading and putting it on their own server. It’s bandwidth theft, and bandwidth used to be so precious that a hotlink to a lowly JPG was annoying. Nowadays, it’s video that’s a concern.

Some FLV files I posted have been hotlinked for streaming video. The owner of the site is using Dreamhost, the same service that hosts Mark Evanier’s sites, so it isn’t as if this guy is short on storage capacity or bandwidth.

Up to now I haven’t tried to block hotlinking, because I assumed people would download the files. That’s now changed. I’ve edited the .htaccess file for the site with some code that should greatly cut down on the potential hotlinking of FLV files. It won’t prevent it entirely, and I’m not about to say under what circumstances it doesn’t block. With a little more tweaking I should be able to tighten the screws some more.

Timmy’s in the Well: The Jon Provost Story

Timmy's In The Well, by Jon Provost

Unless you subscribe to the RSS feed for this blog’s comments, you may not have noticed a follow-up to my “Timmy In The Well” post.

Hi,

I thought you might like this video. You are correct that Jon Provost (Timmy) was never in the well. The joke became so well known that he has named his new book “Timmy’s in the Well”. The book will be out mid-November.

http://www.brightcove.tv/title.jsp?title=894543076

Thx,
Bonnie Vent
Genesis Creations Entertainment
www.genesiscreations.biz

The video is from The O’Reilly Factor, but despite Bill O’Reilly I can recommend watching the segment, because Jon is interesting. Something that I didn’t know, and in fact joked about in my previous post, is that Lassie really did have a stunt double! I’ll embed the video here.

Jon’s Web site is here. The book can be ordered here from Amazon.com.

I hope copies of the book will be available in time for Provost’s appearance in West Springfield, MA on November 2-4, because I’m hoping to see him there to say hi. I’d like to give Jon the Give-a-Show slide that I scanned and posted, now that it’s confirmed he never fell into a well, playing Timmy Martin on Lassie.