I’m watching Lawrence of Arabia on TCM. One of the most memorable movie experiences of my life was seeing the 1989 reissue in a downtown Boston theater.
http://youtu.be/RQA_ldX0VI0
What made it so memorable, besides the fact it’s a great movie, was that only days before I had returned from Arabia myself. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
I spent a month there on business, and it was a very busy, unusual month. I turned down an invitation to see a public beheading, from an American who had been working there for ten years. He told me the single most important issue confronting the Kingdom, and in turn America, over the next 20 years would be the Islamic Revolution that had begun ten years before in Iran. He wasn’t wrong.
I started using WordPress in September, 2006 with the then-current version, 2.0.3. A bit over a year ago I was curious about the differences between WordPress and the previous leading blogging software for self-hosted sites, Movable Type. (Mark Evanier uses an outdated version of Movable Type.) I found this item by a blogger named Derek K. Miller. I was particularly interested in Miller’s discussion of a WordPress plugin that generates static pages, instead of using a WordPress caching plugin as a way to speed up sites on shared hosting services. (I later decided to cache.)
Miller was a writer worth reading, so I checked out some of his other posts. He was a musician, husband, and father, living in Vancouver. Reading Derek K. Miller’s posts, it quickly became apparent that he was a very sick man, and he was being treated for advanced colon cancer.
Derek, you have a big and loyal following — fellow musicians, fellow Vancouver residents, and others whose lives are affected in one way or another by cancer. Because of that I didn’t link to your blog, and I didn’t contact you, but for the past year I’ve been following penmachine.com. I am saddened to learn that you died two days ago.
At work today there’s a CPR training class. It filled before I could sign up, but that’s OK, because I already know all about CPR from watching movies. You clasp your hands together, slam them into the chest of the victim over and over, while yelling, “DON’T YOU DIE ON ME, DAMMIT!” That usually works, and if it doesn’t you throw your head back and scream, “NOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!”
Follow-up: Denro says…
SUCCESSFUL CPR: You keep saying “COME ON, COME ON, BREATHE, DAMN YOU!”, then the person coughs a few times, shakes their head and gets up. Then you say “You really scared me back there.” The person says, “Thanks, I owe you one. Now, let’s get those dirty devils!”
Speaking of the Wayback Machine, here are some thumbnail views of the site’s homepage, going back to before it was a blog, when I was laboring with Front Page and gave up after a dozen painfully static pages. Click to enlarge, of course.
Another Marathon Monday, with me merely a spectator. I’ve done Boston seven times, and maybe I have one more in me, but it’s too early to say. It’s been a long, slow road back from the injuries I’ve had, but I’m getting there.
The online tracking system was working until a few minutes ago, but the service has crashed.
Server Error
The server encountered an internal error and was unable to complete your request.
Application server is busy. Either there are too many concurrent requests or the server still is starting up.
I dropped off some friends at the Worcester, Massachusetts airport today, and on the way back home I stopped at Paul Howley’s super-duper store, That’s Entertainment, to spend some of my unexpectedly big tax refund. I was very pleased to see LP copies of Bob Dylan: In Concert, Brandeis University, 1963, so I bought one of those. I was equally inspired when I spotted The Beatles Box of Vision, an item I’ve been tempted to get many times, but had never managed to pull the trigger until today.
Both of my new acquisitions exceeded my expectations, which were high to start with. Dylan’s concert was recorded well, especially considering when it was done, and the LP sounds great. This is Bob Dylan at the height of his early folk period, with his politics freshly awakened by his passionate girlfriend, Suze Rotolo.
Although the Beatles Box of Vision came out with the remastered CD’s in 2009, my idea was to use it to dress up the original CD’s released nearly 25 years ago. Well, that’s what I did, and I’m very pleased with the results. The only problem is, I’m missing a couple of the discs, so now I’ll have to get those or forever be bugged by the empty slots in the sleeves.
One of the more interesting Beatles reissues is Yellow Submarine Songtrack, which is in the picture. This must-have CD offers a generous sampling of tracks that weren’t only remastered, they were remixed. In terms of sheer sound quality, they’re noticeably superior to the 2009 remastered stereo master tapes, and they’re proof that the Beatles catalog will need yet one more release.
