Category: All Posts

Hitching Post

Hitch

Mark Evanier isn’t a big fan of Alfred Hitchcock. But, then, he doesn’t like cole slaw either. Hitchcock is my favorite director, at least up to Psycho, but Evanier considers even that movie a disappointment.

Hitchcock can, I suppose, be categorized as a genre director of thrillers; but that would be the same as saying John Ford was a genre director of westerns, or Frank Capra specialized in screwball comedies.

NPR has a feature on a new book about the music in Hitchcock’s movies. Click here to hear. The audio player below has Bernard Herrmann conducting a brilliant arrangement of his music for Psycho, 14 minutes long, that I transferred from an old LP.

[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/FEB07/Psycho.mp3]

Skeletons in the Closet

The recent announcement of the eternally embracing skeleton couple brought to mind the 1929 Disney cartoon, “The Skeleton Dance”. But I’d better not post it, because Disney is notoriously intolerant. So I’ll do the next best thing.

“The Skeleton Dance” was animated by Mickey Mouse co-creator Ub Iwerks, who later briefly had his own cartoon studio. Iwerks created Flip the Frog, and while Flip was a forgettable character some of his cartoons are worth watching. “Spooks” from 1932 is one of them.

Now With MORE Storage!

After five months of blogging, and being generous with video, I’ve managed to use up 3.25 gigabytes out of a 50 GB quota. That’s 6.5%. Oh, no! I’m going to run out! Must get more! (That’s a joke for my wife.) But now I do have more. The Web-hosting service has increased the quota to 200 GB!

Obviously, at this rate I can keep going essentially forever. So I’ll increase the rate. The videos are encoded in Adobe Flash to stream at 512 Kb (that’s bits, not bytes) per second. The free Flash video (FLV) encoder I use works well, and I’m utterly reliant upon it, so I sent the programmer some money via PayPal. But the quality for a given bit rate isn’t as good as Windows Media Video 9 (WMV), or Flash 8.

There’s no way I’m going back to WMV9, because it isn’t cross-platform compatible and it doesn’t support a preview still frame. The problem with FLV8 is that it must be purchased from Adobe and it’s very expensive.

So what I’ll do to improve video quality is take advantage of all this storage capacity I have at no additional cost. I’m kicking up the bit rate for the videos by 50% or more. This will mean longer download times at your end. If you have trouble with sputtering-and-buffering playback, let me know.

Kirby: King of Comics

[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/FEB07/jackkirby.flv 400 300]

Producer/writer Mark Evanier has announced the release of his upcoming book Kirby: King of Comics, a biography of comic book artist Jack Kirby. Jack created or co-created the X-Men, the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Captain America, and many other characters. The book should be out before the end of the year.

More good news is that Evanier will once again be writing, producing and voice directing a series of Garfield the Cat cartoons. And he’s losing lots of weight, thanks to successful gastric bypass surgery. The video above about Jack Kirby shows Evanier before the surgery. With so much going on in his life, Mark had a lot to lose by not losing!

Eternal Embrace

skeleton couple

The photos of the eternally embracing skeleton couple are surprisingly touching. But Valentine’s Day is next week. I’m not cynical enough to suggest the skeletons are a hoax, but perhaps the announcement of their discovery was delayed a bit… ?

Zillow – Your Edge in Real Estate

Zillow Chart

Zillow was started by the ex-Microsoft guys who started Expedia, which is now part of Barry Diller’s empire. I occasionally use Zillow to check on the value of our house.

I’ve cropped out the numbers, but the turquoise line is the median price of homes in my town, the blue line is our house, and the red line is for the county. See how our house started to fall below the median right before we moved there? Good timing, although I admit it was purely luck. We’re in a good town to be below the median. The $ indicates when we bought the place.

A year or so ago property values started to drop, as they did in most places. We’re back down to where we were three years ago, and now I see we’ve dropped below the median for the county for the first time. Well, we’re not moving, so I’m not going to worry about it!

I don’t know if Zillow is truly reflective of property values, but it’s useful for tracking trends, as it does in the chart above. One thing I wonder, however, is if Zillow will do to real estate what the Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide once did to back issues of comic books, and start to lead the market rather than follow it. Later, eBay came along, greatly diminishing the utility of an annual price guide. Old comics flooded the market and prices for certain issues collapsed, while the market for one-of-a-kind original art skyrocketed.