Wake up and move!

I’m not terribly big on Broadway shows, but there are two musicals that stand out as favorites. The older I get, the more I appreciate Robert Preston’s thoroughly winning performance in Meredith Willson’s The Music Man. Like Rex Harrison in my other favorite musical, My Fair Lady, Preston wasn’t a singer, but what he brought to the stage has, in my admittedly limited exposure, never been equaled.

One of my earliest blog posts was of Preston singing that Baby Boomer gym class favorite, Chicken Fat. I have Carol’s permission to make this song the alarm clock sound… “for a while.”

Robert Preston (1918-1987)

[audio:http://www.dograt.com/WordPress/wp-content/uploads/2006/09/Chicken-Fat.mp3|titles=Robert Preston sings “Chicken Fat” by Meredith Willson]

Flash in the post

I don’t do very much video capturing anymore, partly because it’s a royal pain, but mostly because YouTube has most everything anyway. But I have some video clips I’d like to post later that aren’t on YouTube, so tonight I spent way too much time testing a new video editor. As is always the case, there are good and bad things about the software, but at least I got it working.

This is a comparison between the 1987 LD (LaserDisc) release of HELP! and the 2007 DVD edition. The LD is full frame, the way the film was shot.

[jwplayer config=”std” mediaid=”17311″]

And this is from the DVD. The movie has been cropped top and bottom to create a wider image, as it would have been shown in movie theaters in 1965. The color has been corrected, but it has much harder video contrast and louder sound than the LaserDisc.

[jwplayer config=”wide” mediaid=”17305″]

The tooth, the whole tooth, and numbing but the tooth

I’ve had a bunch of spontaneous blog ideas, but instead of posting them they went out as e-mail to various recipients. Maybe it was because I was anxious about my anticipated root canal, which happened today. I’d been told by a couple of people that the procedure is better now than it was fifteen years ago when I had my first root canal, but I thought it was pretty much the same drill. 😉 I’m just glad it’s over!

Stephen Colbert has reclaimed the MILLION DOLLARS in his SuperPAC from Jon Stewart! This was how the transfer went down yesterday.

Blog cross-pollutionation

Two huge J.R.R. Tolkien fans are Brian Sibley and Stephen Colbert, and they happen to have provided me with a convenient segue so I can include them both in a single post. (I hope Colbert hasn’t already coined the word “pollutionation!”)

Brian (friend of the blog) Sibley is up for a BBC Audio Drama Award, for his superb radio adaptation, The History of Titus Groan, based on the Gormenghast books by Mervyn Peake. This is a wonderfully engrossing and challenging series of radio dramas, with outstanding performances that are both finely nuanced and, when required, hilarious and over the top. The cast includes one of my favourite ladies of British stage and screen, Miranda Richardson. Winners of the BBC Audio Drama Awards will be announced on Sunday. Good luck, Brian!

A couple of days ago, Brian told the story of the ill-fated attempt by Boston-based American publisher Houghton Mifflin to have artist Maurice Sendak provide illustrations for an edition of The Hobbit. By coincidence, this week The Colbert Report featured an uproarious interview with Sendak.

Apple, phone home

The recent assertions from within the ranks of the GOP that Obama wants to turn America into a Communist country make me laugh and shake my head. They’re implying that Capitalism and Communism are mutually exclusive, when China proves them wrong on that point every day. The New York Times has this article on how iPhones are manufactured. Apple does it with a little help from its friends in the Chinese government.

When an Apple team visited, the Chinese plant’s owners were already constructing a new wing. “This is in case you give us the contract,” the manager said, according to a former Apple executive. The Chinese government had agreed to underwrite costs for numerous industries, and those subsidies had trickled down to the glass-cutting factory. It had a warehouse filled with glass samples available to Apple, free of charge. The owners made engineers available at almost no cost. They had built on-site dormitories so employees would be available 24 hours a day.

One aspect of iPhone production that the article doesn’t get into is the rash of suicides at Foxconn facilities. The problem for Apple, and other electronics manufacturers who rely on Chinese labor, is that eventually the workers will stop tolerating the conditions they work under and suicides will be replaced with strikes. Note: I’m writing this on my durable Acer Aspire One netbook, purchased for $250 three years ago, that was made in China.

Follow-up: The New York Times has posted a second article about Apple that gets into injury-and-death issues involved with iPhone/iPad production.