Saul Bass Titles

You can view stills from a bunch of titles done by Saul Bass here. I posted on Saul Bass before (but the link in that post is broken). Cool stuff.

More on Diet Coke

Here is a page that breaks down the various diet versions of Coke, vaguely related to a post of mine from a while back.

Poor Guy

Check out the White House press briefing [RealPlayer link] where Scott McClellan tries to dodge questions about Karl Rove. He's not very good at it, and it's just kind of sad to watch.

On del.icio.us

After hearing about del.icio.us for a while, I decided to get an account, and it's pretty cool. Now I can easily access links to my online bills / accounts and technical papers that I check from time to time. I've also been trying to bookmark things I think are worth reading; it's for cases where I don't feel like writing a blog post about an article or posting it on NewsDog, but I still think others may want to take a look. There are RSS feeds on all the pages, although the only one I imagine anyone else would want to track is the last one. Anyway, good stuff.

ForecastFox and Berkeley library proxy

Here's something that about 0 of you care about. I use the ForecastFox extension in Firefox to show the upcoming weather, and I also use the UC Berkeley library proxy to access certain web sites from outside school. Unfortunately, the proxy configuration script lists AccuWeather, the site ForecastFox uses, as one that needs to go through the proxy, thereby necessitating a login to the proxy server every time I want the weather forecast to show up. To fix this, I changed the script to not access AccuWeather through the proxy server; here is the altered script. Just use that link as your proxy configuration URL instead of the standard one, and you should be set.

Obligatory Stella Review

I just watched the first episode of the new Stella show on Comedy Central, and given that my blog is called Raking Leaves (Quicktime link), I figured I should comment. To put it briefly, it's funny, and still weird in that Stella way, but it just didn't have the impact that I was hoping for. Stella's lunacy just doesn't work as well over 22 minutes as it does in 2 minute sketches. And, I agree with this Dana Stevens review that this stuff might be too weird to get big ratings. But, don't get me wrong; the episode had really funny moments, and I'm definitely going to watch whenever I can. And, I know from experience that Stella gets funnier after a few viewings, so maybe I'll take another look at the first episode sometime soon.

The Wire Season 3

I just finished watching it, in spite of my current massive workload. I'd say that in the end, it didn't quite match Season 2, mostly because it was a bit too sprawling. To really appreciate Season 3, you need to remember Season 1 and some of Season 2 in a fair amount of detail. The amount of mental effort required to try to track all the plot connections detracts from the impact of the episodes. I imagine that upon a second viewing of all three seasons things would connect in a deeper way, but that's 37 hours of television, which is beyond even an addict like myself. Also, I didn't find the running theme of politics in the third season to be quite as compelling as the inside look at union workers from the second season. Nevertheless, Season 3 is definitely worth watching if you've seen and liked the first two.

Cable Choice

I heard this interview with Tim Winter, director of the Parents Television Council, yesterday on the radio. From the things I had previously heard and read about the PTC, I assumed this guy would be some sort of nut, but he was actually fairly well-spoken and reasonable. I was pleased to hear that his group wants to deal with objectionable content on cable by allowing consumers to only pay for the channels they want. This solution would also solve my problem of wanting HBO, but not wanting to pay $50 for the other 200 channels on digital cable that I'll never watch. Anyway, even though some of what he said was BS, he seemed thoughtful, which was a pleasant surprise.

New Tristan

This is funny. It's related to this earlier post.

PDF e-books

You can get free e-books in PDF format here. Normally these things are a pain to read on a computer screen, but the typesetting in the PDF helps a bit. And, on my Tablet PC it's actually pretty comfortable to read longer documents, so this site should come in handy.

Lens Flares

Here's a nice, insightful essay on Punch-Drunk Love that talks about the lens flares that appear throughout the film. These flares always caught my eye, and the essay does a nice job of linking them in to the film's overall use of color.

Busy

I'm getting hammered by the end-of-semester workload, as usual. Unfortunately, it looks like I'll be pretty busy through the end of July...so posting may be sparse. Couple of random things. I saw Romeo and Juliet at San Francisco Ballet last week. Being somewhat unappreciative of dance, I went primarily to hear all of Prokofiev's wonderful score. The orchestral playing was good, but not great, and as a friend pointed out to me, I was probably one of the few audience members that really cared. You never see music critics reviewing how an orchestra plays for a ballet, and the dance critics don't seem to write much about it either. I guess you can't have everything, but it would be nice if the standards were higher, since some of these ballet scores are rarely if ever played in full by a top orchestra like the SF Symphony.

Second, Backpack is a pretty cool service that I started using. I always thought that done right, this type of web-based organizer / scratchpad would be really useful. That's all for now.

Sandow on Indie Rock

Another nice post by Greg Sandow, this one on indie rock. It's great to see a another "serious" classical music person understanding this stuff (like Alex Ross). Hopefully people like Sandow and Ross can help classical music find ways to be more relevant and accessible.

Running Numbers

I've often wondered what it means to "run numbers," something that Harvey Keitel's character does in Mean Streets; this article answered the question.

The Sleeper Curve

I just finished reading this article on a topic near and dear to my heart, television. I instinctively recoil at the hand-waving arguments made in the piece, but I do agree with its overall gist that television drama has become more complex. Couple things, though: Johnson doesn't mention film at all, and I can't imagine that trends in television are unrelated to what's going on in movies. I know that David Chase, creator of The Sopranos, aspired to bring the complexities of film to a television series, and that his vision for the show was deeply influenced by the intertwining of domestic and mob life in Goodfellas. Given the similarity of the media, it just seems like an obvious point to address. Also, as a nitpick, Johnson left out discussion of two great shows that would fit nicely into his arguments. The first is The X-Files, which used all kinds of obscure terminology and was really fun to watch until it jumped the shark. The second is The Wire, which I blogged about recently. In terms of plot complexity, it's probably harder to follow than any of the shows mentioned in the article.

How To Do a Film Festival

So I was looking at the schedule for the upcoming San Francisco International Film Festival, and I was completely overwhelmed. Tons of films, lots of which could be good, and few of which I'll actually have time to attend. Does anyone have a strategy for picking out films to see in a situation like this? If so, I'd love to hear about it. For now, I used this GreenCine Daily post as a sort of filter. Perhaps the interface on the film festival web site is not ideal; I remember the web site for the Seattle International Film Festival being better last year.

Sandow

Greg Sandow writes a great blog on the state of classical music. Reading this entry made me wish I had been in Pittsburgh at the time. There's lots of other good stuff there; check it out.

The Wire Rules

I just finished the second season of The Wire today; wow. It was even better than the brilliant first season. The show doesn't have the same hype as The Sopranos, and it's not as good, but it's the closest I've seen another HBO show get. So, when you have some time, get the DVDs; you won't regret it. But, seriously, wait until you have some time. I have the 3rd season too, but I need to wait a couple of weeks to start watching it to avoid the distraction. Anyway, it's past my bedtime.

GreaseMonkey

GreaseMonkey is perhaps the coolest Firefox extension I've found yet. You can do all kinds of cool web page modifications with it, as listed here. Right now, I have all links to New York Times articles going to the single-page format, and a script that fixes some of the crappiness in allmusic. Once you've installed the extension, to install the linked scripts just right-click and select "Install User Script...".

WHRB

Just wanted to give a quick plug to the online stream of WHRB, which is the best classical music station I've found online since Andante Radio, which is no longer free. I just heard a fantastic performance of Das Lied von der Erde on there the other day, and you'll rarely find a station that plays pieces like that in their entirety anymore.