Its been a bad week and a half in celebrity world. Quite a few big names have passed away. Ed McMahon always seemed like a “nice guy”. He was the one of the last of the true sidekicks. The current talk shows don’t really have them any more. Well, Conan has Andy Richter, but he is rarely visible. But Ed was a real second man. He was always there to toss a softball straight line to Carson or make the occaisional quip when Carson’s monologue was falling flat (as it did, frequently). After Carson, on “Star Search” and the commercials, Ed always seemed like he was uncomfortable being the front man. Like I said, he seemed like a nice guy.
Farah was an actress of limited talent. And, she was only on “Charlie’s Angels” for ONE season! Other than one season on a TV show, and the famous poster, she had little success in Hollywood. I was mildly surprised that the celebrity TV shows were elevating her cancer to a tragedy of epic proportions. Don’t get me wrong, I have no ill will toward her, and any person’s death is certainly a tragedy for friends and family. But even in death, poor Farah couldn’t catch a break. Because the same day she passed, as Entertainment Tonight was gearing up for her canonization …
That brings us to MJ. I’m afraid that I have to agree with Mick Lasalle, the movie critic for the SF Chronicle. Michael was largely irrelevant in the music world for the last 20 years. The man had three good albums, and frankly I never find myself humming a Michael Jackson tune. And really now, when was the last time you listened to Thriller? The ironic thing for me, is that the MJ tune I remember most, was Weird AL Yankovic’s parody of “Beat It”. Weird Al was never the same after MJ quit making hit songs. Of course the biggest tragedy of Jackson’s life is that he squandered his wealth and his reputation on his eccentricities. There will forever be an asterisk beside his name with explanation ‘probable pedophile’.
Although I hear people who know him say that Billy Mays was a great guy, I just found him irritating. If I was sitting in front of the TV when one of his commercials came on, I usually grabbed the remote to either mute the sound or change the channel.
That brings us to yesterday and Karl Malden. Karl was a real actor. Karl was hardly ‘leading man’ material. He had an enormous nose. But despite his looks he had a solid acting career, winning both an Oscar (for Streetcar Named Desire) and an Emmy. His IMDB entry lists 70 acting credits, including 120 episodes of this:
I liked that Streets of San Francisco series. I had moved to SF in 1968. I was working downtown in the financial district and remember watching them film an episode for the first season. One of my most vivid memories of Karl was his portrayal of the minister in the 1960 Disney movie Pollyanna. There was a scene where he was delivering a fiery sermon that scared poor Haley Mills. They kept focusing in close up on that prominent proboscis of his. RIP Karl Malden. You had a long and honorable career.
Remember Toto? This 80’s Pop/Rock group (they really were a lot more, but that’s another post) may have fallen out of favor in the US, but they have had continuing popularity in Europe. This acapella performance of the their song ‘Africa’ by a Slovenian chorus called Perpetuum Jazille is one of the most interesting musical performances I’ve seen in a long while. Watch and enjoy.
If you are interested, here’s a link to the groups website: Perpetuum Jazzile.
I finally have my photo albums back online. You can see them here. I will add a permanent link to them, or you can always go to the albums by clicking on one of the pictures in the sidebar.
All I have done is post the photos. I haven’t annotated any of them. I’m not real happy with the gallery software I am using. It doesn’t have the strong integration that my old software had. I’m still looking for the ‘perfect’ solution, but until I find it, this will work.
You may have noticed that the site looks a little different. I changed the Wordpress theme that I have been using for the past 2 years. My old theme was called Tiga, and I liked it because the author had done a good job of annotating the code. That made it easier to change the look and add content. Unfortunately, the theme was no longer being maintained. When Wordpress had a major update with release 2.3, the theme broke. Fortunately, some users who are more proficient with PHP than I, created a patch which they shared with all users. For the past months I have been looking for a new theme that was more up-to-date but still allowed flexibility for the look of my site. A Wordpress plugin called ‘Theme test drive’ helped me greatly. With this plugin, I was able to have a 2nd theme that I could see when I logged in, but didn’t change the look of the site when you dropped by to visit.
About 2 months ago, I stumbled across the Atahualpa theme. Not only is this them being actively developed and maintained, it also has an appearance dashboard that allows me to change virtually all of the theme’s colors, fonts, layout etc. The other change I needed to make was to my sidebar content. You know, those little entries on the right side. Many of mine were hard coded, that is, I added code to the stylesheet for the sidebar. I wanted to take advantage of Wordpress’ widget capabilities, so I have been adding widgets, and deleting the hard code. Well, yesterday, I installed the new theme for all, and updated to the latest version of WP, release 2.8. Hope you like the new look, although there isn’t much difference from the old.
There is a new movie that released this weekend, “Food, Inc”. The film details the unhealthy and potentially disastrous rise of manufactured food. Our grocery stores are filled with unhealthy choices. I recommend this movie.
Watch this short video… I worry about our access to fresh un-modified food in this country. Congress and big business don’t want to make it easier. Watch:
I use the Firefox addon known as Adblock Plus. According to the Mozilla/Firefox addon page, Adblock Plus is the most popular addon for FF. At least it was today. It is never out of the top 5 most popular. I have been using it for a couple of years now and I think it does a fine job of weeding out a lot of unwanted ads, particularly those annoying animated ads. But, it also tends to block some legitimate content on web pages. In fact, there are several web sites that just don’t display properly with Adblock Plus enabled. Cnet is one site.
I started thinking about this because I recently added a couple of videos from ‘The Onion’ web site. I thought they were pretty humorous. But today, I noticed that when I went to my site, the embedded flash player for the Onion did not display. I went in and edited the entries, replacing the embed code and still they would not display or play properly. I checked my version of Adobe Flash and it was the latest. The embedded You Tube videos, and the comedy central one all displayed and played normally. Finally, on a hunch, I disabled Adblock Plus and Voila… The video’s reappeared. So, now I am slowly looking through the filters on Adblock Plus and comparing them to the embed code for the ‘Onion” videos. In the mean time, I have set Adblock Plus to ‘disabled’ for larryc.com. It’s safe for you to do so also, I have no advertising, just plugs for my favorite sites and software.
On another topic, I have come to the conclusion that my old email address must bite the dust. That is my oldest Email address. When domain names were first opened to the general public, I grabbed larryc.net. I wanted larryc.com, but it wasn’t available. That was back in 1997 or 98, can’t remember now. Well the .com domain became available a few years later so I grabbed it also. Then, just to be sure, I also bought the .org domain. But now, sadly, my original email address has been around long enough that I mainly see spam on it. So, beginning tomorrow, I am deleting . You can still contact me at my .com address but my oldest Email address is history.
Here is an interesting article I found on Ars Technica. According to this article by Matt Ford
“A new study utilizing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) looks at the brains of early risers and night owls and detects a physical basis for their differences“.
Aha!! I knew that there was a dfference between earlybirds and us normal people! This could explain why I spent the better part of my life working evening shifts. I never felt comfortable getting up early, even when i did it for 10 years while working at the Pacific Stock Exchange. Fortunately now, I don’t have to get up. And, in case you never noticed, the bulk of my blog posts are done late at nite if not after midnight. Read the whole article here.
By-the-way… Ars Technica is one of my favorite reading sites. I check it frequently. Why don’t you give it a try.
email address must bite the dust. That is my oldest Email address. When domain names were first opened to the general public, I grabbed larryc.net. I wanted larryc.com, but it wasn’t available. That was back in 1997 or 98, can’t remember now. Well the .com domain became available a few years later so I grabbed it also. Then, just to be sure, I also bought the .org domain. But now, sadly, my original email address has been around long enough that I mainly see spam on it. So, beginning tomorrow, I am deleting 
