Deonandia - Latest Comments

Re: Of Babes And Poles

deonandan — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 09:39:56 -0000

Whoa. My stats indicate that this article is being read the most in.... wait for it... Poland!

Re: Weekly Twitter Tweets for 2012-01-23

deonandan — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 09:31:11 -0000

There were four B5 movies: "In The Beginning", "Thirdspace", "A Call To Arms" and "Legend of the Rangers". The original pilot, "The Gathering", is also considered a movie, as is the failed movie serial, "The Lost Tales". Of the bunch, "In The Beginning" is superb, and "The Lost Tales" is pretty good, too. "A Call to Arms" is entertaining, but is just the set-up for the failed series, "Crusade." The other movies are sort of bland. "Legend of the Rangers" is just awful.

Re: Recent Facebook Profile Pics

deonandan — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 09:20:57 -0000

That's me during the full moon.

Re: Recent Facebook Profile Pics

Amphibious — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 05:43:48 -0000

ummm, can't see you in #3, no ghostly image on the cookie. Perhaps in the rodent's eyes? He does look rather rattled.

Re: Weekly Twitter Tweets for 2012-01-23

Amphibious — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 05:40:48 -0000

Speak you of BABYLON 5 movies? I was not aware of their existence.
Not sure that I want to reimmerse myself in that recruiting-for-galactic-police oeuvre again though I would like to know what was the deal with Shadows, did they play nice in the end?
In the Antipodes we were ill served by a FTA channel that monopolised the TREK franchise but only broadcast the prequel, ENTERPRISE, intermittently and out of order, then stopped.
However the various glimpses of D'Paul nekkid were well worth the rest of the cowboys-in-space ethos.
There has been NO skiffy at all on our FTA netwroks for the last year or more.

Re: Weekly Twitter Tweets for 2012-01-23

deonandan — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 08:26:50 -0000

I just downloaded the entire series, plus all the movies. 50GB of disk space! I do miss that era of TV storytelling. Have you seen the various TV movies?

Re: Weekly Twitter Tweets for 2012-01-23

Amphibious — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 07:26:41 -0000

Oh, sorry, I see that you acknowledged earlier (?) down the list that you were delving deep. Can't be doing with this Twit thingummy.

Re: Weekly Twitter Tweets for 2012-01-23

Amphibious — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 07:24:06 -0000

Babylon 5 is still extant? Or do you mean you exhumed some musty, crusty old tape? The whole leather and obedience thang wearied me, yea even unto the Shadow stuff. Click heels & hand over brain, ask not .. etc but what you can do for the Hegemon.

Re: Back Scratch Fever

deonandan — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 17:33:16 -0000

Andrew, you need to look up "sarcasm".

Re: Back Scratch Fever

Andrew.AndroWORLD — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 14:23:49 -0000

Demonic visitations? Really? =)) a demon would go through all that trouble just to do what? scratch you with a "pin-needle"? Come on, get real. Its something you are doing to yourself by:

A)nails
B)rings/jewelry
C) u have a small piece of glass somewhere, but that is NOT no alien visitation or demons

Re: Back Scratch Fever

deonandan — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 12:34:45 -0000

glad to know i'm not the only one whose flesh the aliens are sampling :)

Re: Back Scratch Fever

edefant — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 11:11:12 -0000

Hi, I found your picture while looking for an explanation of mine scratches in the internet. I found it very interesting because they look exactly like mine - more like from feline than human fingernails. I find them on my body for many years now about once a week or a month after getting up in the morning and they are usally on my legs. I was absolutely sure that I myself produced them sleeping until I realized that I could not produce the same voluntarily.

Re: Real Women

LOL — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 08:14:13 -0000

lol

Re: Gettin’ Old

deonandan — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 09:50:10 -0000

True: history of RAY'S phones. Or may be even the history of RAY's and his peers' phones :)

Re: Gettin’ Old

deonandan — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 09:49:16 -0000

I remember that story well.

Re: Gettin’ Old

deonandan — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 09:49:02 -0000

yep, one of my favourite stories as a kid. I think we're there now.

Re: Gettin’ Old

Stuart — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 08:20:39 -0000

It was Asimov, but I think from the 50s. And its title was something along the lines of "The Most Dangerous Weapon." Okay, probably not exactly that. Great story.

Re: Gettin’ Old

Amphibious — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 07:29:23 -0000

My son told me (in 2004!!!) that his then phone had more computer power that the laptop on which he write his uni. thesis in 1995.
But, but, is this outsourcing of brain power to chips a "good" thing?
Re a recent tweet of yours that many of your students couldn't calculate 20 x 0.6 is a good example.
Without the ability to do basic calculations in ones head, how can one know, when using a calculator, that one hasn't hit a wrong key somewhere?
The number of times I have had to point out to colleagues under 40yrs that a figure is garbage is quite horrific and more so because they are at a loss to imagine how I can know it out just by glancing at the page.
A skiffy short story from the 80s (possibly Asimov..) had a constant war society in which one side discovered a secret weapon, a lowly prole who had figured out how to do simple arithmetic and thus would eventually prove cheaper than all the whizzbangery that made the war toys so damnably expensive

Re: Gettin’ Old

Logan — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 05:05:45 -0000

Yep, I relate to all of this! (Well, except the moon...I'm not *that* old).

Re: Gettin’ Old

Stuart — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 05:04:34 -0000

Hey, old man! We don't listen to boogie-woogie any more! It's all ragtime and crunkity-crunk. You dig?

Obviously, it's hard to exaggerate the significance of phone portability (the cell phone). But the thing I always focus on is Caller ID--which is, needless to say, built into the cell phone. (On an earlier phone, I did know how to suppress my caller information for individual calls. I have no idea how to do that on my current one.) Think about that tense moment in many a pre-Nineties movie about teenagers: Bobby calls his big crush Sally. She answers the phone. He freezes speechless for an eternal second--then hangs up in a sweat. Today? Can't happen! She knows he's calling before she picks up the phone. ("Picks up"? If it's her cell, the critical act on her part is "accepting" Bobby's call. Even the verb we use has changed, and the degree of significance of this step. Answering the phone is making a decision, almost like accepting a "friend" request on Facebook.) It goes without saying that this was not simply a cinematic moment in the Eighties--and in previous decades--but one that most teenagers experienced repeatedly (unlike getting an operator to do an "emergency breakthrough"--something I knew existed theoretically, but never actually experienced).

I wonder a bit about the history you offer of certain moments in the World History of Phone. My super-non-ahead-of-the-curve household had two phones on the same line from the get-go (i.e., when my parents bought the house in the mid-Sixties). I'm pretty sure Don Draper's house on Mad Men does in the early Sixties. You're right that the switch from hard-wired to modular jacks came (gradually) in the late Seventies or early Eighties. But of course, old phones might continue to be hard-wired, if there was no reason to mess with them. My parents still had at least one rotary phone in the twenty-first century! So I'm wondering whether your History of Phone is a History of Ray's Phones, or perhaps a History of Canadian Phones. We Americans had telephones that doubled as mission controllers for the Apollo program!

A friend of mine in the late Seventies, whose father was somewhat techy, had a "blue box" phone in the basement (or some relative of the "blue box"). This allowed free long-distance calls. Of course, the only reason I ever phoned from his house was to call my home--and I was under strict instructions never to do something, I can't remember what, lest the phone company figure out the existence of the illicit phone. (Maybe I wasn't allowed to initiate a call from the basement phone? But that doesn't make any sense. Can't remember.)

This was also the friend who could remember (I always forgot) the three-digit prefix that allowed you to phone your own phone. If your number was 123-4567, then you dialed 565-4567 (assuming the prefix was 565) and hung up as soon as you heard a distinctive tone. Then, within a few seconds, your phone would ring. This was for phone repairmen to check your lines. We always hoped we'd come up with a good prank to play involving this prefix. Never happened.

And of course phone pranks are practically a thing of the past, thanks to Caller ID. I'm glad my college roommates and I managed to live in that brief, glorious transitional moment when one could make repeated prank calls using touch-tone technology and modular jacks. Good times.

Re: Weekly Twitter Tweets for 2012-01-09

Amphibious — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 06:12:50 -0000

when making fresh beet juice, don't wear a white shirt. - also refrain from nude blackberry picking. Ouch!

Re: Weekly Twitter Tweets for 2012-01-02

deonandan — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 16:50:09 -0000

Happy new year, sir!

Re: Weekly Twitter Tweets for 2012-01-02

Amphibious — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 14:47:46 -0000

yoghurt & bacon, apple pie & bacon,..have you tried bacon & bacon (nod to Python's "SPAM")?
Perhaps you are pregnant, the night scratcher wasn't a succubus but an incubus?
Happy New Year, it can't be worse than the gumboil that was 2011.

Re: Welcome to the End

deonandan — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 02:14:33 -0000

Sometimes my cheapness can appear creative.

Re: Welcome to the End

Logan — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 01:59:01 -0000

Ray (unimportant) Ancedote: best going-away party ever: bring a chair to an empty apartment. Such an awesome party, and an interesting variety of chairs. :)