(no subject)

in my few free moments, i'm reading douglas coupland's "jpod". around page 100, he starts making very wink-wink meta references to early '90s gen-x culture, and he has one of his characters claim to have watched all of melrose place on dvd.

melrose place isn't out on dvd. music rights and whatnot. word is, the first season will be out this fall in england, but there's no date set for the US.

...i officially am in possession of more useless pop culture knowledge than douglas coupland. joy.

i also finished reading david foster wallace's book of essays, "consider the lobster", last week. the longest essay in the book is about power structures inherent in codes of english usage. the first page of the essay is a long, eye-squint-typefaced list of various misusages that make wallace bristle. now, it's not like i follow all the conventions of english usage when writing in this journal. note the lack of capital letters, that comma hanging outside the quotation marks up there. but i generally know when i'm doing something wrong, and there are certain constructions that set me on edge. i always notice and wince when people say "mischevious" or "lasvicious", but that's mostly because i got those words wrong until about the end of middle school, and it's my own inner shame that upsets me. but the one thing that always drives me crazy, and segev can attest to this, is when, at the end of any given airplane flight, the stewardess says "we hope you enjoy your stay in [insert city here] or wherever your final destination may take you." destinations can't take you anywhere! destinations are entirely static. they are an end result. it drives me crazy. every now and then, the stewardess will get it right and say "wherever your final destination may be", and i'll feel the urge to clap. i rank the enjoyability of any given flight almost entirely on the basis of those last few words to come over the speakers, regardless (not "irregardless") of turbulence, leg room, arm-rest hoggage, crappy snack food, or any other air travel deficiencies. it's completely insane, i know, but "wherever your final destination may take you" literally makes the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. (and i actually MEAN "literally", another one of wallace's pet peeves. he gives a pass to "hopefully", though, which i know drives a lot of people up the wall. not literally up the wall. whatever.)

(no subject)

the muppet wiki has solved the great television mystery of my life. when i was in middle school, i watched a couple episodes of a bizarre canadian puppet show that involved two kids, a lighthouse, a sleeping giant, and all sorts of random stuff. i could never figure out what day or time it aired, so i just saw a couple of random episodes when i chanced upon them. for years i've been trying to figure out what it was, without any success.

well, apparently the guy who made it was a muppeteer on fraggle rock. i randomly clicked on a link on the muppet performers page of the wiki and saw the words "blizzard island". i gasped. that's IT! that's IT!

i was just mentioning this show to segev the other day, wondering why i could never find it on google and why no one on the canadian television thread over on TWoP knew what i was talking about. turns out the kids weren't in the lighthouse, the puppet witch lived in the lighthouse. so the description i was giving to people all these years, what i was basing my google search on, was slightly off. i never understood why i couldn't just google "canada lighthouse puppet" and come up with something. today is a happy day. i'm a little disappointed to realize that all the puppets look really crappy, but whatever. apparently it was made into a movie called "argon's quest", but i don't know if that was recycled footage from the show compiled into a movie-length production, or entirely different. looks like the blizzard island website was never completed. boo.

(no subject)

poking around vox, i've decided the following:

1) unless they introduce a feature that lets you transfer all your LJ posts to a new vox journal, i'm not playing. if they want all the grownups off LJ and onto vox, they should make this easy. i don't need a million different blogs. i already have too many as it is. (but then again, LJ's never been big on the making-it-easy-to-change-things-in-one-fell-swoop thing. for years now people have been clamoring for a way to make all your old entries friends-only all at once. still hasn't happened.)

2) the themes are absolutely heinous.

3) apparently there are no custom friends groups? that's a big fat no-go.

all in all? vox looks like a turd.

(no subject)

i'm going to start making some of my posts public again. don't know why, really, except i feel like i've learned better where to draw the line between stuff my friends should know and stuff EVERYBODY IN THE WHOLE WORLD should know. or could know. or whatever. anyway, i've opened up some posts from the last month or so and, although my default will still be friends only, i'm going to continue to make occasional public posts. so. yeah.