Scribblings From The Public Restroom Stalls Of The Gods

Oberon. The heart and loyalty of a lion. And sometimes…the brain of a gnat.

Not that I can really say I’m much better – I was really, really late picking up what may well be my coolest Christmas gift this year. More »

I was watching the Doctor Who DVD Time-Flight this morning while feeding Evan, and listening to the commentary, in which Peter Davison points out a background extra who, in 1982, bore an extraordinary resemblance to our current Vice President:

As Davison puts it, “So that’s why Iraq is such a mess! Dick Cheney is in league with the Master!” And now we know. The resemblance is beyond uncanny – and I didn’t photoshop that frame one little bit except to crop and border it. Since I was watching the region 2 release, I found myself wondering if this portion of the same title as released in the U.S. has that comment intact, or perhaps an awkward silence…

The annual “Christmas tree” is getting to be something of a tradition at theLogBook; basically, it’s a “best of” collection of that year’s Toybox toy reviews and pictorials, all gathered under the tree. As they should be. It’s a very crudely programmed graphical menu that doesn’t really give you any explicit instructions – what you click on is (God and HTML willing) what you’ll see.

In 2006, I assembled the tree and its attendant presents in Paint Shop Pro, as much out of laziness as anything. But this year, I decided to take a different route – I had all of the stuff readily at hand, and one morning I had a little bit of time, so I physically assembled all of this year’s Toybox items – most of them in their original boxes no less! – in one place and took a photo. Compared to last year’s – and a work-in-progress version for this year which was wiped out in a power bump – that’s almost cheating. But I thought it’d be a real statement of geeky cool to actually have all that stuff in one place at one time.

One cheat I’ll admit to: the Voyager and other space probe models were simply too small and spindly to be seen, so I propped up the relevant patches for their missions instead. Also lost in the shuffle may be VINCENT from The Black Hole. See if you can find him – he’s there for a reason. Also a bit sneaky is the dark red gift at the lower right corner – with a Starfleet combadge on it. This is there to visualize something for which there wasn’t a physical package…well, unless I went and found an old 3/4″ broadcast videotape from the ’80s somewhere. This was a bit easier.

If anything was wrong with my first draft of this year’s tree, it was that there was simply not enough going on among the tree’s ornaments themselves. Last year’s tree had a couple of things snuck in among the ornaments, so literally two days out, I added a couple of extra goodies – namely, the baby and Jet Jaguar (!). If these look like cheesily-pasted-on late additions…that’s because they were!

Anyway, hopefully everyone enjoyed this year’s tree. Now that I’ve got a kid who, in theory, should be taking up almost all of the household toy-buying budget instead of his dad, I’m not sure how the tree idea will play out in the future. But then again…I’ve still got a few trinkets here and there that I’ve been holding back on.

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Before I hit the sack with the kiddo and the kitties, I just wanted to wish everyone a merry Christmas and an even better 2008. This year has been a roller coaster ride, and I’m sure I haven’t been easy to put up with during all of those ups and downs, and the fun is really just beginning. I appreciate everyone who’s stuck with me through all of this – I hope the constant barrage of baby & kitty pics (which, conventional wisdom would have us believe, is nothing less than the death knell of a blog) lifts your spirits the way that living the life behind those pictures does for me.

Thanks for being passengers with me on this crazy ride. Get ready, ’cause the kid’s in the driver’s seat!

Everyone seemed to love it last year, so here we go again:

This year I decided to take the bizarre step of mixing soundtrack and non-soundtrack music together, so get ready for a wild ride. The track list (and links to the relevant CD reviews where applicable) are as follows – but don’t read the list until you’ve listened to the whole track! More »

A little video piece celebrating the biggest event of my life this year (with apologies to David Byrne, who came up with a tune that’s ridiculously appropriate). This is a higher-resolution-than-usual video segment, so it may be choppy while it’s first loading.

That is it. We are so gonna sue! More »