sylvar

I'm watching the pilot for "Glee", and I think it's going to be really good. The a cappella bits as part of the soundtrack are mostly cute, but then you get something like the series of scenes beginning at 32:52.

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What follows is a pretty decent speech for a pilot episode, followed by a decision that you probably didn't predict. And the music swells... this time, classic rock by the original artist.

If you're not sure whether to get into the show, just watch that part: "Glee" pilot, 32:52-35:00

I've been avoiding Amazon.com's "Unbox Video Download" because the terms of use on a PC, last time I checked, were fairly heinous. But now they've got their service hooked up to TiVo, so you don't have to authorize Amazon.com to do anything to your PC -- you can just let them upload movies and TV episodes to your TiVo series 2 or 3.

They've got a fairly good selection on TiVo Unbox.  You select a movie, pay Amazon.com through their regular checkout process, and they send it to your TiVo.  In the case of movie rentals, you pay $3.99 and it stays on your TiVo until 24 hours after you first start watching it.  So if you rented Little Miss Sunshine today and then got called out of town for a few days, you'd still have it waiting when you got back.

Not bad -- and, of course, I get a kickback.  (There's your granum salis.)  I haven't tried it yet, but I'll report back with the results when I do.

Jodi's out with some friends tonight, and despite her recent suspicion about the GRE, she says she's okay at the moment.  I read her parts of the first three comments, and she seems cheered by some of them.

I'm going to bed soon so that I've got a halfway decent chance of getting enough sleep to do some coding tomorrow.  Yesterday I got about five hours of sleep and could never get into the flow.

I saw Harry Frankfurt on The Daily Show recently.  I imagine that my stepfather would be like that in a fast-paced interview, too; he, too, has the virtue of thinking before he speaks.  Talk-show interviews are no less formulaic than ballet or Noh, but so many guests have been so well-groomed that you don't notice until a normal person is a guest.  

Today I shuttled back and forth from the testing facility to make sure Jodi was well-supplied with whatever she needed (Mountain Dew, lunch from Chik-fil-A, an iced tall Americano one-shot-classic with room, and a bottle of water).  I walked across campus to drop off a Unite for Diabetes travel bug in a geocache and got some johnson-grass-like scratches for my trouble, along with some needed exercise.  I wished a few times I'd had my camera with me, but the cookbooks I was carrying (to transcribe selected recipes -- which I basically didn't get around to), and which I'll need to return and then check out again, were heavy enough.

Great exchange on yesterday's Jeopardy!:

ALEX TREBEK [to a contestant who works as an auditorium manager]: It says here that your stagecraft students have a special name for you.  What is it?

NATHAN CRANE: Uh, they nicknamed me "Jesus".  [pause]  I have long hair and carpentry skills.

[audience laughs; cut to Alex shielding his face with his hand while he laughs; audience continues laughing as each member of the audience, in turn, gets the joke]

ALEX TREBEK: [pause] ...let's go on.

Now it's time to fold a bit of laundry and go to bed...

The banner on the SciFi Serenity special -- the one that made Joss Whedon look abashed and blush happily -- said 生 日 快 乐 (shēng rì kuài lè), "happy birthday".

I couldn't have done it without zhongwen.com. The trickiest bit was realizing that 乐 is the Simplified Chinese version of 樂.