Garrulus Grommeler

It's 1975 and Burt, a Vietnam vet (played by David Anders), and Vicki, his wife (Kandyse McClure), are driving across country. Right from the start, it's understood that their marriage is as rough as a road filled with potholes. (It's also understood that McClure, can't act worth a damn, but I'm getting ahead of myself.) They're driving through flat and boring Nebraska. Corn field upon corn field upon corn field. Burt, the husband, takes his eyes off the road. A child runs out from a corn field, and before Burt can stop the car, he hits and runs over the child. Vicki gets out of the car, and Burt follows. The tirade that Vicki launches into while they are standing in the middle of the road is not only too damned long — I would've slapped her long before Burt did — it's also an excellent showcase of McClure's lack of acting talent. As much as I like Stephen King, I hate to say it, but the dialogue in this movie had all the flavor of stale bread. It...

My, oh my, how the world has changed. John Dillinger, America's first "Public Enemy Number One," is the man whose pursuit pretty much led to the founding, or should I say "funding," of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which, at the time, was known as the Division of Investigation. The Wikipedia article on Melvin Pervis notes that J. Edgar Hoover became jealous of the fame Pervis gained following the death of Dillinger, "downgrad[ing] him, [which lead to] Purvis leaving the FBI" in 1935. Pervis died in 1960 of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. "The FBI investigated the shooting and labeled it a suicide, though the official coroner's report did not find sufficient evidence to label the cause of death as such. It was later determined that Purvis may have shot himself accidentally while trying to extract a tracer bullet jammed in the pistol. He was 56 years old." Excellent movie.

The final movie in Robert Rodriguez's pulp Western, Once Upon a Time in México is not only chock full of stars, it's also chock full of gun-totin' action. Starring in this movie are Antonio Banderas, Salma Hayek, Johnny Depp, Mickey Rourke, Eva Mendes, Danny Trejo, Enrique Iglesias, Marco Leonardi, Cheech Marin, Ruben Blades, and Willem Dafoe. With names like that on the roster, I think it's fair to say that this movie far surpassed the $50,000 budget for El Mariachi . Wouldn't you agree? It was fun. It was kooky. And, for Johnny Depp's character, it was outta sight.

I've found a fascinating web site that offers translation of Old English (a.k.a. Anglo Saxon) into Modern English and vice versa. It's called Old English Translator . Below is the conjugation of béon, the verb "to be." — BÉON (To Be) IRREGULAR VERB Present & Preterite Indicative • Ic béo (I am) — Ic wæs (I was) • þu bist (you are) — þu wære (you were) • he/hit/heo biþ (he/it/she is) — he/hit/heo wæs (you were) • we/ge/hie béoþ (we/ye/they are) — we/ge/hie wæron (we/ye/they were) Present & Preterite Subjunctive • singular: béo — wære • plural: béon — wæren Present Participle (...ing) & Past Participle (...ed) • béonde — [n/a] Imperative (direct command) • singular: béo • plural: béoþ Inflected Infinitive • to béonne Second Person Present Indicative, among other attributes, really highlights the Germanic roots of English. Compare þu bist (Old English — you are ), which can also be written as ðu bist , with the modern German du bist . Look also ...

I had wanted to watch El Mariachi, the first movie in this trilogy. I'd rented it, in fact, but . . . for whatever reason, the DVD would only play the director's track. Nothing personal, but I wanted to watch the movie, not listen to Robert Rodriguez. So, I had to skip El Mariachi, and moved right on to Desperado , starring Antonio Banderas, Salma Hayek, and featuring a guest appearance by none other than Quentin Tarantino. It wasn't bad, but I preferred the duology of movies Rodriguez and Tarantino did together more recently, Grindhouse , Rodriguez's contribution being Planet Terror .

How can you not like a Quentin Tarantino film? (I find it difficult, and that he and I share birthdays has very little to do with it, I assure you.) Starring Brad Pitt, Inglourious Basterds is what the DVD case for this film calls a "revenge fantasy." I'd drink to that, but I'd prefer to call it "alternative history" given that it knowingly deviates from history. Science fiction/fantasy/mystery/romance author, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, mentions Inglourious Basterds in her commentary, " The Crumbling Monolith ," at Baen's Universe . In her commentary, Rusch offers a critique of the current state of culture, high-brow vs low-brow, but more specifically of the entertainment industry, noting that it "can no longer manipulate the conversation." Says Rusch: Lest you think social media has only a negative effect, let me point out that as I type this, Inglourious Basterds is beating all the predictions. The movie got a terrible release dat...

"I don't know who you are. I don't know what you want. If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I don't have money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills. Skills I have acquired over a very long career, skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter go now, that'll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don't, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you." "Good luck." Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson) is a former spy who is trying build a relationship with Kim (Maggie Grace), his estranged daughter. She and Amanda (Katie Cassidy), a friend of hers, go on a trip to Paris where they get kidnapped. Using his skills as a spy, and former contacts, Mills sets out to find his daughter, no matter what the cost. Taken , starring Liam Neeson, is one incredibly intense film. I think I'd even go so far as to say that it's the best film I've seen all yea...

"It came from another galaxy. A creeping, crawling nightmare of terror!" (Complete with music reminsicent of the original Star Trek series.) It is, in fact, as the tagline for this movie says, "Terror — the whole family can enjoy." "It's 1957," says the blurb, "a spaceship has just landed in a quiet small town, and Earth is suddenly threatened by an unknown evil. But fear not, hope has also arrived." Alien Trespass — directed by The X-Files's R. W. Goodwin and starring Eric McCormack (of Will & Grace fame), Jenni Baird, Dan Lauria, and Robert Patrick — is a modern movie done in the tradition of The Blob (1958) and It Came from Outer Space (1953). It's a fun-filled, "creepy" romp into the past that wholly captures the flavour of films from that era. The San Francisco Chronicle called it, "Retro-escapist fun." Box Office said, "Loads of fun, a highly entertaining retro sci-fi blast from the past....

Acolytes is an Aussie film. It won Best Horror Film at the Austin FantasticFest in 2008 and it won the Midnight Madness award at the Toronto International Film Festival in the same year. The blurb on the DVD case reads (no spoilers in the blurb, by the way): Following the disappearance of a young female classmate, shy high-schooler Mark stumbles upon a fresh grave in the woods of his peaceful suburb, and spies a 4WD driving away from the scene. With the help of two friends — James and his girlfriend Chasely — Mark decides to return to the scene to dig up what they imagine is simply someone's dead pet. Their bit of fun turns perilous, however, when they unearth the body of a Canadian backpacker. They embark upon a hunt for the identity of eht killer (played with frightening realism by Joel Edgerton), and James soon realizes that their grim discovery could help them exact revenge upon Gary Parker (Michael Dorman), a brutal bully who robbed them of their innocence years before and wh...

Scrooged . An old movie (1988). A fun movie. Love the scenes with Carol Kane as the Ghost of Christmas Present. It's all slapstick. Bill Murray getting kicked in the nuts, punched, pulled about by his lower lip, and smacked in the face . . . with a toaster! Ah, man. Loved the toaster bit. Too funny! :D

This evening, I watched The Code , a heist movie that involves the theft of two "mystery" Fabergé Imperial Eggs made in 1917. Ripley (Morgan Freeman) is a known art thief in New York City who runs into Gabriel (Antonio Banderas) on a New York subway train while casing the same job to steal some diamonds. Ripley then ropes Gabriel into joining him on the heist. Things turn nasty when Alexandra (Radha Mitchell), Ripley's god-daughter, is kidnapped by the KGB. In a story that involves the KGB, the NYPD, and the FBI, this is a fun movie that is, as the description on the DVD case describes, "full of deceit, thievery and twists at every turn." And that ain't no lie.

It's been a long time since I've blogged about a movie in this fashion. Hopefully, this new version of my blog won't degenerate into nothing more than a movie-reaction-fest. That's not what it's meant to be. In any case, I watched this last night. It's one of six movies I recently rented (so, yeah, you are going to see a short spate of movie-related posts over the next few days). Bangkok Dangerous was not as good as I'd heard it was. Not in my opinion, anyway. For a paid assassin, Joe, played by Nicolas Cage, is too damned soft-hearted (not to mention too easily swayed from the principles he espouses at the beginning of the movie). I suppose that this is meant to be his character's fatal flaw, but it comes across as too convenient. The ending has a satisfying twist, I'll admit, but Cage has done better. I've a soft-spot for movies that take place in Thailand since I lived there during my early teens. I like it when I can see not only parts of Ba...

While looking for information on HTML coding, and also XML coding, — my interest has been renewed due to the CSS and XML coding in the new blog templates I'm using — I happened across w3schools.com . I've some knowledge of HTML and CSS coding, but my knowledge of CSS extremely limited. However, w3schools.com has tons of tutorials, covering (in addition to the previously mentioned items) XHTML , TCP / IP , JavaScript, PHP and ASP , SQL and Database, and more. Their tutorials are free. I'm unemployed. I've got lots of time, and I could spare a little time each day to learn some of these things — perhaps an hour each day. Also, w3schools.com has an online Certification Program . These are free, too. They say their "tutorials are recommended reading in over 100 Universities and High schools all over the world," and they provide a brief list of some of the schools along with links to pages showing the recommendation. For example, this page at the Univers...

It would appear that my blog template frustration has been abated. I have found a template that is . . . obedient to my every command, appears to have no problems (miracle of miracles), and is a template with which I can live (although there is one minor item I'd like to fix; I've got to figure out where the problem lies first, however). Amazing, isn't it? [EDIT: That one minor item? It's been fixed. Life is good. :P ]

I've found several templates that I like for my Townshende blog , and yet every single damned one of them has problems. Some of them have highly technical problems. One, in fact, — a template that I like a lot . . . this one, called Black Splat — had several problems. The code was designed to work around several problems with Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser (very typical of Microsoft, actually), but it didn't have the code necessary for other browsers to display that template correctly. It took me about 10 minutes of experimentation, along with some very specific searches to figure out the problem. Most people aren't interested in this crap, but indulge me. Here's the original code: body {    position: relative; /* Fixes browser resizing bug in IE6 */     margin: 10px auto;    width: 980px;    font-family: 'trebuchet ms', arial, sans-serif;    text-align: center; /* IE Centering ...

I've tried the "gadget" for Recent Posts found in Blogger's gallery of gadgets, but I didn't care for how it looked. For the list that it automatically generated, that gadget completely overrode the typography specifications embedded in this new template. I like my blogs to have a consistent appearance to them. This meant some customization if I was to have that list. It also means manual updates to keep that feature current. I'm willing to give it a shot, to see how well it works. I added this feature because I want to limit the number of posts displayed on this front page to either one or three. My inclination at the moment, given the length of my posts, is to keep it to one; I definitely would be interested in my readers' opinions on this, however. Having a list of the recent posts available, which I'm thinking of limiting to five or ten — your opinion would be welcome on that point, too — allows you to see if you've missed anything and gives y...

Added links to more destinations in my ever-growing list of links deep down below at the bottom of this blog page. Added links to . . . Belgium (not been there . . . yet) Denmark (not been there . . . yet) England (lived there for about 3½ years, when I was a teenager; lived in the village of Shenington, and later in Bloxham; this was during my high school years) Guam (been there; was a stop-over when I moved to Okinawa and again when I moved to Thailand) Japan (lived there for about 3½ years, when I was very young; lived on the island of Okinawa; went to kindergarten there, in fact) Philippines (been there; was a stop-over on the return trip from Thailand) Poland (not been there; have had several friends over the years from there; currently have one friend who lives there, in Bialystok ; good reason to go visit, if you ask me) Scotland (been there; visited when I lived in England) Sweden (not been there; for some reaso...

A test of the various headers, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, and h6. Here you go (isn't this as boring as hell? :P) — H1 — Header 1 Lorem ipsum la la-la la-la. H2 — Header 2 Lorem ipsum toodle doodle doo. H3 — Header 3 Lorem ipsum tweedle deedle dee. H4 — Header 4 Lorem ipsum twiddle iddle poo. H5 — Header 5 Lorem ipsum cock-a-poodle who? H6 — Header 6 Lorem ipsum any silly man will do. :P Well, well, well. Isn't that nifty?

In the code for this template, the three columns of links at the bottom part of this blog are called the "dashboard." The left column is "dashboard1," the middle column is "dashboard2," and the right column is "dashboard3." One problem I've had with this template from the start is that the title for each set of links butted up against the last link in the set above it. So, I've been pouring over the code trying to figure out how to fix this. I noticed that this problem did not exist in the sidebar to the right, that there was plenty of space between the small block of text with my photo and brief description and the "Writer-Speak . . ." quote. With that as my guide, I tried to find the code that spaced them apart. I found some code that read: .sidebar .widget{margin-bottom:1.5em;} I know a little about CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), so I know that a dot preceding a name defines a "class." "Classes" are used in...

I've renamed most of the various lists of links found at the bottom of this blog page. Garrulus' Travels — A half-assed attempt at a play on Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels . For those who know of my penchant for grammatical correctness (or at least my attempts to be grammatically correct), I use Garrulus' instead of Garrulus's because: 1) Garrulus is Latin, and 2) it's ancient. In fact, it is the Latin form of "garrulous," but I don't use it in the sense of that word's definition ( excessively or tiresomely talkative ). It's meant to be a play on my first name. Saith Strunk and White : 1. Form the possessive singular of nouns by adding 's . Exceptions are the possessives of ancient proper names [ending] in -es and -is, the possessive Jesus', and such forms as for conscience' sake, for righteousness' sake. Garrulus may not end in -es or -is, but since it is ancient and since it is deliberately being misu...

Why? Why not? Actually, it's to see how this page will look with a second post added. So, let's take a peek, shall we?

Well, this is a start, isn't it? Not a whole lot going on quite yet, but I've got a new template uploaded. I created a new blog and then exported the old blog to the new address, so everything is still intact. It was a bit of a mess at first, getting it all to do what I wanted it to do: creating a new blog, exporting the old to the new, updating the old to the new format, then importing the non-Blogger template I wanted to use. And now comes the long process of getting everything set up the way I want. It'll mean lots of editing, especially to get all the links and everything else I want transferred (that's the most laborious part of importing a new template, as those things get lost in the process — unless you take care to save them first). I originally wanted to go with a template called Reckoning , but I experienced too many problems with the damned thing. The original template, which you can see here , was not designed for Blogger. It's a CSS template (CSS = Cas...