I Promise You, This Will Be One of the Weirder Things You’ll See Today

- Poppa

Segways Over Forest Park – 2009

It Takes a Viking to Raze a Village

We went to our first Renaissance Festival in Atlanta in the 1980s, back when it was a simple little thing held at a pavilion at Lake Laneir.  There were some members of the Society for Creative Anachronism bashing each other on the head with padded swords and a few artisans selling period clothing and jewelry.  Over the years it grew and grew until it covered several acres, involved hundreds of characters, thousands of visitors, and consumed turkey legs by the ton. 

This year we visited the St. Louis equivalent, the Greater Saint Louis Renaissance Faire, which, not surprisingly, has a French flavor.  The grounds were beautifully wooded; the booths and performance areas seemed to wind forever through the forest.  There are serious exhibits, such as the charcoal burner’s encampment, and downright silly places, like “Arrbucks Coffee” (there’s a huge overlap with the current pirate frenzy).  The men frequently indulge their fascination with weapons; the above gentleman greeting people at the gate was armed with a rapier, a short stabbing sword, a dagger, a fighting axe, and a flintlock pistol, all peace bonded with zip ties.  The women frequently indulge their fascination with breast presentation, cramming them into corsets that display them in all their jiggly glory.

The Faire is mostly family friendly, but every now and then, you encounter something that’s not quite Disney.  Some of the leather artisan’s products cross the line into S&M territory, you have to be over 21 to buy some items, and there are usually several booths selling fully-functional edged weapons.

There is a huge overlap between the SF-Fantasy community and the Renfest folks.  It’s not uncommon to see the same people in the same costumes at SF conventions and the same bumper stickers in the parking areas (“Republicans for Voldemort” “It Takes a Viking to Raze a Village”).  There’s an oft-stated sentiment that Renfest participants are creating “The Middle Ages as they should have been,” meaning: no open sewers, burning witches, flogging peasants, or putting the boot to the scullery maid.  It’s also come to mean elves with pointy ears and fairies with wings.

Both SF Cons and Renfests are for people who’ve never grown up or accepted the limitations of so-called “reality,” people like me.

And here’s the obligatory food shot, California Pizza Kitchen’s Wild Mushroom pizza: Cremini, Shiitake, Portobello and white mushrooms, Fontina and Mozzarella cheeses with a wild mushroom walnut pesto.  . . . .mmmmm. . . .

- Poppa

“What Light Through Yonder Airlock Breaks?”

Saturday night Nan and I accompanied Joe and Marie (Nan’s brother and his wife) to see a performance of New Line Theater’s Return to the Forbidden Planet, a version of the 1950s SF classic movie Forbidden Planet, itself based on/inspired by Shakespeare’s The Tempest.  Like the Worm Ouroboros, the snake swallowing its own tail, Return to the Forbidden Planet loops back to the original source.

It’s not every day you get to hear the term “klystron generator” embedded in Iambic Pentameter.  New Line Theater’s Return to the Forbidden Planet is a glorious hodgepodge of Shakespearian bombast and kitschy 1950s references; Miranda’s/Altaira’s Poodle Skirt has a rocket instead of a poodle and Ariel/Robbie the Robot zips around the set on carhop roller skates.  There were even a few Star Trek phaser shout-outs thrown in for people under fifty, though everybody knows the crew of the C-57D was armed with neutron beam blasters.

Seeing (actually, hearing) Forbidden Planet is a vividly remembered event from my youth.  I saw it in on TV in the late ‘50s, not knowing what it was called, and it scared the bejabbers out of me.  I fled to the top of the stairs and listened to the sounds of the “Monster from the Id,” afraid to look, but too fascinated to turn off the TV.  It wasn’t until years later, while looking through a coffee table book on Science Fiction films, that I learned what had frightened me so as a child.  When I watched it for the first time as an adult, it was a cathartic experience.

The entire cast was good, but Zachary Allen Farmer, playing Prospero/Morbius really stood out. He was channeling Walter Pidgeon, and I mean that in a good way.  We’ve enjoyed him (Farmer) before as Barry in High Fidelity, and Barry is about as far as you can get from Prosporo/Morbius.

The music, classic ‘50s and ‘60s rock standards, tied the whole thing together beautifully.  The only negatives were the occasional Shakespearian soliloquies that stopped the tempo of the show like a circular saw hitting a knot.  Shakespeare was used to best effect when the cast mined every bad pun they could out of his work: “Two Beeps or Not Two Beeps, that is the Question!” “Beware the Ids that march!”  But I wasn’t crazy about the soliloquies.  Having them intrude on the rock-and-roll/SF fun was like finding a peppercorn in your ice cream.  They’re both edible, but they don’t belong together.

- Poppa

Veridian Dynamics – When Presidents Talk

Do Do That Hulu That They Do So Well

The long nightmare is over! Once again, we can watch (almost) current TV on demand, complete with the oh-so-essential Pause function, while ensconced in our big ol’ TV-watchin’ chairs.  But this time we’re not at the mercy of DIRECTV or any of the other Big Cable minions of the Devil.  And the best thing is, IT’S FREE!  Sort of.  Ya gotta have the bandwidth. * See the Boring Stuff if you want to know more about bandwidth.

After several months of frustration, I finally bit the bullet and had a member of the Geek Squad come out and tell me why I wasn’t able to get my HDMI cable to work between our PC and our HDTV (it turns out I was NOT supposed to use the Expletive Deleted PC setting on the TV).  Now our 1080p HDTV functions as a really high-resolution giant PC monitor.

While it’s great fun being able to blog from across the room, my real motivation for this was to watch our favorite cable channel shows on free PC TV.  Now we can enjoy new Battlestar Galactica episodes in style and comfort the morning after they debut on the Sci Fi channel.

While Erin was here last week, we watched Battlestar Galactica while huddled around the laptop, just like Neanderthals huddled around a campfire 50,000 years ago, or Hippies huddled around an old RCA Victor 40 years ago.  As we huddled, Erin told us about a site called hulu, where there is a huge amount of video content, both movies and TV, both old and new.

There seems to be some kind of Harmonic Convergence going on here.  Internet TV was the subject of a recent CNN headline story, and millions of people around the world heard about hulu during a Superbowl XLIII ad.  I’ve also tried some of the Netflix Instant Play features now that I can see them on a big screen.

There are still some down-sides.  The streaming video will occasionally hang and the quality of the images isn’t as sharp as DIRECTV high def (the Netflix Instant Play features look better and have been more reliable, so far).  There are supposed to be some HD shows available on hulu but I’ve mostly been watching old episodes of Lost in Space from the sixties, so HD hasn’t been a priority yet.

The hulu stuff isn’t commercial free, but the commercials are few in number and brief in duration, at least for now.  They are also not diverse and make hulu look like a front for the DoD.  I must have seen the same six Air Force ads twenty times each by now.  Unlike Tivo, you can’t fast-forward through the commercials, though you can see where they will be in the progress meter at the bottom of the screen.  If you try to jump beyond the next commercial, you’ll be routed through the ad before you can get to where you want to go in the program.  Gotcha!

I suspect this is going to get a lot better as additional shows jump on board and streaming reliability and image quality improves.  It’s also probably going to get a little worse as advertisers figure out this is where their rice bowl is going to be in the future.

Damn, I love being alive in this day and age.

- Poppa

* This is the Boring Stuff

Hulu requires a minimum download bandwidth of 1,000 Kbps (kilobits per second) and recommends a bandwidth of 1,500 Kbps to watch most videos.  To give you an idea where this fits into The World, AT&T Basic DSL is rated at 768 Kbps.  You might be able to watch most of the clips with this level of service, but you won’t get any sympathy from the hulu support people if you have trouble.

AT&T’s next highest package supports 1,500 Kbps.  The clips in hulu’s HD Gallery are encoded at 2,500 Kbps.  They recommend a download bandwidth of over 3,500 Kbps to stream those.  You don’t see those speeds until you get into the Pro or Premium DSL plans.  I think cable modems are comparable.

If you’re not sure what your bandwidth is, Google “bandwidth test” and a bunch of free bandwidth tests will pop up.