Posts

Posted on

Separated at birth?

Holy crap! Until just a few minutes ago, I’d never actually seen what the members of the band The National look like. I got curious and went to YouTube, where I watched the video for “Bloodbuzz Ohio”.

Is it just me, or is lead singer Matt Berninger a dead ringer for a bearded Phil Hartman… at least in the music video??

Phil Hartmannational_01national_02

It’s not even the resemblance so much as it is the mannerisms. At one point in the video, Berninger does this little dance thing, and I could swear to God it’s Bill McNeal come back to life.

Watch the video yourself and tell me what you think:

Posted on

Quote of the Day

“It is a very strange sensation to inexperienced youth to feel itself quite alone in the world, cut adrift from every connection, uncertain whether the port to which it is bound can be reached, and prevented by many impediments from returning to that it has quitted. The charm of adventure sweetens that sensation, the glow of pride warms it; but then the throb of fear disturbs it; and fear with me has become predominant, when half an hour elapsed and I was still alone.”

– Charlotte Brontë
Jane Eyre

Posted on

Restoring all tabs in Firefox

I post this both as a tip and as a lesson that even IT guys can sometimes miss the obvious:

I’ve used Firefox for years, and one of my favorite things about it is the “session saver” feature. If you have ten eBay tabs open, you can close Firefox and those same ten eBay tabs will reload the next time you open Firefox.

But I never figured out how to restore multiple windows. If you have, for instance, one window with ten eBay tabs and another window with five Amazon tabs, you have to choose which window you want to close first, as only the last window will be restored. So if you close the eBay window and then the Amazon window, only the Amazon tabs will be restored. Or if you closed the Amazon window first, only the eBay tabs would be restored.

And then it hit me last night: if you close Firefox by clicking File > Exit (or, in Firefox 4, Firefox > Exit), the browser will restore multiple windows when you restart.

Duh!

Posted on

Quote of the Day

It seems appropriate today.

Standing firm on this stony ground,
The wind blows hard,
Pulls these clothes around;
I harbour all the same worries as most,
The temptations to leave or to give up the ghost.

I wrestle with an outlook on life,
That shifts between darkness and shadowy light;
I struggle with words for fear that they’ll hear,
But Orpheus sleeps on his back still dead to the world.

Sunlight falls, my wings open wide,
There’s a beauty here I cannot deny;
And the bottles that tumble and crash on the stairs,
Are just so many people I knew never cared.

Down below on the wreck of the ship,
Are a stronghold of pleasures I couldn’t regret;
But the baggage is swallowed up by the tide,
As Orpheus keeps to his promise and stays by my side.

Tell me, I’ve still a lot to learn.
Understand, these fires never stop,
Believe me, when this joke is tired of laughing,
I will hear the promise of my Orpheus sing.

Sleepers sleep as we row the boat,
Just you, the weather, and I gave up hope;
But all of the hurdles that fell in our laps,
Were fuel for the fire and straw for our backs.

Still the voices have stories to tell,
Of the power struggles in heaven and hell;
But we feel secure against such mighty dreams,
As Orpheus sings of the promise tomorrow may bring.

– David Sylvian
“Orpheus”

Posted on

Useless Facts!

The original jimcofer.com FrontPage site used to have a “Fact of the Week” on the home page. I used to have a page on that site where I stored all the previous facts. This became the “Useless Facts” page on this site, but since I stopped updating the facts years ago, I decided to cut and paste the old page into a post and delete the original.

So here ya go:

– The Kid Loco remix of the Saint Etienne song “4:35 In The Morning” is exactly 4 minutes and 35 seconds long.

– The character “Fez” from That 70’s Show got his name from pre-production scripts, where he was referred to only as “Foreign Exchange Student” (abbreviated “FES”).

– Dennis Hopper really was inhaling nitrous oxide on the set of Blue Velvet.

– The scene at the beginning of Apocalypse Now when Martin Sheen put his hand through the mirror?? Also real.

– Every ten minutes, the National Security Agency destroys a stack of classified papers 6 feet wide, 8 feet tall and 60 feet long.

– The shortest war on record – between Britain and Zanzibar in 1896 – lasted just 38 minutes.

Continue reading “Useless Facts!”

Posted on

Quote of the Day

“A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”

– James Joyce
“The Dead”

Posted on

31 MORE Great 80s Movies!

This list from the Old Stuff Archive. Per my post from the other day, I’m going through the archive and re-posting a bunch of old items that didn’t make the cut when I migrated this site from FrontPage to WordPress. Enjoy!

The following is a list of some of my favorite 80s films. When I originally wrote this article, it was a follow-up list of “Honorable Mentions” to this list of my 31 favorite 80s films. As such, the descriptions are much shorter and don’t include IMDB links or pictures.

Amazon Women on the Moon – A hilarious comedy from 1987. There’s no “plot” to this film; the movie is just made of bits and pieces that go back and forth, as if you were flipping through the dial trying to find something to watch. While the film is still funny, it’s extremely dated. And if you’re under the age of 30 you might miss much of the humor altogether since you weren’t around during the “VHS vs. Laserdisc”, “Celebrity Roast” and “The Late, Late Night Movie” era.

Back To The Future – A hugely popular trilogy of films in the 80s, starring Michael J. Fox as the time-traveling teenager that must go back and make sure his parents stick together. It’s still good family entertainment (although the quality of the films decreases at they go on), but I didn’t include it on my list since most of the action takes place in the 1950s.

Beetle Juice – Lots of people love this film. I’ve recently come to the conclusion that I just don’t like most Tim Burton movies. I’m sorry, make me hand in my “cool people’s card” if you will, but I just don’t care for them. This one’s pretty funny, though.

Continue reading “31 MORE Great 80s Movies!”

Posted on

31 Great 80s Movies!

This list is from the Old Stuff Archive. Per my post from the other day, I’m going through the archive and re-posting a bunch of old items that didn’t make the cut when I migrated this site from FrontPage to WordPress back in 2007. Enjoy!

The following is a list of some of my favorite 80s films. It’s not a “best of” list. I originally got the idea for this from talking to a much younger friend of mine who’d only seen a couple of films on this list. And while it’s not a “best of” list, the films are listed in rough order of preference.

Also, keep in mind that this is a list of “80s films” and not a list of “films made in the 80s”. There were plenty of great films from that time that have nothing to do with 80s culture, like Amadeus and Chariots of Fire. This list isn’t about them. It’s about movies that capture what life was like – directly or indirectly – in the 1980s.

The links are to the IMDB page for each film.

#31 Videodrome (1983) – Videodrome stars James Woods as Max Renn, the sleazy owner of a soft-core porn channel in New York City. Renn is always on the lookout for new material that’s both “cheap” and “edgy”, so when his chief engineer Harlan (Peter Dvorsky) finds a new program called Videodrome from Malaysia on the station’s pirate satellite dish, he’s excited. The program is simple: women are brought into a room, tied up, and are beaten until they die. There’s just something about the show that Renn cannot resist. He watches every second of it and comes in every morning begging Harlan for more.

Little does Renn know what’s really going on: an evil corporation called Spectacular Optical produces Videodrome, and embedded within the show’s transmission signal is another signal which causes brain damage in every person that watches it. This damage – which causes massive hallucinations – can then be manipulated by the company to get any person to do anything they wish. Spectacular Optical’s president, Barry Convex, and Harlan (who was working for Convex the whole time) “program” Max to kill his partners and give the company control over CIVIC-TV, Max’s station. Which Max does. After this, Max is “re-programmed” by Bianca O’blivion, the daughter of Brian O’Bilvion, a “nutcase” (or is he?) that only communicates through television itself. Max then takes on the leaders of Spectacular Optical with a single hand grenade, then later kills himself.

Videodrome

I initially watched this movie for Renn’s crazy hallucinations and the “trippiness” of the whole story. I recently saw it again and realized just how dated the “hallucinations” look now.

However, watching it again also made me think of what director David Cronenberg was trying to say. Is TV evil? Or do corporations have too much power over our lives? Or both? Are there really people in the government that would be willing to look the other way if a similar technology were used by a private company? These are the questions the film raises. New Wave fans will enjoy Debbie Harry, who stars as Nikki Brand, Renn’s masochistic lover. If you’re a fan of Skinny Puppy, Front 242, Ministry, or any of the “Wax Trax” bands, you should see this film immediately, as every single one of those acts sampled this movie in at least one of their songs!

Continue reading “31 Great 80s Movies!”

Posted on

Force FF’s Download Manager to a Tab

I love Firefox 4, but one thing I don’t like about it is having the download manager as a separate window. I can’t stand Google Chrome; believe it or not, IE 9 has replaced Chrome as my “second choice browser”. But one thing I do like about Chrome is the way the download manager appears as just another tab.

You don’t need an extension to replicate Chrome’s behavior in Firefox. In fact, setting Firefox up to do this is pretty easy:

1) Click on the  Firefox button in the upper left corner of the browser window and select Options > Options. On the “General” tab, uncheck the box next to “Show the Downloads window when downloading a file”. Click “OK” to exit the Options screen.

2) Cut and paste the following address into the address bar:

chrome://mozapps/content/downloads/downloads.xul

This will open the download manager in a tab.

3) Right-click the downloads tab and select “Pin as App Tab”.

The download tab will then appear to the left of your active tabs:

ff_download_as_tab
(click to embiggen)