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United States, North Carolina, Carrboro, English, Paul, Male, 56-60, All Music, All Food.

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Saturday, February 26, 2005

“Yew got them chicken-livered men too excited…”   If a buncha cowboys riding at night with nooses dangling from their saddles or dialogue like the line above is your cup of tea, then Run Home, Slow just might be the movie for you. I’m one of a very few people who have actually seen it. A friend sent me a VHS copy a couple of years ago and I converted it to SVCD.   What is SVCD? Long story, but here’s the quick version. Video CDs became very popular throughout Asia in the mid-90s. They were very low quality video that could be recorded on a standard CD (recorders and blank media were still pretty expensive “back then”). When DVDs, even more expensive, begin to hit the market, the Chinese government had engineers develop a standard whereby movies could be recorded on standard CDs. The rationale was that they wanted access to foreign culture (cough-cough, don’t even think “pirated”) for even their poorest citizens. The engineers done right good. Using a superior compression algorithm, they managed to nearly double both the quality and the recordable length that could be squeezed onto a lowly CD – nearly 50 minutes of VHS quality video!   The history of Run Home, Slow is funny. Don Cerveris was Frank Zappa’s high school; English teacher, who got Frank to do the soundtrack. The music is good and the theme has a bit of guitar-playing that might be a very young Zappa. Can’t prove it. Zappa later gave a synopsis of the plot as thus:   "A bad ranch lady, a nymphomaniac cowgirl, and a hunchbacked handyman named Kirby who eventually ends up pooching the nympho in the barn, next to the rotting carcass of the family donkey."   I’m watching it now thanks to a new tool I downloaded this morning, SVCD2DVD. It allows me to read 2 or 3 SVCDs and then convert them to just one DVD. I never believed recordable DVDs would become as cheap as they have, so I spent an entire summer converting Zappa VHS – movies, interviews, public service announcements – to SVCD. It was a great joy to be able to see all these things, but making an SVCD was a major pain in the ass – taking hours to set everything up and then as long as a day to render the video into usable files. With higher speed CPU, cheap hard drive space, and better tools, this process has become trivial. It took less than 30 minutes for me to convert SVCD and burn the DVD of Run Home, Slow.   The video quality on this is similar to what you might get on a B&W TV with rabbit ears back in the 60s, and that’s a perfect match.   3:11:46 PM    comment []

As I was resizing this picture in PhotoShop Elements, I happened to glance up at “F” keys all in a row on my Microsoft keyboard. I rarely use any of the shortcut keys on it so I’d never noticed that F2 doubles as “Undo” and F3 as “Redo.” I still haven’t used them. Still, it would be nice if we had those functions as easily accessible in life itself.   Suppose you held up a convenience store, for example, and as you’re running out into the parking lot with your booty you see a whole slew of oncoming police cruisers with wailing sirens and flashing lights. An “undo” function would come in real handy right then. But it wouldn’t have to be a felony; it could be something as simple as undoing that last teaspoon of sugar you put in your coffee that made it too sweet.   I bought a Usinger’s beer sausage while I was in Ohio a few weeks ago and brought it in to work to share. These things not only are visually amusing, they taste great! So good that a good friend of mine there asked me where he could get a couple. I didn’t have a “Redo” key for my Ohio trip, but I did have Google. It was only a matter of seconds and we had located Usinger’s web site. Finding the beer sausage, Hielman’s Old Style or Pabst, was no problem either. The problem was the 6-pound minimum order.   What the heck. I made a few phone calls and told a few cubicle mateys and in a few more minutes I had the 6 pounds and then some. The order, still frozen, arrived Thursday and you can see the results above: Beef Salami, Braunschweiger, Schinkenwurst, Yachtwurst (pistachios in it!), and the beer sausage. We’ll prorate the ~$20 shipping by item weight when the invoice comes. Notice how I avoided any “wurst” jokes? They are tasteless and, worse, cliché and not even a “redo” key could scrub the brain cells of people whose minds you infected with one. So, even though the order arrived, in that regard you can safely say the wurst is yet to come. You can.   5:41:40 AM    comment []