Today I got up early and ran in the Tortoise and Hare 5k in downtown Ann Arbor, hung out at home and finished editing a paper that I was unable to finish last night, and went out to lunch at ABC with Dave. Lame-ass Theresa and Rich didn’t join us, but that’s okay, they probably didn’t feel well or have time. Since I had no particular thing to do or place to be, and I didn’t want to go back home and sit in my hot, stuffy apartment for 6 hours, I decided to drive around to a couple stores and look for furniture or electronics that I could buy in the future (after I move next month or next summer). I headed for Art Van, the furniture store, to look at coffee tables, end tables, night stands, and couches. I saw lots of good ones, probably plenty of things Kathy and I would like, but it felt kind of pointless without her there (for her knowledge of home design and her opinion of every piece, as they will be joint decisions), but then I saw the TV store that existed in an annex in the back of the store: Paul’s TV. It is like the “home theater” section of Best Buy, just a medium-sized room in the back of the store, and it operates as an independent store. I’m sure they have plenty of TV/furniture deals in coordination with Art Van, but other than that, they’re separate.

I went back to Paul’s TV and sat down in an armchair to watch a plasma TV (Panasonic P50S2) and an LED-backlit Sharp (LC52LE700U) that were set up perpendicular to each other. I had a good angle to watch the Tigers game on both, though it was closer than I’d typically sit at home. The reason I sat down to watch those two, mainly the Sharp, is that the local appliance store ABC Warehouse had given me a guaranteed price of $1500 for the Sharp, to be delivered in August after I move, if I paid a down payment on it, but I saw that Paul’s TV had it for $1197. THAT…is insane. Paul’s TV never charges for shipping, whereas ABC Warehouse would have charged $50.

Naturally, my first thought was that this was too good to be true, but I double-checked the model number and size. I had been keeping track of many TV prices in a spreadsheet over the last year (yes, total loser-geek), so I had gotten good at memorizing model numbers and was already familiar with this one anyway. It was definitely the same TV, for $350 cheaper. Its MSRP is $2000. My second thought was also along the lines of, “This is too good to be true,” but referring to the picture quality—maybe this TV isn’t all that great, despite great reviews (at both Amazon and Newegg, which is a ringing endorsement, considering the tech-savvy videophiles who populate Newegg). It is that great. I thought that its colors might have been a little too bright or washed out compared to the plasma, but, first of all, that’s adjustable, and I don’t believe that the Sharp’s colors will be the slightest, remotest bit sub-optimal after I adjust them. One strong point of the Sharp LEDs according to reviewers is the color accuracy. The motion of the ball and players seemed nearly identical to the S2, with the edge probably going to the S2. I don’t know if that’s a by-product of the colors being turned up too bright, but I wouldn’t be surprised. The big advantage of the Sharp LED was, surprisingly, its black levels (and other dark levels). They were better than the plasma’s. Its blacks were blacker, and it was easier to distinguish a few details in dark places than on the plasma. This is despite the incessant claims by videophiles at CNet and everywhere else that plasmas’ black levels are so superior to LCDs’. Not these two. (Nor any plasmas in ABC Warehouse, which is the very thing that swayed Kathy and me towards the Sharp in the first place.) In and around the backdrop of Comerica Park, which is the dark, empty part behind center field that enables the hitter to see the pitched ball, more detail was distinguishable. It was July 4th, so the Tigers and Mariners were both wearing these special “patriotic” caps (here’s the Tigers one). Before the start of one inning, the camera zoomed in very close to a Tigers hat that was sitting in the dugout or in a shaded part of the stands or somewhere; I guess the Fox Sports crew had set it up there for the purpose of zooming in one inning. The LED-backlit TV was far, far more detailed and accurate in showing the lines of the Tigers’ English D and distinguishing the navy-blue textures of the middle and left side of that logo from one another. It was a mess of navy blue on the plasma, and a clear English D on the LED-backlit screen. Sold.

To make the end of this story rather shorter, I took this price to ABC Warehouse to challenge them to beat it, but I had no documentation, so all they could beat was the website’s price of $1497 (the $1197 was a special 4th of July sale). I went back to Paul’s TV, paid a 10% down payment on my credit card, got the receipt, brought it to the ABC Warehouse manager, who eventually told me he would not only match it but beat it by $100. I don’t know if he mistyped, misspoke, or miscalculated, but he actually gave it to me for over $160 less than Paul’s TV: $1102 after tax and shipping, compared to $1268 in total from Paul’s TV. That is INSANE, people.

When Kathy and I had first picked out the Sharp LED-backlit TV in June, I walked out of there telling her it wasn’t quite a steal, but it was a very good or great deal on a great, long-lasting, highly reviewed TV that we both witnessed outperforming every TV in the store with a remotely similar price. But $1100, THAT is a steal. It’s unbelievable. I am ecstatic. This has made my month.

So I have liked most of the clips of Late Night With Jimmy Fallon that I’ve seen online, but nothing prepared me for the blinding white light of brilliance that emanates from this clip. I first saw it posted on my friend’s Facebook page and have watched it about 10 times since.

Instead, for now, I’ll publish them on my LifeBlag, and I’ll start with a limerick about the book and movie that have been on my mind for the last couple weeks: The Silence of the Lambs. I realized I was remiss in never having seen the movie, but after I discovered it was based on a novel I committed myself to reading the novel first. I added both the novel by Thomas Harris and the movie on Blu-ray to my Amazon wish list. Luckily, the novel was very cheap, about $5.50, so I bought it in the summer and read it this month. I don’t own a Blu-ray player yet, nor do I plan on buying Blu-ray discs or players for a couple years, but Kathy insisted that after I finished the novel, we had to watch the movie; we rented it and watched it last week.

To save you and myself from an overly detailed comparison, I’ll say the movie was about as close in content and in quality to the book as any movie/book combination I’m familiar with. Even though Anthony Hopkins won the Best Actor (not Best Supporting Actor) Oscar for his portrayal of Dr. Hannibal Lecter with less than 17 minutes of screen time and the English-speaking public is almost unanimous in regarding Hannibal the Cannibal as the greatest movie villain of all time, an additional few exchanges or perhaps an entire scene between him and Clarice would have made the movie and his performance more powerful. The deleted scenes included some bits of their conversations that were almost verbatim from the book, that would have given Hopkins even more chance to shine, and that would have given viewers more insight into Clarice’s psyche.

Anyway, here’s the long version of The Silence of the Lambs in limerick form. It takes some things that were exclusive to the book and at least one that was exclusive to the movie, but it’s all basically the same story:

In Behavioral Science they sought
murderers who victims caught
one after the other
to rape, skin, or smother
and regarded their humanity not.

Young Starling was but a mere student
whom, Crawford thought, ‘twould be prudent
to send on an errand—
she’s young and she’s fair and
she might reach the madman we couldn’t.

Alone in a sunlight-less cell,
Lecter burned in his well-deserved hell
To get in his head,
to avert one more dead,
to glean clues he won’t straightforward tell:

Young Starling was charged with this task.
Jack needn’t a second time ask;
she was eager to prove
she could easily move
up from her roots, which were white trash.

Down behind plexiglass screen,
he dropped clues for Starling to glean:
A head in a jar
in an old victim’s car
told more than it would, at first, seem.

Another young body emerged,
a girl of considerable girth.
Clarice helped to print her
and noticed that in her
mouth a cocoon was insert’d.

By feigning impairment he caught her,
the tough junior senator’s daughter.
About a fourteen?—
his judgment’s quite keen
for a fiend who takes women to slaughter.

Back to his lair they sped.
Mere scraps and lefto’ers she was fed.
Trapped in a well
in his dark, homemade hell,
her heart filled with mis’ry and dread.

Her pleas and her promises failed
to sway the man who had her jailed.
Put lotion on skin,
send it back up again,
in exchange for her excrement pail.

He doesn’t just capture and kill,
nor does he rape for the thrill.
He covets, Clarice,
to transform, find peace:
the motive of Buffalo Bill.

Clarice divulged long-hidden pains—
quid pro quo was the name of their game—
of horses and sheep
that haunted her sleep,
but Hannibal gave her no name.

In his new high-security cage,
Lecter showed neither malice nor rage
until, with a key,
he broke himself free
and escaped with a cop’s borrowed face.

The first body wasn’t the first;
’twas the third, weighted down to divert.
Why try to hide it
so no one would find it
till after the second or third?

The rationale didn’t quite register
till Clarice grokked the clues Dr. Lecter
had fed her in pieces,
and then said, “Oh, Jesus!
He must have resided in Belvedere!”

To Fredrica’s hometown she went
to interrogate family and friends.
But what gave her a start
were the girl’s sewing darts
like the ones in the last victim’s skin.

Their former employer to seek,
hot on the trail was Clarice.
A sewing professional,
rejected transsexual,
he’s skinning himself a boutique!

“Yes, we know, from Johns Hopkins, a name
with a typo: not Jamie, but Jame.
An address near Chicago
where he shipped pre-imago
caterpillars that later became

the moths and the grand butterflies
with which Jame Gumb identifies.”
Far away’s where the game is!
She was feeling quite anxious
but was closer than she realized.

He acted aloof but complied.
Nothing he said seemed contrived.
A moth in the air.
Mr. Gumb met her stare.
The moment of truth had arrived.

Chasing him down underground.
He was hiding and couldn’t be found.
The girl screamed in fright,
and then out went the lights
and Clarice was left feeling around.

Silently watching her search,
with his night-vision goggles he lurked.
His pistol he cocked,
she turned and she shot,
and he toppled there…dying…inert.

Now Hannibal Lecter’s in hiding,
but doubtless his time he is biding.
On Doc Chilton’s trail,
but he still didn’t fail
to send Clarice Starling his tidings.

Our heroine has proven supreme
and ended the psychopath’s scheme.
And now the lambs’ cries,
as Lecter surmised,
will no longer torment her dreams.

Speaking of Windows, this is one of the funniest things I’ve read in a while.

The entry for Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country was the featured article on the Wikipedia home page on October 6. Freakin’ sweet. I LOVE that movie. Probably my favorite Star Trek movie and definitely in my top 10 or 20 favorite movies of all time. Please don’t read any of the plot summary if you aren’t familiar with it. You should get ahold of the DVD’s of Star Trek 2, 3, 4, and 6, and watch them in close succession. You will discover a strong appreciation for the Star Trek universe.

I am not as good of a speller as I was when I was a child. This kind of disturbs me because I feel it is indicative of reduced perspicacity and failure to pay attention to detail as well as I used to. Maybe my mind is lazier or doesn’t retain information as solidly as it used to. That shouldn’t start happening until I’m really old, like, my parents’ age. I never had a photographic memory or anything, but I used to be able to look at a word once and pretty reliably spell it for years and years after that. (This certainly wasn’t 100% true, and it didn’t help me win any spelling bees, as I missed simple words that I had read numerous times before. In 4th grade, I won my class’s spelling bee but lost in the school-wide competition by spelling apology “apolagy”, and in 5th grade I expected to win my class’s competition again so I must not have studied very much, and I misspelled balcony as “balcany” on my first word of the day! Identical errors, two years in a row, but I didn’t actually think balcony was spelled that way; it was more like a typo than an error of thought or memory. It was a speak-o. “A” rushed out of my mouth when I knew “O” belonged there.) Now I forget all kinds of things I used to know and should have retained. I don’t expect to spell everything right, but words like “broccoli”, “accommodate”, and “preferable” have really enraged me in recent months. I haven’t misspelled “privilege” in a long while. That’s good.

(Btw, the one and only reason I would ever use the word perspicacity in speech or writing is because Lisa Simpson uses it to great humorous effect in the episode “Lisa the Simpson”: “Oh, my god! I’m losing my perspicacity!”)

One of the five or so country songs that I like is “Alcohol” by Brad Paisley. Only recently did I understand all the lyrics of the chorus, because of a Jack Daniels commercial I saw. The chorus begins, “Ever since I left Milwaukee, Lynchburg, Bordeaux, France/I’ve been making the bars lots of big money/And helping white people dance….” I didn’t understand the word Lynchburg. I thought it could have been Pittsburgh, but that didn’t make any sense and it didn’t sound like a P at the beginning, so I was pretty much clueless. And then I saw a Jack Daniels commercial that showed a close-up of the bottle, and the label said, “Lynchburg, Tennessee.” So I knew he was referring to Jack Daniels whiskey at that part. I don’t quite think beer originated in Milwaukee or wine in France any more than whiskey originated in Tennessee, so…I’m not too sure about that chorus.

Speaking of alcohol, there’s a professor here at the medical school who must be kind of a lush (then again, lots of them are) because he is a regular at one of my favorite bars, and somehow he is well-known for ordering a hazelnut daiquiri at happy hour every week before he gets into his beer drinking. It’s like his schtick. I saw him there last Friday, and I don’t know him personally, so I didn’t say anything, but he sat close to where I was at the bar. Somehow I felt privileged to witness him first-hand saying, “I’ll have the regular, [I forget bartender's name], my hazelnut daiquiri.” The bartender said, “Sorry to disappoint, but we were clean out of hazelnuts. Try this instead, on the house.” The doctor looked kind of annoyed and silently drank it. He said, emotionless, “Hmm. Pecans?” The bartender responded, “Nope. It’s a hickory daiquiri, doc!” Rimshot!

Here are Morgan and Adam previewing and interviewing the creative director of the game.

Here is another G4 guy reviewing Scribblenauts.

Randall Munroe must be on the same brainwaves as I am recently, because today he published yet another comic with very coincidental timing related to my recent experiences.

However, it turned out not to be that funny and not really fascinating, either. I suppose it was well-written and the characters were somewhat interesting, and I got a little bit of a flavor of what life was like on this fictitious Caribbean island. But all the trials and tribulations that the main character suffers through in the purchase and management of his new hotel/restaurant/bar were more frustrating and stressful than funny.

Next was an Agatha Christie novel, which was very clever, as usual. I have a lot of those still to read, and they’re short, so I felt both interested and obligated to read one of those.

After that, though, I knew I wanted a clever and thought-provoking science-fiction novel. Over the last few months, glancing at my bookshelf, some of the novels I considered reading were Bruce Sterling’s saga about the future technology and space colonization of the human race, Schismatrix; Dan Simmons’s beloved, epic, Hugo-winning novel Hyperion; Ursula K. LeGuin’s story of an anarchist utopia of sorts, The Dispossessed; and Connie Willis’s Hugo- and Nebula-winning novel about time-travel, Doomsday Book. I have also long wanted to dive into two large books I own, a collection of Harlan Ellison‘s short stories and Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, which also came highly recommended by the aforementioned NIH labmate.

However, somehow that afternoon I was drawn to Speaker for the Dead and grabbed it first. I am really glad I did because it is awesome in every way. It picks up a considerable time after Ender’s Game, and I had forgotten a lot of the details of Ender’s Game, apparently. I remembered a lot of stuff about Battle School, and his siblings publishing essays under the pseudonyms Locke and Demosthenes, and the little holographic instant messages the students used to send each other, and of course the most important plot points. But a lot of things Ender does after Battle School that Orson Scott Card mentions in the other novels were news to me. Maybe they weren’t actually included in Ender’s Game and we’re supposed to learn this history as we go. Like the good and bad aspects of the Hegemon, who the Hegemon even is, and Ender’s exile from planet Earth for the rest of his life (which is the subject of a new and enticing novel). Some things that must have been featured prominently in Ender’s Game that I had completely forgotten, however, were the ansible, Ender’s killing of two Battle School mates partially in self-defense, and the significance of those dreams Ender kept having about that giant.

Maybe since I had forgotten so much about Ender’s Game, I’m not in a position to make quality judgments about the novel, but nevertheless I would say Speaker for the Dead is an equally good novel. I just loved it. The plot was fascinating, the science-fictional aspects that Card invented like the pequeninos and the descolada were clever, and Ender’s ability to deal with people and understand and love and heal them is just perfect.

Within a day of finishing that, I went to Barnes & Noble and bought the second half of the quartet of novels, Xenocide and Children of the Mind. I loved those almost as much and agreed with the blurb on the back of the latter that described the Ender novels as “a saga of the ethical evolution of humanity”. The main point of each novel, it seems, was to use science-fiction to explore ethical dilemmas that humans and even other species might face.

When I read Ender’s Game I credited Card with inventing or at least successfully predicting the future nature of instant messaging and blags/discussion forums. I don’t know what other authors might have made similar or different predictions that influenced him, though.

I found it very coincidental that today’s xkcd comic was about Ender’s Game and its blag-like ansible forums.

So if you haven’t read any of the Ender books or you were stuck on one for a long time like I was, get out and buy Speaker for the Dead today!

1. When Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum are walking away from their crashed alien fighter jet across the desert in Independence Day, and they’re smoking their cigars, and the heat is coming up off the ground, and the smoke and fire are in the background, and they’re just totally bad-ass in every way. I don’t care what people say about that movie, I love the movie and I LOVE that shot.

2. Much more obscure: In Star Trek VI, when the Excelsior is flying at maximum warp to rendezvous with the Enterprise at Khitomer to help it fend off the reputed Klingon bird of prey that can fire while cloaked, and Captain Sulu urges his helmsman to push the Excelsior as fast as she can go, and the helmsman warns, “She’ll fly apart,” I love the way Sulu responds, fiercely and intensely, “Fly her apart, then!” I can’t explain this one. I don’t know why I care about that line from Sulu, but it’s just so perfect.

3. The photograph of Sean Maher (Simon Tam) in the opening credits of Firefly…he’s standing with some kind of formal wear on, a suit and a vest, looking off to the right with virtually no expression on his face, but I love it because it’s just so…poignant, stoic, artistic, something. There’s something undefinable about that photograph that makes me want to watch the entire opening credits every time. That, and the very defiant, libertarian theme song.

4. The last shot in the montage of scenes in the opening credits of season three of Battlestar Galactica: The young-ish, clean-cut male Cylon model #5 is standing in front of Gaius Baltar’s desk, and two of the female Cylons are walking up beside him, and he’s kind of looking to the right, and then he just turns his head to face forward with this smug, matter-of-fact grin on his face. I don’t know why I like that shot so much, but it’s just perfect. I don’t mean just the still frame you see below, I mean the combination of the movement of his head and his expression.

Do you have any unusual or quirky moments like those that strike you as particularly cool or poignant or perfectly shot?