Today’s assignment was in a building where I hadn’t worked before, so I didn’t know about the fascist gatekeeper. Luckily my Costco card has a picture of me.
I oughta make a laminated card with my picture and a name such as “Archibald ‘Harry’ Tuttle”. Suggestions of other names are invited.
It’s a fair bet that my readers include at least one Mutant Enemy fanatic. Got a couple of canon questions for ya.
In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, anyone seen smoking is either evil, under a spell or doomed. (There’s one exception: Mrs Epps in “Some Assembly Required”, who seems to spend her days watching her dead son’s football triumphs on tape.) I didn’t notice whether the second vampire to acquire a human soul then stopped smoking.
In Firefly episode “The Train Job”, the sheriff of Paradiso shares a cigarette with a prisoner. Is anyone else ever seen smoking in that universe? I can easily picture Jayne with a cigar, but that’s just stereotyping.
A few of my Povray scenes include objects with negative indices of refraction; I’ve said of this one that three-quarters of it cannot exist in the real world. Now I read in The Economist that, because a negative-refractive slab could make a “perfect lens” (for obscure reasons), there’s an active effort on to create such a chimera; indeed the effect has been demonstrated but only with microwaves.
John Baez gives (among other things) a handy summary of transneptunian objects.
I’m watching a collection of Tom and Jerry cartoons, made by Joseph Barbera and William Hanna, who were later known for the much cruder animation of The Flintstones.
I’m puzzled by the opening disclaimer in which Whoopi Goldberg explains that while the ethnic stereotypes that appear in some early cartoons are wicked it would be wrong to falsify history by cutting them out. The sin, apparently, is that Tom’s owner, a woman of color known as Mammy Two Shoes (though her name is never mentioned in the toons, nor is her face shown), speaks in nonstandard grammar; she has no other stereotyped qualities that I can detect.
Whoopi makes the same disclaimer in a Looney Tunes collection, and there it makes more sense; I’ve had occasion to cringe at some early ones, though I have not seen such moments in this collection (yet).
If my new printer’s resolution is 1200 dots/inch, then a sheet of gringo-standard letter paper with half-inch margins can take an image of 9000 by 12000 pixels. As a test, therefore, I rendered one of my most complex Povray images at that size. It took 182 hours.
Now if I can find a program that will open an image that big . . . .
Whatever it is (or isn’t), someone has made a list of it.
Here’s one that interests me a bit: once upon a time I started a (mental) list of persons ineligible who have portrayed a President of the United States, such as Peter Sellers (as Muffley) and Anthony Hopkins (as Nixon). (Found from a related page cited by the muted horn.)