2014 — 20 September: Saturday

Just heard a Beatles 'B'-side from 1962 with an uncorrected error1 noted by Brian Matthew. Apparently John and Paul sang different phrases at the mid-point. Who gnu? I have to admit I simply don't listen that closely. Not when I'm slicing up plums for my cereal topping, at least.

SHIELDS up

Now, I grant you, the image here lacks a certain je ne sais quoi (detail, perhaps?) but it will do very nicely as my wallpaper on the new SHIELD Tablet PC. And I've popped it here just to make it easier to get it onto the blessed device. Or, at least, that was the theory:

All-black wallpaper

Last time I performed this particular incantation — good grief, just over three years ago — the trick was to point the Asus Tablet's web browser at the page, touch the image for a couple of seconds, and up would pop a menu offering to make it your wallpaper. This being Android, however, everything has become just a little more convoluted in the intervening three years.

Never mind. So, first 'save' the image (because there's no longer an option to "wallpaperise" it in one swell foop). Next try2 to use QuickPic to browse it and turn it into wallpaper. Give up on that. Use ES File Explorer to browse the same image from the 'downloads' folder and 'save' it yet again. Finally press and poke at various menu options (none of which actually says "save this image as your wallpaper") at random until it settles down as my wallpaper.

I've earned that cuppa.

Displaying the result

I couldn't persuade SHIELD's purported "Lasso Capture" to put in an appearance from the 'Navigation Bar' — it was far too shy — so that approach was ruled out. However, the massively-intuitive "Hold Power button and Volume Down button" simultaneously for a 'few' seconds until you hear a 'snapshot' sound did actually do the trick. Then it was just a question of reeling in the PNG file that showed up in the Screenshots gallery, and here it is, at half-resolution:

SHIELD main screen

Thanks, Mr Postie

It will be nice to watch this again. Though why the studio still decided to zone-lock it to North America after all these years is as unfathomable as ever.

Absence of Malice BD

Still, "dimmer, dimmer, dimmer, mute, 1" to the rescue.

One of the troubles...

... I've been finding with crowd-sourced data can be seen by examining DVD Profiler versus IMDB. Take Joe Wright's 2011 film "Hanna", for example.

According to DVD Profiler, this is just one of nine "Joe Wright" titles currently in my collection. But when I click on "Crew Information" to see what else I have by him (as I can only think of "Bob and Rose", "Charles II", "Pride and Prejudice", and "Atonement") four of those nine titles actually turn out to be the four not-very-intellectual films made with Dean Martin in the role of "Matt Helm" between 1966 and 1969. So? Well, this was before "Hanna's" Joe Wright was born.

IMDB, by contrast, identifies the "Hanna" Joe Wright as "Joe Wright (IV)" and the "Matt Helm" chap as Joseph C Wright, the art director, who died in 1985.

Recall the relevant XKCD cartoon here. Late lunch next, methinks.

I likewise find it hard to believe that the Pat McGrath (born 1916) who appeared in the 1944 Basil Dearden film "The Halfway House" is the same guy as the 'hog farmer' in "Game of Thrones, Season #3"... I shall stop now.

I wonder...

... what all the local fireworks are in aid of, this evening? Noisy blighters. Meanwhile, I'm ascending the nursery slopes of Season #2 of "Scandal" and enjoying the climb. As I did my recent curry. I'm in no great hurry to restart my crockpot programme after the disaster last Saturday.

  

Footnotes

1  How geeky is that?
2  Turns out to be amazingly difficult to browse a jet black image of exactly the same resolution as your display screen and be sure that you've selected it.