2014 — 28 December: Sunday
Hearing news of the apparent loss of an A320B airbus1 followed almost immediately by a soundbite from the last astronaut currently known to have walked on the lunar surface it does, I admit, put some of my present concerns and 'problems' in an entirely different perspective.
Pause, for a cuppa.
It's a "genre" thing
The quality of crowd-sourced data depends, very much, on the quality of the crowd being used as the source2 of the data. ("GIGO" still applies, naturally.) And I'm unaware of effective crowd-sourced data quality control mechanisms that don't at some point call on the services of nit-picking pedants such as myself — in the publicly-expressed opinion of one (at least) of my all-too-many managers during my lifetime in IBM. In the case of the "genre" classifications that members of the crowd of DVD Profiler users have been applying (I'm tempted to say "with gay3 abandon") to the 600,000 or so titles in that online database it's clear that a hardcore subset of these users has no clear understanding of the meaning of the word "genre".
How else could over 650 or so of my DVDs and BDs have initially ended up with the unhelpful genre "Television" attached to them? There are, of course, many further instances of data malfeasance buried among the titles, and I've been combing them out by filtering the data views and seeing what ends up in each genre classification. My goal (not a terribly lofty one, I admit) is to assign each of my discs to a single genre. Take, for instance, that recent acquisition (on BD) of David Kelley's "Lake Placid". Comedy? Certainly. Horror? Certainly not.
Pause, for breakfast. It's sunny out there and has recently crawled all the way up to 0C.
Grrr!
Having just added poor old Richard Wilson to the cast list of "Prick Up Your Ears", I now see that although he's correctly cross-referenced to "How to get ahead in advertising" and "One Foot in the Grave" the Richard Wilsons who appear in the 1947 "Lady from Shanghai" as an assistant district attorney (and in "Incident at Oglala" as a real-life Tribal Council Chairman) are both equally unlikely to be our cuddly Victor Meldrew. Slightly adapting an appropriate XKCD image:
The "alt text" tag on the original cartoon shows "What do you want me to do? LEAVE? Then they'll keep being wrong!" — how true.
Oh, good grief!
I take an annual look at science shenanigans:
Just call me "capricious"
A few months years ago, I was exhorted to buy Season #1 of "The Invaders" but I held out for better things. I just ordered a box set of the two seasons made (on the flimsy grounds that it also features an interview with Roy Thinnes [who's apparently been promoting the French re-issue] too).
Let's see how long I hold out against "Land of the Giants". Don't hold your breath.
Until just a few seconds ago...
... I had only one BBC recording of a play by JCW Brook — and that's a terrifying tale called "The Doppelganger" that I (first) heard in 1977. I've just snaffled a second play, originally broadcast as a quadrophonic recording for the (by me) much-lamented Saturday Night Theatre time-slot in April 1978. "The Tale of the Knight, the Witch and the Dragon" with a chap called Patrick Stewart as the Knight. Now all I need, of course, is one of those blasted round tuits.
Which reminds me...
... to update the latest A/V setup in tabular form.
| Source | Audiolab input | |
|---|---|---|
| Oppo Blu-ray | 5.1 | |
| Humax Freesat | dab | |
| PC media player | dtv | |
| US NPR | hdmi #2 | |
| CD | cd | |
| Minidisc | md | |
| Cassette | tape |
That "5.1" is a misnomer, as I'm only conveying the Oppo's downmixed stereo analogue audio whatever the digital audio format on a spinning silver disc.
Curiously...
... I've only just got around to watching Parker Posey's tour-de-force performance in "Broken English":
Considering Mr Postie dropped it off in mid-April, erm, 2010 I can't say this was one of my shorter response times. It was the first film directed by Zoe Cassavetes (yes, the daughter of John and of Gena Rowlands). Still, I've also now downloaded the Auto-Rip set of MP3s from its soundtrack CD (though, amusingly, the CD is currently out of stock and I won't therefore be charged for this fine music [by Scratch Massive] for a while).
Even more curiously...
... one of the cast is Roy Thinnes, though I confess I didn't recognise him. (It is, after all, some 47 years since I first saw him — see above.) I happened to spot his name scrolling by in the end credits. IMDB's picture of him is, I suspect, not the most recent. I don't recall seeing him in "A Beautiful Mind" or the one episode of "The Sopranos" and I've not caught any of the myriad other things he's been in since 1967.