Alden Bates' Weblog

As you've probably heard, Al Lewis who played Grandpa Munster sadly died yesterday. Coincidentally tonight I watched the Lost in Space episode "Rocket to Earth" which features Al Lewis as the wizard Zalto.

Jeff alerted me to a bizarre mystery involving Zalto. At one point during the episode he states that Neptune has three rings. Neptune does have three main rings. The only problem is that the rings appear to have been first discovered in the 80s (thinkquest.org says they were first detected in 1983) while "Rocket to Earth" was screened in 1967.

Presumably the only person who could shed light on how the rings came to be mentioned over a decade earlier than they were discovered is episode writer Barney Slater, but unfortunately he died in 1978, so the mystery remains...

(Unless my info about the year the rings were discovered is totally wrong, of course. :)

On a somewhat more advanced note than Lost in Space, today I watched the first four episodes of the recent Captain Scarlet remake.

In ther original, Captain Scarlet (member of elite security organisation SPECTRUM) was rendered invulnerable by the Mysterons. The Mysterons dwell in a city on Mars, and were provoked by humans into starting a war whereby they wish to destroy Earth and its inhabitants. The original show was done using puppets. The new show is done using CGI, and it's allowed the makers to do much more than could have been done int her original.

The updated Mysteron city looks gloriously like something from a movie rather than a TV series. In fact, all four of the episodes felt more like half-hour movies instead of episodes of a TV show. In the fourth episode, our heroes go to Mars to rescue some scientists, and the production all the way through feels more like a big-budget motion picture.

Seems to be the in-thing in Britain at the moment to do remakes that blow everything else out of the water. Excellent. :)

From the Lost in Space episode "The Golden Man", the title character Keema(Dennis Patrick) carries Judy Robinson(Marta Kristen) out from the centre of a mine field.

I have to say, I've never considered the idea of disguising mines as badly-inflated beach balls. It seems to me they'd be sorta easy to spot and avoid...

Also featured in this episode: Christmas Tree lights pretending to be barbed wire. CLASSIC!

(via Bob01): Poll Examines Music Buyers and Their Needs

While one-quarter of the nation's music fans say they've downloaded songs onto their computers — legally or otherwise — a new nationwide poll suggests music executives should look elsewhere to explain their business woes.

Three in every four fans complain that compact discs are too expensive, and 58 percent complain that music in general is getting worse, according to the poll conducted for The Associated Press and Rolling Stone magazine.

So the problem's not downloading but the fact that CDs are too expensive, and music's getting crapper? Perhaps they should stop putting crappy DRM products on their CDs and take a look at making the music better, hmm?

As you may have guessed from the title, another issue of TSV has gone up on the NZDWFC site. TSV 34 came out in mid 1993 - the "It's Back!" on the front cover referred to the ill-fated production The Dark Dimension which never really got off the ground.

One of the features of this issue was the publishing of the results of a short story contest won by Nicholas Withers with a Quatermass crossover. Then's also a feature on the amazing Kandyman costume which won the Judges Choice award at DefCon 1993, and another speculation on the future of Doctor Who.

Also, as you can tell from the artwork page Tim Hill produced a large amount of the artwork for this issue, but that quantity is dwarfed by the couple of dozen pieces he had in TSV 40!

Next up I will be upgrading the NZDWFC site to XHTML and updating the style. :)

You may recall I was previously having trouble with people on myspace hotlinking to my LJ icons like crazy. Previously I redirected the image requests from the hotlinking sites to a 5120-pixel-wide gif in order to mess up their layouts.

This, however, doesn't seem to have discouraged hotlinking much. I suspect the problem is that many of the myspacers have page layouts which are already so fubar they don't notice when my gif image screws things up further. So a couple of days ago I went to step 2.

Step 2 involved me changing the redirection to a copy of the infamous tubgirl image (If you haven't seen it before, for the love of God, don't Google it). It's amazing how quickly the hotlinking disappears when people suddenly find they have one of the foulest images in existence on their web page.

I saw this number plate today and it confused me a bit. In computer games, "gib" is the term for a piece of an exploded game character after, say, they step on a mine, while "FXR" could be interpreted as a contracted form of a particular piece of leet speak which could lead one to translate the number plate as something entirely inappropriate.

But the vehicle it was attached to was parked on a construction site, so a more likely translation is "Gib fixer" or "one who neuters male ferrets"

I'm not even sure I know quite what this one is proposing...

GROUP VILLAGE ORGANIZATION Of EXTRACTION Of GOLD MOROVIA LIBERIA
WEST/AFRICA.

Mister/Madam,

PROPOSAL FOR GOLD SALES In our search for reliable associates in addition to-me, we obtained your contact by the Internet and we are impressed of your profile from there our interest in the management of the businesses with you. We are very sorry as this letter can surprise you. We are minors of group of village organized in gold based in the west africa in Republic of LIBERIA .

I'm shocked. What sort of people use minors to mine gold. Only adults should be miners!

Because of the difficulties of the government of liberia give a licence to the protocols in transactions of sale of gold and for the safety of our goods, we have successfully transferred (65kilos) from gold to the metal which is (purity of 99 % of 22 carats), being stored in the Agency Company for Safety Extracting in Ouagadougou in the Republic of Burkina Faso the West/Africa. Currently we seek the honourable foreign purchasers who will be able to accept and respect the agreement of trade and to treat the business with us. the case so more necessary.

Ummmmm... Tilt. There's a French version of the email included as well, and I suspect that the English version is simply the French version run through an autotranslator (the "minor" goof is present in both language versions). This portion of the email appears to suggest they couldn't get a mining licence and want to sell their gold under the table.

However our price is (6.500 $ per kilo) and the system of operation is after the analysis; the pleasant part of the quantité is paid to us here while one of our representatives will accompany the goods with his final destination for the balance payment or if possible with satisfaction, the quantité can be paid suddenly. The customer will be responsible for all the tax payments in Burkina - Faso in % well pleasant during the payment. The customer is welcome visit us in Burkina - Faso for the full insurance and the modus of operation. We will be happy to have joined and any of your favorable interested associate. You are welcome and hoping to receive news of you at his possible time more the first.

Translation: You give us $6,500 per kilogram of gold, we run away very fast with your money before you realise there is no one coming to give you the gold.

BEST REGARDS
MR.AMOS ZONGO VILLAGE LEADER

And oddly I got another email from Amos Zongo about an hour ago, now claiming to be auditor general of the Bank of Africa and wanting to offload 16 million dollars. Gets around, does Mr Zongo. Interestingly the second scam email was addressed from "OUAGADOUGOU, BURKINA FASO" - the Bozeman, Montana of Mr Zongo's scam emails, evidently.

Thunderbird 1.5 is a pretty cool email program which keeps getting better. 1.5 has a spell checker which underlines misspelled words as you type them and allows you to right-click and fix your spelling. As I make a lot of typos, this is very helpful. However, there's a couple of words missing from their dictionary...

Hee hee hee! :)

I was waiting to come out of the driveway this evening, signalling that I was going to turn left, when a van nipped past and parked directly to my left (on a yellow line, I might add) completely blocking my view of the oncoming traffic to the left. Way to go, dickhead!

I'd have gotten out and given them a piece of my mind or (more likely) snapped a picture and sent it off to the proper authorities, but (a) it was raining and (b) there was a somewhat impatient person in a van right behind me also waiting to emerge.

Sheesh.

PS, and this is completely unrelated: To the person using rfetch to grab my atom feed: You don't need to refetch it every five minutes - I don't post that often. :)