The Pecman

Her claws are not cute. Her cute face hides a personality of Pure Evil.

Sharp claws on this one. All our previous cats had been de-clawed, but my partner won't let me do that this time. Here's she is in an inquisitive pose:

Very good writing, totally pro. And I agree, the drama is well-done.

Good start -- very well done. I look forward to seeing where Cole takes this.

Chris, are you sure the whole system is down or is it just the hard drive? 90% of the time, the internal parts are fine and just a drive replacement will cure the problem. I run three or four cheap PCs for miscellaneous crap around the house, and they never break. I have a few that have monitors that are literally 7-8 years old, and the only thing I ever replace are the hard drives. Two important principles: 1) you gotta back up, and 2) sometimes the only way to fix a computer is by using another computer. In my 30 years of using them, these two concepts are more true today than they were when I was starting out. (Technically, I started in 1980, using an Apple II running CP/M.) Computers are inherently evil, but it is possible to beat them into submission and keep them going for a long time if you keep your wits about you and know what you're doing. I disagree with Colin about treating PCs nicely. I go with Bogart's philosophy: "I've never met a PC who didn't understand a good rap in the mouth or a slug from a .45." A whip and a chair works for me. Most of the time I fix computers, I'm muttering, "you f@cking son of a bitch piece of crap bastard pile of c@ck-s@cking sh!t I will see you in hell before you stop working and I'm as serious as a heart attack," on and on, for hours on end, a long continuous stream of curses until it's fixed. It works for me. I will not take no for an answer, especially from a PC. And I get abused by Linux, various flavors of Windows, and Mac OSX all the time. I just won't let them get the better of me.

Working here! I have a couple of different Yahoo accounts. (I refuse to guy into GMail because I hate the interface, and I dislike Microsoft so I won't use their Live Email service.) They're all kinda crappy, if you want to know the truth. I actually pay for my Yahoo account because I've had it so long -- 14 years, last time I checked. I got it when I wrote my first novel in 1999-2000, mainly to get email from readers. But I confess, getting support from Yahoo is a total drag. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/11/yahoo-mail-down_n_4426253.html

I hope all American corporations that do business in India -- particularly those who have call centers for customer support -- will act immediately and move their operations to other countries that observe basic human rights. This is outrageously stupid on the part of the Indian government.

I prefer what 1970s DJ Don Imus used to say: "The First Church of the Gooey Death and Discount House of Worship."

A pet would be a nice animal who shares your house with you, shows you affection, appreciates being fed and having a roof over its head. Not this cat. The cat loves my partner more than me. Hates me. We didn't know her full story when we adopted her, but apparently, she had come from a very traumatic situation from a crazed cat hoarder in West LA, who had 45 cats shoved in a 15x20' room for several years. This is not a happy cat. Looks nice, though.

Our cat is pure evil. Hates everybody and everything. Very neurotic.

I could absolutely see Frozen becoming a Broadway musical. It's doing huge business at the moment -- $120 million in about 10 days, and getting great reviews.

Or he just believed he was straight. A pal of mine who worked for a major studio for 25 years used to run into guys like this all the time and tell me, "I can't believe it! This guy I met talked like a duck, looked like a duck, acted like a duck... but he wasn't a duck!" I think Saturday Night Live even did an entire sketch on the "Sensitive, Effeminate Straight Guy Show." Very funny bit. I used to work with a somewhat effeminate guy who I just assumed was gay. He dropped a couple of hints, and there were some wink-wink, nudge-nudge moments, but nothing very overt and we kept everything strictly business. One day, much to my surprise, he introduced me to his wife, who was a fairly butch, masculine woman, wore pants, no make-up, very short hair. Very nice woman, but she was 10 times more masculine than the husband. We're talking red-flannel shirts, blue jeans, leather boots, the whole deal. Once when the two of them left the room, my boss turned to me and we both kind of giggled and he said, "well, you can tell who wears the pants in my family." We both fell down laughing for five minutes. I know it's wrong to make fun of people who have inclinations one way or the other, but these two were a weird combination. And yet they're still married and have been a couple for more than 20 years. More power to them -- both very nice people.

This is a brand-new song from the new hit Disney cartoon film Frozen. I wanted to post it because I thought the lyrics were striking and the melody was very strong, and singer Idina Menzel has a helluva voice: The lyrics specifically talk about being yourself and the need to be realistic with yourself and other people. I think there's an allegory there about gay people being willing to accept who they are, and not having to hide who you are... and let it go. (Plus, when do you ever get to hear a lyric that uses the word "fractal"?) I found it very moving in that sense. And the orchestra arrangement is absolutely dynamite. If this song doesn't at least get an Oscar nomination, I'll be stunned.

No, effeminate gay people go back hundreds of years. Long before the word "faggot," they used "sissy" and similar words to insult effeminate-sounding gay men or boys. I also grew up in the 1960s, and trust me, there were effeminate kids I knew (casually) who were insulted, sometimes to their face. And some really were swishy. I accept effeminate people as who they are. A close friend of mine I've known for 30 years is fairly effeminate -- as he says, he was gay "in the womb" -- and he actually tried speech therapy in the 1980s to try to rid his gay affect and speak in a masculine, lower tone. It worked for a time, but he finally decided he was happier just being himself and gave up. I was so firmly closeted and frightened when I was a teenager, I went out of my way to act and sound as masculine as I could, and refused to be perceived of as effeminate, especially in my voice. Eventually, when I came out, I stopped caring about it... but we are who we are, and our personalities are going to come out no matter what. My problem with the gays in Modern Family is that it forces the typical gay stereotype on television. What's worse is that the quality of the acting and writing on the show is generally very good. The gay actor who plays half of the gay couple actually uses his real voice in the role. Having met Sean Hayes before (the more-effeminate guy on Will & Grace), I can tell you he's 75% less effeminate off the air. So a lot of this kind of thing is very hyped-up and put on.

And the link is here: http://www.awesomedude.com/Cynus/ROW/index.htm I can't hate a story that has a "Marc-with-a-C," because that's me!

Anybody who worked in TV news in the 1970s and 1980s can tell you, those Anchorman movies are not that far off from the truth.

Great show. I can remember in the early days of the Iraq War, I saw a few cars in LA with bumper stickers that said, "I'd Rather Vote for President Bartlett." I'd usually honk and give them the thumbs up when I saw that.

That's very bad. Can you tell us the file extension, like ".BAK" or ".STF" or something like that? You never know -- you might be able to do a Google search and figure out what it is. It's for reasons like this that for more than 15 years, I've refused to use any backup format that won't result in copies that can't be read in a normal Finder or Explorer window as standalone files. Proprietary file formats are for the birds, especially for backups. On the other hand... a lot of LTO backup systems do this even today.

Shut up! You don't know what you're talking about, you idiot!

I refuse to believe anybody could do something this stupid.

Note that Paramount has sunk $130 million into this movie. I dunno... but on the other hand, I also predicted that Passion of the Christ would be a big flop, and it wound up making over $600 million.

Tell me what format the floppy disks are and I'll be glad to help you for free if I can, Nigel. You never know: sometimes the stuff IS still usable. I just had a case where a close friend had a 1992 5-1/4" disk with the only copy in the world of a valuable file. We were able to borrow an old computer, get the file, email it (!!!) through Yahoo, and once on Yahoo, I could download it and decode it just fine. 3-1/2" disks are easy. We used to use 8" floppy disks for video edit sessions in the 1970s and 1980s. God knows if any of those work now. Back to Vermeer: the paintings are brilliant no matter how he created them. I don't look upon his technique as "cheating" at all. If the desired result is there, and the passion, the mood, and the emotion is still captured by the painting, there's no issue.

Very well-said, Cole. Not enough people are asking: "well, wait a minute -- won't these unmanned drones put delivery drivers out of work?" And I can think of quite a few neighborhoods in LA where those drone copters wouldn't last five minutes if they got anywhere near somebody's front porch.

Much appreciated, Cole! I did take two years of music theory, and played clarinet for 7 years, but it's been a long time. I know just enough to be dangerous. The trick to me is also having one person doing 9 vocal parts, particularly in terms of balance and recording. Not simple or easy. But then, there's 10cc's 1975 classic "I'm Not in Love," where I believe they went down 6 generations across 24 tracks, creating 144 layers of sound for certain parts of the song -- most of which were all a capella. It's just a wash of sound, a very interesting aural effect.

They are flogging the living hell out of Anchorman 2. I think Will Ferrell is desperately trying to make sure this movie does better than his last four or five flops. And BTW, let me say that I worked on Mr. Ferrell's 2007 film Blades of Glory for a couple of months, and he was very nice and low-key throughout the shoot, and was very even-tempered to everybody, and funny on camera. In fact, his ad-libs were about three times funnier than the script.