Misirlou

I was watching some YouTube Shorts and this video pops up and the guys are playing Pump It by the Black Eyed Peas and I'm thinking - wait a minute - I know that tune and it's not Pump It. I heard it in a Quentin Tarantino film, but which one? Found a couple of playlists of tunes from his movies and scanning down the list I see Miserlou. Bang, that's it, so here we are. Here's the one Quentin used in Pulp Fiction:


Pulp Fiction • Misirlou • Dick Dale
HD Film Tributes

I put up another post about this tune a while back.

Banana Slugs

Jules and Vincent 'holster' their guns before leaving the diner in Pulp Fiction.

This morning Jack informs me that banana slugs have chewed through the hose carrying propane to his water heater. Tonight I catch the tail end of Pulp Fiction, just in time to see Travolta wearing a Santa Cruz Banana Slugs T-shirt. A coincidence like this cannot pass without notice.

Update:

Propane hose damaged by vermin.

Roy-Al with Cheese

McDonalds
Just something that came across my ear holes this AM. Pulp Fiction will never die.

Denver

I spent a couple of days laying low in Denver. I did not mind, it gave me a chance to recover from the long drive. When I first got off the freeway, I'm driving up Lincoln and I see this impressive building. Someone went to some trouble to give it a little more character than your typical big city high-rise. There are no other tall buildings near it, so your're going to have a good view from any room. I take it for a hotel, one that I am too cheap to stay in. Later I find out it's not a hotel, but the Beauvallon condos.

Here's the the capital building, or at least the gold dome.

I saw this sign while walking around downtown. I thought it was kind of odd. Why do they have the name of a TV show plastered in big letters on that wall? And why did they add "as to be"?

This truck was parked in front of my room. I don't know why it was chained to the post. I am not sure I want to know. My room was at the Day's Inn on Federal Way, which is on the other side of the Interstate from the Capital and all the cool people. This motel is more of a residential type place. There are families living in some of the rooms, little kids riding bicycles and scooters in the parking lot during the day. One man has a limousine and he is repairing bicycles out of his trunk. 

Ross and I had breakfast at Tom's Diner one day. If really reminded me of the diner scene from Pulp Fiction, no crazy hold-up couple with guns though.

Across the street from Tom's was this Pizza joint. I took this picture just for Tam.

Misirlou

Dick Dale & The Del Tones "Misirlou" 1963
I got on to Dick Dale when I heard this tune in Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction. Dick passed away last week. Misirlou has been around for awhile.


The Indian Tomb - Debra Paget - Snake Dance Scene - HD
The Indian Tomb is from 1959. The snake is bogus but the girl is definitely real. What is it with girls and snakes anyway? Don't answer that.


The original Misirlou - Μισιρλού (Τέτος Δημητριάδης -1927)

Gunpowder Milkshake

Gunpowder Milkshake | Karen Gillan & Lena Headey | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix
Way over the top shoot 'em up gangster movie. Best show I've seen in a long time. Take equal parts Pulp Fiction, John Wick and Clint Eastwood, stir liberally, add a pinch of Sin City and serve. Near continuous action, superb fight choreography and fabulous sets, but it's the little things, too many to count, that send it over the top into comedy.

ID

Me in 3D

Friend on mine emailed me this morning to let me know that someone has apparently hacked my Facebook account and is using my name in vain. I don't really care, I haven't used Facebook in years, but I suppose I ought to secure my account. I mean, taking my name in vain! How dare they! Where the heck did I stash my lightning bolts?

Ezekiel 25:17 - Pulp Fiction (3/12) Movie CLIP (1994) HD
Movieclips

So I try to logon on to Facebook and I fail because I have no idea what my password is, so we go through the usual forgot-your-password routine where they send a secret code to my email. That only gets us through the first barrier, now Facebook wants to confirm my identity, so they put up the names and photos of five friends who I am supposed to call and ask them for secret codes. Yeah, that ain't gonna happen, even if I knew these five people, which I don't. I sort of recognized one of the names, but the rest of them are complete strangers.

There is another method, you can upload a photo ID like a copy of your driver's license or passport, which sounds worse than handing over your Social Security number, but Facebook is a good corporate citizen, they wouldn't use my driver's license for any nefarious purposes, would they? It happens I already have a scanned copy of my driver's license so I upload it but it's not good enough. They want an image that is at least 1500 pixels wide. I could take a photo with my phone, but I still haven't figured out how to take close ups of small objects that are well focused. (I get them sometimes, but it's mostly a matter of luck and a lot of messing about.) I also have a scanner that claims to have a high resolution mode that will scan at 600 dots per inch. Let's try that.

Load my driver's license into the scanner and point and click and I have a high res image on the screen. The scanning software won't crop anything that small so I use Pix to cut it down to size. I was a little worried that the image would not be large enough for facebook, I mean the driver's license is only a couple of inches wide. Times that by 600 and you are only up to 1200 pixels. I check the dimensions and it's fine.

Now I upload it and Facebook ignores it. It's like it doesn't even see it. Might be the wrong format, though that seems unlikely being as everyone and their mother seems to be able to handle most any kind of image format you have. Whatever, I'll try again later, if I remember.

Poking around I come across their requirements for the photo and I realize that the smaller image probably would have worked if it just a big fat border around it. Curse my compulsive image cropping.

While we are on the subject of ID's, Home Depot has some new tech. I returned a bunch of doo-dads and gee-gaws the other day and while most of it went back on my credit card (which they remembered, which was nice because the receipts had long since dried up and blown away), some of the refund went on the store-credit card, which is fine because a week doesn't go by that I'm spending a zillion dollars for materials for the next phase of my new house remodeling project. The clerk wants to see my driver's license for the store-credit, doesn't need it for the stuff that is going back on the credit card, but for store-credit she does. Now when I want to buy something using store-credit, I use the scanner to scan the store-credit card, but then I also have to scan the barcode on the back of my driver's license.

Barcodes on back of Oregon driver's license

No, not that one, not the one that looks like a normal barcode, scan the one that looks like a scrambled mess of black and white dots. That's the one they want. After some digging I turned up this video that goes into all the gory details.

How to Decode PDF417 Barcodes | Dynamsoft Tutorials
Dynamsoft

The scrambled mess is a PDF417 barcode . It encodes all of the information on the front of the card. The AAMVA  (American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators) adopted it for driver's licenses. Huh, another organization that I've never heard of. Probably in cahoots with the cabal of evil motherfuckers that are trying to ruin our lives by making everything easier.

Big Ideas for HTML

Remember the discussion in Pulp Fiction?

Whenever you come across a number with its associated units in a story on the web, you will also find the number converted to another system and displayed with those units. For instance: "it is 10 miles (16 km) to the next gas station". If you are reading something on Wikipedia, they are liable to include nautical miles as well, and if there are several numbers under discussion the converted values and units can overwhelm the story. While the trained eye can pick out the bits you want, the overall appearance is basically wretched.
     You are reading this on a computer. The computer knows who you are, and where you are, and what you are reading about. Perhaps the computer could simply display the numbers in your chosen system and not display all those alternative values that you do not care about.
    While we are at it, how about abbreviations? Some are common and well known, some are not. How about a switch that lets you choose whether the terms in question are spelled out or abbreviated?
     Let's do something about acronyms. They are proliferating at an alarming rate. No reason the computer couldn't scan the text, identify any undefined acronyms and insert their definition immediately after their first appearance.
    Maybe the HTML committee can include these functions in their next version. HTML, that would be Hyper Test Markup Language. Not sure that expanding that acronym helps at all. Just shows how much of a nerd I am, I suppose.

The porcine princess emerges in the morning with the parka regally draped across her shoulders. 

    While we are on the subject, what is it with POTUS (President Of The United States) and SCOTUS (Supreme Court Of The United States)? Who came up with these, and more importantly, why? I suspect it is part of the imperialization of the Federal government. I'm just waiting for Obama to start wearing a purple cloak trimmed in ermine.

Jumble Does Pulp Fiction

Sunday Jumble

Does this scene look familiar? Yeah, maybe, just a bit.

Vincent Vega (John Travolta) & Jules Winnfield (Samuel L. Jackson)

If you want to see the puzzle, you have to go buy a copy of a Sunday paper. I've already scribbled all over mine. There is an online version of Jumble, but until recently it only carried the daily puzzles, not the more challenging Sunday version. I don't like the online version of the daily puzzle, there are too many clues available, which means it is not as challenging. I haven't tried the Sunday version yet, and as long as I have a paper version available, I'll probably stick with that.

Brandy Jensen & Jack Reacher

Actor Alan Ritchson as TV character Jack Reacher

You may have heard of Jack Reacher. He is a character is a series of pulp fiction novels. Tom Cruise made a movie about him. The movie was great. I tried reading one of the books but failed.

But who is Brandy Jensen? She writes "essays for the internet for Christ's sake", and she does it very well. Here we have her wonderful take on the Jack Reacher books (she completely disagrees with me):

My Year With Jack Reacher by Brandy Jensen

I particularly liked this paragraph: 

Or maybe it’s something less formal that hooked me. The writer Andy Martin once described Reacher as “a liberal intellectual with arms the size of Popeye’s.” He’s not wrong, exactly. Reacher’s arms are indeed large and he is a liberal in the sense that he will rain down unspeakable violence in service of a cause he deems just. It’s the intellectual bit I quibble with. Reacher certainly thinks a lot—one of the singular joys of the books is following along as he puzzles through various problems. He engages in feats of ratiocination redolent of Sherlock Holmes (a character, in fact, notes that his nickname among some Army personnel is “Sherlock Homeless”) and it’s a good thing these passages are so propulsive because if you stopped for even a moment to ponder what he’s actually saying you would realize he’s completely full of shit. Reacher depends on what I tend to think of as Dad Wisdom: beliefs held dear and delivered with the utmost confidence that are nonetheless entirely baseless. 

Bonus: we got a new word: ratiocination. I've seen it before, don't know that I've ever heard it. Not sure what it means, so I looked it up:

Noun. ratiocination (usually uncountable, plural ratiocinations) Reasoning, conscious deliberate inference; the activity or process of reasoning. Thought or reasoning that is exact, valid and rational. - Wiktionary

Via Defector, which is some kind of sports / news website. 

Google Video Problems

I have been having problems with video clips on the internet lately, some with Google, some with YouTube (is there a difference?). I have a longish video (ten minutes or so) that I have been trying to upload off and of for months, and it just won't go. I've let it run overnight and come down in the morning and it is still just sitting there spinning it's little upload-in-progress spinner.

I tried to upload some shorter clips (ten seconds or so) along with a bunch of photos to Picasa the other day. All the photos went, but none of the videos. Had to send them again. It did work the second time.

And then there are the playback problems. Seems like if it is a popular clip, it generally plays smoothly, but if it is anything out of the ordinary there are hiccups and glitches and it's very annoying. I can understand that there are times when you might not be able to deliver obscure video XYZ in a timely manner, but could you at least equip your video player with a "wait till download is complete before starting playback" button?

Right now the only way to accomplish this is to let the download play to completion and then hit the replay button, which means you have to watch it twice, or get up and go for a walk. Wouldn't want to do anything else on the computer that might jeopardize this download.

There was a clip of a deleted scene from "Pulp Fiction" that I wanted to add to my post on communication, but it just would not play smoothly, it kept getting delayed, and not just little hiccups, delays on the order of a minute or more. So I thought I would capture it, upload my own private, re-pirated copy, and maybe that will play smoother. To make a long story short, that was also a bust.

I quickly found, downloaded and installed a demo version of a video capture program. For some bizarre reason, it needs to be started before the browser. Which means replay won't work, because video clips are not cached in the normal sense. So I launch the program, launch the browser, pull up the video clip and go read for a while. I come back and the capture program has stopped with an error. What's the error? No info, just an error. No video today, you come back later.

Misirlou

Dick Dale Misirlou
I'm out wandering around on the net and I stumble across Peter from Family Guy dancing to "Surfin' Bird" (Everybody knows that the bird is the word) by the Trashmen. I know the song, but I don't remember the Trashmen. What else did they do? Misirlou which I recognize from the first bar as being from one of Quentin's movies. At first I thought Kill Bill, but no, it's from Pulp Fiction. The song even has words, which were sung by Anna Vissi at the 2004 Olympics in Greece, which is fitting, because it's a Greek song. You need to turn the volume up to eleven for this song.

Update March 2019 added caption to video.

McGuffin

Hitchcock explains the McGuffin

The term "McGuffin" came up in a conversation. Older son says it is the thing that drives the plot, like the Maltese Falcon in The Maltese Falcon, or the briefcase (with its never shown glowing contents) in Pulp Fiction. I recalled that it was more like a red herring. It's something in the story that has no bearing on the story, like some unknown character gets killed. You think it has some bearing on the story, and so you wait for the movie to explain it, but they never do. Close, but no cigar. A McGuffin is the thing in the movie that the characters care about. The audience doesn't really care about it, we may not even know what it really is, but we care that the characters care.