Slave to electronica

After a midnight donut run, I watched the Manchurian Candidate remake tonight. (Mmmm...Manchurian Candidonut.) Despite my bitter distrust of remakes, and this remake in particular, I was fairly well impressed. The plot was not as drum-tight as the original's, and tomatoes frankly aren't as vivid a symbol as the queen of hearts, but Demme surely knows how to move a camera; it was beautifully shot, and clearly a cinematographic tribute to Frankenheimer. The movie was not explicitly about media saturation (a more plausible kind of brainwashing), but Demme worked TVs and video feeds into so many shots it became a clear subtext; the first crucial meeting between Marco and Shaw takes place in a frosted-glass office surrounded by moving light sources, and it seems to be taking place inside a TV. Worth watching, if you're willing to overlook some of the sloppiness that didn't mar the original.

Still waiting to be watched is Barely Legal Lesbian Vampires: the Curse of Ed Wood, for which I have high hopes.

My other main accomplishment today was several hours of HTML coding, which resulted in a reasonably pretty slate of web pages for adfamiliares's Latin class; I suppose I'll include a link once they're hot. (Thanks, elysdir and others, for assistance!) There are a lot of things that make my designer's eye wince, but I have to remind myself that I am a coding duffer, and the additional hours it would take to polish the edges off probably aren't worth it. They should do the job, though I probably broke a hatful of coding guidelines.

I also ordered a microphone (an Audio-Technica Pro 24), which I should be able to plug directly into my Mac for purposes of guitar recording—I had a horrible, dreadful, bad idea for a filk two days ago, and (lucky you) now I can record it—and a new multi-purpose remote to replace the one whose buttons have stopped buttoning. I went with the Universal MX-500, which seems to cause immediate and unending bliss in anyone who caresses its buttons, to judge by the reviews online. People love this remote; people want to have its babies. I expect some joyful button-programming in my near future.

Labor Daytritus

On my Labor Day walkabout, I saw a large jet in the sky—not sure what it was, but it had four engines, so perhaps a 747. I noticed it because of the graceful white sweep of its contrail; as I watched, that curve turned into a full U-turn, and the jet beat ass back into the north. I wonder where it was going, and why it couldn't go there.

It's a beautiful day. I stopped for a while by the trout pool in Congress Park, joining the kids and parents watching the speckled-submarine bodies in their slow orbits. One of the trout has a skewed jaw, which gives it a permanently sardonic appearance, like Popeye. I imagine it telling cranky, lengthy stories to the other trout, which try to swim away when it comes near.

In my investigation of remote controls yesterday, I discovered one with a marvelous feature. It has a little microphone in the back, and, should your remote's programming need updating, you can call their support line, hold the remote up to the phone, and let the phone talk to your remote until everything is hunky-dory. Ain't technology grand?

Webut

I've finished the web page for adfamiliares's Intro Latin course; you can see it here. Suggestions are welcome, provided they do not involve JavaScript or CSS or anything else that will make me whimper. I need to do a somewhat more involved page for her Roman Religion class, so pointing out mistakes would actually be helpful.

[Edit: okay, CSS does not make me whimper. sinsofthedove and franzeska suggested I learn it, so I did, and it makes things a whole lot simpler.]