Me and My Cam

Okay, it ain't "Me and My Gal", but I still think there's a song in there somewhere. I finally moved into the realm of High Definition this year both in buying my first HDTV and now a pro quality HDV camcorder. I got it used from a guy who barely used it for less than half the price of a new one. I could probably sell it on Ebay tomorrow for a good profit. I've been strongly considering trying to do a full-scale documentary on the works of CS Lewis. I've just re-read the space trilogy, the Narnia tales, and Till We Have Faces in preparation. Now I've got a cam that's fit for doing interviews, so that's a good thing. It'll also shoot in 1080/24P for a pretty decent film-look if I want to do something dramatic.

Work, Work, Work

I don't mean to be so quiet as of late, but work is really hectic this time of year, and I've been helping my nephew and sister with some remodeling after work and weekends, so I'm too bushed to do much of anything but lay in front of the TV when I get home lately.

Speaking of TV, have you seen the new Tom Selleck (can you believe he's 65 now?) TV series called "Blue Bloods?" He plays a police commissioner in NY with two sons that are cops (a third was killed on duty) along with a daughter who's a prosecuting attorney.

His aging father (a former commissioner) lives with him too. After just a handful of shows I'm already prepared to say that it may be the best cop show ever when all is said and done. And a big part of that I must say is because Donnie Wahlberg plays the best TV cop I've ever seen. He seems born for the role. It's also a show that truly relishes family. Every episode seems to end with the family all together eating supper, including spouses and grandkids. They're a Catholic family, and saying grace is still an honored tradition among others. You've really got to see this one. If you miss it on TV, CBS has been posting the shows online.

Watch Terriers or Else!

The or else is that, if they don't get more viewers, we won't be watching them at all. The show is in danger of being cancelled at the moment.



If you don't yet know about Terriers, just let me say that it's the most clever and witty dramatic show on TV right now, yet at the same time it's down to earth and gritty (in a good way). It's about a pair of pretty regular good ole boy types, Hank and Britt, who start a private investigation firm called "terriers." Hank is an ex-cop who did some things that got him booted from the force, and Britt is an ex-crook who's determined not to go back down that road. They're both broke, living job to job while working out of Hank's beat-up old pickup truck. In fact, you might say they're broke and broken. Hank's recently divorced and we see him struggle with his ex getting remarried. Britt decides he wants to marry his girlfriend, but she's suddenly getting a wild streak. And into the mix comes Hank's brilliant, but disturbed, sister recently escaped from a mental hospital and hiding in Hank's attic until he finds out about her.

It's a strangely intriguing show on many levels. Just reading that last paragraph, you probably are thinking it's pretty bland. What makes it work is the dialog and underlying feel of things. I've never watched a show in which I felt so much like I was actually inside the character's heads. The chemistry between Hank and Britt is great, and that's undoubtedly due to the fact that Michael Raymond-James and Donal Logue are best pals in real life. And there's plenty of offbeat literary referrences, which seems kind of bizarre coming from these two guys, at least one of which we know never attended a day of college.

It's on the FX network. You can also catch it on Hulu.

Now I'll Really Have to Stop Judging Books by Their Covers

There are two actors I've seen for several years, but just this week found out some things about their personal lives and history that just floored me.

First up is... well how bout I let you try and guess who this singer is. If you don't already know, I'm confident you'll never guess:



His name is Ken Curtis. You'll probably recognize him best in this next video sporting a scraggly beard and dressed in the attire you know him best in:



Yep, that's the feller who played Festus Haggen for over a decade on Gunsmoke. Turns out he was a singer and actor long before Gunsmoke. He even took over Frank Sinatra's old job singing with Tommy Dorsey's band for a while. He was also the son-in-law of John Ford and had small roles in many of his best films. If you look close you'll see him sometimes singing in them too. He was a member of a famous western group called The Sons Of The Pioneers. Here he is singing lead with them in Ford's movie--The Rio Grand--with John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara:



That was fun! Would you have ever thought.... Let's do one more. I bet you've seen this face in a bunch of old TV shows and B-movies but didn't know the name that went with it:

That's William Smith. Don't worry if you don't know the name. I guarantee you've seen his work. He did a string of motorcycle films in the 60/70s. Before that he was known for playing Joe Riley on Laredo. Actually, he's been acting in films since he was eight. (He was born in 1933, so you do the math). In real life he was a sports fanatic and body builder. He was a terrific amateur boxer (he only lost one fight), and held the Air Force Weightlifting Championship. He also won the 200 pound arm-wrestling championship of the world several times over.

With the notable exception of Laredo, he almost always played a bad guy and did a bunch of fight scenes, some of them quite famous. You may remember the one between him and Clint Eastwood in Any Which Way You Can. His most well-known one was probably with Nick Nolte in Rich Man, Poor Man:

Unfortunately I couldn't find any video of it, but I did find a few stills from what I (and apparently a few others) consider to be his portrayal of the best bad guy character of all-time, and that was in the role of Jude Bonner on a special 2-hour episode of Gunsmoke entitled "Hostage". If you watched Gunsmoke, then you probably remember this episode as the one where Miss Kitty gets kidnapped, raped, shot in the back, and left for dead because Marshall Dillon wouldn't turn over Bonner's younger brother who was sentenced to be hanged after being found guilty of murder. The show ended with Marshall Dillon taking off his badge (the only time he ever did) and going after Bonner with the strict intention of killing him. The fistfight between Dillon and Bonner (Smith) was probably the best fight scene ever in a western. Dillon nearly tossed a boulder on Bonner's head at the end, but his streak of decency brought him to his senses, and he relented from killing him. It was truly a great, maybe the greatest, episode in the annals of TV Westerns.

Well, if you're like me and used to seeing William Smith in almost nothing but tough guy roles, usually playing a rather doltish sort (often a downright idiot), then you're going to be as surprised as I was to find that this guy went to Syracuse; was fluent in English, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, French, and German; taught Russian at UCLA; and was a Russian Intercept Interrogator during the Korean War who flew secret ferret missions over Russia. He had both CIA and NSA clearance. Turns out this guy is like a freakin' genius....

Sometimes you just never know about people.

"Who Is Harry Nilsson (And Why Is Everybody Talkin' About Him)?"

That's the name of the new documentary that's out now about Nilsson. I've been waiting a long time for this. It was actually shot a few years ago but I guess was held up for monetary reasons. (It's cheap to make a documentary but expensive to distribute it). As far as I'm concerned there were many good singers during the last century but only three great ones--Bing Crosby, Elvis Presley, and Harry Nilsson. he was a darn good writer too.

Finishing up on "Till We Have Faces"

I've been re-reading the old CS Lewis classic lately and should finish it in a day or two. There are some places where the writing seems a bit clumsy to me this time. Certain phrases he uses that don't read particularly well or that sound a bit corny. And I must say that I've always felt that the second book the queen writes seems a little outlandish, and I find myself thinking she couldn't have been so wrong about things in the first book. Her second youngest sister really is a selfish trouble maker. Lewis wrote her that way, and now he wants us to believe the queen was just terribly confused. But her sister did taunt her and say terrible things to her. There's no mistaking that. She truly did mistreat her queen-sister. I tend to believe now that Lewis wrote the queen's second book almost on a lark--that he changed direction from something else he had originally planned, and so, the queen's two books don't always make sense when comparing them. At least it's my only explanation. I still like the story very much. But I now consider Perelandra to be his masterpiece of fiction. I don't think there's a word in it I would change.

Tomorrow I will try to put into thought the kinds of things I like to see in writing, and why these things work for me. Of course I'll also exemplify things I don't like. I've been thinking about this a lot lately.

So I Rebuilt My Computer Today

Okay, it's 12:48 AM, so I guess I should say I rebuilt it yesterday. Anyhow, it's always a great joy to do a major undertaking like this and have everything actually work when you put it back together. I did have one scary moment. After installing Windows 7, I got to the registration page, and after filling everything out including the key #, I got a message saying that my software was out of date. At first I thought maybe I needed to reset the clock/year in BIOS, but then it suggested that I go online and try to register it there, but wouldn't you know that W7 couldn't detect a modem or a driver for one. I use AT&T DSL along with a D-link N 300 so my laptop can go wireless. I figured Windows would have a driver for the ethernet connection. It didn't. Strange. Fortunately the utility disc that came with the new MOBO had the driver on there, so after installing it I was able to get online, and W7 somehow did the registration automatically. Funny that just a few minutes earlier it was flashing a message saying my copy of W7 "may be illegal." I don't really know what that was about.

I just bought a new Antec case a couple of years ago, so I re-used that and also kept my DVD burner which is only a year old. So I basically got a new MOBO, CPU, HDD, RAM, and the new pro version of Windows 7 64-bit. Oh, and I kept my Firewire card because there's no FW on the new MOBO. My new laptop didn't come with any FW either. I guess it really is on the way out, and USB has won the war. The FW built-in to most MOBOs is junk anyway most of the time. The only thing I really use it for is transferring MiniDV footage.

For those interested in the details, I use a microATX case because it fits perfectly under my desk and I don't need a lot of slots. I went with an ASUS M4A88T-M/USB3 MOBO. It looks to be a great one (ASUS makes some of the best), and comes with some terrific overclocking tools. I hate to use the term "overclock" because no one really overclocks anything anymore. You never push anything past its prescribed limits. They should really call it re-clocking. I'm continuing my love affair with AMD chips and used one of their best quad cores--the Phenom II X4 965. It's rated at 3.4GHz, but I've been... umm-umm... re-clocking it to nearly 3.9 with no problems at all. I can't wait to get my audio and video programs running on this tomorrow since they're smart enough to know how to take advantage of all four cores. I also went with one of G-Skill's 8G Ripjaws RAM sets. This machine ought to smoke!

And hard drives... man I can't believe we're seeing 2-terabyte units out now. That's an amazing amount of space. And some are running at 10000rpm! I went with just a 1-TB Western Digital unit at 7200rpm. You can get them fairly cheap, and it's still a lot of space.

I'm thinking of switching from Adobe Premiere to Sony Vegas for video editing. I'll probably be blogging about that soon. I would love to get away from the evil giant. Adobe is a longtime funder of the Planned Parenthood baby killers and is on just about every abortion watchlist out there. I also can't stand one of their video personnel.