The McWetlog

Don LaFontaine, the king of movie trailer voiceovers, has died. Here’s a thing about him:

LaFontaine has been absolutely iconic in recent years. See, for example, his self-lampooning GEICO ad.

And he’s by no means alone: Five Guys in a Limo features four other movie trailer voiceover talents. Also, the guy appearing on the Comedian trailer is Hal Douglas, not LaFontaine — but both are know for using the “In a world …” line that has become a shorthand for this kind of thing.

Via Accordion Guy, MetaFilter and Scalzi.

Update: In this Washington Post tribute to LaFontaine, every fucking paragraph begins with “In a world …” Okay, we get it. (Via Kottke.)

Third-party accessories may not fit on a Celestron NexStar 5 even if they’re designed to do so. Apparently, some NexStar 5 telescopes are a little thicker around the corrector plate than others are, so even accessories specifically designed for them may not fit if the tolerances are too tight. I found this out in my recent shipment from Kendrick Astro Instruments, which arrived today. Their solar filters and Kwik Focus are designed to cover a telescope’s objective lens or corrector plate, and be tightened with screws. They’re sized to fit based on the telescope tube’s outside diameter (OD). My NexStar 5 SE has an OD of exactly 150 mm, which is on the cusp between two sizes. The smaller one was advertised to fit my telescope, so I ordered it. It doesn’t fit, and according to the Kendricks — who are, incidentally, wonderful to deal with — it should have fit easily. So back it goes, to be replaced by the larger model.

So, apparently, we’re about to have a federal election, and apparently, the Tories want to make leadership the central issue. Oh, great, leadership — the most content-free issue there is.

Here’s what leadership means in the context of Canadian politics: it’s how we determine which party leader has a bigger dick. It’s the George Carlin theory of politics: Stephen Harper wants to prove he has a bigger dick than Stéphane Dion, and wants to have an election to fuck Dion, and the Liberal Party, right up (i.e., knock Dion from his post and cripple his party’s finances). It’s not about the economy, or health care, or the environment; it’s about how tough and decisive you can be — never mind what decisions you actually make. It’s just, as Carlin would say, a big dick-waving cockfight. Male aggro sublimated into the political arena.

And there are plenty of examples of this in recent political history. I bet you can think of a few.

Let me see if I get this straight:

John McCain says that Barack Obama is too inexperienced to be president, and then picks as his running mate someone with substantially less experience.

He implies that Obama is insufficiently patriotic, and then picks as his running mate someone with ties to an Alaskan separatist organization.

He mocks Obama as a celebrity, and then picks as his running mate a governor who trades, in part, on her appearance (“America’s hottest governor” and all that).

I understand that the pool of choices for McCain — maverick reformers who were still acceptable to the social conservative base — was rather shallow, but still. This wasn’t an inspired pick; it wasn’t a desperate pick; it was a bipolar pick.

I don’t know, maybe the reason that iPhone users on the Rogers network are using far less data than expected is because Canadian customers, remembering stories of monthly phone bills running four or five figures thanks to data usage, are terrified of going over the limit, and are holding back accordingly.

In the first four weeks after the iPhone launched in Canada July 11, Rogers says 95 per cent of customers used less than 10 per cent of their plans’ data allotment. … In the first four weeks of usage, 95 per cent of customers used less than half a gigabyte and 91 per cent used less than 200 megabytes. Only a single customer exceeded the 6 GB threshold, [Rogers spokeswoman Liz] Hamilton said.

People scared of exceeding the limit will generally buy more than they need. But changes are afoot to address these usage patterns: Rogers’s iPhone plans will become less generous in the fall, but they will cap data charges at $100 a month no matter how much you use. And data plans will be unlimited for the first three months, and can be changed, so that people can find out for themselves how much data they would normally use if they weren’t holding back. Both go some ways to addressing the problems with limited data plans I outlined two months ago. Unlimited data would still have been easier for all concerned in practice, even if Rogers has a corporate allergy to it: it would not have saturated the network — not on a device with WiFi — and it would have put users at ease. Via MacNN.

I have no fillings. This used to be a matter of some pride for me, except for one small detail. It’s mostly because I haven’t been to the dentist in 12 years. And “no fillings” is not the same as “no cavities”: the last time I was checked — back in 1996! — I had one or two very small cavities that, in dentists’ opinion, were too small to drill at the time, but they’d drill if they got worse.

In the intervening 12 years, I either had a dental plan, but life was too chaotic (graduate school, moving from city to city) to see a dentist, or I didn’t have a dental plan and was afraid of what it would cost. (Knowing, of course, that the longer I put it off, the more likely the dentist would find something, and the more expensive it would be. And a healthy — or in this case, unhealthy — dose of procrastination was certainly involved here.)

Yesterday, I finally got off my ass and saw the local dentist, who, after the hygienist had her way with a decade-plus of tartar buildup and sensitive gums, found a total of four cavities, which will receive fillings in a month or so. So much for 36 years of dodging the dental drill. Still no dental plan, but I’d set aside more than enough money for it.

Not that I’m unfamiliar with dental work. In addition to braces, I’ve had a total of 11 teeth pulled: four eye teeth along with three baby teeth that had yet to fall out, as part of the orthodontic work, as well as my wisdom teeth. (Remind me to tell you the story about how I got my wisdom teeth out on the same day that O. J. went on his slow-speed chase along the Interstate, and how I thought the news coverage of that event was a drug-induced hallucination. Me, the next morning: “You mean that actually happened?”)

In honour of Caturday, here’s a recent picture, taken by Jennifer, of Doofus, who continues to grow, and Goober, who is merely enormous. He’s catching up, as you can see.

Speaking of cats, Jennifer got a strange e-mail the other day. It went like this (typos intact):

Hello I am sorry to hear that your meow passed away. Please do not feed any of your other cats choclate. The same thing can happen to dogs if you feed them choclate goods. Unfourtanly the cat wouldn’t know any diffrent. It is quite possable that your cat has pased away due to the cookie. You can consult your vet to ask what choclate can do to a cat or dog for a clear reasion why. Since you in to since you would under stand the ingreadent that would effect the pet. sorry once again.

Nice, eh? “Sorry about your cat dying. By the way, it’s all your fault.” I don’t think you can find a better definition of asshole out there.

But here’s the thing. Our boy Brian (that’s his name) is referring to this picture of Maya appearing to eat a chocolate chip cookie. The problem for his nasty little theory is that it was taken in November 2004. Maya died in March 2007. It’s kind of ridiculous to argue that chocolate chip cookies are so toxic to cats that a single bite can kill them — but that it’ll take two and a half years to take effect. Asshat.

This is an example of something I’ve been noticing lately about some of the e-mail I get about my sites. No matter how old a blog entry or a page is, some people write in as though it went up yesterday — there’s no sense, in other words, that any time has passed. To take another example, the Ringneck Diary is five years old, but I still get e-mail from people who write in as though it’s current and ongoing. The present participle, in other words.

I wonder if I need to make things more clear. But then, an awareness of the passage of time is not our boy Brian’s main problem. Tact comes to mind. Decency. And, you know, literacy.

Jennifer and I paid a visit to the Canadian Museum of Nature last month. My photos: let me show you them. The focus of the photos is on the new Talisman Energy Fossil Gallery, which is quite a bit different from the old fossil exhibit, and the special Ice Age Mammals exhibit, which was smaller than expected.

Some quick points about the visit:

1. The Museum was only half open; the rest is being renovated. The half we were in had been renovated first, I think. It was hard getting around, especially from floor to floor.
2. My comments regarding children at the Biodome are equally applicable: museums are turning into day cares.
3. After processing a whole whack of photos taken with the Sigma 30mm f/1.4 prime (see previous entry), I’ve noticed that the lens suffers from a certain amount of chromatic aberration, at least on blown highlights when wide open.

A brief note here — though I’ve mentioned it elsewhere — that yes, I will be doing DFL again for the Beijing Olympics. I’d been hemming and hawing about it until Monday night, when a conversation about it turned into a long rant by me about the Olympics — that clinched it. On Tuesday I redesigned the blog template — it’s still off the shelf, just different — and started up a DFL page on Facebook. New posts will not appear on the blog until Friday, August 8, but I’m already getting ideas for material to relaunch with.

You know authentication alone is effective in preventing spam when you look in Movable Type’s junk comments folder and the only things you see are legitimate comments. So I’m turning off the spam filters system-wide: too many false positives. And some very old comments have just been published.

Would I ever like to lay my hands on one of Orion’s newly announced 190-mm f/5.3 Maksutov-Newtonian astrographs (an astrograph is a telescope specialized for photography). Of course, I’d need a fairly robust equatorial mount first, and a place to put it on a semi-permanent basis. Oh, and $1,300.

As usual, I gravitate towards the obscure and unique corners of my interests. Maksutov-Newtonians are weird telescopes: most Maksutovs on the market are Maksutov-Cassegrains; Mak-Newts combine the Maksutov corrector plate with a Newtonian reflector configuration. The upshot is that they have a reputation for superior image quality — certainly better than other catadioptric telescopes (e.g., Schmidt-Cassegrains), and approaching that of premium Dobs and apochromatic refractors, as this comparison demonstrates. In short, damn good for astrophotography, which seems to be Orion’s target lately — they’ve announced a six-megapixel CCD and a cheap autoguider, for example, while Celestron and Meade futz around with handheld planetariums.

Most Mak-Newts come from Russia, although Ottawa-based Ceravolo used to make them. Orion imported several from Intes a while back; I wonder where this new one comes from. Orion’s marketing copy highlights its component quality; earlier Russian imports apparently had first-rate optics but were a little unrefined otherwise. I look forward to reading the reviews. With any luck, it’ll still be on the market when I’m ready for one.

So one of Jennifer’s co-workers gave our phone number to one of her friends, who just called to ask if he could bring his granddaughter to visit the snakes.

I don’t know what gave her co-worker the right to do such a thing. It’s as if she had a swimming pool, and I invited my friends to swim in it.

I mention this in my reptile FAQ, and it seems I’m going to have to be more explicit about this from now on: we’re not a zoo. You don’t have the right to so much as ask to see our reptile collection, because you’re essentially trying to invite yourself into our private home. It’s especially inappropriate if, as is often the case, we haven’t met — or you’re calling us because a friend, or a friend of a friend, gave you our number.

If you’re a friend of ours and have a nephew or granddaughter who’s interested in snakes, we’ll probably give you an invitation. But it has to come from us, and be on our terms. If friends start passing out our number without our permission, they won’t be friends for much longer. And if co-workers start doing it, there will be consequences in that arena, I promise you.

We do not let strangers into our home — and for good reason: we’ve even been robbed by a delivery guy. And while we’re happy to teach people about snakes, we draw the line at letting strangers into our home to do it.

Especially when it’s clear that what people really want is a free one-on-one tour. Little Ray’s costs $10, and if you want that level of one-on-one attention, pony up for a birthday party or something. I’m sorry, but our time is valuable — we each bill at around $30 an hour — and it belongs to us.

At the Biodome this afternoon (I’m in Montreal for the weekend), I came to the following two conclusions:

1. The presence of entirely too many children emphasizes the problem with public education facilities like libraries, museums, zoos and suchlike: anything to do with education — and especially science — is seen as for children only. As though adults, once grown up, have but to sit at home and cultivate their ignorance, and only through their offspring are they allowed to expose themselves to knowledge.
2. Digital cameras are ruining everything — and I’m as guilty of this as anyone. Everyone was crammed against the railing or the glass, camera, video camera or cameraphone in hand, as we jostled to take our precious photos. We don’t visit any more; we’ve turned ourselves into photographers on assignment. It’s rather risible to see people try to take photos in dark rooms with cameraphones and pocket cameras under a no-flash rule; I was using an f/1.4 prime lens at ISO 1600 with as slow a shutter speed as I thought I could get away with, and I’m 50-50 as to whether any of them will turn out.

Any photos that turn out will be processed once I’m back home; there’s no way I’m working on 400 photos on this Asus Eee PC.

About The Dark Knight, which we saw on Saturday and by which we were suitably awed, impressed and overwhelmed: it’s an interesting sign that those who know their Batman — steeped in the mythology, own all the key graphic novels, have been reading the comics for decades — like this movie an awful lot. My brother, for example, who loved it. Lou Anders calls it “perfect”: he loved Batman Begins, and says The Dark Knight “even makes Batman Begins look silly by comparison.” Or have a look at Gary Westfahl’s self-described obsessive review of the film.

There are novels less dense, with fewer layers. This is a great movie; it makes the Tim Burton Batman look like the Adam West Batman. This is Batman for grown-ups. It is not, however, a concise movie.

Nothing is wrong with this picture. Yes, we were looking through the telescope before sunset last Friday, and no, we don’t have a solar filter yet. We were looking at the Moon, which looked pretty good.

Our plan was to look at and photograph the Moon before sunset, and then turn to Jupiter once it got high enough. (We stayed in the backyard because the path to our observing site was too muddy to carry a telescope along it, so solar system objects only that night.) But we never got that far: the onslaught of mosquitos chased us back inside before Jupiter was favourably positioned. I got bitten more in two hours than I had in five days of camping the previous week.

Note also the presence in the above photograph of one of my new toys: an Asus Eee PC, a Linux-based subnotebook with a solid-state drive. Basic, but cheap. Of particular note is that it comes preinstalled with KStars, the open-source planetarium application. One goal of last Friday’s observing session was to see if I could connect to the telescope, which was at least partially successful: the program recognized the telescope, but I didn’t do anything beyond that. Next time.