Luke turned 5 on January 4. He had his birthday party yesterday. Big fun was had by all.
I used the occasion to test out 8mm Vintage Camera, one of my favorite new iPhone apps. It’s a neat little video camera app, with several film styles from years gone by.
Best of all, unlike Hipstamatic, with which I eventually threw my hands up in frustration and gave up, the options and controls are very intuitive.
I shot this clip on my iPhone, uploaded it to YouTube right from the app, and then changed the audio track to a song from YouTube’s library via YouTube’s AudioSwap feature.
The third episode and season finale of Deacon Blues has been released.
In this tense and thrilling episode, a prospective new member inquires about the Deacon Fight Club and its purposes and challenges.
Episode 1 is here. Episode 2 is here. There may be future episodes, if WFU continues its downward spiral and the show gets renewed for another season.
Note: All characters and events in this show—even those based on real people—are entirely fictional. All celebrity voices are impersonated…..poorly. The following program contains coarse language and due to its content it should not be viewed by anyone.
Obviously, this is satire and humor. No offense to any person, real or fictional, is intended.
Note: All characters and events in this show—even those based on real people—are entirely fictional. All celebrity voices are impersonated…..poorly. The following program contains coarse language and due to its content it should not be viewed by anyone.
Obviously, this is satire and humor. No offense to any person, real or fictional, is intended.
Now that Boardwalk Empire is on hiatus, Martin Scorsese and Terence Winter turned their attention to some real drama: the 2010-11 Wake Forest Demon Deacon basketball season.
Inspired by the creative writing at the DeaconSports WFU message board, Scorsese and Winter have produced Deacon Blues, a mini-series about the highs and lows of being a WFU sports fan.
As a holiday gift to all, the first episode was made available for free, on the net.
Note: All characters and events in this show—even those based on real people—are entirely fictional. All celebrity voices are impersonated…..poorly. The following program contains coarse language and due to its content it should not be viewed by anyone.
Powerful stuff, that.
Obviously, this is satire and humor. No offense to any person, real or fictional is intended.
They got a name for the winners in the world
I want a name when I lose
They call Alabama the Crimson Tide
Call me Deacon Blues ~ Steely Dan, Deacon Blues
It’s hard to be a Wake Forest basketball fan. Almost perfectly hard. You suffer through long periods of frustration, interspersed with brief moments of sheer joy. The most joyful being the Tim Duncan/Randolph Childress fueled back to back ACC Championships of the mid-nineties.
That was a long, long time ago, so let’s look back at a wonderful moment in time.
Those were good times. Many fans thought they were the beginning of a long period of WFU hardcourt dominance.
It didn’t quite work out that way.
Later, Skip Prosser led Wake to some good (but again not quite great) seasons. Skip was 126-68 during the regular season, but alas had mixed post-season success.
Skip died tragically, and his top assistant and close friend Dino Gaudio took over. Dino led WFU to a 61-31 record in 3 seasons, but the post-season collapses that pre-dated Dino continued, ultimately leading to his sacking after last season.
I was very worried when it became clear that Athletic Director Ron Wellman was bound and determined to hire his old friend Jeff Bzdelik to replace Dino. The same Jeff Bzdelik that had a 36-58 record at Colorado, and has never won an NCAA Tournament game. In fact, if anything his post season record made Wake’s look better.
Others shared my reaction. It was, at least by objective measures, a strange hire.
But I was willing to take a wait and see approach.
I’ve waited, and what I have seen so far is nothing short of a complete train wreck. Wake has gone from a team that was a contender in the ACC and ranked no. 1 in the country to having to scramble to nip a previously winless UNC-G team. At home.
Sadly, that UNC-G win was a high point of the early season, compared to home losses to:
Stetson (Atlantic Sun). Currently 3-7 with losses to Bethune Cookman, Palm Beach Atlantic (whoever that is) and Jacksonville.
Winthrop (Big South). Currently 5-6, with losses to Hampton, Belmont and Liberty.
UNC-W (Colonial Athletic Conference). Currently 5-5, with a loss to N.C. A&T.
And then, tonight, a home loss to the 5-6 Big South juggernaut, Presbyterian (whose losses, in the interest of fairness, are better than many who have beaten Wake this season).
It would have been unreasonable to expect Wake to be really good this year. But it would be selling Wake short to believe that this is OK. It’s not, and if you really believe Wake can be good, if you’re really a fan, you should not suffer quietly. I want to make it absolutely clear to anyone who will listen that I- and many other fans- expect more than this. It’s OK to have a bad year. It’s never OK to have this bad a year.
Those whose psychological makeup won’t allow them to face reality argue that Wake Forest has a young team and does not have a true point guard. True enough, and that will be a great oft-used excuse when Wake gets beat by 40 or 50 once the ACC games begin next month. But to say that Wake’s roster, with highly regarded recruits, point guard or not, should be a cellar dweller in the Big South Conference is absurd and indefensible on its face.
Jeff Bzdelik is in all likelihood a really good guy, and I mean no personal disrespect to him. But no one forced him to take the Wake Forest job, and he is highly paid for his troubles (I have long been fascinated by the coach-as-a-proxy-for-the-program transference that leads some to defend a guy they’d never heard of a year ago like he’s the Pope, Gandhi, Santa Claus and their favorite uncle all rolled into one). At the end of the day, there are two possibilities. One, all of Wake’s recruits were greatly overrated, not only by the prior coaching staffs, but also by most of the national recruiting services. Two, Bzdelik is not, as it turns out, the second coming of John Wooden. Occam’s razor precludes me from believing the former.
The thing is that I am a Wake Forest fan. Not a fan of whoever happens to be the coach at the moment. It would be cool to be excited about both. At the moment it’s really hard to be excited about either.
And if Bzdelik and crew can’t manage a victory over Presbyterian at home, how’s it going to go when Wake plays Duke? Call me Chicken Little, but I’m thinking not too good.
Those who try to keep their eyes closed and their chins up have provided a mountain of anecdotal evidence in support of the proposition that Bzdelik is a great game coach. That’s it- he’s an Xs and Os wizard who will coach up his players to compete with the Dukes and the UNCs.
First, he has to coach them up to compete with the VCUs and Xaviers.
As I have said to other Wake fans: Bzdelik may be a great coach, but nothing I have seen so far proves it. He better be a great recruiter, for all of our sake. Crazy thing is that few have tried to argue that he will be. Many have hung their hats on the great game coach peg.
Yes, yes a million few times yes, it’s early. Time will tell, but no one who is being even remotely honest can say that this season so far is anything more than a complete disaster- point guard or not.
Equally as frustrating as Wake’s dismal pre-conference record is the fact that the Deacons look fundamentally unsound and unprepared, and are unbearably boring to watch.
I completely realize that if Bzdelik turns Wake around, this year (fat chance) or another, this post will be constantly tossed in my face as proof that I am a “bad fan,” whatever in the hell that is. If that happens, I’ll be happy to admit that Wake is good again. I’ll even admit that I could have kept my mouth shut and suffered through a dismal season or two so I could claim to be a loyal fan when WFU wins a few games. What I’ll really be is happy, because I’ll once again be able to look forward to watching games.
I won’t even go into the ancillary marketing and branding effects that flow out of a successful sports program. I just want Wake to have a good team so it will be fun to watch the games.
Here’s the thing. Maybe when you’re in college you have some implied duty to support the team, keep a positive attitude no matter what and attend the games. But when you’re middle aged, with a job, family and a million other things competing for your time, you have absolutely no obligation to sit in front of the TV game after game watching your team get dismantled by lesser competition. You just don’t.
And I’m not. I’m calling a TKO on this season.
Maybe next year will be better, more fun. It can’t possibly be any worse.
It was way too cloudy last night for us to see much of the lunar eclipse. We could catch only glimpses once in a while as the heavy clouds passed overhead.
Fortunately, William Castleman, a professor at the University of Florida and photographer, put together an amazing time lapse video so we can see what we missed.
When I see or read about lunar eclipses, I am reminded of one of my favorite B-horror movies, Messiah of Evil.
It’s a creepy film about a blood red moon, vampire-zombies and, sort of, the Donner Party. It was made by the same people who later made Howard the Duck and who wrote the screenplay for American Graffiti. That, friends, is range.
I bought a VHS of Messiah of Evil on eBay back in the day, but I never got it converted to digital format. That’s not a problem, as the film can be seen, in its entirety, on YouTube.
Want to make a really cool video in about 10 seconds (of your time)?
Go to Pummelvision, point the app to your photos, and give it access. A few minutes or hours later (depending on the number of photos involved, you get something like this. . .
It continues to boggle my mind that so many people deny the threat of global warming. I have previously set forth my position, and provided references to scientific data in support of the same.
This time I’m going to distill it down to a single sentence.
The only reason to deny the need to address global warming is if you believe an extra dollar or two now is preferable to a better quality of life for your grandchildren.
Here is a 15 minute presentation on the threat we all face, via the Official Google Blog.
We can debate what should be done. It is completely clear that something must be done.
This is not a political issue. This is a human issue.
I just cancelled my Angie’s List subscription. Here’s why.
1. The navigation structure makes Facebook’s navigation seem crisp and intuitive. I was going to do a screen shot, but then, um, I just carried on living my life. It’s just too hard to find what you’re looking for. I could probably live with that, but there are 3 more reasons.
2. They auto-renewed my subscription. Sure, I probably agreed to that when I signed up a little more than a year ago in an unsuccessful attempt to find a home theater guy. But it pisses me off when sites do that without sending me an email in advance. It makes me think they don’t really believe I would knowingly choose to re-up.
3. Worse than the unannounced auto-renew, I just went to cancel my account, and there’s no easy way to do it. It reminds me of my Rhapsody nightmare.
Notice that there isn’t even an email address listed. You have to go find it.
So you’ll auto-renew me as a convenience, but I have to call, email or fax (fax? seriously!?) to cancel. Hmmm. Angie’s List should take a page from Hulu Plus, where it is super-easy to cancel (which I just did because I’m simply not going to watch ads). Hulu even sends an instant email acknowledging the cancellation.
Newsome.Org 