This is the last frivolous friday open thread of the year. So, get all your frivolity out of your system. Next year, we mean business.
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
Come be frivolous and play Friday Random 10 with us in the lounge!
Can I do 2005 over again instead, for the frivolity?
Aaahhh, never mind. I really want to repeat 1977, or 1968, or…were there any truly frivolous years?
Ok, here’s my frivolous. I resolve to ride my bicycle naked at least twice next year. People in town do this weekly once the weather gets warm, so I have lots of opportunities.
But I know what you mean, BooMan. I’ve been trying to rebuild DFA membership for next Wednesday’s meeting and find myself using army-talk to fire myself and others up.
So lock and load, friends. 2006 is when the neocons come crashing down.
I’m doing a frivolous cooking night. This is my first attempt ever at cooking French food. Check this out (as I did from my public library)
1st course: toasted baguette slices with broiled cheese, shallot, garlic and swiss chard spread.
2nd course: cream of leek soup with homemade croutons
3rd: beef braised in cabernet, broiled beets with raspberries
4th: citrus fruit and avocado salad
Then we get to the homemade cheese tart with brandied apricot sauce. (I treated myself to a ceramic tart pan, one I’ve been coveting for months.)
Yum. After all this we’re going to have a family night and play games.
I just drank tow glasses of champagne to put some sparkle into the evening’s blogging experience. (Make that 2.) That should keep me bubbleous until New Year’s Eve. When I plan to drink more and better!
Courtesy of BooMan the other day.
OMG
What else, for dinner on a Friday night?
Looks rather well done.
Nope! Not at all, that is a shadow, I think. It was actually considered the best Pizza ever by everyone in the family.
But, if you don’t like that one, I’ve got another handy:
Mackerel & tofu chile, 1/2 alarm, leftovers from last night, served as taco salad on taco chips, lettuce, tomatoes & onion. And my own personal alarm sauce of course!
Fwivowitty? Fwiday fwivowitty? I’ww be waking Puget4 up from hew afew dinnew nap with Mawtin Mull’s Duewwing Tubas.
I love it when you do that!
Purportedly true. the following….via inside sources…
Welcome to Jeb’s World sponsered by BushCo™
Peace
Urban Legends Reference Pages.
But still funny as heck! Living in FLorida, I think I see this all the time. Now, that’s true.
Thanks for the “Urban Legends” link…very good…I just got that riff via email from a friend…and indeed it is funny, and spooky as well.
Glad I don’t live in Florida…no offense intended…be safe.
Peace
So I decided to frivolously join the Random 10 fun at the FBC, but I don’t have an iPod (or non-fruit mp3 player). I can get the iTunes to do a random shuffle, but it doesn’t tell me what it’s going to play – it just randomly plays things. Second one up was Patti Smith’s Jubilee which I consider my “political anthem.”
from Jubilee
We are love and the future
We stand in the midst of fury and weariness
Who dreams of joy and radiance?
Who dreams of war and sacrifice?
Our sacred realms are being squeezed
Curtailing civil liberties
Recruit the dreams that sing to thee
Let freedom ring
Now it’s Stevie Wonder’s Katrina relief version of Shelter in the Rain. Frivolity is hard. I’m in favor of it, but reality keeps intruding . . .
Hit party shuffle in iTunes, and you can read them off the list then…
Patti Smith rocks.
Cool! Thanks – I hadn’t noticed that little icon. I got a pretty neat list with just the regular shuffle, but too late to join the fun. Can I post it next Friday, or is that cheating?
Yeah, I border on idolotry when it comes to Patti Smith.
i was frivolous last night!
I’m cookied out.
making fun of the wingnuts is so damn amusing. and easy. and there’s nothing people like that hate so much as not being taken seriously…
Good evening to all –
For the past 1/2 hour or so I’ve been on the Tivo website, deciding whether to order it as a birthday gift for my husband (yeah . . .that’s it – for my husband ;^)
Anyway, just wondering if folks have had good/bad experiences with their Tivos. I noticed they have a DVD recorder as an option on one of the boxes and wondered if that would be worth the extra money. And . . . I don’t know why . . . but they offer the option to choose between service through Best Buy or service directly through Tivo. Comments anyone?
Thanks in advance, and a good night to all!
(Oh yeah . . . and permission to join the multi-course meal and attend family night with the chef above. The meal sounds fabulous! I promise to chew very, very quietly and you won’t even notice me. Promise.)
I don’t have it, but most of my friends do. They all swear by it. It has revolutionized their TV watching like nothing since the inception of the remote control.
Thanks, ej. I’ve heard nothing but positive things, so it seemed like it might be too good to be true.
The only downside I see is that you’ll probably watch more TV. Because there is no longer such a thing as ‘having something else to do while your program is on’. You just save it and watch later, when you have time.
So that’s the risk you’re up against 🙂
Oh dear! Good thing we only watch educational shows ;^)
Well, then you should be ok.
Personally, I only watch reality TV. You know, like college football and major league baseball 🙂
Definite hazard at first. However, I found in the long run I watch less, actually. Since I know whatever-it-is will be there waiting when I get around to it, there’s no urgency to watch now. Most of the things I record I just never get around to.
And it’s great for political junkies for watching those hours-long hearings on C-SPAN, etc. Lets you go do other urgent things without missing anything important.
I just got Tivo for my Christmas present from my son. They got tired of me calling up on Mondays and asking what happened on West Wing. I just can’t seem to make it past 9pm anymore. What an old fart I’ve become. They got a great deal on it with a big rebate and the first three months free. Now, if he will just get his ass back over here to hook it up…
I love it as I have watched many sporting events at his house and it is great to replay too. Get it, you’ll,,,I mean your husband will love it! Teehee
If it’s any consolation . . . being the “party girl” that I am . . . I logged off around 9:10 last night to go to bed. (That’s my current version of living in the fast lane. I could’ve gone to bed at 8:30, but instead, I stayed up till 9:00. ;^)
Thanks for the feedback!
You want this! Er, for your husband (right).
IMO, it is the only way to watch TV. I’ve had a Tivo for years, and I can’t imagine going back to having to watch a show when it’s actually broadcast instead of whenever I feel like watching it, or not being able to pause or replay live TV (WHAT did he just say?), or not being able to zap all the commercials, or what I would do without the Season Passes. And I don’t even watch much TV.
I tried Time-Warner’s DVR version and it was not even close in ease of use and features. I took it back.
As for the DVD recorder – I just bought a separate one and use it to record from the Tivo – easy to do. A DVD recorder is handy for things you want to keep or share – once they’re on DVD you can clear them off of the Tivo’s HD and make more room on it. I’d say get whichever is cheaper – the combo or two units. Same with the Best Buy vs. Tivo ordering. Just get the best deal – the beauty is in the service, where you buy the actual machine is irrelevant.
If you can afford it – the best deal is the lifetime service, which gives you $150 off the cost of the machine itself*. I did that when I first bought mine and never regretted it. Since I’ve had it for years, it’s saved me a lot of money overall.
[*Offer is with 12mo subscription, but fine print says you can upgrade this to lifetime and still get the discount on the box.]
to pause Countdown to make a comment to the spouse…also easier to fast forward through the commercials IMHO. And it’s awesome for taping entire series — I have one series that I tape daily; shortly before the holidays it went into a brief period of reruns and the DVR automatically stopped taping it daily, but it’s already set to resume on Jan. 9 when the series starts back up with the first runs. 🙂
Haven’t gone for a DVD recorder yet; we’ve got a dual DVD/VCR deck, though we haven’t used the VCR in a while (we’re still in the process of replacing many of our VHS movies with DVDs, but some aren’t out on DVD yet). Might do it eventually, but it’s not a high priority…
Way cool! And thanks for the point about pausing.
I can’t count the number of times Mr. A thinks of a crucial opinion he desperately needs to share – during the most critical moment of any given show. (Huh? Did that attorney just tell Chris Matthews that the president has been impeached? Did they just solve the murder in that mystery movie we’ve been watching for two hours?) Sadly, Mr. A’s timing couldn’t be more “impeccable”, and I often find myself reading online transcripts to find out what was being said while he shared his perspectives on things.
In turn, Mr. A will undoubtedly appreciate “pausing”, as he witnesses the significant decline in the number of times he’s on the receiving end of “The Look”
Thanks Cali, Good Day!
“YES!!!”
Okay, I think I’ll accept that as a resounding product endorsement (or an impersonation of Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally ;^) Thanks for taking the time to share all your valuable commentary, Janet – much appreciated! By the sounds of things, I can’t afford not to get TiVo (to fulfill my husband’s long-term happiness). I understand where you’re coming from regarding your viewing habits, because up until our VCR conked out on us, we taped all our shows and viewed them later – sans commercials.
What is a “Season Pass”? I’m not understanding how that differs from the service in general.
From the TiVo site:
On a side note, we own an NEC TV that I purchased in 1987. We have no interest in replacing it because the picture seems better than most new TVs on the market. But we seem to be running into compatibility issues with current technology. For example, when our VCR bit the dust a few months back, Mr. A attempted to install several different new ones, but none of them fully worked (for a variety of reasons). So right about now, I’m hoping we don’t run into similar compatibility problems with TiVo.
Thanks again, Janet – you’ve been very helpful!
If you’re still checking back . . .
Season Pass is an option to record ALL the episodes of a certain series, and as Cali pointed out, it even knows not to get the reruns (unless you tell it to “record all.”) It’s really clever in the way it does these things. For example, suppose you read about a series, e.g. “Independent Lens” that looks good. You don’t even have to know the network or time it’s on – just “search” for it and it will come up on a list. Select that and you have options like “view upcoming episodes” which will tell you when and on what channel its on. Or “get a season pass” and then you can set things like the quality of the recording, how many episodes you want to save (for example, I have it keep only 2 of BBC news – it’s topical, so if I haven’t watched a particular newscast after a couple of days it might as well delete it), how long to keep it (a movie might be “until I delete” or a show like 60 Minutes for a week).
“Regular service” is when you tell it to record one thing one time. Most of what’s on my Tivo is from my season passes, but I also use it for one-time recordings of movies, for example.
What really amazes me is how it deals with conflicts. Your season pass list is in order of your priority – so if there is a time conflict between two shows and it can only get one, it records the one higher on the list – and it’s easy to rearrange the order. With PBS shows or some cable shows, there are multiple showings. In that case if there’s a conflict between two shows, it will change the time of one so as to be able to get both. Even if say, Masterpiece Theatre is set to record at 8pm Tuesday (or whenever – one result of having Tivo is that I don’t have the slightest idea anymore when the regular time of shows is) but you add something else that’s on at 8pm Tuesday, it will look for another showing of Masterpiece Theatre (say 2am Wednesday) and record it then.
You connect to a phone line and it calls up – toll free – and downloads all the shows that will be on for the next two weeks (you tell it where you are and what cable or satellite service you have so it knows what to download). You don’t have to have a separate phone line – it only takes a couple of minutes to update the schedule each day, and if you happen to pick up the phone to use it during a download, it cancels the download and reschedules it.
And finally, I too have an antique television and have had no problem with connections.
You almost have me talked into it now…
I must agree with CabinGirl. TiVo would be utterly remiss in not hiring you to head up their sales division. (And I’m just guessing here, but I bet that would be an occupational wet dream for you! :^) Okay, back to reality . . .
Thanks so much, Janet. What a wonderful lesson plan in TiVo 101. So much so, that I decided to print your comment and involve Mr. A in the decision-making process up front. And I have to say – you accomplished the impossible by instantly selling him in one post.
In spite of the fact that he’s wanted TiVo for many years, Mr. A just can’t make a decision like that without polling every (male) person in his life to obtain their valuable opinions of any purchase at hand. Then he’ll undoubtedly mull it over some more, because he’ll find that some of the people (men) he polled had conflicting opinions and experiences . . . which always leads us into the next phase of determining which of the resources he polled has the most credibility. And then, we have to circle back to decide which one of the credible resources has the most credibility for that particular purchase. And it’s a very exhausting, lengthy process.
But you, dear Janet, eliminated those standard operating procedures in just one post. Bless you.
Thanks again for all the great input! Trust me when I say that you’ve achieved quite an amazing feat, indeed.
Good night!
i posted a frivolous friday diary.
http://www.boomantribune.com/?op=displaystory;sid=2005/12/30/221149/55
i hope you like it.
Everyone is entitled to:
Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Frivolity!