Monthly Archives: December 2005

New Fallen Angel for the New Year

Posted on December 31, 2005 by Kelson

Fallen Angel artwork by J.K. Woodward After months of waiting, I finally picked up the newly-relaunched Fallen Angel today. This was a bit of a challenge. My usual comic store hadn’t ordered it for some reason (despite the “Fallen Angel” note on my pull list. Maybe it was still listed under DC? They figured out when Angel moved from Dark Horse to IDW, and even picked the right cover for me.

So I stopped by my other regular comic store this afternoon—the one near home instead of near work—and picked up Fallen Angel and Night Mary. In the rain. And had to get them not only back to the car, but from the car up three flights of stairs, around the apartment building, and up to the landing without getting them wet. While carrying three bags of groceries and two umbrellas.

Anyway, the book is well worth it. Peter David launches a new story with all the major players 20 years later. Some of the dynamics have changed, some are the same… and some look about to be altered significantly. Lee still fights the good fight in Bete Noire, Juris is still Magistrate, even Dolf still runs his bar. But there are new players in town, including Juris’ wife and 18-year-old son (who he thinks is his firstborn)… and a figure from Lee’s past who comes to her with a tantalizing offer (an actual “Whoa!”-out-loud moment). It looks like we may be learning the Fallen Angel’s origin soon. We’ve only just learned her real name…

Yes, this comic is good. It’s pricy at $3.99, but the story’s great, and J.K. Woodward’s art is fantastic. (See the cover? The whole thing looks like that!)

Posted in Comics | Tagged Comics, Fallen Angel, IDW, Peter David | 1 Comment

Strange Shopping Sights

Posted on December 31, 2005 by Kelson

While Christmas shopping, I kept seeing things that made me wish I had brought my camera. The ridiculously giant Christmas tree at Fashion Island was not one of them; all I needed was a picture demonstrating its height.

Giant Xmas Tree

A toy store yielded a number of amusements (appropriately enough), in the form of a series of unconventional action figures—Jane Austen, Leonardo DaVinci, Mozart, Charles Dickens… and of course talking Jesus and Moses figures. And then there’s the Avenging Unicorn!

Historical Action Figures

Continue reading →

Posted in Signs of the Times | Tagged Christmas, weird | 2 Comments

Moroccan Mint Mocha

Posted on December 30, 2005 by Kelson

The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf has a drink they call a Moroccan Mint Latte. It’s a tea latte with chocolate. You can get a fairly good approximation by making hot chocolate using mint tea instead of hot water. Katie suggested Bigelow Plantation Mint (after I mentioned that I’d tried it with Stash Moroccan Mint), which seems to work well.

Update: I forgot to mention the key difference between the two varieties of tea that I tried. Black tea works better with chocoloate than green tea.

Posted in Food | Tagged chocolate, coffee, tea | 1 Comment

Bunny’s Technorati Tags and WordPress 2.0

Posted on December 30, 2005 by Kelson

Solved! To make Bunny’s Technorati Tags fully compatible with WordPress 2.0 you need to change two lines in the add_tags_textinput() function.

Just replace this:

function add_tags_textinput() {
	global $postdata;
	$tags = get_post_meta($postdata->ID, 'tags', true);

with this:

function add_tags_textinput() {
	global $post_ID;
	$tags = get_post_meta($post_ID, 'tags', true);

The problem is that it will show existing tags, or let you add a new tag, but it will lose tags when you edit a post. It’s not able to retrieve the tags to fill in the form field, apparently because $postdata isn’t returning the ID it expects.

I’ve submitted the fix to wp-plugins.org, so if the author is keeping track of tickets there, the fix should show up in the next version of the plugin.

Update Jan. 3: The plugin author has released version 0.5 with a slightly different fix (plus a few other improvements), and it’s now compatible with WordPress 2.0.

Posted in Site Updates, Troubleshooting | Tagged bunny, plugin, tags, Technorati, wordpress | Leave a comment

WP2

Posted on December 30, 2005 by Kelson

Well, I see that WordPress 2.0 was released on Monday. Oddly, no fanfare from the WordPress website since last week’s release candidate. Upgrade was fairly quick and painless.

So far only three gotchas:

The spell check plugin is not compatible.
The new post preview, while nice, does not work with the stable release of the Permalink Redirect plugin. The test version posted in the comments seems to fix it.
The old pop-up “Press it!” bookmarklet is a bit messed up. There’s a new bookmarklet that just pre-fills the regular post page, but I liked having it in a pop-up window so that I could keep the original page open for things like quoting, going back to make comments, adding it to del.icio.us, etc.

I’m trying to get used to the WYSIWYG post editor, but I suspect I may go back to textile. I’m too much of a control freak when it comes to HTML, plus this does stupid things like ... instead of ... or .... (Older versions of WordPress did similarly stupid things like always using ... for italics—sometimes you aren’t using them for emphasis, you’re using them for, say, a book title.) Of course, what I’d really like is to use the rich text edtor for the comments. Probably only the comments. I do like being able to change the size of the entry field, though.

Update: Well, the rich editor trashed my examples. There’s no clear separation between formatted mode and HTML mode. If you type in HTML tags in formatted mode, they look like they’ll appear as text, but they actually get stored as HTML… and it even converted my italic tags to emphasis tags! Add in the fact that I can type in the HTML for a link faster than I can point-n-click, and the editor, for now, is toast.

Update 2: Bunny’s Technorati Tags only half-works. It can add tags to a post, but will lose them when you edit it.

Update 3: Something Unpredictable has a list of known bugs in WP 2.0 [archive.org]. Of particular interest is bug 2160 in get_post_custom_values(). Unfortunately the patch doesn’t seem to fix the tags problem. It actually makes it worse by breaking the plugin’s ability to display the tags.

Update 4: And there’s the official announcement.

To read tonight: What’s New in WordPress 2.0. And maybe I’ll finally get around to putting together a new theme sometime.

Posted in Site Updates | Tagged wordpress | 3 Comments

Edward Scissorhands Sharp as Ever

Posted on December 28, 2005 by Kelson

We went to see a screening of Edward Scissorhands tonight. A couple of local art cinemas (both part of the Edwards/Regal chain) have been doing a weekly “Flashback Features” series since summer (or possibly earlier). The first one we went to was The Princess Bride, which was absolutely packed with people who knew the movie so well they were laughing before the jokes.

None of the others we’d been to were anywhere near as full, and we lost track of the series a couple of months ago. Then yesterday I remembered we’d been planning to go see Edward Scissorhands, and figured we’d missed it. (I finally bought the DVD a couple of months ago, but wanted to hold off until after the screening since Katie hadn’t seen it before.) Fortunately, Katie remembered that it was this week, and we were able to make it. (And for once, we made it on Wednesday, so we could go to South Coast Village instead of Rancho Santa Margarita.)

Well, we prepared to turn into the theater parking lot and noticed it was full. Katie was the first to realize why: Johnny Depp. We got in, but I had to park across the street. The crowd was as good as the one for Princess Bride, and there was even one guy in full costume (the normal-clothes version, not the leather and buckles). We were pleased that while they showed “The Twenty,” which I suspect is a contractual obligation, they neglected to turn on the sound! The 15-year-old print was in terrible shape, but the condition was forgotten quickly.

It’s always a risk to go back and watch something you enjoyed when you were younger. Your tastes change as you grow up (or you actually develop a sense of taste). There are some cartoons I refuse to watch because I want to remember liking them. Sometimes they work out. Sometimes they don’t. Edward Scissorhands still holds up: The contrast between the inventor’s mansion and the pseudo-50s achingly “normal” suburbia, Danny Elfman’s fairy-tale music, the neighborhood’s curiosity, then acceptance, then ultimate rejection of this strange visitor, Peg’s determination to make things work out, Kim’s slow realization that her boyfriend isn’t a very nice guy, and that this scary blade-handed stranger is, the cop’s efforts to smooth things over—all with Tim Burton’s distinctive quirky style.

Back to the screening series, it really brings out the difference between the home movie experience and the theater experience. It’s not just the size of the screen and the volume of the sound. It’s the audience. When you have a few hundred people all watching the same movie, reacting to the same things, you get an emotional synergy that you don’t get with a couple of people at home—or with a few dozen people yakking and answering their cell phones!

Posted in Reviews, Sci-Fi/Fantasy | Tagged movies, Tim Burton | 1 Comment

Flop? What Flop?

Posted on December 28, 2005 by Kelson

OK, so we know Serenity didn’t do that well at the box office (despite being an excellent movie), but the DVD sales seem to be doing great. Last Thursday, just two days after release, Best Buy not only had it on its Best Seller shelf, they were actually sold out of the widescreen version. And Amazon.com’s DVD rankings show Serenity at #2 and Firefly at #3. Considering that the Firefly DVDs have been out for something like two years, and everything else on the 25-item list is either a new release or a new special edition, the obvious conclusion is that Amazon’s “Buy this DVD with Firefly” ploy is working—or that people are (again) watching the movie and then coming back for more.

Is Fox TV eligible for the “Turning down the Beatles” award yet?