See It.

We made it to see The Dark Knight Rises tonight. I'm certainly not going to spoil anything, but I'll say it was very very good. It's a little longer than the second one, but it doesn't feel nearly as long as it is. It was a very satisfying conclusion to the trilogy (and now it's pretty clear that the three Nolan films are meant to be taken together as such).

One other thing, for those of you in my area: Showcase Cinemas offers a Tuesday discount: all movies are $7 all day. I think tickets are normally $11 and change, so if you can make time to see a movie on a Tuesday, it's a decent deal.

Last Week in Awesome (7/28/12)

All day I had this feeling that I'd forgotten something...

It turns out that what we have all suspected about 3-D movies is true. (Funny or Die)

There's a lot of cool stuff underground, as this list shows. (Flavorpill via The Daily What)

The wisdom (?) of Ralph Wiggum. (Laughing Squid)

Ooh, so close... (The Daily What)

And finally this last week, those with acting talent have so much to offer the rest of us. (Gawker)

Ironed Out

I've discovered one annoyance with our new iron: once I have used it and turned it off, I have to unplug and replug it before it can be turned back on. I imagine this is meant as some sort of safety feature, but in daily use it becomes a nuisance.

I have not tried leaving the iron on and letting it shut off automatically to see if that makes any difference when turning it back on. I suspect it doesn't, but it's probably worth checking.

Retro Video Unit (7/27/12)

How is it that I've overlooked this video? The dB's have been one of my favorite bands for decades, and in honor of their newish release Falling Off The Sky, their first album in 25 years, we absolutely must pay tribute to the genius of "Amplifier."

Happy Dog Day

Whoops, I almost forgot: today is our six-year "dogaversary." We are very lucky to have found such a sweet and well-behaved dog.

Uh-oh, looks like someone got a little carried away with the celebrating...

Towel Pride

I came across this aisle a few days ago at our local Ocean State Job Lot:

I guess they're really going after the Irish customers in the area.

Stock Up Now

I have a tendency to buy household items in large quantities. Part of it is the idea of taking advantage of a good deal, part of it is having the space to store the haul, and part of it is a dislike of running out of things that we use every day or regularly.

Costco and the other warehouse clubs encourage this approach with the way their items are packaged. You want this cleaning product? Well, you'll have to purchase it in this bulk-pack. At the moment I have an eight-month supply of laundry detergent that I purchased at Costco a couple of weeks ago. It's their store brand, Kirkland, and it comes in an enormous squared jug that sits on its side with a spout on the bottom.

But I do this when shopping for other household stuff. I almost always buy two tubes of toothpaste at a time, or two sticks of anti-perspirant, when I go to Target. I'm already there, it's a good price, and I know I won't have to go back so soon for more. Target has the best everyday deal on tissues that I have found: four boxes of store-brand, 200 per box, for $5. Tissues are one of those items that are almost universally overpriced, so this helps avoid that pitfall.

A few weeks ago the Mrs. returned from a trip to CVS with 52 rolls of toilet paper (two 20-packs and a 12-pack). Normally we buy it by the 12-pack, but CVS was offering a $10 gas card to those who spent a certain dollar amount on certain products. (I am curious to see how long the 20-pack lasts in a household with only two adults.)

However, this purchasing behavior does not always extend to food. We try, but we have to be selective about the purchases. We can't always justify bulk food purchases because we often won't be able to use whatever it is before it spoils, which ends up wasting money, which is the opposite of what we're trying to do.

Where's Bloggo?

Things have been busy this week: career workshops, informational interviews, dental appointments for both me and the dog (at different places, fortunately). But don't worry, I'll be back with more real stuff soon.

Confusion

I was up and out fairly early today (relative to my current norm), and so far I've seen two different people wearing fleece jackets. Given that the temperature and humidity are where you would expect for late July, I simply don't understand it.

This Week in Awesome (7/21/12)

I'm not sure yet when we'll be seeing The Dark Knight Rises (probably next weekend), but based on a couple of the reviews I've read, we are going to prepare by rewatching Batman Begins and The Dark Knight (on blu-ray, baby). It has been a while since we've seen either movie, and apparently the new movie references the previous ones enough that a refresher is helpful.

Elsewhere...

A remote-controlled drone flight over Detroit with a camera attached gives a unique perspective on the city, both the good and the bad. (Deadline Detroit via Jalopnik)

If you're old enough, this flickr gallery of old library posters might stir some memories. (The New Yorker Culture Desk)

Here's a really neat fake map made up of familiar elements from the movies. (BuzzFeed via We Are Dorothy; for a look at some of their other work, go here.)

This is the kind of thing that can cause the internet to break itself, if it isn't careful: Suggested BuzzFeed Articles (McSweeney's via Videogum) which of course led to...

And finally this week, this needs no explanation or introduction: The Lego Wire. Previously, from the same people, CSI: Legoland. (Yahoo Sketchy via Videogum)

Weekend Reading: Talking Heads

I don't get The New Yorker (I know, what a philistine...) so I was unaware of this piece on the band Talking Heads from mid-June, but I discovered it yesterday while catching up on the magazine's Culture Desk blog.

It's longish but definitely worth reading, and when you've finished there is a high probability that "This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody)"—you know, the one that starts with that flutelike sound—will be lodged in your brain for a while. (And if you want to get a head start, here's the music video.)

What's Not in Store

Boston-area residents in need of cheap furniture are going to have to continue driving to Stoughton: it was announced today that the long-promised, quasi-mythical (can a retail store be considered vaporware?) Somerville IKEA will not be happening, according to the Boston Globe.

It's been well over a decade since IKEA purchased property between the Assembly Square shopping center and the Mystic River. If I remember correctly, the original proposal had the store opening in 2001. At the time I lived within walking distance and was quite excited at the prospect, but after years of delays I began to wonder if the store would ever be built.

After my first experience visiting an IKEA in Virginia in 1991, I desperately wanted to earn enough money to have my own apartment and furnish it entirely from there. But the longer we waited for the Somerville store, the less its existence came to matter to me. IKEA became less of a novelty, and at the same time I grew up and my tastes changed.

If I do want or need something from IKEA, the Stoughton store is about a 30-minute drive from our house. It's still a useful store for inexpensive household items, and I've had this gigantic aerial photo of the Flatiron Building in New York bookmarked for a couple of years now. (It's almost five feet high by six and a half feet wide.)

When the adjacent mixed-use Assembly Row project started construction earlier this year, along with the future Orange Line stop, and no mention was made of the IKEA project, I suspected the worst. According to the story, IKEA will look to sell the property, and with the other activity already underway on the adjacent sites, I imagine it won't be too difficult.

Feeds and Reads

I was asked by a friend to add an RSS feed to my blog. I was kind of surprised, because I thought that feature was already built into the Blogger template. Poking around in the settings showed me that I was mistaken.

Although I'm a heavy internet user, I've never used RSS feeds, and to be honest I've never quite grasped how they work, which is partly why I stayed away from getting into it. I went and looked around at a bunch of other blogs, Blogger and otherwise, but none of them had RSS set up either.

The Blogger help section is rather obtuse and pretty unhelpful about this feature. I was able to figure out what I was supposed to do, but an explanation of how to do it was sorely lacking. My friend pointed me to the correct place in Blogger's settings, and the correct widget to add to the layout, and I managed to suss out what code to add to the widget.

So now you'll see an RSS button over there in the right column (scroll down a bit), and those of you who use RSS can take advantage of it. Please let me know if it doesn't seem to be working properly.

(Side note: I wonder if this will have any effect on my visitor stats?)

Hot Dog

The dog doesn't understand that it's not a good idea for her to be outside for more than a few minutes on a day like this (it hit 97 here today). She still wants to wander and sniff things, regardless of how uncomfortable she is.

Iron, Man

Some months back, our iron of several years started misbehaving, dripping water on the garment being ironed seemingly at random. It was a basic iron we had bought at Costco for $30, and I think we'd had it six or seven years, so I figured we'd gotten our money's worth out of it.

I started thinking about what to replace it with, and I went to Amazon to read some reviews. After maybe half an hour I was dizzy, and felt like my brain was trying to stab itself. There were just far too many products, and every single one of them had at least one person who'd had a miserable experience with it and needed to vent about it. (This probably isn't news to those of you who shop online with any frequency, but people are much more likely to post negative reviews than positive ones.)

I decided the path of least resistance was to do what we'd done before; we went to Costco and I got the less expensive of the two irons they were carrying. It was a different $30 iron than the one we'd bought before, but it was the same brand, so I figured it would be all right. But a couple of months after we got it, I noticed that it wasn't generating steam properly. It was getting plenty hot enough but not making any steam, even on the highest steam setting. As a result, ironing a shirt was taking three times longer than usual.

I realized that we could still return the iron, thanks to Costco's generous return policy; for most items they sell other than electronics, there's no time limit on returns, as long as you have the receipt and don't abuse the privilege. That still left the question of what to get in its place. A Bed Bath & Beyond sale catalog arrived in the mail that same day, and inside was a basic iron, a different brand and $40 instead of $30. Conveniently there's a BB&B in the same shopping center as the Costco, so off we went. Costco even gave me the refund in cash, even though I'd made the purchase with my debit card.

I know there are people who swear by their $100 "professional" irons, and I did consider that option, but for the amount and type of ironing we do I believe a "regular" iron is sufficient. Some of the pro models are still made in Germany, however, instead of China, which is something I know some people like to be aware of (I'm one of them). If this new iron does turn out to be deficient in some way, I will most likely give in and get a pro model, but I'm hoping it won't come to that.

This Week in Awesome (7/14/12)

I didn't even notice it was Friday the 13th. I guess that's how Friday the 13ths should be, right?

As a word nerd, I appreciated this argument for the reintroduction of some obscure old words. (Note that "loggerheads" is not among them.) (Thought Catalog via Kempt)

Of course there's a website with scanned archives of decades' worth of Radio Shack catalogs, silly—it's the internet. (The Truth About Cars)

Have you ever wondered why we wear pants? (The Atlantic)

Here's an interesting piece from PBS's OffBook web series about logo design. They post new videos every other week, so it's worth bookmarking this page and revisiting it. (The Daily What via The High Definite)

Have you seen this alternate version of the Dark Knight Rises trailer? That voice sounds awfully familiar... (Hulu via Videogum)

And finally this week, in anticipation of tonight's season five premiere of Breaking Bad, some reading to get you in the mood: first, a recap of the first four seasons in 10 minutes (SlateV); an analysis of the show's approach to storytelling (Grantland); and a wish list of hoped-for answers in the final season (Vulture).

Retro Video Unit (7/13/12)

Today we have another instance of "this band just popped into my head for no particular reason." The Replacements weren't the biggest fans of making music videos, and in some cases they worked hard to make what they considered anti-videos, but in hindsight those can be just as interesting. Here's the official video for "Alex Chilton," a truly great song:

Meddling with History

If I was given the opportunity to erase one band from existence, I think it would be Supertramp.

Readers: your thoughts on this, please? Agree, disagree, suggest alternatives...

Game Face

I've never been much for video or computer games. I've never used an XBOX or a Playstation, or even a Wii. I do not have Angry Birds on my iPhone, nor have I ever played it. Way back in the pre-smartphone days when I was using a Palm handheld, I used to like a couple of puzzle games, Tetris and Bejeweled.

But not long after I got my iPhone, I did download the free version of Scrabble. And about a week after that I downloaded the $2 version so the incredibly annoying ads would be gone. I started a game with a college friend who lives in Texas, and another with a friend who lives nearby. When we visited family in California in May, I started a third game with my brother-in-law.

A couple of days ago, my in-progress games suddenly would not load on the main menu screen. The game would search and a little cursor thing would spin, and after a couple of minutes I would get this message: "something went wrong, pull down to retry." Not good.

I found a support email address in the game info, and sent a request explaining the problem. I expected it would be at least a couple of days before I heard anything back. This evening, nearly 48 hours later, my games were just as suddenly back, and shortly after that I received a message from Gmail informing me that it has been unable to deliver my message, for vague reasons. I suppose it was a bit naive of me to think that email address would actually work, but at least my games are back.

It Comes in Colors

A couple of weeks back, when I was writing about the items I'd picked up at Target, I came across this.

I meant to do another post about it the next day, but my middle-aged brain let me down (again) and I forgot about it. Today my memory was jogged when it showed up on Dappered as "offered without comment." What fun is that?

Seven color choices (what, no acid green?), 100% cotton, matching pants, $80 for the whole rig. How can you resist? Seriously, how?

The blue might be passable in certain situations, and people who like to wear bold color in general could probably get away with wearing either the jacket or the pants, if the rest of the outfit was suitably toned down, but the two pieces together are just too clownish, too reminiscent of The Time back in the '80s.

But hey, maybe you want to go retro and do a Morris Day thing for Halloween this year...

(All images borrowed from Target's website.)