Happy New Year!!!

Happy New Year!!

    My beloved Effie and I want to wish each and every one of you a very happy and healthy New Year!! May the Good Lord bless each of you and keep you in the year to come. 

    Enjoy the New Year's blog below... Effie and I are off to bed to ring in the new year with some snoozing, lol. Moving on...

Happy New Year, 1 January 2012

Happy New Year!!

    My beloved Effie and I want to wish each and every one of you a very happy and healthy New Year!! May the Good Lord bless each of you and keep you in the year to come. 

    Enjoy the New Year's blog below... Effie and I are off to bed to ring in the new year with some snoozing, lol. Moving on...

Morning Vent, 1 January 2012 (New Year's Day)

Gungal^TM of the Day

 Santa's Helper Gungal^TM likes her 'Long Tom' magnum...

     Today is the first day of January, the first day of the year 2012. The month of January, as you can read in the Wiki link, is named after the Roman god, Janus, the god of the doorway (i.e., the door to the new year). Janus is the god with two faces: one looks back and one looks forward. As is often the case with major holidays, it's appropriate at the New Year to look back at the years past and forward to the year and years to come.  
    When I began the blog a few years back, I could never have suspected that I'd be where I am today: I'm married to the Love of my Life, my wonderful Effie, and I'm healthier than I've been since I was in my 20s. That, friends, is a miracle!! Moving on...

Morning Vent, 1 January 2011 (New Years Day)

Happy New Year!!

    No blog today as my beloved Effie and I enjoy the first day of 2011 together. Back on track tomorrow with more gaming news, videos, and tech items. Moving on...

Call of Duty and Gaming Links, New Year's Day 2010

Mrs. Claus likes my magnum!

     Happy New Year! No CoD for us on New Year's Eve. We streamed movies till we fell asleep. I slept right through New Year's. I was looking at the numbers I scribbled down for the last Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer, and it reinforces my belief that ReiboChief is a beast at MW2. His kills are almost always more than Matt64's and mine -- combined. In some cases, Reibo racks up twice as many or more kills. Wow.

• Ice-T plays Modern Warfare 2, uses cliched gamertag.
• Infinity Ward nearly sweeps BASHie awards: Infinity Ward CEOs Vince Zampella and Jason West win BASHie for Most Reviled in the FPS Community.
  
• Incredible: Call of Duty sleep shorts.
  

    More Gaming Links:

• G4TV Bayonetta review.
• Not a Game of the Year, a Game of the Year 2009.
• Crispy Gamer: The Year in Multiplayer.
• Co-Optimus: Co-op Terminology Guide.
  
• GameTrailers: Most Overlooked Games of 2009.
  
• YouTube: Battlefield: Bad Company 2 PSNGirl channel.
• And speaking of BC2, the Palo Alto Daily News reports on the Battlefield: Bad Company 2 PS3 beta and its potential versus Modern Warfare 2.
• Good games for the Wii scarce.
• Mirror's Edge goes mobile in 2010.
  

    Non-Gaming Link:

• Most tarnished brands in tech.
• Ars Technica's Most Popular Stories of 2009.
• Apple knows it has a customer's stolen iPhone for repair, refuses to give it back to her.
• ITWorld: Top 10 Tech Stories the Decade.
• Could they make me one life-size? Joan Jett Barbie. Woof.
  

Happy New Year! 1 January 2010

Happy New Year!

     Today is the first day of January, the first day of the year 2010, and the first day of a new decade. The month, as you can read in the Wiki link, is named after the Roman god, Janus, the god of the doorway (i.e., the door to the new year). But Janus is also the god with two faces: one looks back and one looks forward. So, taking that into account it's appropriate at the New Year to look back at the years past and forward to the year and years to come. Here are a few of my favorite things from my childhood back in the Jurassic of the 60s and 70s.
     The 60s:

• My favorite Gerry Anderson puppet series was Captain Scarlet. YouTube has the title sequence from Captain Scarlet. Pretty cool, huh?
  
• My favorite Gerry Anderson live action series was U.F.O., starring Ed Bishop. The wiki page for U.F.O. has some great info on the show. I liked his later show, Space: 1999, almost as much. Space: 1999 cheesed out after the first season.

     The 70s:

•   Jim Rockford may have sometimes worn sport coats that looked like they were cut from picnic tablecloths, but he was my favorite TV private investigator. The Rockford Files is a show which was almost perfect right from the get-go. (And, best of all, he gave Tom Selleck, the future Magnum, P.I., a real break with his part as Lance White, the sunny dispositioned P.I. with the white Caddy and improbable detective technique.) James Garner's comic delivery was flawless, and he conveyed a reluctant tough guy attitude that influenced a lot of detective shows that came after. The Rockford Files had some tough competition in the 60s from other great detective shows I watched, tho. Mannix was notable for Mike Connors getting his head cracked just about every week. (In fact, the IMDB's Mannix trivia page states that, over the course of the series he was knocked unconscious 55 times and shot 17 times!)
• Kolchak: The Night Stalker , which was produced by Dan Curtis, the creator of Dark Shadows, had some elements of a detective show; it combined the inquisitive reporter genre with the supernatural. The TV series never rose to the level of the two TV movies which preceded it, The Night Stalker and The Night Strangler. Darren McGavin, tho, still managed to make the TV series a pleasure for me and a generation of other lovers of SF and horror, including Chris Carter, who based The X Files on the format established by Kolchak: The Night Stalker. (He wanted Darren McGavin to play Fox Mulder's father on the series... That would have been simply amazing.)
• Dan Curtis produced two of the best, creepiest TV movies of the 70s (not counting the two great Kolchak movies). The Norliss Tapes, starring Invaders veteran Roy Thinnes (who was another Chris Carter favorite who did actually make it onto The X Files), involved Roy Thinnes investigating a demon-worshipping not-quite-dead artist who appears to be haunting his wife, played by the luscious Angie Dickinson. Trilogy of Terror had Karen Black playing four distinct roles in three eerie horror vignettes. Most memorable from that movie was the "Devil Doll" sequence which features an African fetish doll which is possessed by an evil spirit which is really, really pissed off at being stuck in a foot-high wooden doll.