Chatter Of The Squirrel

Amazon Affiliate

Much Coolness!

I subscribed to be an Amazon affiliate just for kicks. And it is useful for the pics I use for my book reviews.

Never expected to make any money from it cos of my limited readership.

But guess what? I just made $1.19 from someone clicking through and buying Life of Pi from Amazon.com

Sweetness…

If a thousand people would do that for me every month, I might not need to work again.

Movie: The Last Unicorn

Spent one dark early morning talking to an anime freak. Discussing the gems we’ve uncovered in non-mainstream entertainment. (That doesn’t mean anything deviant!)

I guess you can say we were trying to top each other, mentioning random classics to see if the other has watched it. Things like Kino’s Journey (footnote 1), Now And Then Here And There (2), Ebichu (3), Guu (4), etc were brought up. Often times with much hilarity.

It’s really something, when you can just say, “Ebichu“, and generate great hilarity at the table. That web archive link might give you some idea to what that anime is about. I can just say that it’s really unique…

Anyway, there wasn’t anything that my friend hasn’t watched or at least sampled before. With the exception of The Last Unicorn. Which was something he had been trying to get hold of for years without success.

This was a classic cartoon that I watched on TV when I was in my early teens. And 10yrs ago, before BitTorrent, but after Gnutella came out (an early generation peer to peer file sharing software), I managed to dig up this cartoon from a file share…

It was an effort spanning several months. I’ld go to the hostel comp room with my portable harddisk, load up the software and download a little bit until the comp room closes. Took a while to get the whole thing.

The cartoon was based off a novel written by Peter Beagle. And wouldn’t you know it, it had voices by Jeff Bridges, Christopher Lee, Angela Lansbury, Alan Arkin etc. The film was animated by a Japanese company, Topcraft. The same company that worked with Hayao Miyazaki on Nausicaa. Subsequently, Hayao formed Studio Ghibli, and grabbed the bulk of the senior staff of Topcraft with him.

The movie is old. But even now, it still has a certain magic that’s lacking in recent films. I had just dug it up and watched it again.

And it’s still good.

Not to be missed.

Thankfully for everyone who can’t get hold of the old videos… They’ve released a 25th Anniversary edition. Amazon link below.

Footnotes:

(1) A gun-slinger girl travelling a fantasy world on a talking motorcycle.

(2) A dark alternate world where children are used as soldiers. And child rape in a cartoon, now that’s dark. Not graphically depicted, that would’ve been bad taste. But such was implied.

(3) A house-keeping hamster. Why is this funny? Click the link to see some stills.

(4) An entity with access to more than three spacial dimensions manifests as a young girl in a tropical jungle. It’s just not easy to summarise this story. But it’s a hoot to watch.

Triumph!

Just something I needed to brag about…

Few weeks ago, the local distributor for WARMACHINE finally managed to get his stocks through customs, and i rushed to the shop to pick up a copy of Hordes: Evolution. This shipment had been really badly delayed cos of a customs spot check, where they pulled a bottle of acrylic paint out of the box, and declared the entire shipment to be Acrylic Polymers, which incur a 25% customs duties. And the little toys? They’re Acrylic Polymer Accessories. Retards.

Anyway, I happily picked up the book, but on the way back home my car started acting up.

The car just started losing power, and started to jerk. Like the engine was misfiring, or choking.

I had just tuned the car, and it was working so beautifully on the way out. But died on the way back. Stopped the car a few times and tried to readjust the tuning in the dark but without success. Eventually had to abandon the car somewhere along the way and asked a friend to pick me up.

We were on the way to meet some other friends at a cybercafe anyway. A friend had a new Warcraft 3 mod that he insisted that we play. Night of the Dead Aftermath was pretty cool, and it took my mind off the worry that my engine might have blown a head gasket and might need an expensive engine overhaul…

Next morning, I woke up earlier than I’ve ever had in months. Strange dream with a face that I’ve not seen in almost 10 years. Anyhoo, took a bus to where I left the car and took another crack at it.

Tested the compression of the pistons first, cos that’s the biggest worry… Happily the compression was good for all three pistons. So, less likely to be a head gasket.  Picked up a new set of contact points and put it in. Retuned.

Car started. And it ran nicely. The timing was right. Dwell angle right. The engine sounded right. But when I started driving, the engine would choke when I rev the engine past 2k RPM. Still, I managed to struggle the car back home on the low gears.

Over a week, I tried a whole bunch of things to get my car running. Octane booster to eliminate the possibility of a bad batch of gasoline. Sprayed carburettor cleaner into the carb. Tested the resistance of the distributor cables. Changed the spark-plugs etc.

From online research, the symptoms also sounded like a damaged accelerator pump.

I was just about to consider taking out the carburettor apart and clean it thoroughly, thinking that it may be possible that a jet is clogged, or something. But last minute I figured that the distributor was easier to overhaul.

From my limited understanding of cars, from Auto Repair For Dummies, I had a thought that the vacuum advancer may not be working, thus the timing of the ignition wasn’t advanced when the engine is running under higher RPMs. But I did test the vacuum advancer, and it did seem to be doing what it should.

But taking the distributor apart, I removed the breaker plate. Which seemed a little sticky. Figured it was worth a try, so I broke the plate apart, soaked the 3 dozen tiny bearings, completely cleaned the bearing rails, and put fresh grease. The plate spun MUCH smoother after that.

I slapped the plate back in the car, and took it out for a 15min test drive, and it worked BEAUTIFULLY.

There is no greater feeling of triumph than this!!

Book: Making Money - Terry Pratchett

A new Terry Pratchett book. One of few authors I will commit the time to read every year.

Making Money continues the story of Moist von Lipwig, the con-artist turned postmaster in the earlier Going Postal. The postoffice has lost its challenge, and Lord Vetinari has ‘encouraged’ Moist to take over the Ankh-Morpork Mint.

Terry Pratchett writes amusing fantasies. But there’s always a deeper level of satire in his works. Most of them are obvious. Thud! was about the Middle East conflict. Going Postal was about Enron.

Making Money, is about gold. And our contemporary banking system.

But unfortunately for us, there is no magical solution for our predicament when the bank vaults are empty. The con is the same: bankers want us convinced that gold is a barbaric relic and has no place in the modern economy. Instead, we should just let the government print however much money they think we need.

Lord Vetinari needs this. He has plans for an underground metro for Ankh-Morpork. A government project. And the mint is taking too long to engrave pennies and farthings. Even with outsourcing.

“The real buggers are the mites, ’cos they’re worth half a farthin’ but cost sixpence ’cos it’s fiddly work, bein’ so small and have got that hole in the middle.”

And if the workers have to work overtime, they will have more work, to make the money to pay for the overtime. And where does it end?

So Moist starts printing paper money. And tries to convince the public they don’t need gold in the bank. Which is just as well cos the gold had been stolen years and years ago, but so long as people still THINK the gold is there, it hadn’t affected the way things worked.

But of course it all has a happy ending. But I doubt there’ll be one for the world being satired.

Underneath the veneer of satire though… there’s a lot of humor, and plenty of rib-tickling moments. I’m sure the other bookstore patrons were wondering what the heck I was finding so funny in a book on “Making Money”. But humor is all empty calories. After I’ve finished the book, I could scarcely remember where the funny bits were.

Although there was a scene from Fatal Attraction. And a small dog with a wind-up dildo as a chew-toy is always a gag.

And you simply MUST read it, if only to find out how Pratchett used horseradish as a metaphor for sex.

“….. and eventually there’s more horseradish than beef, and then one day you realize the beef fell out and you didn’t notice.”

Incidentally, gold is USD 770 /troy ounce today. How I wish I had bought more when it was 380.

A prophet without the funds to invest. Sigh…

Movie: The Bourne Ultimatum

Verdict: Nauseating. Literally so.

It’s a well executed film, with a very fast pace. Bourne is always running away or towards something. Nobody did more running on the silver screen, except maybe Tom Cruise.

But the camera techniques employed to capture the frantic nature of these chases made me nauseous. I was holding a mouthful of saliva, and barely contained myself from vomiting.

One other movie had that effect on me before… Speed 2: Cruise Control. Asides from Sandra Bullock’s desperate bid for credibility as an actress, the boat scenes made me ill too.

Maybe I’m too accustomed to watching movies on a small screen. Big screens make me ill.

But I got to watch this movie for free. Wendy won 4 free tickets to the show, and we watched at Cineleisure.

Had a better time after the movie, where I spent 8hrs at Borders finishing Making Money.