Back from Transexual Transylvania

Last night, some friends and I went to the American Theatre Company's performance of The Rocky Horror Picture Show at the Tulsa Performing Arts Center.

Chad Oliverson's performance of Dr. Frank-N-Furter was spot-on. He is the star of the show, without a doubt. And those platform shoes! They are about 4 or 5 inches tall. I kept thinking he was gonna twist an ankle, but that did not happen.

The show was one of those shows that's so much fun, you don't want it to end. I was afraid they would tone it down for an Oklahoma audience, but it was a word-for-word reanctment of the movie and just as risque.

One of the cool things about the show was the ushers before the performance started. They are in character and they kept doing think to various audience members. That's definitely not in the movie.

There were a few things that detracted from the performance considerably, however. Some of the actors act like they are bored. Others are very flat when they sing. It took a while for the stage production to build up to the energy that's in the movie through most of it. Another problem was the sound kept cutting in and out. Still, the problems were minor, and should not keep you from doing the Time Warp again.

Oktoberfest is Here

Last night was corporate night at Oktoberfest here in Tulsa. Man it was so much fun to see my fellow co-workers get drunk. Of course, I didn't get that way. ;)

Pesticides

The other night was a cool evening, so I was driving back home with the windows down, when I came upon a fog bank an interesting fog bank with a well-defined boundary. As I drove through it, it quickly became apparent to me this was no natural fog...it was a cloud of pesticide! By the time I rolled the windows up, it was in the car with me to stay. Dammit.

I don't think the city should be allowed to just randomly spray the area with poison. Several times during the summer, a truck can be seen driving up and down my street spraying a dense cloud of pesticide to kill mosquitoes and probably other insects. Pesticides don't just kill insects. Other animals eat the insects and they die, too. Then other animals eat those animals, and so on and so fourth. I'm adamantly against pesticides and rarely use them in my house (unless there is a spider, and then it's so long sucker!) Plus I just really don't appreciate having the breathe the shit. Even with my windows up in my house, I can sometimes smell the pesticide when they spray outside. What's also aggravating is that there are very few mosquitoes this time of year anyway.

Contracts

Who else here thinks Corporate America is screwing them over? Can I get a show of hands?

I'm tired of companies that lock you into a contract to keep your business. It goes against our society's long-held belief that competition spurs innovation and drives down costs. Today, if you want a cell phone you're more than likely going to be locked into a two-year contract. You can get a cell phone sans contract, but then your per-minute cost is much higher than if you signed a contract, and it will cost you even more in the long run. Corporate America has gotten lazy and rather than innovate, they just lock you into a contract so they can innovate at their own artifically slow pace. It used to be such that if you didn't like a company, you could run to the competitor, but not anymore. If you don't like what company A has to offer, company B has a similiar set of offerings and the same type of contract, so you're not really changing anything at all. Consumers have fewer choices today than they should. Does Congress do anything about it? Are you kidding?

I have some friends who are moving from an apartment to a house. SBC says they can move their service, but they have to pay a re-connect fee, and their DSL contract starts over if they do. Now, if they decide to cancel the service, they are required to pay around $200 to break the DSL contract, since the contract isn't up for a while. That's outrageous. Talk about being between a rock and a hard place.

Here's a shocking idea. I bet you that if a company were to provide a decent service and treat it's customers like customers instead of revenue streams, it would probably do pretty well for itself.

It's Official

It's official: Tivo has turned me into a couch potato.

Surface

I'm 4 episodes into Surface on NBC, and I'm addicted. This show is somewhat campy, but in a fun sort of way. It's really a good blend of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Jaws, E.T., X-Files, and Abyss. If you like "creature features", you should not miss this one.

Now on to the spoilers.

In the last couple of episodes, we learned that the creatures secrete a mucus membrane around them that lets them live inside lava. It now looks like the creatures have been living inside the earth's crust for a long time, as the creatures seem to have DNA in common with dinosaurs. Yeah, yeah. Where did they get dino DNA? We saw in Jurrasic Park that it's not easy to come by. Logic aside, there has been some really cool happenings. A whirlpool in a lake in Austin, Texas opened up, swallowing a boat and a para sailer recently. Actually, the entire lake just went dry. It turns out these whale creatures have been digging tunnels under much of the continent. Later, Old Faithful in Yellowstone erupted lava! And the best part is the one kid who is raising one of the creatures in a swimming pool. A poodle started barking at the creature from the water's edge, and you can imagine what happened next! The creature ate the poodle. Awesome! I hate poodles.

Unlucky 7's

Today is the first day of the Oklahoma Lottery. Well, sorta. They only have scratch-offs right now.

Anyway, I was going into my local QuikTrip this morning to get cash from the ATM when I noticed Cindy Morrison from Channel 8 (at least I think it was her) doing a story from inside the QuikTrip. She was blocking the ATM, so I didn't go inside...it looked like she was going to be a while.

So I went to a different QuikTrip. On an impulse, I purchased a Lucky 7's scratch-off. And what did I win? Absolutely nothing. Now see? Here is where Oklahoma screwed up. They should have made virtually every card a winner at the beginning. That way, people would play, win, and think, "Wow! That was SO easy. I'm gonna buy a hundred of those!" And everyone would be addicted. But, thankfully, they didn't do that, so I probably won't play scratch-offs any more.

Tivo, Part 2

Well, after nearly an entire day of playing with firewall settings, I have the Tivo Desktop, an add-on application called Galleon, and an add-on application that pulls down Netflix information all communicating wirelessly with the Tivo from my PC. It is a beautiful thing to be able to play music sitting on my PC through the speakers in my living room. Or I can pull up current weather information or movie showtimes. This thing rocks!

We have Tivo

I've been trying to decide if Tivo is right for me or not for several days now. I've been voraciously search the internet for stuff about building a DIY PVR, but it's just not as cost-effective for me to do that. Well, this morning, my mind was made up. CompUSA was offering a $20 instant rebate on Tivo, in addition to the $150 mail-in rebate from Tivo itself. That put the cost of the hardware at $30. That doesn't include the subscription, but it's still cheaper overall than a DIY system.

So far I'm pretty happy with it. I've not been able to get it to connect to my wireless network yet, but hopefully that will be resolved shortly.

Tulsa State Fair

Well I went to the fair last night. We started off at Bell's. The Zingo is rougher than I remember. I'll probably never ride that again. The drop ride that Bell's has is freaking scary. Just before it drops you, you are about twice as high up as any ferris wheel out there. The drop really got my pulse a racing! The midway this year seemed like a tone-down version of last year. I didn't see any new ride configurations, but it seemed odd to me that a lot of the rides there last year were missing this year. Oh well. I still had a good time. That is until I got mildly sick on this one ride. I'm not sure what it's called, but basically, we were on it longer than normal because somebody wanted off half-way through. So they stopped it and then restarted it. I probably won't ever ride a ride like that again either. Then later I had a funnel cake and everything was right with the world.

Flightplan

Just got back from seeing the new Jodie Foster movie, Flightplan. I have mixed feelings about it. It was very suspenseful throughout the entire movie. You could never really be sure if Jodie Foster's character was crazy or not until about the last quarter of the movie. But the movie was slow in parts...real slow. If you haven't seen it, wait for video. It's worth a rental, I suppose.

Spoilers ahead!

The biggest problem I have with the movie is its utter implausibility. The real villian took a large risk relying that no one on the plane would see or remember Jodie Foster's daughter. Why would the Sky Marshall pick a woman that knew her way around the plan? He should have picked someone less likely to ruin his plans. What if when they were searching the plane, one of the other stewards had actually searched the hiding place where the girl was...it seems unlikely the Sky Marshall could have forseen all the events that ensued.