CollisionWorks

I could have used another week, but there's things to do -- the NYIT Awards on Monday, teching a show at The Brick the next two days, and getting really cracking on directing Trav S.D.'s Kitsch for Theater for the New City, going up in November. We'll get back here in January, I'm sure, but that's not exactly as great a time to visit Maine as September. Of course, we spend almost all our time here lounging about one room, reading, playing on the computer, and watching TV (as we have no TV at home in Brooklyn, we use our time away to catch up on what's going on there, or as B puts it, "surfing the zeitgeist"). Actually, though, there hasn't been much bearable on the cathode-ray box apart from cute animal programs, Mythbusters, some news, and reruns of Roseanne and C.S.I., so we're not really zeitgeisting ourselves all that much.

(Berit interrupts to note that we're seeing lots of TV commercials, and that this tells us more about what's really going on in the world than any shows do -- she's right, of course)

So that's our happily boring week.

Hey, some advice . . . if you're on a Mac, and still running Tiger rather than Leopard (let alone Snow Leopard) as an OS, and you haven't been upgrading QuickTime for a while because the upgrades interfere with some of your computer games (notably, maybe even only, ones from Aspyr) and make them not work, but you HAVE been updating iTunes . . . I wouldn't advise updating to the new iTunes 9, as it REQUIRES the newest QuickTime to run at all, and you will be stuck without any iTunes until you upgrade QT as well. And you will NOT be able to downgrade back to the previous iTunes without losing all your library info. And while Aspyr has patches that will fix the problem, assuming that all your copies of their games are {ahem} fully legal and so forth, if you simply want to go back to the older iTunes and QuickTime that you had, it involves a huge amount of workarounds and . . . well, it's a major pain in the ass.

How do I know this?

Guess.

In future, I ain't automatically upgrading nothin' without paying more attention to it and having more of a backup system. And I just have to say I'm SO tired of programs and upgrades that absolutely REQUIRE you to have the latest, most up-to-date software from top-to-bottom installed, as I've far too often had to keep my "out-of-date" but working perfectly equipment going for many years as I couldn't afford to upgrade -- we wouldn't have any of these problems if we had been able to upgrade to a newer OS.

In any case, I still have no iTunes until we decide which one of several ways we want to go about fixing this problem.

But I can still do the Random Ten on the iPod, out of the 25,551 tracks, with associated links, and here is this week's . . .

1. "Turtle Blues" - Janis Joplin with Big Brother & The Holding Company - Cheap Thrills
2. "Everything Louder Than Everything Else" - Meat Loaf - Bat Out of Hell II: Back Into Hell
3. "Shake 'Em On Down (version 3)" - R.L. Burnside - A Bothered Mind
4. "One Time Too Many" - PJ Harvey - C'mon Billy EP
5. "Little Girl" - Pilferage Humor - So Cold!!! Unearthed 60's Sacramento Garage
6. "Nothing Down (99 Years To Pay)" - Jean Dee - Back to the 50's 04
7. "Kung See, Kung See, Let's Be Happy" - Penny Lim & The Silvertone's - Girls in the Garage volume 9: Oriental Special
8. "Sea Horses" - Blueboy - If Wishes Were Horses
9. "Contact" - Brigitte Bardot - Club Au-Go-Go
10. "City Creatures" - V2 - The Identity Parade

And as we're here in Maine, I should focus the weekly "cat blogging" on our loaner animals up here -- like Bappers The Cat, here in the living room . . .

And closer in. This cat is over 15 years old, an indoor/outdoor cat, in great shape and still going strong, though she weighs less than any cat I've ever lifted . . .

She can be a little standoffish, but will accept a good belly rub at times . . .

Bappers HATES the dog, Sasha, who is adorable, if excitable. Here, Berit tries to give both affection at once, though the kitty isn't having any of it, and is pointedly ignoring them . . .

And here's the dog on my lap as I try to watch TV -- in this case it was Meercat Manor, and when Sasha caught sight of the meercats on the TV she flipped out and wouldn't stop growling and barking at them and had to be removed from the room to get her to shut up . . .

Okay, time to sit back and reread book 7 of the Harry Potter series. I've already reread the first six this week -- I am not exactly a fan of them, but I was both interested in reading them all in order straight through in rapid succession and seeing how the entire story worked in one big lump as well as just examining them to understand what did in fact "work" about them. Rather relaxing.