Domo tissue dispenser

The husband and a friend and I were hanging out today, and we wandered around a store that I like. And then I saw an item that I then pointed out to them as I was trying really hard not to laugh too hysterically. Thanks to Mox for letting me use the picture he took.






Do I really need to say anything other than: the Japanese are whack.

Google finds water on the moon

OK, not really. Here's the actual information. But Google's logo for the occasion is really cool.






And then, if you hover the cursor over the image, it tells you why you're seeing the image.





Yeah, I know, I'm a dork because I'm more excited about Google's logo than the actual findings themselves. Hey, whatever comes out of the discovery probably isn't going to make any impact on my life, and if it does, it would be minimal and in the distant future. Google's logo amuses me now. :)

Radisson Boston - hotel review

October. Boston.


OK, you know the setting. My friend and I were trying to figure out where to stay in Boston. I'd never been before and so knew nothing about the city. I thought it might be nice to stay close to the Berklee Performance Center since we were going to see a show there. Well, it turns out that since it was kinda close to Fenway Park in the middle of the Boston Red Sox's pennant run, rooms were a bit difficult to find and fairly expensive to boot. We'd be sharing the room, so that halved the cost, but that didn't mean we wanted to pay the price of one regular room for just our share of the room.

We found a hotel that we thought might suit our needs, but then my friend ended up getting a really good deal at the Radisson Hotel Boston because of her membership.

The hotel has a parking structure, though the spaces themselves and the layout of the multi-floored structure were a bit odd. We arrived about mid-afternoon and drove around a bit before finding a space. There's an elevator in the structure that takes you down to the main floor, and then you have to enter other doors to get into the lobby of the hotel. At one point during our stay, when it was a bit later at night, we discovered that the doors from the parking elevator to the lobby were closed, so we had to go around to the valet parking entrance to get inside the lobby.

And there are stairs everywhere - coming in from the parking elevator, there's a couple steps down to get to the elevator area for the hotel itself, and then a few more steps to get to the main lobby area and then yet more steps to get to the reservation desks. Being from California where wheelchair accessibility is fairly common, it was a bit odd to encounter so many steps (which we noticed because we were pulling our rolling luggage) as that would not be wheelchair friendly at all, but then Boston is a much older city, and I expect this hotel has been around for a while.

The room itself was very nice, with two beds - I can't remember if they were doubles or queens. There was a little balcony area outside the room that we peeked at.



The view from the balcony. No, I have no idea what the view is of.



The view looking in a different direction. I'm not sure that the water from the harbor is readily visible in this picture. You could tell when looking out the window.


The room was clean and comfortable and suitable for our needs. The showerhead in the bathroom was extremely high up, so it was pretty much raining on me when I took a shower, but I find that a lot of hotels are set up that way. Too bad for us short people who don't prefer to be rained on.


The hotel ended up being fairly conveniently situated. We had a lovely dinner at Rustic Kitchen, which is pretty much right next door, across the covered driveway, and the hotel site even refers to Rustic Kitchen as on-site dining. Then just a couple blocks away, there's the lovely Finale. And the nearest subway entrance is only a couple blocks away as well, so that's convenient for travelling around Boston. We ended up taking a cab to Berklee, and that worked out just fine.

I will admit that I have no idea what the regular pricing is on the room, but I definitely would consider staying at the Radisson again on a future visit.

Thanks to Sherry for letting me share her room with her.




Radisson Hotel Boston
200 Stuart Street
Boston, MA 02116
1-800-395-7046
(617) 482-1800

"Dollhouse" of cards comes tumbling down

Joss Whedon's new show about programmable people, "Dollhouse", was barely picked up for a second season, but before lunch today, I got Variety's alert that the show had been officially cancelled.

The news wasn't good when the show was pulled for November sweeps, but hope remained that the show would survive. However, the ratings haven't been great, DVR numbers notwithstanding, and the show will be allowed to complete its 13-episode run, and all the episodes are expected to be aired on television before the presumed DVD release of the second season.

I'm sad that the show will be done soon, but I am glad that they at least got the extra 13 episodes. Without that, we would never have seen the amazing Jonathan Frakes-directed episode showing how Priya/"Sierra" came to be in the dollhouse.

Joss has a little time to decide how he wants to wrap the series. We'll have the two seasons of episodes on DVD. And we'll always have "Epitath 1".

Google celebrates Sesame Street's 40th

For the past week or so, Google has featured logos in celebration of Sesame Street's 40th birthday. Since today is the actual birthday, today's logo features quite a few of the Sesame Street characters. Really cute.

Google logos

I've written quite a bit about the cool logos that Google does on their main page to salute various things. A friend alerted me to this site that has a compilation of their cool logos, international as well.

Enjoy.

Luxo, Jr. - convicted felon

There had been a story a little while ago that Pixar's logo of the Luxo, Jr. lamp was being contested in a lawsuit. Well, the lawsuit has now been settled, but in the article, they mentioned a short parody film of the opening used in Pixar films featuring Luxo, Jr.

O.M.Bob. This film is just too frickin' funny. And ingenious. Enjoy.

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

"Jennifer's Body" - spoiler movie review

I've previously mentioned how I became interested in seeing this film. However, when I actually went to see "Jennifer's Body", I decided that bringing Gloomy with me was more appropriate than bringing Teddy. And boy, was I ever right.

The film was a lot more bloody than I even expected, so there were bits I did not watch. (And even though in the one scene in the abandoned house, ripping apart of the one boy was done as a silhouette behind a white sheet, I still didn't watch it.) Generally, I thought it was a decent film with an interesting premise. I had thought from the trailer and such that Megan Fox's character, Jennifer, was born a demon, so I was surprised when during the course of the film, it was revealed that she became a demon because she was used as an inappropriate virgin ritual sacrifice by members of a band hoping to gain success. Ooops. I thought it was interesting that she wasn't necessarily completely evil - she really just killed when she needed to feed to keep herself alive, every couple of days. I loved the make-up job on her, making her pale and gaunt when she hadn't fed in a while.

I'm definitely a fan of Amanda Seyfried, and I really enjoyed her performance in this film. They did dress her seriously down to make her look bookish and dowdy, but she was really pretty in "Mamma Mia". She's probably not considered as hot as Megan Fox, but I think she's got a very different look, that innocent "girl next door" thing going for her. But that horrid formal dress they put on her? Ugh!

And yes, the teenage boys at the screening that we went to were hooting and hollering during the kissing scene between the two girls. OK, guys, put in back in your pants and settle down.

There was one scene early on that was made all the funnier for the husband and my friends because I was there. Needy and her boyfriend were talking about bands, and I think it was Needy who said something about there being no well-known drummers. The boyfriend mentioned Don Henley and then mentioned Phil Collins, which made me really happy - and then in the next second, Needy said "who"? I hadn't even had the chance to really enjoy Phil being mentioned in a movie when he was totally slammed by the character not even knowing who he was. The husband and friends laughed at me REAL HARD. Oh well, it was funny.


I probably wouldn't recommend the film for those who are squeamish, but I thought the story was decent for a horror film. However, I will say that it's not an appropriate film to bring toddlers and small children to, something that several parents in the audience thought it was ok to do.

unfollow, unfriend, turn the damn thing OFF!

You very often can't control what other people say. And sometimes, you can't control the fact that you HAVE to listen to them. But there are other situations where you have direct control over what you have to be subjected to.

Some people don't understand Twitter, don't get what it's for, don't get why they're supposed to be interested in what someone has for lunch, or when someone is headed to the airport, or any manner of other things that people tweet. Ummm, ok, well, no one says that any particular person HAS to be interested in that sort of thing, coming from anyone. "Why do they tweet about such mundane things? Why can't they tweet interesting things? Why would I want to read that?" Well, if you don't want to read that, then there's a really simple solution. DON'T FOLLOW THAT PERSON'S TWITTER FEED!!!! As far as I know, no one is forcing anyone else to be on Twitter or to follow anyone in particular. I personally enjoy knowing that kind of information about my friends because it keeps me connected to what they're up to. I also enjoy that kind of information from the "celebrities" that I follow (to differentiate them from the people I actually know). Anthony Daniels is currently traveling around with the "Star Wars in Concert" tour, so it's been really interesting to read his tweets as he travels to different cities.

I am going to assume that the majority of what I tweet is interesting enough to the people who follow me since none of them have unfollowed me. I'm not crazy enough to think that *everything* I tweet is interesting to them. There are particular topics that I tweet about often - Disney, restaurants, movies - whether my attendance at one of those or news about one of those. If they were annoyed by any of those things, I'd figured they'd be long gone by now, because I tweet about those A LOT. And I sometimes tweet song lyrics from whatever I'm listening to. Just because. I'm not really trying to "entertain" my followers, though I will sometimes tweet or re-tweet something that I'm not necessarily interested in but that I think someone on my followers list might be interested in based on what I know about them. I tend to be a lot more flippant and snarky on my Twitter feed than anywhere else online because it's protected and I'm very careful about who I allow to have access to my feed. Some of the things I tweet about are definitely NOT for public consumption.

So what if someone doesn't like what I'm tweeting about or doesn't like the attitudes or thoughts or feelings that I express on Twitter? Well, I suppose they could respond with their opinions about that, but ultimately, it's my choice to tweet what I feel like tweeting, and if the consequences are that someone is going to unfollow me, so be it. There are people I've tested out following and then ultimately decided that it didn't suit me to continue to follow them. One example is the actor Greg Grunberg, most notably from "Heroes" fame. He does have some really interesting things to say - but he also has a lot of chatter and he's very prolific in responding to those who direct tweets at him, and the volume of his tweets was just overwhelming my feed. For me, it was too hard to pick out the gems in the feed that I really liked, so I decided that it wasn't worth it to continue following him.

I rarely tweet about politics because it's not my thing. I don't follow any of the plethora of political Twitter accounts out there. For the most part, the people that I do follow only tweet political things on occasion. But what if some of them started tweeting about political things on a regular basis, as much as they tweet about what they're having for lunch or what they're doing at any given time? Then, I'd have to decide if I was willing to put up with the political tweets to still be able to read the personal ones, or if I was too bothered by the political tweets and would therefore have to forego being able to see the personal ones that I like.

I also follow actors Wil Wheaton and Brent Spiner, and from the stuff that they tweet, it amazes me that people are APPARENTLY tweeting them to tell them to stop talking about this or that thing, and that they really want them to tweet about THIS thing instead. Umm, ok, you can make requests or ask questions, but if you don't like the majority of what they're tweeting about, it's really easy to just unfollow them rather than to bitch at them that you don't like what they're talking about or to try to control what they say, tailored to what YOU want, the "you" of course being a billion people who all want different things. OK, so they don't have a billion followers, but you get the idea.

The same goes for Facebook. There are structural changes going on with what information you're given about what your friended people are doing, but there are ways to manage the flow of that information, and if it really becomes an issue, there's also the option to unfriend that person. But telling someone that they should stop posting about something or that they should post more about something else? Why would someone think they have the right to tell someone else what to talk about on their own page?

And why do people think they can tell other people what they can listen to or watch? I get if someone isn't interested in a particular show or whatever. Over the course of the past however many years, I've spent time listening to radio shows by Rush Limbaugh, Dr. Laura Schlesinger and Tom Leykis, all of whom have very vocal fans and detractors. There were bits from each that I found interesting to listen to, but for various reasons, I stopped listening to each of them. In the case of Tom Leykis, I always found it interesting that people, usually women, would call up and tell Tom how awful he was and how much they hated him and his viewpoints and such and that he shouldn't be on the air. Ummm, ok, if you hate him so much, why the foxtrot are you listening to him, are you continuing to listen to him, to be listening to him so much that you can mention very specific things about his program? I enjoyed listening to him for a while, but eventually, I started to get annoyed with him more than I was being entertained by him. So I turned the channel. WOW! Isn't that amazing? What a brilliant discovery I made! It seems that no one else has ever figured out that turning the channel or turning off the radio works, that it then prevents that particular person's voice from coming over the device anymore.

I see the same thing happening with television shows. "I don't want to watch that kind of show." OK, idiot, then don't. Turn the channel to something else or turn the TV off. "I don't want my kids to watch that kind of show." OK, douchebag, then exercise some control over your kids and monitor what they watch and don't let them watch shows that you don't feel are appropriate for them. But if you plop them down in front of the television all day and expect that EVERYTHING that comes over the airwaves is going to meet with your approval, then you're a bad parent and a flippin' idiot all rolled into one. Rather than trying to control what a total stranger who's an adult can watch, why don't you actually pay some attention to your own kids instead?

There are plenty of things I'm not interested in. But I'm APPARENTLY a genius in being able to figure out how to not listen to radio shows I don't like, not watch television shows I don't like, not read books I don't like and not read what people write on Twitter or Facebook if I have no interest in them. Where's my medal?

Vinoteca di Monica - restaurant review

On the Sunday of our trip to Boston last month, my friend and I wandered around the North End doing some sightseeing. We also looked for a place to have breakfast/brunch, but we were sort of wanting just regular food. Well, it turned out that our sightseeing was in a neighborhood where there were 400 Italian restaurants per square inch. We weren't really feeling like having Italian food because 1) most of the restaurants were serving regular Italian dishes like pizza and pasta and other heavy lunch/dinner foods as opposed to lighter breakfast/brunch foods and 2) we'd just had Italian for dinner the night before.

We did more sightseeing, and eventually, we just got too hungry to wait for a "regular" restaurant, so we started seriously looking at the Italian restaurants that were in abundant supply. We saw this one little restaurant with open windows, and when we glanced at the menu, behold, there were regular brunch items at this little Italian restaurant!

So, we stopped and had brunch at Vinoteca di Monica. The restaurant was pretty empty at the time - I can't remember if we were the only diners, but if not, there was only one other table occupied. We chose a table right by the open windows which looked out onto the little street. It was a beautiful Boston day.





I decided to just have a really regular breakfast and opted for two eggs with roasted potatoes, rustic toast and bacon. I also decided to add a side of fruit for good measure.

When the dish was brought, I was pleasantly surprised at how generous the serving of bacon was. Usually, it's two thin little pieces of bacon, but not so in this case. Everything was yummy.





When my friend was perusing the menu, she was having a hard time deciding between two items, the French toast and the bruschetta (grilled rustic bread) with eggs, cheese and prosciutto. Our server was *very* Italian, accent and everything, which I rather liked, and when he came to take our order, she asked him which of the two he would recommend. His suggestion was to have the bruschetta, so she went with that. After he left, I told her that he was Italian, so of course he was going to talk her out of having FRENCH toast. ;)

When her dish arrived, it looked really good, and she seemed to enjoy it.





One thing we found curious and amusing is that my dish came with "rustic toast" and hers came with "rustic bread". We wondered what "rustic" was supposed to mean and what the deal was with the bread being rustic.

Well, a search of the net didn't turn up too many things, but I found this description on wisegeek.com that helps a bit. I also found this particular discussion on chowhound which was pretty interesting.


We had a nice little quiet brunch, and everything was pretty tasty. It was a nice respite after our morning of running around and sightseeing. The restaurant looked to be pretty small, so I can imagine that it could be very busy, but it's a place I'd definitely be interested in trying again.




Vinoteca di Monica
143 Richmond St.
Boston, MA 02109
(617) 227-0311