Warehouse 13 Season 1

With dark and quirkiness cranked all the way up to ten, Warehouse 13 is an unexpected treat. Its premise… a warehouse for paranormal objects and the two agents who are tasked with tracking down new additions to its inventory… barely begins to explain its rich palette of whimsy, occult references, nightmarish American gothic and twisted history.

The only predictable element of Warehouse 13 is that it won’t do much that’s predictable.

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Taylor 714ce Guitar

Taylor makes some of the sweetest acoustic guitars in the known universe, and this is one of them. In fact, it’s two of them – this is my second 714ce. My first one, built in 1998, is still playing, subject only to some fret replacements a few months ago. I bought a second 714ce to have access to Taylor’s estimable Expression pickup system, a feature that didn’t exist back at the end of the twentieth century.

My new 714ce is a limited edition instrument, with a spruce top, rather than the red cedar top that the 714ce is usually built with, and Madagascar rosewood back and sides, rather than Indian rosewood. The spruce top makes it just detectably brighter than my original 714ce, and the Madagascar rosewood seems to be wholly cosmetic – although it must be said that it looks cool.

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R.F. Connections Rocket Hub Antenna

The Rogers Rocket Mobile Hub review that ran at Storm Gods a few months ago attracted more comments and general attention than anything before or since. Offering high-speed Internet in parts of Canada that don’t even enjoy pizza delivery, it promised to do what various levels of our government have been lying through their respective teeth over for the better part of a decade.

Anyone with a computer and forty-five dollars a month can have broadband.

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Taylor GS Baritone Guitar

Taylor’s high-end guitars are just dripping with superlatives. They’re gorgeous to behold, rapturous to play and they sound like something the gods would own. Even the cases they come in are built with remarkable craftsmanship.

The Taylor GS Baritone is an unusual instrument – baritone guitars are a devious little back alley of instrument design. They’re tuned down such that what would normally be the high E string on a conventional guitar plays B. The rest of the strings are tuned accordingly. The result is a dark, throaty sound that can shake the earth.

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Winning the Power Wars

I wrote this posting on March 27, 2010, during Earth Hour. The lights were on.

Consumer electricity rates are something of a cash cow for electric utilities and especially for the governments who regulate them. Unlike direct taxation — increases in which are becoming decidedly toxic to the politicians responsible for the wealth grabs in question — incremental increases in the monthly electricity bills of harried, attention-depleted consumers typically go unnoticed. In many cases, this can be attributed to most consumers of electricity being of the opinion that there’s little they can do about their bills, short of making Earth Hour a daily event.

Of late, the people who manage power generation utilities have begun to appreciate that the environmental issues that drive greenwash like Earth Hour, far from being a threat, are a public-relations blessing sent from on high and delivered by FedEx. Unless the people who run your power company are all dead or living in a time warp, you’ll no doubt have noticed that they’re leaning on you to conserve power.

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Waking the Energizer Bunny

Maglites are truly excellent flashlights, and there are dozens of them lurking about the place. In that we’re pretty deep in the sticks, where the power company is only reliable during an election year, the flashlights get considerable use.

It’s rare to find a Maglite refusing to work, and when one of ours failed unexpectedly, it turned out to have died of catastrophic battery failure. Its batteries had leaked.

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Dell OptiPlex 760

Dell makes excellent computers, and this is clearly one of them. Fast, expertly configured and custom-built to afford it exactly the hardware required of it, it’s about as flawless as anything with a power cord is ever likely to get.

Purchasing our OptiPlex 760, however, was a retail experience from the ninth circle of hell, and something we hope never to repeat. In our darkest hours of hopelessness as we attempted to complete the transaction, we vowed that the ninth circle of hell would enjoy temperatures approaching that of liquid helium before we’d consider another Dell product.

Well it might be suggested that having experienced relatively trouble-free ordering of Dell’s computers for over a decade, our karma got snapped back all at once this time.

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Adventures in Cell Phone Modding

When m’lady’s ancient LG cell phone began to disintegrate into a cloud of static, garbled speech and dropped calls, it became clear that it was irrevocably destined for the electronic recyclers. Living in the hinterlands, we decided that her next phone should be one with unimpeachable radio reception, such that it would be able to hang onto the oftentimes ephemeral signals out here.

As noted in the Storm Gods review of the motoKRZR K1 phone, our experience has been that Motorola’s high-end phones can carry on a clear conversation when all around them are hissing, spitting and flashing “no service” upon their displays. That m’lady fancied a slider phone complicated the matter somewhat, in that none of the Canadian carriers offered a suitable device.

…and such began the adventure.

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The Prisoner on Blu-Ray

Uncompromisingly strange, eerily timeless and periodically disturbing, the 1967 British series The Prisoner has rarely been equaled. It runs for seventeen episodes, and you’ll be checking the woodwork for hidden microphones before you get half way through it.

The nameless protagonist of the tale, presumably a former British spy now resigned, is kidnapped and wakes up in The Village. None of the inhabitants thereof have names, only numbers. He finds himself addressed as number six. He quickly learns that it’s impossible to know which of his neighbors are prisoners, and which are jailers. Sometimes they change sides. Most of them appear to be interested in messing with his head.

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Fringe Season One

Increasingly, television that’s worth watching is too good to watch on television. The delay of a week between episodes, the incessant interruptions of commercials and the propensity of broadcast networks to regard the lower third of your screen as another revenue source can mangle the continuity of even the most engaging content.

Fringe is arguably such a work – an initial viewing of the trailers for its pilot made it clear that viewing it on broadcast would be deeply frustrating. Weird, engaging, skillfully written and played by a troupe of deft actors, it deserves better.

Such it was that we ignored it until it became available on DVD.

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GV Winter Trail Snowshoes

Canada is not without its shortcomings. Much of our domestic beer tastes like it went through a moose prior to bottling. Our mainstream broadcasting is so unspeakably bad as to have caused the Earth’s atmosphere to shrink by 0.015 percent over the previous two decades due to the effects of the picture tubes of tens of thousands of television sets imploding after being hurled from assorted windows. Our elected officials have the ethical standards of a Barbary pirate who’s found himself ostracized by all the other pirates; a level of forethought slightly inferior to that of suicidal lemmings and math skills that would embarrass a village idiot with two missing fingers.

We do, however, know a lot about snow up here. As such, in the event that you find yourself looking for snowshoes, you’ll want to keep an eye out for the ones with conspicuous “made in Canada” red maple leaves emblazoned upon their packaging. This is as distinguished from the ones made in the Philippines from parts fabricated in Korea. There are a lot of fine things that can be said about the latter countries – but they have little experience of extreme cold.

We saw an awful lot of snowshoes from the Philippines before we found a store selling snowshoes made by GV Snowshoes of Wendake, Quebec. Unquestionably the best designed, best built and generally coolest devices to have between your feet and winter, these are snowshoes that will probably take you almost as long to find as they did us, and they’ll be worth every minute of it.

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Helium Digital Leatherback Flip iPhone / iPod Touch Case

An iPod Touch – or an iPhone, if you really felt you needed a phone that was smarter than most of your friends – will start looking a lot less leading edge after it’s been used for a while. Scratches, dents, a damaged screen and a few unidentifiable stains can serve to make these icons of technology and general coolness resemble leftovers from an upmarket garage sale.

This is, of course, why there are cases available for these devices. In fact, there are a bewildering number of cases available for them, ranging from really cheesy and objectionable ones, right on up to rhodium-plated micro-sarcophagi hand-tooled with Edwardian hunting scenes. Most of these suffer from the same palette of shortcomings, too – they’re either too ugly to look at without suffering permanent retinal damage; they’re too awkward to use, causing them to be hurled across the room in time; or they offer no detectable protection for that which they encase.

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Blue Snowball USB Microphone

Just this side of too cool to be real, the Blue Snowball is neither blue nor made of snow. It is, however, one of the slickest devices in the known universe to plug into a USB port.

In ages past, getting sound into a PC was a bit of a labor. The options for doing so included plugging a conventional microphone into the audio input of your sound card – which worked flawlessly, but typically sounded like a long-distance call to Mars – or springing for an expensive and mind-numbingly complex external analog to digital converter, and then hiring a team of research alchemists to consult on how to install the beast.

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Rogers W35 Rocket Mobile Hub

This review arguably won’t be of much interest should you happen to reside outside Canada – Canada being Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood. For the passing interest of those fortunate enough to enjoy a more robust national telecommunications industry, Rogers is one of the three primary telecommunications companies in Canada.

Can you say “oligarchy?” I knew you could.

It’s a source of pride and gratification to the people who write speeches for Canadian politicians that the populace of Canada is among the world’s most connected. Something like 85 percent of Canadians access the Internet. This statistic is a bit misleading, however, in that a fair number of them still access it though dial-up modems, just as their forefathers did in the preceding century.

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Dell Inspiron 15 Laptop

In my darkest imaginings, I want one of those road-warrior laptops with a machined aluminum case about as thick as an in-flight magazine; a high-resolution display panel suitable for performing remote-control brain surgery; flawless surround sound through speakers slightly smaller than a quarter and fewer ports and interface devices than a toaster.

Admittedly, such laptops have several drawbacks. They’re largely unusable – there’s not a lot you can do with no mouse, no CD-ROM drive and twenty minutes of battery life. They’re also preposterously expensive.

The Inspiron 15 is something of a digital Volkswagen, and it’s great computer to consider once you get your brain past the whole up-market credit-card bruising section of the computer isle at Best Buy. Attractive, not unduly weighty, nicely thought out and affordable, it’s a laptop that’s comfortable on jeans, rather than Armani trousers.

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Bushwacker Street Flares

Pickup trucks are like sports cars without a cloth top – really, really big sports cars. Unless you actually bought a truck to get some work done, you’ll probably want to indulge the inner sports car in yours. Some tasteful customization will be called for.

This having been said, there’s an ill-defined boundary between a few artful touches of plastic and steel, and what looks like the aftermath of an all-you-can-eat buffet at a local accessory shop.

Never attach anything to your truck bearing the chromed silhouette of a reclining woman.

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Red Dwarf Back to Earth

Red Dwarf has arguably been an acquired taste since it first appeared in 1988. A strange, twisted science-fiction comedy, it was everything North American science fiction television wasn’t. Its plots were preposterous, its special effects all appeared to involve flashlights, its sets moved when someone bumped into them and its characters were all clinically insane.

It was born to have a cult following.

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Sanctuary Season One

Some of the best science fiction to show up in a box in a long time, Sanctuary is edgy, unpredictable and periodically very, very strange.

Doctor Helen Magnus is 157 years old, although as a result of some stealthy Victorian medical experimentation, she hides her age quite well. She runs a sanctuary for mutants, genetic anomalies and other beings of latex and CGI. She and her entourage of fearless monster hunters sneak around tracking down new mutants.

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Ridgid 2 ½-inch Straight Finishing Nailer model R250SFA

Nailing trim by hand was originally devised as method of punishing unrepentant criminals who stubbornly refused to recycle their plastic bottles. Outlawed in several European countries as barbaric, cruel and inhumane, the practice remains legal in most jurisdictions in North America. Despite the outrage expressed by human rights agencies around the world, the carnage prevails to this day.

While it seems like a trivial matter, driving hundreds of finishing nails into wooden baseboards and moldings without splitting the wood or mashing your fingers is about as easily accomplished as getting a believable answer out of a Canadian cabinet minister.

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Wii Sports Resort

I’ve never killed an alien with our Wii console. None of the games we own involve first persons shooting anything. In fact, I’m pretty sure none of the characters therein are capable of dying.

Unlike more heavily-marketed game consoles, Wii is pastoral, social and very nearly uplifting. If you’re not careful, you might switch it off and find yourself still humming the background music that accompanies its games.

You can buy vicious, blood-soaked carnage-fest games for Wii, of course… you just aren’t required to.

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