Monsters

Representing twenty dollars and 94 minutes of my life I’ll never get back, Monsters is easily the most disappointing flick we’ve sat through in living memory. These are the consequences of impulse shopping in the video section at WalMart.

The premise of Monsters is intriguing – a recent NASA space probe has brought back something creepy and unexpected, and when it crashed in Mexico, whatever was lurking therein escaped and started to breed. Two people – a wealthy twenty-something blond woman with issues and her conflicted, economically-challenged male companion with an immaculately-coiffed three-day growth of facial hair – find themselves on the far side of the “infected zone” along the US-Mexican border and must survive the journey through a hostile and generally expensive landscape to reach safely… without being lunched out upon by huge, floating, ill-tempered CGI octopi.

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Franklin NID-260 Webster’s Electronic Dictionary

There’s nothing like funky spelling to convince anyone reading your prose that you’re an illiterate fool not to be taken seriously. Whether you’re confronted with a letter to write, a blog posting to concoct, an article to fashion or a book to finally get around to beginning, you’ll probably want a dictionary.

Paper dictionaries, aside from being somewhat Victorian in concept, are large, heavy and cumbersome to use. They’re also distracting, in that in looking up the word you’re interested in, you’re likely to become interested in other words during your search. We have a complete Oxford English Dictionary on paper – it’s fascinating, if you don’t need to get any work done.

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VistaQuest DVR2 Endoscope / Borescope

Honesty bids me note that our original interest in a portable endoscope was somewhat mercenary. We received a substantial number of requests for assistance with using our Graphic Workshop Professional software to manage images generated by these devices. In order to respond to the first few, we had to Google around for a while to determine what an endoscope actually was.

Decidedly a one-trick pony, the one trick in the repertoire of the VistaQuest endoscope – or “borescope,” as these devices are called in some quarters – is decidedly handy. The endoscope consists of a tiny video camera mounted on a flexible probe, along with some bright white LEDs. The other end of the probe is connected to a hand-held video monitor slightly larger than a GPS receiver. The probe can be slid into places that would otherwise be inaccessible, to see what lurks behind walls, down pipes, under furniture and at the back of your refrigerator, if you haven’t dared clean it out in a few months and are inordinately fond of cheese.

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DeWalt DC515K Portable Wet / Dry Vacuum

Dust is remorseless and evil and likely to be the subject of a serious documentary on Frontline one day. Aside from provoking sneezes at inconvenient moments, it shortens the life of the sorts of technology that our digs are just crawling with. Dust gets attracted to electronic components, whereupon it prevents them from cooling themselves, and eventually cooks them.

It’s probably ironic that the fans and heat sinks and such that computers and other digital toys are equipped with to dissipate their heat issues are also monster dust collectors.

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Canon EOS 60D Digital SLR

Cool enough to violate several fairly serious laws of physics, sufficiently intuitive to get you charged with witchcraft if you teleport back to the middle ages while carrying one and only somewhat expensive, the Canon 60D digital single lens reflex camera can’t be adequately described in a single review. You’ll really need to own one to fully appreciate its place in the universe.

Equipped with an eighteen-megapixel image sensor and lots of internal logic, the 60D can produce professional results without requiring that its users enroll in a three-year course to understand its manual. It can be configured to take effortless snapshots, or you can get involved with its many modes, sub-modes, adjustments, refinements, displays, readouts and psychic abilities to make it as creative as you like.

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Osprey-Talon HQRP Battery for Dyson DC16 Vacuum

The Dyson DC16 Root 6 hand-held vacuum cleaner remains one of my favorite toys. It only does one thing, but it does it really, really well. It also looks like a prop from a low-budget flick on the SciFi Channel, which is unquestionably a bonus.

As with all hand-held appliances, the Root 6 is powered by a battery… and its battery is easily its most contentious element. Despite being quite large and way heavier than the rest of the device, it can only run the beast for a few minutes before it’s exhausted, and it thereupon requires several hours in its charger to get its mojo back.

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Cuisinart SS-700 Single Serve Brewing System

Coffee makers that accept plastic coffee pods, rather than loose coffee, are a marvel of convenience, a wonder of taste and a prize beyond avarice for the companies that manufacture those pods. Coffee pods are expensive.

The Tassimo coffee maker, reviewed elsewhere at Storm Gods, is a brilliant way to enjoy a quick shot of caffeine with a minimum of preparation or delay – but the coffee pods that drive it costs about ten times what comparable loose coffee does.

Cuisinart’s SS-700 Single Serve Brewing System – also known as the Cuisinart Keurig Coffee Maker in some quarters – is a giant step sideways in coffee pod technology. It accepts widely-available T-Cup coffee pods, for those days when you’re in a raging hurry or your eye-hand coordination is limited to stabbing at the machine’s buttons – but it’s also accompanied by what its manufacturer calls a K-Cup filter – essentially a reusable coffee pod that you can fill with any ground coffee you like the look of.

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Echo PB200 Leaf Blower

Leaf blowers appear to be the nexus of contempt and admonition of the eco-weenies on several continents – which would strike me as a compelling reason to own one even if I lived in a studio apartment. As it is, with several acres of lawns and meadows, and three hundred feel of driveway snaking through a boreal pine forest, these things seem all but indispensable.

The Echo PB200 leaf blower is easily among the best designed and most robustly constructed of these contentious little machines. Insubstantially light to carry and yet capable of generating a cyclonic atmospheric disturbance of sufficient magnitude to frighten every leaf within shouting distance, it’s as far removed from a leaf rake as a leaf rake is from a good sneeze.

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Aquilasax C Melody Saxophone

Saxophones are the voice of the gods – whichever gods you happen to believe in – but for the most part, the gods insist on singing in an inconvenient key. Saxes play in Bb or Eb as a rule, and while this is cool if everyone else you’ll be jamming with plays in a comparable key, it can a bit of a dog should you find yourself called-upon to play with a piano, a flute or anything else that prefers to play in C.

It wasn’t always this way. During the 1920s, a number of horn builders created what came to be known as C Melody saxophones. As its name implies, a C Melody sax plays in C. That is, when you finger it to play C, it actually plays C, rather than, for example, Bb, as would a conventional tenor sax.

C Melody saxophones disappeared during the 1930s. It’s still possible to find relics of their brief history in specialized horn shops and the occasional garage sale. However, many of them were cheap horns to begin with, and with close to a century on their clocks, they’re usually not pretty when they turn up in the new millennium. Even the really nice ones suffer from weird intonation and unusual key placements.

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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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