Capt. Mondo's World o' Mondo-ness

Sinister Pete is in Town!
Woo-hoo! That donkey-loving Irish-based guy is back in Canada, and visiting his friends in Toronto! So far all I’ve heard from him is an email from him saying that “he’s here”, and that he wants to get some sort of get-together going on Saturday.

Is an “S” session in the offing perhaps?

The Importance of Frivolity ;-)
With all of the “heavy” things that have been having of late family-wise, I have abandoned myself to light, frivolous activities this week. And I feel much better for it.

Yesterday I met with Sean T. who still works at my former firm, and picked up the MAME DVDs that he cut for me and for Peter L. + Michael W. This is in aid for the MAME arcade machine I am building (and have been working on sporadically for the past few months). I now have the complete MAME release of games, current to 0.57 release. Several thousand classic arcade games. Sweet! ;-) I also noticed that the second article in my arcade building series has been published in the most-recent edition of The Computer Paper, which cheered me. I have been having the most fun writing this new series of articles, and am thinking about putting together a book proposal based on the articles once I’ve got a couple more of them under my belt (I finished off article #4 in the series last week).

Sean T. and I chatted about a bunch of things over the lunch I bought at the Patrician Grill, a favourite old former haunt: where we had burgers and shakes – good artery-clogging fun food. We talked about the dot.com crunch and how it has affected our respective firms, mutual friends who now work elsewhere, how overworked we both feel, and how we both feel about being “survivors”. It was really good to see him, and I think I may have infected him with the MAME arcade-building-bug (at the very least I think he’ll make a pilgrimage to the place where I got my arcade box from).

I also got my copy of Buckaroo Bonzai a couple of days ago. While surfing Wil W.’s Web site, I saw a reference to the fact that there’s finally a DVD release of this cult classic movie, one of my all-time favourites. It's a completely batty, almost verging on nonsensical 80s pseudo-sci-fi film with what can only be described as an eclectic cast. Was somewhat disappointed by some of the extras on the DVD – for example, the scenes that had been cut don’t really add a lot more to the film, though I'll admit to not yet having heard the director's commentary track yet – but it was good to indulge in buying a fun, silly movie.

[Pierre, if you are reading this, do yourself a favour and mention this DVD to Louise. Or better yet, buy it for her as a surprise present. ;-) She was the person who first turned me on to this movie way-back in our undergraduate days, when she was my roommate.]

Thanks to another Blog I like to read, I discovered a completely whacked-out cartoon called Sealab 2021. It’s only available on the Cartoon Network in the States, which means that I can’t get it in Canada... So I downloaded the entire series as it now stands via Fucinet.

It’s based roughly on a cartoon series – Sealab 2020 – which I vaguely remember as a child: a typical low-quality animation series from the mid-60s by Hanna-Barbera, where a large underwater facility is set up to explore the oceans and to teach the kids watching the show about the environment. With this new series, it’s a year later, and pretty much everyone is slowly going insane. In one of the episodes, the captain flips when his toy “happy-cake oven” goes missing, starting a series of events that leads to Sealab's destruction (a common theme); in another, pirating cable TV ends up creating a temporal vortex along with multiple copies of the smartest guy on Sealab, as well as the dumbest, who is the former's constant foil in trying to fix the situation. There's one episode that catches the entire crew of Sealab babbling on about the possibilities of robot bodies, while Sealab is slowly falling apart around them. I couldn't help but draw a parallel of this episode to some of the conversations that seem to consume some of my fellow employees at work: all talk while completely blind to what's going on around them (or when vital work needs to be done -- I could sympathize with the lone guy in the cartoon trying to keep the individual Sealab modules from imploding while everybody else was nattering on about the finer details about what life in a robot body might be like). The show is definitely not for kids, but I found many of the episodes very funny.

CFRC Reunion?
I got a letter in the mail from Queen’s Alumni Affairs yesterday. I expected it to be yet another pledge drive, but it turned out instead to be an invitation to a CFRC Reunion, celebrating its 80th year on-the-air. The get-together happens sometime in May, and it seems like a good excuse to re-visit Kingston and hopefully see a bunch of old friends.

I am keen on going, though as the ever-pragmatic Erika pointed out that bringing two kids along would make things a wee bit tricky logistics-wise. Still, we have several months to figure that out, and I think it would make a good break for the both of us.