Movies, Books, and CDs

I just saw a spot on TV for Disney’s new movie, Dinosaur. The guy doing the voice over for the spot pronounced the name of the movie as dinosore (ryhmes with more) instead of dinosaur (rhymes with car). I’ve noticed a few other people lately mispronouncing that particular word. I wish they wouldn’t do that. Dinosore sounds like some sort of medical condition that you’d want to see a dermatologist about. So remember folks, it’s Dinosaur, as in sauropod or saurian. I can just imagine a Discovery channel documentary with the narrator saying, “millions of years ago great ‘sores covered the Earth”.

I finished reading How the Irish Saved Civilization to Susan and I’m now reading her a couple of chapters from an old out of print MIT music theory book while we decide what our next read-aloud book will be. For my programming book of the week, I picked up Eric Harlow’s Developing Linux Applications with GTK+ and GDK. It doesn’t deal with Gnome issues at all but if you’re trying to build a custom GTK+ widget, you’ll find the examples much more helpful than Havoc’s GTK+/Gnome book (though his is better if Gnome is what you’re interested in).

My CD of the month is Journey to the Center of the Earth: The Original Motion Picture Soundtrack by Bernard Herrmann. I love all of Herrmann’s compositions, most of which were soundtracks. This is another in a series of remastered original recordings. This recording is particularly interesting because it was the first time Herrmann had recorded a performance in the new two channel technology called “stereo”. The recordings were later mixed into a coventional mono recording for use in the movie and this CD is the first time the original stereo recording has ever been available. They also threw in a couple of the Pat Boone songs that were fortunately cut from the movie, but they’re good for a laugh at least.

And speaking of music, last night we attended the DSO‘s performance of Anton Bruckner‘s Symphony No. 8 in C minor led by guest conductor Claus Peter Flor. It’s a very long piece. Most recordings run 70 – 75 minutes. This performance ran over 80 minutes. And Claus is one weird conductor – he seems to have learned most of his arm and hand motions from extensive study of the mad scientists in 1950’s B grade science fiction movies. He also had quite a range of bizarre facial expressions (we were sitting in the choral terrace seats behind the orchestra). Susan mostly noticed the odd contortions of his nose as if he had detected a skunk nearby while I was impressed by strange shapes he made with his mouth, which never remained closed for more than a few seconds during the entire performance.

Today was yard work day – a little mowing and edging before the afternoon rain. And we noticed one of our large, green anoles perched on the side of the house watching us. The males tend to be quite brave when it comes to humans and, once in a while, they’re brave enough to eat from your hand. This one looked like he was in need of a meal, so I offered him a cricket. After a moments hesitation, he took it and after scooting off a safe distance he ate it while watching us out of one eye. I spent the rest of the afternoon getting a head start on next weeks work and playing with some GTK+ code.