National Sarcasm Society

A bit of vagueposting regarding the state of LJ in the larger world...

The country that owns LJ may be shutting off Internet access soon. Not sure how that might affect LJ use, but I'm also over at DreamWidth, and plan on starting to post there in the future.

I'm trying to import my LJ stuff to DW, but my entries have not imported. I know LJ has changed some stuff that made crossposting not possible, but I can tell the import connection is working because it has imported stuff like my bio and tags. I guess 18+ years of posts is a bit much, especially when I'm assuming a lot of others are trying to import. Should have done it years ago, but it was always one of those things I was planning to get around to. Still trying, fingers crossed.

LJ itself only allows saving stuff month-by-month, and even then, I have no idea on importing to DW. If anyone has pointers on saving my posts at a minimum, even if I can't import elsewhere, please let me know. I've tried a few options without much luck so far.

ETA: Going throught this list of potential archivers, most links are dead. I did find BlogBooker, which exports stuff into a pdf or doc file. I now have 2021 in a book format, and will go back for the rest. At least I'll be able to go back to read old entries, which I do a lot to refresh my memory on certain events.

Not really a trailer for this series, but this is their best know skit, "Going for an English".

This is some early work from Sanjeev Bhaskar, that ran from 1998 to 2001 on BBC Two. It's a skit show featuring British Asian actors, often reversing the roles with white British characters. The title comes from a comedy song of the same name featuring Sophia Loren and Peter Sellers, in which Sellers plays an Indian doctor (also from the movie The Millionairess), using a stereotypical Indian accent.

It's been a while since I've watched any skit show, and I know I'm missing some of the jokes because (a) I'm not British, (b) I'm not South Asian, and (c) It's no longer the late 90s/early 2000s. It's still enjoyable, especially the stuff that's aged well and still relatable. There's a few "best of" clip collections on YouTube. One thing I learned is that Bhaskar can sing!

The first two seasons are on Amazon Prime.</span>

Guillermo Del Toro's latest is based on the 1946 novel of the same name, and is the second adaptation after a 1947 film. Del Toro always has a thing for monsters, but there are no literal ones in this one. As always, the human ones are the worst monsters.

This one had a theatrical release in December 2021, but is now available on Hulu and HBO Max. Very quick move that I'm sure is yet another COVID related thing. It's up for an Oscar for Best Picture, and I'm wondering if the theatrical release was more of a formality, then on to streaming for a wider audience.

The opening has Stanton Carlisle disposing of a body before burning down a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, before heading out and ending up working as a carnie. He learns all the ins and out of the trade, specifically the "mind reader" bit with a code for a partner in the audience to pass the clairvoyant info to read an audience member. Stan becomes interested in Molly, a woman who performs with electricity, and proposes that they head out and do their own clairvoyant act, but for a higher class of clientele.

As he becomes more successful, he eventually expands the con with private readings for wealthy clients, which sees him vetted by Dr. Lilith Ritter, a psychologist who attempts to expose him. She's unable to do so, but as a noir femme fatale (Cate Blanchett), she's intrigued by him, and eventually offers some of the recordings of her clients for Stan to do even more convincing cons.

At one point, a potential client has a doctor hook Stan up to a polygraph machine. You can see a bit of that scene in the trailer, with David Hewlett as the doctor. The majority of his scene is in the clip, but it was nice to see him again. He was also in Del Toro's The Shape of Water, and the director likes to user actors multiple times, so maybe we'll be seeing him in a future film.

I will say it felt a bit slow in places, but I think that may be because while the twists were good, I could see the majority of them coming, so drawing it out didn't always work for me. The only twist I didn't see coming was one that wasn't outright explained onscreen, and it wasn't until I read a review that I made the connection. Great cast and overall good plot, so worth a watch if you've got access.

I started watching this because I'd enjoyed Sanjeev Bhaskar's work in Unforgotten, and I'm rather charmed with it so far. Classic fish out of water type story, with the NHS in the 1960s recruiting doctors from countries that were current or former parts of the British Empire. So we have Prem Sharma, an Indian doctor, and his wife, Kamini, arriving in a small Welsh mining town. The culture clash is a bit different than some might expect, as the doctor and his wife are from a high-class family with a lot of familiarity with English customs. That doesn't prepare them for a rural town in Wales, and the town isn't quite prepared for them either.

There are some folks against the new doctor in the first series, but it's less about his country of origin and more about other issues, though there is a thread of casual racism that must be navigated. The first season also features his wife immediately wanting to go back home, or at least to London, and continuing that way through most of that series. Of course she comes around, and the audience learns that Dr. and Mrs. Sharma have had a personal tragedy in India, and the job in Wales was also an attempt at a fresh start.

The first series was on Prime Video, which I have, but the second and third were on another service. Instead of paying for another service, I just requested them via interlibrary loan. I've not received the third one, but just finished watching the second series.

This series has an arc of an outbreak of smallpox, fear of foreigners carrying disease, getting vaccinated, religious opposition to said vaccinations, quarantines, and even talk of staying at least six feet away from others. I thought it was well done, but rather eerie to watch a show made a decade ago that's set in the 60s hit on stuff from our current... everything. It's not exactly surprising, because the potential for disease outbreaks have been fodder for fiction for ages, plus actual doctors and scientists have researched not just the diseases, but how people would react to an outbreak. It's just that watching it in the current moment felt a bit weird at times.

Looking forward to the final series, though I just hope it doesn't end with any cliffhangers. At least Unforgotten is getting another series, and Bhaskar will be returning, though the dynamics are going to be very different.

I posted last month about figuring out I had a uranium glass bowl after owning it for ~40 years. Since we didn't go anywhere for Christmas, I wasted a good amount of time online. Stumbled on a forum for people who collect uranium glass, and many were sharing pics of recent hauls and Christmas gifts.

You'd be surprised at the various things made with UG: drinking glasses, plates, lamps, lanterns, marbles, and various knickknacks. So I got out my blacklight and tried it out on the hobnail glass lamps that came from my maternal great-grandmother's family. No dice. A glass oil lamp found in the cellar that used to be behind my house. Nope. The various knickknacks in the glass display of a secretary desk. No... wait... a glimmer. There's a compass my father bought when he was a kid with the needle and points glowing vigorously. Not uranium, but radium. If you want to be horrified, check out the info about the "Radium Girls".

I then remembered I have some marbles that also came from my father's maternal family, just as the bowl did, and I think I got them at about the same time. I have a glass full of them, so shine the light on it and there were two UG marbles. One is very pale clear green, which is a common color. The other is pale clear blue, swirled with opaque white and a bit of light purple. For the latter, just the clear bit glows, and it's relatively faint because the opaque bits cover up a lot of the glow. For the former, it glows very brightly.

I don't plan on becoming a collector, but I do plan on getting a better blacklight flashlight to keep in the car for whenever I got into a charity shop. It's just an interesting thing to see out in the wild.

For several years now, I've set aside about 1/3 of the library's DVD budget to be spent during Black Friday sales. This year, that's $300. It's now the day after Black Friday, and I've spend less than $100. Last year there was the pandemic induced delay for, well, everything, so there just wasn't much newish stuff to go on sale, but this year is kinda back to normal. So what gives?

The majority of what I did get on a discount was actually the week before, and I kept waiting on prices to drop but nothing happened. Took me a bit to realize they didn't do any "lightning deals" on any video this year. Those are limited time/amount sales where prices drop more dramatically than usual, but you have X minutes of Y amount available, and once it's in your cart, you have 15 minutes to complete the transaction. For most people, these are high pressure deals, intended to make you go after a "deal" before the limit is hit, even if you didn't really want/need the item before it went on sale. For the library, they were a bonanza, especially for TV seasons.

The best deal I found was a 3 for 2 sale, which is still active. You're limited to items on their list, but many of them were already on the library's wish list, so that works for me. The ones I bought yesterday I also had our referral fee to spend, so I technically bought one and got two free. Oh well, I've already got the money allocated to this purchase order, so I might as well buy some of the stuff off my regular list anyway.

I've been noticing recently that the UK gets a lot of video releases before the US. How do I know this? They show up on the US version of Amazon, and while they might say the region in the description, you can't narrow down just to R1 in the search, which is super annoying. I can play any region myself, but for library purposes, that doesn't work. I'm especially noticing this on Disney-owned properties, such as the MCU, where stuff is already out on DVD in the UK, but not even listed yet in the US. I figure this is Disney+ related, but my understanding is they have that in the UK too, so I'm not sure what the difference truly is.

If you're in the US, or even watching the news about the US, you know about the so-called Culture Wars. Conservative media makes the claim that "traditional values" are under assault, such as saying that store employees are forbidden to say "Merry Christmas" to customers, which isn't true, but it makes their viewers angry and gets the media ratings.

I knew a new front in the assault had started when a Texas State Representative sent out a list to public schools asking if they had any of the titles in their library. The article at that link gives a good summary of what exactly they're targeting, but if you guessed mostly queer stuff, you've been paying attention, because that's the majority, followed by race/racism, then sex ed. Our lovely Governor then made a comment about wanting such "pornography" removed from school libraries.

I'm seeing news from all over the country about similar issues, generally at school libraries, but also some public ones. School libraries often get more attention from potential censors as they're much easier "think of the children" targets, and oten have school boards that can fold like a bad card table if they think it will make angry folks go away.

This latest assault is definitely a political gambit to stir up the conservative base, but I'm concerned that a lot of school board meetings have been infiltrated by a lot of people into Q-adjacent conspiracy theories. Tons of video online showing them protesting and/or speaking at meetings regarding masks, vaccines, etc. They're often unhinged, and frequently not even from the district or other entity, but they add to the numbers to scare those on boards. Some are even going stealth in order to get on boards so they'll gain control.

Local elections don't get as much attention, but keep an eye on your local stuff. I don't think this would get much traction here, but all it would take is a targeted effort to change that. I don't have a ton of queer content on my physical shelves, but the digital ones have a ton of the challenged titles and then some. If protestors start taking note of digital content, a lot of librarians are going to have a Bad Day.

Back in the early 90s, I worked in a town that had several antique shops. One had a display of uranium glass, with a UV light that would cause it to glow. It was fascinating to me, but I never looked into buying any because I didn't have much money or space to keep what's essentially a knickknack.

Fast forward to the present, and I was looking for something to toss the empty vials of Restasis (medication for dry eye disease) because there's no space for even a small trash can near where I use it. So a small dish to toss them in, to later dump in the trash would make it a more convenient. I recalled having a couple of small glass bowls that I think came from Down Home (what we call the homestead of my paternal great-grandparents). I would have gotten them around 1980ish, after my g-grandmother passed and all the stuff was divvied up, but I didn't really have any use for them, so I kept them in a cabinet all these years.

One of them is an light green color, and a couple of days after I started using it, my 51-year old brain realized something my 11-year old brain wouldn't have known -- I very likely had a piece of uranium glass. The way to test is to shine a UV light (aka black light) and I happened to have one, so presto, I now have it confirmed with a fluorescent glow.

It's nothing fancy, just a small bowl. Looks like a cereal bowl, but a wee bit smaller, with a raised ridge on the bottom but no other details. From similar items I've found online, it's probably a mayonnaise/condiment dish, and the plain design means it might have been a promotional giveaway. I recall my mom buying Duz detergent in the 70s to get glasses and dishes, and I remember a few kitchen towels in those boxes too.

Not worth much, less than $20, but it's just very cool to have one. I can't believe I've had this for 40 years and had no idea.

We had our first LEGO Club yesterday, with 10 kids from elementary through high school age attending, but the big news was a donation. Two LEGO tables (they have base plates on top) as well as an unbelievable about of LEGO. I'm taking a guesstimate based on the number of set instructions I found, but it's easily $500+ worth of product. That's the retail estimate, but I looked up a few of the sets and they've been discontinued and folks are asking $300+ for each one! o.0 Of course they're not sets now, but still... dayum.

I need to do some cleaning and probably repaint at least one of the tables, but this is an amazing donation. LEGO holds up its value (hence asking $300+ for an old set), so the person who donated could have easily sold it in bulk, as there are tons of people selling it by the pound online. I did get amused that three of the kids and two moms were starting to sort stuff out by type, because I totally would do that for my own collection. I think with this we'll try to keep it in different storage containers by type for LEGO Club, but also just keep out a separate random mix if anyone just wants to play with one of the tables.

Now I'm working on our STEM Club project. First one is done and I have the supplies for it, but I need to start stocking up on more craft supplies that work well for this type of stuff. It's amazing what you can build with craft sticks, rubber bands, and straws. Some of the parents seem inclined to help with that, which is good because I'm not sure if I'll hit the intended goal of at least 50% female and/or POC. I've got 20 signed up, with 8 female, but it doesn't show me race/ethnicity, so I'm not sure where we are. It's from the Texas Alliance for Minorities in Engineering, hence the focus on minorities, and if we do hit the goal, their corporate sponsor will provide a bit of funding that can be used for supplies.

Okay, now back to writing press releases. My favorite. [sigh]

We're starting a STEM Club for our homeschool families, so I built a catapult out of craft sticks, rubber bands, and a plastic spoon. Also been showing co-worker our example crafts that were STEM related from the last few summer programs, and she's showing some interest. May see if she wants to present the program, at least some of the time. Especially if I migraine out on program day, she needs to know what to do.

Looking for other STEM stuff using craft sticks. Already had quite a few sticks, but someone just donated a big box of them. Might as well use them up as much as possible. We've got 9 members registered, so the catapults will use up about 100, and it's a box of 1,000, so I've got a ways to go.

We're co-hosting a coloring contest in the local paper. We've been handing out the page, but for a bit of advertisement, I've colored one and have it on display.

Most weeks are not like this, but with more programs coming up, it looks like I'll at least be doing the research for STEM kits that can be done here or in a "take and make" bag.