Alexei's Weblog

RaZZberry M&M’s

Sun, 04 May 2008 22:19:20 +0000

What is it about Limited Edition M&M’s this spring? This is the third one I’ve come across. I found RaZZberry M&M’s today at the Rite Aid at San Antonio Shopping Center (along with single-serving bags of Mint Crisp M&M’s on sale for 50¢ each!). These are enlarged milk chocolate M&M’s with a fruit flavor somewhat reminiscent of raspberry. Actually, they remind me a lot of the Wildly Cherry (aka Cherry Cordial) M&M’s, except the fruit flavor is milder and more tart. I like the cherry ones better, but these aren’t bad.

Yes, I am aware that five of my past seven posts have been about M&M’s.

Mint Crisp M&Ms

Tue, 08 Apr 2008 07:06:58 +0000

Tonight at Walgreens, I ran into a stack of Mint Crisp M&M’s bags. A tie-in with the upcoming Indiana Jones movie, these green-and-white M&Ms are mint-flavored like the holiday mint M&M s and crispy like the now-defunct crispy M&M’s. I’ve missed crispy M&Ms ever since they were discontinued, and I always look forward to mint M&Ms during the holiday season, so I was very excited to try these out. On the balance, though, I’m somewhat disappointed. The rice crisps seem to clash with the mint flavor rather than blend with it, and I think the two work better separately. Still, for those who miss the crispy M&M, it’s better than nothing. I think these are a limited-time special and will probably be gone once Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is out of theaters.

M&M’s Wildly Cherry

Sun, 23 Mar 2008 07:37:32 +0000

I discovered a bag of “Wildly Cherry” M&M’s at Target today. They are, as near as I can tell, exactly the same as the “Cherry Cordial” M&M’s that I enjoyedd this past Christmas. The same size, color, taste, everything except the packaging.

I’m not sure if this means that the cherry M&M’s were so successful as a holiday special that they decided to sell it at other times of year, or if they were such a failure that they had enough candy left over to try and repackage it and sell out the remaining inventory.

The M&M’s Web site calls this a “limited edition” candy, so chocolate-cherry fans should stock up now!

iTunes Meme

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 05:25:10 +0000

Saw this one floating around LiveJournal (first from R.J.): Instructions: Open up your iTunes and fill out this survey, no matter how embarrassing the responses might be. How many songs total: 3452 How many hours or days of music: 8.7 days Most recently played: "Seven Drunken Nights", Bill Craig, The Wild Rover Most played: "I ...

These have been the voyages…

Thu, 10 Jan 2008 05:18:29 +0000

Since May 2005, I have watched…

6 series…
30 seasons (and 10 movies)…
224 DVDs…
726 episodes (and 10 movies)…
33539 minutes (i.e., 23 days, 6 hours and 59 minutes)…

…of Star Trek. Whew.

I finished the last episode of Enterprise last night. Not quite sure what to watch now.

Found: Mint M&Ms

Thu, 03 Jan 2008 07:28:50 +0000

I mentioned in my previous post that I had been looking for mint M&M’s; they’re available only during the holiday season, and I hadn’t happened to find any at any of the stores I had looked in the last few weeks. After Christmas, I happened to be in a bunch of supermarkets and drug stores, and I did a pretty thorough search of the holiday clearance section of local stores with no success. But I happened to be in the new Longs in downtown Mountain View this evening, and they had a whole pile of them, so I was able to get some finally. Yay mint M&Ms! If anyone else is looking, try the Longs Drugs at 850 California Street. As of a few hours ago, they had a fair amount left; at 75% off, they’re only 87¢ per bag.

M&M’s Cherry Cordial

Mon, 24 Dec 2007 21:52:04 +0000

Was at Target the other day looking for mint M&M’s (normally available only during the holiday season), and while I didn’t find any, I did run across M&M’s Cherry Cordial, oversized dark chocolate M&M’s “with a hint of cherry flavor.” They turn out to be quite good; I recommend them.

Is it a drama or a comedy?

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 03:09:01 +0000

Great quote from Aaron Sorkin from the documentary In Depth: The Evolution of Studio 60, one of the special features on the DVD set that came out last week.:

I have a theater background, and in theater nobody ever asks is it a drama or a comedy, just is it a musical or a non-musical. This is a non-musical.

If Sorkin wrote a musical, I’d go see it.

Enterprise: Season One

Wed, 17 Oct 2007 03:37:26 +0000

Just finished watching the first season of Enterprise. If nothing else, this show is a lot of fun to watch. I started watching Star Trek DVDs back when Enterprise was first on the air; the theory was that if I watched all seven hundred-odd epiosodes of Trek back-to-back, I’d be able to keep it all fresh in my mind and compare how the show has changed over forty years. It hasn’t worked, really. By the time I got to the end of The Next Generation, I’d pretty much forgotten the original series, and now it’s been over two and a half years since I first started watching DVDs. I just finished watching twenty-six episodes of Enterprise that I saw when they first aired back in 2001, but I have only a vague recollection of them. Oh well.

As I feared, the Enterprise DVDs aren’t any better than the other series’. You still have to wait through several minutes of opening warnings, credits and a video sequence before you can pick an episode. Actually, I think the Enterprise DVDs are a little worse than the other series in term of usability. Each disc has four episodes, and this is what the episode selection menu looks like (this is actually from season two since it’s what I have on-hand; season one is the same):

Although English does usually obey the rule of left-to-right before top-to-bottom, the visual divider between the left and right groups makes it look for all the world like two columns of selections, so that the correct episode order would be 028, 029, 027, 031 instead of the correct 028, 027, 029, 031 (the out-of-order episode numbers don’t help). But it is nice that the episodes are presented in widescreen, so my DVD player’s entire screen is filled. Also, unlike the previous series (but like the animated series), there are commentaries and deleted scenes for a few episodes.

Mistaken iden-maki

Tue, 16 Oct 2007 04:41:01 +0000

I picked up some sushi at Whole Foods earlier, and I got a little concerned when I took a bite of my cucumber roll and discovered a soft texture when I was expecting crunchy. Turns out I picked up a package of avocado rolls instead of cucumber. Oops. Darn green vegetables all look alike. Oh well; it could have been worse. They could have actually been cucumber rolls.

What is the plural of MacBook Pro?

Sun, 14 Oct 2007 02:39:01 +0000

Stupid question of the day: To describe more than one MacBook Pro, should one write MacBook Pros, MacBooks Pro or MacsBook Pro?

Public service announcement: keep those bike tires inflated

Mon, 08 Oct 2007 01:10:36 +0000

For only the second or third time in recent memory, I have remembered to inflate the tires on my bicycle before they’ve gone completely flat, and without damaging the tire or bike in the process. So therefore I wish to remind my fellow cyclists to check your tires and keep them inflated. I find that a properly inflated tire gives a much easier ride, and helps avoid costly trips to the bike shop.

I think the experts say to check your tire pressure every time you ride the bike, or at any rate more frequently than I do. I always seem to remember it when I’m at the other end of my commute from my bike pump, and by the time I’ve gotten home, I’ve forgotten. I don’t know exactly how long it’s been (a few months at least), but I normally inflate the tires to 65 PSI, and they were around 20, so that’s not great.

“The Counter-Clock Incident”

Mon, 20 Aug 2007 05:01:27 +0000

After writing that most of the Star Trek animated episodes seemed to have a direct tie to an original series episode¹, I was interested to see that most of the next set of episodes (from the late first season and second season) are more stand-alone. The last episode of the show, “The Counter-Clock Incident,” was a little bit surprising, though. There was a mention of the planet Babel (from “Journey to Babel"), and then immediately the episode introduces Robert April, first captain of the Enterprise. This is a major connection to the rest of Star Trek—or was it?

My years of Trek fandom had cemented this character and his background into my mind, so it took me a moment to remember that, in fact, this episode is the only place where Robert April is ever mentioned, let alone appears on-screen. As a kid, I had read so many Star Trek reference books and novels that of course I knew that Robert April was first captain of the Enterprise, before Christopher Pike and before James T. Kirk.

Amusingly, when I heard Robert April speak, I immediately identified his voice with the character. As with most of the male “guest stars” on the animated series, the character was voiced by James Doohan². One of the Star Trek novels that April appears in was Final Frontier, by Diane Carey. As it happens, I used to have a cassette tape with the audiobook version of this novel, which was read by—wait for it—James Doohan.

¹	I was amused to see that the TAS DVD set has a special feature “What’s the Star Trek Connection?” detailing in excruciating detail dozens of cross-references between TAS and the other Star Trek series and films.
²	Doohan could do a multitude of voices and accents, and since they were already paying him to do Scotty, it was cheaper to have him do other characters than hiring more voice actors. Likewise, many of the female guest characters were voiced by Majel Barrett or Nichelle Nichols.

More on Star Trek: The Animated Series

Thu, 16 Aug 2007 04:02:45 +0000

Finished the second disc, so now I’m at episode 12, more than half way through the series. I’ve been enjoying it; like the original show, but more cartoon-like in appearance.

One thing that is notable compared to the original: There are far more internal references. Of the dozen shows I’ve seen so far, three are direct sequels to a TOS episode ("Yesteryear” from “The City on the Edge of Forever", “More Tribbles, More Troubles” from “The Trouble with Tribbles", “Once Upon a Planet” from “Shore Leave"), and a bunch others feature direct references or characters from TOS episodes (e.g., Robert Wesley from “The Ultimate Computer” in “One of Our Planets Is Missing", the Eugenics Wars reference in “The Infinite Vulcan", Harry Mudd in “Mudd’s Passion", Kor from “Errand of Mercy” in “The Time Trap").

In part, this is so because the original series was so lacking—by modern standards, at least—in continuity. I suspect, though, that it is not so much that the animated show’s creaters felt differently about episodic television, but more that they were excited to be working on Star Trek (by then a pop icon). Tying back to the original series as often as possible was probably fun, and helped “prove” their Trek-ness. Also, since Trek was well-known by 1973, many of the viewers probably enjoyed the back-references.

On a side note: The TAS DVDs are, unfortunately, similar to the other series’ box sets in their annoyance factor. All the Star Trek DVDs I’ve watched so far make you sit and wait for several minutes after inserting the disc before you can select an episode and watch it. I believe the first four DVD series (TOS, TNG, DS9 and Voyager) were all produced basically at the same time, and are similar in form. Since TAS was just released this past year, I had hopes they would have made the discs more usable. Instead, they added previews for other shows. This does not bode well for the Enterprise DVD sets, also produced more recently than the others but before The Animated Series

Finished Star Trek: Voyager, now watching Star Trek: The Animated Series

Sun, 12 Aug 2007 18:45:21 +0000

I finished watching Star Trek: Voyager last week. Overall, I enjoyed the final few seasons of the show, which I had never seen before (except for the series finale, which was not spectacular). Even the parts of Voyager I had seen before I thought were much better than I remembered them. Perhaps I had lowered expectations, or less to compare it with. When Voyager was on the air the first time around, I was watching it along with Deep Space Nine and Babylon 5, both superior shows. So maybe the lack of direct comparison helped it.

I’m now watching the Star Trek animated series. It’s out of order, but it was just released on DVD recently, so wasn’t around when I finished the original series almost two years ago. I had seen a couple of these episodes before (Nickelodeon used to show them), but long enough ago that I don’t remember anything about them. It took a few episodes to get used to the animation—the episodes feel very slow and static (even though they’re only half an hour long), because there’s not much motion in most scenes. Presumably this was to save money when drawing the animation.

I was surprised that both the episodes I had heard of and was looking forward to seeing ("Yesteryear” and “More Tribbles, More Troubles") were on the first disc, so I have no idea what to expect from the rest. There are only 22 half-hour episodes, so it won’t take long to find out.