Dave Mancuso dot Com

Sorry I missed my post yesterday–I accidentally burned my hand and dealt with that all night instead of posting to this blog. Really, you say?

Yes, really. Since I managed to keep ice on my hand all night, I seem to have staved off blisters in all but two small areas on my hand. Moral of the story: never touch a pan you’ve taken out of the oven with your bare hand, even (and especially) when you’re crowded and in a hurry.

This burn is nothing compared to the burn from my ’87 VW Camper, though. It’s time to tell that story soon.

This is interesting news buzzing around the Net the last few days. The Shuttle Radar Topography Mission has some up with some images that show a huge impact crater from a long time ago here in North America. They believe that this impact caused the dinosaurs to become extinct millions of years ago.

So, if this hadn’t happened, dinos would still rule the earth? Would we be living a strange coexistence with brontosauri? Are the Flintstones now a bizarre view into a strange parallel universe? Am I thinking way too hard about this?

You can find a good story about this at the ScienceDaily site.

Brad, that’s who. My friend and colleague Brad’s top ten movies list has another set of top movies. I think as our top ten lists develop they’ll have some interesting contrasts, since Brad is ten years younger than I am. Music might be a sore spot, as Brad continually fails to appreciate even the best ’70s music–Car Wash, Kung Fu Fighting,and Play That Funky Music, to name a few. You know, the classics. I just keep playing and playing them, and he’s not coming around.

I feel a ’70s fest coming on, playing in the office all day tomorrow…

Field of Dreams leaves us with a refreshed sense of innocence; it doesn’t stand out in any one particular way, but it’s got great moments, and most everyone knows the line “If you build it, they will come.”

Plus, it’s got a ’73 (or so) VW Transporter in it. They even got the sound right in the audio track. That alone gives it a place in my top movies list.

One more top movie to add to the list. If you hate Kevin Costner, then this movie might not impress you as much as it did me. My feelings about Costner are neutral, but I thought the movie was great. A great message. Whoever could have thought that a post-apocalyptic postal service could generate the gripping tension and epic sweep of this movie? Even at three hours long, I thought it was great. The Postman rules.

Apparently Sean Astin (Sam Gamgee in The Lord of the Rings) is the son of John Astin and Patty Duke. I never knew that.

Oldsters like me will remember John Astin as Gomez in the original The Addams Family and Patty Duke from The Patty Duke Show (oddly enough). Patty Duke was also Helen Keller opposite Anne Bancroft as Annie Sullivan in The Miracle Worker, if I recall correctly. Patty took the role of Annie Sullivan in a remake of The Miracle Worker a few years ago. John Astin had a great part as a professor in The Adventures of Briscoe County, Jr. a few years ago.

A few weeks ago, I was driving with my wife Denise and the little ones, and I looked over to see a car on a lot that looked like a Forester. I never figured out what kind of SUV it was, but a few miles later, Denise said she “saw me” checking out “the female” at the lot. She said I was caught red-handed (or -eyed as it were). This did catch me by surprise, so I explained to her that I was looking at a car and not at all at “the female.” She seemed unconvinced, but then I had an idea. I explained to her that since I’d missed the female, and probably other attractive women during drives with Denise, could she just please point out all the attractive females wherever we go so that I would at least get to see the ones I was accused of looking at? I mean, it’d be a win-win situation, right?

She didn’t think so, either.

I’ve long wanted to put some of my top movies into this weblog, but it’s so tough to nail them down. Some of my favorite movies are showing their age, too. Regardless, here are a few of my top movies in no particular order:

Raiders of the Lost Ark–like my friend Kevin says, Indiana Jones has more action in his little pinky than James Bond has in his entire body.

Ordinary People–Robert Redford’s first directed film. As I’ve re-watched this over the years, my understanding of what the family’s conflicts are all about continue to evolve. A great character drama.

Risky Business–it transcended the subgenre of teen comedy movies. One of Curtis Armstrong’s earliest (and possibly best) roles.

The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring–need I say more?

The Two Towers is great too, but departs from the books more.

North By Northwest–Great Alfred Hitchcock film with Cary Grant. People say Notorious is just as good or even better, so I guess I should make a point to see it.

It’s A Wonderful Life–so I’m a sucker. Sue me.

The Princess Bride–if you haven’t seen this, go get it right now. Try to recognize Billy Crystal.

Back to the Future–I’ve seen it a hundred times. The attention to detail between 1955 and 1985 is amazing, by the way.

Groundhog Day–one of my all time favorites, and I don’t necessarily see this as a comedy. One of my favorite scenes is when Phil is sitting quietly in a diner, looks around him, and smiles. You can tell he’s begun to get what it’s all about.

Pleasantville–a great character movie.

I tend to be into movies that are character driven more than plot driven. This explains many of my top movie choices, or other favorites like Gattaca.

I loaded my old copy of MasterCook onto my laptop today. It’s a Macintosh System 7 product from 1995, but it seems to run fine on Mac OS X in Classic mode. I made a new Recipe Book in the program and started lisitng recipes. I came up with over 50 original recipes off the top of my head, but I need at least 250 for a good book. I thought of 30 more after dinner. If I can get 250 by the end of the week, I can start working on the book. MasterCook will take my recipes and calculate the nutritional values in each one. I can get the carb level in each recipe easily. It looks like this project is beginning to jell.

I’ve downloaded the latest nightly build of Camino (formerly Chimera). While the latest release of Chamino is version .7, the nightly builds are now focusing on the .8 version. The biggest change is that the developers are merging the code with the Mozilla trunk, which essentially means that they get all the benefits of the work that’s been going on with Mozilla. The first visible benefit is speed. I could tell instantly that today’s Camino is way superfast. Awesome.

The disadvantage is that we lose a few things until the bugs are ironed out again with the trunk implementation. Buttons and checkboxes in Camino have become boxy like they used to be, but that’s just cosmetic. The history drawer window has lost its relative dating (Today, Yesterday, 2 days ago, etc.)–it went back to 0, 1, 2, etc. But that’s just cosmetic too. The one pain is that the new build has reintroduced some instability into the program. But I can live with that–it’ll likely improve daily as the developers excise bugs. There are indications of some new cool stuff in the works, too, like a new bookmark manager. You know, with the number of browsers running on the Macintosh platform, it’s a great time to be a computer user.