over here at LAist.
But not the way you’re thinking.
A clutch of four Komodo dragons that hatched at London Zoo this year were all the result of virgin births, according to research that could help scientific efforts to protect the world’s largest lizards.
Genetic tests conducted at the University of Liverpool have proved that all four born to a female called Sungai were conceived by parthenogenesis, a form of asexual reproduction that is known to take place in lizards but never documented in this species before.
Good time of year for it, too. 
I’m still recovering from my hardware problem. (My computer hung on Sunday, and as a result of the abnormal shutdown the TBM files I was working on got mangled, so I’m having to recover the messed-up material and reconstruct the rest.)
As a result, I now have an offsite storage facility via Windows SharePoint (and I recommend this site to any of you who need free storage of this kind: http://www.fpweb.net/free.sharepoint.faq.asp ). This should add some peace of mind to this process (and indeed all my other Word-based writing processes. I just with there were something like this (with automatic live offsite backup capabilities) for Movie Magic Screenwriter.
So all of you who’re subscribers should check the usual upload directory late tonight. (If you’re not a subscriber and you want to be, check over here.)
Meanwhile, back to work…
The first part of Sky One’s adaptation of Terry Pratchett’s The Hogfather managed an impressive average of 2.6 million viewers last night.
This figure means the £6 million production, which stars David Jason and Marc Blake, has become the highest rated multichannel commission, beating BBC Three’s Torchwood, which started on 2.4 million viewers in October.2.4 million viewers initially tuned in to Sky One, according to unofficial overnights, but Hogfather increased its audience as Sky’s multi-start viewers were added to the figures.
(I will now run off and do a little Hogswatch dance. Go Pterry!!)
[tags]Hogfather, Terry, Pratchett[/tags]
Folks, apologies. I’m having some hardware issues with the computer that are going to make it impossible to get this chapter up before (my) bedtime tonight: it’ll be posted tomorrow. (mutter) Sorry about this.
I’m about to coin a word.
I don’t know if the thing I’m going to coin about is happening in the US right now (or elsewhere), but it sure happens a lot on this side of the water, and it is driving me nuts.
It happens in commercials on both radio and TV. They’ll show you, or tell you about, some consumer item. Let’s say it’s a sofa.* And (on TV) they’ll show you the price. (Let’s say it’s $499.) And then they’ll say it out loud. They’ll say: “Now — only four nine nine!”
Not “four hundred ninety-nine”. These commercials seem to be utterly terrified of saying the word “hundred” out loud.
So there’s the word I’m coining. Ekatonosmilophobia. The irrational fear of saying the word “hundred”.
Why won’t they just say it?! Do people at all the ad agencies responsible for those commercials really think that if you want that sofa, the pronunciation of the word “hundred” is genuinely going to stop you from buying it? Or do they think we’re so stupid that we can’t read the numbers and see that there are at least three of them, and know perfectly well that this means the word “hundred” is going to be lurking in there someplace? Because the people in the store sure aren’t going to be afraid to say that word at the cash register, and charge an amount containing the H word to our credit / debit cards or take the h**dred Euro/pound bills/notes out of our hot little hands.
(It just happened again, in a Dell computers commercial. “Five seven nine.” Oh, come ON, Dell!! Aaaaaargh!)
Seriously! JUST SAY HUNDRED, commercial people! (And don’t even get me started on the four-digit numbers.)
(sigh) Okay, that’s my rant for this year. Back to work.
*And another thing. What is it with the approximately eight million sofa ads on TV the day after Christmas? Do people really trash that many sofas over the holidays?
[tags]commercial, Christmas, price, sofa, television, radio, ekatonosmilophobia[/tags]
Or Orson Welles. Or somebody.
Last night the Belgian state broadcaster’s news program announced that the Vlaamse-/Flemish-speaking part of Belgium had seceded from the country.
Over the next hour and a half, the … anchors …cut to live footage from the Royal Palace, where an emotional crowd had gathered to protest for the survival of their country. A reporter in Kinshasa, capital of the Congo, commented on rumors that King Albert II had fled to the former Belgian colony. A crowd waved Flemish flags behind the live reporter at the Flemish Parliament. The ring road around the capital, Brussels, was blocked, NATO headquarters on red alert, and police controls thrown up along the border between Flemish-speaking and French-speaking regions. A parade of prominent politicians and public figures opined on the grave development, and there was even a report of julbilation among Catalans keen to separate their region from Spain.
Except whoops, it hadn’t really happened.
Love it. Love it love it love it love it.
Just for those of you who might be interested — The Big Meow’s sixth chapter will be going up for the subscribers on Sunday evening, the 17th of December. Subscribers, please note: the login location and username/password info for ch. 6 will be the same as it was for chapters 4 and 5.
Thanks!
I have a piece of software called “Woodstock Chimes SereneSaver” that I picked up some years ago. Apparently it’s still available here and there online — see here, for example. The software very accurately duplicates the sounds of the famous Woodstock Chimes, and also has a screensaver element (not of that much interest to me, as it’s a fairly basic slideshow image player, and I have a fair number of those already).
Anyway, what I’m interested in doing is recording extended chunks of the chime sounds for use as background in podcasts. Does anyone know of any audio software that could straightforwardly capture this sound, while the program’s running, and save the output as an .MP3 or whatever? (I need something with a very shallow learning curve, as I just don’t have time to spend right now wrestling with something complicated.)
For reference purposes: my computer has what would have been a moderately high-end audio setup a couple/few years ago (Creative SB Live!Platinum, I think it is, with the Live!drive jack “console” — the guts of it being a Creative EMU10K1 processor).
If anyone has any thoughts on this, I’d love to hear them…
(snort) Defamer swings twice, connects twice.
In other multiple nominations news, Helen Mirren was recognized for playing both Elizabeth I in a TV miniseries and Elizabeth II in The Queen, an achievement that we genuinely hope you won’t use to concoct transgressive, cross-generational fantasies that sully the monarchy. Leave the queens alone, sicky.
That’s code-talk for fanfic, surely. So we can’t all run out and start writing hot E-I / E-II pairings, then? Aw, shucks.
…Also a no-no, apparently: Bigfoot / Unicorn. (Seriously. There’s video. And a fat lady who sings.)
…And jeez, it’s true, you can find anything on teh Intarwebz. Look! Fanfic pairing generators:
Ultimate Star Trek Pairing Generator
Brain Hurting Pairing Generator
…This wet weather’s beginning to get to me. I’m going to get some cocoa and try to forget all about this.