John Lindal’s Blog

Home Theater — Part 2

The JBL speakers sound phenomenal! My daughter loves it. When she watches Shrek, it’s like she’s seeing it for the first time. She gets so excited now, instead of just sitting and watching.

I put the finishing touches on the wiring today. All the audio now goes directly to the Denon receiver, instead of via the TV. The Sony DVD goes directly to the TV, while the Sony VCR and APEX DVD are multiplexed by the receiver, so I can use a single input on the back of the TV for both. This finally gets the APEX DVD off the top of the Sony DVD, so everything runs cooler. If you’ve never heard of APEX, it’s an unknown brand, but it plays anything, no matter how damaged. Sony normally chokes on damaged DVD’s.

The only remaining issue is to connect the Aiwa CD player to the receiver, since the Sony DVD player cannot handle our CD’s. The optical digital cable is on order

Home Theater

After a lot of research, my wife concluded that JBL makes the best home theater speakers, while Denon makes the best receivers. Unlike most home theater systems that use tiny little tweeters for surround, JBL uses two pound monsters for all four satellites. We got good deals on both the speakers and the receiver, because JBL is unloading the two pounders cheap in favor of their new three pounders, and the Denon 787 is discontinued in favor of the new, and by all reports worse, Denon 788.

This presented me with the irresistible challenge of installing all of it

Thankfully, our back living room has an open beam ceiling, so there was no question of how to mount the speakers — simply bolt them to the beams. Our house is close to 100 years old, and the beams are clearly original, because drilling them was tough. I had to push hard to get the bit in, even at full speed, and for some of the holes, it came back came out smoking!

Then there was the question of cables. Wireless surround is convenient, but it suffers from interference. We finally settled on Monster Cable, which conveniently came in off white, exactly the color of our walls

It took me two half-days to hang the cables, because I wanted them to be as close to invisible as possible. My wife claims it was successful. There really is very little visible, because I hid behind the curtains on one side of the room, and the fireplace tiles and display cabinet on the other side.

I’m still searching for gold plated, color coded banana plugs so I can simplify the connections to the receiver. After that, I have to rip up all the existing wiring (TV, DVD, etc) and reroute everything through the new surge protector ($350,000 warranty!) and the receiver. And then the real fun begins, because the receiver has a massive configuration system designed to measure and compensate for all the accoustic peculiarities of the room. But I’m sure it will sound terrific once it’s all finished!

The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl

I was just assaulted by The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl. How this putrid piece of fanfic ever got turned into a movie, I will never understand. It makes the Spy Kids franchise (by the same director) look like timeless literature.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

I finally got to see Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, which is no mean feat when one has a two year old attached at the hip, but grandparents do make good, if temporary, solvent

Considering the major faults of the previous movie, e.g., the overdone dragon chase which squeezed out so many other plot threads and the failed attempt to construct a scary labyrinth, I rather dreaded seeing this one, but I really needed a break after working several weekends straight!

I am delighted to be able to say that this movie far exceeded my admittedly lowered expectations. It captured the essence and highlights of the book very well. Granted, it has been a while since I read the book, so I don’t remember every nuance, but I cannot find anything to complain about other than the perfectly excusable fireworks when Dumbledore fought Tom Riddle. In the book, their fight was like an exquisite game of chess, which showed that they were in a completely different league from their troops, who fought aggressively and loudly. In the movie, however, this would surely have been a letdown for most audiences, so the director had to make it spectacular instead — and they did succeed!

Kill Bill

Normally, I blog about a movie soon after I see it, but Kill Bill really wasn’t worth mentioning — until now, when I figured out what was bothering me about it.

All the major characters in the movie, with the exception of the sword maker who had retired, were animals, not people. Sure, they were sentient, but for all the good it did them, they might as well not have been. They were completely governed by their desires and instincts. For example, not once did it occur to the main character that she should forgive Bill and move on — not because he deserved it, of course, but because the alternative, revenge, would ruin the rest of her life.

The characters in the movie were highly skilled, very clever, very smart, and very wily, but all they ever used any of it for was to outwit and kill each other. Lions and hyenas do this, too. The only differences are in technology and tactics.

Animals, as far as we can tell, are governed entirely by instincts and desires, so they cannot choose how to behave. Humans, however, are sentient, which allows us to step back from ourselves, learn the difference between right and wrong, and choose how to behave.

Some people like to claim that the difference between right and wrong is fuzzy or relative or even nonexistent. To me, this is nonsense. Of the Ten Commandments, four through ten (using the Roman Catholic version) should be obvious even to atheists and anarchists, if they stop to think about them. They are all examples of “Do unto others as you would have them do to you,” which is the foundation of a stable society.

Given that there is a clear difference between right and wrong, if one chooses not to learn it, or one does learn it and then chooses to do wrong, then that is Evil. The choice discards what makes the person human and debases him or her to the level of an animal. This is what all the characters in Kill Bill did.

I, Robot

FX showed I, Robot this weekend. It was much better than I expected. The trailers that I had seen all focused on the action, and while there was certainly plenty of it, they did actually weave a decent detective story around it. I’m not a huge Asimov fan, but I do know the Three Laws, and the movie’s interpretation of them was not unreasonable. The product placement, however, rivaled that of Return of the Killer Tomatoes in shamelessness, though surely not in quantity

Flash Gordon

This weekend, it was my daughter’s and mother-in-law’s turns to be sick. Still sucks.

In between changing messy diapers, I managed to watch Flash Gordon again. I just never get tired of Queen’s sound track or the crazy costumes!

The Princess Bride

It’s been a long time since I watched the movie, but I found myself thinking about it again recently. At the beginning, the main characters all climb the Cliffs of Insanity. Logically, it follows that once this is accomplished, they have reached the Heights of Insanity. It’s all downhill from there

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

I finally watched Charlie and the Chocolate Factory a few days ago. It’s a great movie. I’ve seen the original version, and this one definitely had a better ending. But what really got me was when Mike TeeVee was enjoying himself in the first scene inside the factory. He was smashing pumpkins.

Why pumpkins? Well, I’m old enough to have spent way too many hours playing Doom back when it was state-of-the-art. Enough hours that I still remember the cheat codes for it. “idspispopd,” the command to allow you to walk through walls, was a real finger-full to type. I did some research way back then and discovered that spispopd was the name of a game: Smashing Pumpkins into Small Piles of Putrid Debris.

And, yes, I’ve played that, too

Lord of the Rings on TBS

So the Lord of the Rings made it to TBS this weekend, and they’re giving it exactly what it deserves. Here are some quotes from the preview ads:

Good witches? Evil Wizards? I don’t think we’re in Kansas any more!

Comparing Galadriel with the Good Witch is right at Peter Jackson’s mental level of comprehension of the books. Too bad they had to insult The Wizard of Oz in the process

It sucks to be Frodo.

Indeed. Sucks to be watching, too

If you stank, and people called you names, and you had no friends, you’d have issues, too!

They were talking about Gollum, who is probably one of the only characters that doesn’t really deserve to be ridiculed. Now, if they had been referring to Peter Jackson…