mardi 3 mai 2011

The call of the Mac: proprietary freedom postponed

It seemed only fair to replace the old Mac after I finished it off with a full cup of coffee versed amidships into its already battered and grubby keyboard. Within a few seconds it was dead. I let it dry out for a few days and then tried booting it off the mains power supply, but it wouldn't boot--and still smells very strongly of coffee. It was a nice tool for curating CD/DVD/internet playback reclined in bed of an evening, so we missed it when it was gone. Hopefully the data will be retrievable onto another machine. I'm just waiting for the USB 2.5in SATA hard drive enclosure to arrive, and we'll see.

Anyway, I decided to introduce Mme Beezer to the delights of the comedy roast, and found this rather fine example of the genre: a general mocking of Pamela Anderson surrounded by her comedy entourage, posted in eight parts to YouTube.

It's almost 90 minutes of viewing, and eventually rather exhausting, but there were some very good bits indeed, amongst a considerable amount of what I think my late grandmother might have called "blue banter." Still, it was quite charming, and M. Lee-Jones's musical intervention was competent, thanks to his super backing musicians, and we watched it to the end quite content, having had to brush tears from our eyes on occasion. There is anthropological interest in its representation of American taboo in the early twenty-first century, and a lot of quite immaculate American English spoken word stuff, which is of considerable interest for the linguist.