Tivo notes, good and bad

Bad: Our Tivo modem is clearly injured, possibly fatally. When I got home yesterday, shadesong mentioned to me that incoming calls all went straight to a busy signal (which should never happen, since we have voice mail). After much troubleshooting, I unplugged the Tivo, and everything worked just fine. That said, the Tivo made a test call just fine. If it can still make the data calls (it had already done so yesterday, so no way to test until today), we can just plug it in twice a week or so and have it call in. If it can't make the calls at all, we've got two weeks before it enters the Great Tivo Graveyard. :-( I've had my Tivo for over five years, dammit.

On the plus side, we watched a couple of shows, including the latest Robot Chicken. And we noticed that the latest Harvey Birdman commercial has a "real" phone number. It's 877-MANBIRD, and I highly recommend that any fan of the show calls it. :-)

Also watched the season premiere of the new Surreal Life, which has some interesting potential, mainly due to the fact that the cast seems to be the least likable one ever (and I coined a term last night: Sexual Harassment Pinchot!).

Go Alton!

From Alton Brown's Blog:

Dear Tom Cruise:

Your lack of belief in the existence of clinical depression tells me one thing: you didn’t spend $10 to see War Of The Worlds.

HST's ashes to be fired from cannon

The cremated remains of Hunter S. Thompson will be shot from a cannon next month.

Really, not much to add to a headline like that.

Crowley does Byron

Dammit, no one wrote me a memo letting me know that John Crowley had a new book out! And I love the concept of Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land: Lord Byron secretly did manage to write a full novel based on that famous night of storytelling at Villa Diodati. The fictional novel (featuring zombies!) also contains footnotes by Byron's mathematician daughter.

Crowley's one of about three people I think could pull this off (Tim Powers and John Ford being the other two).