Strange-but-true: My mother (who was born and lived much of her life in Memphis), was born on the day that Elvis Presley would later die. My mother-in-law was born on the day Elvis was born.
No idea what the significance is of that, but it’s my mom’s birthday today.
You were born on a Friday
under the astrological sign Leo.
Your birthday falls into the Chinese year beginning 2/2/1946 and ending 1/21/1947.
You were born in the Chinese year of the Dog.
Celebrities who share your birthday:
Vanessa Carlton (1980)
Emily Robison (1972)
Timothy Hutton (1960)
Angela Bassett (1958)
Madonna (1958)
James Cameron (1954)
Kathie Lee Gifford (1953)
Lesley Ann Warren (1946)
Eydie Gorme (1932)
Robert Culp (1930)
Frank Gifford (1930)
Ann Blyth (1928)
Fess Parker (1925)
Charles Bukowski (1920)
Menachem Begin (1913)
Your age is the equivalent of a dog that is 8.57729941291585 years old. (You old hound dog, you!)
OK, I’m in the process of setting up my computer, again, right now, and I’ve gotten my phone hooked back up. So here, as promised to Joel, is the video of his daughter Kate on the teacups at Disneyland, as shot by my Treo 650.
I don’t imagine these videos will be of a lot of interest to anyone but Kate’s parents and grandparents, but this one is kind of neat to watch because of the shadows. (The two-part It’s a Small World extravaganza will only be for the really serious home movie audience to watch.)
We also got the NBC pilot of “Kidnapped” from Netflix on the same DVD. It’s a season-long kidnapping investigation of the son of a rich New York couple.
This literally was unable to keep me awake, so maybe I missed the best parts of it during nodding off spells.
In a burst of self-confidence, NBC is releasing two of its pilots for the upcoming season on a single DVD, “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” and “Kidnapped.” This might suggest they think both are great, but they previously have released turkeys for free onto iTunes, so there’s no guarantee.
While I’m lukewarm on “Kidnapped” (more on that in a moment), “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” — one of two shows about Saturday Night Live this television season — is a winner.
(We rented the two shows on DVD from Netflix, although I’m told both are now floating around the Internet via BitTorrent and other mediums.)
I expected something much more reverential of SNL from an NBC show. Fortunately, Judd Hirsch’s meltdown before the opening credits even roll throws that out the window, attacking the fictional version of SNL, and television in general, for being too afraid of offending anyone and of putting commerce ahead of art (although acknowledging it’s always been a battle between the two).
The cast is good, with a lot of depth — there are recognizable solid actors who don’t have any lines in the pilot, but just appear in group shots — including an incredibly unpleasant Steven Weber, Amanda Peet playing a non-bimbo character (although her hot babeness is mentioned repeatedly by other characters), Tim(othy) Busfield, D.L. Hughley, Matthew Perry and Bradley Whitford.
A great cynical little show and one I definitely intend to TiVo this season.
We’re changing the way the Honor System works to be more of a non-competitive grind so that it’s something that you can work toward over time. You’ll still be able to get honor points in battlegrounds and from outdoor world-PvP objectives, and from outdoor world PvP in general. You’ll be able to get honor points which you then spend to get rewards, but once the expansion comes out, it’s not going to be a ladder. There won’t be any decay involved – it will be a lot more like an experience system. At the same time, we want an arena, we want a forum to be able to do competitive PvP, and we want to make sure that competitive PvP isn’t just a time-grind. We want to make sure that it’s skill-oriented, so that’s where we’re going to focus with the Arena System. We’re going to try to make sure that the Arena System will require some kind of time investment, but very light compared to grinding away to the top honor ranks in the old Honor System. With the Arena System I think we can expect to see more of a chess-like rating system involved, and we’ll see plenty of players that spend some of their time, maybe 10 to 15 arena battles per week, in order to climb to the top.
My dwarven hunter has killed more than 17,000 members of the Horde, but under the old system, unless I was killing like mad every week, I’d make no forward progress beyond knight rank. Removing honor decay from the system sounds great to me. (Although I find the hunter PVP armor so fugly — not to mention it’s kind of a step down from my Zul’Gurub-level gear — that I don’t forsee me ever getting it, just the weapons and battle standard.)
