May 13, 2003

Well, hell

Cable teevee hell has already started. I turned it on only to see a message that my service had been turned off, to call the service. So I call. "Oh, they changed some software, call this number to have your box turned back on." So I did, and after twenty minutes of unsuccessful fiddling I have another appointment with a cable guy on Thursday. All hail technology! Frankly, I think it's a conspiracy to get me to wake up early.

Oh well, I still have my dvd player. By the way -- I just wanted to point this out: the opening words of The Fellowship of the Ring where Galadriel is "the world is changing, I feel it in the water, I feel it in the air" etc., are actually in the book -- Treebeard says them to Pippin and Merry in The Two Towers. It strikes me as quite clever of the scriptwriter to choose those words to open the movie with. (With which to open the movie? Bah, you're not getting good grammar from me at this hour.)

Posted by Andrea Harris at May 13, 2003 09:40 AM
Comments

Don't worry about the grammar, kid. It was a phony rule to begin with.

Posted by: Ken Summers at May 13, 2003 at 10:17 AM

Indeed, Ken: pompous Oxbridge classicists said you can't split infinitives in English just because you can't in Latin. But Latin infinitives are ONE WORD!

Posted by: David Jaroslav at May 13, 2003 at 10:28 AM

Oh wait, wrong rule. Whatever. To paraphrase Churchill, grammar Nazis are something up with which we should not put.

Posted by: David Jaroslav at May 13, 2003 at 10:30 AM

Yeah, different rule but same grammar nazi. Can't remember his name but I fart in his general direction.

Or is it "into his general direction I shall fart"?

Posted by: Ken Summers at May 13, 2003 at 02:18 PM

Andrea, your cable company trouble sounds like the same exact trouble we had that ended with me taking the digital box back to the cable company. We're getting only the analog channels now, about 78 of them.

We replaced the digital movie channels with a Netflix subscription. In the end it's cheaper.

Posted by: McGehee at May 13, 2003 at 02:47 PM

Come to the dark side, Andrea: Get an 18-inch
sat dish.

Posted by: Dark Avenger at May 13, 2003 at 06:45 PM

Only if your Internet is DSL already.

Posted by: McGehee at May 13, 2003 at 06:53 PM

I have a cable modem. Through the same company, of course. I also had lots of trouble getting that to work in the beginning. It seems to be par for the course. (In any case, it's a one-month-free promo offer, so I'm not going to complain too much. I don't even know if I'm going to keep the teevee cable stuff after the month is up. We'll see.)

Posted by: Andrea Harris at May 13, 2003 at 07:36 PM

I have a cable modem, and a dish for the TV. The Time WarnerBrighthouse installer mentioned he had the same setup. Heh.

Posted by: Ian S. at May 13, 2003 at 07:46 PM

I may try the dish some day. (PS: the strikeout tag that is permitted in the comments is the plain "s" one.)

Posted by: Andrea Harris at May 13, 2003 at 11:39 PM

Yep, definite Tolkien dialogue, even if moved around and put it someone else's mouth. They really did a nice job of preserving original dialogue... so many of my favorite lines from the books show up in the movies.

Posted by: John Thacker at May 15, 2003 at 01:05 AM