I didn't realize how long it was since I last went to Plaza Singapura; there were a few curious things in it, despite the renovations that have one and a half floors wiped out. A good number of stores are holding renovation sales, including Blue Max, a small DVD chain. I noticed there that It's Pat: The Movie was released, or maybe escaped, to DVD. The cover copy claims without evidence it to be ``The Outrageously Funny Adventure.'' I remember it mostly as the movie which made us give up the faint hope that a Saturday Night Live movie might ever be funny again.
Arousing my curiosity, though, was something playing on the monitor outside. It was some cartoon, looked like mid-to-late 80s vintage -- very much like G.I.Joe or Transformers. The episode at least was set in some thick generic jungle, with locals in a large stone pyramid-type Lost City arrangement. Our Heroes had some G.I.Joe type gear like missile launchers, but seemed to be technology themselves, as they wear full-body armor outfits with chest displays that I think are supposed to be holographic, since they flickered some even in poses when the characters were just talking, and they wouldn't use a separate animation cel for that if they weren't showing off the cool thing of the show. The hologram plates are able to project green wolves into the jungle, though for what purpose besides the obvious joy it brings them I don't know.
On another note, can someone suggest a program for taking screen grabs from a DVD, usable on Mac OS X? I'm trying to get pictures (from a DVD-R, as it happens) for a friend, and while I've got vlc, I'd really prefer a program that isn't unspeakably awful and designed to break every possible rule of user interface design. (Among notable vlc-for-Mac shortcomings: rewind and fast forward jump to random points on the disc; screen capture scales the output to the dimensions of the most distorted the control panel window has ever been; the marks indicating a pause sometimes, but do not always, disppear after a few seconds, and appear in a screen grab. And, of course, it crashes like it were SimCity 3000.)
Trivia: Buffalo, New York, established a National Football League team named the `Bisons' three times in the 1920s; each attempt folded. Source: The Uncyclopedia, Gideon Haigh.
Currently Reading: A Few Acres of Snow, Robert Leckie.