Last night, Tracy and I went to see a local production of Dracula. I'm a big fan of theater, especially after having done a bunch of productions in stage crew in both high school and undergrad college. The production was actually quite good -- it was theater in the round, with a fully-functional single set.
The technical setup was actually quite impressive (being an engineer and an ex-stage crew type, I tend to notice these things). I couldn't find the control room, for example -- it was that well hidden. Or perhaps the control room was distant from the actual production area, and the techies watch by video (I'm guessing here, but that would be a pretty cool setup).
This production had a few extra twists that separated it from others that I have seen. For example, Lucy had a female friend, Nina, who died before she did. Nina came back as a vampire and started attacking children around London.
Props to a bunch of the special effects, too:
- Some various pyro, bangs, pops, flashes, etc.
- Using deep sustained bass noise, very hard to hear -- the kind of sound that you subtly feel rather than hear -- that created a feeling of dread and fear. Very cool.
- The professor killed Nina with a wooden stake through the heart while she was sleeping in her coffin. Since it was theater in the round, it actually happened right below me -- not 10 feet away. The stake actually appeared to go into Nina, and blood squirted everywhere. Again, very, very cool. That alone made the price of admission well worth it -- who wouldn't pay to see a beautiful vampire seductresss screaming in the throes of death, with blood squirting everywhere?
- Once or twice, there a character had a sudden moment of clarity and realization. The clock in the corner of the study suddenly got very loud (tick, tick, tick), as if the focus of the world suddenly got very narrow. And then the ticks got subtly farther apart
-- creating the illusion of slowing down time, and heightening fear. - Dracula "disappeared" at one point by means of what I assume was a hydrolic trapdoor in the floor of the stage (I caught a glimpse of it). He was surrounded by a cloak, which suddenly fell to the floor, and he was no longer in it (having been in theater for a while, I was proud of myself for anticipating the classic misdirection designed to make you look away from him for a second while his head disappeared downward -- no one else that I was with noticed it). Most excellent.
- In the final scene, where they drive a stake through Dracula's heart while he's sleeping in his coffin (more blood squirting everywhere -- yummy), they kill him, and then close the coffin. A few seconds later, his hand pops through the top of the coffin in a feeble attempt to strangle the professor, who successfully evades his grasp. Seconds later, they open the coffin again to really kill Dracula, but all that is there is a skeleton. Cool!
All in all, a good production. The actress who played the maid was a little weak, but the badass transformation of Count Dracula to a Vampire (multiple times, too!) made up for it.
The Director's Cut of the movie The Abyss was on TV tonight; I hadn't seen it in quite a while. Most people aren't aware that there is a 10-15 minute sequence at the end that was chopped from the version that was released. It was all about war and violence in the human race (a sort of commentary on today's society), and how the water people almost killed everyone on the planet with enormous tidal waves. With this sequence, much more of the movie makes sense.
I'd advise renting it to those who haven't seen it -- I'll give it a rating of 10 minutes.
We finally finished all of our thank-you notes from the wedding today. Woo hoo! We had gin and tonics in the excellent ND drink glasses that Brian/Arun gave us.
And speaking of alcohol... I think Arun's proclamation of not drinking until Momar's 40th anniversary is a sham!! He admitted in his journal that he had Kalua pancakes, and later had One Enormous SuperPankake with some kind of flavored liqueur in it.
Hence, I think Arun's thin guise of "not drinking" has fallen away
-- we now see him for the closet alcoholic that he is. Was it really "Sprite" that he was drinking all Sophomore year (by the gallon, I might add)? Does he really like "water" and "Dr. Pepper" that much? I think not, gentle readers. Yes, it's true
-- Arun was even kicked out of the 1996 Olympics (Bulgarian all around gymnastics team), for his excessive indulgence in what he called "pixie sticks", and "Mr. Pibb". Said Mr. Rodrigues at the time, "I just love pixie sticks and Mr. Pibb. Don't knock it until you've tried it! Now don't bother me -- I've got to go practice my Triple Lindie."
(...catch the rest of this exclusive story in a special expose section in this week's National Enquirer)
My fricken' router has frozen 5 times tonight. Destroyed a good uptime, too. It seems that one of the NICs is getting overloaded (I'm trying to ftp/scp/whatever 4.5GB from my router to my desktop, which hangs the machine after a while). Sucks!! I don't quite know what to do about this yet -- I need to get that data over to my desktop so that I can burn a CD of it. Arf!
In other linux woes, during one of my router crashes this evening, it caused the xmms on my desktop machine to freeze. So I did a "ps" to kill it. I found no less than 662 copies of xmms running. No joke.
My desktop has an uptime of over 37 days, and I've been logged in to a single KDE session for probably over half of that time. I guess there's some kind of leak in xmms that's causing that to happen. Weirdness. For example, I see that there are already 11 copies on my desktop now.
Some testing shows that a new one appears every time a new song starts. I'll bet that they are terminated-but-not-reaped threads (remember: linux emulates threads with duplicated processes). <sigh> Open source software can suck sometimes. :-(
Did some LAM work today. Turns out that I was a bit sloppy and checked some crap back into CVS that didn't work. Oops. :-( Caused Arun a bit of pain, too. Double oops. :-(
But it's fixed now -- it compiles (and seems to work) with and without IMPI support. I also added some stuff for XMPI to drop communicator name traces during MPI_Init for MPI_COMM_WORLD, MPI_COMM_SELF, and MPI_COMM_PARENT (if it exists). I added man pages for MPI_*_set_name and MPI_*_get_name, too, just for good measure. I've got to finish the IMPI extensions to MPI_Reduce tomorrow.
Found a new "hauntingly beautiful" song today. It's not quite "Slut", but it might be close. It's Tori Amos' "Carnival", from the MI-2 soundtrack. I've put it on repeat, but my router (which streams my MP3s to me) has been rebooting, so I haven't heard it continuously enough yet. I'll keep you posted.