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Though for different reasons from my absence here at HTF, I've been away from the world of two-wheeled adventure for some time. However, I have been drawn back to it due to the simple reason found in an old MC adage: Once a motorcyclist, always a motorcyclist. When I first moved to California...

For a few years I have been out of the loop, so to speak, on matters of home theater (among them, lack of a home in which to put said theater). Things are changing, however, and I just have a question or two about current display technology. I am eschewing anything exotic, such as OLED...

The Beatles made history. John, Paul, George, and Ringo have sold more records than any other artist -- by a margin (estimates run toward 800 million albums and 1.6 billion singles). They altered the popular-music landscape, bringing rock almost to the level of "serious music." And the band...

Much has happened since my last post. And I am under some time pressure at the moment. But I want to say hello. I am also going to read that thread about Parker Clack. How is everyone, though? I trust many of the people I have known here are still with us. My favorite films remain David Lynch's...

Though the past two years have been (by my standards, at least) tumultuous, one respite has been the Los Angeles Public Library. Thanks to said institution, I have been able to renew my readings of the long- and ever-popular master of mayhem, Stephen King. I read the author closely back in the...

Remember me, folks? I used to be an administrator at this site. Back then, floating high and mighty in Los Angeles. Well, I am still in Los Angeles. But due to this awful (more than awful) economy and due to my having been laid off from my job in October 2012, things have fallen apart. Just to...

Most of you have no idea who this man was. But for those of us who were kicking along in the 1960s, Augustus Owsley Stanley III enjoyed nearly demigod status. And his legacy is with us to this day. Not only that, but the major newspapers are running their obits today (the New York Times, the...

The good people at Travel and Leisure magazine poll their readers about several aspects of cities and regions worth visiting. But in the latest issue, according to many reports on the Web, I live in what most of its readers consider the rudest city in the United States: Los Angeles. That's...

First, from this morning's Los Angeles Times, a columnist writes a straight-up appreciation of the new grassroots-style Roller Derby leagues forming all over the nation: http://www.latimes.com/sports/la-sp-erskine-20101118,0,1711789.column Of course, the column is specifically about the...

Not that this post will garner many responses at the unusually quiet Home Theater Forum, but those of us who love our PBS and who live in Los Angeles heard last Friday that KCET Channel 28 has decided to leave the fold, arguing it cannot meet PBS's requirement of $7 million to air the network's...

Though I was initially not that impressed by the films, a number of rescreenings have provoked something of a change in my view of them. Now, with some confidence, I can say that I genuinely love one of them and I really, really like the other. Steven Soderbergh's Solaris, despite its...

As usual, Home Theater Forum is very well-run and well-moderated. That has not changed. However, the look of the place is a bit bewildering but something one can get used to. To those in charge, however: You might want to return to HTF's old logo. I am speaking as someone who looks at page...

Those of you who have long been members here remember me. But the newbies among you will not quite comprehend how unsettling this is for me to say. Say it I will, however: After I don't know how many screenings of it, I have come to realize that David Lynch's 2001 masterpiece (ah, how...

We are all familiar with the unsettling demise of some and downsizing of many newspapers in this country. A great industry appears to many to be in its death throes. And, of course, I am an editor at one, Los Angeles' daily for the legal community. The Los Angeles Times, however, has always...

My beloved Attila was a Colorpoint Shorthair -- Seal Point -- with a shiny, shimmering coat and penetrating, liquid-blue eyes that seemed to stare into a person. Like all cats of the Siamese ilk, his personality was pronounced, his "meows" quite noticeable -- a cat's kind of feline. Attila...

Nothing earth-shattering here, but kind of interesting: Two Saturdays ago, I was looking inside one of my cabinets that contain DVDs (they have for a long time exceeded all my shelf space). The cabinet is at the level of the floor. And I was just trying to figure if I wanted to screen one of...

This is the first time I have ever mentioned an oddity I have noticed for many years. In my (now unaffordable) neighborhood, on every street, there are city signs that state the following: No Turns from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. Again, as I said, these signs are on every street. But what do...

At best, my participation here has been very limited for the past couple of months (for somewhat serious reasons I cannot go into here). But today, I've had some time to look at some of the threads on this board. So many of the members are unknown to me, and now that we are allowing Internet...

I just finished looking at the DVDs of the two most recent seasons of Penn & Teller's Bullshit and, man, I gotta tell you: These seasons are considerably lesser than the first two. In fact, the third season is nearly unwatchable. And I think I know why. To wit: In the first two seasons...

I've been on this board for years. And I have a high post-count (I think I'm still at No. 3). My posting routine used to be filed under "V" for "voluminous." These days, I come here and do my basic staff gig. Then I read some threads for amusement. But I just do not post that often any...

Until the World Wide Web arrived I thought most people spelled most of the words they knew correctly. Not so, apparently. One misspelling that I have seen on Internet message boards (starting with this one) is actually not a misspelling but an attempt at a conjoined word: "Alot" -- as in "a...

For the past few weeks I have been noticing an awful lot of Toyota Priuses here in Los Angeles. In fact, the numbers are phenomenal. Which, to divert myself on the way to and from work, I've started counting the numbers of these marvelous cars I see on each day -- either on the road or parked...

Many of our younger members will never know what it was like. Back in the days before commercials started to dominate the programming, one could enjoy well-thought-out teleplays that had meat on their bones. It all came back to me just recently. To wit: It had been in 2003 since I last...

Here's the deal: My vintage, G3-based iMac, which had served me well for lo' these many years, is broken. It happened a few months ago, but only now am I getting ready to fix the thing. Thing is, I don't want to have to pay too much for it. What happened was that I had been surfing the...

For those of you who might not notice all the information available at this site, Home Theater Forum will be down this weekend as our co-master and co-commander, Parker Clack, does an extensive software upgrade. We'll make it through this down period. I know we will.

About two months ago, I was on a strange Website that seemed to be "refusing" to let me log off of it. The site kept spamming me with its splash page plus other pages. This would all settle down, but restart when I tried logging off. As a result, when the pages again "settled" I simply tried...

We all love a good widescreen set -- the bigger the better, eh? Well, your electric bill should also be big. To wit, check out this story from the Christian Science Monitor: Bigscreen TVs Guzzle Electricity the Way SUVs Guzzle Gas

Just curious. I had heard about this series here at HTF, and then purchased the first season on DVD -- and was very, very impressed (I no longer have cable). So, I'm getting ready to pony up for Season Two, which has just been released. Anybody else going for it?

I can't believe that the USAF even spent $25,000 on this: Transporters not practical.

First off, it's posted atop every section in HTF: Look at what _Forbes_ says about HTF! Looks like the big financial magazine is making us still more "famous"! But hats off to everyone who has participated in the finest online discussions about home theater and related subjects here at...