The Last Laurel & Hardy movie

After translating five really bad Laurel & Hardy movies form 1940s, I watched their last movie ever, Utopia (from 1951). I had rather uneasy feeling watching these frail old men being beaten over their heads. Especially Laurel (61 years old, very sick) looks more like a zombie than living human. Also, this film features young Danny Trejo!

It's a dog's life

By an unfortunate coincidence, both Albert and Chucky hurt their legs (independently of each other) and both now have to wear special plastic collars to prevent licking their wounded paws. Not to mention that they need Iodine and vitamins daily. Poor things. Click on Albert to see the whole photoset...

"We Ask You Really Very Serious to Keep Cool Forward of the Club Mecca"

This is how you recognize that you are in world-class international nightclub (click for large version):

The Face of Death

I had a misfortune of seeing really bad Laurel & Hardy movie from the 1940s, called "The Big Noise". What intrigued me was the small kid which appeared in the movie as "standard cute kid" but I had such a weird feeling when I saw his face - as if it said "I kill small animals and someday I'll kill you all". Just for the fun of it, I looked at IMDB what became of him - and bingo!



It was Bobby Blake who later became "Robert Blake", became semi-famous in TV series "Baretta" in the 70s and became really famous a few years ago when he planned the murder of his wife together with his bodyguard!

The intricacies of single life

OK, let's not beat about the bush any longer. Let me show you the photo of our "family" a few weeks ago:



And today:



Yes, the second picture is "boys only"! You win the grand prize.

The fact is, Karolina is no longer living with us. It doesn't mean anything bad happened to her. It doesn't mean she won't live here in the future and it doesn't mean we hate each other now. But she is not living here currently and won't in the foreseeable future. I'd rather not go into the details of this, thank you very much. It looks like some sort of epidemic outbreak because many couples I've known for very long time are breaking up right now.

What this means is that I now have to put up with various things I could safely ignore before. Like, for example, feeding the boys in the morning and watering flowers. I have detailed lists and Google Calendar alerts to organize everything but there are still occassions when I discover new interesting things:

• After one week of watering flowers, I found out one of them is plastic.
• I found a body of small turtle with head chewed off. Did we have a living turtle in the fish tank? Was it just for a decoration? How dangerous is it for a small animal to eat turtle's head? What if the head was full of formaldehyde?
• I was recently told that all those flower watering rules actually don't work under the current weather conditions and I have to use other rules, which are unfortunately too hard to explain logically.
• The dog, however cute, does not like his teeth being cleaned with toothbrush (even the special dog one).
• The dog can go up to 12 hours without peeing! Nice dog.
  
• Chucky simply does not like his breakfast unless I hand-feed him. Otherwise, he just sits around like idiot and waits until Albert eats his food.
• Kryspin became really evil cat, waiting for three of us to go to sleep and then always pouncing on us fiercely and unexpectedly. This leads to stress (mostly with Chucky).
• Karolina snored. Now, Albert is snoring very loudly. Cannot sleep again.
  
• It's highly impractical to organize grill parties on our huge balcony for just one person and three animals.
  

My need for a special Linux feedreader alerts

Let me tell you about what I need:

I am subscribed to many different newsfeeds using my reader.google.com account. That means I get approximately one fresh newsitem each 1 or 2 minutes! That's the reason why I need to have some Linux feed reader / notifier which could display sort of popup windows or ticker areas with the latest headlines from my Google Reader feed.

I tried something called "Liferea" but it didn't even accept the feed from Google Reader as a valid feed (maybe because it's Atom, not RSS?).

Note that the "notifier" part is more important than "feed reader" part. If there is good Linux notifier program available (which fully supports UTF8), I can easily create my own script which checks my feed regularly and tells the notifier what to display. However, I didn't find the right standalone popup/ticker notifier software yet. Any help?

Crazy Frog (Not Annoying)

A few minutes ago, next to our house...