Castle: a bland end to a bland season

“Castle, I think we bored them”

Last night was the season finale for season five of ABC’s Castle. To show you how engrossing I’ve found the season so far, I had no idea this was the finale. And, at the end when the announcer gave the “see you next year” sign off, I found myself not caring.

That doesn’t mean I dislike the show — quite the contrary– but this season was a substantial letdown compared to prior seasons, to the point that it felt like the series was running on fumes. I’ll watch next year, but they need to do some work to make the show interesting again.

More below the fold, to guard against spoilers.

Shockingly, this is not the start of a Call of Cthulhu scenario

“Where’d those kids go??”

I hope:

A 63-year-old South Korean woman was shocked to learn she became pregnant with 12 baby squid after eating a portion of calamari. The story — definitely giving new meaning to the term Octomom — was detailed in a scientific paper authored by researchers at the Kwandong University College of Medicine.

Here’s what happened: The unnamed woman, who we will refer to here as New Octomom, said she was eating a portion of whole squid when she felt an extremely sharp pain in her mouth. She told doctors she could feel something in her mouth, which she described as bug-like organisms.

She did not swallow the portion, but spat it out immediately, the researchers wrote. She complained of a pricking and foreign-body sensation in the oral cavity.

After the woman was hospitalized, doctors discovered baby cephalopods — tiny pods covered in a cementlike material to make them stick — attached to the inside of her mouth. The pods, which covered her gums, tongue and cheek, were filled with an ejaculatory apparatus and sperm, with the apparatus discharging the sperm very forcefully.

Twelve small, white spindle-shaped, bug-like organisms stuck in the mucous membrane of the tongue, cheek, and gingiva were completely removed, along with the affected mucosa, the researchers said. On the basis of their morphology and the presence of the sperm bag, the foreign bodies were identified as squid spermatophores.

Spermatophores, according to Science 2.0, are packages that carry semen and other tools that attach themselves to the female squid’s body. Spermatophores are adhesive in some species of squid, which allows them to easily glue onto the surface of the female’s skin.

So, you see, the real danger isn’t Cthulhu eating you or driving you insane; the real danger is that he’ll make you bear his children.

Read the rest, but be prepared to be utterly grossed out.

Do I have to get a restraining order against Amazon Cloud Drive?

Really, it won’t leave me alone.

Background: A few days ago, Amazon “upgraded” it’s Cloud Drive software, changes that very much annoyed me. A helpful individual (not an Amazon employee) on the Help Board pointed me to a way to make Cloud Drive at least stop doing the Annoying Thing. Once that problem was safely solved, I uninstalled Cloud Drive through the Win 7 control panel, planning to only access it via the web interface. Problem solved, hero gets the girl, movie ends, right?

It’s baaaaack.

Tonight, when I logged in to Windows, a message appeared asking me to log into my Cloud Drive account, and there was the Cloud Drive icon in my System Tray, just as if nothing had happened…

It. Won’t. Die.

Really. There’s no trace of it in control panel, nor can I find it installed anywhere in the program directories, but it does appear under “Favorites” in the File|Open dialog.

I never knew Amazon was in the undead virus creation business.

Anyway, I’ve posted another question to the help forum. We’ll see what comes up.

And, Amazon? I’m annoyed. Very, very annoyed.

In which Amazon makes me want to get off their Cloud (Drive)

“WTF??”

A bit of background: For a while I was using Google Drive (formerly Google Docs) for my offsite backup, but I decided I didn’t like having all my eggs (email, offline storage, online doc creation, photos) with one company, particularly one that has a tendency to regularly annoy me, such as…. Google.

So, when Amazon offered 5 free GBs of storage to go with my Prime account, I decided to buy 20 GB and make that my offsite backup, diversity of vendors having its attractions. All was fine until last night when I logged in after getting home and saw a message from Amazon that an upgrade was available and asking for permission to install it.

“What could go wrong,” I should have thought.

Apparently they’ve “improved” the software. Now it copies the folder structure of your Amazon Cloud Drive to your  hard drive, and then it downloads copies of all the files you’ve uploaded to that new, local “Cloud Drive.” (Yes, that’s what the top level of the new directory structure is called.) Now, if I want to upload files to the Amazon Cloud Drive, I can copy them to the corresponding folder on the local “cloud drive” and they will be synched to the server. And if I upload directly to my Amazon Cloud Drive, they’ll be synched to my local “cloud drive.”

If the downloading of all files to my hard drive struck you as odd, you’re not alone. I tested my suspicions by copying a photo I’d never uploaded to the local Cloud Drive’s “photos” folder; it was synched to the server no problem. Then I deleted the copy from the local Cloud Drive and…

It was instantly deleted from the server, too.

I tested this several times, including uploading directly to the server and letting it synch to the local Cloud Drive, and the result was always the same: If I want to keep a copy of a file on the server-side Amazon Cloud Drive, I have to keep it in the local hard drive version, too. On top of this, the original file(s) is in its original location, too, so now I have three copies!

As you can imagine, this left me thinking “Amazon, what were you thinking?”

Space itself isn’t the issue for me: I have a 1.5 TB drive that’s barely 25% full and I’ve used only 5GB of my Cloud Drive allocation, so the downloaded copies barely register.

But the whole nonsensical design annoys the heck out of me. Dropbox, a popular file-sharing/storage service, also creates a local “Dropbox” directory that then synchs to their servers. But it’s basically a fancy “copy” command — it doesn’t create a new file that must stay on your hard drive, if you want to keep the server-side copy available.

But, with this latest iteration from Amazon, they’ve wrecked any utility this has for me as an offsite backup; why would I want to backup anything to their “Cloud,” when it forces me to keep more and more duplicates on the local hard drive? I’m better off saving the money and relying on my external hard drive. (I like the dual redundancy of local and offsite backups, though.)

I wrote Amazon about this, thinking it’s a bug they’re fixing, but, no. In their reply, the customer service droid told me:

I’m so sorry to hear about the disappointment the new cloud drive application update has caused to you. When a file or folder is deleted from the Cloud Drive folder on your computer, it will also be removed from Cloud Drive.

That is more than lame. That is just stupid. Bad, bad design.

A user on Amazon’s “general help” board suggested a work-around that I’ll try tonight. But, unless Amazon fixes this, I’m looking for another offsite storage service.

PS: Amazon provides great services, but you have to wonder about their software design choices. Not just in this Cloud Drive problem I’ve described, but in the Kindle Fire, too. I love my Fire, as I’ve mentioned, but the failure to implement “collections” is just inexplicable. Or, if it is, Amazon isn’t telling anyone what the explanation is.

PPS: I forgot to mention — Soon after the installation of the new, improved Cloud Drive software, I discovered my Kindle for PC software (another Amazon product) was gone. Vanished. Utterly deleted. Now, I can’t swear the Cloud Drive installation caused the KfPC deletion, since I hadn’t used it for a few days, but the coincidence (and what I’ve heard of other glitches with Amazon software) is pretty suggestive.

For the sake of Les Boobs, ban Les Bras!

“Don’t worry. It’s for research purposes.”

SCIENCE!!

Women have long been told that a good bra can help support the chest, relieve back pain and prevent sagging.  However, a new 15-year French study reveals the opposite: bras do little to reduce back pain and, over time, they can actually make breasts sag even more.

Researcher Prof. Jean-Denis Rouillon, a sports science expert from the University of Besançon in eastern France claims that “bras are a false necessity,” according to The Local.

“Medically, physiologically, anatomically – breasts gain no benefit from being denied gravity,” said Rouillon. “On the contrary, they get saggier with a bra.”

Rouillon and his team spent years measuring the changes in the breasts of 330 women using a simple slide rule and caliper at the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire (University Hospital) in Besançon, where he carried out his research.

He found that no evidence that bras helped ease back pain. Instead, he found that the chest supports could even add to the problem.

The guy worked on this for 15 years!  Such dedication. (And where do I get a job like that?)

Arachnophobes be warned: a tarantula the size of your face

You know, it’s only a short step from a face-sized tarantula to a face-hugger from Alien:

Ew.

Cthulhu’s tiny minions found!

 

“Where’d those kids go??”

 

Two new species of microorganisms that bear an uncanny resemblance to The Big C:

UBC researchers have discovered two new symbionts living in the gut of termites, and taken the unusual step of naming them after fictional monsters created by American horror author HP Lovecraft.

The single-cell protists, Cthulhu macrofasciculumque and Cthylla microfasciculumque, help termites digest wood. The researchers decided to name them after monstrous cosmic entities featured in Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos as an ode to the sometimes strange and fascinating world of the microbe.

“When we first saw them under the microscope they had this unique motion, it looked almost like an octopus swimming,” says UBC researcher Erick James, lead author of the paper describing the new protists, published in the online journal PLoS ONE.

Sadly, the UBC researchers didn’t realize  these were “children” that went missing from a Deep One city far beneath the waves off the coast of British Columbia. Nor will anyone ever truly understand what happened that night when the UBC labs were destroyed and the samples went missing…

Definitely a Delta Green plot.