Our RV Adventures

With last night’s forecasted 40°, I said that we’re normally 3-5° lower out here in the countryside, so I was looking for 35° or so.

Well, it went down to 29° last night here at the park, but then was up to 79° today, sunny and breezy. But tomorrow is looking for 56/31 and rainy.

But then there’s this on Friday night.

Notice the little snowflakes falling from the cloud. And since they’re showing 29° here in Sunriver, I figure low 20’s based on past performance.

After a slow morning, we headed out about 12:15 up to Bend to see “Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol 2.” We had decided to see it in IMAX 3D, but were shocked by the Sticker Shock. Senior tickets were $32.50 for the two of us!

WOW!

And I won’t even mention $14 for a medium popcorn and medium drink.

One thing that was different this time was that we had to pick our seats at the box office. They had a monitor facing us with open seats in blue and taken ones in black. Then your seat numbers are printed on your tickets. But it really wasn’t needed on a Wednesday afternoon since there wasn’t more than a dozen people in the theater.

But we both really enjoyed the movie. The story was great, with a lot of action, pretty much non-stop. It answered a lot of questions about Star Lord’s background, and also why he was kidnapped from Earth as a child. And of course, any movie with both Sylvester Stallone and Kurt Russell in it has to be great.

There a couple of glitches in the showing early on. In the first 5 minutes of the movie, it kept popping in and out of 3D, but finally settled down. But the other thing was kind of curious. As the trailers played before the movie started, every other one had no video, just audio. But what was curious was how they were being shown, at least to me.

BTW they’re still called ‘trailers’, even though we see them as previews, because years ago they were originally shown at the end of the film, not the beginning. Kind of like people still talk about ‘filming’ or ‘taping’ something, when everything is pretty much all digital these days.

Back in the good old days at a TV station, besides the video tape recorders (VTR’s), you had 16mm film projectors and 35mm slide projections, sometimes more than one of each, all pointing into a film chain box and outputting into a TV camera.

Inside this box is a set of mirrors that allow the director to switch between slides and film, usually for commercial breaks. Although back in the early 70’s, we would show afternoon TV shows like Green Acres, F Troop, Petticoat Junction, and others, all on 16mm film.

OK, probably (certainly?) more than you wanted to know.

Now as far as I knew, most films at most theaters these days are on digital video, not actual film. So that’s why I was surprised to see the mirror flopping back and forth between each preview (You can see it too if you know what to look for) And the reason every other preview was black, with just audio, was that the bulb in that projector was bad.

But that shouldn’t have happened either, since even back in the 70’s the film and slide projectors all had backup bulbs that switched over automatically when the first one burned out. The only time you would have a dead bulb on-air is if the main bulb died, the unit switched to a good one, someone didn’t replace the dead bulb, and then the new one died.

And as far as on-air mistakes, it’s a little after midnight right now, and I was watching a Law & Order from 2007. First off, although it was scheduled to start right at midnight, it actually started early at 11:55pm. Then about 12:05am it suddenly switched over to about 5 minutes of Conan, before finally switching back to Law & Order.

Even stranger, Conan is shown on TBS, and not on TNT. So I figure someone at DirecTV hit the wrong switch. So it looks like they used the 5 minutes of Conan to make up for the early start, so the program would end at the correct time. Of course that’s not as bad as years ago when a broadcast engineer hit the wrong switch.

Back then local cable companies showed old movies on one of their channels. Late one night while the engineer was showing the movie, he was watching a porno on the other projector. Coming back from a commercial break, he mistakenly punched up the porno rather than the movie, putting it out on the air. And it was about 30 minutes before he realized his mistake.

The story goes, that the next day no one called in to complain, but six viewers did want to know when it was going to be shown again.

Leaving the theater and walking across the parking lot, we had dinner once again at Red Robin. Jan did a repeat, with a cup of clam chowder and a Mushroom Cheddar Burger, just like our last visit.

And unlike the Clam Chowder she recently had at The Sparrow Bakery, where she was pretty sure she got the Creamy Chicken instead, this cup had actual clams in it.

I tried something different this time, although I did start out with a cup of chili just like before.

But rather than my usual Burnin’ Love burger, I got the Smoke and Pepper Burger, with a half pound of Angus Beef, Black Pepper Smoked Bacon, Extra Sharp Cheddar, and thin sliced dills, with made-in-house Smoke & Pepper Ketchup, all on a toasted ciabatta bun.

Good, but not near as flavorful as the Burnin’ Love, so I guess I’ll go back to it next time.

Tomorrow, maybe another movie. We’ll see.

Thought for the Day:

“The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.” ― Terry Pratchett

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