UNDERDOG of PERFECTION

Even though I’ve never dropped acid, looking back on the children’s television I absorbed like a sponge in the late ’70s, I think I got enough of the experience. Case in point:

I’m lazily linking over to this on YouTube, but I actually watched it again for the first time in 30 years earlier today on the Sesame Street Old School 1974-1979 DVD set I just bought at Target. Which is not — at all — to say that I hadn’t thought of it countless times in those intervening 30 years. The “plastic house” and the freaky yo-yo dude in particular are burned eternally into my memory.

Now, I know a lot of people my age are going to have a nostalgic recollection of clips like this, but I wonder how many are as deeply imprinted with these iconic images as myself. Back in 1978, when this clip actually aired, I was at my absolute peak of Sesame Street viewing and on most days I spent at least 3 1/2 hours watching the show. (We got two PBS stations; one aired it at 8:00, 11:30 and 4:30, and the other at noon and 3:00.) I saw many of these segments more times than I can count. And speaking of counting, fortunately, I didn’t need, at that age, to learn to do so in Russian:

The first time I watched this I was so in awe of the ambitious yet failed effort to squeeze the copious syllables of the Russian numbers into the fast rhythm of the song, I didn’t even pay attention to the fact that the entire “12” segment consists of U.S. landmarks (Statue of Liberty, Washington Monument, Mount Rushmore, etc.). I wonder when exactly this clip aired on Russian television, and whether anyone involved in putting it on the air realized what it was depicting wasn’t just drugged out hallucinations. (Well, it was, but not just.)

Yes, the manualist from my previous post also played the Super Mario Bros. theme, but I think this is even better: the SMB theme is here being performed by a pair of Tesla coils!

Of course, a quick search on YouTube reveals a ton of creative arrangements of this timeless piece of music. I have to give credit to even some of the less-than-stellar performances, like the one on a ruler. But for sheer audacity, the award has to go to this kid who played it on a church pipe organ… at a service!

Apparently this “art” is referred to as manualism. I always just called it “hand farts”… but then again, I’ve never gotten it as musical as this guy.

Of course, I never used a wah-wah pedal with it, either!

Much has now been written, a smidgen of it by me, regarding the various design faux pas committed by Apple with Leopard, but here’s another new inexplicable one I just noticed:

What’s wrong you ask? Well, if you think about it, this just plain makes no sense. I’m not complaining about the weird blur effect on translucent elements in this new version (although that bugs me too). It’s this bizarre drop shadow on the little slide-down alert dialog box. Why is there a drop shadow here? Presumably it’s to make us realize this dialog is attached to the window (as they’ve been ever since Mac OS X debuted, albeit without a gratuitous shadow). But the effect is to make it look like the title bar is casting the shadow. Yet, the title bar does not cast a shadow on the rest of the window itself. So it therefore appears that the dialog is recessed below the window itself. And yet, the dialog casts a shadow on the window as well. It’s M.C. Escher’s worst nightmare. As others have already said about other UI elements in Leopard: Why, Apple? Why?

On the other hand… I have to admit, I’m actually starting to like the translucent menu bar. The horror!!!

Yes, I drank Steve Jobs’ Kool-Aid a long time ago. I lined up at 4:30 on Friday outside an Apple Store to wait for 90 minutes for my copy of Mac OS X Leopard. I had read lots about it before it was released, so I knew what was coming. And yet, as much as I like most of the new features (especially the new Finder), and can put up with the things I like less (such as the cluttered-looking new Dock), I simply cannot stand the translucent menu bar.

Since I installed it yesterday, 90% of my computer time has been spent online trying to find out what I can do — whatever it takes — to just get back to a normal-looking, opaque menu bar. Why, oh why, Steve Jobs, can you not cede one tiny millimeter of interface control to the user? (OK, maybe I’m just bitter because I’ve spent the last week in the nirvana of user customization that is Ubuntu Linux.)

Judging by a Google search, it looks like I’m not alone in my frustration. But so far the only fixes I’ve seen are a hack app that only worked with the beta, and the somewhat obvious but equally lame option of incorporating a proper menu background as a band at the top of all of your desktop pictures.

Unfortunately, it looks like I won’t even be able to take the “somewhat obvious but equally lame” route, as it appears that Photoshop 7 (yes, it’s pitifully out-of-date, but it’s the version I own) doesn’t work in Leopard. D’oh!

Some more searching revealed a plausible, inexpensive alternative called Pixelmator. Of course, I am always dubious when someone posting on a forum or a blog comment says “this $59 shareware program can do everything Photoshop can do.” Um, yeah. Right. For less than 1/10 the price it was worth at least investigating though, so I downloaded the demo. It’s definitely a nice program, but it looks like the one thing I need most in Photoshop for the work I do, its layer effects, are completely missing from Pixelmator.

Update: Finally an elegant (if still fundamentally hackish) solution has presented itself, in the form of a little app called Opaque Menu Bar!