Testing dollhouse circuits and bulbs

[micky]

I hadn't read that here. Good idea. I guess I coudl do that, but since I only do my house, I go up around 5 in the morning, after the roof fan ran until about 10PM .

[micky]

I go through periods when I am a night owl, but when that stopped I just recorded those two and Patty Duike. Patty Duke's show is really great in a lot of ways. It's the most "sophisticated' sitcom I ever saw, in that they talk about all kinds of topics international travel, how to form corporations, how to get suppliers, vendors, advertising, about politics (One episode where her father's boss runs for office, he makes the same speeches politicians make today, word for word). They use words even I barely know or don't know. They had an episode where Patty wants a fancy French dinner for her friends, and her mother gives her some choices. Patty can pronounce the French well, but she doesn't know what they mean. One was chicken broth, which she said sounded a lot better in French.

I taped all three but didnt' have time to play back everything I tape (record) so when I went away for a week, I cut out Sea Hunt and Patty Duike, all the episodes I had seen already, and kept Highway Patrol.

So far, even when it starts boringly and I know I've seen it, it still gets very interesting within 10 minutes. A big advantage of half-hour shows is they are all plot, no sitting around thinking about what to do next.

I read that once, (here? from you?) and wikip says something similar, but I don't see it. His body language seems reasonable, especially for a man his weight, and he doiesn't run fast, but he does climb hills and move around a lot when the plot calls for it. The last couple days he's had a dark mark on his lower lip, towards the side. But the show stopped filming in 1959 and he didn't die until

1986, so maybe it was only a cold sore scab or something.

A lot of interesting things about the show. They rarely rush, and not because he's too fat, because often they haven't left the station yet. And they almost never use the radio when the police car is moving. Instead, even though it's usually an emergency, they call in before they get into the car. Even when they see a guy turn around at a road block and in 30 seconds he can be out of sight or turn down a side road, the cop stands there and calls in.

Or someone's shot, and his wife doesn't ask the operator for an ambulance, she asks for the highway patrol. I was alive then and at least in Pennsylvainia, one asked the operator for the police, an ambulance, or the fire department. A lot quicker.

OTOH, it was what people would, sillily, call modern, in a lot of ways. Sometimes the women criminals were the dominated female who did whatever their boyfriend or husband told them, but other times they were the more crimiinal one, who dragged the guy into crime, and even the brains. More than half of the criminals wore suits and ties,. They had people who were extorted into crimes. They had an episode with a mute girl, who had been kidnapped and released, where they showed how smart she was when matthews asked the right questions, and she wrote down enough info to catch the bad guys.

Of course no one on the show was black. Not in Sea Hunt either iirc.

A great movie he stars in was Born Yesterday, with Judy Holliday. She's great too.

Patty Duike had token blacks, someone dancing at the school dance or sitting in a class or at the malt shop, but I dont' think they spoke more than three words total.

BTW, the aparatment building they used to show was actually in Brooklyn Heights, right at the south end of the Brooklyn Promenade, a broad sidewwalk facing the river above the Brookly Queens Xway which was built into the side of the hill, northbound lanes on the bottom I think, southbound above them, Promenade on top. They have an episode or two where they walk on the Promenade and look at Manhattan. It's an apartment building, even though they acted like they lived in a house. My friend lived a couple doors away, 20 years later. In later episodes, they lived in a big house with a big yard. No one in Brooklyn Heights has even a small yard in front. Nor does Brooklyn Heights High School exist. There is no neighborhood school in Brooklyn Heights, even elementarry I think, and for high school they'd have to walk a couple miles to Brooklyn Tech, one of the 4** NYC HS's that require passing a test to get in, but maybe not such a high score if it's the only high school near your home.

**Brrooklyn Tech, Bronx High School of Science, Stuyvesant High School (in Manhattan) and the High School of Performing Arts, portrayed in the move and tv show Fame. That one requires an audition, not an academic test.

Over and out.

[The Daring Dufas]

Dollhouse was a little more cerebral than Buffy. I watched it more for the way it made me laugh at their treatment of technology. I get a kick out of SciFi shows where the space cowboys are running through the engine room of the Draconian Dreadnaught starship which is full of pipes and electrical panels that look suspiciously like the chiller plant at the university hospital complex. At least the set dressers cover up the part of the machines that reads "Carrier" or "Trane". o_O

P.S., I love old Japanese monster movies, I'm usually laughing so hard I can't breathe. ROOK! GODZIRA! ^_^

TDD

[Jennifer Murphy]

Thanks for that lead. I have one on order.

[Jennifer Murphy]

I want to thank everyone who offered helpful suggestions and advice. I got started too late to get the dollhouse lights working so I just finished fixing up the house itself. It was a big hit on Christmas morning. When I get some time, I'll finish the lights. My plan is to replace the transformer with a battery pack and use LED lights. I'll probably have to replace the four toggle switches.

[Robert Green]

I've noticed a lot of TV is dumbed down in a peculiar way. The tell the joke, leave enough time for those who get it to laugh, and then explain the joke further on in the script. I believe pretty strongly that the major TV networks of the 50's and 60's, and to a lesser extent later years, really "synchronized" the cultural patterns of Americans. What we see now is outlets that cater to laser-narrow special interests. Network TV, for many people, defined what is was to be American. People would discuss the shows the next day at work as if they were discussing a large, common extended family. Remember how obsessed the nation was with "Who shot JR?" TV barely has enough clout now to pull off anything similar.

Yep, it was probably me. I slander the living and the dead, but mostly the dead because they don't sue with the same vigor as the living. I believe you'll see it in the episodes towards the end of the series. From what I read, it was boredom and I remember it because the writer used the word "ennui" which I did not know at the time. I couldn't quite figure out what the author meant when he said "He drank from the ennui." Was it a bottle? A disease? At first I thought it meant "he drank from the toilet" but I've only heard that happening when people take ketamine (animal tranks) or smoke Jimson weed (one of the guys who lived in my dorm name Mouse who also took 7 tabs of LSD to prove he was braver than anyone). If you ever seen a human drink out of toilet, you'll never forget it. Voted mostly likely to be dead before graduation.

Are you sure you're not looking at his stunt double? (-:

Maybe some ham reading this will tell us why. Could be that the radios didn't work so well on the move or that a moving car complicated the filming and sound recording. I remember an interview with the director of the enormously entertaining film "Gun Crazy" (written by blacklisted commie Dalton Trumbo):

who talked about how difficult it was to film scenes in a moving car back then if only because of the size of movie making equipment at the time. He talked about how "button" mikes were brand new and so enabled him to place them throught the car to capture each actors' voice accurately.

These were all filmed in California, which at some point in time has stood in for every place on earth and quite a few places not of this earth. I'm stumped on this, but I haven't watched Highway Patrol in years. There are plenty of shows I'd love to see again from the 50's. What's mostly left is Perry Mason and I Love Lucy. A staggering number of old shows were recorded on tape that was erased when the shows left the air. A lot of TV history was simply demagnetized out of existence.

HP was made toward the end of Hollywood's film noir period and when there was no film work for them, a lot of directors and craftsmen ended up doing TV series, which many felt was beneath them. But they had to eat.

That's one reason why it's sad to have lost so much of even "junk" TV from the 50's. It captured so much of the essence of that society. No book, to my mind, can ever express the same sentiment as a scene from Leave it to Beaver, showing what houses looked like, what people wore, how they talked, etc. I get TCM now, and get a real hoot out of seeing movies from the 30's with wind-up telephones, furniture cabinet radios, cars without any safety features whatsoever(!), men all wearing hats. The people all have the same sorts of problems we have now, though. They just had to be circumspect in showing things like violence. In the original "Scarface" when someone is killed, they show a bowling bowl making a strike, the pins go flying and you see an X being marked on a scoresheet. Now you get to see slow motion images of pieces of brain matter spattering on the lens.

Gangster and his moll? Seen it a long, long time ago. Just watched "White Heat" again and noticed that they made their radio calls stopped, too. They had radio transponders they used to track the gangsters that were the size of vacuum cleaners!

You see some of that going with Hispanics, Koreans and Chinese nowadays. I guess if I were black I'd be happy that other minorities are lower on the totem pole.

The show "Homicide:Life on the Street" was filmed in Baltimore and every year the H:LotS group on the Internet had a drinking tour of all the buildings that were used as sets or backdrops. I went one year. It was a lot of fun. Seeing something you've seen on TV is always a weird feeling.

Careful, friend. I graduated from Brooklyn Tech!

HSPA wasn't usually considered one of the "three" special entrance NYC high schools. Once, during a transit strike, I got to attend our sister school, the all-girls Bay Ridge High School. I still have dreams about being the only teenage boy in a building full of teenage girls. Good dreams. (-:

"Whenever the laws of any state are broken, a duly authorized organization swings into action. It may be called the State Police, State Troopers, Militia, the Rangers... or the Highway Patrol. These are the stories of the men whose training, skill and courage have enforced and preserved our state laws."

Well, that's about as OT as you can get. (-: Has the OP returned to tell us how the bulbs have worked out? My newserver occasionally drops posts.

-- Bobby G.

[Robert Green]

Agree about FX for FP. They let you into Calfornia? Must have been before your reptutation became nationwide. (-: I worked on two films as a still photographer that filmed in the DC area. "The Amateur" and "Raise the Titanic." I often thought that locations crews should share their knowledge with the Pentagon because if anyone knows how to take over an urban area with few casualities, it's a location film crew.

I'll always remember the "starter" check I got as a down payment from the RTT location crew's accountant that had no name, address or phone number on it. I got worried so I took it to.the bank where I was friendly with the teller (she eventually died from AIDs because she had sex with a bisexual male model ONCE but that's another sad, sad story). Anyway, I handed her the check for $200 and asked "is this check any good?" After punching in the check's numbers, her eyes widened and she said "It's *plenty* good!"

Ironically, there's a crime movie called "City of Industry" starring Harvey Keitel and the woman who was in Star Trek. She was meant as a bride/gift for some alien wedding and is supposed to fall madly in love with the first person she sees. Due to some mechanical error, she falls in love with Captain Picard. (A similar plot was used in the original series with the woman who wore the raw dilithium crystal necklace that saves the day). I guess I have to turn in my trekkie badge - can't remember the name of either one although I think the ST:TOS woman was Frances Nguyen. Crap, now I gotta go look it up.

Before I do, I've got one more complaint that should really resonate with the ex-Navy guys here. On way more than one occasion, huge shipping barrels and crates tumble from high storage racks in STNG. One nearly kills Worf. I've been on a number of subs (mostly old diesel boats) and there isn't a THING that's capable of flying around and killing someone that isn't secured in some way. Two hundred years from now, they've forgotten all about cargo's tendency to fly around the holds if not strapped down.

Back to the irresistible ladies from space:

Star Trek (1968) "Elaan of Troyius"

The other one was:

*

starring Famke Janssen as Rachel Montana

a starring role in the 1992 Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Perfect Mate"

• The picture at this site

makes her look like Mariska Hargitay's twin sister although I never thought the two looked that much alike.

Who's Mariska Hargitay, aside from being a running gag in Mike Meyer's "The Love Guru" she's the daughter of the late Jayne Mansfield and now the head detective on L&O:SVU.

The closest I can get to bringing this back on topic is that Famke's married to the son of architect Tod Williams. (-:

-- Bobby G.

[The Daring Dufas]

What has always completely cracked me up about the future and space cowboys is the distinct lack of dentists. Dentists must have been outlawed by future Democrats for wrecking the self esteem of the poor who couldn't afford tooth whitening and braces. o_O

TDD

[Jennifer Murphy]

We got it all fixed up except for the lights. She absolutely loved it. Once she saw it, she lost interest in opening up any other presents. It really is a cool dollhouse. It has a very realistic brick chimney on the side, windows that actually slide, and all kinds of little accessories.

Thanks for the pointer. I don't completely agree with you about a transformer being as safe as a battery pack, but it woulod be a biug improvement over what's there now. The other advantage to batteries is no cord to trip over. Everything is inside the house.

Those power supplies look like they have a round plug like for cameras and computers. Would I get a compatible plug to mount on the side of the dollhouse? I didn't see anything on the website.

I'm not sure how I'd use that type of LED. I don't want to remove the E10 base sockets. I couldn't find any E10 base bulbs on their website.

They are available other places:

This place has several types for 12vdc and they come in colors:

Here's another, but a lot more expensive: