I'm posting with Opera once again. This last WordPress update promised some fixes that claimed to have conquered the long-standing bugs that... Did some really weird stuff when you tried to write a post in Opera. I don't know how it was even possible, what with all the CSS that's supposed to confine the text to a portion of the page, but sometimes it wouldn't wrap the text in the editor, and it'd keep spilling ever farther to the right, and when you posted it, that same non-wrapping problem would spill onto your blog and your post would be unreadable. ANYWAY! They said the problem was fixed, and I'm having some really horrible issues with Firefox just devouring all CPU time as soon as I open the stupid thing, so I've switched my default browser back to Opera to see if I can live without Firefox. So far, I think the blog's been okay, and I've only managed to use Firefox for Google Reader... Somehow, the news posts load faster under Firefox. (Well, used to... I have to close Firefox and restart it sometimes so it doesn't bog the whole system down.) We shall see what the future will bring!

Remember my post about Monkey Kick Off? I saw some traffic to that post, and I was bored, so I decided to take another crack at it... To my absolute shock and joy, I surpassed my previous score of 5095 meters (which Tay and Edrick easily beat) by 86 meters to total 5181 meters! I was impressed with myself... Still not enough to pass Tay (but I think it beat Edrick), but I was happy. Then, a couple of kicks later, I absolutely NAILED the ball for an additional 397 meters to total 5578 meters! Click the links for instant replays and a chance to surpass it! (It even puts a little marker where my ball stopped so you can track progress!) As I said in the post back then, I'll update it with any newer scores I have, so I went ahead and did that... But I don't know if post updates refresh RSS feeds, so I thought I might mention it separately.

I made a Gilligan's Island group in last.fm! I was both shocked and unsurprised to find out that nobody has made a group for it, yet... If that's even physically possible. So I made one! It's free to join... But... I don't know anyone personally who would even want to. Nobody seems to appreciate when humor was clean and actually funny. Come on! You don't know what you're missing... It was a cultural phenomenon! I've been running a marathon with those new DVDs I got from Amazon and I've been having a blast! I even dug up the theme song I had in MP3 format and started listening to it. Then I decided that I wanted last.fm to pick up on it (which is what convinced me to create the group), so I searched for the proper tags to put on the thing. It turns out that the Gilligan's Island theme has a name: "The Ballad of Gilligan's Island", and it was composed and written by George Wyle and Sherwood Schwartz, so I decided to go with that as an artist tag: "George Wyle and Sherwood Schwartz". (That, and all the lyrics sites said that was the artist... So there's at least some sort of non-official agreement, seeing as how there's not an official soundtrack.) I found the track I have on Amazon.com (well, slightly different, but pretty close), but there's no artist information, so I decided to just tag it with the guys responsible for it in the first place. As a result, I'm the only one who's actually listened to "The Ballad of Gilligan's Island, by George Wyle and Sherwood Schwartz" on last.fm... There's a few people who've listened to "Gilligan's Island", but that's NOT the official name. I also decided to try updating the artist page with a photo of the two guys but... I couldn't find a photo of either one of them, much less two of them together, so I just uploaded the title screen from the first season. So yeah... Properly tagged Gilligan's Island theme to spam last.fm with? Check!

Here, by the way, is the MP3 if you want it:

The Ballad of Gilligan's Island, by George Wyle and Sherwood Schwartz

Go get Adobe Flash Player!

Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale... A tale of a fateful trip that started from this tropic port, aboard this tiny ship. The mate was a mighty sailin' man, the skipper brave and sure! Five passengers set sail that day for a three hour tour... A three hour tour. The weather started getting rough, the tiny ship was tossed! If not for the courage of the fearless crew, the Minnow would be lost... The Minnow would be lost! The ship set ground on the shore of this uncharted desert isle with Gilligan, the skipper, too... The millionaire and his wife, the movie star, the Professor and Mary Ann here on Gilligan's Isle! So this is the tale of our castaways, they're here for a long, long time... They'll have to make the best of things. It's an uphill climb. The first mate and his skipper, too, will do their very best to make the others comfortable in their tropic island nest. No phones, no lights, no motor cars... Not a single luxury. Like Robinson Crusoe, it's primitive as can be. So join us here each week, my friends, you're sure to get a smile from seven stranded castaways here on Gilligan's Isle!

Oh, speaking of which, I was reading the Wikipedia article trying to find who wrote the song, and I learned something very awesome... Those of you who've watched the show as much as I have will know that the first season's lyrics were a little different. At the end of the opening sequence, instead of saying "the Professor and Mary Ann", they sang "and the rest" because the two weren't considered part of the main cast (for some odd reason). Apparently, Bob Denver (who played Gilligan) got wind of this and demanded that the studio put their characters and names (Russell Johnson and Dawn Wells) in the main title, but the studio refused, citing, of course, that it would cost too much to change. Same old story, eh? Well, Denver told them that it was in his contract that he could have his name placed anywhere in the credits, and if they weren't going to put the two in the front with everyone else, he wanted his name put in the ending credits with them. Of course, being the star character, that was completely unheard of... So the studio decided they would, in fact, put the Professor and Mary Ann in the opening credits. Best thing of all? Dawn Wells said that Bob Denver never told anyone he did this, and she, herself, didn't know this until long, long after the series was cancelled. I think that's absolutely awesome... He wanted to make sure his cast mates were properly credited and he used his star status to push this studio into doing it, but didn't tell anyone about it! That's the very definition of selflessness... Doing nice things for people without expecting anything in return.

I love this show so much.