18-May-1999 [Artur Marques]

Today [23:56]: #1) Accident!; #2) Sex and the City; #3) Sarah Michelle Gellar @ Conan o'Brien

[your attention, please: today there are 2 NEW VIDEOS; last week news, including Martina Hingis and Delta Force stuff is available from the May 1999 updates]

Accident!

I am sorry for the lack of updates, but I was hit by a motorcycle dude, last friday. I am OK, really. Just a few scratches on the head. It didn't affect my regular life, except for the fact that I couldn't resist spending the WHOLE weekend reading Paul Aster on the bed, and not doing many things I should have done... I am quite irresponsible. I've always been like that :-).

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"...but it never goes down?!" - the girls comment, about the image below, from the last episode of "Sex and the City"
"Sex and the City" about to debut @ the Trade Center [don't you know what the Trade Center is?! Visit it!]

Candace Bushnell wrote the brilliant fast novel "Sex and the City", and the HBO network did its port to TV. The resulting series is a set of 23 minutes episodes, very much like "The Simpsons", in terms of chrono precision and pace. Each episode has such as rhythm, that it is inevitable for you to want more, by the end of it. Just like a candy.

Each story is about sex and New York, in a very, very irresistible comedy tone. These are hilarious episodes! It comes to my mind the "rabbit" - a vibrator that the 4 starring ladies once discovered and that almost totally replaced men in their lives :-).

Sarah Jessica Parker is the main actress. She performs Carrie Bradshaw, who writes a regular chronicle about sex, for a NY newspaper. Carrie gets her ideas from her friends' experiences, and her own love problems. Her friends are the superb Kim Catrall, Kristin Davis and Cynthia Nixon... giving life to very different women.

 

 

 
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This couple does it all the time... again, a picture from the last episode of "Sex and the City".
"Sex and the City" was broadcasted in Portugal, by the [terrible] SIC television. I've taped all the episodes, and I am transferring them from VHS to DIGITAL, so they can last forever.

Normally, I convert analogue PAL VHS to DIGITAL MPEG-1, but... you will be surprised... this weekend I've done some experiences with MPEG-2, the family of algorithms behind digital sat television and DVDs! I can already encode MPEG2!! This is so great and so significant: remember that it took years before home computers could encode MPEG1!! And now, just a few months after the european DVD launch, you can already do your own MPEG2 videos @ home! Really impressive!

Unfortunately, MPEG2 files can require more than 670 MB of data, per 20 minutes (@ good quality settings) of video, so they are not really useful for CDROM media. And because I don't have any hardware for DVD recording, I WILL NOT BE OFFERING MPEG 2 videos for exchange in the Trade Center.

Although DVD RAM is becoming very affordable and even cheaper than CDR (!!!), the truth is that DVD RAM doesn't interest me. I am waiting for DVD-R drives to became stable... and that could take months (years?). Must wait.

The message is: THIS WEEK, the "Sex and the City" videos will be available from the Trade Center section.

Have a teaser with this short [sexy] clip. Note that my CDROMs for trade have better quality than the one on the sample, which is VERY GOOD already!!

"Sex and the City" MPEG teaser (1 MB ZIP file)

Sarah Michelle Gellar @ Conan o'Brien

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Well, "Sex and the City" might me a great entertainment, but it is not better than the extraordinary "Buffy, the Vampire Slayer" series!!

The beautiful Sarah Michelle Gellar [SMG] was @ the Conan o'Brien late night show, which NBC broadcasts every saturday [night], in the USA. In Europe, it was also possible to watch the 10 minutes interview, thanks to CNBC sat channel, a service of NBC and Dow Jones.

I managed to tune the ASTRA array of satellites and tape the interview, which has already gone digital (MPEG1). I've also started the DIGITAL Buffy project, where I aim to convert all my VHS Buffy episodes to secure CDROM media. I will be offering the DIGITAL Buffy episodes from the Trade Center, as the conversion goes on.

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I am offering you 3 pictures of the interview [and one video - keep reading], where Sarah was wearing this black discrete dress. The audience was very "animal" all the way, always screaming, with Sarah always laughing and waving at them... Conan o'Brien joked saying they were "the american gladiators audience" :-). SMG reacted saying "they all were her dates for the night"... which was quite a odd thing to say...

...in fact, to be honest, I did NOT like the interview. Conan o'Brien is a gigantic dude and from moment zero that SMG faced him with "one foot behind", being a relatively short girl. She was over polite with the guy, and went on this wax mood of stating that "she had dreams with him"... kind of horror dreams, but still... dreams... yuck!

The only real "worth the time" moment, was when Sarah spoke about an accident she had while performing, where she broke a "finger bone". She couldn't be more specific, because "she wasn't a doctor" and that was another sentence that I did not like to hear.

If you didn't catch the interview, or don't know who the hell Conan o'Brien is, or what the show looks like, or just because... then go ahead and download this MPEG1 video, that shows SMG entering the interview room. This 2.6 MB ZIP file, features a MPEG video file, with GOOD QUALITY, almost like my original [full interview] that will be available from the Trade Center, soon.

SMG interview intro (2.6 MB ZIP file)