Remains of the Day

Top Ten Mistakes writers don't see

A useful list from Holt Uncensored.

6

The new BMW 6 Series, complete with heads-up display, tilting glass panorama roof, active cruise control, and a six speed sequential manual gearbox.

Swimming to Antarctica

This past Sunday, the NYTimes reviewed the memoir Swimming to Antarctica: Tales of a Long-Distance Swimmer in which Lynne Cox recalls her life as the world's premier distance swimmer, including her most famous swims (as quoted from the book description):

• At age fourteen, she swam twenty-six miles from Catalina Island to the California mainland.
• At ages fifteen and sixteen, she broke the men’s and women’s world records for swimming the English Channel—a thirty-three-mile crossing in nine hours, thirty-six minutes.
• At eighteen, she swam the twenty-mile Cook Strait between North and South Islands of New Zealand, was caught on a massive swell, found herself after five hours farther from the finish than when she started, and still completed the swim.
• She was the first to swim the Strait of Magellan, the most treacherous three-mile stretch of water in the world.
• The first to swim the Bering Strait—the channel that forms the boundary line between the United States and Russia—from Alaska to Siberia, thereby opening the U.S.-Soviet border for the first time in forty-eight years, swimming in thirty-eight-degree water in four-foot waves without a shark cage, wet suit, or lanolin grease.
• The first to swim the Cape of Good Hope (a shark emerged from the kelp, its jaws wide open, and was shot as it headed straight for her).

While in school at UCSB, medical researchers discovered that she was neutrally buoyant because her ratio of fat to muscle was perfectly balanced. That allowed her to channel all the energy from her swimming motion towards forward movement instead of flotation. In freezing water, where most people would become hypothermic, Cox could maintain and even increase her core body temperature.

The review writes of how she swam through a 15-mile stretch of the Nile that was mostly raw sewage and rotting animal carcasses, and how she prepared for two years to swim a mile in the 32 degree Antarctic waters without a wet suit.

[What an amazing feeling, to float in the water, neutrally buoyant, weightless, the burden of the world lifted off your shoulders. I'd love to experience that feeling in water, but I have the buoyancy of a cannonball. In water, I'm always fighting the inexorable pull from below, the water's surface unable to support my density. Perhaps that's why I find scuba diving so enjoyable. Somewhere, down below the surface of the water, is my neutral buoyancy depth, and only there can I relax. Scuba takes me there.]

Cox's new book sounds like a fantastic read for swimmers and non-swimmers alike, and I added it to my wishlist today.

8 is a lucky number

The first half of 2004 looks to be the coming out party for the 8 megapixel sensor. Already, cameras using this chip are on their way to consumers from Canon, Nikon, and Sony.

Yet my Epson 2200 photo printer still doesn't have a driver for Mac OS X Panther. Shame on Epson.

Big Willie Style

Bill Simmons linked to a Miami Herald series following Miami's top high school linebacking prospect Willie Williams as he visited Florida State, Auburn, Miami, and finally Florida on official recruiting trips.

After you pick yourself off the ground and wipe the tears of hilarity from your eyes, you realize why the same schools seem to repeat in college football year in and year out. Willie's experiences are sure unlike any of my recruiting trips to college campuses.

Review: Spellbound

Spellbound.

Definition, please.

A documentary released in 2002 (yes, that long ago). It follows eight children as they vie to be the last cute kid standing (i.e. the last cute kid to screw up) in the Scripps National Spelling Bee.

Can you use it in a sentence, please?

Spellbound is funny, charming, touching, and suspenseful, though all those words are wholly inadequate because they're too damn easy to spell.

Can you use it in another sentence, please?

As the pool of competitors in Spellbound is whittled down from nine million to one, our sympathy for the vast, eclectic people of this nation (all linked by this odd manifestation of the American Dream) grows in inverse proportion.

Okay, one last definition. Please.

Spellbound. How I felt as I watched this documentary. Spellbound.

S-P-E-L-L-B-O-U-N-D.

This entry may cause diarrhea, nausea, baldness, paralysis...

One of this week's New Yorker articles that's posted for free for a week online is this interesting read on dietary supplements. An odd side effect of the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act is that supplements you buy at the local drugstore are marketed with all sorts of extravagant claims while drugs you can usually obtain only from a doctor are advertised on TV in the most cryptic, uninformative manner ("Ask your doctor about Levitra," says the voiceover, while an old man and woman ride horses down the beach).

Do a little digging and you'll find that most pills advertised on TV seem to deal with high cholesterol or erectile dysfunction. Some hearty soul put the top remedies for the latter through their paces for Wired magazine this month in a piece titled Hard Drugs.

The bravery of journalists always inspires.

Golden Globes

It's too bad Salon doesn't blog about awards shows live. It would make watching said shows much more enjoyable. Salon's latest blog about the Golden Globes is pretty funny, but how does the author, who obsessed over all numberous actresses' flaunted, er, vaunted boobs, avoid making a pun on the word Golden Globes?

And just who is the Hollywood Foreign Press anyway, and how can you sign up?

Quantifying the slope of the money/happiness curve

In this list of 10 popular misconceptions, I found some reinforcement and quantification for something I've learned over the years: having lots of money won't necessarily make you happy, but having too little money will likely make you unhappy.

"Money magazine columnist Jean Chatsky polled 1,500 people for her book You Don't Have to Be Rich and found that more money makes people significantly happier only if their family income's below $30,000, but by $50,000, money makes no difference."

Surprised again

My friends got me yet again. I was all set to see Jason Falkner and Travis on Friday night, followed by a steak dinner at Morton's, courtesy of one unfortunate loser of a variant of credit card roulette. Peering out of my office into the rain-washed night, I was about to pack up and head to the Moore Theater when I saw the unopened envelope icon on my cell phone. My voicemail contained a message from Jason, garbled by poor reception.

I called him back. What was up? I'd see him at dinner later that evening?

Yes, yes, but first, he was wondering if I might be able to swing by. Jamie and Sadie had made me something that they wanted me to see, and it was perishable.

Sure, I was on my way out and could swing by right away.

Actually, Jason was on the East side, headed home. Could I hold up and come by at 8:30?

Well, I'd miss some of Falkner, but since Pete was going to be late, why not? Couldn't let down Jamie and Sadie, especially if they had spent time baking (I was guessing) something. In hindsight, as I review the sequence of events in my head, the conspiracy comes together coherently, like Tom Cruise finally connecting the dots in Mission: Impossible in a series of flashbacks.

• An encounter two weeks prior at the PacMed cafe, when someone apologized for having to miss my party. I didn't say anything, but after Sundance it just faded out of my mind.


• Perishable present? Jamie and Sadie had prepared sushi?


• Jason said he was on the East side picking up his his LoveSac seat. I had visited Jamie and Sadie the night before and saw the LoveSac, still in its wrapping, sitting in the living room.


• All the cars lining Highland Drive.


• All the lights were out in Jason's house. It's usually lit up inside, especially if Sadie is up.


• All the people wishing me happy birthday in the hallways at work. How did all these people know it was my birthday? Were the years so evident in my ravaged complexion?


• Jon Voight, playing Jim Phelps, tumbling off the bridge in Prague into the river. That blood--he had faked it, hadn't he? He was the only one with the opportunity to pick off each member of the crew. And that Bible, stamped by the Gideons with the name of the hotel Jim said he had stayed at...

But I have to be honest and say I underestimated my friends and they got me. I realized everything the second I opened Jason's front door and saw the red eye on the camcorder in Jamie's hands. Jason took a big gamble, calling me so last minute, and damn if it didn't work.

But even then if I had in inkling about the party, I had no clue, none at all, that later that evening, when everyone sat me down on the living room sofa, that my sisters Joannie and Karen would walk through the front door with a birthday cake. It was the best surprise yet in what has been an escalating series of unexpected twists. To goof around with my sisters this weekend, what a treat! I'm not an easy guy to surprise, especially since I was bitten by that radioactive spider during a high school field trip, but it's happened to me a few times in the last week and a half.

Only with all the facts before me do I realize what I difficult customer I proved to be for all the party planners. Thanks to everyone who had to deal with all sorts of unexpected and late-breaking obstacles to pull it off. It was completely unnecessary and utterly cool.

The Herminator vs. Bode

This week's New Yorker contains an interesting article about alpine skiing and the two men who compete for its throne, Bode Miller and Austrian Hermann Maier.

Maier dominated the sport before a motorcycle accident nearly severed his right leg at the knee. He made a miraculous comeback and was back on skis within five months, and his nickname The Herminator seems apt. He is depicted, in the article, as a skiing machine, treated by the most advanced doctors and medical techniques: a real-life Ivan Drago. Maier once challenged Arnold Schwarzenegger to an arm wrestling match and won.

Meanwhile, Bode Miller is depicted as an athletic savant (state tennis champion and soccer star) who brought enormous natural talent to the sport of alping skiing but never seemed able to capitalize on it with proper technique. He always ignored his instructors and skiied slightly out of control, leaning back, body flailing, turning late, usually crashing out of runs. Then, one day, a sales rep put a pair of hourglass-shaped carving skis in his hands, and he never looked back. Other professional skiers were too proud to use what were thought of as tools to aid recreational skiers, but the carving power of the skis was perfect for Miller's technique and vaulted him to stardom.

Word

Most years, I pay not attention to dispatches from Sundance, but since I was there this year, I've been scanning the daily updates. This dispatch at McSweeney's, focused on the difficulty of getting off the wait list, the high school auditorium called Eccles, and the hierarchy of status at the Blender Magazine parties at Harry O's, is deadly accurate.

The one where she kills Bill

Teaser trailer for Kill Bill Vol. 2.

Comparing the candidates on key issues

The NYTimes has organized, concise candidate profiles online. However, they should place the candidate's stances on key election issues into a tabular format. It would make a handy printout on a tabloid-sized page.

The Washington Post has an interactive Flash graphic covering similar topics but also adds a feature to compare any two candidates on any key election issue.

Both features are missing a page for Bush, though his views are shown on the election issue pages at the NYTimes. On many, it's pretty cut and dried where he stands versus all the Democratic candidates.

U.S.S. Mariner

I'm not a huge Mariners fan (those who visit regularly know I bleed Cubbies blue), but for the many of you who are, the U.S.S. Mariner should be bookmarked.

Review: The Company

A fictional movie, yet it feels like a documentary: its plot is held so lightly in the hand it seems to slip through one's hands like sand, yet by movie's end we have a panoramic understanding of life in Chicago's Joffrey Ballet. On the other hand, the movie's dialogue and editing make less of an attempt at assembling into a linear plot or tracing a discernible dramatic path than even the roughest of documentaries. The movie feels like a multi-layered composition, dozens of stories overlapping, criss-crossing, starting and ending mid-stream.

Most of the dancing is beautiful, filmed in a gauzy haze, and the sounds of the fabric and human bodies as they slide and bounce against the stage are a feast for the ears. Malcom McDowell is humorous as the upbeat company director who delegates and deflects with casual aplomb, and Neve Campbell is convincing as one of the star dancers dealing with the demands of being a world-class dancer. The most organic movie one will see in years; those who go to the theater to be man-handled may be disappointed.

Huh?

Various journalists have tried to simulate the Dean howl in text.

• "Aiiiii-oooooo-ya!"


• "Yeaaaahhhhhhghhhh!"


• ‘EEEAAARRGHRRR!!!!!!!’

Not exactly onomatopoeia. It just goes to show that depicting sounds in English is an inexact, imperfect science. Best to leave such things to audio/video clips (like this (Real)One).

Mmmm, ostrich

More fodder, err, food for the low-carb revolutionaries: Ostrim. High protein, low-fat, low-calorie meat sticks made from ostrich meat.

The cult of the coach

I have no hard proof of this, but my hunch is that the press overestimates the impact of a coach on a sporting team. I'm not saying a coach isn't important to the success of a team. I just think the press slap coaches with labels like genius or failure much more often than is warranted.

The Bears were trying to hire a coach recently, and local columnists rooted hard for them to nab Nick Saban because of his success with LSU this year. When the Bears ended up hiring Lovie Smith, columnists expressed disappointment based on the Rams collapse versus the Panthers in the NFL playoffs. They forget that when Dave Wannstedt came to the Bears, he was coming off of coaching a hugely successful Cowboys defense. Much good that did. Ditka? I think I could have coached the 85 Bears to the Superbowl, their talent level was that extreme.

Bill Belichick is labeled a coaching genius for bringing the Patriots to the Super Bowl. What was he when he was losing with the Ravens? I'd argue that when he gave all credit to his players after their victory over the Colts, he wasn't being modest but truthful. Belichick is often labeled a defensive genius, but in the AFC Championship, the Pats rarely blitzed, just played a straight up defense most of the game, and his players simply pounded the Colts into submission.

This misattribution also extends to the systems which coaches bring with them wherever they go. The triangle offense worked great when the triangle consisted of Jordan, Pippen, and Grant, or Jordan, Pippen, and Rodman, but see how it's worked for the Bulls these past six years. Meanwhile, Phil Jackson took the triangle to the Lakers, and lo and behold, it works pretty well when the triangle is built using Kobe, Shaq, and Malone/Payton. Steve Spurrier's fun and gun? Sure, it was all that in college, but in the pros it was more like none and done.

When Bill Walsh came to Stanford to coach the football team my sophomore year, we were elated. Walsh's first year, the football team, built mostly with Dennis Green's recruits, went to the Blockbuster Bowl and shut out Penn State, and everyone was elated. When all those players graduated, even Walsh's vaunted genius couldn't resurrect the team, and he soon left. Take Tyrone Willingham, another ex-Stanford football coach: the previous season year everyone touted him as a genius for reviving Notre Dame, but this year he's a chump around South Bend.

The greatest impact a coach can have is to find really good players and put them in the game. Perhaps in baseball the impact of a manager is slightly greater, given the isolated pitcher vs. batter nature of the game and the manager's direct control over either of those actors (yes, Grady Little should have yanked Pedro).

Yes, motivation and leadership and diagramming the X's and O's all help. But if we were to divide credit for a team's success between the coach and the players, the press might have you think it's 50/50, or 40/60. I'm guessing the magnitude is more like 25/75.

Offshoring

Jim Heskett wrote a column at HBS's Knowledge Base about the exportation of jobs and then asked readers to respond with their opinions. The range of responses is fascinating to sift through. It's an interesting, complicated issue.

30

The radio silence I've maintained for the last week could be characterized as a respectful mourning for the passing of my twenties. Early early this morning, I entered decade number four. This feeling I have...it's as if I suddenly looked at my watch and realized how late it was, that the last bus of the night had come and gone, or a shop I wanted to visit had already closed, or that I had missed an audition I had told myself I'd attend come hell or high water. Melancholy, with a spoonful of regret, all carrying the sheer numeric weight of the accumulated history behind me.

Sometime in my mid-twenties, I came up with a list called 30 Before 30, thirty things I wanted to accomplish before I entered my thirties. It took on a life of it's own, and now, ticking off the items I missed out on is a letdown. For example, I never set foot on all seven continents (how did Antarctica qualify to be a continent anyway?), never directed a movie, never made it into outer space (though I still may beat Lance Bass), and I didn't retire today.

But I guess my thirties wouldn't be much fun without a few goals to chase. I'm going to add 10 to the list and carry over the remains of the previous list for a 40 before 40. Underneath it all, I have a hunch that my thirties will be my best decade yet. I'm ready for my scene.

Friends and family have been amazingly kind in helping to cushion my fall. Last Friday, I thought I was headed to Whistler with Dan and Jason. Around lunch, I walked to the elevator on my floor to go down to a meeting. The elevator doors opened, and Sarah and Jason were standing there.

"Where are you headed," Jason asked.

"To a meeting with Andy."

"No, you're not. Pack up, meet me down in the parking lot."

"Now? I thought we were going to Whistler later in the afternoon."

"I have some bad news and some good news. Bad news: we're not going to Whistler. Good news? We're headed to the Sundance film festival for the weekend."

!?!?!

Sarah had prepared a detailed itinerary for my surprise weekend excursion, titled Project Eugene, and a few hours later, Jason and I were checking into a condo at the base of the Park City ski resort. It was so completely unexpected and overwhelming that I didn't really truly comprehend it until...well, I'm still a bit awestruck even now.

Things only grew more surreal from there on out. First person we run into on Main Street in Park City? Joy, former CFO of Amazon, up to whom I used to report. She was strolling around town with her family and Jason and I just walked right into her. I thought the weekend might degenerate into a David Lynchian episode of "This Is Your Life". Joy gave us a set of tickets to a movie the next morning and sent us on our way.

We walked down the brightly lit street in ridiculously cold sub-zero temperatures and walked right into Sundance founder Robert Redford. A few more steps, and Lance Bass strolled out of a bar in front of us. A few people would mention later that this year's Sundance was light on celebrities, but coming from celebrity-lite Seattle, we felt as if we'd landed in the celebrity sightings pages of People Magazine. Eventually, we made it to Emily, one of the conspirators in Project Eugene, and she ushered us into some exclusive party where some famous chef had prepared a fancy multi-course dinner. Midway through our meal, Kato Kaelin walked up and started chatting us up. For some reason, he thought he had met me the night before and kept apologizing for having stepped on my foot the day before.

Just as the room was near empty--everyone was migrating to the Blender Magazine party upstairs where Liz Phair was scheduled to perform--in walked Paris Hilton and boyfriend Nick Carter and Nicole Richie. Paris and Nicole are to the world of professional partying as Doyle Brunson to professional poker. If one were to distill American celebrity to its purest essence, devoid of any relation to anything, what you'd end up with is Paris. Bold fans ignored the burly bodyguards surrounding their table and thronged to get her autograph.

Upstairs, Liz Phair played a set to a half-inebriated crowd. The Blender Magazine party had featured Nelly the previous night and had Pete Yorn lined up for the next night and Macy Gray for the following night. Every day a long line of hopefuls snaked back and forth outside Harry O's desperate to get inside. After you got inside, there was an upper level that required yet another level of access to enter. A bewildering world of parties within parties through which Emily was our guide, like Virgil to Dante in the The Inferno.

The following day, we caught the movie Brother to Brother, then learned that it's practically impossible to make it off the waiting list into anything other than the earliest morning showings (primarily because so many attendees sleep in, trying to shake off a hangover from the previous night's parties). Many of the theaters hosting screenings at Sundance are tiny. We tried to get in off the waiting list for The Fight, but the theater it showed at only sat 150! We stopped to check out the waiting list line for Garden State and two hours prior to the movie's showtime the line was about 200 people long.

In the afternoon, Jason and I visited a digital filmmaking center where all sorts of video editing systems and software and camcorders were on display. Sony brought their entire line of professional camcorders, including their fabled 24p HDCAM HDWF900. For a mere $102,360, one of these beauties could be yours.

Emily's party selection for that night was the Project Greenlight party. We had just gotten inside when Ben Affleck and Chris Moore brushed past us and got on stage with Carly Fiorina from HP to announce a joint promotion/contest. Upload five photos, and you could be the on-set photographer for a week on the set of Project Greenlight's next film. Ben and Chris shared their example You pages with the crowd (Ben's was a mosaic of Boston sports team jerseys), and so did Matt Damon in a taped message from Berlin where he's filming The Bourne Supermacy.

[Affleck is a funny guy. I wish he'd take greater advantage of his natural sense of humor and do more comedies instead of action flicks.]

All the party attendees had received tickets on the way in. During the press conference, Fiorina announced that anyone finding an HP and Project Greenlight logo on the back of their ticket would walk out with an HP gift bag. Lo and behold, I turned my ticket over and found the magic graphic. In a photo area in the back of the room, I was handed an HP shoulder bag containing an HP Photosmart 945 digital camera and an HP Photosmart 245 photo printer. By this time next year, the story will have evolved such that it was Ben Affleck who gave me the gear for my birthday.

Amazingly talented teenager Jason Mraz was on hand to play a set (if you don't own his CD Waiting for My Rocket to Come, please click on that link and purchase the album immediately), and Jason, Emily, and I snagged front row seats for the show. It's as close as I've ever been to a musician I admire with the exception of seeing Liz Phair from the front row when she visited Amazon.com. During the concert, both Jason and Emily dialed their brothers, huge Mraz fans, on their cells, and Mraz actually grabbed Emily's phone and spoke to her brother. It wouldn't be until the next morning that Jason and Emily's brothers realized it wasn't all some kind of drunken joke. Mraz live? Very very good.

Emily ran into a friend from her school days as we were walking out, and it turned out he was married to Shannon Elizabeth. The two of them were just arriving. In hindsight, I wish I had prepared some pithy comments to say to all these pop culture figures, but I conjured nothing all that clever the entire weekend. The best I could think of was, "Wow, you're really short." We saw Gael Garcia Bernal strolling around town and he was a wisp of a fellow, maybe 120 pounds soaking wet. The camera doesn't just add ten pounds. It adds twenty pounds and puts everyone in high heels.

Partied to exhaustion, Jason and I slept in the following morning. We hit the Park City slopes for some snowboarding in a blinding sunshine just before mid-day. I learned that ski-in ski-out means staying on the slope itself. We walked out our back door and got on a lift, and our last run of the day brought us straight to our back patio. Very convenient. The snow of Utah is world-renowned for being remarkably dry, and though there wasn't a ton of powder, I could see why so many ski fanatics the world over reminisce fondly of that one perfect day in Utah when they whisked through a powdery lull in gravity's pull. [Oddly enough, the mountains and high pressure fronts in Utah also trap a great deal of smog in the valleys, and the urban communities around Salt Lake City have some of the dirtiest air in the United States].

That evening, we attended the world premiere of The Machinist, directed by Brad Anderson (Next Stop, Wonderland) and starring Christian Bale and Jennifer Jason Leigh. Bale was on hand with his stunning wife. He lost 63 pounds to play the part of Trevor Reznik, a machinist plagued by insomnia and strange visions. He was so thin on screen that the audience gasped in pity, disgust, and awe everytime he appeared on screen without a shirt on. He looked near death, and he laughed in disbelief during Q&A when someone asked him afterwards how much of his weight loss was the result of digital effects.

I really enjoyed the movie and would be surprised if it didn't receive some distribution in the U.S. It's an artful visual mystery that has a twist of an ending in the vein of The Usual Suspects or Memento, and it's fun to try and solve the puzzle based on the the clues interspersed through the dialogue and visuals.

Afterwards, we rushed over to a party co-sponsored by Amazon. Paris and Nicole were on hand again. Jason and I were drinking a beer when a photographer stopped the two of them in front of us for a few photos. As soon as the camera was raised, without a second thought, they turned sideways to the camera, facing each other, and then posed looking over their shoulders at the camera. As I would learn by the end of the evening, many who live in the public eye have acquired the ability to strike a pose unconsciously, on demand. In most of those Paris/Nicole photos, Jason and I lurk in the background drinking our beers like a couple of Forrest Gumps.

I then met my first supermodel. She was introduced to me as such.

"Eugene, I want you to meet supermodel Carmen Kass."

I've never heard anyone introduced to me personally in that way. Is anyone else's job in life so vital to their identity that it becomes part of their name in a noun-noun compound? Only in Hollywood. It sounds ridiculous in any other context (Eugene, allow me to introduce mother of two and middle manager Jane Smith; Eugene, this is basketball legend Michael Jordan; Eugene, have you met recovering alcoholic Homer Simpson), but standing in front of Carmen, it seemed appropriate. La féminin absolu? Absolument.

The entire weekend was all the more surreal because it was so unexpected. I can't recall the last time a weekend had ended up playing out so differently than I had anticipated. Jason pulled off a real doozy, with a huge assist from Emily, probably the most memorable birthday surprise yet. In another thirty years, he and I will be sitting around in some bar cracking up about it over a beer.

Back in Seattle, I thought for a moment that perhaps the actual turning of the odometer would slip past quietly, but no one lets you off the hook when the far right dial spins from 9 to 0. Audrey treated me to a meal at Bandoleone (tasty...make sure to get the banana flan) and a showing of The Company (despite being nearly plotless, it's one of the best Altman movies in recent history); Jenny and her son Nathan (donning a hairpiece courtesy of Photoshop) filled in a missing chapter of my childhood (I started to laugh until I realized that the depiction of my childhood coif was uncannily accurate); Joannie sent me an e-card with a dog cackling madly (the caption read "Hee! Hee! Hee! Haw! Haw! Haw! Sorry, I just realized you weren't counting in dog years.") while Karen sent me an e-card from what she felt was Amazon's disappointing birthday selection, only to learn that she had sent the one that Joannie considers the best of Amazon's birthday e-cards, one she uses all the time; Joannie, Karen, and Mike also sent me some lovely tableware and flatware from Crate and Barrel so I no longer need to feel embarrassed to have people over to eat; tomorrow Eric is taking me down to his courtside seats for the Sonics game; Friday the boys are going to re-enact perhaps my most memorable dinner in Seattle ever--"credit card roulette with a shred of intelligence", the $676 tab before tips that Dan was so kind to treat us to that drunken night at Morton's.

The point of all this blathering, besides being a record of a memorable week and a public expression of thanks, is to log the realization that everytime I wanted to hang my head over turning 30, one of my thoughtful friends and family got me laughing, and when I finally stopped laughing and looked at my watch, I had missed the big countdown and was well on my way into the next decade.

There now, that wasn't so bad, was it?

The weakest Prospectus

Baseball Prospectus is awesome (their 2004 book is due in a few weeks) and Basketball Prospectus is really good (though the website was stale for a month), but Football Prospectus is a disappointment. An article like this is an example. The author makes some huffy judgments in hindsight (a lot of sports criticism is made in hindsight which is only valuable if some lesson can be extracted and used for predicting the future, but that's a bar that's rarely met), admits he was absolutely wrong about a lot of teams (the honesty is admirable, but it's about as soothing as hearing your financial advisor admit he goofed by investing your 401K in Enron stock), and strays into some random commentary on American Idol at the end to inject some humor, I suppose (if you don't have much insight to add on football, why do we want to hear you critique reality TV?).

Maybe, as Josh Levin wrote in Slate, it's just too difficult with the tools available today to model the sport of football with much accuracy.

Dean-Clark ticket?

There's an idea. Seriously, though, can we all just rally behind one person, any person, that isn't Bush?

Three Kings: Larry, Dave, Lebron

Curb Your Enthusiasm is back on the air, and thank goodness. TV was missing something until the king of situational comedy returned to the air. In a world of rhetoric cowed in the face of politcal correctness, David is a breath of fresh air. Ben's Birthday Party was hilarious; Ben Stiller is a great choice as guest star.

Monday night I went to see Dave Matthews and Friends at Key Arena. I'm not a rabid Dave Matthews fan, unlike just about everyone in attendance, but he brought along Tim Reynolds, a mad genius on the guitar and someone I've always wanted to see live. Dave Matthews occupies his own strange little kingdom, completely outside the critical spotlight. He doesn't seem to win any awards, and his albums are rarely given rave reviews, but his fan base is massive and cult-like. Even in years when he doesn't release a CD, he can sell out arenas all across the country. Seattle, his current home, definitely offers home field advantage as his audience is primarily white, ages 25-35.

I barely understood anything he mumbled between songs (he enunciates best when singing), but every phrase was greeted by several thousand female shrieks and strangely affectionate hollers from former fraternity boys (who comprise the oddest segment of his fan base): "We love you Dave!" It's quite peaceful when he slows things down, if you can ignore the sensitive white guys trying to dance all around.

The acoustic set with Tim Reynolds was the opener, and my favorite part of the concert. It's just Tim, Dave, two guitars, and Dave's voice, but it sounds like twice as many guitars. I wasn't as in to the electric big band stuff when the rest of his friends, including Trey Anastasio from Phish and Emmylou Harris, joined him on stage, though they did a few fun covers (set list can be found here). No one could complain they didn't get their money's worth; Dave played a good three hours, perhaps more, and he was on stage the whole time, laughing and jamming.

Tonight, I caught Lebron with his visiting Cavs at the very same Key Arena. If you had no idea who Lebron James was and were asked to pick out the player on the court who was the 18 year old, you would not pick Lebron. 6' 8", 240 lbs?! Why hasn't he been signed up for a Got Milk ad?

He put up a line of 27 points, 9 rebounds, 9 assists, and he didn't always look polished doing it. It was an easy 27-9-9, if there's such a thing. If you extrapolate based on his age, it's frightening to think of what he could become, especially with better teammates (the Cavs need to dump half their team and rebuild around him). He could average close to a triple double for a season. Who knows if it will happen? There hasn't been an 18 year old at his level in the NBA before.

Bad, bad little flash

Compact digital camera flashes are terrible. I wish I could default my Minolta digital camera to always have the flash turned off. I don't think I've ever taken a good photo with that camera with the flash turned on.

Chris Rock

I caught Chris Rock tonight on his swing through Seattle for his Black Ambition tour. He was the man, putting on over an hour and a half of new material, much more than Seinfeld or Dennis Miller did during their last appearances in Seattle. What's great about Rock is his smart commentary on a wide range of issues. He covered, among others, marriage, Dubya, the good and bad about America, the hypocrisy of our democracy, race, education, affirmative action, gay marriage, flag burning, money, rap, censorship, fidelity, and plenty more. And while it perhaps isn't as laugh-out-loud funny as his first stand-up tour, Rock comes off sounding honest yet politically pragmatic, like we wish our politicians sounded. As a comedian, he's not afraid to take an unpopular stance, yet his opinions appeal to conservatives, liberals, whites, blacks, men, and women. This is his best social critique yet.

"Don't get me wrong, America's still the greatest nation in the world, even for black people. But you don't see any black C students running any corporations, making lots of money. But a white C student? A white C student became the president of the country."

I wish I could reprint more of his jokes, but Rock's invective is strewn with f-bombs. If you're fortunate enough to live near one of his Black Ambition stops, do yourself a favor and go listen to him put the world's events in perspective.

Happy birthday Ryan!

My nephew Ryan turned the big 1 today. He's a child of the modern age, and as such was able to accept my birthday call on his cell phone.

"Hello, who is this? How'd you get my number? Uncle Eugene? Oh, sorry. I thought you were that baby girl mommy made me share my toys with last week. That crazy girl is always calling me up. Hello? Hello? Sorry, that's me. I have this fabric cell phone and service from Fisher Price, the reception is terrible. Dad won't let me use his anytime minutes."

"And the bartender says to Baby Einstein, I was talking to the rubber duck. Hee hee hee hee hee! I love that one. Hey, listen, I've got to run. This teething is driving me nuts, I'm going to go gnaw on the sofa."

The 4-inch snowstorm, and other milestones

A number of milestones in 2004 already. Today is the single largest dump of snow I can recall since moving to Seattle. Meteorologists predicted it would arrive last night, and since I was up late fighting a head cold I'd occasionally glance out the window. By 1:30 in the morning, not a flake had fallen and I passed out, thinking that perhaps it was all a false alarm.

In the morning, my alarm clock woke me at 6:30 with a female voice reading off school closings. I gazed out the window...

In the Midwest, of course, 4 inches is a winter rounding error. In Seattle, with its hilly terrain and snow plow and salt truck fleet of approximately two, 4 inches qualifies as the storm of the decade. Local newscasts dubbed it the Snow Blast, and I was snowed in.

It's not just the snow; the Northwest has seen record lows in temperature recently. This is bitter cold, bitter because everyone who goes outside wears a frozen grimace as if they swallowed something bitter.

On a warmer note, last Friday the boys had a night out at Key Arena as the Lakers were in town to play the Sonics. It was by far the best Sonics game I've seen in my six years here. It was the first time back in Seattle for Gary Payton, and he got a huge ovation when he was introduced.

Shaq left at half-time with a hamstring injury, opening up the middle for the Sonics to attack the basket against the Lakers zone which in turn set them up for a ton of wide open three pointers. The Sonics are a jump-shooting team, and they live and die by the outside jumper. That night they were hot.

Kobe led a furious comeback. His Colorado trial aside, he's really really good on the basketball court, clearly the best player on the court that night. With under a minute left, Ray Allen hit a 3-pointer to put the Sonics up by 3 and send the crowd into a frenzy.. Then Kobe, one on one against Allen, faded into the Sonics bench and swished a 3 to tie it. He was feeling it and came back down court wagging his index finger like Mutombo. Then Allen drove in and hit an acrobatic double-clutch jumper under the basket among three Lakers with about five seconds left. After a time out, Devean George picked off Kobe by mistake, and so the inbounds went to Horace Grant who fumbled it. By the time Kobe got it, he was six feet behind the 3-point line. His desperation jumper was straight on but hit front iron and that was it.

Anyone who was anyone seemed to be at the game that night as we ran into all sorts of people exiting the stadium. We'll do it again on the 13th when King (Lebron) James visits with the Cavs.

Remains of the year 2003

What I'll remember from 2003...

New Zealand - Seems to have become the travel destination of choice for everyone I know. It may be that many people were inspired to visit by The Lord of the Rings movies, but it's likely more accurate to say that New Zealand contributed more to The Lord of the Rings than vice versa. The country is worth the hype, and my time there was one of the most fulfilling period of my life, not just for the country's natural beauty and friendly people, but because of all the fellow travelers who befriended me along the way. It will be an annual rite of jealousy that in January, February, and March, I'll envy my friends who head off to the land down under the land Down Under.

Sydney - a lovely city, a cross between San Diego and San Francisco, and yet different. One of the great cities of the world. I learned that all Aussies, no matter how petite, can drink me under the table, and that Aussies regard Foster's as horse piss.

Scuba diving - One item on my list of 30 before 30 was to obtain my scuba certification, and I did so on the Great Barrier Reef. It doesn't look like I'll make it into space before I turn 30, so this will be the closest I come to weightlessness. In the water, sound and light and movement and time all seem to slow, and so do one's breathing and heart rate My memory of scuba is of floating in a green-blue medium, nurse sharks and rays and giant turtles and schools of fish swimming past, brilliantly colored anemone fronds swaying to and fro lazily in gardens of coral. It was my Benjamin Braddock swimming pool moment.

Trekking through Torres del Paine - So it was off peak season. Still, I didn't expect to go three days without seeing another human being. I trudged through the musty corridors of my personal history and determined that it was the longest I'd ever gone in my life without seeing another human being. At night, devoid of moon or star light, I experienced the thickest darkness of my life, when I literally could not see anything. The human deprivation and proximity to the wild did not transform me into a scruffy, bearded, crazy, feral hillbilly, though I began to understand why Tom Hanks turned his Wilson volleyball into a friend in Cast Away.

Trekking the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu - Just noses out my Torres del Paine trek as the longest time I've gone without a shower. That's not what I'll remember of the trek (though it may be what my fellow trekkers remember). What will stay with me is the brutal several-thousand foot hike up to Dead Woman's Pass the first day, lugging twenty-something pounds of camera equipment. Dozens of hands of Hearts with my fellow trekkers. The spectacular views. The super fit porters, sprinting past me in flip flops with fifty or sixty pounds on their backs. Sleepless nights in the freezing cold, feeling every contour of the rock-hard ground through a cheap rented sleeping bag. Seeing the sun rise over the mountains that last morning, its rays like fingers gliding over the walls of Machu Picchu, a city suspended in the clouds. Many have said that the city of Machu Picchu is a disappointment after the Inca Trail. While the journey is indeed the reward, I consider Machu Picchu part of that journey.

Glaciers - It's doubtful I'll ever visit as many glaciers in a year as I did in 2003. From the Fox and Franz Josef in New Zealand to the Perito Moreno in Argentina, and all the others in between, I learned more about glaciers than I ever knew. The Perito Moreno was the highlight for its sheer size and the awesome spectacle and sound of hundred meter chunks of ice breaking away from the face of the glacier wall and crashing into the water. It sounded, to my ears, like someone tearing apart a stalk of broccoli the size of the Eiffel Tower.

Alpe D'Huez - It's not the most difficult French mountain I've climbed on my bike, but it's arguably the most historic of the Tour de France peaks, and it was my favorite stage from my trip to this year's Tour. The ride up that morning was beautiful, and partying with the Dutch by Turn 7 was nearly as epic as the stage that followed, when everyone from Mayo to Vinokourov to Beloki to Hamilton attacked Armstrong like he'd never been attacked in all of his five Tour victories. Awesome.

Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King - Will there really be no LOTR movie to line up for next holiday season? Oh sadness.

Keira Knightley and Scarlett Johansson - Keira was the hot new young face with the sexy British accent (Bend it Like Beckham, Pirates of the Caribbean, Love, Actually), Scarlett the hot new young actress with the bee-stung lips (Lost in Translation, Girl with a Pearl Earring).

Mark Prior and the Cubs - Mark Prior's magic was not enough to break the Cubs streak of World Series rejection, but they gave fans a great run. Every Cubs home run in the playoffs was accompanied by a dozen cell phone calls. "That's what I'm talking about!" we shouted to each other. And for the first time in years, it looks on paper like the Cubbies can repeat their success in consecutive years.

Reality TV - It's been around for years, but in 2003 it took over television. The only television shows I ever hear anyone talk about are the ones on HBO or reality TV shows, or HBO reality shows. My fave is still Curb Your Enthusiasm, which isn't technically a reality TV show but displays more reality than most shows that are classified as such.

No Limit Texas Hold'em - Who knew that some of the most compelling television characters around were high stakes no limit poker players? Shows like The World Series of Poker on ESPN and the World Poker Tour on the Travel Channel and books like Positively Fifth Street made household phrases of "I'm going all in" and Binion's Horseshoe Casino. The negatives? Televising celebrities playing poker (they stink) and going to your monthly poker game only to find one of your friends wearing a cowboy hat and giant wraparound sunglasses indoors.

Babies - It's that time of my life when all my friends are having babies. The year prior, everyone was buying DVD players, and this year, everyone's having babies. At parties, people wear babies on their chest in Baby Björns like sharks wear remoras. My nephew King Ryan, Jason and Jamie's little princess Sadie Sutton, and all those other babies approaching the 1 year milestone are cute. I discovered that one can feel quite attached to helping care for someone else's child. I guess that's my "uncling" instinct kicking in. Earning an infant's approval is stressful business!

The persecution of carbohydrates - Low-carb diets like Atkins have been around a number of years, but this year it seemed that nearly everyone I knew was on some diet that regarded bread and pasta as toxins, and many products at grocery stores were marketed as being low in carbs. There is even low-carb bread, nearly as absurd as low-fat fat.

There's no doubt that Atkins has overcome some of the psychological hurdles of previous diets, but it's also continued evidence that Americans continue to grasp for any shortcut around reducing caloric intake and increasing exercise. I myself am not sold. Richard Atkins, the founder, had a heart attack in 2002 and croaked in April of 2003. Which will come first: an epidemic of deaths from cell phone usage, or an epidemic of heart disease from all the Atkins Diet devotees?

Spam - the year in which the amount of spam I received finally out numbered the count of real e-mail in my inbox. Ironically, I receive more spam at my work account, which I never publicize, than my personal account, which I've used all over the Web. Spammers replace lawyers and car salesmen and telemarketers as the most fashionable people to loathe. Now that my work spam filter has started to toss out some good e-mails, I'm ready for more drastic solutions in 2004.

Metrosexuality - Mark Simpson coined the term metrosexual in 1994, and it took nearly a decade to take off, but in 2003 it achieved critical mass, giving a name to that species of man in love with himself. Finally, we had a term to refer to men who spent a ton of time at the gym working on their physiques in sleeveless t-shirts, used beauty products like exfoliators and toners, and read GQ, Details, and Men's Health.

Simpson's technical definition: "The typical metrosexual is a young man with money to spend, living in or within easy reach of a metropolis -- because that's where all the best shops, clubs, gyms and hairdressers are. He might be officially gay, straight or bisexual, but this is utterly immaterial because he has clearly taken himself as his own love object and pleasure as his sexual preference. Particular professions, such as modelling, waiting tables, media, pop music and, nowadays, sport, seem to attract them but, truth be told, like male vanity products and herpes, they're pretty much everywhere." Or, any person who wouldn't qualify to be a subject for a Queer Eye for the Straight Guy makeover.

Simpson wrote in a recent Salon followup: "Perhaps the most interesting thing about metrosexuality is that it represents the beginning of the end of "sexuality," the 19th century pseudo-science of sexual preference that said that personality and identity are dictated by whether or not your partner's genitals are the same shape as yours. In a hyperconsumerist post-industrial age like ours, identity and personality are not permitted to be inherent -- it would put most ad agencies out of business -- and are instead based on lifestyle choices, consumption patterns, brands, social circles. "

Will the term stick? Linguists have already issued a warrant for the term's arrest.

Outsourcing jobs to India - Dentists and cab drivers used to give stock tips. Now they comment on how jobs are going overseas to India, as the cab driver who drove me to JFK on New Year's Day lamented because his son had just moved from India to the U.S. When an idea gets in the hands of dentists and cab drivers, it has hit the mainstream. Have the Simpsons covered this idea yet?

The right and left drift further apart - this is the year that both the left and the right turned me off with their finger-pointing and partisan politics. The truth became ever more elusive as both sides accused the other in increasingly shrill voices. Just sample some of the book titles:
Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right.
Dude, Where's My Country?
Thieves in High Places: They've Stolen Our Country--And Its Time to Take It Back.
Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth.
What Liberal Media? The Truth About Bias and the News.
The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception.
Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot.
Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right.
Useful Idiots: How Liberals Got It Wrong in the Cold War and Still Blame America First.
The Savage Nation: Saving America from the Liberal Assault on Our Borders, Language and Culture.
Off with Their Heads : Traitors, Crooks & Obstructionists in American Politics, Media & Business.
Shut Up and Sing: How Elites from Hollywood, Politics, and the UN are Subverting America.

Is there any actual dialogue taking place, or is there no room for that in American politics anymore?

Kushner on 2004 election

An interesting interview with Tony Kushner in Mother Jones. Some excerpts:

"TK: There are a lot of politically active young people, but I feel that we've misled them. I have great admiration for the essayists and writers on the left, but the left decided at some point that government couldn't get it what it wanted. As a result, it's a movement of endless complaint and of a one-sided reading of American history, which misses the important point: Constitutional democracy has created astonishing and apparently irreversible social progress. All we're interested in is talking about when government doesn't work."

About 200 Top Ten Lists

A compilation of roughly 200 movie critic top ten lists for 2003.

If you assign 10 points for a #1 ranking down to 1 point for a #10 ranking on each list, the top ten movies of the year by points were:
1. Lost in Translation (785 points)
2. LOTR: Return of the King (667.5)
3. Mystic River (565)
4. American Splendor (552)
5. Finding Nemo (490)
6. In America (321.5)
7. Capturing the Friedmans (305.5)
8. Master & Commander (292)
9. 21 Grams (250)
10. Kill Bill: Volume 1 (217)

Those with a massive printer could print out this entire table with every movie that received a point, discovering, in the process, that even Old School made a few top ten lists.

The worst of 2003, using the same criteria:
1. Gigli
2. Cat in the Hat
3. Bad Boys II
4. Dreamcatcher
5. From Justin to Kelly
6. Beyond Borders
7. Charlie's Angels 2
8. Life of David Gale
9. Daredevil
10. Boat Trip

Entries from Gladwell and Wolff

Worthwhile interviews with two of my faves, Malcolm Gladwell and Tobias Wolff...

Malcom Gladwell writes on SUVs in this week's New Yorker, and an interview with some of his observations (as usual, they're incisive) is here.

"If every car on the road was a Mini, then the cost of an accident would be quite small: if you are in a Mini and you hit a Mini, you aren’t going to be that bad off. So, in the old days, the premium on active safety wasn’t so large. On the other hand, if every car on the road is an S.U.V., the cost of an accident grows substantially. When a Ford Explorer hits a Chevy TrailBlazer, both parties suffer enormously. And, if a Ford Explorer hits a Mini, the Mini driver is a dead man. I’m more interested in active safety now than ever before. As a non-S.U.V. owner, I simply cannot afford to get into any accident at all these days."

Atlantic Monthly online prints an interview with Tobias Wolff in which he discusses his novel Old School, among other things. Many have speculated as to how autobiographical the novel was, and this interview reveals more on that topic than anything I've read thus far.

"I think we're all self-deceived to a degree, and it can become pathological in some people. There's a wonderful line in Eliot's "Four Quartets": "Mankind cannot bear very much reality." There's a great deal of willful blindness in our living that's probably necessary. For example, when we eat, we don't look too deeply into where our food comes from. If we did, we probably wouldn't be able to stomach it. The clothes we wear—where do they come from, who makes them, at what expense, to whose profit? They are rare people who are willing to look at every aspect of their lives and say, "I can't do this anymore because whenever I start this engine, I bring the world that much closer to extinction. I can't wear this shirt because the people who made this shirt are being exploited—they're not even allowed to go out on break, they're fired when they get pregnant."

How many people are there who will parse their lives in this way, take them apart analytically and, if you will, morally? Most of us don't do that, and the truth is, most of us can't do it. Just in day-to-day living, there's a built-in dimension of self-deception or blindness, and that gets carried on in our relations with each other. We tend to overlook our selfishness, to almost forgive ourselves for it in advance. We fudge things to get ahead without thinking about it much or meaning to—people who consider themselves honest perhaps don't always correct a misapprehension that another person has about them to their advantage. There are many levels of falsity, conscious and unconscious, in the way we live."

On a lighter note, AM asked Wolff if he had seen the movie Old School, starring Will Ferrell.

"I saw part of it on an airplane. It was pretty funny."

The 2004 movies I'm excited about

The movies I'm eagerly awaiting in 2004, excerpted from my movies page:

• Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Mar 19): The premise: what if there was a medical procedure by which you could erase your most painful memories, like a relationship gone bad? With a script from Charlie Kaufmann, and starring Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet. Faux related website. Teaser trailer.


• If Not Now (Spring?): Sequel to the wonderful Before Sunrise which starred Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. In this sequel from Richard Linklater, those two characters meet again, nine years later, while Ethan Hawke's character Jesse is on a book tour in France.


• Kill Bill Vol. 2 (Feb 20): I will go out on a limb and predict that this is the one where she kills Bill.


• The Passion of the Christ (Feb 25): Mel Gibson's controversial take on the last twelve hours of Christ's life.


• Starsky and Hutch (Mar 5): It stars Owen Wilson, Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn, and Snoop Doggy Dogg, which guarantees nothing other than my $9.00. Will either be glorious or gloriously bad.


• The Ladykillers (Mar 26): There will come a day when we forsake Coen brothers movies that star Tom Hanks and feature a soundtrack produced by T-Bone Burnett, but it is not this year. View the trailer. This is a remake of the The Ladykillers starring Alec Guiness.


• Innocence: Ghost in the Shell 2 (Spring 2004 in Japan): Mamoru Oshii's Ghost in the Shell was one of the most influential and brilliant anime movies ever made.


• Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (Summer): Cool retro look.


• Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Jun 4): I'm not a rabid fan of the books, the first two of which failed to excite me. But I'm intrigued by the selection of Alfonso Cuaron as director, and fans of the series tell me the books improve as they go. Cuaron as director is a bold and admirable choice.


• The Terminal (Jun 18): teams two unknowns named Spielberg and Hanks. And Catherine Zeta-Jones.


• Spiderman 2 (July 2): Michael Chabon (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay) wrote the screenplay so the story should be stronger, and hopefully they'll fix the goofy special effects this time around.


• King Arthur (July 2): Produced by Bruckheimer, helmed by Antoine Fuqua, so unlikely to be great. Odd romantic pairing of Clive Owen as King Arthur and Keira Knightley as Guinevere. However, it will be difficult to pass up an opportunity to gaze on Keira Knightley for a few hours to a Hans Zimmer score. View the trailer.


• Anchorman (Jul 9): Will Ferrell is Anchorman.


• The Village (Jul 30): M. Night Shyamalan's next movie. The trailer (available off the Flash-enabled site or here) seems to indicate another of his favored mystery plots. I'm always curious to see the surprise twist, but when I guess what's going to happen, as with Signs, it's not quite as fun.


• The Life Aquatic (Fall): Let's examine the talent involved. Wes Anderson, Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Cate Blanchett, Willem Dafoe, Henry Selick...good Lord.


• The Incredibles (Nov 5): Pixar's next computer-animated tale. Let's draw a trend line based on all the past Pixar movies. Hmm. Apparently this movie should be really good.


• Alexander (Nov): Oliver Stone's take on the original Great One will beat Baz Luhrmann's to the big screen. Stars Colin Farrell as Alexander the Great and Angelina Jolie as his mom(?!).


• Ocean's Twelve (Dec 12): Soderbergh directs the followup to Ocean's Eleven, itself a wonderfully fun flick. This time, the heist(s) takes place in London, and Vincent Cassel joins the cast.


• The Aviator (Dec 17): Leonardo DiCaprio continues to tackle famous historical figures by playing Howard Hughes in Martin Scorsese's next project.


• Izô: Kaosu mataha fujôri no kijin (Winter?): Takashi Miike directing Takeshi Kitano?! In. I think the title means "Sweet Ass-Kicking Samurai Movie."

Preliminary favorites of 2003

Of the movies I saw in 2003, which always seems to be fewer than I'd like but more than most people who aren't movie critics, my favorites were the following:

• Lost in Translation


• The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King


• Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World


• Mystic River


• Thirteen


• Finding Nemo


• Whale Rider


• American Splendor


• City of God


• The Italian Job


• Ping Pong


• So Close

Other movies I enjoyed that are worth seeing for one reason or another:

• 28 Days


• Winged Migration


• Girl with a Pearl Earring


• The Last Samurai


• Kill Bill Vol. 1


• School of Rock


• Open Range


• Swimming Pool


• Pirates of the Caribbean


• 25th Hour


• Seabiscuit

My favorite books of 2003, from the disappointingly short list of books I managed to finish this past year:

• Old School by Tobias Wolff


• Moneyball by Michael Lewis


• The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown


• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon


• Every Second Counts by Lance Armstrong and Sally Jenkins


• Blankets: An Illustrated Novel by Craig Thompson

Partly cloudy and very cold

I left for NYC on Christmas Eve. While I was there, it was sunny nearly every day, temperatures in the mid forties to low fifties. I landed back in Seattle in the middle of the night yesterday, the JetBlue 737 descending in a swirling snowglobe. The Accuweather forecast icons for the next few mornings and evenings in Seattle:

High 36° F

Low 28° F

High 32° F

Low 17° F