Remains of the Day

Recycling

Vice President Cheney, meaning to direct viewers to factcheck.org, instead directs them to factcheck.com, a site that quickly posted a redirect to an anti-Bush site from George Soros.

Sports Guy goes premium. ESPN.com now requires a paid subscription of $40 a year to ESPN Insider to read Sports Guy. A quiet knife in the back. Brutal. ESPN.com doesn't offer any options for decoupling their Insider subscriptions, so you end up paying for content from some uninsightful ex-jocks like Rick Sutcliffe, Joe Theismann, and Trev Alberts.
UPDATE: Whew, turns out it was only a glitch and Sports Guy remains a freebie.

Seriously now. Are stories like this real? Right now, on the page where the article is listed, an unfortunate juxtaposition shows a photo of a dog and a separate photo of what appears to be a bratwurst in the right gutter.

SpaceShipOne completed the first two journeys 100km above the earth's surface. One more journey into space within two weeks of this one and they'll capture the $10 million XPrize.
UPDATE: SpaceShipOne wins the XPrize with a second successful flight.

Reckless

Last Friday, I saw the second showing of the preview for a new Craig Lucas play, Reckless, at the Biltmore Theatre. Going in I knew nothing other than it starred Mary-Louise Parker, of whom I'm a big big fan, and that Craig Lucas had written Prelude to a Kiss which I'd never read or seen.

The play begins on Christmas Eve. Rachel (Mary-Louise Parker) is sitting in bed with her husband Tom as the snow falls outside on an idyllic suburban community. She gushes about how much she loves the holiday while her husband trembles in silence. He's not moved by her nostalgia; no, he's racked with guilt for having taken out a contract on the life of the mother of his two children. He spills the beans, ushers her out the window in her bathrobe just as the hitman enters their living room, and she's set off on a strange, almost absurdist journey.

She's picked up by a stranger named Lloyd at a gas station and invited to live with him and his deaf wife Pooty (Rosie Perez). Eventually Rachel gets a job at Lloyd's company, and a bizarre journey through financial scandal, game shows, and talk shows ensues.

The play feels not just surreal but imprecise. It's not a pure comedy, nor is it purely a drama or tragedy. The theme seems to center around a line Rachel asks Lloyd at one point, "Do you think you can truly ever really know somebody?" Clearly Rachel didn't know Tom, her own husband, well enough to understand why he'd take out a contract on her life. Nor, for that matter, does the audience. Lloyd and Pooty are not who they seem, nor is Trish, the assistant at Lloyd's company. Post 9/11, the bewilderment from being the object of hatred or harm from complete strangers resonates to some degree, but the play also contains some awkward attempts at comedy, especially a game show appearance in which near complete strangers Lloyd, Pooty, and Rachel prove to know more about each other than Rachel did about her own family. Is it luck, more proof that nobody really knows anything about each other?

The play ends with Rachel reuniting with her son in an unexpected way, and we're left wondering if she'll actually finally know someone. It's perhaps the most poignant moment of the play though it comes too late.

The part of Rachel casts Mary-Louise Parker as a wide-eyed naif, and perhaps my problem with the play is that she is so good as the smart and sassy woman, her large and penetrating eyes always seeming to see right through everyone. She's so self-assured on stage. Her origination of Catherine in David Auburn's Proof was definitive, and I wish she'd been tapped for that role on film (it went to Gwyneth Paltrow who also did that role on Broadway).

Perhaps Parker's gaze is too penetrating. That may explain why both images in this post show her looking off to the side instead of directly at the viewer.

Timing is everything

I've been spending my time between the West Coast and New York serendipitously. I left NYC during the RNC and enjoyed some gorgeous sunshine driving from Seattle down the West coast to Los Angeles. Then I landed back in NYC in time for the first blushes of autumn. Now I've landed back in Seattle just as tropical depression Jeanne wreaks its final fury on NYC before sailing off into the Atlantic

I found it a strange coincidence that this Gothamist post was titled "You Are Not Living In Seattle". As if addressed to me. Yes, I don't live in Seattle anymore, but for a few days, I can pretend as if I still do. And yes, Seattle has less avg. annual rainfall than NYC.

2046

Wong Kar-Wai's 2046 opens today in Asia. The traffic has slowed enough that you may have luck viewing the trailer at the European 2046 website. If not, at least you can gaze at photos of Zhang Ziyi, Gong Li, and Faye Wong, some of the sirens in the movie.

More on Wong Kar-Wai's organic filmmaking style and his current rift with Christopher Doyle in this past Sunday's NYTimes Magazine article. I heard Christopher Doyle speak at the Seattle Film Festival earlier this year. He must have been on okay terms with Wong Kar-Wai then, as he showed footage he shot from 2046 and spoke fondly of Wong's maddening and "eastern" filmmaking technique.

Review: Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

All that technology for Kerry Conran to play with, and yet he did so little with the toys I'd be most excited to play with, and that's Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Angelina Jolie. No, most of the $70 million budget of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow was spent on drawing the art deco backdrops, not in crafting the plot, which reminded me of Saturday morning cartoons I watched as a kid, or in writing smart dialogue.

Law, Paltrow, and Jolie come off as flat, both physically since they are clearly superimposed over blue-screen drawings and emotionally as they do what they can with harebrained sci-fi/fantasy dialogue. The movie reminds me of crazy stories I dreamed up and enacted with toy action figures when I was just a kid, and some of Conran's boyish enthusiasm for his childhood influences comes across in the fusion of the swashbuckling soundtrack, fantastical plot twists, and often grand landscapes. Ultimately, though, I outgrew my action figures and such shallow stories.

For all the time spent in illustrating this digital world, the movie feels strangely underpopulated. All the people besides those played by real people (the three leads, Giovanni Ribisi, Michael Gambon, and a handful of scientists) are about as animated as video game characters, which is to say not very (Laurence Olivier makes a cameo, and in one nice bit of irony, we realize he's dead on multiple levels, not just in real life or because he's been digitally resurrected). It doesn't feel like there's anyone else in the movie, further lessening the importance of the main characters' mission to save the world. It's a planet that feels empty, and by the end of the movie so did I.

Gourmet, August 2004

I don’t usually purchase cooking magazines (correction: Gourmet bills itself as “the magazine of good living”, a broader lifestyle claim, though it is grouped with the cooking magazines at the bookstore, rather than with, say, The Robb Report or Cigar Aficionado) though I do subscribe to Cook’s Illustrated (the cooking magazine for gadget geeks, what with its scientific-method laboratory tests of cooking methodologies, kitchen tools, and foods). Cooking magazines are dangerous for a pack rat like myself. I can’t bring myself to throw out magazines that contain useful information I might someday need or use, however remote the possibility. By that definition, cooking magazines are almost never disposable, filled as they are with recipes and articles on various foodstuffs and magical cooking techniques and secrets. However, I purchased the August 2004 issue of Gourmet because it included an essay by David Foster Wallace.

I go out of my way to collect magazines with essays by Wallace or Malcolm Gladwell or short fiction by Tobias Wolff (in the case of Gladwell and Wolff, nearly always the occasional issue of The New Yorker). I enjoy Foster Wallace’s fiction (okay, let’s abbreviate to DFW, as his fans refer to him), but I adore his essays. His essay collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again is, in my opinion, his finest work. It is in his essays that DFW's odd writing tic of inserting copious footnotes throughout his writing (to a shallow inspection, it’s the habit that most identifies him as a sui generis of the writing world) is most effective and endearing rather than ponderous, as it can be in his fiction. I admit to a similar tendency (one could argue that it’s a symptom of being a writing pack rat, unable to jettison the least relevant train of thought), albeit in HTML my digressive train of thought manifests itself in an abundance of parentheticals due to laziness (creating footnotes in HTML is a hassle, and for longer works not broken up into separate web pages, anchor links are necessary to prevent the reader from having to scroll back and forth vertically, an action which, if performed multiple times in succession, might lead to repetitive stress injuries such as carpal tunnel syndrome).

DFW’s essay for Gourmet is a paragon of the DFW essay style. What makes him such an unique and engaging journalists is not just his cool, perceptive, and almost clinical eye, or his flat and just slightly satirical, acerbic tone, but his complete disinterest in writing a conventional half-investigative, half-advertorial piece that most travelogues or celebrity interviews turn out to be. Gourmet commissioned a piece on the Maine Lobster Festival. A third of the way into his essay, DFW abruptly shifts gears from a straightforward overview of the logistics of the Maine Lobster Festival and the taxonomical and culinary history of the lobster itself to raise the real topic of his essay:

”Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure?”

It’s a question DFW spends the rest of his essay attempting to answer with his usual cubist mind. But enough on DFW and his essay. His work is nearly impossible to describe simply through a few excerpts. The footnote-laden style demands a journey to the source material.

This issue of Gourmet also contains another article that fascinated me, one that investigates whether or not wine glasses, particularly Riedel wine glasses, actually make a difference in how wine tastes. It’s particularly relevant in light of the recent news that Riedel purchased Spiegelau, creating the world's largest wineglass producer.

The article recounts how Riedel claims that their glasses improve the flavor and aroma of wine. How do they do this? At a Riedel-sponsored seminar, a Riedel representative explains that their glasses are engineered to deliver the wine to precise areas of the tongue, taking advantage of the "tongue map" which charts which regions of the tongue experience which tastes (e.g. sweet, acid, bitter, salt). Riedel has glasses for just about every variation of wine you've heard of, and many you haven't.

There's only one problem. The tongue map is a myth. It's one I was taught in grade school health class, and even I hadn't heard that it had been debunked until reading this article.

Furthermore, the article points to all sorts of scientific studies that have not only shown that in blind taste tests, the type and brand of glass makes little to no difference. It also cites one famous experiment in which wine experts were fooled into thinking a white wine with food coloring and another in which wine experts pooh poohed a mass market wine while praising a luxury wine to the heavens, only to discover that the testers had reversed the two wines.

Wine has always been a front in class struggles, bolding otherwise imperceptible lines between the highbrow and lowbrow. Non-wine snobs always suspect that they’re being bamboozled, victims of an elaborate hoax, and perhaps they’re right. Price disparity of wines is high, and objective measures are lacking. I often find myself in the wine aisle of the supermarket or a wine store, baffled by the selection of wines, the hundreds of brands, all priced seemingly randomly.

On the other hand, as the article concludes, expectations can have a huge impact on one's enjoyment of an experience or product. If you believe that paying more for a bottle of wine will buy you a better wine, or if you believe that a $40 Riedel glass will improve the taste of that Pinot Noir, that belief may indeed improve that bottle for you. Certainly Riedel wineglasses are more aesthetically pleasing than a Dixie paper cup or your average wineglass from Target. Disentangling form and function altogether in assessing a product is counter to how we experience them in everyday life. Despite the fact that most golfers would be better served by spending their money on lessons, sometimes it helps to spend it on a fancy new driver that they believe will improve their drives. If you feel more confident with a certain club in your hands, that can translate to better swings. Mind over matter.

Many people wish to affirm their purchases after the fact, like reading a Pauline Kael review after seeing a movie in the hopes of finding her in agreement with your opinion. After reading this article, I won't feel quite so bad snickering at the wine snob at the next party I attend. There's always one.

Related: Ordering lobsters online
Kinky sex secrets of the lobster (in which Trevor Corson, author of The Secret Life of Lobsters, debunks DFW's Gourmet article)

ENTJ

After reading a recent Malcolm Gladwell article about personality tests, and after Howie randomly mentioned his Myers Briggs personality type, I stopped in an Apple Store (the world's most glamorous Internet cafe) in SOHO to take an online Myers Briggs test. The test claimed I was an ENTJ, thoughly only mildly T.

The Complete Cartoons of The New Yorker - All 68,647 of them across 2 CD-ROMs, with 2004 of them excerpted into book form. Ooh la la.

CRAZIEST laid across two triple word scores, with Z on the double letter score, leads to 311 points, the highest possible National Scrabble Association-approved scoring move.

This guy has slept with over 1000 prostitutes and defends his lifestyle. No, it's not Charlie Sheen.

Sims 2 is built on emergent behavior. So, so cool.

Bone. Bone. Both cool. The FingerWhisper looks interesting, but you'll look like you're picking your ear all the time. Try the Jawbone demo for a taste of its military-grade technology.

Funeral by Arcade Fire

I really dig the album Funeral by Arcade Fire. I need something to listen to as I unpack, especially since Time Warner botched the work order for my Internet and cable TV installation, leaving me in the dark for another two weeks. Good to know the cable company out here is just as incompetent as Comcast. Verizon, the local phone provider, is no customer service Hershey Kiss either.

Download an MP3 of "Wake Up", a track from Funeral. Purchase the album from a used seller at Amazon.com (click on the Used and New link as Amazon has it on special order right now; used sellers have better pricing and immediate availability).

You bleeping bleeper! Bleep bleep!

Sunday, I visited Yankee Stadium for the first time to catch the rubber game of the Yankees-Red Sox series. My seat was in the right field bleachers, a few rows down from the DiamondVision scoreboard.

Before the game started, I took in the view of the stadium. It didn't impress me. The history of great players and great games played there is undeniable, but the actual structure itself is non-descript and rather dumpy. It lacks the distinguishing visual features of other stadiums of seniority like Wrigley Field (ivy-covered outfield walls, manual scoreboard, views of Lake Michigan and buildings outside the outfield walls) or Fenway Park (the Green Monster). The thing I do like about Yankees Stadium is the P.A. announcer. The deadpan delivery (a refreshing contrast from the biased, Michael-Buffer-like grandstanding of most home team introductions) and the acoustic texture of his voice as heard through the old-school speaker system gave me goosebumps. I'm not sure how to describe it without a sound clip, but every name he uttered sounded like a legend, even Miguel Cairo.

The best bleacher seats in sports are those that attract the die-hard, loud-mouthed fans. The ones at Wrigley Field certainly do, and by the end of the Yankees game, I had no doubt that the ones at Yankee Stadium did as well. Bleacher seats are the modern day equivalent of the standing-room only cheap seats at the Globe Theatre back when a Shakespeare play was mass entertainment, except nowadays the rabble are further from the stage than the well-to-dos. These are the fans that will throw back a home run ball if it's hit by an opposing player, assuming they're sober enough to toss it in the right direction.

And of course, they also taunt everyone, from opposing players to opposing fans. I wasn't surprised to hear profanity-laced trash talk from the fans around me, but the sustained viciousness impressed me.

Any Red Sox fan brave enough to venture into the bleachers was serenaded by a rhythmic chant of "ass...hole...ass...hole" and pointed out by a forest of jabbing index fingers, moving in time to the chanting. A few younger boys, Red Sox fans, had their Red Sox t-shirts turned inside out. I suspect their mothers forced them to do so out of fear for their lives.

In the top of the first inning, after the Yankees took the field, the bleachers conducted roll call. They started by chanting Ber-nie, Ber-nie, Ber-nie, until Bernie Williams acknowledged them with a wave of his glove. Then they moved to Mat-su-i, Mat-su-i, and then Sheff, Ole-rud, Cai-ro, Je-ter, and A-Rod. No roll call for Mussina and Posada, busy pitching and catching. I hadn't seen roll call performed at a baseball game like that before, and it was impressive. It offered a sense of camaraderie between the right field bleachers and the players, even if most of them were purchased as free agents like so many bobble-heads off of eBay.

In the bottom of the first, the bleacher fans turned from love to hate, and the target of nearly all their ire was center fielder Johnny Damon, who hasn't cut his hair since the Carter administration. I'm not sure what to call his coiff--a caveman mullet? His do and the varied hirsuteness of his teammates were a great affront to Yankees fans, perhaps in deference to the strict grooming rules passed down from Steinbrenner.

Some of the chants directed at Damon (these choruses were chanted to the "Let's go defense" cadence, i.e., [chorus in four beats], clap clap clap-clap-clap, repeat):
You're a wookie
Jesus Damon
Get a haircut
You're a homo
Take a shower
You're a [two syllable expletive]
[expletive] [expletive] [expletive] [expletive]

One Red Sox fan sitting in front of me had on a Red Sox cap, white and red and navy blue Red Sox t-shirt, and dark, thick-rimmed glasses. A Yankees fan walking up the aisle saw him and started shouting "Where's Waldo? Where's Waldo?" Then, pointing at the Red Sox fan in glasses, "Here's Waldo!"

In the sixth inning, between innings, the Village People's YMCA played. Yankees fans sought out all the Red Sox fans and pointed at them while altering the chorus: "Whyyyy are you gay?"

By the seventh-inning stretch, when the famed Irish tenor (so famous I've forgotten his name; if he's so famous shouldn't he have another gig somewhere else?) popped out to sing God Bless America, the game was out of reach. Pedro Martinez got knocked around pretty good by the Yankees. Pedro has lost a few mph off of his fastball (reducing the velocity differential and effectiveness of his nasty changeup) and some bite off of his curveball. He's still good, but he's no longer dominant. The score was 8-1 by now, Pedro had stalked off to the showers to a derisive chorus of PEEE-DROOO, and Yankees fans were preening in triumph.

One particularly obnoxious Yankees fan, a young punk with a bandana on his head, was nearly frothing at the mouth. He found one mild-mannered Red Sox fan and stood over him, screaming, "You're an asshole! Boston sucks! Get your ass back to Boston!" Unlike some other Yankees fans, Punk Yankee Fan lacked the gift of wit or creativity, so that was all he could muster, over and over. The Red Sox fan, who looked like a skinnier version of Alan Cummings, was a bit shell-shocked, so stunned he made the mistake of forgetting to remove his cap during God Bless America. Some Yankees fans shouted at him, "Hey asshole, remove your effing cap!" Though I doubt he was a Communist, Alan-Cummmings-Lite refused to acknowledge requests uttered with such disrespect, even if it offended the crowd's sense of patriotism.

After the seventh inning stretch was over, Punk Yankee Fan went over to Alan-Cummings-Lite and knocked his Red Sox cap off and kicked it down the aisle. The two of them started shoving each other and had to be separated.

The Yankees won, increasing their AL East lead to 4 1/2 games, and everyone piled back on the uptown 4. Needless to say, I wouldn't recommend bringing young children to the Yankees bleachers for games against the Red Sox, even if those are the cheap seats. The threat of collateral damage is just too great.

Next week they repeat a 3 game series, but this time in Boston. I wish I could be there to see how Yankees fans are received in the bleachers at Fenway, though I suspect the reciprocity principle holds true here.

Don't play against players named HAL

Master poker bots invading online poker sites? It would be quite annoying to have to pass a captcha everytime you wanted to bet. On the other hand, it's probably safer to just play in private online poker rooms with people you know anyway.

Failed Olympic drug test for Tyler Hamilton? This would be tragic for the sport as Tyler is one of the beloved good guys.

The halo effect

Someone in my apartment complex has an open wireless network running, and sometime last night my laptop detected it. I must be on the periphery as the signal is faint, fading in and out like the pulse of a dying man. It has me jacked back in to the net, though, and amen to that. Just a few weeks of spotty internet access is enough to remind me how much I've come to depend on the net for paying bills, shopping, communicating, and looking up phone numbers and addresses.

Don't die on me yet, mysterious internet spirit.

What's yours is yours

Poker great Johnny Chan. "It doesn't matter to me if I'm dealt two aces or a three and a five," he says later. "In fact, I don't need any cards. I just play the person."

Breakable: A few days ago, someone in Bike Forums broke the story, so to speak, of how to unlock a U-Lock using a plastic ballpoint pen. Now the NYTimes has picked up on the story, writing that "Many cyclists erupted in disbelief and anger this week after videos were posted on the Internet showing how a few seconds of work could pick many of the most expensive and common U-shaped locks, including several models made by Kryptonite, the most recognized brand." After having two bikes stolen in college, both secured with U-Locks, I long ago recognized that U-Locks were nothing but an inconvenience for bike thieves, a way to slow them down. It's hard to believe many cyclists would still think a U-Lock is some foolproof security mechanism. The best security for your bike is to keep it next to you indoors or to own a bike so awful you wouldn't feel any sorrow if someone stole it. Here are links to the videos.

Stunning animation from Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, opening this weekend.

The Law of Large Numbers: Events with million-to-one odds happen 295 times a day in America.

The predominant ideology of our age: anti-Americanism?

Nikon announces a new professional digital SLR, the D2X. The specs are sweet, but unfortunately it doesn't hit dealers until winter 2005, so this is all premature elation.

Amazon takes A9 out of beta; new search engine amalgamates results from a variety of sources, including Google and Gurunet. Bookmarks are a handy way to drag in potential winners from a search for future reference.

Google Accounts. Bwahahahahaha (maniacal laugh of Google emperor as his plans for world domination several years down the line continue to gel).

Wong Kar-Wai collection on DVD

Kino is releasing a Wong Kar-Wai 5 movie boxset. Though all these movies have been available on DVD already in one form or another, this box set features remastered versions of Fallen Angels and Happy Together. The other movies included are Chungking Express (on loan from Buena Vista), Days of Being Wild, and As Tears Go By. Good stuff.

On a lighter note, Will Ferrell earned a second volume in the SNL DVD series: Saturday Night Live - The Best of Will Ferrell - Volume 2. James bought it, of course, and we watched the whole thing after the season finale of Entourage on Sunday. If you combined the first and second volumes of The Best of Will Ferrell, you'd have one solid DVD. The second volume includes the bad doctor ("I'm sorry, your son is a witch"), Wake Up, Good Morning, and the abusive boss sketch with Pierce Brosnan, but it also includes a bunch of duds. Divided, the two volumes are rentals best used as chasers after a night of drinking.

A New York minute

I haven't had Internet access since my arrival in NYC, thus the blackout on my site. It will likely continue for another week or two as I get settled.

My first night, I arrived to a dark, empty apartment. I had electricity but no lights. The screen of my laptop wasn't enough to illuminate much more than my face, and I also lacked some basic living essentials, like toilet paper and somewhere to sleep. Thank goodness for family. I headed over to James and Angela's right away, as much for the welcome feeling of friendly faces as for a supply run. Angela loaded me up with an air mattress, sheets, a towel, toilet paper, and a dose of goodwill. I lingered there perhaps longer than usual, drawn in by the presence of furniture, lighting, and the lived-in warmth of their apartment.

Sharon and Alan have also offered a ton of support. They call just about once a day to see what I'm up to and to make sure I'm not spending all my time in an empty apartment. Several times, I've gone over to their place for dinner, and they often have leftovers I can polish off. I'm so grateful to have family here to soften my landing.

My primary focus right now is furniture hunting. I need a bed, a sofa, a dresser, and some standing closets, among other things. I happen to live in a furniture district of sorts, though it's not the type of furniture any normal humans can afford. The first store I visited was Ligne Roset, just because it happened to be across the street from me. Gorgeous furniture, horrific prices. A sectional I admired cost $8,695. I may have to resort to catalog shopping yet again.

The morning after my arrival, I locked myself out of my apartment. Smooth.

Most of my time has actually been spent at Flushing Meadows, watching the U.S. Open. I watched the women and men's semis and finals on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Mostly I wanted to see Roger Federer play, and I got my wish. Having watched him destroy Tim Henman and Lleyton Hewitt, I can confirm what the tennis cognoscenti have been saying: he is the best tennis player of all time (though of course I'm discounting longevity).

I've seen Sampras, Agassi, Lendl, Edberg, Becker, and Wilander play, all in their prime, and none of them matched the quality of tennis I saw from Federer this weekend. He has no significant weaknesses and a long list of strengths: the best forehand I've ever seen, a powerful and accurate serve, a beautiful and dangerous one-handed backhand, incredible court movement, mechanically solid volleys, off-the-charts tennis smarts and anticipation, and the calm and cool of a contract killer. All this, and he doesn't even have a coach. I've seen him hit a variety of full-swing, half volley forehands on the move that are just absurd.

Hewitt was on a huge roll coming into the finals, and Federer made him look like a college player. I think Hewitt won all of five points in the first set. In fact, the match was a bagel sandwich: 6-0, 7-6, 6-0. Federer's play that weekend has been the highlight of my stay.

I'm trying to take advantage of the city's cultural wealth. I grabbed a few tickets for the NY Film Festival in October, though many shows sold out instantly. I have tickets to see Avenue Q and I'm My Own Wife and the opening night preview of Reckless starring Mary Louise Parker. And this weekend, if a few things fall into place, maybe I'll take in a Yankees Red Sox game.

Okay, my one-hour Starbucks wi-fi pass is running out. Back out into the NY night, where everyone's still awake.

In other news...

politics.slashdot.org - a limited edition flavor of Slashdot available through the 2004 election.

Roger Ebert's very own website, a work in progress, using most of the same material as his current Suntimes site.

Why are foreign language movie subtitles so bad? Is it similar to the reason television subtitles are so bad: the method of transcription? I always wondered how those court reporters typed so quickly. You'd think movie subtitlers would just work off of the shooting script, but perhaps not. All I know is that I rented the American release of Shaolin Soccer to show Eric, and we nearly wet ourselves at some of the English subtitles. They added a further level of absurdity to an already absurd comedy.

Good TMN interview with Alex Ross about the state of classical music. True, the future of classical music seems dire, but then again, every baby I know is transfixed by Baby Mozart. Alex Ross, the music critic for The New Yorker, also has his own weblog titled The Rest Is Noise.

You can’t knock Yo-Yo, though. You never know what he’s going to do next. He’s Yo-Yo.

Sony's new prosumer high-def camcorder

Sony finally unveiled their upcoming prosumer high-definition camcorder, the HDR-FX1. It's a mixed bag of good (3 CCDs with 16x9 pixels, manual controls, strong low-light performance, support by Apple and Adobe) and disappointing (no 24p and/or progressive scan).

2 of the 7 "million dollar" math challenges solved?

Mathematicians may have solved the Riemann hypothesis and the Poincaré conjecture, though, as is usual, their proofs must be validated and accepted by other mathematicians.

Louis de Branges de Bourcia has posted a paper titled An Apology for the Proof of the Riemann hypothesis (PDF). Here's his full proof (PDF).

Grigori Perelman's has posted two papers (1, 2) proposing a proof of a problem even more complex and difficult than the Poincaré conjecture.

If you'll excuse me, I'm going to see if I can spot any holes in their work.

Clinton has heart attack; rumors of quadruple bypass

Those are the initial reports. Google News has the first wave of stories.

Eric suggests the reality show for me: Ivana Man. Since all reality shows get reversed, soon we should have Lolita Man, in which ten wealthy, fifty-something men compete for the affections of a just-turned-eighteen year old girl.

Sports Guy selects 1984 as the greatest year of the ESPN era, bringing up painful memories of the 1984 Cubs-Padres NLCS series. Game 5 was the one and only time I cried at the outcome of a professional sporting event.

Three people die in crush of shoppers invading a new IKEA store in Saudi Arabia. (via BoingBoing)

Oh Mickey you're so fine...

SBC Park

I visited SBC Park (formerly Pac Bell Park) for the first time tonight. One of Jon's coworkers gave us five tickets for the Club Level to watch the Giants play the Rockies.

The ballpark lived up to the hype. It feels extremely intimate, almost like a really expensive and upscale college or minor league ballpark. It might just be the coziest baseball stadium I've ever been seen a game at. Club Level seats put us almost directly on top of home plate. The visuals of the ocean over the outfield wall are awesome, just one of the ways the stadium integrates seamlessly with (and takes advantage of) its surroundings.

The food selection impressed as well. I had an excellent Sheboygan bratwurst sandwich to start, accompanied by some garlic fries. From there Jon and I moved on to Compadres Beef Taco Trays and Nachos with Beef. If I hadn't gone for a walk to explore the stadium, I might have been arm-twisted into Krispy Kreme to top it all off. I've never been to a ballpark with a broader and more diverse selection of foods. Wine, fruit from a farmer's market, Carl's Jr., and sushi were just a few of the surprising additions to all the ballpark staples like hamburgers and pizza.

And, had I known about the Giants Wi-Fi Network ahead of time, I would have brought my laptop and been surfing the web between innings to check up on my fantasy players. Rumor has it fans will soon be able to see wireless instant replays and order food for delivery to their seats through the wi-fi network. Awesome.

Bonds was walked three times, two times intentionally. He hit a ball hard and deep in the other bat, but straight to the center fielder. Giants fans wave rubber chickens and screamed their displeasure everytime a pitcher threw a ball to Barry, let alone when the catcher stood to signal for the intentional walk. When you see his stats, you understand why opposing teams avoid him: his OBP this season is .608, and his slugging percentage is .818. Those are video game numbers, or those of someone in a slo-pitch softball league. Pedro Feliz, who bats behind Barry, has an OPB of .294 and a SLG of .467, most of it compiled against pitchers working out of the stretch. Of the 44 balls hit out of SBC Park into McCovey Cove since its inception, 31 of them have been hit by Bonds.

The Rockies seemed to be fielding a minor-league roster with the exception of Helton, Castilla, and Burnitz: Clint Barmes, Luis Gonzalez, Matt Holliday, Todd Greene, and Choo Freeman. Fortunately for them, the opposing pitcher was Kirk Rueter, a soft-tossing lefty who this season has allowed 200 hits in only 159 inions. He also has only 48 strikeouts to 57 walks. His WHIP is over 1.6!

The Giants lost, 4-1. The Cubs won in Montreal, 2-1, to take a one game lead in the wild-card race. The lone Colorado player on my fantasy roster (Barmes) went 2-3 with a walk and also snagged a few tough grounders. It was a good night.

Lance at NY Marathon?!

Lance Armstrong was on the Tonight Show today, and he revealed that he's pondering running the NY City Marathon. He'd run it to raise money for charity (his cancer foundation) a la P. Diddy. That would be awesome and a huge motivational boost for my training. He said he's out of running shape and would have to run slowly, but somehow I suspect his notion of slow is different than mine.

In fact, my likely race pace is not just slow, it is, according to Houston Marathon medical director John Cianca, an "insult to the distance." He goes so far as to say "a ten-minute pace arguably is not running at all." I'm guessing John doesn't do much motivational speaking.

This afternoon, I ran a route that Betina mapped out for me. It took me along the waterfront to the base of the Golden Gate Bridge and then back. It was a beautiful run on a crisp, sunny day, fighting through a stiff wind on the way out (oof) and cruising with the tailwind on the return. One of the great things about traveling around these past several weeks has been the opportunity to constantly run new trails. Every one of my long runs thus far has been run in a different city, and that should continue this weekend when I reach Los Angeles.

On the way out, I saw a fit, attractive thirty-something woman running towards me with a black shirt that had the word MOTHER in silver lettering across the front. Cool, I thought, someone who wants to prove that you can be a mother and still stay in shape. I turned around after reaching the base of the Golden Gate Bridge and caught up to her after a mile or so.

The back of her shirt contained, in the same font and color, the word F*CKER.

Shut out

Every one-day Farallon Island cage diving trip offered by Great White Adventures this fall is booked solid. Nuts.

You may claim that the thought of lowering yourself into a cage in the water with a Great White Shark is too frightening, you fraidy cat, but then who are all these people who booked the trips solid? It's you, isn't it, you snake? If you're really so scared, let me take your spot.

The writer of the copy for this particular trip exercised get restraint in not using exclamation points, and wins huge points in my book:

Witnessing a very large White Shark attack and consume a 200 to 300 lb. Elephant Seal is an extremely dramatic event.

Vice Do's and Don'ts

Vice (Magazine) Do's and Don'ts - excellent, though not G-rated, as is the norm with Vice articles. One of the things I most looked forward to in Seattle was picking up a free copy of Vice from Rudy's whenever I got a haircut. (via kottke via Gulfstream)

Some is surprising to hear in the States:

If your parents don't happily pay for all your education, they are stupid gaylords. No matter how poor you are. They're also supposed to help you start a business and pay for the wedding and help you buy a house. Of course, once they get too old to live normally, you have to take them in. Old-age homes are not cool.

On fashion:

The basic rule is: You have to be at least a little uncomfortable.

We are in an epoch right now when everyone is determined to be at a sleepover. Nobody can endure any discomfort whatsoever, not even for a moment. If a woman goes out on a limb and gets dressed up one night, she punishes the world by wearing track pants and flip-flops for days after. If a man feels even slightly warm he takes his shirt off and lets the whole world see his hairy tits. Back in the Wild West, we were wearing three-piece suits and top hats in the middle of July. Can we not have at least a modicum of discipline? It's not that hard. Men just need to stay away from belly tattoos, chokers, cargo shorts, cargo pants, umbrellas (under any circumstances), colored sunglasses, long hair, tribal tattoos, wool hats, and piercings. Women need to avoid platform flip-flops, belly-button piercings, toe rings, cleavage, low-riding jeans if they're chubby (we're talking to you, London, England), thongs, shirts made to look like tattoos, cowboy hats, fake tans, and Von Dutch.

Another 100 Do's and Don'ts from the Onion's Amie Barrodale.