January 31, 2006
"The Deposition"
The short story in this week's New Yorker, "The Deposition," is by Tobias Wolff, a favorite of mine. The held mail from my vacation arrived today, and my issue of The New Yorker was missing. Thankfully, the short story is online.
Academy Award Noms
The Academy Award nominees were announced this morning. I have not seen Brokeback Mountain yet, but I'm guessing it's a heavy favorite for Best Picture, only because the other four nominees in the category all have some flaw that journalists can fixate on. Other heavy favorites: Ang Lee, Reese Witherspoon, and Philip Seymour Hoffman (in a two-horse race with Heath Ledger, at least based on what I've read about Ledger's performance). I'd guess Paul Giamatti nabs the supporting actor Oscar, also, though I have yet to see two of the movies in that category.
I haven't seen any of the Foreign Language Film nominees. That's the first time I can remember that happening since I started watching The Oscars. Well, the announcements always provide another way to prioritize my moviegoing and Netflix to-do's for the next month.
It's unlikely to be something they'll risk doing in real time, but I'd love to see Jon Stewart showing replay footage from the evening, the same way he opens the Daily Show each night. With much of it, no commentary will be necessary.
January 30, 2006
Raconteurs
Chuck Klosterman blogs the Super Bowl week for ESPN.
Jack White and Brendan Benson are The Raconteurs (via Stereogum).
A new Malcolm Gladwell article, this one on police profiling. It's been a while since he's published.
January 24, 2006
Sundance
Here are a few of my pics from Sundance, where I've been since Friday. This is my third straight pilgrimage to Sundance for my birthday (yes, sometime this weekend my odometer turned another notch, damn it all to hell), and navigating the fest now feels like secondhand nature.
I'll try to post a few more pics later this week, but that depends on whether or not I can clear some space off of the hard drive on my now ancient laptop. Everytime I try to open one of my RAW image files, my computer clicks and whirs and coughs like an old smoker.
Highest wattage celebrity about town: Jennifer Aniston. Jason saw her the first day, and I caught a glimpse of her yesterday (or was it the day before? it's all a sleepless blur) emerging from one of the celeb giveaway stores, and a nanosecond later she was consumed by a mob of people with cameras.
Biggest movie acquisition: Fox Searchlight bought Little Miss Sunshine for $10.5 million and 10% of gross. Biggest Sundance deal ever, and a sweet deal for the creators who had put up a hefty $9 million to get the movie made. Beyond that, no movie has emerged as the clearcut gem of the festival yet, though studios tend to judge the festival on pics of commercial appeal, and there does appear to have been a dearth of movies fitting that description. Most of the ones I saw which seemed destined for commercial success (Thank You For Smoking, Lucky Number Slevin, The Descent) already have U.S. distributors.
Most fun movie screening: Last night I attended a midnight screening of Neil Marshall's The Descent at The Egyptian Theatre. Last year I saw Oldboy, Three Extremes, and Wolf Creek at this Park City at Midnight series, so that gives you an idea of the type of fare showcased in this series. The movie is already out on Feast should come out later this year, caught up as it was in the Weinsteins spinoff from Miramax.
Favorite movie thus far: No single movie has been the revelation that, say, Pulp Fiction was back in the day, but probably the movie that contained some of the most enjoyable and enjoyable micro-moments was the latest by Michel Gondry, The Science of Sleep, starring Gael Garcia Bernal. Rumor has it that Warner Independent snatched the movie up just a half hour after the World Premiere. It won't have the mass commercial appeal of Gondry's previous movie, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (the movie is destined to split audiences: just look at its early ratings on IMDb), but Gondry still captures the child-like quality in all of us better than almost anyone, and his depiction of male insecurities about women is dead-on in a way that could only come from someone who has lived with them much of his life. The movie feels autobiographical in many ways, and Gondry revealed that all the dreams in the movie are ones he has had. Gael Garcia Bernal, besides seeming like a really pleasant and mischievous guy, proves himself to be a gifted comic actor, and he had to wrestle with French and English in addition to Spanish throughout the movie.
My favorite brush with celebrity: If you walk up and down Main St. enough, or if you attend enough movies, you can't help but satisfy run into someone famous. While waiting in line for the Weinsteins party really late one evening, just as the clock passed midnight and ushered in my birthday, Scarlett Johansson (accompanying Josh Hartnett) walked past me. Yes, my embarrassing crush on her, dating back to the days before she became a sex symbol, is common knowledge, and so my birthday was a good one, even though I could no longer feel my feet.
The Greatest
New Cat Power album The Greatest out this week (yes, endorsement implied).
January 19, 2006
Always look on the bright side
Brian came all the way up from Philadelphia today to go see The Odd Couple with me. I'm not a big musical guy, but among the things I wanted to do in NYC before I left was to see a live show starring Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick. Even though chances are that Matthew Broderick will look exactly the same for the next twenty years, the same cannot be said for Nathan Lane. For tonight's show, I had second row seats, dead center.
We grabbed dinner beforehand at Fatty Crab, the new and much buzzed-about Malaysian restaurant in the Meatpacking District. It's one of those tiny NYC restaurants where weaving between the tables and all the people standing inside waiting for a table requires holding your hands over your head like you're dancing to hip hop, shimmying sideways, and wriggling your hips like a hula hoop dancer. It's an entire restaurant of two-person tables, so arriving with an Allen Iverson-sized posse is unwise.
To avoid some of the restaurant's usual claustrophobia, we arrived at 6pm, about a half hour before the dinner rush. The menu is manageable, just a few pages, and the food is meant to be eaten family style, with dishes arriving in random order, whenever the kitchen happens to knock them out.
The first of our dishes to arrive was the Fatty Duck, a plate befitting its name, much like characters in Chinese karate movies. Take, for example, Zu: Warriors from Magic Mountain. In this movie, one of the characters is an old man with huge, superpowered eyebrows. His name? Long Brows. Take almost any Chinese martial arts movie where the hero has an overweight sidekick, and 8 times out of 10 the sidekick's name will be translated as Fatty or Piggy or Porky. The Jet Li/Tsui Hark classic Once Upon a Time in China has one character named Porky, another named Buck Teeth Soh. Their appearances, I assume, are vivid in your mind.
This is all a long-winded way of saying that the Fatty Duck consists of four pieces of duck, each topped with a healthy, juicy layer of fat. Brian and I attacked this dish with forks, then chopsticks. Then we conceded and grabbed it with our hands, and the waiter nodded his approval. Spicy, sweet, salty, awesome.
Second place in the race from kitchen to dinner table were the Heritage Foods Slow-Cooked Pork Ribs. I'm a huge fan of braised meats in general, especially when eating out because I'm too impatient to spend the time braising at home, and if you take braised meats home as leftovers, they taste just as good or better the next day. These ribs, coated in a sweet sauce, were so soft they melted in our mouths like butter. By the time we finished, the two of us looked like two-year olds after consuming a bucket of ice cream with our bare hands. I shudder to think of the carnage had we ordered the signature dish of Chili Crab.
Once our Nasi Lemak arrived (coconut rice, chicken curry, slow poached egg), we realized we'd over-ordered by just a bit, a sentiment confirmed a minute later when a steak/noodle/clam/chili pepper dish (whose name escapes me now) arrived to complete our order. There is a wine list, but this is food to be enjoyed with beer, and we washed our meal down with a Hitachino Classic, a sort of IPA.
This is food that's survived the journey across the Pacific. I cringe at the words Pan-Asian or Asian fusion, and all the Jean-Georges Asian fusion restaurants have been disappointments, massively over-priced for food whose roots lie in cheap street-side food stands, but this isn't a remix, it's a faithful rendition of flavorful Malaysian cuisine, with all its intense flavors. It will cost you a whole lot less than a meal at a Jean-Georges Asian joint like Spice Market and leave your taste buds a whole lot happier. The best news is that it's open until 4am from Thursdays through Saturdays, making it another addition to my list of really late night weekend food oases. Add Fatty Duck to the Beef Marrow and Oxtail Marmalade at Blue Ribbon Restaurant as two of the most pleasing and decadent ways to counteract (or top off, depending on how you view it) a weekend drinking buzz.
After cleaning our hands with turpentine in the bathroom, we hopped a cab up to the Brooke Atkinson Theater. The show was set to start in 15 minutes, and already a long line had formed. A man was passing out flyers to everyone in line, and then he pressed one into mine, and it took me a minute to digest the news. The show had been cancelled because Nathan Lane had laryngitis. I was crestfallen and felt like a failed host, but Brian took it well considering he'd travelled all the way from Philly for one night. He suggested a movie instead. As we walked away from the theater, a ticket broker materialized out of the shadows, like an ambulance chasing attorney at the scene of a traffic accident.
"How about seeing Spamalot instead?" he said, leering through a mouth in which every other tooth appeared to have never grown back, or perhaps he'd pawned them off to someone coming out of a dentist's office. "Show starts in five minutes."
I responded with my best poker face, as if I'd hit a set on the flop and was contemplating a fold. But inside, I knew this was the lucky break we needed. I hadn't seen Spamalot yet, it won the Tony for Best Musical in 2005, and it was among the more difficult shows to score tickets to. Brian was a huge Monty Python fan, knew nothing of the show, and had watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail "a thousand times." The ticket broker interpreted my frown as skepticism and produced a business card as proof of his legitimacy. It read "Tix R Us".
A few moments later, each of us $50 lighter, Brian and I were sprinting through the usual Times Square sidewalk traffic down to 44th St. Dashing up three flights of stairs, we sat down just as the lights went down, our $50 having bought us seats in the second to last row in the theater, a thin pole about seven rows up bisecting our view (though the theater was cozy and we were in the center).
At first I thought the entire show would be a literal rehash of the movie on stage. It began that way, and I was worried that we'd paid $50 to watch what we could've watched at my apartment for free. To my relief, the musical does branch away from the movie to generate some parallel identities, for example as a post-modern spoof of musicals themselves (one of the songs is titled "The Song That Goes Like This" and begins: "Once in every show, there comes a song that goes like this. It starts off soft and low, and ends up with a kiss. Oh where, is, the song, that goes, like this."). And, as the lady working the cashbar told us with breathless excitement at intermission, a portion of the French guard skit was improvised every night. Even she, having seen the show countless times, had no idea what was coming.
This is somewhat of a spoiler, but if it's the same gimmick every night, it may be worth knowing ahead of time if you can choose your premium seat, but the Holy Grail ended up being located below seat D101 in the Orchestra. I don't know if it's always seat D101. From our nosebleed seats, we couldn't see who occupied the lucky seat, but apparently it was not an attractive woman, because the cast member who went to bring the lucky audience member on stage said he'd have to choose a surrogate and ended up bringing what appeared to us to be a hot young woman named Elizabeth Riley on stage. She was presented with a trophy and a Polaroid of her standing with the cast. So, if you're a really attractive young woman and can obtain seats in the general vicinity of seat D101, or seat D101 itself, you stand a better than average chance of ending up a part of the show.
The reenactments of famous skits from the movie didn't do much for me, but some of the musical numbers were both funny and catchy. The Lady of the Lake in Act I is a tickle (Lauren Kennedy). The cast members probably have the best time of anyone in the theater, but the audience is a close second. It's a musical I'm putting on the recommended list for out-of-towners, so many of whom deem a musical an essential part of a successful New York visit.
So The Odd Couple had been cancelled. Hey, as one song in Spamalot urged, "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life." It was hilarious when all the crucified folk in Life of Brian were singing it to Jesus, and it was sage advice for me on this night. Brian and I were whistling that little ditty the whole subway ride home.
January 17, 2006
Anything is possible, except signing a really famous NBA star to endorse our shoes
Li-Ning, the third most popular mfr. in China behind Nike and Adidas, signed Damon Jones of the Cleveland Cavaliers to be their spokesperson. Abel Wu, their VP of brand marketing, explained, "We were looking for an N.B.A. star to represent the N.B.A. image and be our spokesperson. Mr. Jones is one of the outstanding 3-point shooters who can always change results of the game at a key moment."
Well, you have to start somewhere, but Damon Jones?
Here's the Li-Ning logo:
The Li-Ning slogan is "Anything is possible," which also seems to ring a bell.
Li-Ning should just sign a Lebron look-alike to be their celebrity endorser, even if he doesn't play basketball. Or maybe Yao Ming's younger brother or dad.
January 15, 2006
Ridiculous
Managed to catch the last quarter of the Colts-Steelers game...wow. That was the most entertaining quarter of football I've seen all season. I don't even know where to begin.
Two plays might epitomize the game. Manning is sacked on 4th and 16 after Joey Porter blitzes yet again, from the same spot as on the previous play, and isn't picked up. Steelers take over on the 2 yard line of Indy, then Bettis fumbles. Nick Harper, who had his knee slashed open by a knife (wielded by his wife) a day earlier, picks up the fumble and breaks into the open field, on his way to an apparent game-reversing touchdown. Then, with just one man to beat, that being athletic but by no means swift Ben Roethlisberger, for some reason Harper cuts back towards the center of the field and allows the QB to tackle him with a one-armed swipe to the shins.
I think it's safe to say free agent Mike Vanderjagt won't be kicking for the Colts next season. Rich and I were on the phone laughing our arses off after Vanderjagt boomed it about 25 yards right and all the way into the stands. As Rich put it, that's pretty much the equivalent of yanking it into the Blue Monster at Doral.
I felt bad for Dungy, but then, in the post-game press conference, Peyton Manning hung his offensive line out to dry, saying something to the effect of, "I'm going to be a good teammate here and say the right thing, but we had some protection problems." Not a cool thing to say about the guys who have to protect your butt agains a couple of 250 to 350 pound behemoths coming in and putting you on your butt next year.
No one's ever going to feel sorry for Manning when he blames everyone but himself everytime he loses, again, in the playoffs. A huge talent with the maturity of a three year old.
January 13, 2006
Runs in the family
Happy birthday to my nephew Ryan, who turned 3 on Sunday. Last Sunday was all about him. By the way, if you're struggling with a gift idea for a 3 year old, I suggest a fish. Jen got one for Ryan, and a fun time was had by all watching Ryan carry on a conversation with his new companion, who Ryan insisted on naming Dorothy even though the fish was male. I believe that's a product of the marketing efforts of The Wiggles, with their character Dorothy the Dinosaur, and Pixar, who featured a fish named Dory in Finding Nemo.
As for this coming Sunday, Ryan (um, he's the littler one below) left little doubt as to what that's going to be all about. That's right, I'm going to be drilling him on the Cover 2. There comes a time in every child's life when he must trade in his Wiggles t-shirt for the uniform of his favorite sports team. As far as sports allegiances go, the father's genes are dominant.
"What's your favorite animal, Ryan?" we'd ask. And even though his vocabulary didn't include Urlacher yet, his gestures left no doubt.
Two more 'staches
Two more reasons 2005 was the year of the mustache.
His name is, well, you know. His mustache transformed him into a big TV star.
The Terrible Triad
I had a terrible flashback when I saw Carson Palmer crumple after suffering a torn ACL and MCL and damage to the media meniscus. That injury is commonly referred to as the terrible triad because they tend to occur together. The knee is just a stubborn joint, it can bend forward until the leg is straight, and it can bend backwards until your foot hits your butt, and that's about the extent of its operation. It's not so good with side to side forces, like a big defensive lineman rolling into it from the side.
The good news is that ACL reconstruction has come a long way. In the old days, they wouldn't even bother repairing the ACL, and athletes would just back out and play with an unstable knee, though it was highly recommended that you strengthen your muscles around the knee. My doctor actually gave me that option, but I didn't want to limit myself to sports requiring only straight-ahead linear motion, like running or cycling. My docs didn't bother repairing my MCL, but they did take a piece of my hamstring to replace my ACL, and they snipped a bit of my torn meniscus out and stapled the remainder together with some biodegradable material that just dissolved after a while. A half year of rehab later, and I was back out and running around, with the added benefit of being able to predict inclement weather with my reconstructed knee.
***
This hard drive is a real brick.***
Play Windows Media files in your Quicktime player on the Mac.January 12, 2006
Bob Loblaw
What foods to buy organic (lots of fruits, meats, and baby food), and what not (seafood).
Analysts guess that Sony's Playstation 3 will cost $499 when it's released, as opposed to the $399 that the Xbox 360 theoretically costs now, though if you want one right at this very moment you'll probably pay a lot more than that on eBay.
Skype 2.0 for Windows offers free video calling. Non-Windows XP users don't get the video calling feature, but that means we get to continue calling in the nude, so we've got that going for us.
Nikon to halt production on all but two of its seven film camera bodies, phasing them out one by one. My old Nikon film camera is already starting to display that healthy antique glow.
John Madden Arrested for possession of turhumanheaducken (I've flirted with the turducken for many a Thanksgiving now, so James just had to pass this along to me).
Digi-portraits - Sweet! I want one!
Kobe vs. Lebron tonight, though it's really lame in the NBA that star players almost never guard each other, so it's really more like Lebron and Kobe tonight, on the same basketball court and occasionally within a few feet of each other. John Hollinger compared the two statistically (ESPN Insider subscription required), and to summarize, Lebron won out by the slightest of margins.
January 11, 2006
No free lunch
So you own and use lots of Mac apps and are wondering whether or not they'll run on the MacBook Pro and its Intel processors. Here's the skinny.
New Mac apps bearing the Universal symbol will run on both Intel and PowerPC Macs. This includes Mac OS X, iLife ’06, Safari and Mail. Other apps will run on Intel-based Macs with the aid of Rosetta.
Pro Mac Apps－Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro, Motion, Soundtrack Pro, Aperture, and Logic－won't run on Intel-based Macs. Owners of those apps will have the option of upgrading to a Universal version of the app for a fee, and those are expected to be available by March 21, 2006. Full details here.
An extra $49. Seems like Apple should just allow existing users to download an update, but they've got the users hostage on this one.
January 10, 2006
Apple of my eye
Oh, new MacBook Pro, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways (starting with $2,499 of them). Will you be my Valentine?
The Webcomics Examiner's Best Webcomics of 2005.
Anthony Lane looks back on the year in movies.
Download the Mac beta for Adobe Labs (formerly Macromedia) new application Lightroom, a competitor to Apple's Aperture. For many people who just need an application for photo retouching and processing, either Lightroom or Aperture is likely a better choice than Photoshop, which has always been bewildering in its complexity to newbies (I say "likely" because I've yet to try Aperture or Lightroom, though I'm downloading the latter now; I wish Apple offered a tryout copy of Aperture).
The pre-beta version of Filmloop is available for download. This is photo-sharing software that pushes pics in a slideshow to other people's desktops. Apple today announced that iPhoto in iLife 06 will include a feature called Photocasting, which allows users to push iPhoto albums to other iPhoto users through .Mac. I'm surprised Flickr hasn't released something similar (Flickr allows you to publish your photos as an RSS feed, but that doesn't pass the grandma ease-of-use test). If I ran the show at Flickr, I'd have a lot of people focused on cranking out an app like Filmloop ASAP. This all reminds of PointCast, the first popular push software for the web. It went kaput, but everything old is new again. For Christmas I wanted to get my parents one of those digital picture frames that could display pictures all of their kids would upload. I did some research on the Ceiva service, and it turned out to be a massive disappointment, with outrageous annual subscription fees. So I got them something else, with the hopes that I could just find a way for all the kids to publish photos to their desktop instead. And without even a request to the Lazyweb, my wishes are nearly answered.
IMDb plot summary for Roberto Benigni's next movie Tiger and the Snow, to be released in 2006 in the U.S.: "A love-struck Italian poet is stuck in Iraq at the onset of an American invasion." I'm all for the resilience of the comedy and the human spirit in the face of tragedy, but jeepers creepers.
The humane way to kill a lobster, a short article dedicated to David Foster Wallace as a response to his essay "Consider the Lobster," an article originally written for Gourmet and which provides the title for his latest essay collection. Besides being humane, that is just an impressive move with which to show off your chef's knife.
If you want a copy of Flash Gordon by Mike Hodges on DVD, you can find it on Amazon Canada. I saw this on television in Taiwan in 1982 during a family trip, and it's one of the earliest movies I saw that left specific scenes impressed in my memory. In one scene, some sort of competition, Flash and someone else take turns sticking their hands in holes in this giant mound of dirt. I forget what happened if you chose poorly; some creature chewed off your hand? In another, Flash and his adversary wrestle on a moving circular floor with spikes that would emerge intermittently. If you fell off the side off the floor, you fell to your death, I believe. Finally, at the movie's conclusion, Max von Sydow's Ming the Merciless is impaled by the spike on the nosecone of a spaceship, a fitting end for the criminal in a cheesy, kinky, quintessentially 80's movie. I wonder why this DVD is out of print in the U.S.; I'd like to see it again.
January 7, 2006
B-Dazzle Scramble Squares
Christmas Day, I woke up to find Mike and Joannie working on a puzzle at the breakfast table. Nine squares, each with either the head or tail of a wolf on each side. The goal was to arrange the nine squares in one 3x3 grid so that the heads and tails matched up. There were four different wolves.
I spent a half hour before breakfast trying to tease it out, to no avail. I always got 8 pieces in place, the but the last piece never fit.
Rich and Carol let me bring it home with me to finish. At Derek's house I spent another hour on it, beginning to develop a system. 9 pieces, each of which can go in 9 positions, and within each of those 9 positions, each piece could be rotated into one of 4 orientations. The number of combinations is staggering: 9! * 4^9 or 95,126,814,720. However, one quickly realizes that the easiest way to solve the puzzle (short of using a computer algorithm) is to start with one piece as the center piece and then work out from there. You can choose any side of the center piece and there will only be several other pieces that connect to it. From there, there are only several pieces that can connect with those two pieces, and you can quickly determine which just don't work. It took me about five or six maddening hours of using that method to finally stumble across the solution, pictured below.
There may be other solutions, though I'm not certain. I know that in order to preserve my sanity I'm not ever going to touch this puzzle again.
Makes a great stocking stuffer, though. The puzzle is deceptively simple, the rules are easy, and you can drive people crazy with it. The puzzles are manufactured by a company called B.dazzle, Inc., and they're called Scramble Squares. You can purchase any of the dozens of variants of the Scramble Squares directly from B.Dazzle online for $9.95 each. There's an online sample puzzle at their website.
January 5, 2006
God, I wish I knew how to quit you!
Because we're guys, my brothers and I are constantly bantering around movie lines. The quote du jour, useful in so many situations: "God, I wish I knew how to quit you!" Actually, you can just use the quote by itself, in any context, and it will crack us up 90% of the time. We haven't even seen Brokeback Mountain yet, though we have seen Brokeback Goldmine, and I've read the short story by Annie Proulx.
Jon Stewart to host the Oscars
News bit here. The Chris Rock experiment ends after just one year. Hosting the Oscars is probably the most unimportant but highly scrutinized hosting gig in the world.
Stewart typically focuses on politics, so I'm curious to see him turn his wit on Hollywood. Amidst all the tearful speeches and white-clenched knuckles around gold statues, a host who's willing to poke fun at the biz to balance out the extravagance of the whole affair is a really good thing. Stewart seems to fit the bill.
January 4, 2006
Trailer park
If you're a member of Netflix and a friend and I haven't added you to my Netflix friends list, drop me a note. I enjoy the quizzes about my friends' tastes.
***
Trailer (high def or std) for Mel Gibson's next directorial effort, Apocalypto, about the end of the Mayan civilization. Wow, I'm speechless. I really don't have anything to say about that.***
I love when David Letterman gets serious. I wish I'd seen this segment, in which Letterman landed a few body blows on Bill O'Reilly (YouTube video clip). Letterman even displays a stronger grasp of logic than O'Reilly, who tries to exonerate the CIA's intelligence failure on Iraq by saying MI-6, Putin's intelligence agency, and the intelligence of Mubarak's agency in Egypt all made the same errors.Letterman: "Well then that makes it all right?"
***
Jet Li's next and perhaps final martial arts movie: Fearless. Trailer under the Media link (click on Media and then click on the Trailer link below the Story button). His run of American movies was a disaster (as were those of most of the Hong Kong and China action stars and directors who sought out Hollywood), but when teamed with Chinese directors and focused on martial arts period pieces, his batting average is quite good. Ronny Yu and Yuen Wo Ping...I'm going to go see this.Every year, I hear a rumor that Jet Li is going to retire and become a monk. I'm okay with that, as long as a band of evil martial artists attack his monastery, forcing him to come out of retirement to whup their butts. And, oh yeah, as long as movie cameras are rolling to capture every ass-kicking moment. If that happens, then I'm totally cool with that.
***
Teaser for Michael Mann's Miami Vice feature film starring Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx. I'm not sure I wanted my fond memories of the television show to be tainted by a revisit with new actors (Farrell's Fu Manchu doesn't feel right, and "You understand the meaning of the word verboten? As in badness is happening right now." really doesn't go down easy), but I've not passed up a Michael Mann simmering testosterone hotpot in the past and I probably won't start now.Back when I was in the fifth and sixth grade, sneaking over to a friend's house to watch an ep of Miami Vice was one of the great illicit joys in life. Yes, I led a sheltered youth.
Ginger
I'm not a cat person (in fact, I'm allergic to them) or much of a pet person in general, but Rich and Carol's cat Ginger, who I met over holiday break, cracked me up. She's 17 years old. I don't know if the translation constant of cat --> human age is the same as for dog --> humans, but if so, Ginger is older than the hills.
Compound juices
For the longest time, I thought Seth Rogen, who played Ken on Freaks and Geeks, pulled a reverse Kirstie Alley and lost a ton of weight in order to play Logan Echolls on Veronica Mars. I finally paid attention during the credits and realized that Echolls is played by Jason Dohring. Same face, same voice - they look like brothers.
***
On so many airplane flights, they don't have apple juice or cranberry juice, but they do have cran-apple juice. SKU and space-saving decision, or the fingerprints of the powerful cran-apple lobby?***
At the grocery store near Derek's apt in Chicago, Bartlett pears were selling for $0.59 a pound. I wanted to cry when I saw that. Those same pears sell for $2.49 a pound at Whole Foods in Union Square.***
Sign up for the beta test of AllPeers, which looks like it will be a killer extension for Firefox.***
Since we have such a big Brady Bunch-esque family, we instituted an annual Christmas gift exchange several years back. Every year I use the Excel random number function to assign everyone another member of the family to shop for, and all we have to do is purchase for that one person. It reduces the holiday shopping stress by at least one magnitude of order, and everyone receives something substantial. The days of receiving three pairs of socks, a book, and a $20 GC to each of four different stores is over.I highly recommend the same for those who are driven bonkers by holiday shopping.
January 3, 2006
Back from holiday break
They say writing is a muscle (and I believe it), and if so, mine is weak and out-of-shape after a holiday break with no writing, minimal time online, and wave after wave of consumption of various holiday foodstuff. Come to think of it, I'm just flab all over. Much of the popularity of New Year's fitness resolutions can be explained by timing, New Years coming directly after typically the most protracted and gluttonous of American holidays.
Just as with going to the gym, every day I don't write adds to the output I feel I need to generate the next time I do write. After a while it feels impossible to make up for all the lost time. The only way to get rolling again is a little chunk at a time.
***
Do people still eat geese, or is it an anachronism from Dickens' novels and a time before people learned to appreciate other fowl? I never hear of anyone eating a Christmas goose anymore. Is it not good, or is it just too much hassle to farm-raise geese to make it a grocery store staple? Geese don't seem to be endangered. I see them everywhere.***
The BT Technology Timeline - BT has a futurology department, and they've built this interactive timeline that runs out to 2051 (which probably covers the remainder of my life expectancy). My first thought on seeing this was that some lucky SOB's job is to sit around and predict the future. The second was that even the most advanced futurologist has no clue when the Cubs will finally win a World Series.Lots of fun to play with, though there's little in the way of supporting evidence. A cursory kicking of the tires spilled these nuggets (my notes in parentheses):
- Androids will make up 10% of the population in 2015 (ensuring that already awkward blind dates will begin with the administration of the Voight-Kampff test)
- The world's population will peak at 10 billion in 2039 (you think finding an apartment in Manhattan is tough today)
- Virus crosses over from machine to human in 2025 (because some eager SOB forgot to do the Voight-Kampff test before jumping into the sack)
- Rise of a global machine dictator - date unknown (Skynet?)
- Robot superior to humans in 2030 or so (well, we still have 25 years to enjoy our supremacy)
- Creation of The Matrix in 2030 (related to the prediction above?)
- Fully telepathic communication in 2049
- Brain downloads in 2049 (shortly thereafter, someone will write a plug-in to allow direct sending of brain logs to all the major weblog software packages; confusion will reign as the term blog is re-appropriated to refer to brain-logs)
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Some guys TiVo'd the previous night's Texas Lotto drawing and then bought their buddy a matching ticket that day. Then they set up a camcorder, played the drawing while their buddy was there, and put the video up on Google Video. I hope they take their buddy out for dinner or something. That's just cruel.At any rate, it's just an example of a type of humor which seems to be at the peak of its popularity: laughing at the person in the dark, the person who is being honest and genuine. It's the modern ironic mode of expression as entertainment.
Punk'd. The Ali G Show. All those reality television shows in which contestants are kept in the dark as to the real premise of the show, like My Big Fat Obnoxious Fiance. Even The Colbert Report, at times.
I hope this mode of humor hit its saturation point in 2005. There's a mean-spiritedness at its core that isn't that funny and is only tolerable in small doses, a level it has long since surpassed in mass media.
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While searching for a copy of The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner on DVD, I stumbled across Nostalgia Family Video, a site which carries just such hard-to-find movies on DVD. The aforementioned DVD is just one of many gems in their catalog.