A podcast about books, art & life — not necessarily in that order
Watching the Giants-Seahawks game on Fox right now, and I’m just wondering: given that Washington state is currently searching for a couple of convicts who busted out during the weekend, maybe the Fox guys could stop promoting Prison Break so heavily during the broadcast.
Just as my last night of bachelorhood wasn’t exactly filled with strippers and belly-shots, our first weekend of living in sin was pretty laid back. Our main activity was watching flicks, leading to this truly bizarre assortment of Hollywood offerings:
We moved all of Amy’s stuff here on Friday, so now we need to sequentially unpack (and, of course, make room for stuff). I can’t wait till we get to the point where we finally figure out what to do with our two copies of the Stanley Kubrick Collection DVD set.
I don’t know the answer to that question, but if you’re looking to buy me stuff and avoid going to a mall, you oughtta go to my wish list on Amazon! It’s worth checking out, just for the novelty factor of having the Metamorpho collection followed by Jane Jacobs!
The official VM fiancee isn’t much more coherent in her tastes, as you can tell from her wish list. She’d sure be happy if someone got her that Complete Buffy DVD set. (On the other hand, I’m convinced she only put this on her list because it might get her closer to Ed Hochuli.)
It’s been a great year for smart comics, so if you’re looking for gify-buying advice for other geeks, you need to check out Tom Spurgeon’s Black Friday and Beyond Shopping Advice For Sophisticated Comics Fans 2005!
We spent Thanksgiving down in Holmdel, NJ, at the parents of Amy’s buddy Scott. Highlights (besides the food) included a college student who was like an idiot savant of the behind-the-counter dynamics of fast food (accent on the ‘idiot’), and a conversation at the other end of the table about how terrible “drugs” are.
We got home and watched the first part of Kill Bill, which probably won’t become a Thanksgiving tradition, but was a lot of fun.
The official VM fiancee moved in yesterday, and we celebrated with a double-feature of So I Married an Axe Murderer and Showgirls! I got a light dust of snow to fall during the night, so she woke up to a peaceful view of our suburban future.
“Wow,” she said. “The only thing we’re missing is a monkey butler to serve us coffee.”
And you wonder why I’m getting married!
In other news, I posted another set of pix to Flickr. There’s about 100 snaps from my October 2002 trip to Paris, including some good “celebrity” shots from Pere Lachaise.
I figured out some neat Photoshop automations that should help me process a whole ton of other shots so I can post them up there, too. The big set from New Zealand will likely be next.
I hope you all have a great holiday weekend.
(Update: posted the NZ pix (11-12/03) and the California coast drive pix (6/04))
It’s my last night of bachelorhood, dear reader! The official VM fiancee is moving in tomorrow, and I’ve been living it up in style tonight!
That’s right: Now that I’ve gotten over my ass-whomping case of the avian head-cold, I did laundry, cleaned the bathroom AND the kitchen, and also had a long phone conversation with my mom! I live a playboy’s life!
Seriously, that was about it for this evening, along with searching for a new company to host some MySQL databases, since Network Solutions isn’t doing a great job handling my DB needs (which has kept me from moving this blog into a neat new format).
So them’s the thrills at Chez VM. Bathroom and kitchen floors are nice and clean, laundry’s folded, and Mom and I were able to talk about some of our family history. Turns out she found some good resources at Yad Vashem about the branch of our family that was wiped out in Poland in 1941. I’ll post some links to that when she sends them over.
She came across all these records from other, distant family members, posted since the 1950s. We talked about all the generations and stories that were lost. She told me that her rabbi had some interesting comments recently about the undying nature of the soul, but both of us thought they were bordering on Kaballah mysticism.
I told her I think stories are how we live after we die. It reminded me of the line from Unforgiven where Clint Eastwood says, “Hell of a thing, killin’ a man. Take away all he’s got and all he’s ever gonna have.”
She told me that one of the massacred was supposed to have been named Rachel, and Mom couldn’t understand why another name showed up for that person in the records. I told her that there was probably a really easy explanation for it, but that it was just a day-to-day story that was lost. Stories are how we keep living.
Got socked with the office head-cold. Grr.
Amy & I are about to head down to Philadelphia for a friend’s wedding, so I’ll suck it up, take some Airborne, and leave you with this quote from Latrell Sprewell’s agent, Bob Gist:
Anyone who thinks he should play [$1.1 million], that’s absurd. […] He might as well retire. Latrell doesn’t need the money that badly. To go from being offered $7 million to taking $1 million, that would be a slap in the face.
Oh, and here’s a neat article about the abuses of eminent domain, if that sorta thing interests you.
And here’s a moment of zen. Enjoy:
I don’t know why I get worked up about this stuff, but there’s a boneheaded editor at the NYTimes who today decided that Tamiflu is a flu vaccine. It’s not. It’s a drug that treats the flu. There’s a world of difference. The writers of the article, Andrew Pollack and Tom Wright, got this correct, referring to Tamiflu as a drug throughout the entire piece.
Given the huge debate going on about how to improve the vaccine infrastructure to prevent a flu pandemic, a headline like this is only going to give more people a wrong impression about the issues.
Neat interview at BusinessWeek about innovative retail achitecture with New Retail author Raul Barraneche:
[W]hat interests both the company and the architects involved is the fact that retail spaces are, by nature, building types that allow for innovation. Stores offer quick turnaround times, as opposed to, say, a residence or a museum. […]To paraphrase [architect] Zaha Hadid, shopping is an effective way to see a city; these days, to see what’s new in architecture, the most efficient thing to do is to go and look at stores.
Make sure you check out the accompanying slideshow.
It’s nice to see that baseball’s trying to get some illegal substances banned, with the new steroid penalties. Sure, it was fun to see mega-juiced players belt cartoon-level home runs for the past decade or so, and older players show unprecedented power, endurance and recovery time, but the carnival had to come to an end at some point.
(Of course, maybe that point should’ve been after Brady Anderson socked 50 home runs one season, and then tore the muscles off his rib cage the next year. Don’t get me wrong; I don’t mind performance-enhancing products. After all, I’m kicking back with a Tanq-10 & tonic right now. But it’s legal, and it makes me virtually invulnerable to criticism.)
Anyway, what’s good about the new penalties is that it whomped the MLB Players Association square in its testosterone-shrunken nuts. Reading over ESPN’s recent “expose” about steroids in baseball, it seems pretty clear that the players’ union was the main obstacle to any sort of testing for steroids.
Sure, the owners were happy that home run numbers were up, because it brought in more fans and got more TV revenue, but that added money was likely offset by the increased number of players getting injured, spending more time on the disabled list than ever.
What is amazing about the new policy is that it also involves testing for amphetamines. What the heck were they thinking, adding speed to the banned substance list? Are they planning to cut the season down to 100 games and give them July and August off?
I don’t care how much these guys are being paid; it’s boring to play 162 games of baseball. Cal Ripken, who couldn’t find anything else to do for more than 16 seasons, has to be the dullest man in existence. Or he had to be totally hopped up on goofballs.
Trying to get players off of speed would be like trying to get me to quit drinking during trade shows; it’d be tough to implement, and the final result wouldn’t make anyone happy.
A lot of companies talk about “sales force synergies” when they merge, but they’re usually full of crap.
On the other hand, it makes perfect sense for Allergan (makers of Botox) to acquire Inamed (makes of boob implants)!
(Since I was hanging up Playboy centerfolds when I was at the tender age of three, I like to think that I have “the leading breast aesthetics portfolio”, but hey.)