A podcast about books, art & life — not necessarily in that order
Okay, I don’t exactly take back all the comments I’ve made about how terrible the standard coffee is at Starbucks, but I will stop in for a cup of Pike Place today in honor of CEO Howard Schultz’ decision to sue to regain ownership of the Sonics and keep the team in Seattle.
Remember, Clay Bennett:
I scored 26 out of 34 on The Rather Difficult Font Game. Top that!
Oh and, like my wife, I’m
Speaking of which, it’s high time we rented that movie.
What I’m reading: Locas
What I’m listening to: She and Him, Vol. 1
What I’m watching: A marathon of The Deadliest Catch, in preparation for the premier of the new season.
What I’m drinking: Guinness Extra Stout (bottled)
What I’m happy about: That Starbucks’ new Pike Place roast isn’t anywhere near as offensive as its old coffee. I mean, I still wouldn’t choose to stand on line behind a bunch of people ordering orange mocha frappuccinos, but at least I know that if I DO have to go to a Starbucks, at least I’ll be able to get a decent black coffee. Oh, and here’s an article on their retro mermaid logo. This is not a mermaid.
What I’m sad about: That DirecTV’s installer messed up the installation of my new dish, so a bunch of my HD channels are badly digitizing/artifacting. Now I gotta work at home today so they can get someone out here to realign it. But it’ll be pretty sweet to have all those extra HD channels.
What I’m pondering: Why LeBron James is getting so much MVP consideration, given that his team is barely over .500 in a terrible conference.
Portishead’s first studio record
I’m also all for something a little less depressing than the solo album by their lead singer, Beth Gibbons
500,000 songs on an iPod? Just. Bring. It.
Sitting in White Castle for lunch today, I thought of starting an “Overheard in White Castle” category for this blog, but realized that every entry would be a variant of what I had heard on line:
Customer 1: You never ate White Castle before?
Customer 2: Not sober, no.
In the month that he’s lived with us, we’ve come up with several nicknames for Rufus. His ruthlessness with his plush friends has made him “The Toya Destroya,” while his ability to pee for 10 minutes at a time earned him the sobriquet of “Austin Powers.”
I just discovered his second tick in three days — it’s currently taking a dip in Lake Isopropyl — so I’ve decided that Rufus, following in Prince Harry’s footsteps, will now be known as the “Ginger Tick Magnet.”
Tick #1 was enough of a signal for me to buy a 3-pack of Frontline Plus for Dogs. Reading over the labeling, I discovered that the product “can also be used for the treatment and control of flea, tick and chewing lice infestations on breeding, pregnant and lactating bitches.”
And in a happy coincidence, Shoot ‘Em Up is our next Netflix DVD!
* * *
Bonus dog cuteness!
“I didn’t do it!”
I don’t really believe in the term, “Mental Health Day,” but this qualifies. It’s a gorgeous day, so I decided to take a vacation day, run some errands, hang out with Rufus, and otherwise not do any job-related stuff.
One of the errand-class activities was upgrading this site to WordPress 2.5. The new administrator interface is different enough that it made me averse to writing anything this morning, but I figure I oughtta post something on it before the dog & I head out to Ringwood Manor for a little meander (with cameras, of course).
Here’s a little double-whammy I’ve been waiting to post. I’m not getting anywhere in my ruminations on them, so I offer them up to you, dear readers. I hope they coalesce into a little something that you can share with me.
First, Ron Rosenbaum offers up some ruminations on Hiroshima in the 21st century. (Of course, Ron being Ron, it’s “what we talk about when we talk about Hiroshima.”)
Then, Steven Heller examines the history of the CND symbol, and how it may stretch back a lot further than its official 50 years.
I’m gonna head out with my dog; don’t work too hard.
In my previous post, I decried some lame-ass attempts at infusing “literaryness” into an article that chronicled the decline of the New York Knicks. My complaint was that the writer’s story is compelling enough that it doesn’t require the trappings of middlebrowness-trying-to-prove-its-smartypantsness in order to please hip urban crowd.
But just because I lambasted the editor involved in those decisions, I wouldn’t want you to think I’m dropping my own high-brow snobbishness. In fact, Amy & I receive a whole spectrum of viewpoints, on line and in print. It ranges from. . . well —
— Hegel to Heigl!
The mag on the left is the official magazine of St. John’s College in Annapolis & Santa Fe. I attended graduate school for 2 years in Annapolis and, as I’ve written on numerous occasions (most recently/ramblingly here), it was the most important period of my life. What I learned there — including how to learn — informs every day of my life.
So I was overjoyed (I’m an easy mark, I know) to open the current issue and see an article from Laurence Berns, the first tutor I had in my first semester in the program, chronicling the process of putting together the graduate curriculum 40 years ago. The best part of “Why Didn’t We Know About These Books?” (a question from one of the early grad students), is Mr. Berns’ discussion of choosing which books to include in the program and when to get to them. There’s a funny passage about one tutor’s enthusiasm for the Theaetetus
Michael Ossorgin, tutor, ordained Russian Orthodox priest, Dostoyevsky expert, and musician, was perhaps the most sweetly intelligent man I have ever known. Some days after I had shown him my Literature selections, he called to invite me to lunch. He had developed a better idea for that sequence, but he would never say that.
As soon as we were seated for lunch he turned to me and said, “Larry, I think all of human life can be understood in terms of the Iliad
and the Odyssey
.” And then for about two hours he led me in a wonderful discussion about how the Iliad and the Odyssey clarified the foundations of human life, at the end of which I asked him if he would redraw the literature sequence to extend the time for the Iliad and the Odyssey.
He did. Of course, that’s the first section that I studied under Mr. Berns when I arrived in Annapolis.
(You can download a PDF of the Winter 2008 magazine over at the St. John’s publications page or directly from my site. It’s about 1.3mb, and Mr. Berns’ piece starts on page 26 of the PDF. There’s also a neat piece on Hegel (of course) by Peter Kalkavage, another tutor who had a profound influence on me. I’ll write more about that topic later, since it involves re-typing a 15-page essay of his. You should go buy his new book, The Logic of Desire: An Introduction to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit