Month: January 2009

Party politics and the middle east

You know, when representatives of over 30 countries agree on something… it’s kind of miraculous. All the agendas, and internal bickering, and differing philosophies, etc. Hell, just getting the government of a single democratic country to take a position on something is an achievement, since every firm position is bound to offend some power group “at home”. So something that… Read more →

More Book-y Bits

Did you get a chance to experience the cognitive dissonance that comes from VanderMeerian words read in a high-toned children’s literature type voice? Speaking of VanderMeerian weirdness, there was a nice little slice of it over at Tor.com. Sometime soon (yes, Real Soon Now) I will write another golden book post, and this one will focus on a Pat Cadigan… Read more →

Noted Quotes

A couple of quotations from my web reading recently: “I agree with you, Mr. Chairman, waterboarding is torture.” –U.S. Attorney General nominee Eric Holder (via) “Watch half a film. Ring someone up, ask them about their dreams. Make your life as patchy a discourse as possible.” —M. John Harrison, explaining something about writing “If only it were all so simple!… Read more →

Aside

I must be the worst techo-tv-phile in the world. I just watched a movie that’s been on my DVR since June of 2006. I’m not sure why it’s wrong that I kept it there for two and a half years without either watching or deleting it, but I’m sure that it is somehow. It wasn’t that good either.

Closing the book-related tabs

And here we go again… I’ve been reading Jeff’s daily reviews of the books in the Penguin Great Ideas series. While I don’t think I’m interested in trying to read all sixty of them in sixty days (despite Jeff’s examples and the exhortation of the Harvard University Press) I am very impressed with the presentation of the volumes, and have… Read more →

Happy Accidents

That’s “A Bar at the Folies-Bergère” by Édouard Manet. I spent a bit of time thinking about it recently because of a cut-and-paste error. It started when the guys over at SFFAudio pointed out that the podcasts of UCSD lectures are available for a limited time. Their intention was to direct us to quickly grab the MP3s (before the were… Read more →

Closing tabs from last year

You know the drill. I’m skipping the stuff that deals with Bush, Harper, or books, which should get their own posts. I had a weird fascination with Cass Elliot for a while there, primarily as a reaction to how much I was digging her tune California Earthquake. There were some weird side effects of this, from the relatively obvious, like… Read more →

Aside

Wow. Some people are so dumb it would take them an hour to make minute rice. I want to get that site’s customer list so I can do a tour and just slap people upside the head. Or possibly sell them them my air purifying apparatus, which takes advantage of non-commutative loop space in M5-branes to make air vibrationally harmonic.

UPDATE: That page appears to have disappeared, but you can still see some of the madness at the root page of the domain. Or, at lots of other domain names all for the same thing.

The Eldritch Dark

Now as the twilight’s doubtful interval Closes with night’s accomplished certainty, A wizard wind goes crying eerily, And on the wold misshapen shadows crawl, Miming the trees, whose voices climb and fall, Imploring, in Sabbatic ecstacy, The sky where vapor-mounted phantoms flee From the scythed moon impendent over all. Twin veils of covering cloud and silence, thrown Across the movement… Read more →

Some Movie Recommendations

I wrote this up for another online venue, but I might as well put it (lightly edited) here. The idea was to recommend five movies that you think are “good” and that people are less likely to have seen. I chose these: From the Heist/Caper/RomCom Of The Old School pile, I’d choose O’Toole and Hepburn in How To Steal A… Read more →

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Canada
This work by Chris McLaren is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Canada.