Holiday Monday has kept me too busy to properly blog, so you get a bit of a tab-closing list instead.
- I’m not sure that it covers anything new, but the piece from More Intelligent Life (the quarterly from the Economist) about authors and drinking was a fun read anyway.
- I’ve seen some stories about tough people in the news, but Lubna Hussein is definitely in the top ranks. Arrested for wearing pants, and facing a possible 40 lashes, she quits her job with UN (to make it simpler to go to trial), and then shows up for her trial IN PANTS. Damn.
- I see that some research has been done into marriages between people with different financial styles–like say my spendthrift ways and the nigh-masochistic disciplined frugality of my wife–and it suggests that while such marriages are common, the results are not necessarily good. I’ll keep this around as something to point to the next time someone mocks our “his”, “hers”, “ours” financial strategy.
- I love how the major media seem to lag a half-decade or so behind the world, and then seem kind of surprised when they stumble on a “new trend” that represents the long-term results of a shift that started in the not-so recent (relatively) past. Like say this NYT article about how creative people are using the web to connect with their audiences and peers, and to build a “presence” rather than moving to the places where they could expect to find peers and an audience–like New York. No surprise to me.
- Everytime Jeff Ford writes more than three sentences about a book, I end up ordering a copy. I hope he uses this power only for good.
- The teenage boy inside me regrets that this technology did not exist when he was running the show. The father-of-a-girl part of me responds by looking around for a baseball bat.
- When I said I was a spendthrift up there, apparently I’m actually a bit of piker in that department. Compare me to say awesome photographer Annie Leibovitz, and I just look terribly bush league. She makes over three million dollars a year from her photography, and has somehow still managed to get herself over twenty-four million in debt. That’s some dedication to debt, right there.
- And the winner of this week’s quote-that-makes-the-speaker-sound-most-like-a-jackass award would have to be Jeremy Abelson. “In the New York dating scene, the men of finance are the lions, and the women of fashion are the trophies. We have to maintain the purity of the genetic lines.” Just reading that make me want to scrape him off my shoe.
- I admit, the web site of the Soul Storage Company had me confused for a few moments… until I saw Strathairn, and knew it had to be movie propaganda (I could believe Giamatti would be in on a straight-up joke site, but not both of them.)
- If you like Joe Hill’s writing, you might want to check out a short film the BBC is hosting, Pop Art, based on Hill’s short story.
- BibliOdyssey always brings interesting things to the table, but I was particularly caught by a recent posting of Celtic designs.
- Any hope I had that the Solomon Kane movie would be either a good adaptation, or at least a good movie, is now crushed.
- I’m still too busy loving that the Irish crown a goat as their king every year to even process the fact that the practice was at risk. I did search Google News and could find no confirmation that the goat actually made it on time. (via Eddie Campbell)
- The goat thing totally beat out the other “new of the weird” item that caught my eye recently: the arrest of some Aussie and Kiwi masons as sorcerers.
- While I, as an occasional language pedant, am well aware of the force of Muphry’s Law, I hadn’t previously been aware of its name.
