So, when you hit your first birthday you’re starting your second year of life, right? And when you hit you second birthday you’re starting your secondthird year of life? Well, that means that when you hit your 99th birthday, you’re starting your 100th year of life. (I can actually prove this via mathematical induction, if you doubt me.) Which means… Read more →
Category: General
Unrelated Lapham Quotes
“Talk about the flag or drugs or crime (never about race or class or justice) and follow the yellow brick road to the wonderful land of consensus. In place of honest argument among consenting adults the politicians substitute a lullaby for frightened children: the pretense that conflict doesn’t really exist, that we have achieved the blessed state in which we… Read more →
This whole ports thing…
While I’m Bush-bashing, I should toss out at least some small comment on the whole ports thing. Look, I actually don’t think there’s necessarily anything wrong with the ports deal–I think most of the reaction to it has been ridiculously overblown. In fact, I think Kenton Kelly has some excellent points in his piece over at Reason Online: Beyond that,… Read more →
Personal Space Limits
How can you not want to read an article that includes this: Bin Laden was “very polite and humble and shy. He didn’t like too many kisses… he didn’t mind being hugged but kisses he didn’t like and he just seemed to float… across the floor,” and this “I never really thought I’d be a Muslim,” he told ABC. “I’d… Read more →
Krewe du Vieux
I follow the online journals of a lot of authors. One of them is Poppy Z. Brite, onetime wunderkind of the flash horror set, but lately the author of some really excellent New Orleans food porn novels. I really didn’t have much use for her early horror works, but both Liquor and Prime were excellent, both at portraying “the life”… Read more →
The slow inexorable conquest…
I’ve doing a little playing around with the information available at The Surname Profiler Project. The project describes itself as: A recent research project based at University College London (UCL) has investigated the distribution of surnames in Great Britain, both current and historic, in order to understand patterns of regional economic development, population movement and cultural identity. This website allows… Read more →
She’s From Away
When we moved to Halifax we found out that we were “Upper Canadians”, or more generally “come from aways”. Apparently we will never shed this distinction and become Maritimers, but Sarah has a chance. We’re not the only people to have this kind of experience, of course, and now there’s even a weekly comic strip that’s nominally about it (although… Read more →
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Trailerspeak
OK, this is more than a little awesome: “Voice Over” is the latest project of artist Brian Joseph Davis, who also did the Ten Banned Albums, Burned, Then Played project. in Voice Over, Davis created a text based on lines from 500 different film trailers, then gave the cut-and-pasted text to professional voiceover artist Scott Taylor to read. Of course… Read more →
OK, I might be alive…
Feeling much better, although not 100%. I just replaced some light bulb in my office–I have no windows in here, so I try to keep the place extremely well-lit, especially in the winter. For the last couple of years I’ve had four of the 100W-equivalent compact fluourescent bulbs, which are both more energy efficient and a whiter light. However, I’ve… Read more →
Oh, poor poor me
The Head Cold from Hell has really settled in now. It’s funny, because you’d think the head cold was the mildest ailment, and the easiest to get by, but I find that not being able to breathe right makes it impossible for me to sleep. Of course not sleeping is not the best way to get over a cold, so…… Read more →
Loathsome People
I had a good laugh (a “you have to laugh, or go insane” laugh) this morning while reading “The 50 Most Loathsome People in America, 2005” over at The BEAST . You should give it a read, and take your own laughs. Here’s two examples from the list: 15. Karl Rove Charges: A greasy pig whose only distinction in life… Read more →
SF authors say smart things (Part 2)
Responding on his message-board-cum-blog to a question about writing and “staying in the moment” Christopher Moore (whom I’ve mentioned here before) goes on at length about Buddhist concepts and their relation to the arts. Here’s the nub of what he says: In my studies I ran across an interview with Wynton Marsalis, wherein he compares Jazz to Sumi-e. What he… Read more →
100 things we didn’t know this time last year
Each week BBC’s “the Magazine” picks out snippets from the news, and compiles them into 10 Things We Didn’t Know This Time Last Week list. They’ve put the lists from 2005 together and made a master list of 100 things we didn’t know this time last year. Here’s a couple of snippets to encourage you to click through: 8. Devout… Read more →
1 down, 2 to go
Well, this came in the mail today. That means of the Seven Movies I Still Need On DVD, there’s only two left to go. (I recently realized that all of the movies on that list are ones I saw in Waterloo at the Princess. And there are other DVDs in my collection with the same history–most notably including the Chomsky… Read more →
