On the recommendations of a friend, I made a trip back to Julio’s last night to score a bottle of Anchor‘s “Our Special Ale”, a.k.a. “Christmas Ale 2008“. Actually, when I say “a bottle”, what I really mean is “one regular bottle for drinking now, and one magnum for taking home to share with the Boys”. (If you download their… Read more →
Tag: something great
Aside
I’m normally not much for ordered lists, and especially not ordered lists of “favourites”. I tend to break things down into relatively low resolution buckets and am happy with that. For instance, with music I tend to assign a song to one of {Awesome, Good, OK, Tolerable, Terrible, OH MY GOD MAKE IT STOP} and stop there. There’s not a lot of reason to try to assign comparative rankings among Awesome songs–they’re all worth listening to, pretty much at any time, and the ranking would be a function of my mood, what I’ve listened to lately, etc, and thus would be so constantly changing as to be useless.
That being said, it occurred to me earlier this week, that I have a ready answer to “What’s your all-time favourite song?”, and that answer hasn’t changed at all in over half a decade now. And second place has been locked for just as long. After that there’s just a bunch of Awesome songs, though.
Uncommon Madness and the Altoids Of Soap
Have I talked about Dr. Bronner’s here before? My searches say not, but I remember expounding upon it recently–although it might have been at my poker game. If you don’t know Dr. Bronner’s, I’m not even sure where to start trying to explain it. The short version is this: my shower contains a bottle of liquid peppermint soapIt’s easy to… Read more →
Aside
You may also remember my pleasant surprise at how much I enjoyed Titan’s first collection of Nemi strips. I’ve been reading the strips online fairly religiously since. The second collection of strips also showed up today, and I’m quite looking forward to going through it to see which, if any, of the strips collected in this volume will be new to me. Apparently the ones in Metro are a sanitized subset of what’s in the collections. There’s a preview of 24 strips from the collection (use the cursor keys to navigate the set) at Titan’s site.
Explainers In The Mainstream.
Hey, remember back in June when I wrote a bit about how much I was digging The Explainers? Well, it appears the mainstream media has caught up with me…he said arrogantly.. The Sunday Book Review in the New York Times reviewed the book this weekend. It was the cover review. Here’s an excerpt: Of course, representing any Feiffer strip with… Read more →
Lapham’s Quarterly, Again
I have previously mentioned how thrilled I am with Lewis Lapham‘s current project: Lapham’s Quarterly. The current issue, which focuses on education, is a fine and marvellous read. Actually, the cost of the issue is more than justified just by the introductory essay. Lapham is on fire. Here’s a little bit: Why would any politician in his or her right… Read more →
Closet Land
While thinking about the use of torture by governments today, I found myself wishing I could just make everyone watch Closet LandThe “why” here is obvious if you’ve seen the film. If not, then here’s a quote from the creator’s site: “The film captures the psychological landscape of those who engage in torture and aggression, while also defining the nature… Read more →
Diverse practyk in many sundry werkes
My goal is to redefine the whole history of rhyme ‘Cause the only way to free the soul is to free the mind And no wisdom as old as this should be confined To total mystery, so we’ll just read the signs And DaVinci codes, and try to see the science In this linguistically-composed pristine design –extracted from Rhyme Renaissance… Read more →
Golden Books 1: The Sun, The Moon, And The Stars
Over at the blog Steven Brust shares with his roommates, the question was posed about the “golden books“—those ones that because you hit them at just the right time, and they were just the right thing, made a lasting change in you, and how you interact with the world. I didn’t comment there, but I’ve been thinking about it. Several… Read more →
Old John Paul is keepin’ a tab
My musical crush on Montreal blueswoman Dawn Tyler Watson continues. While “Hey Hey” is still the top of my playlist, some of the covers from the recent En Duo album are climbing up. For instance the cover of Patty Griffin‘s tune “Wiggley Fingers” (lyrics) on the album is pretty amazing. Something about Dawn’s voice, especially when she gets to the… Read more →
T-shirts from futures past
After four years of wearing only solid colourMostly black, I admit. t-shirts for everyday wear–primarily a habit I developed during my daughter’s infancy, as between her and I several shirts a day were suffering various stains, and I wanted cheap, “hot swappable” clothing–I am starting to pick up a few new interesting printed shirts. (Yes, I have lots of “not… Read more →
Limits Of Human Ability
Because I have a young daughter, I spend some time every week looking at various clips of dancers on YouTube, for her entertainment. I’ve seen some pretty amazing stuff, but today I saw one that is hands down the most amazing thing. It’s a performance at the Circus Festival of Monaco, by two dancers, Wu Zhengdan and Wei Baohua from… Read more →
Jaycee
I read a lot of science fiction. I have, since I was a kid–the first novel with no pictures I ever read was A Wrinkle In Time. The first “adult” book I ever read was Foundation. When I was younger I had the opportunity to read a lot of the early short work in the genre. Libraries had a lot… Read more →
Chris Jordan On TED
I’m still loving almost every one of the TED Talks, but every now and then one pops up and really grabs me by the collar. Here’s the one that really hit me this week. This is a presentation by photographer Chris Jordan, where he presents some of the images from his exhibition, Running The Numbers. (At the link you can… Read more →
The tabs, they must be closed.
You know the drill–some things that I found worthy of some comment: I quite liked Julie Rehmeyer’s short piece on the math scholars who accidentally solved an astrophysics problem. It’s got all the good stuff: pure math, astrophysics (come on, “gravity lensing” just sounds cool, even without any context), serendipity, and above all a good science journalist doing the writeup,… Read more →
