Month: January 2008

Bienvenidos a Miami

I’m headed off to Miami, FL, this evening for a couple of days in the fun and sun. Which, given the recent turn back to the cold and rainy here, couldn’t have come at a better time. My parents and I will be visiting my sister, who’s down there all of January for work, and with luck I should be back Monday evening. In the meantime, I leave you with this, the Friday Random Guess 10:

  1. “$1000 Wedding” by Willie Nelson
    With all the invitations sent the young bride went away
  2. “The Apology Song” by the Decemberists
    I’m really sorry, Stephen, but your bicycle’s been stolen
  3. “Jerry Was a Race Car Driver” by Primus, guessed by Eric
    He never did win no checkered flag
  4. “Laughing” by the Guess Who
    Time goes slowly but carries on
  5. “How Lucky Am I” by Maggie Gyllenhaal
    I’m young with a few bucks to spare
  6. “Caramel” by Suzanne Vega
    It won’t do to stir a deep desire
  7. “God Only Knows” by Petra Haden (orig. the Beach Boys), guessed by Eric
    You never need to doubt it
  8. “Bridge Over Troubled Waters” by Simon & Garfunkel, guessed by Eric
    All your dreams are on their way
  9. “Pillar of Davidson” by Live, guessed by Kim
    Go see the foreman, go see the profiteer
  10. “Only the Good Die Young” by Billy Joel, guessed by Eric
    Send up a signal, I’ll throw you a line

It works the same as always, the same way it worked last week, and, as always, no prizes will be awarded. But you’re not really in just for prizes — are you?

As always, good luck! Have fun while I’m gone!

Stop. Collaborate and listen.

I got some spam today that asked, “Who is Vanilla Ice? Would you like to Party with Vanilla Ice?”

Those, my friend, are two of the age-old mysteries of the universe. I believe Socrates himself puzzled over those very same questions — although, sadly, he died several centuries too early to put those questions to the test.

They’re also remaking Tron. Seriously.

Admittedly, it’s just one website and an anonymous source, but a Neuromancer movie? Hasn’t that boat sort of sailed? Gibson’s novel is still important for the quality of its writing and the depth of its characters — neither of which, I imagine, is exactly what would draw big-budget Hollywood to the project — but its vision of “cyberspace” is a little out-dated. It’s difficult to see how they would get around that — and thus provide the special effects I’m sure Hollywood is interested in — without seriously messing with the story.

Not that that’s ever stopped anyone before. I’m just saying, how do you film Neuromancer without its cyberspace looking like something out of the ’80s?

And just how do you know dying penniless won’t be fun?

I’m sure in the radio version, when it ends, rather than starts, with a poem, it’s not quite so depressing or jarring, but here’s how today’s Writer’s Almanac ends in the e-mail version:

Although for a time [Zora Neale Hurston] was the most prolific and most famous black woman writer in America, interest in her work faded away in the 1950s, and so did her money. She worked at odd jobs for the next ten years, writing a few magazine articles every now and again. Her death in 1960 in a welfare home went largely unnoticed and she was buried in an unmarked grave.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.

Yes, you too can die penniless, unnoticed and unremarked, even if you’ve had great early success! Yea, go writers!

I think I still have a copy of Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God that I think I was supposed to have read for a class but never did. I really need to remedy that.

Borges is rolling over in his grave…now.

Proof that evil bastards like to read good books, too — Karl Rove answers Vanity Fair’s Proust Questionnaire:

Who are your favorite writers?
In alphabetical order: Jorge Luis Borges, Gabor Boritt, Ray Bradbury, G. K. Chesterton, Winston Churchill, David Herbert Donald, T. S. Eliot, Joseph Ellis, Gary Gallagher, F. A. Hayek, Paul Horgan, Paul Johnson, Tom Lea, C. S. Lewis, Abraham Lincoln, John D. MacDonald, David McCullough, Merrill Peterson, Robert Remini, Andrew Roberts, William Shakespeare, Adam Smith, Alexis de Tocqueville, Evelyn Waugh, and Robert Wiebe.

Then again, that list does have a slightly focus-grouped feel to it. As does his answers to the greatest love of his life (“America”) and his heroes in real life (“The men and women who volunteer to go into harm’s way wearing the uniform of our country’s military.”) More interesting, and maybe telling is his answer to the trait he most deplores in others. Rove’s answer? “Not being authentic.”

It is to laugh.

Via William Gibson.