- Instead of cutting Oscar winners’ speeches (and thereby any hope for spontaneity the whole ceremony might have), maybe they should start with some of the endless montages and interpretive dance numbers. Why not, instead of cutting the part that’s ostensibly what they whole evening is about, stop doubling the number of films being nominated?
- How to Succeed as an Ayn Rand Character
- Please Rob Me. As Waxy.org noted, this is “only dangerous if someone knows where you live” (or if they can extrapolate from other online information about you). But I know I’m a little hesitant to post that I’m away when the house is unattended.
- School used student laptop webcams to spy on them at school and home. Yikes! [via]
- And finally, A Brief History of Pretty Much Everything. [via]
Month: February 2010
“Come on baby, put the rock in the house”
Today is Wednesday, and there’s not a whole lot to say about it except for that. It was a lot more of the same — more reading chapters, more hoping I can get these two projects finished before February is done — except with much better weather than yesterday. I still don’t love the walk between the house and train station, especially today when I didn’t wear my boots but everything had iced over, but even this evening was a whole lot nicer than the wet sludge we had on Tuesday.
It’s Ash Wednesday, and as I joked on Twitter earlier this afternoon, it’s that day when, traditionally, we draw a circle of ashes around ourselves to keep the island’s Smoke Monster at bay. (Does that qualify as a Lost spoiler? If so, um, oops.) I hope that doesn’t make me a bad Catholic…although, truth be told, I also ate meat today, and aside from my sister’s wedding (which wasn’t a full mass), I haven’t really been anything like a regular churchgoer in years. Maybe it’s the four years at an all-boys Catholic high school that did it, I don’t know. I’d probably consider myself a spiritual person, if not a religious person, but despite how I was raised — and though it might pain my mother to learn this — I don’t know for a fact that I’d call myself Catholic. God and religion are definitely things I think about, seriously and often, but I’m not entirely sure I’d put a label on any of my beliefs. (Nor am I unwilling to admit that might be a little bit of a cop-out.)
In other news, I watched a little more of the Olympics this evening — mostly women’s hockey, Canada versus Sweden. At the time when I get home in the evening, it’s apparently that or curling on NBC. And despite having seen Men With Brooms, which is ostensibly a movie about curling, and despite realizing it’s not all that complicated, I remain a little mystified by just what those teams are attempting to do. (Though I’m with John Scalzi: these pants are nothing short of amazing.)
And that, really, is that.
Wednesday various
- I think I’m going to make a movie called Vaguely Historical People Killing Things and Shouting at Each Other.
- You know, Jeff VanderMeer is probably right: “in another 40 years lots of folks are gonna be laughing at lots of stuff we think works just fine now.”
- John Seavey makes the argument that Heroes is actually the best Watchmen adaptation ever. Yeah, I’m just not seeing it.
- “French celebrity philosopher” (how’s that for a title!) Bernard-Henri Lévy has come under fire recently for quoting a philosopher who never existed. [via]
- And finally, I didn’t watch this year’s Super Bowl, not even for the ads nor the stirring triumph of the New Orleans Saints. So I luckily missed this Dodge advertisement, though I got a general vibe from the internets that there was sexism aplenty that evening. The internets, they did not lie. So it’s nice to see someone parody the ad so skillfully, simply by reversing the genders.
Perpetual sludge
Today was such a wet and sludgy day, my first day back to work after a three-day weekend, and all around it was pretty busy. I’ve got several book projects in the pipeline, a couple that need to finished and off my desk before the end of the month, so I spent most of the day reading chapters for one of those projects and making some final edits where needed. I’m really just sort of glad the day is over.
This evening I spent a whole lot more time than I expected to working on a little side project, my mother’s birthday present. It’s all hush-hush, but her birthday is this weekend, and I’ve been putting together this gift for awhile.
And I also finished reading Scott Westerfeld’s The Risen Empire. It’s really space opera, and the fact that it ends on a cliffhanger with much of the plot unresolved is maybe the best argument against my whole “no new books for 2010” pledge yet.
And that’s that. Right now, I’m going to go to bed or watch Lost and then go to bed. I haven’t yet decided, though bed is definitely in the near future.
Tuesday various
- An inspiring profile of Roger Ebert and his struggles with losing his voice (and food, drink, strength) to cancer and how his life has changed since then. [via]
- Apparently, we were once this close to Israeli President Albert Einstein.
- Oh man, why did no one tell me yesterday was International Grover Appreciation Day?
- I think there’s an argument to be made that new and valuable art can emerge from appropriation, but wholesale lifting of entire pages without acknowledgment is still plagiarism and, therefore, still wrong. That much seems pretty clear-cut to me. [via]
- And finally, if I’d know this was what the Olympics was like — “Try to imagine Pegasus mating with a unicorn and the creature that they birth….I somehow tame it and ride it into the sky in the clouds and sunshine and rainbows. That’s what it feels like.” — I’d have been watching from the beginning.