- Maybe I’m just still bitter that my family stood on line for several hours to see this when it was new — and missed out on Journey into Imagination (at the time a personal favorite and which is what we originally thought we were standing on line for) — but come on, the return of Captain Eo? Really?
- I’m always dubious about lists of new slang words. They inevitably seem like they’re just a joke on whoever is compiling them — “can you believe what I got that reporter from the Guardian to believe?” — or like somebody’s just gotten corrugated ankles, gone to goat heaven, and started making things up. [via]
- Graham Greene once entered a contest to parody himself. He came in second. [via]
- Sketchy Santas. Parents, do you really want your kids sitting on these men’s laps? [via]
- And finally, speaking of which, Jack Bauer’s making a list and checking it twice…
personal
It’s cold outside, there’s no kind of atmosphere…
Via Cynical-C.
So it snowed a little here last night.
At a guess, it’s about 12-14 inches. So it’s just as well that I don’t have to go in to work tomorrow morning. Or for any morning until January 4. That’s right, I’m using the last of my vacation days at the end of the year, just like in 2008. There’s really something wonderful about having all those days of not having to do anything stretched out ahead of me. (And, of course, being paid for it. My heart goes out to anyone out of work this holiday season.)
I plan to do some reading — I’ve still got a little ways to go to meet my self-imposed 50-books-a-year minimum, thanks largely to a little year-long reading project — some movie and TV-watching, and maybe, just maybe some writing. I’m seriously thinking of entering the Geist Literary Postcard Contest. I’ve got the postcard, and I think the stirrings of a story idea to accompany it. Let’s see if that January 15th deadline is enough of an impetus to get me to finish it.
Other than that, not much to report. We put up the Christmas lights, though we’ll probably wait to decorate the tree until my sister comes home later this week, and we spent most of this morning shoveling out the driveway. It was a pleasantly lazy weekend here, and I’m looking forward to plenty more of the same.
Saturday leftovers
- Michael Schaub on being an English major:
I remember being an English major at a Big 12 school in the mid-’90s. This was an agriculture- and engineering-heavy school where liberal arts departments were isolated in a building that permanently smelled like paint thinner. Whenever I’d tell people I was an English major, they’d look incredulous and say “What are you going to do with that? Teach?” Like in the same tone you’d say, “What are you going to do with that? Trade blowjobs for meth?” Good times!
I was an English major at a pretty agriculture- and engineering-heavy school myself, so I know the feeling. Even my undergraduate advisor told me, “You know, you really can’t get a job with this degree.” (My advisor within the English department was a lot more encouraging, but I met with him all of once, the day I declared, and he left Penn State around the time I graduated. So take from that what you will.)
- Are you now, or have you ever been, a Lovecraftian horror? [via]
- Will we be telling our grandchildren (or even our children) about this thing we used to call “fish”? [via]
While the climate crisis gathers front-page attention on a regular basis, people–even those who profess great environmental consciousness–continue to eat fish as if it were a sustainable practice. But eating a tuna roll at a sushi restaurant should be considered no more environmentally benign than driving a Hummer or harpooning a manatee. In the past 50 years, we have reduced the populations of large commercial fish, such as bluefin tuna, cod, and other favorites, by a staggering 90 percent. One study, published in the prestigious journal Science, forecast that, by 2048, all commercial fish stocks will have “collapsed,†meaning that they will be generating 10 percent or less of their peak catches. Whether or not that particular year, or even decade, is correct, one thing is clear: Fish are in dire peril, and, if they are, then so are we.
- Sorry I missed this around Halloween (and by dint of not living in Chicago), but I think a zombie-preparedness fitness class is a terrific idea!
- Has xkcd been watching the Penn State Monty Python Society’s Mall Climb?
- Ken Jennings takes the logic of Pixar’s Cars maybe a little too far.
- Speaking of Pixar, this Pixar opening parody is pretty great. [via]
- Imagine if the producers of FlashForward had gone with Robert J. Sawyer’s original concept and made the Large Hadron Collider responsible for everything that happens? Imagine how laughable the show might seem then. [via]
- I’ve never been remotely tempted to buy a bootleg DVD, despite an abundance of them on the streets of Manhattan. Still, their cover art can be pretty delightfully bizarre. [via]
- NBC sued over font usage. Really.
- Well, Coldplay does kind of put me to sleep anyway… [via]
- According to a recent survey:
Almost half of British consumers have lied to their friends about seeing a classic film to avoid the embarrassment of admitting ignorance of great movies.
I’m reminded — as it seems I often am, often enough that I should probably get around to reading the book — of the literary parlor game described here, where everybody one-ups each other with all the books they haven’t read. (The “winner is an American professor who, in a rousing display of one-downmanship, finally announces that he’s never read Hamlet.”)
For the record, of the “top ten classic films people most lie about seeing,” I’ve seen all but one of them. Can you guess which one I haven’t seen? [via]
- I often find it a little ridiculous what parts of the internet they do and don’t block in my office: blogger.com, but not www.blogger.com; twitpic.com, but not Twitter itself. We have a YouTube channel, for instance — I’d link to it, but there’s nothing there right now — except I can’t visit it at work, even when I’m working with our UK team to upload video to it. Glad I’m not the only person who thinks these policies are a little outdated:
As I’ve said a whole bunch of times, the “competition†for those of us in traditional media industries—book publishing, broadcasting, newspapers and magazines—is no longer other book publishers, broadcasters, or newspapers and magazines. Instead, our “competition†is now the plain fact that, even if you stipulate that 99.9% of the for-free internet is worthless nonsense, the remaining 0.1% is large enough to absorb anyone’s attention full-time for the rest of their life. For anyone with an internet connection, running out of interesting things to read is completely a thing of the past.
- This is probably the subtlest Rickrolling I’ve ever seen. [via]
- And finally, Birds on the Wires [via:
Birds on the Wires from Jarbas Agnelli on Vimeo.
Thanksgiving
We had a very nice Thanksgiving here, with far too much food for a small army, much less the nine of us around the table. The dog offered to take up some of the slack and polish off the turkey for us, but we didn’t take him up on his kind offer. I’m still a little over-caffeinated right now, but would otherwise be thinking there’s actually something to this whole turkey-tryptophan thing. It was a really nice day, and for that — and for family and good friends — I am very grateful.
Hope you had a good Thanksgiving (or Thursday), too!
Goodbye, October
So, October. That was quite a month, huh?
It’s hard to believe it was just a month ago that I was in Las Vegas, much less that it was only a few weeks ago that my sister was married (sorry, still no photographs), or even that it was only about a week ago that my mother and I went to see Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me! at Carnegie Hall. It was a very good month, but I’m actually looking forward to a relatively uneventful November, to be honest.
In the meantime, here’s some of the music I was listening to in October.
- “Transmission Pt. 1” by the Lower 48
- “Nina Simone” by Tom Russell
- “This Blackest Purse” by Why?
- “White Dove” by John Vanderslice
- “Oh What a World” by Sonos
- “This Land Is Our Land” by Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings
- “Older Now” by Grant-Lee Phillips
- “Dimestore Diamond” by Gossip
- “Time of the Season” by Ben Taylor Band
- “Alone and Forsaken” by Social Distortion
- “Bad Cover Version” by Jordan Galland
- “Alone Again” by Tok Tok Tok
- “Just Dance” by Gary Go (feat. Mr Dialysis)
- “Crazy Love” by Thea Gilmore
- “Sarah” by Ray LaMontagne
- “Sea of Heartbreak” by Rosanne Cash (feat. Bruce Springsteen)
- “Librarian” by My Morning Jacket
- “Pills” by Perishers
- “Say Say Say” by Kesang Marstrand
- “The Very Thought of You” by Nellie McKay
- “This Is For” by Ingrid Michaelson
- “Oh!” by Eric Hutchinson
- “The Walls Are Coming Down” by Fanfarlo