Overtime Again!

Any fan of basketball should be watching the Celtics v. Bulls series. Holy crap are these games fun.

Late Update: Celtics just ran out of gas, there. Poor Paul Pearce looks like his legs have abandoned him. But just don't understand why no one got Ray Allen the ball at the end of regulation or the first OT.

In anticipation of the Wolverene movie...

...here's a look back to when our favorite "dark hero" used to swig beers like water, annoy everyone in sight, and regularly look at porn.

Remember those days? That was awesome.

Plastics

It being a generational thing, I never really understood what was so funny about the "plastics" line in The Graduate. Perhaps it's because I was already aware of the new irony that environmentalism brought out of it. Does that make me too serious? I doubt it - I've got the same problem with most of Mike Nichols movies.

To Trek or not to Trek...

All of the scenes where Shakespeare is quoted in Star Trek.

Who said Trek wasn't high art?

Dear Comcast

Version's internet service is faster, their TV picture isn't distorted on several channels, and they aren't charging us MORE for not signing up for phone service.

Wonder why we switched?

Thanks for playing!

Women in Comix

I always knew that women were portrayed in sexist manners in mainstream comix (i.e., Marvel and DC). Hell, even Nexus's Sundra acted in silly ways sometimes (although I loved her costumes when she got the juice for a few issues).

But Marvel Divas? Sex in the City in the Marvel Universe? Really? Honestly? People buy this stuff? And take those pictures seriously.

Wow.

Quote of the Day

"I always prefer to believe the best of everybody, it saves so much trouble" - Rudyard Kipling

Deep Thought

While I appreciate that jury duty is part of every citizen's responsibility, waiting around in the jury pool is just damned boring.

Cavfay

I must admit that I don't know a whole lot about C.P. Cavafy other than his fantastic poem Ithaca, one of the few poems that has stuck with me over the years. This new translation by Daniel Mendelsohn seems like it's worth checking out. The linked review makes it sound delicious, with commentary like:

In Cavafy's world, everything has already happened. The fortune is spent, the pantheon abandoned, the body grown old. This overpowering sense of belatedness is what provokes the tone of his poems — rueful, distanced, knowing but never wise.

and

Because of the polyglot nature of the English language, the sound of great English poetry is the sound of monosyllabic Germanic words chiming against multisyllabic Latinate words (Shakespeare’s "seas incarnadine" or Tennyson’s "immemorial elms"). Echoing such effects, Mendelsohn makes me wonder if it wasn’t the deliciously mongrel nature of English, which Cavafy spoke and wrote perfectly, that first provoked him to forge his own hybridized idiom. The fact that the few poems Cavafy wrote in English contain phrases like "penetrating eye" and "transcendent star" (the Latinate word wedged against the Germanic) suggests that the poet’s ear for English was at least as acute as his translator’s.

Double Portraits

Chino Otsuka's double portraits are amazing.

Quote of the Day

"Try to choose carefully, Arren, when the great choices must be made. When I was young, I had to choose between the life of being and the life of doing. And I lept at the latter like a trout to a fly. But each deed you do, each act, binds you to itself and to its consequences, and makes you act again and yet again. Then very seldom do you come upon a space, a time like this, between act and act, when you may stop and simply be. Or wonder who, after all, you are. ... That's why I like the sea."
- Ursula LeGuin, The Farthest Shore

Andrew Sullivan

A long article about this fascinating man, who writes his own prolific blog here.

Stop Drinking!

The ambivalent story of one guy who decided to stop drinking for a month. Funny:

I discovered that I use alcohol the way Susie Orbach claims women use fat: as a locus for blame, a red herring. Off the sauce, I was still tired, lazy and prone to overeating carbohydrates and chocolate. I still spent too much money, talked too much and went out too much.

Children's Books

One of the great things about having a kid is revisiting kids books. While some are sentimental and inane, most are full of wonder and fun. Reading Dr. Seuss with Hunter - esp. my favorite I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew - has been extremely fun for both of us. Even young adult literature has been very entertaining lately. The Harry Potter books were supurb, and even Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games was a very entertaining read (despite a disappointing ending).

N.D. Wilson writes about his experience as a young adult writer:

When I write for kids, I try to embrace the wildness of the world. I have no desire to trick children into false security. My characters almost always begin a story afraid. ...
Enough posing. I'm childish. I like books for kids. I like reading good ones. I like trying to write good ones. I like readers that still have some elasticity to their imaginations.

Learning JavaScript

It's something that's long overdue, but i'm starting to learn JavaScript, mainly by working through some tutorials i've found at JavaScript Kit. You can see my fledgling results here.

Tips, recommendations, etc. are all welcome!

Why Do They Stay, Explained

Fascinating account of the reasoning behind why someone might stay in an abusive relationship. I've always wondered the answer to this question myself, and this argument makes a lot of sense.

Blogging 101

An interesting view of blogging - pros and cons, how to get started, and how to maximize the benefits - from a technical writer's perspective.

Musical Synchronicity

Listening to Brian Eno & Harold Budd's The Plateaux of Mirror while job searching today, I realized that the first minute of the title song sounds just like the recurring theme of Twin Peaks - not the theme song, but the arching theme that recurred several times an episode during season one and was part of what made that show so enjoyable.

Brought me back to those shifting evergreen forests where Owls are Evil.

That's a Lot of Money!

As people start getting hot and bothered about "defense cuts", Ezra Klein points us towards this telling fact:

Sketching

Here's a quick sketch I did of Kelly and myself on our wedding day.

Dylan on Obama

I've never heard his radio show, but if it's half as entertaining as the interviews i've read of his thoughts on Obama, i'm missing out.

Newspaper Reality

Having had to talk to the Globe's customer service recently, i'm a bit disenchanted with them anyways, but from I've been reading lately about the NYTimes' bad business decisions, it certainly seems like all of the newspapers are not long for this world. Case in point is this antidote about why the NYTimes didn't integrate it's Book Review section with Amazon. Incredible.

Processing the Past, Toddler Style

Driving home from daycare the other day, Hunter randomly said: "I saw grandma and grandpa. They say hot diggity!" The funny thing about this is that G&G had visited Hunter over a month ago, trying to get him to say Mike's favorite saying, and even though he hadn't seen them since then, Hunter had been spending that time learning what G&G were saying.

Learning how Hunter processes his information has been one of the biggest lessons Kelly and I have learned with Hunter. He's always talking about random stuff that happened in the past, and we coldn't figure out why until K. found this article about why toddlers don't do what they're told.

Essentially, toddlers are constantly thinking about the past and not necessairly what's going on right now (and definately not about the future). This means that when H. doesn't want to put on pants - which is every single day now - we just tell him that "okay, but when you're cold, your pants are in your bedroom." Sure enough, 10 minutes later when he's cold he comes running in to say "i'm cold. I'm getting my pants in my bedroom!"

This is all a function of the amount of information that they have churning thorugh their heads every day. All we know as parents is that we're finally able to let go and accept that he won't always do what he's told when he does it... but he probably will do so in the near future, and that's what you need to concentrate on.

Quote of the Day

"The eyes of an animal have the capacity of a great language. Independent, without any need of the assistance of the sounds and gestures, most eloquent when they rest entirely in their glance, they express the mystery in its natural captivity, that is, in the anxiety of becoming (Bangigkeit des Werdens). This state of the mystery is known only to the animal, which alone can open it up to us—for this state can only be opened up and not revealed. The language in which this is accomplished is what it says: anxiety—the stirring of the creature between the realms of plantlike security and spiritual risk. This language is the stammering of nature under the initial grasp of spirit, before language yields to the spirit's cosmic risk which we call man. But no speech will ever repeat what the stammer is able to communicate."

- Martin Buber, Ich and Du.

Decadance Defined

Custom smells for your eBook.