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Entries for December 2004
At the end of his latest novel, Michael Crichton has attached a personal statement saying that “the theory of global warming is speculative at best”. “World powers, he says, use global warming to keep citizens in a state of fear, just as they did with the Cold War.”
What sort of city should New York be?. “You truly become a New Yorker when the city seems more to you than your workplace and a collection of shops and restaurants, when you start caring about the city itself, beyond your daily route, outside of your neighborhood, about the city we were and the city we might become.”
Some words and definitions that aren’t in the dictionary, but probably should be. Examples: “Caterpallor (n.): The color you turn after finding half a grub in the fruit you’re eating.” or “Circumvent (n.), the opening in the front of boxer shorts.”
Short review of Thomas Barnett’s book The Pentagon’s New Map. I heard Barnett speak at PopTech; his was one of the best talks.
Quitting the paint factory, on the virtues of idleness. If I had a manifesto, parts of this essay would be in it.
The 10 most accurately rated artists in rock history. These artists are neither overrated or underrated.
A Leaf by Bronislaw Maj
Read on the subway this morning:
A leaf, one of the last, parts from a maple branch:
it is spinning in the transparent air of October, falls
on a heap of others, stops, fades. No one
admired its entrancing struggle with the wind,
followed its flight, no one will distinguish it now
as it lies among the other leaves, no one saw what I did. I am
the only one.
I might need more poetry in my life.
Scientists have devised a way to make embryos that cannot grow into a baby. “This could provide a more ethically acceptable way of creating ‘embryonic’ stem cells”.
Some Amazon reviewers don’t like Barbie hooking up with Blaine after her break with Ken. “This is harmful to children. This teaches lack of responsibility towards those we claim to love. And moreso, this is depressing. Children should not have to fear broken hearts so early and accept that even a relationship of nearly 50 yrs…should and will be followd by a rebound fling.”
Mr. Sun has some trouble with an intimate moment in ESPN’s Dale Earnhardt biopic. “If I were to write down a list of people I’d like to visualize naked and getting busy, I could use all the paper in an Office Depot and not get to Dale Earnhardt.”
Now offering cheap air travel, rental cars, and Internet access, easyGroup will soon offer cheap hotel stays. Tiny easyHotel rooms in London will go for ~5 pounds per night.
Good Bye, Lenin
Like many movies I enjoy, Good Bye, Lenin doesn’t fit neatly into any particular genre. It’s billed as a comedy, but could easily be considered a drama or even a romance. I loved the dual Kubrick homages…the overt 2001 reference and the later less obvious Clockwork Orange reference. (Of course, I may have missed a nod to Full Metal Jacket…I’m not sure how “Private Snowball” translates into German.)
Sabermetrics for football. “Romer found that football coaches punt far more than they ought to — perhaps acting out of fear of the worst outcome (going for it on fourth down and failing), rather than rationally balancing risk and reward.”
1994 Guardian article did fairly well in predicting things 10 years on. One uncanny prediction: Arnold as governor of California.
Dave Pell used Google Suggest to find the suggestions for each letter of the alphabet. May or may not be strictly popularity-based, and looks to be filtered by humans for porn-based stuff.
Google Suggest beta suggests search terms as you type. I just made this my home page.
For $20, you can get a photo converted into an iPod ad. There’s even an option to add an iPod to the photo.
Mia Hamm has played her final match with the US women’s national team. In the second half, she wore a jersey with her new last name (Garciaparra).
This homemade NYC subway map is more useful than the official one in some ways. The addition of Metro North, PATH, and the AirTrain routes is helpful.
Web magazines
Before weblogs ruled the realm, a typical way to publish content online was in a Web magazine format. Suck, Feed, Netly News, Smug, Stating the Obvious, etc. Sites like Salon, The New Yorker, Slate, and even most online newspapers publish in the magazine format, but sites like The Morning News and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency are more culturally similar to those early Web magazines (in sensibility and because there’s no offline component). Are there any other sites that you read that are still publishing regularly in this format?
Parents go on strike protesting their kids’ lack of help with household chores. How did they let their kids get this in control of the parent/child relationship? A strike isn’t going to reverse the effects of 17 years of bad parenting.
Shrek 2
For all the corny potshots that Dreamworks takes at Disney in Shrek 2, they’re hard at work exploiting their own set of rapidly tiring cliches, an approach that eventually steered Disney’s reputation for creativity straight into the ground. I know it made lots of money and that the kids love green ogres (and green ogre Happy Meals), but the movie just wasn’t very good (apart from some Puss in Boots moments). Animation aside (are we done judging CG-heavy films largely by how cool they look yet?), Shrek 2 was just another lame romantic comedy with big name stars and barely funny pop culture references; it couldn’t have taken any more than 15-20 minutes to write the screenplay. Anthony Lane noted something similar in his review of The Incredibles and was spot on:
[Brad Bird] has bothered to think through the impact of his outlandish designs, whereas one of the depressing things about a big summer hit like “Shrek 2” was that it nodded at other recent movies, and commercial fads, purely on the ground that they were recent and would thus grab a temporary laugh. The “Shrek” pictures, like “Shark Tale,” will date fast, eaten by the rust of their own cynicism, while “The Incredibles,” silly as it is, retains just enough innocence to suggest that it might hang around.
Cambodian soldiers, first hiding and then lost in the jungle, return home after 25 years. They thought the war was still going all that time.
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