February 2008
"The Whore of Mensa"
Holy crap, you absolutely have to read this short story by Woody Allen. It is a mock-pulp fiction tale about a hard-boiled detective who investigates a prostitution ring that sets up intellectual conversations for married men who don’t get enough close reading from their wifeA silky voice answered, and I told her what was on my mind. “I understand you can help me set up an hour of...
January 2008
Watchoats: I’m late to this party, but that sure was a fun story. Wow, this is just wonderful.
Has anyone else seen the Of Montréal T-Mobile...
Jeff Mangum is spinning in his unmade grave, I’m sure
I went to the doctor today (again) and they put a hard cast on my wrist, (the type you get when you break your arm.) It is kind of a drastic step for my condition, but there are literally running out of ways to treat me. The doctors said that if this doesn’t work one of the few options left is to do exploratory surgery. I’ve never had a cast before and kind of nervous and kind of...
“I feel like a guy at Victoria’s Secret. I like the final product but I...”
– Greta, at the beer making supply store.
Reblog: Books That Make You Dumb, Books That Make...
Using “favorite books” data from Facebook and the average SAT/ACT scores from the colleges the people in the data set attend, Virgil Griffith plotted a graph of “books that make you dumb”. Lolita, 100 Years of Solitude, and Crime and Punishment were the “smartest” books while the Zane erotica books are the “dumbest”. (via Kottke.org) I mentioned this...
True Potentials
My friend Christopher told me about the videogame Passage back in November, but Kottke recently mentioned it on his blog and reminded me of it. I highly recommend you go download it and play. For a very simple and free five-minute video game it is a remarkably affecting simulation of what it’s like to be human. From the creator’s statement: You have the option of joining up with a...
I finally got around to seeing Juno. It wasn’t as good as I was hoping, but I still enjoyed it. I am surprised it got so many Oscar nominations though, I certainly didn’t think it was that good. Instead of cramming almost all of the major conflict into the last third of the movie they could have spread it out a little more evenly, it felt kind of lopsided. Ellen Page was just as...
Seattle is officially cool again
Stephen: oh but the highlight! there were guys. in knight suits. with fake swords. fighting. in a public park. http://www.flickr.com/photos/stephenbabcock/2218321778
Carleton: whaaaat? what's that about
Stephen: i have no idea but it was THE most hilarious thing i've ever come upon
Carleton: wow I'm not sure what to say. clearly a place with these features is the place I need to be visiting and/or living in soon
Stephen: exactly. it was just like "AND there's a Lenin statue?"
Carleton: with a scarf! Amazing. http://www.flickr.com/photos/stephenbabcock/2217531145
: I also really enjoyed this photo Steve took while visiting Seattle http://www.flickr.com/photos/stephenbabcock/2218320356
An Observation
One thing I’ve noticed from all of my reading of historical literature is that in the past we needed each other a lot more. Now days thanks to modern refrigeration and food packaging I can (and have) gone several days without seeing another person, but back in the day that really wasn’t an option, especially for city dwellers. Hospitality was literally a matter of life or death,...
“Life has no real shape or form to it, but literature does. Literature is...”
– Paraphrased from Oscar Wilde’s The Decay of Lying, via Northrop Frye
This semester is going to be brutal but manageable...
“in the bottom of the hour
lurks
the tree that cries in the night
the place...”
– Chuck Bukowski As a general rule, blogs and poetry don’t mix, but I’m not thinking clearly at 3:52am. Every time I have insomnia I think about these lines.
This is Mira Billotte’s cover of “As I...
Novels on your cell phone?
This Times article about the newest literary genre is just ridiculous. My book history professor would totally freak out about the following Until recently, cellphone novels — composed on phone keypads by young women wielding dexterous thumbs and read by fans on their tiny screens — had been dismissed in Japan as a subgenre unworthy of the country that gave the world its first novel, “The Tale of...
He Loves New York, and It Loves Him Right Back →
“CJ” sent me this article. This is the kid from The Met Museum that I was talking about! — dalasverdugo oh my God, it is the real-life Oscar from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer
Romney and the Truth (Reblog)
The following is a long re-blog of a post from Dan Kennedy’s blog Media Nation. Dan is a professor of journalism at Northeastern, and long-time Boston-based journalist who taught a few of my classes. He makes some really good points about Romney, who I absolutely despise. He was an absolutely awful governor while I was living in Massachusetts, who pulled shit like this all the time. As for...
tricks of the trade
I have found that when I get bored with whatever it is I’m reading for class (which happens more than it should probably) reading out loud is a good way to keep myself motivated. However when things are really tough I will pull out my microphone, open a sound recording program and record myself reading aloud. when I’m done I just delete the recording. For some reason being recorded...
You may or may not be familiar with Cracked, which was MAD Magazine’s longtime competition. The magazine has long since folded but apparently it still exists as a web site. Tonight I stumbled across Cracked.com, which I poked around and found to be consistently hilarious, unlike their magazine, which wasn’t that great to be honest. In particular, I laughed a lot at this article and...
I never realized what a timesucker it was to keep track of all of my friends blogs plus the professional ones. (Professor Najarian was right Deirdre!dammit!) My Google Reader page is waging a serious war against my productivity. I think I might have to start limiting myself to checking it only once a day if I ever attempt to keep up a decent workpace this semester. I might, as was suggested by...
uh-oh. My first day of the new semester and I'm...
“I knew playwrights, young guys my age, who were simply not prepared to face the...”
– Arthur Miller
WatchWatch the whole way through, please.
“For cows (like sheep, bison, and other ruminants) have evolved the special...”
– Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma Oh man, how awesome would it be to be able to make beer in a cow’s stomach? Or better yet your own stomach. It reminds me of that time on Futurama when they brewed beer in the robot. Pollan’s book, by the way, is fantastic and incredibly...
Presidential Debate Question I Just Daydreamed...
“Hi. This is a question for all the canidates. So, any thinking person who’s read more than one book knows that you can’t be both intelligent and religious. Which one are you? Please limit your response to twenty seconds and please include the answer to the question in your response.” — rickyv I get really frustrated when I see the polarized state religion holds in...
The Raw Story | Revolutionary air car runs on... →
Can I get excited about this? — diniscans It’s almost as good as a rocketship powered by farts. — anjalouise This is cool, but it obviously takes some kind of energy to compress the air in the first place, so it can’t be TOTALLY pollution free, but it sounds better than what we have. — dalasverdugo I can’t wait to see how some American company screws this one up like they...
“My love is like a kiddie pool. It drains easily.”
– Zemmi, last night Boy howdy that was a ridiculous first night back in town. Oh New England!
2008 Resolutions. (Yes, I make these every year....
1.Drink more beer. (My schedule last fall meant I was on campus from mid-afternoon to late night most days, which made it difficult to buy and drink beer during the week.) 2. Prove to myself and parents and professors I actually belong in Grad School after a disastrous 1st semester. (Read: Straight “A”s in stead of barely passing. Seriously.) 3. Research jobs/careers I would 1. Enjoy...
“If I die, I’m sorry for all the bad things I did to you. And if I live,...”
– Bob Fosse
1 tag
Steve Winwood- While You See a Chance (audio) I...
E-pals!
On many tumblr blogs there has been a lot of attention paid to how many people “follow” your blog and how many blogs you “follow.” This basically revolves around tumblr’s own internal method for letting you keep track of your friend’s tumblr blogs and who reads yours. I prefer to use Google reader to keep track of all of my regularly read websites so I...
the high temperature in Atlanta today was 30° I...
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2007 in Cities
In keeping with a several year tradition inspired by Jason Kottke via Zach Klein, here is a list of all the places I’ve been through this year in roughly chronological order. I have linked to photos from each place as well.
Boston, MA* Dedham, MA Quebec City, Canada Montreal, Canada London, UK* Oxford, UK* Salisbury, UK Bath, UK Brussels, Belgium Antwerp, Belgium Prague, Czech Republic...
Oscar Brown Jr.-“But I Was Cool” This...
