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July 12th, 2009
12:28 am - saddle your ponies!
I love how ESPN2 is running the World Series of Poker over and over and OVER again. There's actually not much distinction between the self-presentation of poker and that of pro wrestling, except that the former isn't actually fixed. You have the random "characters" with their elaborate stunts (one player played a full day made up like an old man, another one showed up with a team of Rockettes), the announcers who "disapprove" of the stunts of the heels like Phil Hellmuth, the general sense of entertainment directed at a crowd that likes it raw and pure.
Speaking of which, this is probably the most awesome pro wrestling clip ever. I can't decide what's most fantastic: the tartan bikini, Piper's pronounced Canadian accent, the staggering prize money of...$45,000, the fact that his foe is apparently a team called "the Sheepherders"--really, it's impossible to choose.
P.S. Remix posted...whew!
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July 10th, 2009
10:32 pm - Apropos of nothing
Today I came across a picture of Glenn Gould (during the recording of the first Goldberg Variations) that I don't remember having seen before:
(Sorry, couldn't find a good version of this exact picture on the web.)
I find this picture terribly moving. He looks so enraptured, but his hands aren't on the keys. He's probably not hearing the physical note he just played, he's hearing the ideal note that should have issued forth, and the ideal note that's coming next. He's caught up in that paradise of the artist, where the art is perfect, unmarred and undiminished by the need to reduce it to a medium that can convey it to other people. It's utterly joyous.
...why, yes, I am suffering from writer's block at the moment, why do you ask?
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12:18 pm - Nifty!
Prowl lets you push Growl notifications
to your iPhone. In effect, this lets you kludge together push
Gmail. (Of course, it has many other potential uses.) Whee!
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July 8th, 2009
11:48 pm - Huh
...Tom Hanks and Stephen Colbert just kissed full on the mouth on my TV.
Good to see my instincts regarding the original sequence were correct.
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July 5th, 2009
12:44 am - the long dark tea-time of the challenge
For various reasons, I wish to write a particularly awesome remix this year.
...
...And while I'm wishing, I'd like a pony.
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July 4th, 2009
11:05 pm
One of the advantages of spending the 4th on the crumbling edge of civilization is all the unregulated fireworks. In parts of the country that are actually governed, a person setting off a massive hour-long show would draw police attention.
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July 1st, 2009
12:38 am
Of all the wrong-headedness in this post, the thing that hurts me the most (well, besides the fundamental underlying assumption that women can only find a place in society by leveraging the desire of men to sleep with them, and without that we are doomed, DOOMED!) is the use of Catullus's poetry as illustrating women's inability to compete with the delights of sleeping with men...among straight men.
Catullus.
Catullus who has provided dozens of generations of sniggering schoolboys a reason to master Latin--so they could read his filthy heterosexual porn.
Catullus who notoriously invited a girlfriend to stay home for a nooner and "fuck nine, yes, nine times straight!"
Seriously, didn't the problem used to be that conservatives were too absorbed in the classics, rather than that they were quasi-illiterate?
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June 29th, 2009
01:20 pm - moral of the story: don't mess with a car service driver
As bad a day as I've been having...this fellow had a worse one:
"This case arises out of a short-lived crime spree on the morning of January 29, 1991. Around daybreak, Carlos Medina was riding the subway through Brooklyn, when another passenger tried to rob him at gunpoint. A New York City Transit Police officer happened upon the crime in progress and attempted to intervene; the gunman fired four shots, hitting the police officer twice. At the next stop, the gunman fled the subway. Immediately thereafter, near the same subway station, car service driver David Ramos was warming up his vehicle when he was held up at gunpoint and his car was hijacked. Ramos rushed to the car service's office to tell his dispatcher and both men chased the carjacker in the dispatcher's vehicle.
They located the carjacker just a few blocks away, marooned in New York City morning traffic. When they finally pulled alongside the stolen vehicle, the carjacker pointed a gun at them, jumped out of the car and ran toward a nearby house. About two hours later, the police found Petitioner David Aparicio cowering under a stairway in the backyard of a house a few blocks away."
Aparicio v. Artuz, 269 F.3d 78, 85-86 (2d Cir. 2001).
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June 28th, 2009
01:50 pm
Femslash isn't usually a particular delight of mine, but for some reason, today I really crave a sweet little story about Teyla (as opposed to the other pairing that will surely get coverage) participating in SF Pride, post-series.
*peers wistfully out into the universe*
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June 27th, 2009
10:34 pm - Site update
Into the blue again, after the money's gone (SGA, ~2K)
Summary: You may find yourself...
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June 25th, 2009
08:05 pm - that's how easy love can be
The news of Michael Jackson's early death is not, perhaps, surprising, but it is very sad. It would be difficult to overstate the place the Jackson 5 and then Jackson himself had in the musical backdrop of my childhood; looking back, it seems like Thriller was the only album played on the radio in Detroit in 1983. It's heartbreaking now to listen to the utterly delightful bubblegum pop of his early career and consider what came after.
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June 22nd, 2009
12:23 am
It's funny; when I was working sixty to seventy hours a week every week, I really stopped noticing or caring when the weekend was. And when you're seriously ill, of course, all time is exactly alike to you. Now that I'm recovered and have a job that respects the concept of the weekend, Sunday evening brings the most irksome end-of-the-weekend angst.
Speaking of the weekend, if this is the view from your living room couch, your wallet probably has "bad-ass motherfucker" written on it also:
El Greco, Rembrandt, El Greco, and if you were to turn your head around, you'd see a Goya.
I've never understood why the smaller galleries of the Lehman Collection--the ones that attempt to "recreate the atmosphere of his home"--are so sparsely traveled. There's always a decent crowd looking at the Impressionist paintings in the main atrium, but they tend not to go into the side galleries. Could be that wallpaper, I guess. But actually I'm secretly glad they're underappreciated. After braving the throngs up front, it's so nice to slip back into the quiet and settle down on that plump blue sofa for a spell. It's the single most secluded and restorative spot in the whole Met. (And that sofa is the most comfortable seat in all the public areas!)
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June 20th, 2009
01:59 pm - Times Reporter Escapes Taliban After 7 Months
I've had a lot of frustration with the media over the past decade, but this is an amazing story. Rohde is a brave guy who's done important work, and I'm frankly amazed he made it home alive.
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June 19th, 2009
04:05 pm - Oh, Mr. Bradbury
“Yahoo called me eight weeks ago,” [Ray Bradbury, now 89] said, voice
rising. “They wanted to put a book of mine on Yahoo! You know what I told
them? ‘To hell with you. To hell with you and to hell with the Internet.’ ”
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June 16th, 2009
11:39 am
[Experimental post-by-mail, hope the formatting's okay]
The author in the Salinger case has responded to the suit (http://tinyurl.com/nfgpr8). I think the case is winnable, but unlikely to proceed all the way to trial, unless the publicity makes the second novel much hotter of a property than it was before. I'd certainly like to see it won.
The comments at the link (a NYT article) are interesting. For some time, I have felt that one of the forces impeding the acceptance of transformative works is what I will untactfully here call middlebrow fetish-worship--the attitude of people who look at certain works not as works but as Symbols of High Culture, whose reaction to a book traditionally regarded as great is object-reverence (which they believe demonstrates their good taste and concomitant class status) rather than artistic and critical engagement. To these people, transformative work seems like an offense against the Genius of the Great Author and against the pieties of middle-class culture, something you'd only do to "rip off" someone greater than yourself. It's an attitude with a long, long tradition in the U.S.
Frankly, The Catcher in the Rye is one of the key texts such people (at least the Americans) revere, especially since Salinger played the role of "tortured, reclusive genius" to such perfection. (As I've suggested above, one of the underpinnings of this attitude is a full-blown adoption of the traditional Romantic view of genius.) So this case appears to have touched a nerve with a certain segment of the NYT-reading public.
(The comments are also interesting for the RPFers: 'What private person
would not be incensed at being treated as a fictional character?' one
commenter demands. Very suggestive phrasing.)
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June 14th, 2009
10:14 pm - Spending some time working on my Leverage backlog
...next season, could we just have the The Show Where Parker, Hardison, and Eliot Bicker and Banter and Possibly Make Out A Lot, please?
Although this episode did give me a pleasant flashback: "Be a rainbow, not a painbow!"
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June 10th, 2009
11:50 pm
The Tom Hanks segment on Colbert Report this evening was about thiiiiiiiiiiis far from a buddyslash fic where Stephen ends up pregnant, no?
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June 9th, 2009
June 8th, 2009
10:51 pm - By the way
Whoever it is on my friendslist who has all the people doing the Clark Kent picspam friended, so that my friendsfriends is sporadically interrupted with untrammelled gorgeousness?
Bless you.
My God, you forget how heartbreakingly beautiful that cast was until you see a high-quality cap from the early days.
(ETA: Geez, Tom Welling looks a little Adam Lambert-y in this icon...)
ETA2: Oh, and speaking of beautiful, if you haven't seen this yet...J.Flan rubs himself. Forcefully.
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