Friday, September 01, 2006 ::: An interview with Robert Best. via bpr, which also has a short interview with his sister. Robert, you were so charming but the judges were right about your designs being a little dull. Nonetheless, I found your half-joking discussions of barbie and designing to accomodate her fashion moods and whims one of the highlights of this season.
Friday, August 25, 2006 ::: boing boing has a post about wine-like grape juices, which come in varieties such as pinot noir and gewürztraminer, etc. and presumably have similar flavors but without the alcohol and such.
Tuesday, August 22, 2006 ::: Waiter Rant is a really really well-written weblog about waitering and dealing with restaurant-goers day in and day out. He used to be a seminarian, and wrote this heart-wrenching post about his realizing he didn't want to be a priest, after working with hospital patients dying of AIDS.
Friday, August 18, 2006 ::: I made some changes to the sidebar, mostly removing dead blogs, and adding a few new ones, and fixing some broken archival links.
Wednesday, August 16, 2006 ::: Somewhat over-worried article about how younger moviegoers ignore film critics' reviews and go see poorly-reviewed movies. via medianews.
Thursday, August 03, 2006 ::: long and interesting interview with Jai Rodriguez from Queer Eye. Discusses the FTM makeover episode, the ending of the series, and a little of the internal personal dynamics of the show, as well as his own coming-out story.
Tuesday, August 01, 2006 ::: caught a bit of Bravo's Tabloid Wars last night, which spends more time following around gossip columnist Lloyd Grove's assistant Hud Morgan, whose style, good looks, general air of decadence and apres moi le deluge attitude make for entertaining viewing to say the least. oh, and here is the gawker item that he discusses on the show, the original site seemingly suffering from a surge in site traffic.
via kottke, the best 50 movie endings of all time. as is usually the case with these sorts of things, there is plenty of room for aesthetic pedantry about what makes a perfect ending and what 50 endings constitute the best. nonetheless, I was quite surprised that the end of the maltese falcon was not included, although as I thought about it, my initial memory of the movie ending as bridget o'shaughnessy entering the elevator, the grate pulling across her and a shadow crossing her face is in fact wrong; it ends instead with the humphrey bogart describing the falcon as being "the stuff dreams are made of."
Friday, July 28, 2006 ::: so now there's a flickr banner available for web sites like mine... guess I should buy a new and better digital camera. via lifehacker.
Sunday, July 16, 2006 ::: fascinating video of the lyrebird, which imitates the sounds of its environment with astonishing realism, from other birds' songs to the sound of chainsaws. This link has been sitting in my inbox for about a month, but was originally on boing boing.
Wednesday, July 12, 2006 ::: Kathy Griffin explains the gays to Larry King. her show, my life on the D-list, has become a guilty pleasure for me lately. her utter shamelessness combined with a resigned acceptance of her station in the firmament of fame and witty captioning make for entertaining viewing.
Wednesday, May 10, 2006 ::: so right now it's finals week and I have my papers to write, and am generally busy, but I have had some time to relax a bit every now and then. Gonza and I watched the flower of my secret, an almodovar movie, and despite its similarity, plotwise and characterwise, to some of his other movies, it's quite enjoyable. Focusing on a romance novelist who still in love with her increasingly distant husband, it mixes almodovarist melodrama with absurdity. I think I have probably enjoyed this particular movie most of all, except perhaps for bad education.
Sunday, April 30, 2006 ::: apparently, my wretchedly unpleasant experience with verizon is far from unique. Hidden charges, long waits to get anything done, frustrating tech support, etc. In short, don't get it unless the previous tenant had verizon and everything is ready to be hooked up. not to mention the whole net neutrality thing.
Monday, April 24, 2006 ::: so today marks the hopeful beginning of real internet access at the new apartment. no more mooching off tenuous wireless signals from nearby.
Tuesday, April 18, 2006 ::: I've moved! in with gonza! our new place is super-nice, except that we have been there two weeks without a land line thanks to verizon. also, thanks to verizon, we don't have an internet connection yet. but the place is really nice and once I have things working I will post some pictures from the roof deck that show off the spectacular views.
returning to the subject of new order, I had a dream that I went to an electronic concert, which was given in the basement of some building, albeit a nicely furnished one, but there were only two people in the audience. The concert ended and there was a certain awkward feeling because we were wondering if we would be invited backstage to chat and hang out or no. In the end we headed back and johnny marr was rather standoffish, but bernard sumner was charming and friendly. but then I woke up and went back to sleep, and instead dreamt that prom queen/sorority girl zombies were on the prowl for their still-living sisters, who were all fated to become zombies as well--it would only be a matter of time. Somehow this dream was also being reviewed as if it were a movie, and most reviewers were finding it tired and predictable but inexplicably popular. After waking up and thinking about it, I believe that this is my first blog-inlfuenced dream.
Sunday, February 12, 2006 ::: It's nice to finally get some real winter weather for once. This afternoon I will brave the possibly delay-ridden metro to go visit my parents for my father's birthday.
in other news, I've got some old links I've been meaning to post:
there was an interesting article in a recent new yorker about the original creator of mary poppins and the disneyfication of mary poppins. What an enjoyable read, I thought, after I finished the article. Perhaps the reason why it was so good is that relied a little too heavily on the work done by someone else. ironically, I forget where I saw this link also, but I'm going to guess I saw it at medianews.
Saturday, January 28, 2006 ::: It's been a busy start of the semester! So many books to read, presentations to do, job talks to attend and I am also planning our department happy hours, the first of which I orchestrated and was quite successful. I had to take a great many books off my bookshelves to accomodate the new inflow, which has been a bit sluggish (amazon has been sitting on my order) and so I have been doing a lot of last-minute hunting around the library. the other day I cooked artichokes for the first time, having consumed them many times before but having not been party to their preparation. And they were great! I was so proud of myself. But then again, steaming a vegetable for 45 minutes isn't something that requires a lot of careful effort.
also from the -ist blog chain: American Apparel has opened a dc shop. I've been meaning to go and check out the sweatshop-free goods but have been too busy and poor.
Sunday, January 08, 2006 ::: Since I've been on break I've actually had some time to do some pleasure reading. I bought the latest harry potter (the half-blood prince) and I took a day and a half to read it. And when I finished, I felt very unsatisfied, but couldn't quite put my finger on it. and so I looked at some of the online reviews on amazon and realized what I was missing. I don't like the condescending writing style that JK Rowling uses, and her heavy-handed, oversimplified characterizations were particularly disappointing this time around, especially when it came to the dating. and the very long exposition scene at the beginning with snape. The book was so long, and there were so few good parts (the director of the orphanage scene was fairly decent and had good writing as well.
and so I realized what a good book the latest lemony snicket book is despite its unsatisfying ending wherein nothing is resolved. But I loved the writing in the penultimate peril, and the hotel denouement is perhaps the most interesting hotel to have existed in all of fiction. The characters may lack development but it really doesn't seem to matter because the writing is so good, and the picaresque nature of the baudelaire's adventures makes such concerns irrelevant anyway.
Thursday, January 05, 2006 ::: It was a nice christmas and new year's. With some prodding from the boyfriend, it was decided that the time had come for a decent set of matching dishware. And the dishes we bought are quite nice -- plain porcelain, and we also bought some matching silverware. We had a nice new year's eve dinner with the new plates and dishes before heading out to the evening's festivities, leaving the dishes in the sink since it was party time and doing the dishes in our nice clothes was not part of the plan. I stayed over at gonzalo's the night of the 1st, and coming back to my apartment, I noticed a box of thai noodles lying in the middle of the kitchen floor. and then I noticed that one of the cabinets was open and it looked like someone had rifled through it for some reason. Someone has broken in! I thought, but noticed the laptop still sitting where it usually stays. relieved, I realized that the cabinet shelf that held some canned soups and other similar items had collapsed, and most of the cans had fallen into the sink below, shattering one of my new plates! what horrors! I called up gonza to commiserate, and we both agreed that it was a tragedy but the time had come to move on and pick up the pieces.
