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At first, I was kind of interested in this story in the Guardian about how men and women tend to identify wildly different books when asked to identify the work that was most life changing. When I saw the list though and saw books like Ulysses I have to wonder if people aren’t just picking out books they think they should pick — sort of like people who claim to watch PBS when asked. I really tried to read Ulysses. I found it awful.

I was also kind of disturbed to realize that I’d never even heard of the book most often cited by men, , The Outsider. I wonder if it’s a British thing. If you asked people in the US would they pick a different story?

My favorite book is Dune. I don’t think I’d ever say it was life changing though. I recall Beyond the Tomorrow Mountains strongly influencing my thinking in some areas when I was a kid. I reread it recently though and found that what I took out of it was exactly opposite what the author intended, so either I wasn’t reading critically as a kid, or I was just reading it through a lens of my own making. There’s probably a little of both there.

The book I’ve given and recommended to the most people is Les Miserables. That is such a fantastic book, and while I realize that not everybody would like or appreciate a book like Dune, I think that almost everybody would really get a lot out of Les Miserables if they gave it a chance. Was my life really changed by that book though? I don’t know. I don’t think so, but it’s probably come the closest.

Frugal Reader looks interesting. It basically connects you to a lot of people who’ve turned their book collections into a giant lending library. $1.84 or $2.26 for postage to ship one of you books seems kind of steep though. Sure, it’s less than the $10+ you pay for new paperbacks these days, but it seems kind of high for used books.

It is an interesting idea though.

Writerisms and other Sins: A Writer’s Shortcut to Stronger Writing by C.J. Cherryh:

As a general rule … your viewpoint characters should have less, rather than more, description than anyone else: a reader of different skin or hair color ought to be able to sink into this persona without being continually jolted by contrary information.

Hey, I loved Cyteen, so clearly she knows of what she speaks.

I think the value of getting an MBA would be in the networking and in getting back into a traditional classroom environment. Still, from a pure love of useful knowledge approach, there’s probably something to be said for the The Josh Kaufman “Personal MBA” Program. I’ve read a few of the recommended books and thought they were excellent. I’ll have to add a few others to my reading list.

I just heard that author, Andre Norton, passed away at the age of 93. I hope her passing was pleasant. Her Witch World novels were hugely formative to me as a young boy. She leaves an incredible legacy and her stories will forever live on in the heart of our imaginations and wonder.

Reason has an interesting interview with Neal Stephenson. I need to get around to reading The Baroque Cycle one of these years (decades?). I think I even went so far as to buy Quicksilver, but I’ve been putting it off because it seems too formidable.

The book I’m reading now (which I can’t even remember) is not taking root in my brain. I’m not sure if that’s the book, or the fact that I’m trying to start reading it at 2 in the morning when I really should have been asleep 2 hours previously. Maybe I should switch over to Neal instead.

Oh, by the way, Jeremiad: A literary work or speech expressing a bitter lament or a righteous prophecy of doom. I had no idea.

As I get older, I find myself taking longer to finish the books I’m reading. I’m reading slower, but I’m not reading better. Perhaps, I should strive to do both by embracing the art of Slow Reading.

I say perhaps because the truth of the matter is that I haven’t yet taken the time to read more than an eighth of that page. I liked what I saw, but dreams call. Maybe tomorrow (if I have time … If I don’t forget). via

In case you were wondering, if you stay up until 4 AM to finish reading Children of God, Mary Doria Russell’s just OK follow up to her exceptional book The Sparrow, you will sleep through your alarm the next day, and you will be cranky and tired at work, and you will write extremely convoluted run-on sentences.

Next up on the reading list is An Unfinished Life — a recommendation from my supervisor at work. Not tonight though. Tonight, I need to get some sleep, lots and lots of glorious sleep. Even the web is making me so very, very sleeeeeepppppyyyyy zzzzzzzzzzzz…..

…in which the snake eats its own tail.

Sometimes the web is so cool and connected. A while ago, I posted an entry about the History of the Universe in 200 Words or Less.

Tonight, Eric Schulman dropped by that entry to answer one of my questions, and let me know that he had revised it down to a mere 100 words (greatly improving it I might add), and that it had become the basis for a book, A Briefer History of Time which you can now download or buy. I’m a few pages into reading it, and it’s great. Well worth your consideration.

After 2 months of slogging through it, I finally finished reading The Eye of the World. It’s about 800 pages, so I guess that isn’t a horrible pace (even though it felt like I was moving pretty slow with it). I did the last 300 or so this week, so obviously it was pretty tough getting into it to start.

I guess it was enjoyable enough. I could see myself picking up book two of the Wheel of Time series, but I’m certainly not going to be rushing out to read it.

Not much of it suck with me. Towards the end of the book, they were speaking about characters who were introduced earlier in the story, and I honestly couldn’t remember any of them. This may say more about me and my memory. Most books don’t stay with me for the most part.

Part of the problem too was that I saw so many influences from so many other books. The whole think felt very derivative and formulaic. I guess if you’re looking for that kind of story (quest with strong fantasy elements), then this will fit the bill. There are probably other, better examples of that kind of thing out there — but then if you’re looking for a story like this, you’ve probably already read all of those anyway.

Next up: The Lovely Bones.

On the Edge of Blade Runner is a fantastic documentary about the making of one of my favorite movies. I hear that there’s an Ultimate Blade Runner DVD box set coming out in 2007 that will include four different versions of the film. So, I guess I’m going to have to buy something like my fourth of fifth version of that movie next year.

The production values in Star Wars Revelations are incredible. The story and acting are just slightly better than what you might expect in fan fiction. That means it’s spotty and a bit lifeless through a lot of it, but boy does it look pretty.

Kevin Smith Talking About Writing Superman is about 100 times funnier than Clerks II (except for one tucking scene in Clerks which you’ll know what I mean if you’ve seen the movie).

I was a little sad to see Kevin Smith returning to his Jersey Trilogy universe. It seems like that story has more than run its course now, but other people seem to be excited, so whatever. I wish him luck with it.

Despite my low level of interest, I have to say that doing a Director’s Commentary Podcast is sort of brilliant. Why wait for the DVD to come out, and why not do this so that you can encourage people to buy a second ticket to your movie? That’s smart marketing, and I bet that takes off in a big way with other movies.

Of course I thought Roger Ebert’s idea about other people doing movie commentaries you could download was brilliant too, and I don’t think anything ever came of that, so what do I know?

Darkon is a documentary about a bunch of LARP players that looks absolutely epic in scope. LARP is cute and all when it’s confined to small little web movies with dorky kids, but these guys really seem to be into it. I’m not sure what to make of that. check the trailer here

Hmmm, I don’t remember The Sining being a comedy. I guess sometimes, the trailer is nothing at all like the movie.

Yesterday, I decided to go see a movie. I didn’t much care which one I saw. So, I got to the theater and The Brothers Grimm was showing pretty much right when I got there. And, the previews made it seem like it might be interesting. Plus, Terry Gilliam, so it had that going for it.

I think it could have been an interesting movie. I saw an interesting movie peeking out from behind the corners every once in a while. But there were layers and layers of useless crap piled on top of it. What was the point of the French soldiers? I think they were supposed to be comic relief, but they were neither comical nor a relief.

When the movie ended, I ducked in to see The 40-Year-Old Virgin since, I’d heard good things, and I wanted to try to get my money’s worth for the day.

The 40-Year-Old Virgin is insanely funny. It’s also sort of touchingly sweet and many of the secondary characters all have their own interesting storylines going on that really add texture to what on paper looked like it should have been a stupid farce. Not that there would be anything wrong with a stupid farce, but I was actually kind of surprised at how good this movie ended up being.

So, if you’re going to go see a movie, make it the virgin one. The grimm one is just disappointing.

Lord knows that 80s hair metal fans/bands are easy targets for parody. A few bands recently have done a pretty good job with it. But, I’m just not sure that Backstreet Boys are the ones to pull it off.

It should have been very funny, but somehow it just wasn’t. You’d think these guys would be good at putting on costumes, but they just held themselves too distant from the role or something. I guess good parody needs to be rooted in authenticity, and I just don’t see any of that here. Still, a few funny moments (mostly with the extras), and probably worth a view.

In The O Factor, Field Maloney asks if Owen Wilson was the key to the Wes Anderson phenomenon.

The suggestion is that Anderson is too insular about the worlds he creates without Wilson’s writing collaboration to act as a moderating influence.

It makes sense. It seemed like Life Aquatic was a major homage to Buckaroo Bonsai which was extremely insular in its own right. I loved Buckaroo, and I even sort of liked Life Aquatic, but it did leave me cold in a number of ways. But then, so did Rushmore the first couple times I saw that. It was only after repeated viewings that I came to love Rushmore so much. I’ve only seen Life Aquatic once, so I’m reluctant to pass a too early judgment on the film.

I went to see the movie Sideways this weekend. It was absolutely FAN…TAS…TIC! Go see this movie if you haven’t. Now, I want to drive up to Santa Barbara for a wine tasting tour (and I don’t even like wine).

Devo performing Satisfaction on Saturday Night Live is 10 kinds of awesome. I think I probably must have some Devo on my iPod. I’m going to have to rock that tonight.

The Shatner Woo Remix is 10 kinds of awesome. The David Bowie and Cher Medley is 10 kinds of something else.

Last week, I was deleting an episode of Gilmore Girls that Tivo recorded for me. As I was deleting it, I noticed the episode title, “One’s Got Class and the Other One Dyes”. That struck a chord with me. It sounded so familiar that I thought maybe it was a pun on a song lyric or something.

I couldn’t think of the song though and no manor of Google searches could turn up the lyric I was looking for. I thought it was a Springsteen song or maybe Billy Joel. It just kept coming back and back — some barely remembered wisp of a lyric that I couldn’t quite catch and couldn’t quite forget.

This morning, I finally thought of the lyric that was driving me crazy. “Somebody’s going to emergency. Somebody’s going to jail” from Don Henley’s “New York Minute”. I still think the Gilmore Girls show might be referring to a different song, but that’s the one I was thinking of. I also think it’s funny that Google turned up a West Wing episode called Somebody’s Going to Emergency, Somebody’s Going to Jail, which is obviously a better match.

It’s such a relief to get that out of my head!

The Colbert Report’s Countdown to Guitarmageddon was awesome. Who knew that Kissinger could rock that hard?

OK, so we won’t go into why I was watching Saturday Night Live. Suffice it to say that if you can watch the show on a TiVo, it isn’t too painful, and I typically don’t have a lot of shows to watch on Sunday morning when I wake up anyway, so the season pass doesn’t really cost me much.

Anyway, I’m watching last nights show, and Gwen Stefani is one of the musical guests. This was quite possibly one of the worst performances I have ever seen in my life. I thought that when she did a cover from Fiddler on the Roof that was kind of bad, but this went so far beyond that it was actually a little awe inspiring.

She start off yodeling. Then she moves onto to this sort of rap. I think it’s supposed to be a look how sexy I am Fergie type of song (and Stefani is really sexy, so it should work well), but the rap itself is so forced and stilted that it’s even worse than Fergalicious. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to get this performance out of my head.

She only did one song on the show. They had somebody else do the second act for some reason. If that’s the song from her new album that she decided to lead with, I would love to hear what else didn’t get performed. It must suck harder than 100 black holes.

I finally managed to get a good rip of “Don’t Tell a Soul” by The Replacements. I had this on CD and played the hell out of it, but when I went to rip all my old music it was damaged or something, so the songs had a lot of speaker breaking, ear splitting, white noise.

I know that music fans who care about this stuff think that “Don’t Tell a Soul” is one of the weaker Replacements albums, but I always loved it — proving yet again that my musical taste pretty much sucks. It’s finally on my iPod now though. So Happy!!!!

You have to hear this guy who imitates various artists like the Beach Boys or Frank Sinatra covering Pixies tracks the way those artists might have done them.

So much potential for horror, and yet, they are surprisingly good and compelling versions of the songs.

Boy, somebody is stuck in an early 90s alt-chick loop. Yesterday, I got in the car. The radio came on, and they were playing “Cannonball” by the Breeders. I remember thinking to myself wow, I haven’t heard that in a while. Cool.

Today, I got in the car. The radio came on and they were playing “Feed the Tree” by Belly. I hadn’t heard that in a while either, so that’s kind of cool too I guess. Still, the pattern is becoming clear to me. I fully expect to get in the car tomorrow and either hear Four Non Blondes “What’s Up?” (which I would have sworn was called “What’s Going On?” or maybe “Seether” by Veruca Salt.

Also, what does it say about me that while I recognize the songs and the era, I had to look up all of those bands. I would have sworn that it was the Breeders who sang Feed the Tree, and I had no idea who did Cannonball.

Audiri looks like a pretty good resource for finding new artists. I’m assuming that these are all unsigned artists. I’ll have to explore a bit more and maybe buy a few CDs.

Wow! The Beatles Songs page on Wikipedia is a tremendous resource. Lots of interesting background about nearly 200 Beatles songs.

Just setting a memory point to come back to 99 Flickr Groups for Design Inspiration later when I have time to go through them all.

I spent the past week or so working my way through 5 years worth of Questionable Content back archives. It’s a web comic strip.

On April Fools Day, this super geeky comic that I love, XKCD switched comics in a round robin “prank”. I read a few, and was kind of interested in the characters. I got busy and forgot about it, but then earlier in the week, I was reminded and decided to start from the beginning.

I think I liked it generally. A lot of the drama seems pretty goofy, and many of the characters (particularly the 3rd tier characters) are basically the same unrealistic character with like 1 quirk to make them different, and in the case of parents really unbelievable. Still, it held my interest, and there are a bunch of Dune references that I love. Really, more things should reference Dune.

Presidential Candidate Mike Gravel’s cover of Helter Skelter is surprisingly awesome. Oh sure, it lacks some of the zen koan like absurdity of his throw a rock into a lake video. But, what it lacks in inscrutability it makes up for in disturbing images of war and violence and Bill Shatner like ironic song stylings.

I have no idea what Today is the Day is going on about. It’s surreal in the weirdest ways, but it is foamtastic.

Lasagna Cat is crazy weird. Somebody has done a bunch of live action recreations of Garfield comic strips. Each strip is surreal enough on its own, but then they tack on these crazy music videos. Very, very strange.

Cadbury’s A Minute and a Half Full of Joy is one of the best viral videos I’ve ever seen. I defy you to watch this to the end and not smile. Every time I see it, I laugh out loud. Now, I want some chocolate. The only problem is that there doesn’t seem to be a way to link directly to the video.

I had no idea Roger Ebert was so powerful. Thank goodness there is The Thumbs of Fate comic strip to set me straight.

Wow! The construction paper art that Jen Stark creates is truly amazing. I can only imagine how much work must go into one of those. They are beautiful and playful at the same time. Very nice.

The Kid Creatures over on DrawerGeeks feature monster illustrations that are created and inspired by children’s original drawings. It’s an interesting concept. It’s like the pictures that the kids would have drawn if they only had more sophisticated illustration skills.

Artist, Nicole Maynard, creates a new work of art each week and displays it on the blog Art Weekly.

The Shatner Woo Remix is 10 kinds of awesome. The David Bowie and Cher Medley is 10 kinds of something else.

I don’t know how long This Video of Lynda Carter on The Muppet Show will be left up, but it’s great. Check it out while you can.

Last week, I was deleting an episode of Gilmore Girls that Tivo recorded for me. As I was deleting it, I noticed the episode title, “One’s Got Class and the Other One Dyes”. That struck a chord with me. It sounded so familiar that I thought maybe it was a pun on a song lyric or something.

I couldn’t think of the song though and no manor of Google searches could turn up the lyric I was looking for. I thought it was a Springsteen song or maybe Billy Joel. It just kept coming back and back — some barely remembered wisp of a lyric that I couldn’t quite catch and couldn’t quite forget.

This morning, I finally thought of the lyric that was driving me crazy. “Somebody’s going to emergency. Somebody’s going to jail” from Don Henley’s “New York Minute”. I still think the Gilmore Girls show might be referring to a different song, but that’s the one I was thinking of. I also think it’s funny that Google turned up a West Wing episode called Somebody’s Going to Emergency, Somebody’s Going to Jail, which is obviously a better match.

It’s such a relief to get that out of my head!

The Colbert Report’s Countdown to Guitarmageddon was awesome. Who knew that Kissinger could rock that hard?

OK, so we won’t go into why I was watching Saturday Night Live. Suffice it to say that if you can watch the show on a TiVo, it isn’t too painful, and I typically don’t have a lot of shows to watch on Sunday morning when I wake up anyway, so the season pass doesn’t really cost me much.

Anyway, I’m watching last nights show, and Gwen Stefani is one of the musical guests. This was quite possibly one of the worst performances I have ever seen in my life. I thought that when she did a cover from Fiddler on the Roof that was kind of bad, but this went so far beyond that it was actually a little awe inspiring.

She start off yodeling. Then she moves onto to this sort of rap. I think it’s supposed to be a look how sexy I am Fergie type of song (and Stefani is really sexy, so it should work well), but the rap itself is so forced and stilted that it’s even worse than Fergalicious. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to get this performance out of my head.

She only did one song on the show. They had somebody else do the second act for some reason. If that’s the song from her new album that she decided to lead with, I would love to hear what else didn’t get performed. It must suck harder than 100 black holes.

I’d never even heard of the show, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Judging from the dates, it looks like it’s been on for a year or two. I don’t know how I could have missed it. Anyway, I saw an ad or something and told the TiVo to record an episode. It was pretty good. I think I’ll keep watching it.

Also, the episode I saw had Dennis Haskins, the guy who played Mr. Belding on Saved by the Bell. Man, that guy got huge.

What happened to you Family Guy? You used to be funny man. You used to be funny. The past several episodes though have been joyless and unfunny. Did they get new writers or something?

Everybody else and their brother is linking to the Live Action Simpsons Intro, so I guess I may as well too.

The actors don’t look enough like the cartoon characters for my tastes, but it’s pretty clear that a lot of work went into this.

Well, it’s official. Fox has Cancelled Arrested Development.

The bastards!

I don’t get that station. They green light incredible shows like Serenity, Arrested Development, Family Guy and Gregg the Bunny, but then they cancel them before they can find an audience. I guess it’s good that we at least have shows like that at all, but I sure wish some station would green light incredible shows and then keep them around for a while.

I wonder if some production company could do straight to DVD TV shows. I guess there’d be a lot of risk in something like that, but it would be pretty cool.

TiVo recorded a Seinfeld episode as one of its suggestions for me. So, I’m watching it, and it seems sort of different. I looked it up, and it turns out it was the pilot. It’s really interesting seeing the characters before they were fully fleshed out. You can see shades of what the show would ultimately become, but everything is just slightly different.

I spent the past week or so working my way through 5 years worth of Questionable Content back archives. It’s a web comic strip.

On April Fools Day, this super geeky comic that I love, XKCD switched comics in a round robin “prank”. I read a few, and was kind of interested in the characters. I got busy and forgot about it, but then earlier in the week, I was reminded and decided to start from the beginning.

I think I liked it generally. A lot of the drama seems pretty goofy, and many of the characters (particularly the 3rd tier characters) are basically the same unrealistic character with like 1 quirk to make them different, and in the case of parents really unbelievable. Still, it held my interest, and there are a bunch of Dune references that I love. Really, more things should reference Dune.

I just went through the back archives for A Softer World. I suspect the creator would resist this label, but it’s sort of a hipster comic strip. It seems to try too hard in a lot of them (maybe that’s just a natural consequence of doing 250+ of them), but there are flashes of brilliance there too. I’m assuming those are the ones that are more honest an poignant, but maybe those are just the ones with the best lies.

Anyway, it’s worth checking out. via

Sixty Men from Ur provides a facinating way of thinking about how short human history really is:

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., one the United States’ great historians, is less than two lifetimes removed from a world where the United States did not exist. Through Mr. Schlesinger, you’re no more than three away yourself. That’s how short the history of our nation really is.

Not impressed? It’s only two more life spans to William Shakespeare. Two more beyond that, and the only Europeans to see America are those who sailed from Greenland. You’re ten lifetimes from the occupation of Damietta during the fifth crusade. Twenty from the founding of Great Zimbabwe and the Visigoth sack of Rome. Make it forty, and Theseus, king of Athens, is held captive on Crete by King Minos, the Olmecs are building the first cities in Mexico, and the New Kingdom collapses in Egypt.

It’s hard to imagine how much happens in the life of just one person, or how few generations there really are within the scope of human history.

Flash Photography with Canon EOS Cameras - Part I. provides a very detailed discussion of using Flash with Canon cameras. It also may help explain why some images I took recently had a bunch of motion blur even though I was using flash and expected to be able to freeze the action.

The artwork over at Fubon is really nice. I’m not typically a fan of heavy flash sites. I especially don’t like sites that look to flash for navigation. The stuff on that site is really nice to look at though.

This story about Super, Aquatic Lions is crazy. It does have me wanting to go get some buffalo meatloaf though.

Animator vs. Animation is clever. A character that is being created in Flash starts fighting back against the program interface. It’s like a modern day version of that cartoon where Bugs Bunny is drawing and tormenting Daffy Duck.

Bendito Machine is a cool little flash animation, but I have no idea what it’s supposed to be about. The site that’s hosting it says it’s about our capacity for hate and war. I don’t get that out of it, but I guess it’s as good an explanation as any.

You know there was a time when I thought I was pretty up on all the various web memes. It appears that’s no longer the case. I never even saw Numa Numa. I mean it was on Good Morning America for cripes sake. When Good Morning America is scooping me (by, I’m guessing months), it’s clearly time to turn in my Web hipster club jacket. (more info)

Sibling rivalry, vampires, Vampz has it all. Nice animated short.