The Early Years (2002-2005)

Robodump. For when you absolutely need to pretend there’s someone using a cubicle.

The ODB is dead. Completely unexpected.

I know it’s all for his new “reality” show, but the idea of Tommy Lee being in the college marching band makes me laugh. I’d love to see a drumline rock out to “Dr Feelgood”.

A Slate article on dogs as the great uniter between races and ethnicities, by Ahmed Tharwat, an Arab-American with a beagle: I discovered that owning a dog easily accomplished what many diversity training programs have failed to do for years. Regardless of our race, color, religion, or country of origin, we were one community of civilized dog lovers.

You’re Costa Rica! *You’re about as peaceful as anyone on the planet, a real dyed-in-the-wool pacifist. And why not? No one really poses much of a threat to you and everything seems to work out, no matter how much violence and insanity rages all around you. So you relax and appreciate nature and culture while the rest of the world carries on their petty disagreements. If only everyone could follow your example…

Wow. Thanks to Jonathan Schroeder, I found this old review of one of my all-time favourite novels, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, by one of my all-time favourite novelists, Thomas Pynchon. Magnificent.

Jackie Ashley has a good column in the Guardian about the increasingly narrow definition of “morality”: The suggestion is that a family man who owns a couple of gas-guzzling cars, several homes, a motor-yacht and a private plane, who avoids taxes by clever siting of his company, and who can’t stand “queers” and foreigners, yet goes to church twice a week, is living an ideal moral life. In fact, for many of us, he would be about the least moral example we could think of.

Jailhouse food anyone?

I was about to blog about the concept of the Uncanny Valley - the idea that at a certain level of animation, things get so close to realism that humans instinctively read it as creepy rather than endearing. But then I found this page describing the uncanny valley as it pertains to The Incredibles vs The Polar Express.

I used to really want an Aeron chair, and I kicked myself for not buying it for $400 Singapore when they were clearing it at this auction. But now I’ve discovered that there’s a Tempur-Pedic Executive Office Chair. Man oh man. Anyone have US$1349.95 to spare?

Why is it all the wordplay in Nick Hornby book titles get lost in their translation to movies? Since Hugh Grant’s character in “About a Boy” isn’t a Nirvana fan, the “About a Girl” reference doesn’t come through. The upcoming “Fever Pitch” is transplanted to America, and the substitution of baseball for football/soccer causes the reference to football pitches to be lost. About the only one that keeps the word play I guess is “High Fidelity”.

It’s really juvenile, but I really like this MC Hammer animated icon.

Apparently they brought in two border collies on the Pace campus in Pleasantville, New York to chase away the Canadian geese, and then the dogs were so successful that there were no geese left, so they brought in 5 sheep and a goat to keep the dogs occupied. How bucolic-sounding.

Skepticism on the idea of spontaneous human combustion. All I know is, it was annoying that Krook in Bleak House died of spontaneous combustion.

For it is not inertia alone that is responsible for human relationships repeating themselves from case to case, indescribably monotonous and unrenewed: it is shyness before any sort of new, unforeseeable experience with which one does not think oneself able to cope.

Clearing out a cupboard, I found photos of my stint writing for Let’s Go… here I am in Liverpool, on Penny Lane. (Yes, there’s a shelter in the middle of a roundabout.) The Penny Lane road “sign” on the wall is actually painted on, because way too many people stole the real sign. Very strange.

“Sorry Everybody” - apologies for the US elections.

Once, back in college, me and my friends tried to come up with a list of songs whose titles don’t appear in the lyrics… then randomly, today, I stumbled across a Brainy Encyclopedia on the exact same topic. The criteria are a bit different (we wouldn’t have counted Suzanne Vega’s “Tom’s Diner” because “diner” appears in the lyrics; they include it), but it’s still a good list. We had Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” as one of our first picks.

An old favourite which I thought I’d resuscitate… translated lyrics from music-critic.com. Here’s 50 Cent’s “In Da Club”: When I arrive at the discothèque, you can see me driving a Mercedes Benz with 20 inch rims.

If you knew the police were looking for you - why would you appear on a reality TV show?