links for 2008-01-08

Continue Readinglinks for 2008-01-08

Fake Band / Album Cover Meme

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via (original link, no longer active -http://www.xtra-rant.com/2008/01/06/2331/) Xtrarant…

Generate a fake band and its first album:

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first article title on the page is the name of your band. (Reference Ellipsoid)

2. (original link, no longer active -http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3) Quotations Random (one which is funnier)

The last four words of the very last quote is the title of your album.

3. http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/
The third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover. (Like Jason, I also chose the third creative commons license picture by wmbreedveld rather than just the third picture.)

Thus:

Reference Ellipsoid: One Which Is Funnier
Reference Ellipsoid: One Which Is Funnier

2022-03-17 Update:
I’m sad this one broke with the quotations link page, because it was fun. And was appropriate given how random many cover album names seem.
Continue ReadingFake Band / Album Cover Meme

Movies I’ve Seen: 2007

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I’ve never kept track of movies I’ve seen in the past, but this year we saw so few in the theater, and most of our viewing was via Netflix, so I was able to figure most of it out. I think. If you know of some we saw with you in the theater that aren’t on here, let me know. Also, these are not in any particular order other than just as they came to mind, so if they don’t match release dates or whatever, that’s why. Of the 25 movies I can recall seeing, just 6 were in the theater.

I’m going to keep better track of our movie viewing in the future. I enjoy seeing movies in the theater, but Stephanie can take it or leave it. (And at times, she has trouble staying awake.) And since we have a fully stocked Netflix queue all the time, we tend to stay home more than go out. There are quite a few movies I wish I’d seen in the theater this year – The Bourne Ultimatum, Once, and Ocean’s 13 were a few of them, along with Michael Clayton, Juno, Ratatouille, and Into the Wild.

1. The Simpsons Movie (in the theater)
Cute, but I expected more.

2. Volver (in the theater)
Wow. Penelope Cruz is awesome.

3. Sideways (via Netflix)
Sadly, I know someone just like this guy.

4. Swing Kids (via Netflix)
Not nearly as much swing dancing as I remembered, but what little there is in the movie is awesome.

5. The Prestige (via Netflix)
A great mystery, and I didn’t have it figured out.

6. Cars (via Netflix)
We finally rented this after being teased by the entire Route 66 caravan about not having seen it.

7. Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride (via Netflix)
Eh. Not as good as I’d hoped.

8. The Nightmare Before Christmas (via Netflix)
I saw it when it came out, but Stephanie had never seen it.

9. The Departed (via Netflix)
Wow. Disturbing and compelling.

10. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (via Netflix)
Really holds up after all these years.

11. Clerks II (via Netflix)
I loved it, though it was panned. I enjoy Kevin Smith’s movies and can overlook the dumb parts, though.

12. The Muppet Movie – Kermit’s 50th Anniversary Edition (via Netflix)
I’d forgotten how many familiar faces are in this movie. It was pretty packed with celebrity cameos.

13. V for Vendetta (I own the DVD)
I like Alan Moore, and I thought this movie did the graphic novel pretty good justice, although he didn’t believe so. I especially love that there’s a local right wing blog that has adopted the V persona, given that V was a radical lefty. But, ya know, some people have comprehension problems in books and movies both.

14. Idiocracy (via Netflix)
I enjoyed it, and am still trying to figure out why it wasn’t more popular.

15. EXPO – Magic of the White City (via Netflix)
Documentary on the Chicago worlds fair – I wanted to see pictures after having read Devil in the White City. It was pretty slow, but I got what I wanted out of it.

16. Pirates of the Caribbean – The Curse of the Black Pearl (via Netflix)
Fun.

17. Frankie & Annette – Ski Party (via Netflix)
Rented entirely for the short Leslie Gore scene, where she sings “Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows” and entirely worth it for that, although the rest of the movie sucked.

18. Good Night, and Good Luck (I own the DVD)
Of course I liked it.

19. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (in the theater)
I loved the 3-D at the end, but it gave Stephanie a headache.

20. Blades of Glory (in the theater)
It was a skating movie, so of course we saw it in the theater. Still trying to figure out if this was funny or homophobic. I’m leaning towards the latter.

21. High School Musical (on DVD)
We had to see this at Dan and Doug’s so we’d be prepared for the second one, which was just coming out.

22. High School Musical 2 (on TV)
For a sequel, it didn’t suck much more than the first.

23. Freaky Friday (via DVR)
Lohan before the wheels came off her wagon. Very cute. I thought Jamie Lee Curtis was more over the top, though.

24. Sky High (via DVR)
It has Linda Carter in it. Enough said.

25. Enchanted (in the theater)
It was cute, but the first part was a little too twee for me, and I thought Amy Adams before she wises up was too cloying.

26. Alvin and the Chipmunks (in the theater)
Whatever – I love cute chipmunks, and these are extra cuteness. We were originally going to see The Golden Compass, but one of our Christian friends freaked out at something she read on the Family Research Council website, so that selection was scotched. Believe me, the fact that I know some that reads the Family Research council website gives me pause, too.

Continue ReadingMovies I’ve Seen: 2007

Weekend Update: 2008-01-06

Dunno what my last journal entry covered, so let me start at the top – we rang in 2008 at the traditional party at Dan and Doug’s, which is always fun and pretty low-key, and thankfully a few blocks away so we don’t have to risk life and limb. I got really toasted, but managed to not have a hangover the next day; pretty excellent. I seem to have made a dozen different resolutions lately; I’ll work on them if I remember them all. The books resolution is firmly cemented and I’m sure I’ll do well on it.

I have a new niece as of January 2nd at 3:42 a.m. My sister Stacy had her baby, named Annabelle. I’m suffering from “Twitter is killing my blogging” or I would have mentioned it before now.

Stacy's baby Annabelle

So I’m an aunt, again. Yay! Stephanie and I decided we’d get the kid started right, so we set up an ING savings account and automated it to deposit $20 ever month. After a couple of years, we’ll look at investing it. Stephanie’s Dad invested the money her family gave to her when she was a baby and she has a nice nest egg because of it, so I thought it would be good to do something similar for my niece.

This weekend we had a really full To Do list, and we managed to get a lot of it done. We put away all the Christmas decorations and finally cleaned up after all the Christmas baking and the tons of cooking we’ve done at home lately. We’ve done really well about making meals at home rather than dining out, but it does have a tendency to trash the kitchen. We got other vacuuming and cleaning done, and I managed to finally package up and get ready to mail some gifts we’ve had around the house since this summer. I completely failed to do my crime watch block leader stuff; I’ll have to get to it soon.

I had a full-blown cold after Christmas that went away, but left some sort of sinus thing in it’s wake that I can’t seem to shake. Dunno what that’s about. On January 18th, I’m going to be getting laser surgery on my eyes to correct my vision. I’ll take a few days off, but I’m not too worried about it. I have a pretty high pain threshold these days. If it doesn’t involve I giant hole in my chest, I’m not bothered.

I’m going to keep track of the movies we watch in 2008, in addition to the books I read. I’ve never really kept track before, but in reconstructing this past year’s list, it’s apparent movies aren’t really a high priority in our house. I can recall seeing 24 movies, and only 6 of them were in the theater. The bulk of our movie watching was on Netflix. I’ll reconstruct the list in another post.

This weekend we got the movie Madeline from Netflix and watched it. It’s a live-action version of the children’s book that Stephanie adored as a kid, so it’s been in our queue. It was cute but the story didn’t flow well, and we spent the whole movie analyzing what plot points came from the books. However I have had the Carly Simon theme song stuck in my head all morning, so it made some sort of impression.

I’m currently in the middle of reading The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books by J. Peder Zane (a present from Stephanie’s Mom) and The Dangerous Book for Boys by Conn Iggulden and Hal Iggulden, which was a present from my friend Jen.

I’ve also been playing several different video games from bigfishgames.com. We had a coupon for free downloads with a Barnes and Noble purchase, and after playing their version of Mahjongg, I started looking at some of their other games, including Madame Fate, Mystery Case Files – Huntsville, and Mystery Case Files – Ravenhurst. They’re basically scavenger hunt-like games, where you poke around rooms and find missing items. I find them a lot more fun than war games and blowing up crap, though.

Continue ReadingWeekend Update: 2008-01-06

links for 2008-01-05

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Fascinating Interview with David Simon

David Simon is the producer of HBO’s “The Wire” – a highly acclaimed series that I have on my Netflix queue since I’ve heard so many rave reviews calling it “The Best Show on TV Ever.” Here is part of an interview he gave with Nick Hornby for The Believer:

We got the gig because as my newspaper was bought and butchered by an out-of-town newspaper chain, I was offered the chance to write scripts, and ultimately, to learn to produce television by the fellows who were turning my first book into Homicide: Life on the Street. I took that gig and ultimately, I was able to produce the second book for HBO on my own. Following that miniseries, HBO agreed to look at The Wire scripts. So I made an improbable and in many ways unplanned transition from journalist/author to TV producer. It was not a predictable transformation and I am vaguely amused that it actually happened. If I had a plan, it was to grow old on the Baltimore Sun’s copy desk, bumming cigarettes from young reporters and telling lies about what it was like working with H. L. Mencken and William Manchester.

Another reason the show may feel different than a lot of television: our model is not quite so Shakespearean as other high-end HBO fare. The Sopranos and Deadwood—two shows that I do admire—offer a good deal of Macbeth or Richard III or Hamlet in their focus on the angst and machinations of the central characters (Tony Soprano, Al Swearingen). Much of our modern theater seems rooted in the Shakespearean discovery of the modern mind. We’re stealing instead from an earlier, less-traveled construct—the Greeks—lifting our thematic stance wholesale from Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides to create doomed and fated protagonists who confront a rigged game and their own mortality. The modern mind—particularly those of us in the West—finds such fatalism ancient and discomfiting, I think. We are a pretty self-actualized, self-worshipping crowd of postmoderns and the idea that for all of our wherewithal and discretionary income and leisure, we’re still fated by indifferent gods, feels to us antiquated and superstitious. We don’t accept our gods on such terms anymore; by and large, with the exception of the fundamentalists among us, we don’t even grant Yahweh himself that kind of unbridled, interventionist authority.

But instead of the old gods, The Wire is a Greek tragedy in which the postmodern institutions are the Olympian forces. It’s the police department, or the drug economy, or the political structures, or the school administration, or the macroeconomic forces that are throwing the lightning bolts and hitting people in the ass for no decent reason. In much of television, and in a good deal of our stage drama, individuals are often portrayed as rising above institutions to achieve catharsis. In this drama, the institutions always prove larger, and those characters with hubris enough to challenge the postmodern construct of American empire are invariably mocked, marginalized, or crushed. Greek tragedy for the new millennium, so to speak. Because so much of television is about providing catharsis and redemption and the triumph of character, a drama in which postmodern institutions trump individuality and morality and justice seems different in some ways, I think.

NH: How did you pitch it?

DS: I pitched The Wire to HBO as the anti–cop show, a rebellion of sorts against all the horseshit police procedurals afflicting American television. I am unalterably opposed to drug prohibition; what began as a war against illicit drugs generations ago has now mutated into a war on the American underclass, and what drugs have not destroyed in our inner cities, the war against them has. I suggested to HBO—which up to that point had produced groundbreaking drama by going where the broadcast networks couldn’t (The Sopranos, Sex and the City, et al…)—that they could further enhance their standing by embracing the ultimate network standard (cop show) and inverting the form. Instead of the usual good guys chasing bad guys framework, questions would be raised about the very labels of good and bad, and, indeed, whether such distinctly moral notions were really the point.

The show would instead be about untethered capitalism run amok, about how power and money actually route themselves in a postmodern American city, and, ultimately, about why we as an urban people are no longer able to solve our problems or heal our wounds. Early in the conception of the drama, Ed Burns and I—as well as the late Bob Colesberry, a consummate filmmaker who served as the directorial producer and created the visual template for The Wire—conceived of a show that would, with each season, slice off another piece of the American city, so that by the end of the run, a simulated Baltimore would stand in for urban America, and the fundamental problems of urbanity would be fully addressed.

First season: the dysfunction of the drug war and the general continuing theme of self-sustaining postmodern institutions devouring the individuals they are supposed to serve or who serve them. Second season: the death of work and the destruction of the American working class in the postindustrial era, for which we added the port of Baltimore. Third season: the political process and the possibility of reform, for which we added the City Hall component. Fourth season: equal opportunity, for which we added the public-education system. The fifth and final season will be about the media and our capacity to recognize and address our own realities, for which we will add the city’s daily newspaper and television components.

Did we mention these grandiose plans to HBO at the beginning? No, they would have laughed us out of the pitch meeting. Instead, we spoke only to the inversion of the cop show and a close examination of the drug war’s dysfunction. But before shifting gears to the port in season two, I sat down with the HBO execs and laid out the argument to begin constructing an American city and examining the above themes through that construction. So here we are.

Continue ReadingFascinating Interview with David Simon

Books I Got for Christmas 2007

Part of the awesome loot I got this holiday season from my family.

The Daring Book for Girls
by Andrea J. Buchanan and Miriam Peskowitz

The Best of MAKE Magazine
by Mark Frauenfelder and Gareth Branwyn

Guerrilla Gardening: A Manualfesto
by David Tracey

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight, Volume 1: The Long Way Home
by Joss Whedon

Readymades: American Roadside Artifacts
by Jeff Brouws

Monopoly: The Story Behind the World’s Best-Selling Game
by Rod Kennedy

The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books
by J. Peder Zane

The Lost Memoirs of Jane Austen
by Syrie James

Greetings from Jamaica, Wish You Were Queer
by Mari Sangiovanni

The Great American Road Trip
by Eric Peterson

Forbidden Knowledge: 101 Things Not Everyone Should Know How to Do
by Michael Powell

Far Out: 101 Strange Tales from Science’s Outer Edge
by Mark Pilkington

Magnum Magnum
by Brigitte Lardinois
A landmark book celebrating the engaging mix of photographer as both reporter and artist that has defined Magnum for sixty years. Magnum Magnum brings together the best work, celebrating the vision, imagination, and brilliance of Magnum photographers, both the acknowledged greats of photography in the twentieth century—among them Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, Eve Arnold, Marc Riboud, and Werner Bischof—and the modern masters and rising stars of our time, such as Martin Parr, Susan Meiselas, Alec Soth, and Donovan Wylie. And it shows the work at a breathtaking scale: the vast page size of Magnum Magnum—12 by 15—gives the photos an impact never seen before in book form.

Continue ReadingBooks I Got for Christmas 2007

What I Read in 2007 (38 Titles)

Definitely not a banner year for reading for me. I’m hoping with my New Year’s Resolution to concentrate more on my own library, that I’ll get through a few more books next year. This is the 11th year I’ve recorded everything I’ve read; I began in 1997, a year in which I read 92 books. Of course then I didn’t own a house or have a girlfriend, dog or DVR, and I read a lot of crap. But I did read A LOT of crap.

Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel

The Boy Detective Fails by Joe Meno

The Big Over Easy: A Nursery Crime by Jasper Fforde

The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters by Gordon Dahlquist

The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield

Sword of the Guardian: A Legend of Ithyria (Legends of Ithyria) by Merry Shannon

The Secret History of the Pink Carnation by Lauren Willig

Route 66 Adventure Handbook: Updated and Expanded Third Edition by Drew Knowles

YOU: The Owner’s Manual: An Insider’s Guide to the Body that Will Make You Healthier and Younger by Michael F. Roizen and Mehmet Oz

On Beauty Zadie Smith

EZ66 Guide for Travelers Jerry McClanahan

Hogs on 66 : best feed and hangouts for road trips on Route 66 by Wallis, Michael.

Route 66 lost & found : ruins and relics revisited and

Route 66 lost & found : ruins and relics revisited, volume 2 by Olsen, Russell A.

Route 66: Images of America’s Main Street William Kaszynski

Route 66 Remembered by Michael Karl Witzel

Roadside Giants Brian and Sarah Butko

Over the Edge: Death in Grand Canyon by Thomas M. Myers, Michael P. Ghiglieri

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling

Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder David Weinberger

On the Road by Jack Kerouac

Chicago from the Air by Marcella Colombo, Gianfranco Peroncini

Museum of the Missing: A History of Art Theft by Simon Houpt and Julian Radcliffe

The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

The Poe Shadow by Matthew Pearl

A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder–How Crammed Closets, Cluttered Offices, and On-the-Fly Planning Make the World a Better Place by Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman

The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart and Carson Ellis

Twilight by Stephenie Meyer

Spychips: How Major Corporations and Government Plan to Track Your Every Purchase and Watch Your Every Move by Katherine Albrecht and Liz McIntyre

Collage Discovery Workshop: Make Your Own Collage Creations Using Vintage Photos, Found Objects and Ephemera by Claudine Hellmuth

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union: A Novel by Michael Chabon

Lois Lenz, Lesbian Secretary by Monica Nolan

The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick

The House of a Thousand Candles by Meredith Nicholson

Maisie Dobbs by Jacqueline Winspear

The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel by Haruki Murakami

Continue ReadingWhat I Read in 2007 (38 Titles)

End of Year Reading 2007

I’ve read a lot more the last two months of the year, thanks to the writer’s strike. (Go, writers!)

Collage Discovery Workshop: Make Your Own Collage Creations Using Vintage Photos, Found Objects and Ephemera
by Claudine Hellmuth
One of the best collage craft books I’ve found, I’m going to buy this one for some future projects.

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union: A Novel
by Michael Chabon
What if the Jews had be given Alaska after World War II, instead of Israel? Chabon’s detective novel started slow for me, but a few chapters in, I was hooked.

Lois Lenz, Lesbian Secretary
by Monica Nolan
Funny comedic lesbian novel – very entertaining.

The Invention of Hugo Cabret
by Brian Selznick
Illustrated children’s book – lovely, and I enjoy anything about clocks.

The House of a Thousand Candles
by Meredith Nicholson
Nicholson wrote this novel on 1905 while a resident of my neighborhood in downtown Indianapolis. Set on an estate in Northern Indiana, it’s a rollicking adventure novel/mystery story, and much more fun than I expected.

Maisie Dobbs
by Jacqueline Winspear
A detective novel with a female protagonist, set in post-World War I England. The first of a series; Maisie Dobbs’ history is nicely fleshed-out in a flash-back that sets this apart from a simple genre mystery.

The Jane Austen Book Club
by Karen Joy Fowler
Nice light reading, especially if you love Jane Austen.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel
by Haruki Murakami
Following the first (and second!) rule of book club, I can’t summarize this one yet. But you should read it, definitely.

It seems like there’s a book I forgot to add to this list, but I haven’t figured out what it is yet….

Continue ReadingEnd of Year Reading 2007