June 2008
80 posts
Rodrigo: the first focus group we're trying to do is watching people using wexis
me: ok i don't care about that
i can watch myself do it
and it sux
jessicagoldharalson:
seagull:
Sometimes I wonder if New York is seen as something extraordinarily special by those who live there because they don’t know anything else. They got an itch, New York City scratched it. Austin scratched mine. Maybe another city would have done the same.
Just sayin’.
I’m from Texas and I moved to New York.
New York wins.
Austin is awesome, though. And...
Hey Walt: Yesterday marked the 37th anniversary of Richard Nixon’s Ping Pong diplomacy. This reminds me of whether you’ve set up your Ping Pong configuration. One day delay is equal to one day loss of utility. Enjoy and Relax! Love, Dad
The early brilliance of Wayne Wang. - By Hua Hsu -... →
There is an acknowledgment of just how tense and mysterious Chinatown can be, but there is also a joyful tenderness when Wang lingers on a posse of ancient Filipinos at a community center shuffling to a Los Lobos record, or when an extended scene is dedicated to a chain-smoking cook wearing a form-fitting Samurai Night Fever T-shirt. The cook greets each order of sweet-and-sour pork with virginal...
Turning Japanese
In Detroit, I’ve had a bunch of homeless people yell crazy, angry-sounding gibberish at me. I can say for sure that this has happened more in Detroit than happens to me in other cities. And I think it happens to me more than it happens to other people, though I could be wrong about this. The most interesting encounter was when a normal-looking guy started shouting crazy, angry-sounding...
Were the Olympics better when it was not only a competition between nations but also a competition between races? I think most people agree that one of the finest moments in Olympic history was Jesse Owens winning the gold in the Berlin Olympics which was made possible by racial uniformity on the German side. I ask this question because now even the idea of the Olympics as a competition between...
Bryant Reeves - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia →
After 1998, weight-control problems and injuries began to take a toll on Reeves, and his numbers fell off dramatically. He was still starting at center for the Grizzlies, but his minutes per game dropped, and his field goal percentage dropped significantly. His contract was blamed for tying up valuable salary cap room, making it difficult for the Grizzlies to sign free agents. It also made him...
Only God can judge me
deepalc:
Barack Obama is going against his earlier pledge and opting out of the public financing system. If it works, he will not only win this election but open up the game for the democratic party in the future. He’s already potentially included a new demographic, young people, into the democratic camp and now he might bring in some new states to the “contested” category. If it succeeds, I...
sq=harvard+paycheck&st=nyt →
deepalc:
The NYTimes article talks about Ivy league schools as the breeding ground for Wall Street automatons (myself somewhat close to being among them) rather than public sector workers for the public good. Obama (this guy’s everywhere these days!) said it “betrays a poverty of ambition.” I think he has it wrong. Maybe a poverty of creativity. The one thing most Harvard students have is...
Asian-American v. American Asian
edatrix:
My coffee lady, Christina, is always trying to convert me to “Asianism.” She wants me to learn Korean, embrace my cultural heritage, go to her church, etc. There are a million things that make us different from one another, and normally I don’t even think about it. today, though, I was struck by one little thing.
We were talking about our weekends and she noticed that I’d gotten...
As I get older, I’m spending more and more of my free time managing my accumulating things, e.g., credit cards, bank accounts, loans, investments, electricity, laundry, dishes, etc. I would very much prefer to hire someone to do this for me, but I think I’m in a no man’s land right now where I have a lot of these problems but not quite enough money to contract them out. When I...
My cousin Jeff told me that the way to meet people in a new place where you have no friends is to just go to the same place over and over and eventually you will talk to someone or someone will talk to you. That’s worked for me in the past, usually with food places, because I love to eat. The problem is now that I’m trying to save money so I’m not eating out on a regular basis. I...
Lately, if I touch something cold, that part of my hand will swell up. Someone please tell me what’s wrong with me. It sux.
I wonder how Mongolian people feel about having their national hero played by a Japanese dude. There was a scene of dual meaning in Mongol where a Chinese monk warned some rich namby pamby not to mess with Genghis Khan because he would come back and destroy China.
Turkey v. Croatia
I feel sorry for people whose idea of sport is centered around, say, the NBA Playoffs. There was more drama in 5 minutes of Turkey v. Croatia than the entire NBA finals.
I've got
deepalc:
a handful of heroes, some of whom I’m ashamed to admit, that give me hope. I think the the thread that connects them is that they are all people who have executed on something perfectly and there’s hope there, that perfection is possible. Maybe it’s some residual juvenile longing for purity. A lot of rappers compare hip hop to chess and that could apply to most music, but rap music is...
Watchsequentialist:
I remember when smalter told me the Walkmen “sux’d” and then became obsessed “Little House of Savages,” from Bows and Arrows. For sure, his opinion of the band hasn’t change - nor has his love for that song. My memory of driving around a wintery Ithaca in smalter’s car, the song blaring, is far better than both.
hollaz
village voice > film > Celebrity Justice by J.... →
A star must have admirers. “You want to be like me or you want to be me?” Jesse asks Bob, fixing him with his clear, and clearly insane, gaze. (The question jumps out of the narrative: Pitt may have won the Best Actor award at Venice, but the movie belongs to awkward, whiny Affleck.)
Brad Pitt was like a mix between his character in Legends of the Fall and Tyler Durden. Or maybe the...
The Future of Legal Research →
(via sequentialist)
hollaz
91 and done? →
sequentialist:
A few days ago, I cut my finger while slicing some garlic. I was subsequently out of commission for two days. But ever the fighter, I predicted I would be able to sit and take notes for hours on end in my bar review class - and I did.
Tiger wins this round, but watch out world.
Woody Paige wrote “I’m doing this in pain” or something on the chalkboard by his...
For some reason
deepalc:
I just feared throwing away my used, empty cream tube. The new, full bottle was standing there, but it took everything in me to throw away the old one. For the past few days, as it’s neared it’s end, I thought about throwing it out, in fact, I was leaning towards throwing it out, but I decided then that I would use it until there was absolutely none left. And so I used it for almost a...
AFI: 10 Top 10 →
Is Blue Velvet actually a mystery or is simply a mindfuck?
When I was in Taiwan, I lived with a young kid who had only seen Star Wars I and II, and didn’t even know that 4, 5, and 6 existed. I tried to explain to him how everyone else had seen 4, 5, and 6 first, then 1, 2, and 3. I didn’t make much sense.
When I watched Blue Velvet, I could only think of Dennis Hopper in those Nike...
Is there any contradiction between characterizing your political campaign as a grassroots movement and only talking about top-down policy? I’m, of course, speaking about Barack Obama. Grassroots to me translates into an expression of the power of the people, which seems at odds with the power of government to push policy down on the people. I did get the feeling that spontaneous chants of...
Homophones →
sarahchristine:
kathlellen:
There, their, they’re. I’ve never had a problem with using them appropriately. Most guys I’ve ever liked have. It makes reading emails, text messages and the like a little trying at times, but if I really like someone, it’s kind of cute.
Still, learn to apply homophones correctly or risk looking like a jackass to someone who might not think it’s so cute.
...
Sonya Labs →
I am writing about the state of legal research here.
Honda CEO Vies For Green Mantle - WSJ.com →
WSJ: Honda promotes itself as an eco-friendly auto maker but it appears that Toyota has beaten Honda in the green-image war. What is Honda doing to reclaim its green image?
Mr. Fukui: Honda’s image was better but has evened out with [Toyota] because of the strong image of one single model, the Prius, which Honda feels is a problem. Next year, we will come up with a dedicated hybrid vehicle....
Paul Pierce has so much more class in his game than anyone else on the Celtics. I just realized that Paul Pierce is Michael Jordan, Kevin Garnett is Dennis Rodman, and Ray Allen is Toni Kukoc.
bike as organizing principle?
sequentialist:
(via death & mayhem)
bicycle nomads
“For the radical few, the bicycle is an important part of the solution. The bicycle, that technological throwback from the nineteenth century, is for them a literal and metaphorical organizing principle for a new vision of the world, one that stands not simply against the most obvious form of petro-consumption, the automobile, but that...
I feel like kids and old people don’t construct narratives. When they tell you a story, they’ll go through what happened in excruciating detail without regard to which facts create meaning, develop suspense, add to the punchline, etc. Usually, I just want these people to get to the point, but I can often be surprised where the story leads.
village voice > film > Tracking Shots: Bigger,... →
My first boyfriend was a juicer. Steroids were the drug of choice at my high school, having somehow washed into the Canadian suburbs in the early ’90s on the same raft as Dee-lite and crushed-velvet dresses. As described in Christopher Bell’s scrappy, remarkably expansive, crazily watchable documentary, Bigger, Stronger, Faster*, a similar phenomenon played out in his hometown of...
I don’t mean to suggest the superior power of music when i say that a familiar sound can transport me across time and space, while a familiar sight mostly transports me across space, a familiar taste transports me across time, and familiar smells and touches usually do neither for me.
Do abstractions lead to more conventional song structures? I was listening to the Mountain Goats’ Autoclave today on the way to pick up my ping pong table which has a conventional chorus-verse song structure and speaks abstractly about one’s ability to love and be loved. Concrete stories seem to demand that the musician fit the song structure around the story rather than vice versa,...