Toots and the Maytals - Funky Kingston, and, yes, I still listen to it from time to time. I've moved on and come back many times.

 Serious response: While I will miss Pluto in the "pantheon" of planets orbiting our sun, I don't really have "feelings" about its demotion from planet to planetoid. Having a planet named for a god of the underworld is kind of a downer. How much mass must an orbiting object contain before it is considered a planet? Apparently some arbitrary number ( Read more... )

I'm currently reading Isaacson's biography of Einstein, and it has me thinking, especially about the concept of time ( Read more... )

While "the velocity of money" has been used to describe the rate of circulation of currency in a system for many years, I'm pondering the applicability of other terms associated with physics to describe economic behaviors ( Read more... )

 
El Topo (1970)
From the box: “In this surreal Western, avant-garde filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky uses allegory and religious iconography to tell the story of a gunfighter, El Topo (Jodorowsky), who wanders the desert on an odyssey seeking enlightenment. But first, he must defeat four master gunfighters and dig a tunnel to free a colony of deformed ( Read more... )

 Wow, it seems I've really been neglecting livejournal lately, and haven't posted a DVD review since the end of October.

Here are my reviews and ratings of the twenty or so DVDs I've viewed in the last 2 1/2 months, in reverse chronological order:

Semen: un historia de amor (2006) -- I've got to admit I rented this because the female lead is Leticia ( Read more... )

 
While looking back at 2007 I would have to say that, for me, this was a year of general stasis punctuated by periods of sluggish progress in most of the important spheres of my life. I ended '07 in slightly better shape financially and creatively than when I started, but in both areas the year was a long swim upstream against a strong current. ( Read more... )

 
I read Spinoza on December 25, that day on which the gullible, delusional and traditional celebrate the incredible. Reading Spinoza is about as close as I come to paying attention to (or giving any credence to) theology. There is a great deal of irony in Spinoza: that this man, excommunicated from his synagogue and reviled and banned by the ( Read more... )

 Hu Jintao, President of China, quoted Mao's famous "Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend" during a speech before the People's Delegates at the Chinese Communist Party Congress on monday (10/15/07). Let us hope that this occurs, only without the later reaction and repression on the part of the Chinese government.

( Read more... )

 For many of my classes I have to write essays on a wide variety of subjects in a very short period of time. To practice this absurd and otherwise useless skill, I randomly choose FAQs from Rabbi Roger's web page and reply to them in the form of a "theme" essay. I give myself fifteen minutes. I've posted several of these previously (just look for ( Read more... )