This LA Times article, while an interesting bit of random business news on its own, also contains one of the strangest paragraphs in a news story I've read in a long time. Click over to page 2, and look at the 4th paragraph from the end ( Read more... )

A disclaimer here, because try as I might I haven't been able to get this into the shape I've wanted. But here we go with what I've got:

So a week or so ago I was reading Sylvia Plath's Ariel and some collected Ted Hughes (because I didn't have a strong opinion on where to start), and to my great surprise, I liked the former a lot and couldn't ( Read more... )

So some of these I never listen to anymore (Dookie, anyone?) and some of these are so obvious it's ridiculous, but here's 20 CDs that changed my music-listening life, one way or another. I didn't touch classical because that's a whole other universe of performances, albums, etc for another time.

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So life churns one step closer to where I want to be. I had a day of semi-fruitful phone calls for my news story, finding a library book I'd lost at Great Wall, New Haven's greatest deeply cheap Chinese restaurant, theoretical and practical declaiming and literary recommendations with kirstyn over a pitcher of Newcastle and some frittes (you rock!), ( Read more... )

I biked up East Rock today, something I never had gotten around to in my entire tenure in New Haven. As a result, I saw this city I've lived in on and off for four and a half years from radically above for the very first time. Oh, sure I've been on top of buildings before, and all of those have been transcendent experiences for me (I still ( Read more... )

Repo Man is the greatest film ever MOVIED.

Let it be known.

Outside, what looks like a beautiful white-grey day--not that I've seen it for real as of yet, despite that it's 4 p.m., since I haven't left the apartment yet. But life is good ( Read more... )

Ahem. So. Indeed. Right ( Read more... )

A while ago I was reading a lot of these 19th century novels of various sorts -- Madame Bovary, Bros. Karamazov, Moby Dick (though that's less important to my current point), and it reminded me of something I always notice about novels from before the modern era: they really talk about money, and housekeeping, and personal finances, in these ( Read more... )

Things I've learned or decided so far, just having finished Samantha Power's Pulitzer-winning book on genocide, A Problem From Hell-never trust a diplomat to assess human rights or the good faith of a leader. EVER. There have been dozens of Neville Chamberlains this last 100 years, and for some reason acting like a gentleman for two hours at a ( Read more... )