Speaking of cereal boxes, I couldn't help but notice when I was in the grocery store's cereal aisle recently that enterprising kids who save cardboard tokens from their cereal boxes* can mail them in to claim a 1.0 GB USB Flash drive emblazoned with the Star Trek logo.

Wow!

And I thought it was cool when you could get a "diving Tony" toy in a box of ( Read more... )

I read a snippet of a newspaper article from the 1930s the other day, and I was struck by how punchy, stylish, and compelling the writing was. Granted, the subject matter was the arrest of a New York gangster, so it was inherently exciting, but the wealth of action verbs and the presence of an actual "voice" on the part of the reporter who wrote ( Read more... )

My first mistake when reading articles in the Indy Star online usually involves scrolling down to read user comments, where scores of people with questionable keyboarding skills and even more questionable reasoning skills like to take any news story as an excuse to trade semi-literate insults.

One thing continues to astonish me, though: Any time ( Read more... )

Is it too much to ask to buy a bag of normal, unadulterated jellybeans?

Tempted by the possibility of those sweet, chewy, gelatinous spheroids that show up around this time of year every year, I found myself in the Easter candy section of Target today. What did I find? I found jellybeans with the flavor of Starbursts. I found jellybeans with the ( Read more... )

To borrow stockholmvictim 's words, I feel like a bad parent. Our poor little kitty Roget is missing and it's almost certainly my fault.


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There are plenty of important things going on in the world and in my life right now, but at the moment I'm going to talk about Watchmen. I got to see it last night with kingseyeland and Brian G. after a couple of delays, and have been thinking about it since I left the theatre. Here we go with a review/reaction.

The thesis, in short: Zack Snyder's Watchmen is ( Read more... )

I wrote this piece just after the election, and today is a good time to post it. Some conservatives and people with a generally cynical or grumpy disposition are disdaining the talk of hope that attends President Obama's inauguration today as just fluffy bleeding-heart-liberal pablum, a sign of delusion or warped expectations.

Still, I hope.

I never ( Read more... )

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Well, I was going to embed this, but that didn't work so well.

Anyway, here's the show: Proposition 8: The Musical

Starring John C. Reilly, Jack Black, Maya Rudolph, Neil Patrick Harris, et. al.