It's been awhile, so I'll just start from the top.

A few weeks ago, during a commercial break of a riveting episode of House, there was this Huggies diapers commercial on tv that portrayed a whole bunch of happy cartoon babies in diapers crawling along through some picturesque cartoon scenery. "Cool!" is what I'm sure you've already said. No, ( Read more... )

This has happened before. There reached a point in 2005 when my faithful Red Sox hat, having seen about four years of action, including the heartbreaking ALCS loss of '03 and triumphant ecstasy of '04, was looking pretty good and had a lot of love, sweat, and tears stored up in it (literally). It had lost the assertiveness of its original, navy ( Read more... )

Before I get on to more important matters, I just want to say that with a lack of new episodes from The Office and Lost, I've started watching The Mole on ABC. Suffice it to say that this isn't something that's necessarily embarrassing, but I don't relish admitting I'm kind of hooked on such a cheesy reality tv show. But that is neither here nor ( Read more... )

My faith in humanity was restored today (it wanes). A request had been submitted by my boss, on my behalf, to the OSU motor pool for a rental car to take down to the field sites our lab has in Mendocino, California, as well as some sites in southern Oregon. Low and behold, he submitted my name correctly but dropped the "a" from MacDonald when he ( Read more... )

I don't know what the deal is, but everything seems to weigh a lot more seriously on my mind lately. I don't really mean serious in a negative way - in fact, as long as you're not stuck in serious-thought-mode constantly for years on end, I look at this positively. But still - life, even when not overwhelming, sure can seem...huge ( Read more... )

Sometimes, you go venture out into the country to visit some vineyards and try some wine, but instead end up driving four hours each way in a state of constant partial confusion and only find one vineyard still open to pour you some vino ( Read more... )

I have to say, part of me worries that the musical year has been horribly, horribly frontloaded thus far. What the hell am I going to do with all of this unspent cd-addiction money if the second half of 2008 is just a bunch of releases not worth caring about??? (facetious. but I really do spend too much money on cd's ( Read more... )

Lately I've taken to reading The New York Times' Op Ed "Measure for Measure," which looks at the craft of songwriting through periodic blog entries from four artists. The fact that Andrew Bird (who I would argue is one of the most clever and inspiringly original songwriters out there right now) is one of the contributing artists to this column is ( Read more... )

Appropriately, an article published this weekend in The Oregonian listed deadly sins for anyone who calls himself a resident of these parts - the perfect observatory companion to my arrival here in Corvallis. It's as though they don't want me to waste my energy noticing regional details, that they want to do the work for me. But that itself is the ( Read more... )

Despite the fact that this happened almost a month ago, I think the story merits an email, however belated it may be. To start things off, nobody told me that there are scorpions in Uruguay. Did anybody else know this ( Read more... )