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House of Holiday Slack: Report #2
Day #3: Woke early, around noon. Ventured outside to throw away trashbags piling up in back hallway. The air outdoors was delicious; considered abandoning quest for slack in favor of long walk in park. Compromised by doing laundry. Called landlord to let her know that kitchen and bathroom sinks are now both backed up. Blackened tomorrow's ( Read more... ) -
Kala Christougena!
Greeks celebrate Christmas about a week later than other Christians. David Sedaris says this is because Greeks are too cheap to buy ornaments at full-price. We also like to save money by posting amusing Christmas links when they are no longer relevant.
Norad's Santa Tracker, for example, stopped tracking Santa when he reached China on Tuesday. ( Read more... ) -
Zune musings
Zune website: Fat Albert stylings, analog fetishism, several loving shots of record bins stuffed with albums, skinny sans-serif fonts straight out of the Discovery Books. Any minute I'm expecting to see shag carpeting, macrame plant-holders, an IBM Selectric, one of those brown bottles of rubber cement. Of all the unlikely sources of pitch- ( Read more... ) -
House of Holiday Slack: Report #1
With my daughter spending Christmas with her grandparents in Colorado, I've been looking forward to a holiday week of total, unremitting slack. Here's how it's going so far ( Read more... ) -
Vacation Reading: Cosmopolis
You're Don DeLillo. Everybody says you're one of the greatest novelists of this or any century. It's 2001, and you're thinking about Grand Millenial Themes and the Information Age. Here's an idea: why not build the entire plot for your novel Cosmopolis from the top sites on Digg? You've read about rich math geeks on the internet. Why not make ( Read more... ) -
Frak begone
Every time a character says "frak" on Battlestar Galactica, I die a little inside. -
Here we are in the future...
A long time ago, a pack of illiterate indentured servants traveled here from Germany and Ireland on ships full of dysentery, lice, and tuberculosis. This morning, their descendant, my daughter -- one of the richest human beings who has ever lived on this planet -- boarded a fantasy flying machine that carried her two thousand miles across the ( Read more... ) -
Nostalgia for nostalgia
Some friends sent a "family portrait" Christmas card. These are artsy, sophisticated friends -- the card was homemade, hip, casual, and slick, all at the same time. A family of four -- mom, dad, teenaged daughter, "tweener" son. They are sitting lined up in separate chairs in a waiting room of some sort, against a red wall. Their poses seem ( Read more... ) -
Voting and privacy
Aside from schadenfreude, granfalloon pride, and a sick dread that the Dems will somehow blow it, the most powerful emotion I feel about the election is nostalgia for the old voting booths ( Read more... ) -
Ear Horrors
I take my ears for granted. I have a ridiculous anatomical defect that causes wax to build in my ears to the point that it blocks my hearing, pressurizes my head and makes me miserable and weak. This happens gradually over the course of two or three years, so that when the blockage starts to get critical it always takes me by surprise, like some ( Read more... )