Month: October 2005
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Fred Mertz Experience
Wierdest Band Names . Here’s more wierd band names. My faves: Janitors Against Apartheid, Fred Mertz Experience, Jello Logic, Just Plain Cheese, Lick the Fat Elvis, Natural Fonzie, Nuclear Dog Food, Personal Hygeine, Plastic Nude Martini, Pre-Emptive Sheep, Rhythm Method, Satan’s Cheese, Saturn Flea Collar, Shower With Goats, Slut Kitchen ,Swingin’ Johnsons ,Tastes Like Chicken,…
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Let’s Abolish the Marriage Bribe!
Looks like Texans who don’t like gay-marriage need to proofread their constitutional amendments. Update: It looks like this idiotically-worded amendment will pass by a margin of 2 to 1 according to one political scientist. Here’s my take. Grammar and social implications aside, we should not be offering incentives for lifestyle choices. Conservatives like to frame…
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No Internet
Really, really annoying. My internet service (and by implication this site) has been down all day. Rats.
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Unforgettable Forgettable Classics
I’ve been busy preparing a major book sale and doing major PC upgrading. Here’s an amazon list I created: Unforgettable Forgettable Classics
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Delay to Prison
Tom Delay goes to prison, according to the Borowitz Report. Democrats aren’t thrilled.
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Spurned by the Best
A friend of mine just had a short story rejected by the New Yorker (it’s always a wonderful feeling, he once said, to be “spurned by the best.”) He continues: Somebody asked me why I was consoled that New Yorker took so long to reject my story and I had to explain the delusions we…
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Expelling Preschoolers
I’ve been reading and writing lots of random stuff (and buying lots of books). No time to post. I’ve been following Neil Pollack’s weblog, which actually has turned out to be quite interesting, now that Pollack has toned down his in-your-face punk-rock pose (Btw, I met him a few times at SXSW. He has a…
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CSS Tricks to Scale Images
Nifty tricks: scaling images by percent with CSS and by em. That is truly cool (and helpful if you’re trying to design for portable devices/ebook readers.
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The Joy (and Boredom) of Technical Writing
Ken Circero on the banality of techical writing: The ability to deliver software manuals (or, “docs”) on the Web has taken the technical writing world by storm. Tech writers the world over are singing its praises. The way they carry on, you’d have thought someone had discovered a way to flash the docs in the…
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Aesthetics of Walter Murch
I’ve been reading The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film by Michael Ondaatje. It’s a dialogue between novelist and filmmaker, with lots of insider’s knowledge to producing films. Every single page is full of gems and insights. Murch, if you recall, was involved in The Conversation, The English Patient, Julia, American Grafitti,…
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Don’t Tempt Me
Press Your Luck Scandal, a man who beat a TV gameshow. Here’s some video of him winning. Diaries of Marilyn Monroe Revealed. Here’s her sparring with Clark Gable: When I came back from a day off the set, he patted my a** and told me if I didn’t behave myself he would give me a…
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MFAs, Writers and Poverty
Laila Lalami writes: Maybe publishers are so busy churning out biographies and children’s books “written” by celebrities that they have no time for books that address as unpopular a subject as the poor. Or maybe, just as America has undoubtedly changed over the last decade, so have its writers. The much-maligned MFA programs, which graduate…
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Watching Geese Play Jeopardy
John Scalzi on literary bloggers who sling mud: Authors, if you must write a piece in which you assassinate the character of some other writer, don’t take money for it. That’s just icky; there’s something unspeakably unseemly about Almond having taken money for suggesting that some other writer might spooge in his pants just through…
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3 1/4 seconds, Double Bradley
Joel Selvin interview with Brian Eno on how he created the startup music for Windows: Q: How did you come to compose “The Microsoft Sound”? A: The idea came up at the time when I was completely bereft of ideas. I’d been working on my own music for a while and was quite lost, actually.…
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Summarize Proust, CSS Bookmarks, Ruby v. Python
CSS Tricks, XSLT tutorial. Tutorial on css CSS Tests to run Ian Bicking on Ruby v. Python . Lots of discussions follow. The best bookmarkers on delicious. The Complete Monty Python episode scripts. God, read the Summarize Proust competition
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Book Review: Tie-Fast Country by Robert Flynn
Here’s a review of a recent novel by Texas author Robert Flynn (see disclaimer at bottom). This latest novel, Tie-Fast Country by Robert Flynn has a lot of things going for it. It’s basically a character-driven novel about a grandmother rancher, and it touches on Western/cowboy themes of his earlier novels. It provides a lot…