September 2008
18 posts
3 tags
What Ambition Looks Like (Home Decorating Edition) →
4 tags
Bloody New York Times...
…is always stealing my story ideas. Just yesterday, my friend forwarded me that image. My response was:
Remember when Boston fans (of all sports) were self-hating die-hards who put up with astoundingly horrible teams for decades and decades? But every year the lovable losers would buoy themselves on the eternal optimism that next season it would be different? Well, this kid shows the...
5 tags
Falling Through Your Clothes
Following up on earlier discovery, I finally got through the pay-wall of Psychology Today to see what Hara Estroff Marano has to say about fashion-versus-style. From the September/October issue:
Style goes a long way beyond fashion; it is an individually distinctive way of putting ourselves together. It is a unique blend of spirit and substance—personal identity imposed on, and created...
5 tags
The Sound of Life Experience
I’m loving Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, the new album from David Byrne and Brian Eno. A big Talking Heads fan, I’ve liked Byrne’s solo stuff, but could never shake the nagging feeling that it was too artsy and disconnected from contemporary life. The new album, however, makes him relevant again. The title track is a sublime piece of positivity, without the coy...
1 tag
Judging Books in 30 Seconds or Less →
7 tags
3 tags
WatchBad New for Jacksonville Fans, but Good News for the Rest of the AFC South. via Andrew Sullivan.
9 tags
Lack of History in Sports
Mark Bowden writes in The Atlantic about watching game film of the 1958 NFL Championship with Andy Reid:
It seemed odd at first for a pro coach to have never seen film of this historic game—a little like finding a doctor of English literature who had never read Macbeth. But success in pro football, as in any intensely competitive, constantly evolving arena, depends primarily on current...
7 tags
Politics As Gang Turf War
Andrew Potter’s interesting if puzzling at times—Dief as a great PM? Not likely. Great opposition leader, but not a great PM—comparison of politics with struggles between gangs and hoodlums.
Are we past machine politics? In the contemporary realm of personality-focused, media-driven electioneering, Jean Chretien, Brian Mulroney and Pierre Trudeau were the ultimate political...
4 tags
Highly Local Habits of Drivers
Abigail Tucker looks at Tom Vanderbilt’s new book Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) in the Smithsonian Magazine. If driving habits are as localized as he says, I wonder what sets Torontonian drivers apart from the rest of the country?
Traffic itself, Vanderbilt points out, is a language of its own—a set of rules that unites a culture while allowing for...
6 tags
Photobooth Portraits
For the better part of a century, people have gone through the familiar routine of drawing photobooth curtains to create private or mysterious world, mugged for the camera alone or with lovers, collected the photo printout and signed the back to indelibly record the occasion down in their personal history. Kenneth R. Fletcher at the Smithsonian Magazine talks to Nakki Goranin about her new...
3 tags
I Love This
The book is liberally sprinkled with sidebar anaecdotes telling stories of MAD and Lucas’s relationship to each other (for example, the Lucasfilm legal department sent a threatening letter to MAD about one of their parodies; the same parody generated a personal fan-letter from George Lucas — MAD simply sent copies of each letter to the other sender and the problem went away).
[from...
4 tags
I Want
Sharp VZ-2500 (VZ-V20): Casette deck and turntable in a Ghetto-blaster. The perfect portable stereo system? [via Neatorama]
8 tags
The Jukebox in Heaven: Non-Surf Surf Songs
Maybe it’s that I just watched Point Break over the weekend for the first time since the mid-1990s that has surfing on my mind. I’ve never surfed in my life, but if I did these three would provice the soundtrack.
Devo - Gut Feeling: It always conjured up images of being a theme song for a sport’s network’s coverage of a surfing competition, with the slow-building opening...
Teaser of the Day
I spotted the new Psychology Today on the news-stand today, and was intrigued by one of the minor cover stories. Unfortunately, the full article is hidden behind a subscriber wall, but the article’s introduction is enough to send me back to the news-stand with cash in hand (or at least to the public library):
Fashion is about clothes and their relationship to the moment. Style is about you...
4 tags
6 tags
Celebrity Green
This P.Diddy rant arrived in my inbox this morning via an e-newsletter Harper’s Weekly sends out:
P. Diddy announced that the rising price of fuel had forced him to give up private-jet travel. “Can you believe this, I’m actually flying commercial!” he said. “Gas prices are too motherfuckin’ high. I want to give a shout-out to all my Saudi Arabian brothers and...
3 tags
Corner Gas Begets Buzzword
Corner Gas gets a shout-out in Salon for helping coin/popularize the buzzword du jour this summer: staycation. From the Season 3 episode Mail Fraud:
August 2008
12 posts
3 tags
Favourite Song of the Moment
Peter, Bjorn and John - Inland Empire [mp3 download]
I guess it’s not actually from the soundtrack of the similarly named David Lynch film, but the new single from their upcoming album (more background here). But it sounds like the perfect soundtrack to a dark thriller/neo-film noir to me.
It’s got the simple, repetitive and menacing keyboard riff from The Firm; it’s got the...
5 tags
Whither the Lost Art of Oratory?
At the start of August, The Art of Manliness, complained about the decline of speech-making in the present-day. To rectify it, the site presented a listing of the top thirty-five speeches in history from ancient times to the modern era. Three speeches given by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s—at the fortieth anniversary of D-Day; the Challenger address; and at the Brandenburg Gate—all of the...
2 tags
Rules For Retrosexuals
1. A retrosexual always pays for the date. If she tries to insist, so much the better. He still pays. 2. A retrosexual deals with it. Flat car batteries, house break-ins, cable TV malfunction, earthquake damage — he just gets on with it. 3. A retrosexual never acknowledges he is in a relationship. 4. A retrosexual always carves the Sunday roast. Make sure you know what you’re doing—practise...
5 tags
“A 20th Century-Fox executive in Paris arranged for a visit of the fake paintings...”
– Marshall McLuhan quotes Sheilah Graham in his Culture Is Our Business (McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1970)
I was reminded of this quotation by a recent Salon article on art fakes and forgers.
8 tags
Thank Goodness. Finally.
Over at Radar, they’ve charted the decline of lad mags from their late nineties heyday to their present day online-only incarnations. I say good riddance to bad rubbish. It wasn’t that I never glanced at my roommates’ lowest-common denominator FHM, Stuff, or Maxim magazines. I did. It’s that the men’s magazines I did buy and enjoy, and that spoke to my version of...
2 tags
Favourite Song of the Moment
Tilly and the Wall - Dust Me Off [download]
2 tags
Favourite Song of the Moment
Actually, of the last few weeks.
The Wave Machines - I Go, I Go, I Go [mp3]
But that might just be because it reminds me of the Dixie Cups.
2 tags
Fun With Craigslist
“Henchmen Needed” (via Andrew Sullivan)
5 tags
Gentlemanly Development or Cartoon Refinement?
Stumbled across From G’s to Gents on the weekend without knowing what it was. After watching a bit, it all seemed a bit ridiculous and melodramatic with the “Gents” themselves seemingly defining the style of masculinity being pursued. Today, James Hannaham investigates at Salon:
“From G’s to Gents” shies away from using similar American archetypes as models for...
What Drives a Man To A Life of Crime...
…when his crime is stealing transit buses, driving their routes, and returning them to the depot at night?
He didn’t even steal the bus fares. Just picked up and dropped off passengers at their stops.
I’m fascinated by what his motivation for this non-crime crime could possibly be.
4 tags
