April 2008
winter, continued →
I started the weekend on Saturday drinking a pair of cappuccinos and reading a little bit of the New Yorker. Of anything from Remainder, I suspect that it will be the narrator’s compulsive cappuccino habit that I will remember the longest. It’s often those odd details that stick. Just as the sun was turning to rain, it was off to a birthday party that was crawling with kids. The...
March 2008
so say we all →
I am sick with excitement over the final season of Battlestar Galactica: I can’t decide which I like more: Joss Whedon gushing over it or Joel McHale actually talking about something that he…
can someone please invent a multivitamin that doesn’t leave me nauseated an hour after swallowing it?
“sitting leggily astride a leather ottoman”
– weird bit of language from a Sunday NYT profile which tries too hard to compare Julia Allison to fictional sex columnist Carrie Bradshaw. [nyt]
“North America’s largest copper mine—a vast open-pit complex in Arizona—usually...”
– David Owen, reporting on the economics of the U.S. one cent piece and efforts to rid it from our currency. [newyorker]
this party has a “flaBONGo”.
I like Birdmonster a lot; just not enough to trek to Fremont in the freezing rain to see them.
"winning the second half" →
How depressing to be getting excited about being down by only 15 with 5 minutes to play? Poor Tom Izzo.
enough already. snow falling on seattle at the end... →
SNOMFJ. Surprise icefall again and again
vampire weekend played at neumos last night; so... →
After having dinner at ViOS — crawling kids, on the outskirts of civilization (or maybe just the Park Slope of Capitol Hill), and in the middle of a freak snowstorm — I rushed down to Neumo’s to see YACHT and Vampire Weekend. I have a certain affinity of freak-out motivational speak glitch rock, so I found YACHT as entertaining this time as when he opened for LCD Soundsystem....
“Graceland … appropriates South African mbaqanga … but as in the...”
– Even after turning all of the parentheticals into ellipses I have no idea what he’s talking about, but Robert Christgau’s ”Blood Sucking Geeks” [najp] is probably the smartest thing you’ll read about Vampire Weekend all year. You will never again feel comfortable...
unstoppable polar obsession
Now that Berlin’s celebrity polar bear isn’t cute anymore, the media seems to have found a new way to be obsessed. Every month, there’s a story about how the limelight has turned him evil: January: “Knut the polar bear is a ‘psychopath addicted to human company and will never mate’” [dailymail] February: “KNUT AND BRITNEY: IS THERE ANY HOPE?”...
have we seen the last of SNOMG for this year? (Or, as Vampire Weekend called it, “weird rain”).
“You often hear it said, of some political or other opportunist, that he would...”
– agreeing with something written my Christopher Hitchens [slate] gives me a stomach full of conflicted butterflies.
"this is a muxtape" →
what I’ve been listening to lately: sciencevsromance . muxtape . com love the super clean and easy interface (by jstn.cc).
“Then there are the bands that, unfortunately, attract such a hipster fan base...”
– Is it any surprise that Carrie Brownstein is one of the best music bloggers? (“Save Me From Your Followers”) [NPR]
Michigan State just busted up Obama’s bracket.
one day before easter, my first fresh cadbury creme egg of the year. orange version for kicks.
2 fired over Obama passport breach →
MSNBC reports that three separate contract workers at State snooped into Obama’s passport records. Frankly, given his popularity, I’m not surprised that people gave into temptation and took a a peek. Also, given this administration’s simultaneous cavalier disregard for privacy coupled with their intense and creepy secrecy, it’s no surprise that it took them more than two...
Link →
Malcolm Gladwell’s Moth performance, recently featured on This American Life, was full of lies. [slate]
“When it’s in French we understand the lyrics and most of the time they...”
– Justice, on writing in English instead of French. The exchange at the end about DVNO is pretty cute, too. [NPR]
Hordes of fake St Patrick’s Day celebrants getting corned beef from the taco stand.
“We swear we don’t actively try to overwhelm our readers with content.”
– Even their guide to their overwhelming SXSW coverage is overwhelming. [pitchfork] (i.e., I am old and the internet makes me tired.)
just in time for rerun season, hulu →
Hulu appears to be live and open to the public. In addition to classics like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Arrested Development, and Airwolf, it also has all fourteen episodes of Firefly, which I…
“Their albums are lo-fi with the treble turned up to 10. Live, they have a...”
– Carrie Brownstien blogs about Times New Viking from SXSW. Their album is just about the prettiest ugly thing I’ve heard all year. [npr]
The agony of opening one's own drapes →
Somehow I will manage to survive.
Happy St. Patrick's Day →
Beer drinking costumed rainbow insect patch courtesy the Golden Bee.
OMGSNOW →
this would be more exciting if we were at a ski resort instead of agolf course. And if I still remembered how to ride a snowboard.
Fireside in "the Hamptons of Colorado" →
At least according to the locals.
Feeling the altitude.
In Colorado Springs →
Overlooking the vast flatness on this side of the mountains.
the mall, media consumption →
Washington DC was a rainy mess on Friday. I ventured out for the afternoon not thinking about the weather and ended up getting pretty wet and dodging hordes of kids who were in town for something called Presidential Classroom. Luckily I had time to change into something dry before flying back to Seattle. For some reason I became obsessed with the newish Hot Chip album. It just sort of came up and...
saving daylight →
I rode the little roller coaster at Seattle Center for the first time today. It was scary, not because of the dips and turns but because the threat of hitting a rusty support or skidding from the rusty rails to the concrete below seemed very real. We were there because my cousin was visiting from Los Angeles and we’d overstayed our lunch at Chinoise on the upper part of Queen Anne hill...
Springing ahead.
long flight made all the less tolerable by iTunes not knowing that I was authorized to play an episode of LOST that I purchased.
I hate zoos but I love the Hall of Mammals →
A quick stop at the Museum of Natural History to avoid a downpour.
Why so creepy all the time? →
The meeting ended early so I headed off to the National Gallery and found without looking too hard for it some pictures of creepy little man Jesus and incorrect representations of animals from before 1500. I just can’t help it: these are my new pseudo-favorite kinds of art. There were also some nice Rauschenberg prints [nga], British photography from paper negatives [nga], and the odd...
Oh, right. It’s OK to walk slow on the Metro platforms after 10 pm.
Our Nation's Showplace →
I’m pretty sure that the name of this airport will always annoy me.
Our Nation's Scariest Escalator →
At Woodley Park / Zoo / “Adams-Morgan” for dinner and a dive bar.
having a macbook and a wifi connection at a meeting is a recipe for severe attention deficit.
because of british sea power I only slept four... →
It seems that British Sea Power kept the pseudo-costumes but had to give up on the madcap antics, maybe because knocking yourself silly with crazy stunts every night gets in the way of being technically competent musicians. As good as they were, a lot of the songs sounded the same and after a while all I could think about was how I had to get up in five hours to get ready for a morning flight.
Hello again, our nation’s showplace.
happy: election returns / sad: need to be awake in 4 hours.