[Rain City Story] Paris for Prez
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I’ve never been a fan of hers but she’s got my vote!
[Fire Will Rain Down From the Sky] Party on Wayne.
I'm throwing a party Friday August 22nd. A) that's round-about my birthday B) a couple friends will be in town and C) I haven't thrown a party in 10 months.
eVite forthcoming. Bug me here if you want to be on the list. It'll be a low-key affair.
I wish to God I could remember what people ate and didn't eat last time, so I'd know better what food to buy.
eVite forthcoming. Bug me here if you want to be on the list. It'll be a low-key affair.
I wish to God I could remember what people ate and didn't eat last time, so I'd know better what food to buy.
[Fire Will Rain Down From the Sky] Autodidactos
Every now and then I am possessed by a mania, to shake things up a little. Usually prompted by the ticklish chill fingers of death on the nape of my neck. I become restless and certain. I stay up until three a.m. researching and scheming, unwilling to sleep, rubbing nervously at my face and eyebrows.
Sometimes it works out - I backpack across Europe, set sail for Antarctica, or buy the house. Sometimes it doesn't (too many to enumerate).
The bugs under my skin this week: buy and read a large chunk of the Everyman's Library. Hundreds of the greatest works of literature, both classic and contemporary. Aristotle, Epicurus, Orwell, and Atwood.
Turn off the computers, forsake Twitter and LiveJournal and CNN. Read. Read until it doesn't hurt to go 60 minutes without checking email. Read on my couch, in bed, in coffee shops, in the park. Buy enough books to last for years. Enough to require a new book case. Audacious, impulsive, optimistic.
I read a couple books each month, but nothing of real substance. A lot of Terry Pratchett. I no longer have any attention span. In high school I could read for eight hours at a stretch. Tom Clancy and Stephen King, sure, but it was easy - and King's pretty baroque at times. In my 20s I slurped up Camus, Dante, Homer, Milton, Lao Tzu. Beowulf and Faust. Steinbeck and Bukowski. Leonard Cohen. Norman Maclean. The New Testament. Ralph Ellison. Primo Levi. But I feel my brain calcifying. I'm becoming more neurotic and trivial. Now I can't even finish Bonk, a book about fucking.
Of course the reality is that a lot of Everyman's Library (and the Harvard Classics) is stultifying. I won't read Jane Austen. I won't read Dickens or Joyce. Life is short. Bring on Sedaris.
I mean, Don Quixote is over 1,000 pages!
So I picked 20 or so to start with, nearly all in hard-cover:
The Love Poems of John Donne (I'm a sucker for Donne)
The Annotated Brothers Grimm
The Annotated Alice - Lewis Carroll
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Animal Farm - George Orwell
Collected Stories - Roald Dahl
We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live - Joan Didion
Catch 22 - Joseph Heller (replacing a long-lost copy; may never get around to re-reading it, yes)
The Maltese Falcon/The Thin Man/Red Harvest - Dashiell Hammett (the latter is basically set in my hometown)
The Collected Works - Kahlil Gibran
The Stranger - Albert Camus (read most of his other stuff; honestly I prefer his essays to his fiction)
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich - Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco
Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell (might as well)
All the Pretty Horses/The Crossing/Cities of the Plain - Cormac McCarthy (enjoyed The Road, so...)
The Complete Short Stories - Evelyn Waugh
The Talented Mr. Ripley - Patricia Highsmith
The Moons of Jupiter - Alice Munro
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
The Essential Epicurus
If anyone has an opinion on these authors or books, I'd like to hear it. I'm open to other suggestions, but please only if you can say, "You must read this before you die." Of course, I put Douglas Adams in that category.
And yes, I realize this is the nerd equivalent of saying, "I'm gonna start lifting weights!"
Sometimes it works out - I backpack across Europe, set sail for Antarctica, or buy the house. Sometimes it doesn't (too many to enumerate).
The bugs under my skin this week: buy and read a large chunk of the Everyman's Library. Hundreds of the greatest works of literature, both classic and contemporary. Aristotle, Epicurus, Orwell, and Atwood.
Turn off the computers, forsake Twitter and LiveJournal and CNN. Read. Read until it doesn't hurt to go 60 minutes without checking email. Read on my couch, in bed, in coffee shops, in the park. Buy enough books to last for years. Enough to require a new book case. Audacious, impulsive, optimistic.
I read a couple books each month, but nothing of real substance. A lot of Terry Pratchett. I no longer have any attention span. In high school I could read for eight hours at a stretch. Tom Clancy and Stephen King, sure, but it was easy - and King's pretty baroque at times. In my 20s I slurped up Camus, Dante, Homer, Milton, Lao Tzu. Beowulf and Faust. Steinbeck and Bukowski. Leonard Cohen. Norman Maclean. The New Testament. Ralph Ellison. Primo Levi. But I feel my brain calcifying. I'm becoming more neurotic and trivial. Now I can't even finish Bonk, a book about fucking.
Of course the reality is that a lot of Everyman's Library (and the Harvard Classics) is stultifying. I won't read Jane Austen. I won't read Dickens or Joyce. Life is short. Bring on Sedaris.
I mean, Don Quixote is over 1,000 pages!
So I picked 20 or so to start with, nearly all in hard-cover:
The Love Poems of John Donne (I'm a sucker for Donne)
The Annotated Brothers Grimm
The Annotated Alice - Lewis Carroll
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Animal Farm - George Orwell
Collected Stories - Roald Dahl
We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live - Joan Didion
Catch 22 - Joseph Heller (replacing a long-lost copy; may never get around to re-reading it, yes)
The Maltese Falcon/The Thin Man/Red Harvest - Dashiell Hammett (the latter is basically set in my hometown)
The Collected Works - Kahlil Gibran
The Stranger - Albert Camus (read most of his other stuff; honestly I prefer his essays to his fiction)
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich - Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco
Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell (might as well)
All the Pretty Horses/The Crossing/Cities of the Plain - Cormac McCarthy (enjoyed The Road, so...)
The Complete Short Stories - Evelyn Waugh
The Talented Mr. Ripley - Patricia Highsmith
The Moons of Jupiter - Alice Munro
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
The Essential Epicurus
If anyone has an opinion on these authors or books, I'd like to hear it. I'm open to other suggestions, but please only if you can say, "You must read this before you die." Of course, I put Douglas Adams in that category.
And yes, I realize this is the nerd equivalent of saying, "I'm gonna start lifting weights!"
[Fire Will Rain Down From the Sky] Mouth Feel
I went to Cafe Vega for a coffee tasting. A fellow from Stumptown was there and it was just like a wine tasting: inhale deeply of the grounds, then quickly slurp the brew into your mouth, trying to aerate it. "Like using a spray bottle to spritz it across your palate." There were spit cups. But no cheese and crackers.
I love coffee, but it was just a trifle ridiculous. One coffee promised: "Fragrance of Jasmine mutates into flavors of Dutch chocolate, roasted almonds, meyer lemon and plum finishing with chamomile tea like grace."
The Sumatran tasted like weed (honest!), and damn if the placard didn't promise "a taste of cannabis." So maybe it's not all bunk.
Tasted six coffees, brought home a bag each of Gautemalan and Kenyan beans.
Turnout was very sad. Three of us. There were a few more in the shop who didn't bother to get up from their tables for a taste. Woe to the independent coffee shop in the Central District.
I love coffee, but it was just a trifle ridiculous. One coffee promised: "Fragrance of Jasmine mutates into flavors of Dutch chocolate, roasted almonds, meyer lemon and plum finishing with chamomile tea like grace."
The Sumatran tasted like weed (honest!), and damn if the placard didn't promise "a taste of cannabis." So maybe it's not all bunk.
Tasted six coffees, brought home a bag each of Gautemalan and Kenyan beans.
Turnout was very sad. Three of us. There were a few more in the shop who didn't bother to get up from their tables for a taste. Woe to the independent coffee shop in the Central District.
[ain`t it our world within 4 concrete walls?] хлоропирамина…
хлоропирамина гидрохлорид - правит мои миром близжайшие 2 месяца
[mechanical found ghost] crap in the status bar is the new bookmarks toolbar
uh oh. I just found chainlove.com, which is like steepandcheap.com, but for bikes.
[mechanical found ghost] for some weird reason, every youtube…
for some weird reason, every youtube vid people are posting is coming up in my browser as like one of the two or three that gnarls barkely did on dating. like they just get picked out of a hat or something, but it's always one of those, no matter what the video y'all are posting actually is.
i find this kind of humorous.
i find this kind of humorous.
[mechanical found ghost] movietime
I saw the Lion King for the first time sunday. I thought it was kind of rushed and oversimplified. they didn't manipulate the tension well and it all seemed resolved too quick. also, needs more character development. everyone is all cliche and one-dimensional. predictable ending too.
[Rain City Story] NYPD’s Finest Strikes Again
I don’t condone the methods of the Critical Mass Cycling Movement but everyone should see this.
The video shows the NYPD officer standing in the street as bikes ride past. He begins to slowly walk towards the street as the cyclist, Richard Vazques, approaches. Vazques veers left to avoid him, but the officer speeds up his pace and then violently knocks Vazques to the ground in front of a crowd. Vazques was arrested, held for 26 hours, and then charged with felony assault of a police officer and resisting arrest. One other cyclist was ticketed Friday night for riding outside the bike lane, which is not actually illegal and often necessary, considering how popular bike lanes are for double parking.
Nice job, Mayor Bloomberg. If so inclined, please leave a message for him at (212) 639-9675. I did.
The NYPD placed the unidentified officer on desk duty pending the outcome of a department investigation. With a little luck, he will lose his job, his car, his house and find it very difficult to find employment in the future.
And just so it is known, if I’m ever knocked off the bike like this by a cop or anyone else, I will be charged with much more than assault. I will do everything in my power to end the assailant’s life, right on the spot. Yup, I would kill a cop. In a heartbeat without any remorse.
