Sentence #28
January 31, 2008
“Hello, 911? Yes, I have a Shania Twain song stuck in my head.”
Oh, Pretty Beetle…
January 30, 2008
Greatest song of all time of the week: Amy Rigby, "Balls"
January 30, 2008
It’s an all-out rock’n'roll barnburner that captures the frustration and excitement of desire with anger and a great punch line.
It’s nasty, it’s welcoming, it’s as confusing and wonderful and awful as your life.
Did I mention the slide guitar?
Did I mention how Amy tosses off the aside “this one’s gonna hurt”?
Did I mention it’s on two great albums: The Sugar Tree (along with “Rode Hard,” another greatest song of all time of the week candidate and perhaps the most convincing argument for bad behavior on disc this side of “Dead Flowers”) and 18 Again (a terrific greatest hits record, but all her records are greatest hits records)?
See her website, buy everything she’s recorded (February is sale month!), and don’t forget that she is one of the performers on the greatest tribute album of all time of the week.
Rudy can fail
January 29, 2008
This isn’t a political blog, but since America’s Mayor is going down in flames tonight in Florida, I’d like to reference this post from a year ago.
Jill Sobule rules
January 29, 2008
It’s about music, it’s on my work blog: A rare post about the music industry that isn’t completely depressing
"I’m going to be late for Davos because of this?"
January 29, 2008
Edward Tufte on the iPhone
January 29, 2008
I’ve been an enormous fan of the work of Edward Tufte for decades. His notions about density of content are extremely relevant in this age of information overload, and he has just released a video in which he evaluates what works and what doesn’t on the device of the moment, the Apple iPhone. Before I give you the link, I should emphasize that the Quicktime file is enormous and may take many minutes to download, but its insights and presentation make it worth the wait. It’s here.
Oven, not microwave
January 28, 2008
Christmas was mixed (some of the presents I gave missed the mark), but the food was great, so the next day I decided to heat up some leftovers.
The following photograph was taken on December 26.
What you have just seen is not a still from a Grade L monster movie. To understand what it is, you must understand our kitchen.
The centerpiece of our desperately-in-need-of-an-update kitchen is a double oven manufactured and installed in the early ’80s, roughly around the time A Flock of Seagulls ruled the world. The top half of the double oven has a double function. In addition to serving as a conventional oven, it also works as a microwave. If you’re not paying attention, it’s possible to turn on the conventional oven and think you’re turning on the microwave function. No one in our house had paid that little attention in the eight-and-one-half years we’ve lived here until I did the day after Christmas. I’m using this photo as a warning/example/reminder (it’s the power-on image on my mobile phone this week) of what may happen if you’re not paying attention.
(P.S. It just hit me that the melted-plastic image above feels like the poor cousin of the image on this post on Leaf-Stitch-Word. Coincidence?)
Hello to both of you who’ve waited for this humble weblog to return. I’m going to try something different this year. As those closest to me know, structure and I are not close friends. Everything reminds me of something else, which reminds me of something else, which … well, you get the idea. No structure. If I’m going to stick to blogging for more than a little while this time, I suspect it will be only if I create a structure that encourages me to post here almost every day. And a different topic every day keeps this blogger unbored.
So, here’s the structure that I’m going to attempt:
Every Monday, I will post about Cooking. [insert pause for laughter.] Yeah, I know, but hear me out. When I look at the things about myself that I want to improve, cooking keeps coming up at the top of the list. Partly it’s because I’m a lousy cook (married to an adventurous, imaginative one) and I want to become a better one. Partly it’s because my failure in the kitchen often feels like a metaphor for other failures in my life. Just as last year my cryptic decision to post sentences here from my novel-in-progress helped me focus on writing every day, I’m hoping that chronicling my disasters and occasional successes in the kitchen will keep me focused. The possibility of public embarrassment remains a powerful motivator.
Every Tuesday, I will post something Work-Related. The vast majority of my writing these days is for my work at O’Reilly (and, to a much lesser degree, Harvard). On Tuesdays, I’ll post something related to what I actually do for a living.
Every Wednesday, I will post the latest Greatest Song of All Time of the Week. No further explanation necessary.
Every Thursday, I will post something related to the Novel-in-Progress. They may be sentences from the work (currently, but tentatively, titled The Rock Star Next Door), they may be complaints about the process, they may be lessons I’ve learned.
Every Friday, I will post nothing, probably, because Man was not meant to blog with the weekend coming so soon.
Random Crap can appear any day, as it is, er, random.
I will also tag each post, to make searching by topic easier, and to help anyone coming here who wants to peruse, say, the music posts but none of the cooking posts.
Seeya Monday…
Time for a break from all that pointless, incessant barking
January 23, 2008
Jimmy Guterman’s Jewels and Binoculars will return on Monday.
