Under The Dome
Cloud AtlasI highly recommend Dreamhost.
This month, I searched the Flickr commons for photos with the keyword word “School.” Here’s what I found. In honor of Columbia’s street art festival, Manifest, here’s a photo from a ballet that looks like something you’d see in the South Loop on Friday.
I read blogs for a variety of reasons: humor – cuz’ I like funny stuff academics – cuz’ it’s my job Skepticism and Rationality in sciecne – cuz’ it’s interesting Freedom of speech (particularly on the internet) – cuz it’s interesting AND it’s my job In skimming my feed today, I discovered an overlap in [… Read More]
In watching Jumanji with my kids last week, I realized (belatedly) that Jonathan Hyde plays both Sam Parrish and the creepy man hunter Van Pelt. This got me thinking about a similar move made by the creators of the recent live-action Peter Pan film, to have Jason Isaacs play both Mr. Darling and Captain Hook. In [… Read More]
While I do (or did) have a reasonable facility reading French, I was never very good at speaking it. I never took the leap to spend much time speaking it nor did I travel to any French-speaking countries where I had to make do and learn to do it well. Truth be told, I’m a [… Read More]
A few thoughts as we enter the weekend: Two more weeks of Spring semester, which means I’m entering three weeks of grading hell. Already did a bunch this morning and am almost done for the day, but it won’t let up for a while. Nearly finished some financial reporting I had to get done for [… Read More]
RadioLab’s recent short, TJ and Dave, focuses on two actors whose show consists of a 50-minute improvisation with no groundwork set to start it. Here’s the story, in case you think it sounds neat. As they talked about the experience, the actors discuss the joy of being in the place, of letting the work guide [… Read More]
I have now been trained as a Level one swim official for YMCA swim meets. Go ahead and try to use a dolphin kick before you start your breast stroke pull out. I won’t see it, but I will know you shouldn’t do it. I forgot how crazy Mel Gibson looks in Lethal Weapon. I [… Read More]
First, the coverage of the Boston bombing on Popehat has been amazing. The gang over there have been doing a bang-up job writing from new angles about the event. My two favorite are: “security theater, martial law, and a tale that trumps every cop-and-donut joke you’ve ever heard” in which Clark wrote about the enormous [… Read More]
SF writer and excellent reviewer from Atomic Anxiety Mark Bousquet posted an interesting few tweets about kickstarter the other day, so I wanted to write a bit more about what I like about the platform. First, here are two screencaps from Twitter. The first is a few relevant tweets from MB’s feed and from my [… Read More]
Them: Adventures with Extremists by Jon Ronson It’s a little disconcerting how close Ronson gets to very scary people in this book. But his point, I think, is that even the very scary people are just people. Them details Ronson’s journey into the late 1990s and early 2000s subculture of conspiracy theorists, people who believe [… Read More]
Bit Parts: Following up on my post earlier this week… Oh my goodness, I hadn’t realized how many people whom you would later see in more prominent acting roles had bit parts on The West Wing. I’m not speaking about prominent roles, but rather the occasional one-off role. Here are a few: Clark Gregg, now [… Read More]
I never watched The West Wing when it was airing live. The first time I watched the show, it was running in syndication and I watched an episode every day with lunch. I watched through the end of season four which is, I recall, when Aaron Sorkin left the show. I never returned to see [… Read More]
They Might Be Giants played a great show at the Vic last night. Being officially old now, we got there early and snagged front row seats in the balcony, where we had a great view. A few thoughts: My first thought, on seeing the band, was “Wow, they’ve gotten much older.” But then I realized [… Read More]