November 2010
69 posts
“With a market value of nearly $10 billion, Netflix is now worth more than some...”
– Netflix a Fast-Growing Rival to Hollywood and Cable - NYTimes.com
I love you, Netflix.
(via rrrrred)
When I moved to San Francisco, one of the things that infuriated me was the shameless way in which Comcast abused its customers. With virtually zero competition, there’s really nothing to...
4 tags
Thank you.
Ever so grateful to those of you who’ve responded. You’re great people and I’m looking forward to bombarding you with questions about baseball. I’ve got paper and sharpies ready for you, too.
— From SF.
Baseball Tutor Needed
Does anyone have the time/patience to give a Frenchwoman a baseball lesson?
Not an actual lesson where I learn to bat, more like a theoretical kind of lesson. I have questions about “walks,” “on-base average,” “slugging average,” “fielding error” and other such terms, in the sense that I don’t know what they are.
I’d ask Jason, but he’s swamped, and Wikipedia, but I don’t speak equation.
...
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Alice Cooper's Mom
Kirsty Young, BBC Radio 4: “I read somewhere that you said they should send your mother into the hindukush to find Osama bin Laden.”
Alice Cooper: “She would find him and she would make him clean up the cave first before they arrest him. She is relentless. Her great line is ‘Hey superstar, take out the garbage!’. Paul McCartney called one time and she picked up and...
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Forensic Homeopathologist offers Police... →
“Dismissed as pseudoscientific quackery by many criminologists, Simon Yates is keen to point out that ‘forensic homeopathology has been around for a long, long time. Surely if it wasn’t effective, it would have disappeared ages ago. And yet here it is. Plus you only have to look at the arrest rates to see that it is having an effect.’”
(Lesson #792: know what gets your man’s...
Rufus Wainwright gave a concert with his sister Martha at the Royal Albert Hall last night and it was fantastic.
R.W.: “This song is for my father. The great Loudon. It’s called Dinner at Eight and it’s a love song. The beginning is a bit harsh. Like all true love affairs.”
R.W.: “The next one is a little known song by a little known artist. That was really a joke...
“The worst thing in the world is to be sleeping in your dead grandmother’s...”
– I highly recommend Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt. This page-turning memoir is so heartfelt, compassionate, desperate, witty and hilarious. ‘Tis a style piece, pure in story.
— From Melbourne.
WatchRemember Melbourne’s wonderful find about the power of the pentatonic scale, a video in which Bobby McFerrin demonstrates how everyone, wherever he goes, knows intuitively which note comes next? If you don’t know what I’m on about, or if you haven’t seen it, please click through immediately, it’s three minutes that will make you love being alive. Go on, then....
“So on the one hand, we have to cut, cut, cut because fiscal catastrophe is...”
– E.J. Dionne Jr. for The New Republic sums it up: while some conservatives are trying to cut spending by reducing Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, others want to extend tax cuts for the rich, which will dig a hole the size of the TARP, a plan they criticized vehemently (which, by the way,...
kryz*: The leprechaun way or the Louvre →
A bit of context for those of you who don’t keep abreast of European financial news: following in Greece’s footsteps, Ireland has asked today for a €90 billion bailout, the bulk of which will come from the IMF and a European Monetary Fund (set up last spring to rescue Greece from its demise), mostly financed by… Germany and France.
Five years ago, here’s what Thomas...
Burn Baby Burn
There are few things that make my stomach turn as efficiently and quickly as bad analogies. I just came across this particularly painful one from a Bank of England official:
“Chuck Prince’s disco inferno causes murder on the dance floor.”
Oh help me!
(He was refering to the former Citigroup CEO’s comment about having to keep dancing while the music is playing. Click here if...
Films To See Next
In no particular order:
Four Lions (comedy - Morris);
Inside Job (documentary - Ferguson);
Black Swan (drama - Aronofsky);
Waste Land (documentary - Walker, Harley, Jardim);
Fair Game (action - Liman);
Tangled (animation - Greno, Howard);
The King’s Speech (drama - Hooper);
Somewhere (drama - S. Coppola);
Genius Within (documentary - Hozer, Raymont);
Just a Beginning (documentary -...
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Rocket Man, covered by Kate Bush (from Two...
TSA Puts End to Centuries of Puritanism in the...
Get photographed in the nude or fingered for free at an airport near you! Just don’t expect flowers.
…
Too soon?
— From SF.
“We depend on each other, we’re woven together and we cannot pretend that...”
– Dr Richard Wolff, economist and professor emeritus at the University of Massachussets, Amherst, explains the logic behind socialism for Planet Money (Sept. 17 episode).
Here’s the example he uses:
“A private person decides privately not to avail his or herself of health care. Okay....
Does anyone have an aspirin?
From one second to the next this city has gone absolutely mad over the engagement of Prince William to Kate Middleton. No matter which TV or radio channel or news web site you go to there seems to be nothing else happening. In the entire world. No wait, universe.
The tabloids failed to break the story (tut tut!) so I already fear tomorrow’s headlines when they’re trying to make up for...
Watch
The man is nothing. The work is everything.
Lucian Freud
— From Melbourne, via Nowness.
U.S. and Canada: the Butt of Israeli Airport... →
drcairns— The ‘Israelification’ of airports: High security, little bother. Hot damn. Great read, great questions posed.
This cool little story describes in detail how security at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport works. Summing up,
“That’s the process — six layers, four hard, two soft. The goal at Ben-Gurion is to move fliers from the parking lot to the airport lounge...
A Rock n' Roll Education.
In case that wasn’t enough to entice you, here’s quite a different, but no less interesting, take on Life - Keith Richard’s book - by Liz Phair, published today in the NYTimes:
“The most impressive part of ‘Life’ is the wealth of knowledge Keith shares, whether he’s telling you how to layer an acoustic guitar until it sounds electric, as he did on the classic...
Keef, Mick and the Secret of Successful...
Schumpeter reads Keith Richard’s autobiography and draws lessons many business people ought to learn on “how to keep a creative partnership alive:”
Mr Richards laid down the riffs and Mr Jagger provided the vocal pyrotechnics. But time took its toll. Mr Richards’s decision to give up heroin destroyed the delicate division of labour in which Mr Jagger took care of the details...
- NPR in San Francisco… - No, that’s the only radio. - No. - No. - The Apple TV, but that doesn’t count as cable, does it? - No. - No. - No. - The iPhone… - No… - Just the New York Times… - No. - No. - No. - No. - No. - No. - I don’t think so, no. - Nope. - No. - No. - No. - No. - No. - Two. - 37. - Married. - Post-graduate. - No. - No. - No. -...
A poppy on your heart.
My grandfather was bullheaded and highly emotional, prone to dramatic pangs of fury. He had the ability to terrify his children and wife by making grand declarations in a booming voice. He hated nothing more than being disobeyed and when they were little, he often resorted to violence, including against my grandmother.
He never raised a hand on his grandchildren, though, and I took full advantage...
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A table of contents
With this, I’m done summarizing each chapter of A Small Treatise on the Great Virtues, which, if you remember, is the closest thing I have to a Bible.
Some of you, believers and non-believers alike, have so very kindly told me how much they’ve enjoyed reading these posts. Thank you, it’s great to know you felt this way. Still, I encourage you to find the book and read it in...
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18c. Agapè.
As we said before, practicing virtues is an aspirational exercise. In being prudent, brave, tolerant, compassionate, grateful, humble, gentle and of good faith, we try to gift others with the very best we have. Morality, however, is by no means sufficient. What we do when we are good is compensate for our inability to experience love in its most supreme form. We mimick it, because we are too...
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This has to be said.
We just got the bill for the full amount of my hospital stay last month. We won’t have to pay it, because I had the good idea of getting insured two months ago. Still, I’m in shock, and the way I can deal with it is by putting it into perspective.
So here we go. For what we would’ve had to pay had I not been insured, I could:
buy a return flight to London (about $800);
get...
“They’ve worked out a way to transmit proper holograms in real time – just like...”
– Charlie Brooker explains why holograms are tons better than stupid 3D TV or 3D videogaming, which “sounds almost as brilliant as it isn’t.”
— From SF.
Kiss more
London commissioned installation artists Paul Cocksedge Studio to build a kissing tree on which about 50,000 LEDs would light up whenever two people kiss underneath a mistletoe that is linked to it. Paul Cocksedge Studio already did such an installation in Milan last year. So now the big question is who will be the more eager kissers: the Italians or the Brits? And do the LEDs shine brighter as...
Remember, remember...
This conversation just took place over Skype, in French, between my sister Angie, my mother and I (in mum’s defense, Guy Fawkes night is barely known outside of England).
Angie: Tonight is fireworks night in London… Me (in English): Remember, remember the fifth of November… Mum: What’s that? Angie: It’s about the night some Catholic terrorist tried to blow up the...
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“We love a (wo)man for what (s)he isn’t. We leave her(him) because of what...”
– Serge Gainsbourg, quoted in A Small Treatise of the Great Virtues. The parentheses are mine.
You’d call him an asshole if you hadn’t done, at least once, exactly that.
— From SF. 