Tuesday, October 31, 2006
Cat fight in the Capitol
Kerry doesn't apologize
Obama in 08?
Doesn't really matter much, but I feel like if Obama does end up running, we will hear lots of stories that will rub some of the shine off of the idol.
Oh well, I just love the story about Obama admitting that he inhaled when he smoked pot because "that was the point."
And, that's pretty much all I did that day.
We need a little more old Jim in the new Office. I didn't realize till I read this little blurb how much I missed him messing around with Dwight.
New one this Thursday!
The recurring thump of the Vice President's sharp elbows becomes a leitmotif. On one occasion, when Powell called over to Bush's staff to say he was hastening to the White House to write some diplomatic language into a letter on the Kyoto treaty that was about to be dispatched to Capitol Hill, Cheney hand-carried the letter himself up to the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue before the secretary could go to work on it. On another, Cheney dictated an ultimatum to Turkey to a desk officer at State, ordering him to transmit it without showing it to his boss. Another time he and Bush drafted new instructions to the ambassador at the North Korea talks without bothering to tell their top diplomat that they'd substituted their directive for his. Powell had to assume these slights were intended to put him in his place.
Monday, October 30, 2006
CR
I wonder if it's about the obsessive attention to nutrients and vitamins, less than the diet. Slightly overweight people live longer than underweight people and longer than obese people. At any rate it's still interesting and strange.
Despite the initially promising results from studies of primates, some scientists doubt that calorie restriction can ever work effectively in humans. A mathematical model published last year by researchers at University of California, Los Angeles, and University of California, Irvine, predicted that the maximum life span gain from calorie restriction for humans would be just 7 percent. A more likely figure, the authors said, was 2 percent.
“Calorie restriction is doomed to fail, and will make people miserable in the process of attempting it,” said Dr. Jay Phelan, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a co-author of the paper. “We do see benefits, but not an increase in life span.”
Tuesday, October 24, 2006
Nevermore?
Okay, so they are probably crows, but there are seriously a bunch of big black birds kind of hovering outside. Two of them have flown down from just above my window down to the rooftops below and they're kind of scaring me. Who wants a bunch of scary black birds hovering around you?
I guess they are getting ready for Halloween.
Monday, October 23, 2006
!!!
Not committed or anything, but fascinated. What a weird idea. And oddly enough not that far away from conventional diet methods: cut calories, replace foods that are "empty" nutritionally speaking with foods that are packed with benefits (fiber, antioxidants, omega-3, etc.). Any fitness magazine will tell you to measure portions, keep a food diary, and count calories for weight loss - and this is only a few steps beyond.
Interestingly enough, I saw Ray Kurtzweil (seventh page of article) speak last spring at Stanford. He struck me as a little beyond belief.
“Kurzweil thinks we will reach actuarial escape velocity pretty soon,” says Don. “What do you think, Michael?”
Michael pauses to collect his thoughts, and while he does, let’s fill in a blank or two. Ray Kurzweil is an occasionally best-selling futurist, given to flamboyant but well-researched predictions about the “transhumanist” century ahead of us, in which hyperbrainy artificial intelligence, fiendishly intricate nanorobotry, genome-twiddling Frankentech, and other incipient techno-marvels combine to reinvent humanity in the image of the machine. Swirling in the midst of it all is the key concept of “actuarial escape velocity,” a transhumanist term for that moment in the acceleration of biomedical progress when, for every year you live, technology adds another year or more to your maximum life span. It’s a tipping point that, theoretically at least, never stops tipping.
Anyway, you won't find me on the CR diet anytime soon. But it certainly is interesting to know it's there.iPod, therefore I am (Again)
Levy writes that "just about anyone who owns an iPod will at one point -- usually when a favorite tune appears spontaneously and the music throbs through the ear buds, making a dull day suddenly come alive -- say or think the following: 'Perfect.'" What he's describing is the euphoria of free music -- unconstrained music, not stolen music. It's this freedom -- the freedom to boogie, let's call it -- that iPod's marketers are getting at in those ubiquitous dancing silhouette ads. Freedom is iPod's biggest selling point.
And yet even I wouldn't go this far...
It would be a bit much to say that the iPod helped us heal from the wounds of 9/11 –- or would it? There are probably millions of people for whom the iPod has turned a dark day bright. Because here's the thing about the iPod, its transcendent reason for success, more important than its design, its interface, Apple's marketing, or Jobs' charisma: Sometimes, it can just stop you cold.
(Maybe I'm just not that much of a geek?)
Previously...
Sunday, October 22, 2006
Saturday, October 21, 2006
Heroes
In a way, it almost reminds me of when Alias was good.
Friday, October 20, 2006
Geeking out
Thursday, October 19, 2006
Totally Inane Post
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
Maybe it's also because my friend Sarah and I saw the movie of Cold Mountain and she was angry there were no black people in it, despite it being a movie about the Civil War - and maybe that's more than a little related to the excerpt in the article about how slavery was "uninteresting."
I supposed to be fair to old Chuck I should read Cold Mountain at least. Maybe after I've read the other 911 books I need to read before I die...
More links from Bookslut
I tend to think along those lines sometimes. An admitted blog-reader and obsessive, I sometimes have to remind myself that my life will not end if I don't read that link I saved and e-mailed myself from Slate or Vanity Fair. That in fact, my life could possibly be better - more productive, not just in the "on top of my shit" sense but in the creative sense - because really why spend so much time reading what everyone else has to say? It's like when I read that Atlantic article and only finished half of it, wrote a (I think) brilliant paragraph about the Office and how awesome it was, and then finished the damn article and realized someone else had gotten there first. So maybe if I didn't read so much I'd get there first. (Not that I'd be published in the Atlantic or anything, but that would be nice.)
But so often I discover new interesting things from reading stuff on the Internet that I don't give it up. Like, for example, Shalom Auslander himself, who is ironically writing for an Internet publication (although he seems to be more worried about information-as-news rather than information-as-commentary-criticism-celebrity pictures which seems to be missing part of the point). But anyway, my point is, it's an interesting piece, and it's pertinent to me right now because I'm reading his book. So there.
I'm glad I did. I was shocked at how much actually happened in the book. Plus, it's kind of scandalous (and Wikipedia just taught me that it was nicknamed Jude the Obscene). Reading big tomes like this (although it's not as tomey as it could be) makes me want to be back as an English major so I can analyze it. I really could spend forever just on Jude the Obscure, even though in some respects it's kind of soapy, in others its so interesting.
Here's one of my favorite bit from it - which is a spoiler, sort of, if you can spoil the endings of books originally written in 1895:
"It was in his nature to do it. The doctor says there are such boys springing up amongst us—boys of a sort unknown in the last generation—the outcome of new views of life. They seem to see all its terrors before they are old enough to have staying power to resist them. He says it is the beginning of the coming universal wish not to live." (Part Sixth, Chapter 2)
!
Monday, October 16, 2006
This weekend:
Friday, after a strange job interview, I broke my cell phone. Hours later, our toilet overflowed for no reason. At 1:30am, we sopped up the water, bailed out the toilet bowl (all the water was clean btw), and turned off the water. Nothing like wearing galoshes in your bathroom in the hours past midnight.
Saturday was mostly fine.
Sunday, my car was broken into and my new iPod nano was stolen. And for some reason, a bunch of cup-of-noodle boxes as well.
Today is better. I turned in a writing sample for a job application, I will finally get to exercise after three days of not doing anything, there are free sandwiches at work and the weather is kind of breezy and autumnal. Good deal.
I particularly like this line:
Google is “very leading edge, very young and very appealing to 20- and 30-year-olds,” said Russell S. Winer, a professor of marketing at the Stern School of Business at N.Y.U. “If you walked around with a Google T-shirt, people would think that’s a hip thing to wear.”
I guess 99% of Stanford's CS department is really hip then...
Google freaks me out. (As I use one of their products.)
I seriously think it's just beginning, but it's only a matter of time before people are on GoogleWatch. Google is far too omnipresent to escape scrutiny for long, and I for one am just a little suspicious.
Thursday, October 12, 2006
Best Dundies Ever!!!
But as I thought about it, and read the article (you know all that not-judging-by-covers mumbo jumbo has to be true sometimes), I realized I didn't have a beef with the author at all. For the purposes of that column, the sitcom is defined as the three-camera sitcom, a filming style that started with "I Love Lucy" (shudder) and continuing with such hits as "Two and a Half Men" (!!?). This jived well with my recent thinking about my beloved "Office" and its success as a pseudo reality show, pseudo documentary, pseudo sitcom. There are a lot of reasons for its cult following ("I'll check Brookstone" being one of the classic lines, as Dwight, assistant (to) the regional manager, searches online for a purchasable gaydar machine), but one major one is the show's documentarian feel. (I'm ignoring for the purposes of my argument its English predecessor, even though I know they came up with the idea first.) By avoiding the three-camera feel, the show isn't only a semi-documentary, but it also gives it that YouTubeian nature - the sense that these characters know they are being filmed and watched in the privacy of someone's living room. The lack of the camera crew - the absence of the hand behind the microphone - adds to this homey, DIY feel. As a result, the lines between reality and the sitcom have been blurred almost totally. Add to this the blogging and video blogging done by members of the cast, dramatic, fuzzy readings done by the show's actors of a fellow actor's magazine interview, and the ridiculously high percentage of cast members with MySpace profiles, which are inevitably representative half of the character and half of the actor himself. Where does Jenna Fischer leave off and Pam Beesly begin? I sure as hell don't know. She's got a MySpace as Pam, with photos of herself as Jenna at the Emmys, holding up an Emmy in a self-parody (or is it a tribute?) to her character Pam winning an office Dundie award in the premiere episode of season 2. In other words, the way I see it, YouTube isn't destroying the sitcom - it's just altering it beyond recognition. It's okay, though - as long as I can keep watching the antics in Scranton (and Stamford!), I'm fine with that.
I have just realized that the damn article already mentioned the Office, although I think I really did go into it more and he didn't even mention the MySpacing actors or the grassrootsiness of the American version (or, come to think of it, the American version at all). I really thought the article ended at the bottom of the first page and it was only reading the web version that I realized I was wrong and discovered the bit about Ricky Gervais. I see that I am truly part of the web generation when I can read things more clearly and with less confusion (or omission!) than on a printed page. Dammit!
AND I continue to be a total idiot by finishing the article and realizing that the bastard did write about the American office, although I still have no idea why people like "My Name is Earl" so much.
I think I need to do more research.
Also, my quotation mark button doesn't seem to be working so well. This is a problem.
Also, seriously, check out all the "Office" cast members' Myspaces. Just go to Jenna/Pam's profile and click on all her top friends.
Friday, October 06, 2006
Little victories
NOT ONLY did I scrape my leg to hell last weekend... NOT ONLY did I run most of the Dish two days this week, but today, when I went to run the dish, I was not really feeling it... I ran parts of it but not as much as usual. I blamed it on the slightly warmer weather and the fact that I hadn't eaten much so my energy was low. Then, when I left the dish area, instead of turning right onto Junipero Serra to go back to Stanford Ave for my car, I turned left. I went down Campus Drive. I turned a different direction - and I felt more energy and more enthusiasm. I was just bored! That's the only reason I was lagging today. That's cool, man. I just felt like going a different direction, so I did, and I just had to find another way back to my car. That seems to me like a real runner's thing to do, and I did it! Yes!
The fact that I still run about 5mph if I'm lucky... not the point.
(Also, apologies for my incredibly bad sentence/paragraph up above.)
Wednesday, October 04, 2006
A day in the life...
Seriously, here's what I did:
Answered maybe 3 emails
Read maybe 15 emails
Read a 4 page, useless description of something FOR SOMEONE ELSE
Multiplied mileage by our fuel reimbursement rate for about 8 trips to see what someone is owed for running errands
Mailed one package, ID mail (not even going to the post office)
Moved boxes from my office to the main office for someone else to throw away
Called one person, received a call from same person, had one conversation, received one fax
Counted pages in fax to make sure everything got here
THAT IS ALL. IN THREE DAYS.
Now here is what else I did:
Downloaded approximately 40 mp3s from blogs (semi-legal?)
Read maybe 350 blog posts
Read the NYTimes book review section several times, looking for anything new
Window-shopped online
Ate lunch, snacks, made tea
Wrote about 4 to-do lists
Emailed myself about 15 times to remind myself of things to do at home where I could be much more productive than here
Looked on craiglist and mediabistro for jobs
Got discouraged
Emailed all downloaded mp3s to myself to download from my own email when I got home
Fretted about filling up gmail quota with sent and received mp3s
Met and held my boss's new daughter, Hannah (awesome!)
Held about 20 gmail chat conversations
I'm sure I'm missing something.
UPDATE: Yeah, I am. Forgot all about Facebook. Luckily I haven't reached the Myspace part of the week... that only happens when, as Arielle says, I reach the end of the Internet. Oh and also I printed off job listings and forgot them at work. Two days in a row.