I spent some time with oil pastels this evening, just laying down color in washes and simple shapes. My history with art is tangled and tortuous; the goal, when I was younger, was to become a comic book artist. For many reasons, that never came to fruition. Although I didn’t definitively lose interest, there was [...]
Here’s a band I was only vaguely familiar with until a day ago. I’m sure I’m out of the loop, as usual. Beth Ditto has an amazing voice, even though I can’t understand much of what she’s singing. And look, the drummer is female, too! I saw this video of The Gossip (headed by Beth [...]
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
This was a hard book for me to get through. In the end, I enjoyed it despite my earlier criticisms about the treatment of the female characters–especially since justice was given to the conclusions of their individual plots (and mostly without reference to romantic entanglements).
The biggest hurdle to finishing reading the story was the multiple [...]
I’m a sucker for science fiction. At present, I am reading Vernor Vinge’s A Deepness in the Sky, and as science fiction goes, it is pretty decent. There is a good balance between the maybe-impossible and the scientifically plausible, and attention is paid to the hard realities like traveling between star systems at sublight speeds. [...]
Improv Everywhere have been outdoing themselves lately. I particularly enjoyed the way they turned a little league game into a major sporting event, complete with Goodyear Blimp. How’s that for Opening Day?
What I’ve always liked about Improv Everywhere is their ability to do performance art without being malicious, damaging anything, or leaving anything behind. In [...]
Among the many reasons to love musical artist and soon-to-be-former Culture Minister of Brazil, Gilberto Gil, is the fact that he has almost his entire catalog of music available on his website to listen to for free. Try these sambas:
Aquele Abraço
Chiclete com Banana
He sings ‘em slow . . .
Preciso Aprender a Só Ser
And fast . [...]
[The butler] was certainly a well-preserved antiquity, with an air of serene yet somehow guarded responsibility; in different clothes he might have looked a cabinet minister, in contradistinction to those cabinet ministers who, even in their own clothes, look like butlers.
Random Harvest (1941), James Hilton
I frequently refer to Random Harvest as my favorite work of [...]