Less than two months until my birthday (which, of course, you’ve already penciled into your calendar for July 16th) and therefore time to officially begin constructing an elaborate birthday wish list, the first and foremost item being this.
Somehow, somewhere along the way, I got hooked on Ally McBeal. And while I hate to admit it, for the past several seasons I’ve watched the show religiously, enjoying it through its prime and suffering with it through its decline. By this evenings episode, truly the nadir of five long seasons, I was more than ready to see the series end; it was less a finale than a mercy killing.
Still, I felt oddly sad to see the show go. And I suspect, come next Monday, I’ll be left with an Ally-shaped gap in my evening. So, bygones, Mrs. McBeal. Bygones. We’ll miss you.
According to the latest numbers, $1 million spent monthly on pop-under ads (think X10.com%
Momo’s Home Page is a rather earnest and extensive website dedicated to Momotaro Hirata (Momo, for short).
Which wouldn’t normally be particularly funny. Except that Momo is a hamster. That premise, combined with the worst Engrish I’ve seen in months, makes the site an unalloyed success and a likely candidate for making the email forward rounds.
Just look at this gem of a paragraph, explaining (at least so far as I can tell) both Momo’s distaste at being touched by strangers, and his freezing response to perceived threats:
Hamster are surprised to touch on a large scale when they doesn’t become familir.
I was also surprised to see that Momo was surprised.
Now we are calm each other. He sometimes plays on my hand.
Strange to say, Momo sometimes stops.
He has no action to touch him.
Softly I push him, he sways to may finger.
We call it “Momo-domari” meanes Momo-stop.
How’s your hamster?
Read through the rest of the site, wet your pants laughing, and in six months, with the smugness of an early adopter, explain to friends just catching on that the whole thing is so half a year ago.
For a long time, I’ve been buying linguine, thinking it was my favorite pasta shape. But yesterday, as the supermarket was out of linguine, I picked up spaghettini instead, and was quite pleased by the perfectly al dente results. Logically, I realized, round pastas (like spaghettini or spaghetti) are more likely to turn out al dente than flattened linguine-esque shapes; the center of a round pasta is equidistant from each boiled edge, avoiding linguine’s frequent problem of overcooked far (oblong) edges.
Time to stock up on spaghetti, then. And on penne, which also happens to be a very fine pasta shape.
As ongoing film producer education, and as part of my job as CEO of the nascent Cyan Pictures, I watch a lot of movies – usually at least one a day. It is to that, rather than to a love of the series or to high expectations for the film, that I attribute having gone to see Star Wars: Episode II on the day that it opened.
Unlike the critics, who screened the film hell-bent on skewering it sooner and more harshly than their competitors, and the die-hard fans, who frankly would have accepted even a flipbook of line drawings by Lucas as a work of unparalleled genius, I came to the film with a relatively clear and open mind. Having spent the few days since digesting mentally, I’m left with these main thoughts:
1. Sadly enough, the critics are, by and large, correct. Attack of the Clones is less a movie than a marketing event, replete with poor plot, dialogue and acting, and overwrought CGI effects that somehow lack the charm of the more slapdash originals.
2. None the less, I don’t in any way regret having spent $10 on the film. Lucas’ universe is immersively exhilarating and visually stunning, while Williams’ score bridges earlier and later themes in a sort of Wagnerian ring-cycle so beautifully realized it nearly justifies another trip to the theater just to hear the music again in Dolby THX.
Frankly, though, what I or anyone else says doesn’t much matter; everyone is likely to see Episode II anyway, which is why, in less than 24 hours, the movie grossed an obscene $30.1m at the box office, already recouping over a quarter of the cost of the film (the most expensive Star Wars episode to date).
So why bother to write this review? Mainly, as long-winded introduction to these two quirkily erudite articles: Jonathan Last’s The Case for the Empire and Joshua Tyree’s On the Implausibility of the Death Star’s Trash Compactor. Read them both, now. Or else.
While in the taxi back from dinner with long-time friends Shibani Mukerji and Randy Wolfe, the three of us got into an argument over toilet paper, debating the ever important question of fold vs. crumple. As a folder, the mere idea of crumpling up toilet paper before use strikes me as ridiculously uncouth and uncontrovertibly unsanitary. The other two, crumplers, were equally aghast at the possibility of my folding approach.
So, this morning, to unequivocally demonstrate the correctness of my approach, I set out to find research on T.P. best practices. Rather quickly, however, I discovered that medical research on the subject is in short supply. Fortunately, statistical research abounds, leading me to the ‘might makes right’ answer to my question: we folders are obviously correct, as we hold a 7 to 10% (depending on the survey) majority over the crumplers. More interestingly, however, it appears that the difference breaks somewhat along gender lines, with most men folding and most women crumpling. (Something you want to tell us, Randy?)
Still, as fascinated as I was by that Mars/Venus distinction, I was even more delighted to discover other, more arcane wiping facts. In one large survery, for example, over half of those polled had wiped with leaves, some 8% had wiped with their hands, and more than 2% had wiped with money.
Further, some 60% admitted to regularly looking at the paper after they wipe. And I bet most of them are crumplers.
My 80 year old grandmother makes me look like a slacker and a lazy bum. This is a woman who, living down near Grammercy Park, will regularly walk the hundred block round trip to the Guggenheim Museum. This is a woman who, late in life, returned to NYU not only for a college degree, but for a masters as well. This is a woman who, throughout her 60’s and 70’s, worked at a day facility caring for drug addicts and the mentally disturbed. This is a woman who, now, volunteers at the senior center assisting people ten, fifteen years younger than herself, with absolutely no sense that by all rights she should be the one in the chair being spooned jello rather than the other way around.
And, most recently, this is a woman who, having decided she missed out on her Jewish heritage by not having a bat mitzvah at the customary age of twelve, took it upon herself to learn Hebrew, and, some 68 years later, is holding the traditional ceremony this evening. I’ll be in the audience, wishing her well, and hoping that I inherited some of those genes.
Since 9/11, a slew of pundits have suggested that airports install biometric sensors, such as retinal or fingerprint scanners, at check-in counters, security checkpoints or boarding gates. Perhaps they’ll want to narrow that suggestion to just retinal scanners, as a Japanese scientist has recently determined a way to make gummy fingers from lifted fingerprints that fool fingerprint scanners over 80% of the time. Worse, the process can be done with less than $10 of materials and equipment found in an average kitchen.
At times like these, I’m oh so glad I live in perhaps the US’s most likely bombing target, half a block from the United Nations and sandwiched between a number of controversial embassies.
In yet another instance of zero-tolerance policies raging ridiculously out of control, a group of seven Colorado elementary school students were sent home from school and otherwise punished for running around the playground during recess, pretending to shoot aliens with their fingers as imaginary weapons. I’m all for gun control, but this is ridiculous.
Somewhat related: it apparently really does stop being all fun and games when someone loses (or at least damages) an eye, as a California seventh grader now faces criminal charges from inadvertently hitting another student (standing some 10 feet away) in the eye with a spitball.
It’s a damn good thing I finished elementary school in the eighties. With all the trouble I caused, in today’s harsher and more litigious environment I’d likely have been incarcerated for life somewhere around second grade.