Just poked around on Google Analytics to see and noticed that in the last month, there's been visitors to this site from literally every state in the country. Two visitors from North Dakota, Wyoming and Delaware!
There was a period of time (that perhaps uncoincidentally was around the time I posted a picture of Pamela Anderson) that there was more traffic here. Frankly, I don't know why any of y'all swing by, but I'm glad that you do.
So say we all.
Now I believe they will leave me alone. Obviously Rodman came up hoping to find evidence of my incompetence -- though how an incompetent could have got this place renovated, moved his library up, and got himself transported without arousing the suspicion of his watchful children, ought to be a hard one for Rodman to answer. I take some pride in the way I managed all that. And he went away this afternoon without a scrap of what he would call data.
This is the opening to one of my favorite books - though I can't say I would have been able to identify it with this quote. It's Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner, a magnficent novel that tells two stories that are interwoven. This is from the more modern story, though in thinking about the book I almost always think first of the older portion of the book. Interesting, that.Somehow I thought it was yesterday, which shows how much I follow such things. But either way, the holiday's sentiment is a good one, though it's often soaked in Patchouli and that's never a good thing.
Still, it produces cool videos like this which is well worth watching (and includes what sounds very much like a Sigur Ros score):
If I was clever, I'd use today's post from an election related novel or book...but I'm not clever.
I was in the shower when I realized where I'd gone wrong. That's a cliche now, I know, but it wasn't then. Back then it was wildly new and my idea, and I would have copyrighted it had I foreseen it would become so popular, but well -- as with so many things, who knew? Anyway, there I was, the water drilling away, its wet warmth my amniotic tide, the shower curtain a plastic, plaid uterine wall. Then it occurs to me, like a gift from God: Shoes are our friends.
You might think, with that last line, that this was from one of those chick-lit books. But you are wrong - and I think I can safely say that I'd never quote one of those because I don't even think my wife has them at the house. I just really like this picture:
The gravel pit was about a mile east of town, and the size of a small lake, and so deep that boys under sixteen were forbidden by their parents to swim there. I knew it only by hearsay. It had no bottom, people said, and because I was very much interested in the idea that if you dug a hole straight down anywhere and kept on digging it would come out in China, I took this to be a literal statement of fact.
One winter morning shortly before daybreak, three men loading gravel there heard what sounded like a pistol shot. Or, they agreed, it could have been a car backfiring. ...
That is the opening to the wonderful sparse novel, So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell.Today, we're playing Fictionary with one of my favorite beginnings to any book:
A soft fall rain slips down through the trees and the smell of ocean is so strong that it can almost be licked off the air. Trucks rumble along Rogers Street and men in t-shirts stained with fishblood shout to each other from the decks of boats. Beneath them the ocean swells up against the black pilings and sucks back down to the barnacles. Beer cans and old pieces of styrofoam rise and fall and pools of spilled diesel fuel undulate like huge iridescent jellyfish. The boats rock and creak against their ropes and seagulls complain and hunker down and complain some more. Across Rogers Street and around the back of the Crow's Nest, through the door and up the cement stairs, down the carpeted hallway and into one of the doors on the left, stretched out on a double bed in room number twenty-seven with a sheet pulled over him, Bobby Shatford lies asleep.
This is, of course, the opening paragraph to a great book that made a terrible, terrible movie:
Which reminds me, I need to watch Rocky for the 57th time or so, real soon:
Name this book and author:
The candleflame and the image of the candleflame caught in the pierglass twisted and righted when he entered the hall and again when he shut the door. He took of his hat and came slowly forward. The floorboards creaked under his boots. In his black suit he stood in the dark glass where the lilies leaned so palely from their waisted cutglass vase.
That would be All The Pretty Horses, by Cormac McCarthy. Like all your books, music and movies, you should buy it at Alibris!That whenever I get a window of "we'll be there between 8 and 12" that it's always at 12, or later?
I mean, SOMEONE has to be getting attention at 8:00, right?
Right?
Time for another round of, "Name the book that opens with..."
When the phone rang I was in the kitchen, boiling a potful of spaghetti and whistling along with an FM broadcast of the overture to Rossini's The Thieving Magpie, which has to be the perfect music for cooking pasta.
Those are the opening lines to: Haruku Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which is awesome and you should totally buy at Alibris.When I was a kid, my parents would play a game with their friends that was like Pictionary, but they'd use the first line of a book...they would choose a book, and then people would write fake opening sentences. Those who guessed the correct first line got a point, and the person who wrote fake lines other chose would also get points.
Good stuff.
So let's bring it here - but we'll do it a bit differently. I'll write the first line or sets of lines from a book, and then after the jump, you can find out who actually wrote it. This may only amuse me, but let's go.
Six days ago, a man blew himself up by the side of the road in northern Wisconsin. There were no witnesses, but it appears that he was sitting on the grass next to his parked car when the bomb he was building accidentally went off.
Yep, this is the first few lines from one my favorite, under-rated books, Paul Auster's Leviathan.
Today's lyric:
Are you waiting for the world to get it?
If you're waiting for the world forget it
I'm not waiting for the world
So, yesterday on my way to work, I decided to call The Adam Carolla Show to see if Teresa Strasser had ever spilled the beans about her high school alma mater. (Traffic is boring...) She went to school up here in the Bay Area with some friends of mine, and the school is ridiculously named Lick-Wilmerding.
Yep, Lick-Wilmerding.
Not only had she carefully not mentioned it before but then, in an action I think she regretted by the end of the show, did the Lick cheer:
Lick my left! Lick my right! Lick my, lick my Wilmerding!
I posted something earlier about favorite lyrics...so I thought I'd start something new. Like many of these "...of the day" postings, I assume I'll forget all about this in a week or so, but until then, good times!
So, here is the first lyric...see if you can guess the artist and song. (And yes, I know Google, or "the google" as our president would say, makes this not much of a chore, but it's more the fun of trying to guess, people.)
Song Title and Artist after the jump...
Jaws was never my scene
And I don't like Star Wars
...
I don't believe in Peter Pan
Frankenstein or Superman
Yep, that's Queen, and those are some of the lyrics to "Bicycle Race."
When you try to argue that Barack Obama is not electable...it would be a better case to make
That is all.
see more crazy cat pics
Happy Friday.
Oh good lord.
I just listened via podcast to Isaac Hayes on the Adam Carolla Show this morning and wow. I really hope he was high as a kite, because he was almost unintelligible. A caller actually inquired whether or not he had pulled a wake-and-bake. (He claimed to have only smoked pot once in his life. What a shame, because he sounded like he was swimming in a bottle of Benadryl.)
Mumbling, distracted and ... well, it just didn't sound like Shaft to me.
P.S. The podcast engineer still sucks. It's 1:20 in the afternoon and they still haven't uploaded everything.
In a recent interview, Denver Broncos QB Jay Cutler was surprisingly candid about his feelings towards star WR Brandon Marshall.
"Yeah, he's not my favorite person right now," Cutler said. "I mean, I support him, but it's always something with him right now...I've talked to him many times. I think a lot of people have. ... He knows he's running out of chances," Cutler said. "This wasn't like his DUI and other stuff he's had. It was an accident, but still, things like that can't happen. He knows it."
...
Marshall said last week that he realizes he has to grow up and that his freak injury was a wakeup call.
"His DUI was a wakeup call," Cutler retorted. "He's had many wakeup calls. I mean, he's been in (coach Mike) Shanahan's office many times. I've been up there with him. He said the same thing: 'This is a wakeup call. This is the last thing that's going to happen. Blah blah blah.' I mean, until he goes out and proves it, we'll see what happens."
Jose Saramago's book Blindness is easily one of the best books I've ever read.
Ever.
And if you asked me if it could be made into a movie, I would have a single word answer:
Impossible.
But, it looks like they're doing it...and dare I say, it looks good.
Hm. We shall see.
Gonna start a running list here, of some of my favorite lyrics from the music I dig.
What are some of your favorite lyrics?
Donald A. Norman wrote a landmark book back in 1988, previously called The Psychology of Everyday Things. (Norman explains the change in the preface.) I didn't read it in 1988, but twenty years later it's always entertaining, generally still relevant and often prescient.
If you think something you use on a regular basis is designed by a moron, this book speaks truth to power, my friend. If you occasionally look at a product - say, one by Apple - and think, "That is a brilliantly designed thing," well this book is also clearly for you.
It's considered a landmark book, and for good reason. More below the jump.
The book's main premise is both an examination of some items that are designed especially well (the typical touch tone corded phone) and a slew of others that are unnecessarily complex.
Things you deal with every day -- doors that you instinctively want to push but need to pull, trying to regulate the temperature in your refrigerator, half of the features on an average cell phone -- aren't purposefully confusing, but Norman successfully illustrates why they are too often designed stupidly.
Examining both the way we (users of designed products) react to information, how we map features - see clues to help guide us instinctively to use the product - are among the truly interesting points Norman makes throughout the book.
I'm especially late to the game with Design of Everyday Things, but it's obvious reading it to see how the ideas proposed here guide a lot of what Norman - and everyone else, for that matter - calls User Centered Design. In fact, I just went to a conference basically on that subject alone.
This book is absolutely for everyone but well worth reading for anyone involved in product management or marketing in general. A cool read, so check it.
Rating: 9.0/10.0
This post on currency design (I've been thinking a lot about design from a work standpoint of late) is pretty darn striking. U.S. Currency is not just boring, it's ineffective (how often do you leaf through your wallet wondering if you have a $10, for instance...and finally you realize you do have one, sandwiched between $1, $5, $20 bills...all which look largely identical?)
We've "solved" that problem, apparently, by the new $5 bill, featured below:
I mean...sure, if I have all my bills out, that purple WILL stick out. But the bill itself is essentially the same.
Compare that to the following British currency, which was designed by one guy who'd never done this before (he won an open competition):
More isn't always better. And competition is almost always the right way to do things.
It's worth noting that I am now occasionally posting on AOL's Fantasy Fanhouse about (wait for it) fantasy sports. Mainly baseball and football since that's really all I know about. Posts I author can be aggregated at the following link:
http://sports.aol.com/fanhouse/bloggers/matthew-greber
But...of course, you should check out other great writers over there, many who I worked with at the now defunct TalentedMrRoto.com site.
Oh, and the rest of the Friday Night Lights cast and crew...this is great news, even if the 2nd season had some SERIOUS bumps in the road:
Confirming rumors that had swirled for weeks, NBC said on Wednesday that it had partnered with the satellite television provider DirecTV to keep the football drama “Friday Night Lights” on television.
Read More......
You take them both, and there you have...
The facts of life...the facts of life!
Ah, life. So full of irony and incompetence.
In an otherwise positive story about Jesse Foppert trying to regain his once promising career, there is this note:
[GM Brian] Sabean said the Giants haven't found much trade interest for Steve Kline, who was designated for assignment on Sunday. The team has a little more than a week remaining before it must trade or waive the veteran left-hander.
