Archive for the 'General' Category

Da daaaah…dum dum dum…

Thursday, October 28th, 2004

You know what The West Wing needs? Besides a kick in the pants? A Reality-Track. Like a laugh track, that ubiquitous background gurgle of the sitcoms. But instead of coming in at the punch lines, it would appear at those perfect moments when the show mutilates reality like a street mime playing Hamlet.
When those moments [...]

Ofishuary

Friday, October 22nd, 2004

I.F.S has passed. He was about six months old.
What his life lacked in length, it made up for in fullness. Toward the end he had a large tank with a water filter. He had a neon lump of molded plastic in the shape of some kind of coral formation. He was, by all accounts, a [...]

Life and death on page B7

Thursday, October 21st, 2004

When you scavenge for newspapers in the cafeteria at work, you’re not bound to get the best pickings. There’s always an abundance of sports sections lying around, but though I’ve tried, I just can’t get into reading them. The only games I might care about are the ones I watched on TV the night before [...]

Nocturnal bibliophiles

Tuesday, October 19th, 2004

I had a busy day at work today. For me, that looks a lot different than you might expect. For a firefighter, a busy day involves riding in the truck, running into burning buildings, sliding down the pole (do they still do that?), etc. For my mom, who designs closets, a busy day means driving [...]

This Old House

Friday, October 15th, 2004

There are so many things in an old house that don’t come with instructions. Or if they do, those instructions were lost long ago. The instructions to some of the things in my house were lost before I was born.
Maybe even before my parents were born.
But yesterday when I went down to the basement [...]

Leftovers

Thursday, October 14th, 2004

Apparently my glowing review of “Super Size Me” isn’t getting much attention in Singapore:
Spurred on by shouts of “Shove it in, shove it in!” 19-year-old Don Ezra Nicholas stuffed more than three McDonald’s hamburgers into his mouth – without swallowing – and claimed a new global record at the end of Singapore’s contest to be [...]

Linkarrhea

Thursday, October 7th, 2004

Why the pope is smarter than everyone.
Um…duh.
A new search engine called Clusty based on Vivisimo. It clusters results based on similarity between documents. So if you were searching for Bruno Bornsztein (and, let’s face it, I know some of you are), you’d see all the results from this site clustered together, and you wouldn’t have [...]

A very airy aviary

Wednesday, October 6th, 2004

Good morning, blank page of the word processor. You strike deep fear in my heart. I raised myself from a gentle, swaying sleep to meet you at this early hour, in this remote place. So let’s talk about something.
Penguins?
They have them at the Como Zoo. Like most people, I find them very endearing. They have [...]

Review: Martin Sexton at The Pantages Theater, 10-01-04

Monday, October 4th, 2004

I’m not a religious person, but Martin Sexton makes me want to go to church. His church.
That’s where I was Friday night. At the First National Church of Martin Sexton, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It’s a traveling ministry; on tour across the country, and for one evening it made a brief stop at the Pantages [...]

It’s mine but you can have some…

Thursday, September 30th, 2004

Nothing but links today, folks, so all you dial-uppers (word?) can bail, if you want (oh, no, I was kidding, stay, really). Here we go:
The Star Tribune’s Nick Coleman is just one in the paper’s formidable stable of columnists. I rarely read him, mainy because his headlines never grab me. He writes about “people and [...]