An idea for a short story, told as a sequence of diary entries as written by the first-person narrator. It’s called ‘The Library People’, or perhaps just ‘Periodicals’. Maybe it’s a screenplay. Maybe it’s been done already. Circumstances force a man to work in the big local library ...
[An augmented version of a comment posted on Boing Boing concerning the public release of Chris Crawford’s ‘Storytron’ interactive storytelling engine. I should write something longer and more thoughtful about this endeavour, because I’ve never believed that there was anything to be gained from the ...
A trivial but surprisingly passionate argument with A. a few nights ago, which reminded me of the scene in Radio Days in which the fictional Woody Allen describes his parents arguing about which is the greatest ocean, the Atlantic or the Pacific. How we got there isn’t important, but our point of contention was whether ...
I don’t need to worry any more about drifting towards bastardised mid-Atlantic speech-patterns. Or, rather, I still need to worry about it, but I don’t need to worry that it’s already happened, because I have what seems to be a foolproof test: if I can ask for some butter at a commercial eating ...
Lunch yesterday at Wendy’s near USC (a large #7 combo with a small chili). I was wandering away from the counter with my tray when the server asked, as if he knew me from somewhere: “Are you a producer?” “A producer?” He hadn’t said what sort of producer, but this is LA, so it was ...
I was struck by this piece in Cinematical, for two reasons. Firstly, the piece in the Onion A.V. Club which it references is, after some preamble, in praise of The Rocketeer, a film I’ve always thought had a rough deal. Notwithstanding some slightly bland casting, it’s inventive, playful, and wonderful to look ...
[A few months ago, a friend, who is an ordained minister, asked what I thought about a piece at salon.com, which is an interview by Steve Paulson with James Carse, who ran the Religious Studies program at NYU for 30 years, about his book The Religious Case Against Belief. A lot of the issues are ...
[Copying here a comment I just posted to a piece by Mark Lawson on the Guardian website, which seems to me a perfect example — as the first commenter testily notes — of the borderline ignorance of the scientific model among even the best and brightest of those whose intellectual centres of gravity are in ...
To Vons, a few nights ago, to buy some old-fashioned incandescent filament light bulbs, because the batch of long-life fluorescent bulbs we got at Costco a few months ago lend our living room the snug, inviting glare of a car parts warehouse. Standing, slightly baffled, in front of the display, it took me a few ...
I always knew I had no small talk, and now I know I’ve got no big talk either. — Sue Townsend, The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole I feel like I’ve grown up with Adrian Mole. We’re roughly the same age, and I have a nagging suspicion that I have more of his pretentiousness than ...