This hellishly PowerPoint-ish and (I’d say) woefully committee-driven manifesto for social work as part of the medical process was sitting by the elevators on the seventh floor of USC University Hospital this week. It’s wonderfully syntax-strangling, but I was particularly taken by the list halfway down the ...
We drove across to Glendale on a whim yesterday and spent a pleasantly weird couple of hours wandering around Forest Lawn, inspiration for Evelyn Waugh and many others. The air around LA was thick with a low-lying mistiness that flattened the views across the city into planes of grey, but we were in a quiet ...
To the Getty Center on Thursday for a calming afternoon away from it all. The gentle funicular that runs from the car park up the hill, alongside the serpentine 405, always reminds me of the trip across the lake at Disney World. The places couldn’t be very much more different, but in each case the ...
A. and I saw two films yesterday, and my reactions to each of them probably say a lot about what sort of person I am. We headed over to Hollywood in the afternoon, got caught in one of those inexplicably snarly patches of LA traffic, missed the start of the film we’d intended to see, ...
Tom Burka steps in to take on the, frankly, far-too-easy task of finding the ridiculous in Scalia’s ramblings on the Ten Commandments issue. Says the NYT report: He called the Ten Commandments “a symbol of the fact that government* derives its authority from God,” adding, “That seems to me an ...
(Apologies in advance for how crappily-written this is. It’s late and I’m tired, but I wanted to post it anyway.) Pretty much the defining characteristic of qualia is that they’re unsharable. They keep us in our own little bubble-world of sensations, and we’ve no idea what the same ostensible feeling ...
As a present for my birthday, my mother very sweetly sent me an old friend in a squishy padded envelope: Carrots, the quite adorable small white rabbit that you can see in the picture. Perhaps as a result of the rigours of the transatlantic journey, Carrots now has a rakish look: one ear back, the ...
Everything that I’ve read about Katamari Damacy is absolutely true, both the good and the bad. It’s a stroke of genius. It’s Tetris-quality game design. I can see how it might not have taken off commercially in the west, though. The games’s framing narrative is wilfully, surreally Japanese, and has ...
So I’m reading the new(-est) Pratchett, Going Postal, and it’s shaping up nicely as a tale of the value of the public sector in a free-market world — with jokes. Last night, though, I hit a sequence that actually made me grouchy. Pratchett introduces a very minor character who has a fundamental problem with ...
This afternoon, on the side of a church minivan in Koreatown: Please don’t go to hell. Believe in Jesus Christ. No idea why, but it tickled me to see going to hell portrayed as some sort of dreadful faux pas, from which one’s social standing might never recover. Or maybe it should be interpreted as: ...