(Fiercely redoubling my efforts to be trivial. Ithangyou.) So last night I heated up a frozen sausage lasagna for dinner*. It was perfectly deelish, but I couldn’t help but be struck by the instructions on the back of the cardboard container thingy. See, the instructions had eight steps. To be sure, the final ...
There’s definitely something wrong with me. No matter how dazzlingly good I found The Incredibles to be, what’s left in my memory are the things that I reckon are flaws. And it’s hardly the film’s fault, because there’s nothing that doesn’t have flaws. It’s me. I measure things ...
[Written on Tuesday, but posted early Saturday morning at PDX, to which I give three hearty cheers for free wireless Internet access.] I know this isn’t exactly what’s meant by moblogging, but all the same I feel pretty mobile. I’m writing this at an altitude of many thousands of feet somewhere above the ...
Introversion’s a funny thing. More funny peculiar than funny ha ha, but maybe some of both. Because people as introverted as me are really quite rare — I typically rate 100% ‘I’ on the ‘I/E’ continuum of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator — the sense is often of living in a world that wasn’t ...
It’s not the detail. We pretty soon forget all of that, and — if forced — have to go back to the manual or the text book or whoever taught us the damn thing in the first place. No, what we truly remember of things we learn consists of general principles wrapped up in phrases, ...
A few blocks from here, along Wilshire on the way to Third Street, there’s an empty unit in a commercial building. I walk past it whenever I head down to Barnes & Noble, or the Apple Store, or whatever. It looks like it’s not been occupied for some time — black roller-blinds cover the huge ...
I’m amazed no-one else has figured out the real reason that Alberto Gonzales has been nominated for US Attorney General. It’s obvious, and all you have to do is look: AG is the new AG. See? Nice and easy for, um, less than intellectually stellar presidents to remember. If he remembers the name, that’ll tell ...
(‘Worse than 2000‘. Sometimes it sucks to be right, when there isn’t a damn thing you can do about it.) A couple of years ago I found myself working somewhere I’d previously worked about seven years before that, and in close proximity to some software that I’d written then, which was still ...
[There’s a web-site I was intending to write about tonight, but, despite my poking and prodding at it pathetically all day, it stayed stubbornly down, so that one’ll have to wait for another time. No rush. In its place, here’s a bit of apropros-of-nothing nonsense.] I used to carry around a factoid in my ...
I read a blog post the other day by the estimable Digby. It’s a passionate and incisive piece of writing, but that’s not what stood out for me. What stood out was the fact that, after the first couple of paragraphs, she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, bring herself to use the name of the current US ...