May 2012
1 post
“Every really good creative person…whom I have ever known has always had two...”
– James Webb Young, writing in his 1939 guide to producing ideas, articulates a timeless truth about the relationship between curiosity and creativity. (via explore-blog)
April 2012
2 posts
I opened the dishwasher mid-cycle and was blasted with steam and dripping water. I felt embarrassed, like I’d pushed open an occupied bathroom stall, and I slammed it shut and hurriedly pushed start again and found myself apologizing out loud.
A selection of subject lines from the neighborhood...
Offered without comment: Re: Compilation of Dog Trainers Who Make House Calls FS: Preggle (preggers pillow) $15/obo ferrett cage best offer Earth Day Kids Poetry! (fwd)
March 2012
2 posts
Best video game ever made? →
karmcity:
The objective of the game is to drive a bus from Tucson, Arizona to Las Vegas, Nevada in real time at a maximum speed of 45mph. The feat requires 8 hours of continuous play to complete, since the game cannot be paused.
The bus contains no passengers, contains little scenery (an occasional rock or…
Things the New York Times Has Recently Described...
airhen:
Having gout
Parenting
Eating (in the Blogroll)
Social media
Speaking several languages
Polling in primaries and caucuses
October 2011
3 posts
“RSS “is like a magic spell that calls together knowledge from the winds of...”
– Very unhappy about the Google Reader/Plus changes coming. World’s Youngest Leading Social Network Eats World’s Last Major RSS Reader: Google Reader Gets Plussed
Myke said the other day that my dad as a CEO reminds him of Steve Jobs, particularly in conversations and interviews he has watched of Steve.
I text my dad this and add, “High praise!”
24 hours later, my dad writes back: “Who’s Steve Jobs?”
…
My question: Who lives in a bubble, us or him?
September 2011
5 posts
“We ought to be able to construct a narrative of our lives that transcends the...”
– Daily Dot: The Storify of our lives, and why we’re more than a Facebook Timeline
3 tags
Things I've been making
Grilled banana peppers stuffed with spicy goat cheese. I had two of these beauties growing in my mostly sad garden, and I found the idea on this thread.
That was breakfast.
With more of that goat cheese, I made quiche. Real men ate it.
Then there was orzo risotto with homemade vegetable stock.
I had a single, small butternut squash, and I mashed it and spiced like a sweet potato casserole....
I ran the other night, sprinting in my jeans and boots in the rain, weaving through traffic, to the drugstore a few blocks down. I snuck out of dinner after we ordered drinks; it was an emergency. Five minutes later, I returned in the middle of the same story, flushed and sweaty and grinning, my foot lit up and throbbing. I’d forgotten about my injury for those few free moments.
I...
July 2011
2 posts
“Several years ago, I was a committee chair for a local charity function at...”
– Reader Richard Crystal, in a letter to The Baltimore Sun
My Air Force sister, over IM, on what she is up to in Romania:
“i am sorry i have to go to the grocery store here to buy a bunch of food for orphans who are coming to visit the jets”
Approved.
June 2011
4 posts
“Words that traveled through these electronic lines, then wirelessly, grew to...”
– Nieman Reports
“Doilies are made for eclairs, aren’t they?”
– Myke, after doing an impression of a Bridezilla who yells, “I want doilies for everyone!”
Beyond the Melting Pot of Kuala Lumpur →
“KL is still something of an experiment in urban living. Looking out of my hotel window on my last evening in Malaysia, when rain and mist veiled the tall, silvery buildings and the thickly forested hills behind them, I could imagine the land to be as empty and untenanted as its first explorers may have found it. The illusion disappeared as I walked through the old entertainment hub at Bukit...
I just got caught up in my words and referred to a Neanderthal as “an old-fashioned guy.”
A Neanderthal who wears seersucker suits! A Neanderthal who holds doors open for women. A Neanderthal who drinks mint juleps and listens to the radio on Saturday nights.
May 2011
3 posts
We can feel the humidity as soon as the doors open. It seeps into the jetway and through the empty airport, even though the sun’s been down for hours. We take our coats off as we wait for our bags, the bus, to pay. We are parked by a booted car, temporary tags, blankets covering the backseat.
And then we’re flying down the quiet road, the windows are down, the air smells like honeysuckle, and we...
You know your friend is a musician when she describes her trunk space as being “big enough to fit three cellos.”
Well, then. I believe our suitcases are going to make it.
The Secret Team That Killed bin Laden →
“Sunday’s operation provides strong evidence that the CIA and JSOC work well together. Sometimes intelligence needs to be developed rapidly, to get inside the enemy’s operational loop. And sometimes it needs to be cultivated, grown as if it were delicate bacteria in a petri dish.”
April 2011
6 posts
Easter
Last Easter, I went alone to Mass celebrated in Bahasa Indonesia. I took a taxi on a sunny, humid morning to a church in Kuta, Bali, passed armed guards and under a metal detector, and sat in overflow seating a plastic chair outdoors. I didn’t understand a word, but I knew when to sit, stand and kneel. On the way back to the hotel, consumed with my thoughts, we drove past a monkey wearing...
“I will marry her and she can tour and I can manage and then she can tell me the...”
– Tug, in a discussion about Jenn from Wye Oak working at Golden West
Chris Hondros' final photos in Misrata, Libya →
“Rape culture is 1 in 6 women being sexually assaulted in their lifetimes. Rape culture is not even talking about the reality that many women are sexually assaulted multiple times in their lives. Rape culture is the way in which the constant threat of sexual assault affects women’s daily movements. Rape culture is telling girls and women to be careful about what you wear, how you wear it,...
“First, just look. Draw nothing. Locate the center; also the edges. Find where...”
– Writer Joyce Maynard, in National Geographic Traveler, recalling instructions from her father, artist Max Maynard
March 2011
8 posts
Songs that made an appearance in my brain today:
“Personality Crisis” and “Who Are You.”
I don’t think I heard or read the title of either in the last few days, but I can never be sure.
They are classics of rock, and of confusion of self.
“I feel like the smartphone is becoming the new sweatshop. We’re prisoners of...”
– William Powers in “What ‘Think Quarterly’ and ‘Hamlet’s BlackBerry’ tell us about the need for digital white space,” Poynter.org (via poynterinstitute)
“Infusion Tea and Coffee House
Category: Coffee & Tea
THREE STARS
I got up...”
– McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: Ernest Hemingway, Yelper.
I’m trying to coordinate a weekend for Myke and I to go visit my brother and his wife in Boston, and I have eight calendars listed on Google right now to do so. The two most important are Myke’s bike racing calendar, and Mark’s personal calendar that includes work, concerts and other events.
I’ve been staring at it long enough that it’s hard to tell which event...
“They’re such moral books,” Kelso says of the Little House series....”
– When Books Could Change Your Life: Why What We Pore Over At 12 May Be The Most Important Reading We Ever Do | Baltimore City Paper
Don’t donate money to Japan, says Felix Salmon →
“We went through this after the Haiti earthquake, and all of the arguments which applied there apply to Japan as well. Earmarking funds is a really good way of hobbling relief organizations and ensuring that they have to leave large piles of money unspent in one place while facing urgent needs in other places.”
All in a day's work
This morning, with my coffee not even half-drunk, this headline made me want to go right back to bed:
Diners with dogs may soon be saying ‘bone appetit’
I took a deep breath, paused to center myself, and then began ranting and raving about it so much that Myke took a picture of the screen.
Tonight, I read this, about changes at the Apple store, aloud to Myke:
In a way, it makes...
I sat next to a Mexican priest on the flight.
The flight attendant’s name was Popcorn, he was Father Hugo, in front of me was the girl I sat by on Friday’s flight paired with my brother’s doppelganger. The Johns Hopkins squash team was scattered throughout the small plane.
The priest reached into his bag and said, “Do you accept gifts from strangers?”
I said,...
February 2011
3 posts
Things I've been dying to tell you
I’ve washed my watch twice in the past three weeks, and it keeps on ticking, though I think the condensation is going to finish it. I put it in a box of rice, in the hopes that would absorb some of the moisture, so there was a small leather strap hanging out of the New Handy Pour Spout (TM) in my Uncle Ben’s.
I was telling this to Maryann today, and she thought it was an old...
Myke and I are discussing an event where prospective greyhound owners can come meet and play with some pups. He is calling it a “petting zoo.”
Me: Have you ever been to a petting zoo?
Him: No. Don’t you just throw a handful of corn in the air and all the animals come running?
“I find that with particular projects, I kinda know in the back of my head why...”
– Christian Bale, in an Esquire interview, much of which was off the record because he hates talking about acting. The writer is relentless and strings the pieces together into an interesting portrait of a man who both hates and loves his job.
January 2011
3 posts
I haven’t been feeling particularly reflective about the turn of the year, which is unlike me, but the past few weeks have been a whirlwind of travel, without much time to think, and the holidays didn’t really feel like the holidays, however festive they were.
I am, however, reflective about where we’ve been and what we’ve done and seen, particularly the art and...
December 2010
12 posts
BBC News: Kevin Connolly's guide to American... →
“Its newspapers - with one or two exceptions - are awful. Endless sub-clauses roam across prairies of newsprint in search of the point, like homesteader wagons on the Oregon trail circling around a knackered old buffalo.”
“I’ve always wanted to find the rules that govern everything. It’s amazing that...”
– A Physicist Turns the City Into an Equation - NYTimes.com
When I was a kid, we had all the Calvin and Hobbes books, the collections of assorted comic strips. I read and re-read them so often that many of the panels and jokes still run through my head, and the title of one about a Calvin and Hobbes summer has been popping into my consciousness this week: The Days Are Just Packed.
I’ve been in Germany for a little more than a week, and I’ve...
Lunch in my Work Neighborhood in Kuala Lumpur was always a bit stressful. That’s not quite the right word, but how do you describe the feeling of “Lunch!” (pause) ” … Oh.”?
The office was in a slightly rundown “historic” neighborhood, and just next door to the office building was a lane referred to as Femur Alley for reasons that I hope are clear...
Living abroad for a year gave me a great appreciation for my homeland. I never feel particularly “patriotic” or “American” except when I’m out of the country, but I wear my nationality on my sleeve when I’m away, and I’ve so far not gotten a negative reaction for being American. In Bali, the response to where I was from was often “O …...