10:11pm Aww yeah


OS X on my Dell Mini 9. Officially the best netbook ever.

1:32pm Damn. Pedro and Nomar maybe retiring in the same year. I'm getting old.

6:40pm He could hear the birds. There was always one that began the concert, and then all the others joined in. Truthfully speaking, it was not really a concert. If you listened to it carefully, it was impossible not to notice the resemblance between this sound and that of a saw. A saw whose teeth were tearing painfully into wood. Trelkovsky had never understood why people insisted on comparing the noise of birds to music. Birds don't sing, they scream. And in the morning they scream in chorus. Trelkovsky laughed aloud. The mere idea of likening a raucous cry like this to a song must surely be the height of something or other - futility, no doubt. He wondered what would happen if men should suddenly adopt this practice of greeting the new day with a chorus of despairing screams. Even if only those with good reason for screaming were to take it up, it would still result in an unholy racket.

-- Roland Topor, The Tenant

4:58pm Louis CK is amazing


I think this decade can be summed up as "everything is amazing and nobody is happy." Brilliant.

6:04pm Pitchers and catchers started reporting today! Baseball! Baseball! Baseball!

7:52pm I just bought one MP3 file for $11.98. I sure hope the estate of Morton Feldman appreciates it.

11:07am Get to know Gary...

9:18pm What in the world is happening here? What has happened? Army to report record number of suicides

10:55am Pre-meditated fecal smearing
SAN DIEGO -- A mistrial was declared Monday when a home-invasion robbery suspect smeared human feces on his attorney's face then threw more at the jury.

10:40pm Endless obliteration
There's this Acura commercial that shows bodies in various everyday environs being blown back as if involved in a collision with some terrible primordial force. It's incredibly captivating. I wish it would go on for hours and I could sit and stare...

6:38pm Article about John Krasinski's adaptation of David Foster Wallace's "Brief Interviews With Hideous Men", premiering at Sundance this week. It includes a clip from the film with Josh Charles.

Odd to hear DFW's words in an actor's mouth. I'm excited about the movie. Another article.

9:30pm Little, little, little nuggets of change.
Whitehouse.gov's robots.txt file under Bush and under Obama.

Awesome.

2:35pm Austin Texas.
I went last night to have my hair cut at the usual place and instead of of some young hipster tattooed female stylist I instead was directed to the chair of some grizzled old man.So I thought cool, this is new.

As the guy was cutting my hair, he proceeded to tell me about the various bars he liked to visit and eventually came to tell me of Ginny's Little Longhorn, located near near the intersection Burnet and Koenig.

It's a standard-seeming Austin bar at first: your mixture of hipsters, cowboys, bikers, and college kids. Country music, blues, whatever. Cheap beer, good times, country music. Then he told me about Chicken Shit Sunday.

According to the stylist, on Chicken Shit Sunday you mosey on down to Ginny's Little Longhorn round about noon, which is when you're waking up after Saturday night. You pay a few dollars for a ticket, and on the ticket is a number. You then go stand around a cage in which has been placed a chicken. The chicken walks around the cage, on the floor of which is a numbered board. The chicken starts to eat some food and the band begins to play the sort of music that inspires what comes next: the chicken shits. If the chicken should shit on the small numbered square (or on the line adjacent to the square) that bears the number on your ticket, you have officially become a winner of Chicken Shit Sunday.

This is something you wear on your sleeve as an Austinite, being a winner of Chicken Shit Sunday. I myself have never won, primarily because I have not yet been. For the efforts of the chicken, you win a free beer.

Here's one Sunday's Chicken Shit Sunday going down at Ginny's Little Longhorn.

1:28pm It's quite cool to be able to subscribe to the presidential administration's blog with your RSS reader.

2:31pm Baaaaaltimore.
So it's the 200th birthday of Edgar Allan Poe, who is sort of from Baltimore but as a native Richmonder let me say Richmond is more important in Poe's life and cooler than Baltimore anyway. So when I saw a clip from Homicide: Life on the Streets that referenced Poe on his birthday, and included one of the best television characters ever AND a cameo from John Waters for whom I care very little but he's still kind of cool, well, I just had to share it.



What Baltimore has going for it is the existence of two fine, fine television programs centering around how many people are murdered within its limits. Go Baltimore.

2:02pm Fiction writers in search of a story, I present to you the curious case of Marcus Schrenker. Mr. Schrenker abandoned by way of parachute his personal airplane mid-flight somewhere in Alabama airspace immediately after making a phony distress call to the authorities claiming that his windhsield had imploded and that he was bleeding.

Our hero then approached a police officer for help as he was dripping wet and wearing goggles which appeared "made for flying." Mr. Schrenker told the officer that he had been in a canoeing - that most dangerous of recreational activities - accident. He offered his Indiana driver's license as identification. The officer then took him to a nearby motel, where Marcus checked in under a fake name.

When the connection was made between the distress call and the canoeing victim, the authorities returned to the motel, where Mr. Schrenker was no longer to be found.

A search is now underway.

How's your Monday?

9:22pm According to iTunes dynamic play lists and credit card statement analysis, listening to Elvis Perkins's "While You Were Sleeping" and drinking whiskey are two things I greatly enjoy.

10:54am And if you really want to know yourself (and this will be the test of how much you do), consider the suggestion of Francois La Rochefoucauld: "Our enemies' opinion of us comes closer to the truth than our own."

A great essay in the NY times concerning the growing study/industry of genomics, underlain by questions of the nature of self. Good stuff.

I think I have whatever gene it is that makes me unable to read stuff much longer than this on a computer monitor.

11:36am Witness a born again Christian having trouble finding tenants on Craigslist.

9:27pm Because in your lonely moments you pine for it, Hulu.com presents Howard the Duck in all its glory.

10:09pm I know why it is better to be shot at on a Sunday afternoon than not be shot at. Because it means maybe there is an enemy after all. If there is no enemy, then I am either mad or living in a madhouse.

Peace is only better than war if peace is not hell too. War being hell makes sense.

- Walker Percy

4:12pm "You ask if I would agree to live my seventy or rather seventy-three years over again? To which I say, Yea. I think with you that it is a good world on the whole, that it has been framed on a principle of benevolence, and more pleasure than pain dealt out to us. There are indeed (who might say Nay) gloomy and hypochondriac minds, inhabitants of diseased bodies, disgusted with the present, and despairing of the future; always counting that the worst will happen, because it may happen. To these I say, How much pain have cost us the evils which have never happened! My temperament is sanguine. I steer my bark with Hope in the head, leaving Fear astern. My hopes indeed sometimes fail; but not oftener than the forebodings of the gloomy. There are, I acknowledge, even in the happiest life some terrible convulsions, heavy set-offs against the opposite page of the account. I have often wondered for what good end the sensations of Grief could be intended. All our other passions, within proper bounds, have a useful object. And the perfection of the moral character is, not in a Stoical apathy, so hypocritically vaunted, and so untruly too, because impossible, but in a just equilibrium of all the passions. I wish the pathologists then would tell us what is the use of grief in the economy, and of what good it is the cause, proximate or remote."

- Thomas Jefferson

9:12am Merry Christmas you old Livejournal!
Three dead at party after man in Santa suit opens fire, police say

9:22am Come on optic and all of you other parents out there- tell me the truth, you thought long and hard about naming your kid Adolf Hitler. You thought it'd be a gas, and would make your child unique. But ultimately- you caved, because you thought to yourself, if I name my kid Adolf Hitler, no grocery store will ever put his name on a birthday cake.

Well, you're just not as brave as Heath Campbell and his wife, who let nothing stand in their way.

9:28pm bow down before the one you serve, you're going to get what you deserve!