08.29.07

brain dump 008 [another month bites the dust]


learning to love you more (the book) (yes, again), coming to...something near you september 20! neither amazon nor miranda july can tell me whether or not the book will include contributions from me or jen, and that makes me sad; i also can't really figure out if it's going to be in local bookstores. so many mysteries with the twee collaborative art.

someecards, "when you care enough to hit send." i was quite pleased to receive this one from george the other day; i am getting good at bar games (though it's been a while since i've really schooled joe, who was invited to join the team at our local pub). i sent this in return.

why blockbuster is gaining on netflix. count me with the scores of skeptics who commented on this salon piece; i live a few hundred feet from a blockbuster, so it is in fact much faster to return a movie to them than it is to send one back to netflix, but 1) that blockbuster is a joyless place and i don't wish to browse for exchanges there, 2) i object to the way the company censors some films, 3) i think they're still hunting my ass for some accidental late fee i incurred in 2003, which is unsporting, and 4) their website does not please the eye. fellow online movie renters, have you tried the blockbuster? has it met your needs?

cyrano de bergerac, starring jennifer garner and kevin kline. crap - i'm going to have to go see something on broadway. listen, cyrano has been one of my favorite plays since junior high - when, um, i impersonated the title character for a world history project (my nose kept threatening to fall off as i spoke - very awkward). also, the translation/adaptation is by anthony burgess! also also, as my father and i know, a great nose is the banner of a great man, a generous heart, a towering spirit, an expansive soul.

rick roll, noun. "When what you think is a link to something you want to see actually directs you to a video of Rick Astley singing 'Never Gonna Give You Up.' This is common in the WoW [world of warcraft] community: Awww! Rick rolled again, thought this was the new movie trailer." such a kind, gentle alternative to goatse! what really pleases me about rick rolling is the improbability of it cropping up in gaming forums (presumably populated at least in part by The Youth of Today rather than people our age) in the first place: what made them choose rick astley, of all people? there's hope for the future, maybe.

building on this week's theory that some things were better in the good old days, i'm on the verge of announcing that there is no good thrift shopping left in new york. okay, no good thrift shopping left in manhattan south of 90th street or in williamsburg. wabes wrote this morning with a request for (inexpensive) used furniture expertise for a newly local friend, and i nearly drew a blank. the place on 17th that yielded us two leather barrel chairs for $95 in '03 now wants thousands of dollars for miami vice-ish lacquered vanities, and housing works locations all over town have started auctioning their really good stuff online instead of keeping it in the store - so unless one of their very savvy merchandise people falls asleep on the job and the vintage hunters who turn up at the crack of dawn are away in the hamptons for the weekend, there's virtually no chance of finding something awesome and affordable in a random search. that's the heart and soul of thrift shopping, man.

this post is making me feel like andy rooney.

4 comments:

sharon said...

thanks for the m. july info. she did a reading of no one belongs here more than you back in may, i so wanted to go. did you see the website for that one? rocked.

doug rickroll'd me a few weeks ago. sadly, it was the very day after he told me about getting rickroll'd himself - i couldn't believe i fell for it so easily.

the goatse thing - sheesh, this is what i love about internet memes. it's like one big inside joke. actually, i think that was a slate article. speaking of, remind me to send you the photo doug & i took of a goat at the petting zoo at the wedding we went to in MA a few weeks ago ...

oh hey, and speaking of miranda july: http://youtube.com/watch?v=ly2sdynK77Y

tom said...

Andy Rooney rocks. Maybe it's something about growing up around Albany, but he and I actually agree on a bunch of things. How milk has become more complicated as time goes on. How pharmaceutical ads are totally opaque.

I mean, did you ever notice that eyebrows serve no real purpose? His eyebrows, for an 88 year old man, are very impressive, with random hairs flying all over the place. What are those hairs doing? Maybe its just them having one last little fling before the end. I like that.

lauren said...

i would imagine that eyebrows are for diverting sweat that rolls down your brow, no? i confess that arching and waggling them is so very enjoyable that i've never given serious thought to what their official evolutionary significance would have been.

tom said...

I, actually, have a hidden talent of raising one eyebrow while the other more or less stays still. My friend Melissa goes nuts when she sees it, which I usually whip out, without even thinking about it, when somebody says something really strange (or repeats something that somebody said of that sort).

I don't know about the evolutionary background of the eyebrow either, but the sweat-in-eyes thing is as good as I've heard. I'm going with it.

[BTW: I would concede for the record that Andy sometimes goes off the reservation and says something old, crotchety and wrong in re racial/sexual/ethnic/etc issues. When he does stuff like that, I get mad at him. So there.]