I came late to “The Green Room,†a cable show in which Paul Provenza hosts a panel of four other comedians in open discussions of the stand-up comedian’s life and profession, ideally without the comedians hiding themselves and the more somber truths of their craft too thoroughly behind their wit. I first heard of the […]
Looking for something else entirely, I found the film short “Chocolate Hare†featured at the Gkids website. (It’s also currently available on Youtube, where it may be more permanent.) It’s nothing more than the melting of three chocolate bunnies, frst with a hot iron, then a heat lamp, and finally a blowdryer. Just chocolate melting, […]
We watched saw Captain America in the theaters last weekend, and it was pretty good, a solid three stars. In one scene, the Red Skull confronts Cap and explains that they have more in common than one might think. They are superior men, a cut above the ordinary lot, and why did Dr. Erskine give […]
Eileene drew my attention to khanacademy.org this morning. She first learned of the site through a news article describing it in the most glowing terms. I’m always suspicious of wondrous new teaching systems, because the reportage on such successes typically suffers from a systemic error: failing to observe that spectacularly successful new (or, more often, […]
The real birthday present was dinner at a very fancy restaurant, but Eileene bought me something to unwrap, too. Well, no, not to unwrap, exactly—she didn’t wrap it. But physical objects. Two framed posters, which I liked, and a wild stab-in-the-dark CD of jazz musician Sun Ra and his Myth Science Arkestra, which I didn’t […]
Eileene borrowed a documentary video on pornography, subtitled “the Secret History of Civilization.†She’s cautioned me that the last couple episodes are pretty dull, but the first two, and especially the first, have been informative and hilarious. It begins with a discussion of the sexually explicit art of Pompeii, and especially on its discovery by […]
Got a chance to see The Good, the Bad, the Weird, which I shall henceforth call GBW, tonight. Somehow I’d stumbled across a trailer a year or two ago, and we decided to see it, but never got around to it, and then it was gone. I consoled myself with Joe’s observation that the movie […]
Had a laugh-out-loud moment last night, watching Eileene play L.A. Noire-with-an-“e.†Its protagonist, Detective Phelps, shares with Sgt. Friday a straight-as-an-arrow personality that’s stiffly awkward most of the time and occasionally rises to neurotic. Okay, I get the idea that he’s a straight cop in a dirty city, that he actually pursues evidence instead of […]
Dave wants to run a campaign titled “Bastards,†for the PCs will be bastards in more than one sense: cut off from (what they consider) their rightful respective inheritances, and willing to sink to extreme and contemptible methods to secure them again. If we can really stick to our resolve, it should stretch our boundaries, […]
We watched Thor last night, which confirmed my original suspicions. Thor wasn’t an appealing comic book, and I didn’t expect much from the movie, but friends of friends became very enthusiastic after watching, so Eileene and I allowed ourselves to hope it had risen above its origins. It didn’t. It wasn’t out-and-out bad, but it […]