I Am Very Tall

I have been watching, How to Train your Dragon recently, because it's on HBO all the time and it's awesome. And I was really starting to get bugged by the fact that the dragon in the movie looked... familiar. AND NOW I KNOW WHY.


This website also has lots of other awesome/terrible discoveries. I particularly like this one:

Blue Valentine was not my choice. Granted, it seemed like a better idea than Never Say Never. However, it seemed like kind of a downer of a movie, even just from the description, in which the phrase "doomed marriage" came up front and center.

The movie follows two timelines, one tracing the initial love story, and the other its eventual disintegration. The story is fairly simple, and much of what distinguishes the movie is found in the details. The song that Dean plays, or the dance that Cindy does when they fall in love. The way that Dean chastises her for letting the dog run away, or the way she rejects his advances as they fall apart. This is not a complicated narrative, in need of expository scenes. It is a pair of periods in life, being described.

The ending is understandably... sad. I had to watch another, happier movie afterwards to snap myself out of what was sure to be a state of terrible mopey-ness. I actually found myself digging into a tub of ice cream not too much later.

That being said, I would not ever willlingly choose to watch this movie. It is very well done, but not particularly entertaining. In fact, most of the time, it is simply painful to watch. You feel absolutely terrible for the characters involved. There isn't even any particular lesson to take away from all of this, no way of avoiding such a calamity for one's self. It just leaves you feeling sad and terrible and in need of some sort of reprieve.

Over the past two weeks, I have allowed myself to fall into the habit of conversing at serious length with a new friend of mine, who happens to be a first year at my school, who ostensibly has no plans to move to New York. From this friend, I obtained this link to a short story from Jonathon Safran Foer.

The story's narrative voice is fairly similar to that of a myth, fable, or fairy tale. Characters are referenced by their most significant identifier, e.g. the jumper, the boy and the girl, etc. Their dialogue is earnest and without implicit guile. Everything described is just so.

The focus of this fable is a mythical "Sixth Borough" of Manhattan and how it came to disappear. Its disappearance is slow and only perceptible for the oddest and most debatable of reasons. In fact, one might say that it was a fluke that anything was noticed at all. However, once the disappearance is perceived, it becomes inevitable, despite all of the efforts of the people of Manhattan. Interestingly enough, the Sixth Borough is treated almost anthropomorphically; it is leaving because of some unknown motivation that is inscrutable to all involved. As it leaves, all that Manhattan retains of it is Central Park, which is placed in its heart, and the vaguest of circumstantial evidence that the Sixth Borough ever existed (which is of course, in Central Park).

The parallels between this story and a breakup are hard for me to avoid making. The inscrutability of the partner's reasons for leaving. The gradual dissolution of all evidence of the relation. The faintest memory residing only within the heart of the city. That the memory happens to be one of the few parts of the city that is alive seems to be a graceful way of describing how we grow from these experiences.

The linkage is made even more explicit by the one truly human part of the story, where a boy in the Sixth Borough and a girl in Manhattan, who are connected only by a pair of tin cans and a string that they must continually extend, are eventually forced to break off their relations because of the inevitability of the growing distance. Their one utterance of love is shut up in those tin cans, forever to be held on to, but never to be released.

I suppose it's only appropriate that this story come my way as I leave school, and I too have to face the inevitability of the distance that will come between me and all of the friends that I have made here. Hopefully someone else out there has a less melodramatic reading of it than I do, but that's what's on my mind these days. It was a very nice story. Thanks to my friend for pushing it my way.

The inherent appeal of tumblr over a standard blog. Every so often, I just want to post a song link or something, and tumblr is way better for that than blogger. Facebook would actually be the ideal venue for everything, except the audience is too big. I don't actually want everyone on facebook to see everything that I put down. And I don't really want to manage a list of 500-600 friends, or what not. Blaaaagh.

Anyway, it's a gorgeous day for once in Boston, and I am of course wasting it by sitting around writing at home, listening to Taylor Swift (exploratory listening, humoring a friend). Catch you guys later.

I saw Eliot Spitzer speak today, and I came away both greatly impressed, and also somewhat sad. Spitzer is a man with an immense amount of intelligence, fortitude, and political charisma. As he spoke today, it struck me just how forthright he was. He was very clear on his views, and made no bones about what he thought was smart, and what he thought was dumb (hint: it rhymes with the Tee Party). One of the choice moments of the day was when he stated that, as a politician, he'd always been somewhat embarrassed by the level of self-promotion that he'd had to do. Which he then tossed out, off the cuff, that:

Although, embarrassment is something you learn to live with when you've had my life.

What was sad was that his career as a politician is basically totally done, at least in the short run, because he cheated on his wife and bangs hookers with his socks on. Which is terrible. But frankly, I don't really give a shit. I think that as far as making political decisions goes, I would trust him to do the right thing. But that won't happen.

I'll post later about what he actually talked about.

Just read an article in the NYT about gamers finding love in World of Warcraft. My immediate reaction was to think that there is now finally a venue for finding a date that is considerably more embarrassing than match.com, eharmony, etc. However, I did find the following point interesting:

With more than 12 million subscribers, World of Warcraft is one of the most popular games of its kind in the world (others include EverQuest, Aion, Guild Wars). That’s a sizable dating pool. Match.com, by way of comparison, has fewer than 2 million subscribers.

Obviously, the two are very different, and match is way more focused, making the direct comparison almost worthless. Still, it is some sort of venue where the two people can get to know each other over a shared activity, so maybe that helps? Also, the other shocking fact from the article:

More than 40 percent of online gamers are women, and adult women are among the industry’s fastest growing demographics, representing 33 percent of the game-playing population — a larger portion than boys 17 and younger, who make up 20 percent, according to the Entertainment Software Association, an industry group.

My reaction to this is that the sample here has to include people playing Words with Friends or something, because this cannot possibly be true of World of Warcraft. If it is, my vision of the world will never be the same.

When I was younger, I had no independent musical taste of my own. That said, I knew I hated what my parents listened to. My mom listened mostly to classical, and occasionally a bit of Barbra Streisand. My dad was way into the oldies, and would listen to Nat King Cole, Johnny Mathis, the Righteous Brothers, Andy Williams, etc. I didn't know much about music, I just knew that I hated what my parents were listening to. Them being who they were, it really could not possibly have been cool.

I have recently been listening to a lot of new soul, after being inspired by my much cooler, younger cousin Chris. Oddly enough, it's all a bunch of white dudes who are recreating (not even updating, just recreating) the sounds they heard when they were kids. It's definitely an old sound, and although I'm sure there's probably some weird hipster chic to it (look at me, I'm listening to black music appropriated by white guys with thick black glasses!), it's definitely something that I think can only fly to the extent that I'm almost 30 years old and have no need (or possibility) of looking cool. This has gotten me to thinking though. Am I hitting that stage where I'm turning into my parents? Will I have kids who flip through my music collection and go, "Jesus, my dad is such a loser?"

Ignoring the fact that it's looking like I will die alone and childless, this is putting me in a serious state of existential crisis, since half of my identity is being precisely who my parents are not. Ignoring that though, some of these songs are totally legit. I totally encourage you to check them out at your leisure.

James Hunter - Carina

Jamie Lidell - Multiply

This video was recently passed on to me, with my roommates saying that I was the narrator. I hate them. But the narration is actually pretty funny.

These days, I keep a running tab of what I'm reading on goodreads, which I'm pretty much using as a way to remember what I think about the books that I read. I have a nasty habit of reading things and forgetting their content, so taking the time to write about them has been a helpful way of keeping track of my thoughts. In any case, I'll occasionally be posting some of my reviews here. Here's a review of a book that I just finished today, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

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Despite whatever fronts I may put on, my core being is a big nerd that falls really easily in love with women that I am too shy to pursue (or who are otherwise basically unattainable). So, imagine my interest in a book that is nominally about a fat nerdy kid that falls really easily in love but is terrible with women. So, basically, a book about a hyperbolic version of myself, except from the DR and really fat.

Unfortunately, I never really got the full sense of resonance and connection that I was looking for (a la Nick Hornby's High Fidelity, where the previously aforementioned resonance was almost unbearable at times). For starters, the book is really about the terrible, terrible misfortunes that befell not only that fat kid, but also his entire blighted family. Many of these are quite sad, but oddly non-compelling. The underlying trope of the book is that the family is cursed, which adds an element of "magical realism" (or whatever kids call it these days) that makes the events feel less like a human tragedy and more like a set of just really crappy events. That the family members are bull-headed, stubborn, and given ample warning of the oncoming tragedies also makes it hard to feel really sorry for anyone.

Also, there's a ton of stuff in Spanish here, which I could only partially understand/guess at. Me being the completionist that I am, I constantly felt like I was missing out on stuff while reading this book, since I didn't have Internet access and couldn't look up every phrase that got tossed around (and there are a lot). This feeling kept me from fully immersing myself in the book, and at times made me feel as if the author was just peppering the pages with little things to make the world seem more authentic (much like he does with his nerd references, which I think in some cases were actually wrong).

All in all, it was a fine book, but it didn't really do it for me. I will say that there were definite moments that touched me, and that at times, I definitely empathized with some of the despair that Oscar felt throughout the course of his life. And the story of Oscar's grandfather was also crushing. But I think overall, I found this book to be just OK.

Happy Patriot's day everyone! I'm out in Wilmington today, enjoying a nice golfing vacation in a place that's considerably warmer than Boston. I don't know anything about golf, but this is still nevertheless, totally awesome. Quick post today. Apparently, people have violently attacked a piece of art from 1987 known as "Piss Christ," as part of an anti-blasphemy campaign (link to story). The artwork is a photo of a crucifix immersed in a jar of the artist's piss, hence the super literal title.

I've always been a huge believer in freedom of speech, and this case is no particular exception. However, lately, especially following the hubbub about Pastor Terry Jones, I've been wrestling a bit with the limits. While I'm not a religious person, and find the activity of fundamentalists to be pretty hard to fathom some times, I get that this artwork is kind of a dick thing to produce, given the beliefs of so many others. Regardless of the intent, it's a pretty big "fuck you" to a ton of people who (in a way that I will never really get) derive some greater meaning from even the most minor representations of their faith. And sometimes, when you're enough of a dick (e.g. have a fake trial of the Koran and then stage a burning of another people's holy book with the intention of getting enough media attention to piss people off), you get a lot of people angry enough to go around and kill people in response, or something similarly ridiculous.

At the same time, limits on speech, just because it is going to piss someone off, is frankly ridiculous. Someone will always be pissed off about what people say (e.g. Dutch Muhammad cartoons) and it frankly seems ridiculous that the entire world should have to hold it's tongue because some crazy people are going to get super offended and then go on a rampage in reaction.

So how do you draw the lines? Be insensitive and let the jerks take over the airwaves, or give in to the wusses that can't suck it up and just live their own lives? Is there any clean way to cut a path down the middle?

Election season is basically upon us already. Which means that everybody in the world is suddenly going to become super politically opinionated about things that they really couldn't give a crap about during the quiet part of the cycle. I've already gotten embroiled in discussions about taxes and I'm like, why?

I think the most tiresome part about the election season is that everyone suddenly becomes so certain about what is right for the country and really upset about how stupid everyone that disagrees with them is. If it was all so simple, then why is it so difficult to persuade people of the proper course of action? Why is it that our nation's leading economists, who all ostensibly have really awesome degrees and a bazillion years of education, can't really agree on what to do?

My guess? Shit's complicated. The least we can do is acknowledge that fact, acknowledge that finding an answer will involve a serious discussion, and acknowledge the possibility that we might be wrong/not know everything. Oi, I sound so preachy. Pet peeve vented.

So, today I eliminated my chances of ever becoming a U.S. President and increased my chances of getting a heart attack by preparing and consuming ~3/4 of a pound of seared foie gras. Poorly.

Mental note for the future: controlling the heat so that the fat doesn't start smoking is probably a bit more important than I thought.

Hey team,

Every few days or so, I get an e-mail from Blogger letting me know that someone has posted a comment to this blog. They are never disqus comments though, meaning that they're on one of the super old posts. When these emails show up, I get momentarily excited. Maybe someone has chanced upon my blog and become so intrigued by my keen insights and trenchant wit that they were compelled to write a deep and thoughtful response! And in fact, many of them even start off with some very nice comment about how interesting my post was, and how they can't wait to read more on the topic.

And then I get to the signature, where I find out they're from an escort service. Sigh.

Even so, I have realized that I vaguely miss having people read things that I write, and then responding to them. So, here we are. Read my words. Love me. If you just pretend, that would also be totally cool.

Location:Pearl St,Cambridge,United States

The following link goes to a page with audio clips of Bill O'Reilly reading from his (assumedly) craptastic novel, Those Who Trespass. Here's the Village Voice's synthesis of the plot:

The murderer, Shannon Michaels, is pursued by an O'Reilly-esque cop, Tommy O'Malley. These two Irish-Americans share their author's tough-talk, lust for power, and (alleged!) belief that the best way to seduce a woman is to seize her breasts, preferably as she showers.

Selected quotes, which you can hear being read by Mr. O'Reilly:

"Say baby, put down that pipe and get my pipe up."

"I would like you to unhook your bra and let it slide down your arms. You can keep your shirt on."

"Cup your hands under your breasts and hold them for ten seconds."

There's also an amazing clip of him reading through one of his soft-core porn scenes. Needless to say, I was hideously embarassed for the man.

http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/archives/2009/03/off_with_those.php

[Hat tip to Rob]

People are understandably upset about the AIG bonuses - if a handful of guys bring down one of the largest companies in the world, they really shouldn't be getting $1+MM paychecks. Fine, that's settled, let's move on.

The NYTimes reports that Eliot Spitzer has now cautiously weighed in on the subject, pointing out that the flap about bonuses is peanuts relative to the fact that AIG has actually passed out billions of dollars in bailout money to its trading partners, with the implication that the now $170BN AIG bailout is essentially a second round of TARP infusions. This is a fine point - people are spending way too much time and energy on a handful of guys and their paychecks. It's a problem, it's very unfair sounding and should be dealt with, but let's be clear here: the future of the financial system does not depend on the size of their checks. At least, it didn't until it became a political issue that now threatens to eclipse all of the more substantive things.

The other part of Spitzer's point, whether or not the government should be in the business of making AIG's counterparts whole, is a bit trickier and I won't go into it here.

What I find ironic is that Spitzer is making a point about how major, substantive issues are being overshadowed by more easily politicized, but ultimately less significant ones. This coming from the ex-governor of NY who single-handedly beat down Wall St., but was then ultimately forced out because he paid for sex with a woman that wasn't his wife. And you see this in the article written by the Times, which tacitly questions whether or not Spitzer is in any position to speak on "ethical behavior."

I think this inability of American society to get past little things is a major roadblock in our thinking. In a world that is growing more complex by the day, the number of people that are actually equipped to handle events just seems to get smaller and smaller all the time. It would seem to me that the last thing we would want to do is make that number even smaller by adding on either random or relatively inconsequential criteria. The days when we can find ultra-pure, blemish free leaders that are actually mentally equipped to do their jobs just strikes me as being completely over.

And I really don't miss it. As I may have mentioned before, television has been a time-sucking blight on my life for far too long. Anything that I'd want to watch on TV, I can get on the Internet if I really want to see it. Without having it around as a passive alternative to seeing friends, I'm actually feeling phenomenally better about life in general.

Eat it TWC!

Lee dropped the axe on Saturday. It took about fifteen minutes, and three years were over. Her friends showed up after that and I had to go, so there wasn't much discussion. I knew this was coming for months and I've been bracing for it as best as possible. But it still feels like a piece of me's been ripped out.

NB: Halfway through writing this, I realized that this is the most boring post that has ever been written. There's really no reason to read it, unless you just want to know what's going on with me.

It's recently come to my attention that some people were worried that I'd lost my job. That's my fault, since I haven't really updated this sucker since I posted about layoffs at my firm. To all of my well-wishers, thanks. I still have my job and don't have any plans for being laid off in the foreseeable future.

Things are going well in NYC. Winter's here and it's very cold, so I've been staying in a bit more. Operation Cookie Dough is well under way and I think there's a bit of progress on that front. The cigarette thing is a little volatile, but on the whole, my consumption has dropped pretty drastically. Also, since I went skiing a few weeks ago, my sleep schedule's been remarkably normal (I get sleepy at 11!). I'm watching less TV, mainly because I now just fall asleep as soon as I turn it on.

After several months of doing the going out drinking with friends thing, I'm beginning to get a little bored. Going out to bars really isn't doing it for me. I don't pick up girls and there's only so much fun in being drunk at places where the music is loud. So, I'm broadening my range a bit. This weekend, I'm planning on going to a rock gym that I found on the Interwebz, which will be the first time I've gone climbing in years. I'm looking forward to having my fingers get all chalky and what not. I'm also hitting up the Village Voice and looking for any good concerts that might be coming into town.

Ok, that's it.

Steven Pinker isn't an English Professor, but rather a highly regarded cognitive scientist. Even so, I really hope that his latest Op-Ed is right. Here are the money quotes:

Language pedants hew to an oral tradition of shibboleths that have no basis in logic or style, that have been defied by great writers for centuries, and that have been disavowed by every thoughtful usage manual. Nonetheless, they refuse to go away, perpetuated by the Gotcha! Gang and meekly obeyed by insecure writers.

Among these fetishes is the prohibition against “split verbs,” in which an adverb comes between an infinitive marker like “to,” or an auxiliary like “will,” and the main verb of the sentence. According to this superstition, Captain Kirk made a grammatical error when he declared that the five-year mission of the starship Enterprise was “to boldly go where no man has gone before”; it should have been “to go boldly.” Likewise, Dolly Parton should not have declared that “I will always love you” but “I always will love you” or “I will love you always.”

Any speaker who has not been brainwashed by the split-verb myth can sense that these corrections go against the rhythm and logic of English phrasing. The myth originated centuries ago in a thick-witted analogy to Latin, in which it is impossible to split an infinitive because it consists of a single word, like dicere, “to say.” But in English, infinitives like “to go” and future-tense forms like “will go” are two words, not one, and there is not the slightest reason to interdict adverbs from the position between them.

The rest of the article talks about how Justice Roberts messed up the oath of office because he's one of these "language shibboleths." But I don't really care about that so much. I'm just glad that the split infinitive thing has been put to rest. Because that rule never made any sense to me and it really messed with my writing.

Fascinating article in the NYTimes today about some findings in the newest issue of Nature about the science of love. I'll let you read the article yourself, but in a nutshell, it talks about a study on prairie voles, one of the few mammals with the same level of monogamous tendencies as humans. Here's the money paragraph:

When a female prairie vole’s brain is artificially infused with oxytocin, a hormone that produces some of the same neural rewards as nicotine and cocaine, she’ll quickly become attached to the nearest male. A related hormone, vasopressin, creates urges for bonding and nesting when it is injected in male voles (or naturally activated by sex). After Dr. Young found that male voles with a genetically limited vasopressin response were less likely to find mates, Swedish researchers reported that men with a similar genetic tendency were less likely to get married. In his Nature essay, Dr. Young speculates that human love is set off by a “biochemical chain of events” that originally evolved in ancient brain circuits involving mother-child bonding, which is stimulated in mammals by the release of oxytocin during labor, delivery and nursing.

As a quick aside, I find it highly amusing - and unsurprising - that the hormone that creates urges for bonding in males is naturally activated by sex. I'm not quite sure what to take away from that, but it's still interesting nonetheless.

The article goes on to talk about the fascinating possibility that at some point in the future, drugs could be produced that would induce people to fall in - or out - of love with each other. So what does this mean? Is the most storied of human emotions nothing more than a biochemical reaction? Will the notion of love soon go the same way as the human soul? Is all that crazy stuff that we do for the ones we love really just the equivalent of driving drunk?

Another interesting paragraph:

“It would be completely unethical to give the drug to someone else,” he said, “but if you’re in a marriage and want to maintain that relationship, you might take a little booster shot yourself every now and then. Even now it’s not such a far-out possibility that you could use drugs in conjunction with marital therapy.”

What would it mean to be in a marriage where you have to take a drug in order to maintain a feeling of bondedness with your husband/wife? Would that really be a marriage worth keeping? Or would the emphasis in marriage change from love to more practical matters such as cultural and socioeconomic compatibility?

Crazy stuff.