• I entered my 26th year of life last Wednesday; besides the traditional dinner out with the family, I was treated to other dinners by other people and astute_reason saw fit to get me more Giants paraphernalia. It's been a nice birthday week.
• I have imbibed my first egg nog of the season. This is always a high point of the winter.
• Lost: The Last Episodes, hopefully ( Read more... )

• Spoiler-free review: Inception was really, really cool.
• As spied in the surprisingly creepy trailer for The Social Network that played before Inception, here's the Scala & Kolacny Brothers choral version of "Creep."
• What would you do if an odd little bird toy (or decoration, or something) landed on your doorstep and you knew neither where it came ( Read more... )

• Scott, astute_reason and I saw The A-Team last Monday, and our lives were changed forever. It could very well be the greatest achievement in the history of motion picture arts & sciences. Hypermasculine yet not distasteful, it's pretty much the Platonic form of Shit Blowin' Up Real Good, which isn't something I typically go for but is so damned gleeful here ( Read more... )

( In which I listen to music and write about it )

The whole getting-words-out-of-my-head thing is still causing great difficulty. With some exceptions, to be fair: I was feeling particularly spacey last Tuesday, but when Corinne called me I had no problem perking up and talking to her for a few hours. It's amazing how much talking to her, no matter what we're talking about, makes me feel like a ( Read more... )

• The Nine Inch Nails concert was simply awesome. It was at a pretty small venue, so basically the whole place other than the balconies was the mosh pit; never having been in a mosh pit before in my life, I just threw myself in and let the undulating mass of humanity absorb me. As NIN came on I was about 25 feet back from the stage and off to one ( Read more... )

Over the almost-week I've had it in my possession, the Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan expanded score has blown my mind in a few different ways, all of them great.

( I wouldn't presume to debate you. )

• My credit card balance on August 9th 2008, at its most extreme: $2869.03.
  My balance on February 28th 2009, by which date I'd meant to pay it off: $261.91.
  My balance four days later: $2155.28.
  My balance this past Thursday: $0.00.
  That's right--ZERO DOLLARS. That lasted for about a day before I charged my car insurance for the next year (which I'd ( Read more... )

Non-spoiler version:

The one word that comes to mind when I think about the movie is fun. Except for some tense and dramatic sequences, much of it seems to take place with a smile on its face, which is certainly welcome--as they promised, the producers didn't forget the central optimism of the franchise. The whole movie felt like "the action bit ( Read more... )

Work on my new mix has paused for a couple of reasons: first, I kind of lost track of what I wanted to do with it (that is, it started becoming Hey Look Here's a Pile of Big Heroic Shit, which is fine in itself, but it's not quite what I had in mind originally); second, I got Michael Giacchino's new Star Trek score and spent three days listening to ( Read more... )