One of my Russian coworkers (among many, many others! New York is very Russian) is obsessed with collecting world music, and ephemera of the Soviet era. One of his subprojects is to collect unusual phonograph discs solely for their appearance, regardless of what kind of music they may have on them. He goes for strange colors, sizes, and other ( Read more... )

The other day I happened by chance to quote to a coworker a joke from my 11th grade (AP US) history teacher, Anthony "Tony" DiDonato, or "Mr. D" to the kids: "That was two-thirds of a pun: P - U ( Read more... )

Today I was in a very dull 4-hour meeting. Fortunately, I had pen and paper to keep myself from falling asleep. (Kendell and I were up until 3:45 AM this morning getting back from Key West; of which, more later, from one or the other of us ( Read more... )

At one point when we were in Barcelona with Kendell's dad, he pointed to a tree and said something like, "Look, a sycamore." I've always had a mild desire to be able to do all those woodsy things like identify birds by their songs, or all the various trees and bushes by their foliage, but of course I've never gotten that kind of training, so it ( Read more... )

I've been meaning to blog for a while now about how my colleagues (a bunch of white guys, fellow code-monkeys, of various left-of-center persuasions) are really into Obama (which has been contagious), and gave me a campaign button some months ago that says "BRO'S BEFORE HO'S", with headshots of Obama and Hillary. Which is arguably offensive to ( Read more... )

From greenlily:

Find your 42nd entry ever. Yes, this may require some counting and basic math. Deal with it. Copy that entry in a new entry. This is the meaning of your life.If by "meaning", we mean "typical obsession", then yeah, I think this is fairly representative. It's got some contemplation of mass transit, local customs, and language usage, with a ( Read more... )

I like mushrooms on my salad, and I'm also willing to shell out a little extra to buy them pre-sliced. But of late I was distressed to find that within only a day of bringing them home from the grocery store, the mushroom slices were already turning "rusty" -- i.e., had brown patches on them ( Read more... )

p. 280: "Valle-Inclán always insisted that in literature the essential thing is style. ... Like Darío or Juan Ramón Jiménez, he scorns the commonplace, the cliché, always seeking to 'put words together for the first time.'"

The perfect expression of a noble goal!

I'm a pretty organized/fussy/anal/OCD/neat-freak/whatever kind of person. I never have more than ten e-mails in my inbox (at work or at home), I keep a book debt list (along with Kendell), I always put my clothes away after I take them off for the day, etc., etc., etc. So, with all that Type A behavior going on, it's always amusing and refreshing ( Read more... )

I have a recurrent fantasy of one day going up to a beggar and giving him an immense pile of cash: it would be a simple, effective, concrete act of assistance. In a single stroke, I would have wiped out the beggar's misfortune, or at least dealt it a mighty blow. While he was still reeling from it, and perhaps regaining faith in the goodness of ( Read more... )