For several years running there has been, by common consent among friends, an official/unofficial, sometimes disputed, song of the summer. After an extended email conversation recently with a beloved former contributor (he who shall not be named), I decided to collect a few nominations. Past songs of the summer have been big and epic with [...]
Archive for the ‘Thursday Favorites’ category
Thursday favorite: Nerd pleasures
Last Saturday I went down to Princeton for a “monomeet,” a gathering of 20 or 30 people (two women among them! really!) who had or were interested in monomes. There were presentations on programming for monome in a couple of different computer languages. An attempt to create the world’s longest monome-based step sequencer (successful). A [...]
Thursday favorites: Falling apart in Wisconsin
Hi all. I’d like to use the Thursday slot for talking about a movie I like a whole lot. My favorite movie ever? I don’t know — I could probably find other movies I like “as much” or even “more”. But I will say I think this movie is as good, as fully realized, as [...]
Thursday favorites: Rankin and Bass animation
When I was a kid, I didn’t care if television made us violent or contributed to bad grades or meant we had neglectful parents. I loved watching television. Television was what we did: after school, before bed, late on Friday night and two thirds of the day on Saturday. If we wanted to watch something, [...]
Thursday Favorites: Google 2001
In honor of its 10th anniversary, Google has made available its oldest search index, from January 2001. Meaning, you can search here and find exactly — and only — the web pages that were available on that subject at that time. If you 2001-Google “Paris Hilton,” for example, you get 1,440 hits, nearly all of [...]
Thursday favorites: What it’s like
It’s hard to find powerful figurative language. A good metaphor or simile needs to surprise you, either by describing the same old thing in a brand new way, or else striking a chord of recognition, putting it in some way that you immediately know is just what you meant but you never knew exactly how [...]
Thursday favorites: Wacky destinations
Having been on the road for a couple of weeks, I’m struck once again by the fantastic number of truly wacky things there are to see out there. Not just cow chip bingo, but the many other random monuments to kitsch, creativity and questionable taste. Herewith, a few notable examples from recent travels, and some [...]
Thursday favorites: Polygamist houses
The polygamist house has always fascinated me. It somehow has to hold multiple wives, a large number of children, and the husband that organizes them all. A few weeks ago, a friend and I spent a day in the polygamist community of Colorado City, Arizona taking pictures of houses. We had some pretty unreal experiences [...]
Thursday playlist: Fighting depression
Summer is ending. Just typing those words depresses me. This post is about depression. I get depressed a few times a year and I’m sure most of you probably do too. It’s happening to me again. The days are getting appreciably shorter and the light is changing. Our tree is already losing its leaves. Nights [...]
Us (and them) weekly
My name is S. Godfree and I am an addict. That’s not completely true – I can usually control myself and not actively pursue my guilty weakness, but every now and again, I’m in a place where it’s easily attainable, and most frighteningly, free. To make matters worse, we recently had a couple of houseguests [...]
