Jonathan Lethem new book, “You Don’t Love Me Yet” is out. This follows a great essay he wrote in the February issue of Harper’s. Best essay I’ve read in Harper’s since the flash mob piece last year. In a salon interview he talks about how he is giving away the movie rights to this novel. (For 2% of the film’s budget if made.) We are still waiting for Edward Norton’s version of “Motherless Brooklyn”.
My new SoundBridge came in the mail today. Pretty easy setup after I figured out what ports to enable in the firewall.
Coolest part was buried in the manual. There is a not so secret command line interface if you telnet to port 4444. Checkout the developer site.
From this week “The Pour” on the Beer Advocate:
“Before the Internet, computer nerds felt on the outside but now they’re accepted,” Todd said. “I think beer geeks are the same way. We’ll look back 10 years from now and remember what it was like.”
All we have todo is wait…
Sherry and I went to see Seattle Shakespeare’s version of Macbeth on Saturday night. We have been going to their shows for the last few years but this was the first of the “chamber” series we had seen. According the web site the “chamber” series try’s…
to adapt the plays to make them more intimate, urgent and available to contemporary audiences attuned to the quicker plotting of modern film and theatre.
Shakespeare “Lite” it was not. I didn’t find it that much different then the other plays we have seen of theirs. It was done “in the round” with a smaller cast then usual. This play had the most sword fighting we have seen yet. Sherry stuck me with the aisle seat so I had the pleasure of having the actors run past me in the dark with their swords.
Took myself out music shopping yesterday on the way to the PCC. I had to pickup the new Modest Mouse album. Its a good release from them. There is enough classic sounding songs to keep their fans happy but still different enough to keep it interesting. 
I also picked up the new album from Neil Young. From what I have read, he has been saving up his live recording for years and has only started releasing them recently with his Fillmore album. This release is the second in hopefully a long line of live albums. The Fillmore album was much more jammy (six tracks, with one track clocking in at sixteen minutes!). This show is more subdued. Many of the tracks are on this Harvest album, which is on my “top 10″ list.
Lastly I picked up an older Mountain Goats album, Tallahassee. Great stuff, less rockin then “We Shall All Be Healed” but not has much of a downer as “The Sunset Tree”.
Normally I don’t forward on office humor but I can’t resist this one.
From Dan Savage’s letter to NYTimes on the “Google Buses“:
Given the obvious need to curtail carbon dioxide emissions, enlightened companies should set an example by locating in downtown areas, where mass transit is ready and waiting.
Finally got around to renting “A Scanner Darkly“. Philip K. Dick stories sure do make for entertaining movies. I think this movie is more entertaining then Licklater’s earlier work, “Walking Life“. Which also was done in rotoscope. But in “Walking Life” the rotoscope was used to a better effect. It actually added something to the scenes where in ”A Scanner Darkly” it gave the movie a comic book feel to what was originally a novel.
On one of the DVD bonus features (which I get to watch now that Sherry is not around) had some interesting footage from an interview Dick gave in the ’70s. He complained how because he was a science fiction author he was not considered a serious author. Science fiction was instead meant for kids and could contain little sex or violence. That science fiction limited itself to “Westerns in Space” instead. I haven’t read much science fiction since I was a kid. (Except for the odd Lethem.) I call that my Heinlein phase.
Big news in Wikipedia-land today. One of the main editors has out’ed himself as a fraud.
To the Wikipedia world, Essjay was a tenured professor of religion at a private university with expertise in canon law, according to his user profile. But in fact, Essjay is a 24-year-old named Ryan Jordan, who attended a number of colleges in Kentucky and lives outside Louisville.
The New Yorker had to issue an Editor’s Note for a story they ran last year. Wikipedia has become a major source of information on the Internet. The site regularly comes up in the first handful of results on Google searches. We already know that the facts on the pages are liable to all kinds of twisting. But now we can’t even trust those tasked with editing?
