You know you're a geek

You know you're a geek when you find yourself snickering while reading a unix book in a bookstore.

celebwatch 2005!

so last monday, the 12th, i found myself with like 6 hours to kill in manhattan. it is worth noting that i didn't actually have 6 spare hours, but i had to stay in manhattan and had nothing to do for 6 hours. so i mostly wandered around the west village.

i like the west village. it is all quaint and shit. i went to corner bistro which is still awesome, even though shake shack is now my favorite burger (but it's closed now anyway). for some random reason i decided to see if i could locate the entrance to chumley's, which i completely failed to do. i didn't even see the front entrance, let alone the super secret side entrance. i wasn't planning to actually go there, i was just bored and wanted to see where it was. but nearby i saw a completely different doorway, pictured above, which i found extremely entertaining so it's time for you to play what's wrong with this picture...

i also ventured a little further north. i walked past the future site of il posto, the new mario batali/joe bastianich restaurant. didn't realize it's right under the highline. that area is gonna be INSANE when they redo the highline is all i'm saying. Then, just for the hell of it i walked through chelsea market (which is right across the street from il posto). This proved worthwile for two reasons...

first was that i saw alton brown just kind of hanging around. he looked like he was waiting for the various people around him to finish setting up a shot, except there was no camera equipment. for the record, food network's main offices and studios are upstairs in that same building. i almost stopped and asked him why he told people to brine their own turkeys instead of just buying a kosher one, but i think i know the answer to that now which is that kosher turkeys have more pin feathers to pull out and it's easier to brine a turkey than pluck it. but in any case, alton brown is awesome.

but even more fun was the junior high band that was randomly playing in the hall. most of the kids were playing like trumpet or clarinet, but there was one boy playing electric bass and wearing a ramones shirt, and a girl playing drums in a led zeppelin shirt. they were totally rock and roll.

windmill, windmill

usually i don't post results from online surveys, but i liked this one, so here goes.

Your 2005 Song Is

Feel Good Inc by Gorillaz "Love forever love is free. Let's turn forever you and me." In 2005, you were loving life and feeling no pain.

What Hit Song of 2005 Are You?

i particularly like how it says i was "loving life and feeling no pain," even though for "sum up 2005 in one word" i put "depressing." more blog action coming soon.

Manfur alert!

Manfur alert!

songs i've been obsessed with recently

1. Roy Orbison - Crying
2. Iggy Pop - The Passenger
3. Smashing Pumpkins - Tonight, Tonight
4. Beck - Peaches and Cream (it's the keep your lamplight trimmed and burning... part that gets me. totally transcendent)
5. Glenn Campbell - Wichita Lineman
6. Phil Oakey and Giorgio Moroder - Together in Electric Dreams
7. Fun Boy Three - Our Lips are Sealed

that last one is indeed the same as the gogos song "our lips are sealed." i don't know if it really counts as a cover because the frontman for fun boy three (formerly of the specials) was jane wiedlan's boyfriend at the time and they wrote the song together. i think this version is a bajillion times better than the gogos version and i like the gogos.

and i still hate giorgio moroder, but he is offset by phil oakey here. has anyone ever actually seen "electric dreams," the movie this song is from? i haven't, but apparently it's about a computer who steals some guys girlfriend, and i think the computer's voice is bud cort.

there's no new music on here which i guess is kind of sad. however, furthering my attention to old music, i bought an album by the new radicals for $3 and was horribly disappointed cause i really really like "you get what you give" but the album is pretty sucky. and that song is tracked second which is a shame cause it would have worked well last. instead, the highlight of the album is super close to the beginning which is just not a good idea.

trailers

just watched the trailer for "the fountain," which is easily the movie i am most anticipatory of right now. the trailer was meh, but i'm still pretty psyched for it. it would have been better with some well done music!

also looking forward to match point, the new woody allen movie which is supposed to be super awesome. the trailer for that is constructed so that it's all very non-woody allen (pulsing music, hot young actors, etc) and then at the end they just toss in "from director woody allen." when i saw the trailer last week with "kiss kiss bang bang," the audience totally fell for it, and when the woody allen credit came on screen there was an audible murmur throughout the crowd. whoever did that trailer should win some kind of prize.

speaking of prize winning trailers, if you haven't seen them, fake trailers that switch up the genres of famous movies:

• the shining as a romantic comedy
• west side story as a zombie flick
• titanic as a horror film

lunchtime ADVENTUUUURES (adventures... adventure... adventu...)

i've decided that detailing fun things that i eat is an excellent use of blog space. so!

today's lunchtime ADVENTURE took me deep into the east village (ok, not that deep) in search of bánh mì. bánh mì is a vietnamese sandwich. this would be my first bánh mì experience, and i really did not know much more than the country of origin. however, anyone who has ever had vietnamese food probably doesn't need much more coaxing than that, since vietnamese food tends to be like an asian food if made by the french.

i headed over to "nicky's vietnamese sandwiches" at 150 E2 St. (just off Ave A). there's a selection of 4 sandwiches, but since this was my first time, i went with the "special" sandwich, which contains:

• pâté
• ground roast pork
• vietnamese ham
• pickled carrots
• cucumber
• cilantro
• mayonnaise

they ask you if you want the sandwich spicy, which i inferred to mean "do you want us to put jalapenos on your sandwich." i did not get it spicy.

besides the pâté, mayonnaise and cilantro (actually, where the hell is cilantro from?), the european influence is borne out in the choice of bread, which is a nice crusty baguette. i usually don't like french bread and tend to prefer the softer italian hero bread, but this bread was really fresh and i wouldn't have changed it for the world. i tried to taste a piece of the vietnamese ham separately from the rest of the sandwich, especially since it was very pale (if you showed it to me out of context i probably would have guessed that it was processed turkey). it basically tasted like a generic cold cut, but i didn't really taste that much of it. there isn't much of each ingredient in this sandwich (one slice of ham, one sprig of cilantro, etc) but all together they make for a good size sandwich, certainly enough for lunch.

the sandwich really epitomized what can be so crazy wonderful about vietnamese cooking, which is that it's distinctly asian but go figure out why that is in the midst of pâté and mayonnaise. i think here it may have been the pickled carrots and whatever seasoning is on the pork, but who the hell knows. my one criticism of this place was that they fill the baguette instead of layering the ingredients. this way, all of the pickled carrots are on the cut side of the baguette and all the pork on the other side. this makes for sub-optimal mixing of flavors, but probably makes for a more stable sandwich.

all the sandwiches at this place are a very reasonable $3.95. yeah, that's right, four bucks for a sandwich that has fucking PÂTÉ on it.

here's a list of places to get banh mi in new york. reading that makes me feel like i totally missed the point by not getting jalapenos. well, it was good anyhow.

does blogger images actually work?

as is apparent by the post below, there appear to be some issues with the images. trying another one here...

by the way, that picture is from the cafeteria at the tulip gardens in amsterdam. (in amsterdam or near amsterdam... in the netherlands, in any case. there was a windmill.)

after some tests, it appears to be just pictures from my phone that don't work. great.

UPDATE: got them to work by feeding them through jpegtran w/ no args. i have no idea what's weird about the images, but whatever it is jpegtran is stripping it out.

demo

if you were walking around washington square today, you may have noticed that certain things had gone a little "retro".

it was because they were filming a movie on 5th ave and around the arch. the scene: vietnam war demonstration! they hung a ginormous peace banner inside the arch. how quaint. here is a horrible picture of what was probably the biggest demonstration washington square park has seen in some time... i was kind of worried that if i stood there so as to get a good picture, the crazy movie people who were yelling at pedestrians to walk in specific directions would get mad at me.

It's swell to be...

It's swell to be... at the DMV.

Untitled

i'm now 24 and i have a splitting headache.

hipster foods in my fair city

on saturday i saw julia and we went to shake shack. i had fries, which were very good, and chocolate frozen custard which was totally awesome. i went back on monday for the burger (which i had actually been planning to do since the previous week) and i can say only this: holy flirking shnit. that was one of the best burgers i have ever had. it's up there w/ donovan's and corner bistro, except they are making super thick broiled burgers and this was of the thinner, fried on a griddle persuasion. burger joint in the parker meridian can pretty much go fuck themselves this was so good. the line there is so long now anyhow and the burger is good but not even in the same league as shake shack. the big draw to burger joint these days is the "secret" location. shake shack peanut butter ripple custard was also excellent, by the by, though i wish it had been chocolate base instead of vanilla.

inspired by reading some stuff about flushing, tonight i stopped by a place on 41st ave off of main st. in flushing. if it has a name, it's not in english. there's pretty much no english signage in this place period, which is not really strange for that neighborhood. what brought me there however was the promise of good dumplings at the super cheap price of 4 for a dollar. (interjection: yes, dumpling man is a ripoff). i only knew i was in the right place cause the first thing on the menu, which i believe was also completely devoid of english, was labeled as "4/$1.00". the dumplings this place makes were obviously quite excellent... about an hour before i had them. it wasn't busy at all when i got there, and the dumplings i was given were just not remotely fresh, or even more than lukewarm. which was a shame, because the filling was delicious and the price was ridiculously right.

just watched new york noise. the point in the bloc party helicopter video where there are pig/lizards is also the moment it gets to be a little bit much. we are scientists' video of "nobody move nobody get hurt" however is brilliant, without quite being a ripoff of bear city. oh man i love me some bear city.

meanwhile, apparently birthday w/ the family is going to be sunday brunch. anyone know a good place for that, preferably in queens or possibly downtown manhattan?

extremely blog-like blog entry

playing with the new google-reader, mostly because i like rss readers in theory but they all seem to suck. in fact they're almost like mail clients (see the slogan for mutt). currently i use liferea, which seems to suck the least of the graphical unix ones. it does miss some things, like changing the titles of feeds (for example, i've just discovered that laura renamed her lj, but i have no idea when she did that). I've tried some command-line ones and they suck. the least-sucky of all of the one's i've tried so far has been sage, but that one is a firefox extension, and there are enough things about firefox that bother me. actually, most of them are probably fixable by extensions, but i just can't be bothered, and so will stick w/ galeon.

while on the subject of blog-related software, i wish there was a way for drivel to save drafts to blogger instead of to a local file on my computer.

i have to go to school for 4 days this week! shock and horror. tomorrow however will also be the annual interactive arts performance series concert which sounds pretty cool. last year it sucked (albeit it was a work in progress). in fact it sucked so much i sent an email to jeff complaining about how i had to sit through people standing on stage doing nothing while there were just wind sounds going on for 10 minutes. ugh.

come again some other day

the levels at which i do not want to travel an hour and a half each way in the rain for an hour and 15 minute class is so, so great. oh good i'm already late.

ok, that was some inadvertent bad poetry. i didn't mean to rhyme, honest.

i should not be eating sugary cereals at this time of night

i really like to read old sent-mail files. i have all of mine going back at least through college. i was looking at some from that period tonight. i think i was happiest during my sophomore year. interestingly, that's also when i had my highest GPA.

interesting question i am now asking myself: why did i need a soldering iron in september of my junior year?

i forgot that once upon a time i had www.knightbg.com. i think that was from a company that gave away free domain names if you allowed them to send you spam. i rarely use the knightbg nickname anymore.

i just got to september 11, 2001. didn't even see it coming, despite the fact that i had manually called up september 2001 (they are separated by month). this being my email, it seems to reflect how a lot of people tried to just keep moving forward with work and the like. i was stuck out in queens that morning having gone to vote in the canceled mayoral primary. i seemed to think it important to email my boss to tell her i was stuck in queens and wouldn't be in... seems silly now.

i think part of what keeps me reading these is that some threads are begun in one month and left unfinished... i need to read the next month's to see if the story was resolved!

man i used to email people a lot about what homework was assigned in class. there were just a few classes i pretty much never went to i guess.

i read things that i wrote about classes i remember taking. i have no idea what some of them mean. did i really once understand that much about hobbes? even data structures.

i'm finally tired.

random musical ideas

some random ideas for crazy covers. don't go stealing them now.

• a capella version of that violent femmes song w/ the counting. perfunctory research says that the name of this song is "add it up" and hey the opening, which thematically is substantially different from the rest of the song, is a cappella which i didn't remember. actually i don't know if i've ever heard that opening before. also, there really isn't any counting in the song at all. ok, it's not "add it up" but "kiss off." meh. either one would work for this idea. speaking of counting, how many p's are in capella?
• this idea i've had ever since i found a harmonium on 114th street and half fixed it up. cover of "exit music for a film" with just an acoustic guitar and harmonium. the harmonium kicks in on the "you can laugh" part instead of the whiny noise which is either an electric guitar or a synth but at the moment i don't remember.
• i also have notes somewhere for a synth-heavy version of "what'll i do" (the irving berlin song). fuck, i'm gonna become that taco dude.

also, i really really like politics of dancing which is on my speakers at the moment. fuck you, it is awesome. plus it has a bowie reference. if you haven't seen it, i recommend the video of bowie and arcade fire performing at the fashion rocks show which is floating around the net. i didn't really get arcade fire before, but suddenly i do.

Hello, guy on the bus

Hello, guy on the bus who looks like one of 2 wild and crazy guys, reading a permabound romance novel from the library. I am so going to hell.

musical news

"The feeling was there before I tuned in the musical interpretation of the news on my bedside radio, but it was the musical news that confirmed it: I was about to work again. I would get a case. Violins were stabbing their way through the choral arrangements in a series of ascending runs that never resolved, never peaked, just faded away and were replaced by more of the same. It was the sound of trouble, something private and tragic; suicide, or murder, rather than a political event." - Gun, With Occasional Music by Jonathan Lethem which pretty much sums up what i want to do for my master's project.

why i am a horrible person, part i

besides my general lack of a work ethic or ability to clean my room, today i was doing a crossword puzzle which required knowledge of the fact that bambi was male. i didn't know that.

blog blues

i would like to do my own template for the blog, but i SO don't have the energy for that. i am a whiny teenage girl. NYU has only two means of hitting up the space I have to put files, including my web page: plain insecure FTP, and the most painful web interface ever devised. What really frustrates me about the web interface is that I can see enough to realize that it uses webdav under the covers, but i haven't been able to figure out how to get to that myself. this means that i am loathe to update or do ANYTHING interesting to my webpage at all. i should get a colo or something so i can really do some crazy shit. meh. went to the first master's project colloquy today. looking forward to doing something cool and spending a shitload of time on it. i don't know what it will be yet exactly, but rest assured it will involve hitting buttons and making noises.

mac ui pet peeve

i love osx in concept, but in reality, it is just pure horrible pain, both figuratively and literally (these keyboards! my god!). super-annoying: pressing delete does not delete a file. in fact, there are two keys labeled delete, and NEITHER of them deletes the file. this is just about the most obvious thing i can think of.

also, shortcut keys in text editing windows and boxes are woefully inconsistent. sometimes home and end work, sometimes they don't. sometimes i'm pleased to find that emacs-style keys work, but sometimes they don't. i'd be willing to let that slide except that the claim to fame here is supposed to be consistency and ease of use thereof.

CRISIS on multiple earths

i am out of nutella

ithaca is gorges tally: 6

ithaca is gorges tally: 6

tshirts

Probably pointless because the threadless shirt will be sold out very soon but anyhow: UPDATE: laura wins because the threadless shirt is sold out.

What tshirt should I buy?
	Operation Needed
	Movie quote
Free polls from Pollhost.com

New cell phone.kill kill kill.

New cell phone.kill kill kill.

Sometimes i type "with" and

Sometimes i type "with" and then change it to "w/"

on technology

at the large bank where i work i keep hearing people use the word "technologist." "Obviously," said a very senior person in IT today, "you need to be a good technologist."

Thing is, despite my prodigiously large vocabulary, I have no clue what a "technologist" is. Having been ridiculously overly educated in a classical tradition, my first impulse is to tear apart the word into roots and whatnot. -ologist being someone who studies, tech being greek for art or craft. Yes, technologists must be people who study arts and crafts! Guess I would have made a good camp counselor after all, though I never did learn how to start or finish a lanyard. By the way, you can thank the TeX documentation for my knowledge of what tech means.

The other problem with this etymological approach is that i know these people are just taking the word technology and turning it into a profession. That doesn't work so well because we (people with my job) don't actually study technology, we use it in a practical way. in any case, technology is fundamentally different from other -ologies in that it's not defined as a body of knowledge. a biologist for example, works to improve the body of knowledge that is biology. there's a temptation to say that what i do is analogous to a doctor in terms of biology, but that already has a name: engineering. fact of the matter is that the precise area i work in is kind of engineering, but plenty of people who are being called "technologists" are application developers which is just not the same.

as an aside, many companies are actively in the practice of transforming sciences, that is to say, ologies, into industries. scientists no longer produce knowledge, they produce, well, product. of course, at that point it's no longer science but instead technology.

thing is, pretty much everyone uses technology in some form or other in his job. teachers use chalk, salesman have phones, policeman have nightsticks, chefs have knives. and mandolins. and silicone gloves and stand mixers and salamanders and man i need to stop watching food network. point is, i'm not sure why i'm a technologist and mario batali's sous chef isn't.

going back to the root of technology, i would posit that artists would have to be the ultimate users of technology. sculptors have taken the hardest rock and crude metal tools and created that which looks as if it lives and breathes. painters take oil and pigment and create all sorts of images, from sunday in the park to de stijl to happy trees. in other words, artists take technology and bend it to their whim to produce greatness. pretty much the only art i can think of that is pretty much unaltered because of technology is writing. by the way i like it when people leave com... oh.

Ithaca is gorges tally: 5

Ithaca is gorges tally: 5 (+2! One of them was pink!)

A subway car full of

A subway car full of potato chip ads doesn't make you want potato chips, it just makes you thirsty.

letter i am not sending to the editor of the new york times

dear new york times,

please note that i really couldn't give a fuck about what tom cruise, matt lauer or brooke shields (BROOKE SHIELDS?????) think about psychiatry. none of them knows what they fuck they are talking about, nor do i. if you really think this story is worth further coverage, how about paying a reporter to get off his ass and speak to actual psychiatrists and actual scientists who are critical thereof, instead of letting the star of suddenly susan pontificate pointlessly about personal problems. do you seriously think any self-respecting person in this field will even give you the time of day now? until today, i was vaguely considering obtaining a subscription to the times so that when you close off the opinion section of nytimes.com i could continue reading what this nation's great thinkers are writing, but HOLY SHIT IT'S AN OP-ED BY BROOKE SHIELDS.

/brian

"As seen on the New

"As seen on the New York subways" -copy on a podiatrist ad on the E train.

Ithaca is gorges tally: 3

Ithaca is gorges tally: 3

rip victor wouk

victor wouk, probably my personal favorite old harrisite, died last week. he was the first guy to build a full-scale hybrid gas-electric car. he hacked a buick back in 1971, replacing the big gas engine with 2 little motors, one gas and one electric.

i had the pleasure of hearing dr. wouk deliver a lecture in 1998, when I was in the new york academy of science's summer research training program. that very week, there was a story about hybrid vehicles on the cover of the times automobile section, and of course pleased him to no end... "they must have known I was coming to talk to you this week" he exclaimed as he handed out photocopies of the article. what a great feeling that must have been, to see the fruits of his labors full-born in the final years of his life. he certainly seemed triumphant.

I remember Wouk describing how he first started thinking of hybrid vehicles, when someone else asked him, as an electrical engineer, for advice on building a fully electric vehicle. After a few back-of-the-envelope calculations, he determined that the battery technology of the day would make such a creature completely infeasible beyond making a golf cart. I also remember him specifically asking if any of the students there were Harrisites, and slipping in a sly reference to the fact that he followed his brother first to Townsend and then Columbia, without actually mentioning who his brother was (I went up and asked him to confirm my suspicion afterwards).

Today I found myself on an empty train car. This is a weird experience to be sure. It wasn't late or anything, but rather in the afternoon, so i wasn't freaked out that someone was going to get on at the next stop and rape me. what do you do when faced with 4 minutes alone on a train car?

well i don't know about you, but i SANG. LOUDLY.

and then nobody got on the car at the next stop either, so i sang a different song.

really, does this surprise anyone?

And from Brian Wilson we

And from Brian Wilson we learn how woefully underused the bicycle bell is as an instrument.

whyyyyyy does your dog have a top knot?

The 7 train: where a

The 7 train: where a guy speaks in spanish to another guy who only speaks cantonese.

working for a large bank has finally corrupted me... i've moved from gnu emacs to xemacs.

I still know all of

I still know all of the lyrics to "do the bartman". Help.

I'd like to add an addendum to that last post, movies i really want to see but haven't:

• All the President's Men
• SOMETHING kurosawa.
• Solaris (original russian one)
• The Bicycle Thief
• Duck Soup. I've never actually seen any marx brothers movies, but "I don't know, why a duck" (which apparently is from Cocoanuts) is just the funniest thing ever.
• Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind
• The Third Man
• Saving Private Ryan
• The Seventh Seal
• Nosferatu
• 8½

And other stuff.

as promised: (revised shortly after i posted it)

1. 1. Total number of movies owned? I've never really bought movies. there are so many things that i haven't seen, i rarely watch things more than twice (except when i'm just bored and i watch some movie on tv that i've seen before while i'm doing something else). i own about 5, there are 4 in the house and i can think of one in the garage. I have a few other tapes/dvds that aren't actual movies. Actual movies i have actually purchased myself: Metropolis, Life of Brian (i watch it every year on my birthday) and a used vhs of Clue that i bought from a rental store that was going out of business.
2. The last movie bought? I guess that was Life of Brian. i bought it 2 years ago as a graduation present for myself.
3. The last movie watched? Technically i guess this was Red Diaper Baby, which i watched late at night on sundance while making cookies.
4. Do I primarily buy, rent, Netflix or steal movies from friends? probably the biggest perk (after no rent) of living with my parents is that they have satellite tv and a tivo. if and when i move out i'll probably get netflix, but as is i don't have enough time to watch what i tivo. currently waiting for me are: Dogville; Swingers; sex, lies and videotape; some other stuff i've already forgotten about.
5. 5 movies that mean a lot to me:
   1. The Muppets Take Manhattan was the first movie i ever saw in a theater. it's a musical. i wrote a paper on it. i sang "saying goodbye" at the senior day awards ceremony at thhs. it's the fucking muppets. that movie means way more to me than anything owned by the disney corporation has any right to mean to anybody.
   2. Life of Brian is without a doubt in my mind the greatest comedy movie ever made.
   3. I originally had Citizen Ruth/Election here, but after thinking about it I'm going to change that to Being There.
   4. Radio Days. The funny parts of this movie are hysterical, and the ending is sentimental but heartbreakingly beautiful. but most wonderful is the flawed but loving portrait of the family. i think my favorite scene in this movie is when the father and uncle start randomly singing along with the girl to some carmen miranda song. sometimes i think of this movie as the jewish version of A Christmas Story, which is admittedly somewhat more laugh out loud funny.
   5. "means a lot to me" is a bit strong, but super honorable mention goes to Metropolis (1927 Fritz Lang movie, not the anime thing). i will never forget the first time i saw it (with NO soundtrack whatsoever, just total silence) and the moment when you first see maria walk through the double doors into the garden. holy crap.
   Honorable mentions (movies that wow me but don't really "mean a lot to me"): Network, Citizen Ruth, Election, Ghost World (though it has less and less impact on me every time), Rushmore, Edward Scissorhands, Full Metal Jacket, A Clockwork Orange, Stop Making Sense, Dancer in the Dark, Twelve Monkeys, The Fisher King, Delicatessen, Donnie Darko, a whole bunch of Woody Allen movies but especially Hannah and Her Sisters, Manhattan, and Everybody Says I Love You, An American in Paris, Hedwig and The Angry Inch (with the first concluding musical sequence that might survive being compared to the one in An American in Paris), All That Jazz, A Hard Day's Night. more that just aren't coming to mind right this second.
6. Tag 5 people and have them fill this out on their ljs: meh.

stay tuned for some musings, but not a survey, on my favorite theatre.

Ithaca is gorges tally: 2

Ithaca is gorges tally: 2

i have since become incensed at a lack of a musical equivalent to this survey. here goes:

1. total number of albums (cds, tapes, vinyl, etc) owned?
~100. Plus a significant number of mp3s collected in college.

2. The last album I bought?
For myself, used copy of "Kick" by INXS. most recently i bought a used copy of "Sleepless in Seattle" for my mother. been meaning to buy a copy of the new star wars soundtrack however.

3. Last album and song you listened to?
The last album i listened to start to finish was "Pet Sounds" (The Beach Boys). Currently playing song: "Needy Girl" by Chromeo, which you can download free from their website, which is a ridiculous cacophony of popups and flash, so here's a direct link.

4. 5 songs/tracks/etc. that mean a lot to me?
I tried to do 10 favorites a few months ago, which was near impossible, so this should be fun.
- My absolute favorite song ever is "New World" by Björk (on Selmasongs). That song makes me melt.
- The first time I ever heard the Ella Fitzgerald version of "Someone to Watch Over Me" (gershwin) i cried.
- "Temptation" by New Order. wow.
- super-sentimental: "Saying Goodbye" from The Muppets Take Manhattan
- "Piano Phase" by Steve Reich. and suddenly my ears were open. one of those times i could actually feel my brain expanding.

5. yeesh, now pick a song that isn't so mushy
"Be My Baby" by The Ronettes. That is kinda mushy isn't it? "Once in a lifetime" by Talking Heads.

i was tempted to make this a category, but i'm not sure everyone else goes through this: 5 songs i'm currently obsessed with:
- "Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk" by Rufus Wainwright
- "What'll I do" by Irving Berlin. after much deliberation, I'm leaning towards the sinatra version on this as my favorite... although i haven't yet heard ella's take, and i'm sure she had one.
- "Can't Stand Losing You" by The Police. "i guess you'd call it suicide, but i'm too full to swallow my pride" hehehehe.
- "Perfect Kiss" by New Order. The video for this seems very plain, and the song didn't really get me at first. but i just kept watching it over and over. and now i'm obsessed.
- "Descent Into Mystery" which is a track from Danny Elfman's score for Batman. cheesy name, AWESOME sequence. i believe it's the part of the movie when batman is driving vicki into the batcave.

6. make an awkward comment about how other people should be as dorky as you are.
if laura and leslie don't do this, i will cry.

i will do the movie one, i promise.

by popular demand (and a desire to not do work) i will now do the book survey.

1. Total number of books owned?
based on a count of the books on the shelf directly next to me, a knowledge that there are at least twice as many in the garage and a few more in the basement, probably ~200.

2. The last book I bought?
"Electric Sound" by joel chadabe (text for class). the last book i bought for pleasure... i don't remember, i've been using the library a lot recently.

3. The last book I read?
Currently reading "Tales of Pirx the Pilot" by Stanislaw Lem. Picked this up off the shelf in the library because i had never read any Lem, despite having never heard of this book. It's taking me a long time because i've been leaving it home to force myself to read the aforementioned "Electric Sound" on the train. Before that, I read "The Final Solution" by Michael Chabon. The last really good book I read was probably "Satan in Goray" by Isaac Bashevis Singer.

4. 5 books that mean a lot to me?
- Everyone seems to be starting with their favorite book, and mine is "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" by Douglas Adams
- "Childhood's End" by Arthur C. Clarke, besides being all around wonderful, has the most brilliant plot twist of all time. and you will never, ever even see it coming, even though I told you it was there.
- The words "mean a lot to me" simply beg for the inclusion of a childhood book, and I would like to put "A Carp in the Bathtub" which amazon helpfully tells me is by Barbara Cohen. This book is really about Jewish life in lower class brooklyn in the early part of the 20th century, but the plot centers around a young brother and sister trying to save the carp living in their bathtub for a week before their mother makes gefilte fish for passover.
- "Civilization and Its Discontents" by Sigmund Freud is great because it's the book where Freud basically goes "listen, i know i wrote all sorts of stuff about sex and id and ego and consciousness and dreams, but that's all just ephemera in the grand scheme of things. in the end you can either create or destroy: time to choose sides."
- When "The Complete Calvin & Hobbes" comes out and i can count it as one book, it will be the fifth. in the meantime, a completely random handful of others that i've liked but wouldn't necessarily say "mean a lot to me" (the first few that come to mind): "pattern recognition" by william gibson; "ender's game" by orson scott card (fun new game! is this book an apologist parable for hitler?); "american psycho" by bret easton ellis; "a tale of two cities," which i think i like mostly because i read it with my dad and was the first book i ever read where i knew that there was more than was showing on the surface; doh i can't believe i didn't put 1984 here.
- also not really a book: many, many short stories by ray bradbury are superlatively wonderful but my absolute favorite is "The Toynbee Convector," which can be found in a collection by the same name. also really good overall is the first bradbury short story collection, the october country.

5. Tag 5 people and have them fill this out on their ljs:
my friends are either cooler than i am and did this first, or are cooler than i am and would never do this.

movie survey to come later after i get some work done.

Like the first robin of

Like the first robin of spring, it's the first "ithaca is gorges" shirt of summer.

i forgot to give this a title the first go round

so my discovery that blogger now provides free "moblogging" (god i hate that word) has convinced me to give the blog deal another go. this is because from time to time i send leslie or some other lucky duck a timely witticism in the form of an email or text message. one time i actually said to her "sending stupid text messages to you is my blog." but you know, obviously i am depriving the rest of the world of my greatness that way. but my problem was that i rarely remember funny, clever things long enough for them to survive until i return home. and i almost never think of anything worth typing up while here (which is why i should really get out more. ok, it's one of many reasons). so, the addition of moblogging (gah! there it is again! make it stop!) made this more attractive to me. some of you (well, all of you probably. i can pretty much guess exactly who will read this) may remember the blog i had in college. this will hopefully be very different. i do have a copy of that blog, maybe i will make it available.

i want a new drug

and it's called a blog