June 2009
93 posts
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American Dad pwns Family Guy. Really.
Via TV Squad:
In the end, I think American Dad is maybe showing a higher level of quality because of that character commitment we’re starting to have with this family. On Family Guy, it’s all about the gags and the jokes.
And here’s my comment to this article:
I really appreciate this article, because I think that AD is the most underrated comedy out there right now. ...
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Alice in Burtonland.
I’ve been a fan of all the Alice in Wonderland incarnations, including American McGee’s videogame and the 1999 TV mini-series, and of course the Disney one ranks as probably my favorite Disney movie ever. It seems to me that Alice is a public-domain fairy-tale that can be told again and again without losing its unique charms.
So color me just a little excited that Tim Burton...
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Roger Ebert's review of Transformers 2. →
Ebert can be pretty funny at times:
The humans, including lots of U.S. troops, shoot at the Transformers a lot, although never in the history of science fiction has an alien been harmed by gunfire.
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WatchAtom Films forecasts the potential for movie adaptations of more classic 80s cartoons. My favorites are David Cronenberg’s Cabbage Patch Kids and Wes Anderson’s Teddy Ruxpin.
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Awesomely macabre.
Illustrations by Fernado Vicente.
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The future is (almost) here. →
Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir overviews the currently available crop of online movie delivery sites. The most promising one for film buffs is probably The Auteurs, which focuses on cinephile-oriented classics and has a Hulu-like interface, clean and easy to use. Watching Agnès Varda’s French New Wave classic Cléo From 5 to 7 streaming online, for free? That is most certainly win, my...
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“Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else’s head instead of with one’s...”
– Arthur Schopenhauer (via bookshelves)
“In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get...”
– Mortimer Adler (via bookshelves)
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Kim Jong-un tries to assassinate his older... →
A chip off the old block. Just like old times in the Three Kingdoms.
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Realism and Iran →
Take a stronger stance, Obama & Co. Condemn the brutal suppression and insist all Iranian voices be heard.
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“The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you’ve got...”
– Groucho Marx (via kari-shma)
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“In silence the heart raves. It utters words/ Meaningless, that never had/ A...”
– True Love, Robert Penn Warren.
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The Warp Box Set sure looks pretty. →
Via Pitchfork:
Warp started out as the home to experimental electronic types like Aphex Twin and Autechre, and those groups’ cover art used to invariably depict crazy futuristic-looking space polygons. Well, Warp has kept that proud tradition alive with the design of the Warp20 box set, which looks incredible. The set will include five CDs, five 10” records, and a 192-page book.
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Peter Bjorn and John - Up Against The Wall.
...
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“Use your imagination not to scare yourself to death but to inspire yourself to...”
– Adele Brookman
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Attention: poor audiophile. →
Via Crave:
Look at older models: Headphone technology changes over the past 10 years or so have been evolutionary rather than revolutionary, and as a result, sets that came out 5 or more years ago often sound just as good as their more-recently released brethren. And after several years on the market, the list price is often significantly lower than the original MSRP. For example, the Sennheiser...
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“I am free of all prejudice. I hate everyone equally.”
– W. C. Fields
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Kill Pixie.
Illustrations by Mark Whalen a.k.a. Kill Pixie.
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A brief history of social media. →
It’s funny, reading this article not only brought back memories of the good ol’ days, it made me realize that I’ve dabbled in every sort of category of social media since the beginning, including phone phreaking, which I’m sure is an alien idea to most people today.
The ironic thing is that I’m not all that social to begin with.
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Free-market liberals of Europe. →
Via Salon:
The new pro-capitalist, anti-nationalist center-left finds allies in investment banks and college campuses but has little to offer ordinary people who view the nation-state as their agent and protector in a dangerous world. Nobody should be surprised when, in a period of economic crisis, significant parts of the population should turn to unabashed nationalists of the right, as opposed...
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The Congressional Presidency. →
From The Daily Dish:
Obama seems to think that the dysfunction in Washington isn’t only about the heightened enmity between the parties; it’s also about the longstanding mistrust between the two branches of government that stare each other down from twin peaks on either end of Pennsylvania Avenue.
Obama’s pragmitism at work. Note the comparison between Obama’s strategy and...
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Engineers - Clean Coloured Wire
Shoegazey songs...
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Scary times for the would-be novelist. →
From Wired:
10. Contemporary literature not confronting issues of general urgency; dominant best-sellers are in former niche genres such as fantasies, romances and teen books.
I’ve long believed that truly powerful and lasting literature should deal with problems in the here and now. Today’s lit novelists bore me with their historical epics and romances. Couldn’t be less...
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Updike, the ur-blogger. →
From Slate:
Updike was the consummate stylist with a blogger mentality.
Like I’ve always said (or wanted to say): the man was almost unparalleled in his evocation of detail and subtlety. Where he lacked was overall vision. Like the article advises, though, it’s best to keep a pen and paper handy when reading Updike because you’ll likely strike upon a sentence of such beauty...
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“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
– Oscar Wilde
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Rothko-esque polaroids.
Gorgeous polaroid series called Geometries, by Grant Hamilton.
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Word of the Day: kibitzer →
From Merriam-Webster:
: one who looks on and often offers unwanted advice or comment; broadly : one who offers opinions
Yep, that sounds like me. And probably 99% of all the bloggers on the internetz.
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“Do not weep; do not wax indignant. Understand.”
– Baruch Spinoza
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Feng Shui On Steroids →
Via zenhabits:
Here are some ways you can improve the energy of your space. And in doing so, make it more inviting and likely to make you want to be there and in turn want to work there to achieve your goals.
Some good ideas here. Lately I’ve been very interested in ways to create a living a space most conducive to my lifestyle and the things I want to achieve/do, so this article was...
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“Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen.”
– Robert Bresson
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Philips After Five
Last night I went to the Philips Gallery here in DC for the first time, and I probably couldn’t have picked a better time to go. On first Thursday of every month the Philips Gallery stays open late and hosts an evening full of various events. Last night I got to attend a lecture on Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party, sip wine and eat cheese and crackers inside the gallery rooms,...
The Absolute Best Songs of 2009 (.25 of the way... →
Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs - Bournemouth
...
indierawk:
Doves - Walk in Fire.
“It seems...
Asia Trash and Asia After Dark →
Why does everything sell out before I even find out about it? Sucks. I need to plan my weekends more than 2 days ahead of time.
YouTwitFace is the future.
Last night’s Conan felt like a love letter to his old Late Night fans. There was a lot of miming (and explaining of the miming), deadpan Max and LaBamba stuff, and of course, the return of a classic bit, now rebranded as “The Year 3000,” with impressive new costumes to boot. My favorite joke of the bit was the prediction that Youtube, Twitter and Facebook would merge into one...
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Eat a Choco-Pie and support NK regime change. →
From Asia Times:
The taste of Choco Pie, moreover, apparently is spreading like a poison that is contaminating the [North Korean] system. Since businesses in the complex began serving the snack four years ago “to boost morale”, said Chosun Ilbo, the South’s biggest-selling newspaper, it’s had “explosive popularity among...
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