In the "all I got was this t-shirt" category...for a number of years now I have wanted to go to Pop!Tech, the annual conference on technology and culture held in Camden Maine. I was introduced to Pop!Tech by a former colleague and friend, Renee Blodgett, who was doing PR for the speech recognition company I was working for at the time. Well that year I could not go but she brought me back a great t-shirt (black with that year's slogan "get real" on the front in white, plain sans-serif text and the Pop!Tech logo on the back). I still have not been able to get the time to attend. This year Renee is one of the "official" live bloggers from the conference, going on right now. She always has some good insight into the crossroads of technology and culture and so far she has been shining with informative posts on a large number of of the speakers at Pop!Tech. Now I guess I'll have to donate at Kiva and read Stephen Pinker's newest book.
I payed $4.00 for Radiohead's new album In Rainbows. I had no particular reason for picking this number except that it is less than half of what I normally pay for a CD and since it is not CD-qualitry I figure I deserve a good discount. In addition I am still on the fence about this band...sometimes I really like them, in particular Kid A and Amnesiac...but other times I feel like they are way too over-praised for the music I hear. I really think don't that I can rank OK Computer with some of the greatest albums of all time. I like it, but it probably wouldn't crack my top 50, if I were to ever waste time to generate such a list. Back to the point of the posting - I am really impressed with their model-defying distribution and set-your-own pricing scheme. Similar to Prince's last two CD's - one given away free at his concerts during the promotional tour for Musicology, and the next one given away free with a newspaper - I imagine they have made the big record companies blush with embarrassment. Of course local bands at coffee houses all over the world have been asking for a "sliding scale" or "pay what you can" price for their wares for a long time, but for a band as big as Radiohead to do it certainly is remarkable.
I've been slowly plowing my way through the Discworld novels by Terry Pratchett. They are hilarious. It is very hard to read any other fantasy novels after reading these books. He does such a great job of sending up every possible aspect of the fantasy form. boing-boing recently linked to the reading order guide at l-space which has been instrumental to my understanding how these books fit together. My preference is still to read them in the overall published order so I present to you my own edited version of the guide that has been merged with the data from the published order. enjoy..
I found an interesting contrast between two op-ed pieces published in the past week. Both related to the advancing wave of technology that we humans (specifically middle to upper class with appropriate technology access) have been riding and drowning in. With the advent of ubiquitous computing and search technologies like Google, we are in a unique position in human history to redefine what it means to “know” something. I, for one, could not do a lot of what I do (personally and professionally) without Google or Wikipedia’s constant input. The first article from the NY Times last week bemoans the loss of memorization and the learning discipline of rhetoric from our culture. The writer recommends that we add some level of rote memorization back into our education system. On the flip side the piece from the Boston Globe this weekend recommends that, given the preponderance of information we are subjected too and create we need to find new ways to forget! While the subject of memories has long fascinated me (down to the mathematical models used to simulate biological memory systems), this is the first time that I have started to think about it from the level of our cultural and anthropological connection to what we remember and what we consider our own personal knowledge. This seems an avenue for some further investigation…maybe I should do a search…
now I do feel like the years are passing by quickly....ew is celebrating 20 years since the debut of Start Trek: The Next Generation. Securely in my top five television shows of all time it took a full season before it got really going (as most shows do) but, as this list shows, it had some excellent sci-fi moments…The Measure of a Man is one of my favorites…a story right out of the Asimov playbook
more random lyrics I like....
Wait for Sleep - Dream Theater
Standing by the window
Eyes upon the moon
Hoping that the memory
Will leave her spirit soon
She shuts the doors and lights and lays her body on the bed
Where images and words are running deep
She has too much pride to pull the sheets above her head
So quietly she lays and waits for sleep
She stares at the ceiling and tries not to think
And pictures the chains she's been trying to link again
But the feeling is gone
And water can't cover her memory
And ashes can't answer her pain
God give me the power to take breath from a breeze
And call life from a cold metal frame
In with the ashes
Or up with the smoke from the fire
With wings up in heaven
Or here, lying in bed
Palm of her hand to my head
Now and forever curled
In my heart and the heart of the world
We had to put our cat Tasha to sleep today. In the fall of 1990 Stephanie and I had been married and living in our house for a year and we felt it was time to add another presence. Since we are both cat people and as it turned out we were a good six years away from wanting children, we decided that a kitten would be the best choice. We went to the Northeast Animal Shelter in Salem and picked up beautiful, almost perfect Tortise-shell kitten. Having been grieving over the demise of one of our favorite Star Trek: The Next Generation characters the previous season, we decided that Tasha was a good name (better than Worf anyway). Tasha was best described by my friend Bruce as a “roving knick-knack”. She never got in your way, she was always just part of the things in the room. I can’t help imagining that just like her namesake, there is some parallel universe somewhere where Paul and Stephanie only had Tasha for a very short period before some “skin of evil” takes her life…fortunately for us we live in the universe where Tasha lived a good long time.
Reality can be refreshing sometimes. Today I met Bradley Whitford of (West Wing and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip fame…neither of which have I watched) at the Unitarian Church I attend. I am a friendly with his brother, David, who is a writer, Arlington resident, and a member of First Parish UU of Arlington where I go with my family. David’s wife and I taught the Coming of Age class together two years ago and I am a youth advisor for both of their teenage daughters. Bradley was in town for a big family gathering they have every year…. So there I was chatting with him when he introduced me to his three children. He then noticed that his 8 year-old had cake all over his face. “Go get a napkin and wipe of your face” he said sternly, echoing the same thing I said moments earlier to my almost 8-year-old. I guess it doesn’t matter what we do for a living, we always have to keep our kid’s faces clean.
Since the Red Sox were on the west coast this week end, the Saturday night game was a 10:05 PM EST start. This meant that as the kids were in bed by 9:15 we had some time to kill before the game started. Stephanie had recorded Glory Road on the DVR earlier in the week so we figured we would watch the first few minutes and then switch on the Sox. We would get back to the movie later…or not if we didn’t like it. Well we watched the film straight through and it was the Red Sox who had to wait for a later viewing.
Glory Road is a based-in-fact story of the 1966 NCAA champion Texas Western College Miners (now called the University of Texas at El Paso) men’s basketball team, which fielded history's first all African-American starting lineup of players to take a Division I national championship. Hall of Famer Don Haskins, portrayed by Josh Lucas, was the coach who “changed the history of college basketball” …this only two years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. I knew nothing of this story until I heard Bill Littlefield interview Don Haskins and the author of the book that inspired the movie on his Only A Game radio show last winter.
The story is full of moments where, unexpectedly, race becomes an issue for many of the characters, regardless of their skin color. I liked how a number of prominent, powerful white figures were shown not being overtly racist, but rather ignorant of the situation that blacks found themselves in that era. The cast was great and with the exception of a small role for Jon Voight, there were no big name actors. The soundtrack fits well with the era and was used both as background in some scenes and directly as part of the action in a few cases. While there is no new ground broken with this film, it is a great feel-good story about how pride and teamwork can overcome even the harshest of obstacles. The irony is that it is rare today to field a team in college or pro basketball that is not of a simliar makeup to that of the 1966 Miners.
Neighborhood
Explore friends, family, friends & family, or entire neighborhood.
