July 2009
14 posts
Reading List Update
NYRB Classics is having a Summer Sale.
They have assembled more than a dozen collections of 2-4 books grouped by theme or author and marked them down 40%. Individual books in the collections can be picked up for 25% off. The entire back catalog is marked down 20-30%. Amazon’s regular price for these is usually about 20% off the MSRP.
Additionally, if you buy more than $75 worth, you get...
Take Back the Beep →
WatchI can’t stop watching this.
“I mean, the question actors most often get asked is how they can bear saying the same things over and over again night after night, but God knows the answer to that is, don’t we all anyway; might as well get paid for it.”
— from The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy
Film Movement →
“Our DVD of the month club allows you to see the best new award-winning independent and foreign film regardless of where you live. Many small but deserving films never make it to a theater near you. They get squeezed out of theaters by Hollywood blockbusters and face skyrocketing marketing costs that make it impossible to reach appreciative audiences. We created the club to specifically...
Sligh: Magic 2010 Core Set Constructed
Name
Quantity
CMC
Raging Goblin
4
1
Jackal Familiar
4
1
Goblin Piker
4
2
Sparkmage Apprentice
2
2
Goblin Artillery
2
...
“Trust is a feeling, Hank. It’s something you feel for another person, like love or hate. It comes about because you see what a man does, who he is. A man does what he says he’s gonna do, values his friends, his family, an’ tries to do right by them? You can’t help but trust a man like that. You can’t help but feel trust for that man. A man like you.”
He...
Random Guy I Met Today: So you know computer security, huh? Have you ever seen a Mac?
Me: Uh, yeah. Why?
Guy: I just got one. What the hell was I doing running Microsoft for 20 years? I swear this country deserves to go to hell. GM damn near died and Microsoft is next on the block. GM can't make a frickin' car that gets more than than 10 miles a gallon and Microsoft can't run my computer without getting popups and shit make me reinstall everything twice a month!
Me: (A little stunned by this unexpected rant.) Uh, yeah. It's a pretty solid system. We run...
Guy: I haven't seen a popup since I bought this thing. Unbelievable. Could barely surf the web before I bought this thing.
Me: Well, you could probably could have downloaded Firefox and...
Guy: Guy at Best Buy promised I'd never need Norton again or see another popup. He was right. Everything just works. Yeah, I can get a Dell laptop for five hundred bucks less, but Apple charges more for their computers for the same reason Toyota charges more for a Camry. You get what you pay for. You get what you pay for. So who do you know who'll buy this house?
Me: Uh...
This happened. Guy was a realtor, as average a joe as you could imagine. Rant totally came out of nowhere and caught me completly off-guard. (He's totally right, though.) Microsoft has some huuuge problems right now.
A Fowl Brine
Brining a fowl before roasting ensures succulent meat. I’ll be roasting a 3-pound whole, butterflied chicken over charcoal tonight, and thought I should share the secret of my universal accolades, I mean, my recipe with you.
Equipment
5-Gallon Pail
Kitchen Plastic Wrap
Buy a 5-Gallon Pail at your local hardware store and label it clearly as “Food Only”. Wash it out...
WatchIt’s unfair to call North Dakota “flyover country” when clearly no one flies over this part of the country.
Dustin Curtis's Life Progress →
Reading List
Last year I read Dante’s Inferno. It was a surprisingly good read, thanks to a fantastic translation, great notes by the translator, and very fine and handsome craftsmanship of the physical object itself.
However, I felt many of the finer points of the allusions were lost on me (the notes do a great job of getting the gist of the thing) since my knowledge of Greek & Roman mythology is...
Magical Jones Soda →
I approve.
“An awful lot of women,” said Lora, “dream of having a tail. Think about it yourself. First of all, wouldn’t it be pretty—a thick fluffy tail, it could be striped, black and white, for example—that would look good on me—and you know, on Pushkin Square I saw a little fur coat that would have been just the thing for that kind of tail. Short, with wide...