More money talk: Some of you may remember the book Everything Men Know About Women, which lived for a few years on our bookshelf at Adams House and was unwittingly browsed through by more than one female visitor. (The book is blank on the inside.) What you probably don't know is that this book was self-published by a woman named Cindy Cashman, who sold 500,000 copies of it on a $3000 investment and became incredibly rich in the process. She now spends her time giving motivational talks, publishing feel-good bestsellers like The Book of Smiles, and jumping on a trampoline. That's the kind of career path I'll be lucky to have someday.

My favorite online read these days is the old-school blog of Andrew Tobias, financial writer and treasurer of the Democratic National Committee. I've been reading way too much about finance these days for my own good, of course, but Tobias is ten times funnier and more practical than just about anyone else out there: his Only Investment Guide You'll Ever Need is the best financial book I've read, period, so good that I've sent a copy to my parents and am seriously considering buying copies for my friends. (Not sure how to do that gracefully, though.) Even if you don't feel like reading his book, do check out his archived columns page, which contain chatty thoughts on everything from personal finance to the Bush tax cut to interesting Google tricks to how to de-seed a slice of watermelon. (Answer: drop it onto a clean surface from a height of a few feet or so.) Interesting note: Tobias is also the author of The Best Little Boy in the World, a famous coming-out memoir that was originally published under a pseudonym twenty years ago. I'll have to check that out, too.

Yesterday I went into SF with a math friend to bike across the Golden Gate bridge. We had a nice ride, then stopped for a bite in Sausalito and took the ferry back. Throughout, I kept saying to myself, 'I still can't believe I actually live here.'

In the evening I went with John and his roommate to a party hosted by some Stanford kids in the Sunset. I was just walking about minding my own business when some kid pointed at me and said, 'Hey, you went to Harvard and took Linguistics 120 in Spring 2000!' I was a bit taken aback, but couldn't deny the accusation. Later that night I met someone who said, 'Hey, you were my TF for linear algebra!' Fortunately it was for the class in which I didn't get a letter from the dean regarding my poor CUE ratings.

There are some advantages to not listening to some music for a year, when you start again you're pleasantly surprised at how good it is... By which I mean that this month I've started listening to Suzanne Vega again, and it's good stuff. I should have gone to her concert this summer, just wans't ready yet.

My mother got issued a warning and had her description called into headquarters for eating in the DC Metro. Aparrently this is illegal. Anyone know why? I'm assuming it has something to do with getting rid of trashcans, and that getting rid of trashcans is blamed on some sort of security nonsense, but I'm not sure.

Apparently to be employed by a UC one has to sign in the presence of a witness that:

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of California against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of California; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties upon which I am about to enter.

Goodness knows how crucial it is to have people grading History of Math sworn to defend the state against her enemies...

I'm trying to publish this math paper, and so I looked up on the NSF website what I'm supposed to write acknowledging their funding. Here's how the disclaimers section reads:

An acknowledgment of NSF support and a disclaimer must appear in publications including World Wide Web pages of any material, whether copyrighted or not, based on or developed under the project being reported, in the following terms:

"This material is based upon work supported under a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship."

Except for articles or papers published in scientific, technical, or professional journals, the following disclaimer should be included:

"Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation."

So what do you guys think, does this weblog need to have the latter disclaimer on it somewhere? or only if I ever post anything vaguely having to do with math?

Oh no... why does the onion have to run things like this?

45-Year-Old Fails To Make Someone
Very Happy One Day
NEW MEADOWS, ID—In spite of predictions to the contrary, Larry Naering, a 45-year-old research scientist, has failed to make someone very happy one day, his mother Nancy reported Monday. "He's always been such a handsome, responsible boy," said Nancy, who used to look forward to having grandchildren. "I always told him that some girl was going to discover a real hidden treasure if she took the time to look at him. I guess I was wrong." Nancy said her son's chances of finding that one-in-a-million love have dwindled to one in 50 billion.

Classic Savage Love advice, and the opposite of how I was brought up:

"When in doubt, CONFUSED, always assume the other person is an asshole."

In other news, I am in first place after week 1 of fantasy football. I wisely benched Donovan McNabb, my first round pick, and started Jeff Garcia instead. However, my top wide receiver, Joe Horn, is questionable for next week. Is it too early to put in the rookie Charles Rogers?

This weekend was the 23rd annual Seton Village Pie Baking Contest. A good time was had by all, but inexplicably we were shut out of the winner's circle. My pie was a meatless mince pie which was a little too sweet (it could have stood some nuts, which I couldn't find in the store). Almea made a nice ginger peach pie and the peaches looked like apples because they were white peaches. The most talked-about pie belonged to my brother Chris, who decided to bake an apricot-green chile pie. It tasted more or less how you would imagine. However, this being Santa Fe, people have a strange attraction to all things with chile in them, so it attracted a lot of attention. He's a sample conversation I overhead:

Woman: Have you tried the apricot-green chile pie?

Man: Yes. It was awful. Everyone is cooing about it, but personally I thought it tasted medicinal.

Update: I've checked on Alan Riding, author of Leni Riefenstahl's obituary. He's fine.

Here's someone else whom I half expected would outlive us all: Edward Teller is dead. Interestingly enough, this is another case (along with Bob Hope's) of a New York Times obituary where the author (in this case, the late science writer Walter Sullivan) died before the subject of the obituary did. Apparently this happens more often than you'd think. (I haven't checked the status of the author of yesterday's Leni Riefenstahl obituary, but I'm worried about him.)

Subconsciously, I think I'd always assumed that Leni Riefenstahl was somehow immortal. Certainly she was the most frighteningly robust 100-year-old woman in the world; I think that she actually directed a documentary a couple of years ago, which would easily make her the oldest director of all time. For whatever reason, she lived long enough (even in exile) to outlast every other filmmaker, actor, or actress from the earliest era of movies, which I suppose is a weird kind of victory, albeit a bitter one.

It's probably some sort of ominous commentary on my life these days that while watching Queer Eye for the Straight Guy yesterday with Tamara, I recognized the Pottery Barn on Broadway and 67th Street where I had gone shopping only a few hours before. Still a great show, though.

It's a bit frustrating when you arrive home at 10.30 from choir rehearsal and discover all of your housemates sitting around and drinking but you have four questions left on your problem set due at 8 am tomorrow morning. This never happened in England.

Ooooh, Greg Easterbrook, aka Tuesday Morning Quarterback, has a new blog on the new republic online. Todays highlight quote:

When I lived in Pakistan, the newspapers attributed every national setback to "the Zionist-Hindu conspiracy." Now it turns out there actually is a Zionist-Hindu conspiracy!

Yesterday I finally got the page proofs for "Inversus," the novelette I sold to Analog way back in March. (Actually, the proofs were mailed to my old address in Astoria more than a week ago; it took me a while to figure out where they were.) They're very satisfying to page through. Also, I have a tentative release date for the story: it's scheduled to appear in the January/February issue of Analog, which means that it should hit the newsstands right around Christmas.

So last night I went to see R.E.M. perform at the shoreline. Its been 4 years since I last saw them, so it was a little strange to look back and think how much things have changed since then. That was the end of the summer after my freshman year of college... It's amazing how time flies and how different a person I was then. I'd just met Laura that month. I went down to Virginia to pick up ben from his first month of college, we drove up, saw the concert, got our 5 lyric sheets, and then dropped him off at a bus terminal for a 2am busride back from D.C. to blacksburg. He had just recently been dumped by Allison, yeah, its that long ago... Then I went to St. Johns and arrived at 3am to visit meg who was in her second week at college and crashed on her floor. This was long enough ago that not only was I surprised that my parents didn't disapprove of my crashing on the floor of a platonic female friend's room, I also probably wouldn't have done it if they did think it was wrong... The next day Meg's friends were teasing her relentlessly about liking some guy in their class, and she was insisting she didn't and was ticked off at me for not agreeing with her... Of course she just got engaged to this guy last month.

Anyway, enough silly noah what has changed in the last 4 years stuff... Here was the playlist:

1. Begin the Begin
2. So Fast, So Numb (one of my favorite upbeat R.E.M. songs)
3. Drive (slow like on the album, not like the monster tour version)
4. Animal (a new song, didn't care for it much)
5. Fall on Me (!)
6. Orange Crush (surprisingly great fun live, especially with the megaphone)
7. Bad Day (another new one, better than animal, but still not great)
8. The One I love (accoustic and slow, just piano and accoustic guitar, haunting)
9. Daysleeper
10. Imitation of Life (better live than on the album)
11. So. Central Rain (!!!)
12. At My Most Beautiful
13. Nightswimming
14. Don't Go Back To Rockville (this was great fun, and mike mills sang)
15. Losing My Religion
16. She Just Wants to Be
17. Walk Unafraid
18. Man on the Moon
------ Encore
1. Everybody Hurts
2. Weclome to the Occupation
3. Country Feedback (every bit as good as you'd think it'd be)
4. Permanent Vacation (announced as the first time they've played it in the states since 1981, he had to say at the end, "oh I forgot to say that wasn't a cover. We wrote that song, when I was 21.")
5. The End of the World as we Know it.

All in all an excellent show. Michael was rather on speed at the beginning, but got in plenty of bizarre remarks. South Central Rain was a definite highlight, "go build yourself another dream, this choice it wasn't mine... I'm Sorry..."

It's so nice to deal with a huge company that actually has good customer service. For some reason I got charged San Francisco County tax for this month's mobile bill even though I had changed my address to Berkeley. I called Verizon, and after one minute on hold I talked to a person who understood my problem, figured out what was wrong, fixed it, and credited me back the wrong taxes, all the while apologising profusely for the inconvenience.

So if any readers of this blog are in the market for a mobile phone, I highly recommend Verizon. Plus, that way I can call you for free during peak hours!

Ebert's review of this movie hits a little close to home.

As Noah has mentioned, we got a new kitty last week. Her name is Tilly (short for Matilda). Here are some pictures.

Last night I watched The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, an incredibly moving, witty, and beautiful film by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, whom I'm increasingly beginning to regard as the two greatest directors in British history (and yes, I'm counting Alfred Hitchcock). At the moment, I can't think of any other artist in any medium whose career I admire more than Powell's: his films provide a thrilling example of what popular entertainment can and should be, and he's increasingly become my role model as a writer. (My role models have always been more cinematic than literary.)

Anyway, I've probably said this before, but if you haven't seen The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus, Peeping Tom, or Colonel Blimp, you should. These are films that have nothing obvious in common except astonishing visual imagination, wonderful plots, and endless ingenuity, and The Red Shoes especially comes close to the limits of what movies can do. (To my mind, The Red Shoes is significantly more entertaining and moving than Citizen Kane, and just about as ingenious.) But Colonel Blimp is wonderful, too. This entry from imdb.com does a nice job of summing up what makes this movie unique:

Imagine if Tim Burton was given the opportunity to make a movie based upon the exploits of the dirty politician from "The Simpsons", "Diamond Joe" Quimby. Imagine if, instead of a riotous send-up, an excoriating lampoon of politics and stodgy ideals, what Burton delivered was a sentimental and very sympathetic portrait of Quimby as a young man, who is turned into a shyster politico by time and public tides. You'll then have some idea how confused the British were in 1944 to see The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. Colonel Blimp was a caricature of ineffective Brit bureaucracy and the old home guard, created by cartoonist and humorist David Low for The Evening Standard. But when Archer Production's master filmmakers Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger drew their bow on Blimp they had other ideas in mind. We first see Blimp as he was often found in Low's cartoons, wrapped in a white towel in a Turkish bath, but soon we're transported to 35 years earlier and we encounter a young Clive Candy (the unforgettable Roger Livesey), who'll one day mature into the barrel-chested Col. Blimp. Clive is reckless. He duels with Germans over questions of honor. He falls in love (with the reoccurring Archer favorite Deborah Kerr) and he grows old. His swagger becomes a waddle and his adventurous nature turns into complacency. It's ironic that Winston Churchill was advised by his staff to oppose the release of Blimp (it was supposedly going to be anti-military) and yet he's often the one ascribed with reiterating the Bismark quote, "He who is not liberal when young has no heart, and he who is not conservative when he's old has no head." That's essentially the storyline that Powell and Pressburger chose to tell about their poor, misguided, heroic, tragic, Col. Blimp.

Incidentally, for some unknown reason, Netflix doesn't carry Colonel Blimp on DVD, even though it's readily available at most large DVD stores. (I had to buy my own copy off Amazon.) This is just about the only shortcoming I've seen in Netflix to date.

It is with a kind of unbelieving vertigo that I see the date "9/3/2003" on the e-mails in my inbox. I've been at my job for a year today. Scroll down through the list, and a handful of e-mails dated "9/3/2002" appear at the very bottom. I've never been so aware of the earth's cyclical movement around the sun.

Since it's been about two months since I started using Netflix, I feel like doing a roundup of what I've been watching recently. As of this weekend, I've rented Bonnie and Clyde, Grand Illusion, Sunset Boulevard, The Fury, L'Atalante, L'Avventura, Frenzy, Taste of Cherry, Strangers on a Train, The Wages of Fear, Marathon Man, El Mariachi, Desperado, The Rules of the Game, The Bridge on the River Kwai, and Blood Guts Bullets and Octane. Of the above, a few were rentals of old favorites, but mostly I've been trying to fill in the gaps of my cinematic education. Many were wonderful (Sunset Boulevard, River Kwai), and only a few were disappointing (The Fury, L'Avventura). Taste of Cherry was inexplicable, but the metafictional ending comes closer to my idea of what death must be like than any other movie I've seen (the camera stops rolling, the crew appears, a character's life is revealed as a fiction). The best of the bunch was Grand Illusion, which everyone who loves movies needs to see as soon as possible. Next in my queue: The Deer Hunter; Oliver Twist; Network. No patterns that I can see, except that of the first five movies I rented, two (Grand Illusion and Sunset Boulevard) starred Erich von Stroheim, and two (Grand Illusion and L'Atalante) starred Dita Parlo, and I have no explanation for that.

My new favorite read this month is David Thomson's Biographical Dictionary of Film, an amazingly opinionated and comprehensive encyclopedic essay of 800 pages that just begs to be browsed and devoured. I remember this book from my local library; when I was fourteen or so, I would spend hours standing up with this book by the reference shelf, reading entry after entry (but unable to check it out). I stumbled across it at the Strand bookstore yesterday, and found myself doing the same thing (just browsing and reading while standing in front of the shelf) before realizing that I could actually buy myself a copy. Which I did.

It's a great book, mostly because it never pretends to be objective and provides endless fodder for argument. (Thomson doesn't care much for Kurosawa, for example.) It's also quite prescient. Check out the following entry for Arnold Schwarzenegger, written back in the early nineties:

I remember how a friend came back from a visit to the set of Stay Hungry ('76, BoB Rafelson) with reports that the not unobservant Rafelson was saying that this hulk with the impossible name was the smartest person on the picture, and that he was going somewhere. Fifteen years later, we think we know where. But consider: Arnold may have more dreams yet behind that rippling grin…What will the world do if, on learning the explanation that anyone born in Ganz, Austria, cannot be president, Arnold says "Why, baby?" Paul Verhoeven once said that this man could be as big as Charlton Heston -- which may be Verhoeven's one recorded instance of naivete.

Here's the homepage of Rick Lyon, one of the puppeteers/performers/singers from Avenue Q. He seems to have had an immensely satisfying career.

So my parents have started reading this blog (which might be interpreted as a disturbing development). My mom has rather devastatingly summed up the typical post on this blog as "Hey, a girl looked at me yesterday!" (See samples here and here.)

Its always odd pulling out music you haven't listened to in a while. The other day I played a mix a friend made me last octoberish which i listened to a lot last fall... I'd forgotten just how much time I'd spent listening to the section that went: breakfast at tiffany's (a cappella)/love will come to you/hard candy.

Also my newest line of the week is "i heard the eternal footman bought himself a bike to race" from pretty good year.

Meg and I were arguing the other day over whether this was a parody or real. In either case it is pretty funny, though at points its just a little too familiar to me to laugh...

Speaking of Israel... There's an interesting T-Shirt going on in my history of math class (it's an undergrad upper level math class). On monday there were no interesting shirts.

On weds someone showed up with this shirt that said on the front "anti-racism anti-imperialism anti-zionism" and on the back it had this big malcolm x quote about how the zionist argument for the Jewish occupation of Arab palestine had no legal or historical basis, and then had this rant about ending the occupation...

Then friday someone else showed up with an IDF shirt... I can't wait to see what happens monday.

Interesting factoid from this weeks NYTimes magazine: Israel got the nuclear bomb from France?!? Who knew?

Alec, who does the singing in Avenue Q? Is it all voiceover?

It's a good thing it's a long weekend, I didn't really do a good job last week of adapting to the school year starting last week... There's only so many nights I can stay up till 3am dancing at a club in the city in a tux and a moose hat (more "hey bulwinkle!" remarks I've heard in my life). I'm not sure if it was the tux or the hat, but somehow this resulted in girls flirting with me. So i highly recommend both tuxes and moose hats. (Saturday I went back out without the hat or tux and it was back to normal.)

We finally have a living room (bought a sofa, a comfy chair, etc.), which is very exciting, it's nice to have somewhere to plop down when you return home. At the cat has moved in, which has been quite exciting. She's very cute and kittenish.

By the way, if you're ever in New York, you've got to see Avenue Q, which is the funniest, fuzziest, most beautiful musical I've seen in a long, long time. The concept is easy to explain, but it's difficult to convey how pitch-perfect the execution is: it's Sesame Street for neurotic recent college graduates, complete with Muppets and educational animated clips that tackle such touchy topics as one-night stands, Internet porn, unemployment, and Schadenfreude. The plot follows a young Muppet named Princeton as he tries to find his purpose in life while learning to live with a street of eccentric puppet neighbors, including Katy Monster, Lucy The Slut, and the closeted gay couple Ray and Nicky. (Any resemblance to Bert and Ernie is, of course, completely coincidental.) It sounds tasteless, but it's actually wonderfully respectful and affectionate towards Sesame Street. Best of all, it's educational for twentysomethings in the way that Sesame Street was when we were toddlers. Sample songs: "What Do You Do With a B.A. in English?"; "If You Were Gay"; "Everyone's a Little Bit Racist"; and of course, "I Want to Go Back to College." I wish there were a cast album so that I could all point you to the lyrics page.

Watching it, I felt a little like I felt when I saw High Fidelity back in 2000: someone had made a movie (or, in this case, a musical) that said so many things worth saying about my own life that my own attempts at autobiographical fiction seemed superfluous. It's astonishing how much I found myself relating to these puppets. I especially liked the Bad Idea Bears, who appear out of nowhere with such bright ideas as: "Have a beer!" or "Make a pass! She's wasted!" I want to buy tickets for all of my friends, except I'm afraid they'd recognize too much of themselves (and me) in the characters. But even if you aren't twentysomething and terrified of the real world (and if you aren't, what are you doing reading this blog?) Avenue Q is worth seeing just as a technical tour-de-force: the cast are all experienced puppeteers, usually with eight to ten years' experience on Sesame Street, and because they're always visible along with their puppets, the technique on display is just staggering. According to the program notes, there are only about 40 active puppeteers in New York, and they're all so used to working together that they have natural rapport onstage. In its own way, it's encouraging and inspiring how these puppeteers were able to make it big and to Broadway, even in today's wintry economic climate.

Rachel has a blog now. Jesus. It's just about exactly what you'd expect, if you know Rachel. (I mean this only with the greatest affection, of course.)

On September 4, the first nationally televised Democratic Presidential Debate will take place in Albuquerque. I volunteered to help out at the debate, and I learned today that my duty will be staffing/escorting one of the candidates during the debate. Due to the ever-present danger of getting in trouble for blogging something you shouldn't, I will just say that the candidate is male, a U.S. Senator, a former V.P. candidate, and is named Joe. I am definitely looking forward to it.

Strongbad hits the big time.

I know homestar runner has taken my group of friends by storm. I've concluded my summer can be summed up by: "family guy and strongbad."

From msnbc.com: 12-year-old begins medical school. I was going to comment further on this story, until I read the following:

The response from the public — and some of his undergraduate classmates — has not always been positive. Recently, Sho did an Internet search of his name and was surprised to find many people commenting about his life in blogs (or Web logs).

“One person said, ’Look at this miserable child with a pushy mother,”’ Sho says. “Another said, ’Look at this miracle of God with his supportive parents.”’

Sho smiles at the notion that his parents have pushed him. “Sometimes, I kind of pull them along,” he says.

You know, it's much harder to make unfair generalizations about someone you've never met when there's the distinct possibility that they'll do an ego search and find your blog....

This is a little weird... Those crazy Portland Beavers...

Alright, alright, I'm back, there's no need to post things that you say Nat would love to entice me to post. My computer at home has been down for three weeks and I have a hard rule of not blogging at work. (I have this annoying job where if some stupid reporter wants to write an article about me misusing the internet at work, they might consider it news.)

The news from my end of town is I found a house to move into next weekend. No pictures yet, but I'll take some with the digital camera when we move in.

Pluses: 2 fruit trees, clean, lots of space, close to work, $675/mo., nutty guy in the other half of the house, 1 block from the "river".
Minuses: 2 blocks from junior high school, faces north, in a "be careful" neighborhood, nutty guy in other half of the house.
More pluses and minuses will follow when I move in. There will be a housewarming party soon for all who would like to attend. There is also a spare bedroom for all who would like to visit. This seems like a very strange step, as I actually have never rented before. And it is weird to do it in the town where you grew up.

It's fall which means that tuesday morning quaterback is back (and also, as someone pointed out yesterday, "the leaves are falling back east..." All I don't like about berkeley is the lack of fall). Here's the highlight of today:

Dear France, You Can Keep Your Politicians, But Marianne Is Welcome Anytime: Marianne, traditional symbol of French womanhood -- best-known as a topless warrior in Delacroix's mural Liberty Leading the People -- is now being posed for by Laetitia Casta, a lingerie model. Only in France could a lingerie model be a national patriotic symbol!


Casta was chosen by a vote of France's 35,000 mayors; the French population is 61 million, which means France has one mayor for every 1,750 people. Prior to the vote, many mayors pored over photos of the candidates sans shirts. Only in France could looking at bare-chested babes be a patriotic duty! Le Monde writer Debra Ollivier has said that the essence of Marianne is her exposed breasts -- "flush, freewheeling, insolently raised in protest or subdued in a state of heraldic order." TMQ never dated a woman with flush, freewheeling, insolent breasts. Apparently I missed something.

Figured Nat would really appreciate the number of mayors statistic.

From the New York Times travel section: If a Bear Knocks, Don't Answer.

This is probably common knowledge to Fed groupies, but while looking for resources on the Federal Reserve, I came across this interesting piece from 1997 on Alan Greenspan's relationship with Ayn Rand. Apparently they were close enough (the article refers to Greenspan as Rand's "special pet") for Greenspan to read the manuscript of Atlas Shrugged straight from Rand's typewriter. The article also has some interesting material on Greenspan's reputation as a ladies' man, speculating that he was "a good kisser."

Over the course of the summer I'd somehow managed to completely forget just how ridiculously many undergraduates there are... They're like ants. You can hardly move without running over several of them.

Today is a sad day for musicians and music lovers everywhere: Wesley Willis is dead.

I was introduced to Wesley by Todd Gustafson, who graduated from my high school in 1996 and went to Northwestern. Some time during his freshman year, he gave a member of our Quiz Bowl team a tape of Wesley's music, and we played it during a log car trip to somewhere in northern Minnesota. The only description we got was that it was music by "a 400-pound black schizophrenic from Chicago who writes songs and draws pictures." We heard such classics as "Rock and Roll McDonalds," "I Whupped Batman's Ass," "Northwest Airlines," and "Chicken Cow." We were hooked.

I saw Wesley in concert in San Francisco in January, 2002. He was amazing. He played for about two hours, headbutted dozens of admiring fans, and consumed about ten litres of Pepsi onstage. He played many of the old favourites as well as some timely pieces such as "Osama Bin Laden" and "Grand Buffet" (the name of one of the opening acts). It was well worth spending $20 and waiting through three pretty dreadful opening acts.

In case the Reuters brief doesn't convey the full meaning of Wesley, here are an article and a concert review that do him better justice.

Rock over London, Rock on Chicago.

Suzanne Vega learns to drive in New York City. All I have to say about driving in New York City (to pick up alec, haiwen, tamara for a trip to bessie's) is that within the first 10 minutes I was hit by a taxi driver (just a little love tap) while spending nearly 10 minutes in a traffic jam that was one block long!

Oh, that and realizing that I was driving through a scene from 25th hour, that was pretty nifty...

Last weekend at Middle Haddam, I was trying to remember one of the more memorable financial queries I've seen: a reader asks CNN Money how he should invest today to save $100,000 for his six-year-old daughter's wedding in two decades. Of course, if we put the girl to work now, she might be able to save most of it herself!

If this murder trial were a novel, I'd toss it out the window for sheer implausibility: New York real estate millionaire disappears, disguises himself as a woman, checks into a rooming house in a sleepy resort town, then allegedly shoots his drifter neighbor (nicknamed "Gilligan"), dismembers the corpse, and drops the pieces into the shipping channel. There's also something about the mysterious disappearance of his wife from twenty years ago, and a 45-day national manhunt that ended when the suspect shoplifted a Band-Aid and a sandwich, despite having almost $40,000 in the trunk of his car.

Anyway, I'm tempted to quote the whole story, which strikes me as the sort of thing that Nat would love. Sample quote: "At the Poop Deck, a second-floor tavern with a porch that catches a breeze off the Gulf that rarely makes it inside the bar, neither man was known to have been argumentative or to have dressed as a woman."

Amusing incident on the other side of the ocean.

I probably should have pointed this out earlier, but unfortunately, these replica letters of transit wouldn't have done you much good in Casablanca: the artist fell into a common misconception and had the letters signed by "General De Gaulle" ("copied from the real thing!"). However, as the Casablanca goofs page on imdb.com makes clear, the letters of transit were actually signed by General Weygand (that is, Maxime Weygand, the Vichy minister of national defense), although Peter Lorre's accent makes this difficult to hear. Most people, including me, seem to hear "De Gaulle" when they first hear the line, despite the fact that De Gaulle's signature wouldn't have been very useful on a Vichy document.

The day after my last post, an actual Grail Diary appeared on eBay, at what seems to be a bargain price. I'm tempted, I'm really tempted....

More Indiana Jones replica merchandise: This fellow sells every amazing artifact you've ever wanted, from Sankara Stones to Nazi collapsible coat hangers to the letters of transit from Casablanca. His Grail Diary replica is simply amazing.

You can also buy a discount Grail Diary (at 1:6 scale) from this guy.

Like everyone who saw Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, I've always wanted my own copy of Henry Jones's Grail Diary, arguably the coolest movie prop ever. You can imagine my astonishment, then, upon discovering that there's an entire online community of artists who apparently spend much of their time preparing beautiful, hand-crafted, hand-aged replicas of the Grail Diary, which retail for something like $900 apiece. (A bit steep, perhaps, until you learn that the "original" diary sold at auction for about $18,000….) The site I found is really fascinating, with pages and pages devoted to the different sketches, inserts, entries, etc. that the diary contains. This may even be cooler than the Codex Seraphinianus...

Today Mike Develin told me, "You look very California." I took it as a compliment.

Interesting article on human evolution. However, I don't quite understand the necessity for covering up the breasts and genetalia of the australopithecus and archaic human. It's not like they would be particularly titillating...

I miss being at the frontier of the new day...it's already 9 am in England, and I haven't gone to bed yet.

Yesterday I had lunch with a friend from high school who's now out here and I hadn't seen in several years. We went to Cafe Intermezzo, which was quite tasty and quite crowded. So crowded, in fact, that we couldn't find a table and were forced to share one with a couple of other people. This wasn't so bad, however, as those other people were a pair of attractive undergrad girls. I then spent most of the next hour catching up with my friend, trying desperately in the back of my mind to figure out some way of opening up the conversation to include our tablemates, and cursing my introversion.

I then went to San Francisco to hang out with John, where we played Scrabble (I broke 400, bingoing with 'novella' and 'falsies') cooked dinner, and then went with his roommate to 'The Buddha' in Chinatown, where we played 'Liar's dice' and drank numerous different kinds of bad American beer. At one point I helpfully interpreted the order of a British girl who was trying to order a 'vodka and lemonade' and getting only confusion from the bartender (she meant 'vodka and sprite') but she didn't seem particularly interested in conversing.

At some point during the course of the evening we engaged in a game of 'blind chess,' which invloves two players who can't look at the board and have to determine everything by touch, and a referee whose task is to inform players whether their moves are legal or not. It was great fun. Bishops, we discovered, are incredibly difficult to move, and taking your opponent's piece with your piece of the same type is quite a good move. It also pays to figure out what your opponent is doing, as we discovered early on when Nathan lost his queen to John's knight after 4 moves.

I'm now posting on a high-speed connection from my laptop with no wires connected whatsoever. It took more than 3 hours to get it going; the trick was figuring out that I didn't actually need to deal with any Microsoft software at all, and could configure everything on my Mac.

I wish Noah luck in getting his computer set up.

In case you're wondering how I survived the Blackout of '03, the answer is: I broke out the unopened bag of tea candles that I bought a year ago at IKEA, drank half a bottle of wine, and ate a bag of frozen (but rapidly thawing) jumbo shrimp. Also, for some reason I watched the first half of Kubrick's Barry Lyndon on my laptop, which had four hours' worth of batteries; maybe it was all those candles....

It would have been a romantic evening, if there had been someone else in the room.

I disagree with the current New York Times headline, "Power failure across nothern U.S." They seem to have forgotten that there are states west of Michigan, and in fact, the outage only hit the northeastern U.S.

I hope all you northeasterners are managing ok. :)

Since the frozen head of Ted Williams is back in the news again, I thought I'd finally check out the website of Alcor, the cryogenics company at the center of the controversy. Their FAQ page is especially interesting. No mention of the lucid dream option, though.

There's really no need for them to leave all the "like"s and "you know"s in Bergman's granddaughter's comment. As the Nixon tapes proved, everybody talks like that.

I'm curious as to how Dave's bike incident fits into our whole East Coast-West Coast morality debate from back in March.

Maureen O'Dowd on political blogging.

Thanks to Bessie for this link to the NY Times article on the Casablanca anniversary screening.

Random question: what are your favorite math words?

Today I went bike shopping, and after looking at several stores came to the conclusion that Cambridge is actually a relatively cheap place...I got my bike there for 70 pounds, and the cheapest thing here was $249. I think I'm going to look into shipping mine form home. Let me know if you have any suggestions as to how to do this.

I also concluded that people in California really are nice. I was testing a road bike, which I'd never ridden before, and I wanted to see how quickly it would stop. So as I was coming up to an intersection, I yanked on the brakes, and was thrown forward over the handlebars onto the street. Immediately the guy working in the furniture store I was in front of ran out and said, "Are you okay? Can I do anything?" I was pretty much ok, just a few bruises, so I just asked for water. While he was gone someone else saw me sitting with the bike by the side of the road and asked if I was ok. Would this happen in other parts of the country? Anyway, after sitting for a few minutes I retuned the bike to the shop and then hightailed it out of the neighborhood before they discovered that the handlebars had gone slightly crooked...

There ought to be a word for the relief you feel for getting a girl's voicemail rather than having to actually ask her out over the phone. This reminds me of the following famous (and slightly modified) exchange between me and Haiwen:

He: "Did you call Clarissa?"
Me: "No, I got her machine."
He: "You mean robo-Clarissa?"

Yep, I'm clearly robosexual. The only problem is that Clarissa is occasionally and intentionally (robot voice) inaccessible....

More good stuff from Ebert on Gigli.

Here's Drew Hu on Chinese-American rapper Jin, currently featured in the New York Times:

So I had all these ambitions to somehow be the foremost Asian American rapper, called MC Wonton, of course (what else?), but now, and this is not really new news, as my kids told me about him, and that he was legit (though of course this is not very meaningful, perhaps, as my kids, while they are useful for "keeping it real" relative, to say, Alric's affection for Eminem, buy into a lot of corporate capitalistic misogynistic materialistic hip hop nonsense), apparently Jin is the act to beat. But it is too early to judge without listening to the music. It just seems a bit too packaged. NMBHS is not really ghetto. He is not a Chinatown native, blah, blah, blah. These issues of authenticity I am familar with, perhaps. I dunno: I suppose it wouldn't hurt to much to go and fucking buy an album. I imagined my own work being more polemical and in Chinglish [Ed: Really? Explain!], less foregrounding my ethnicity than speaking from it, like my self-racist fiction, perhaps. Worth thinking about.

Granted, I can't imagine Drew writing a line like "Every time they harass me, I wanna explode/We should ride the train for free/We built the railroads." Also, I'm not sure what the Times means by calling Jin "a less angry Eminem," because Eminem without his anger would just be a novelty act. No comment on Alric's affection for him, though.

I've already mentioned that I sometimes forget that Ingrid Bergman is in Casablanca, because I get so caught up in the incidental pleasures of the setting and the supporting cast and the atmosphere of intrigue in the early scenes. One of the astonishing things about Casablanca is how easy it is to "forget" scenes, lines and moments that, in a lesser film, you'd spend the entire movie awaiting, just because there's so much to love at every turn. Things that I've sometimes "forgotten" about Casablanca include: Peter Lorre. The Bulgarian bride. "That is my least vulnerable spot." "Round up the usual suspects." "Was that cannonfire, or is it my heart pounding?" "The Germans wore gray; you wore blue." Sidney Greenstreet, swatting flies. "We'll always have Paris."

Went to the sixtieth anniversary screening of Casablanca last night, which was just perfect: the best movie in the world with, as Haiwen would note, the best girl in the world.

During the discussion before the movie, the panelists repeated the old chestnut that no one believed, during the filming of Casablanca, that they were making anything special. I don't buy that. There's one shot in particular that argues otherwise: that long, lingering shot of Ingrid Berman's face as she listens for the first time to "As Time Goes By." That shot, arguably the greatest closeup in movie history, must last for almost half a minute, and there's nothing onscreen but the music and Bergman's beauty. If the director didn't know that he was making something very, very good, and that he could depend upon that song and this extraordinary woman to carry the moment, he would have cut away or livened up the scene somehow. That extended, melancholy, introspective closeup implies a supreme confidence in the materials at hand, and it's the precise moment when Casablanca passes from superior melodrama to become the best Hollywood movie ever made.

Life imitates The Onion: According to the New York Times, the failure of Gigli has prompted Kevin Smith to recut Jersey Girl so that Jennifer Lopez dies within the first fifteen minutes.

Meanwhile, Gigli has dropped to #1 on imdb.com's bottom 100 movies of all time list, which is just ridiculous. As I try to argue in my post below, Gigli isn't much of a movie, but it's far from worthless.

The makeup of that bottom 100 list has changed dramatically over the past few months. Before, it was almost entirely populated by movies from the MST3K canon, but now there's room for recent debacles like From Justin to Kelly, Glitter, Rollerball, Ballistic, and On Deadly Ground.

I had dinner with Erin Larkspur last night. When the bill came, she paid with a $2 bill, a Susan B. Anthony dollar, and two Sacajawea coins. Clearly, she hasn't changed a bit....

Playing with Friendster all week has led me into some Malcolm Gladwell-esque reveries about Connectors and Connectees and what my real Friendster network, as opposed to the virtual one, would look like. Bessie's refusal to join Friendster means that my online network will forever be a pale shadow of what it might otherwise have been, given that Bessie is the Connector Supreme. (I do, however, sympathize with her reasons for abstaining: she'd spend all of her time writing testimonials and never get any work done. However, she should also know that she should expect to receive many dozens of invitations to Friendster over the next few years if she doesn't join....)

Oddly enough, my most significant Connector these days is Drew. Something about gay men seems to put them at the center of social networks, I guess; after all, I wouldn't know most of the people reading this blog, ultimately, if it hadn't been for Albert (via Robby, via Dave). Last night, for example, I actually managed to get the phone number of a girl at the Beer Garden; she was, no exaggeration, the friend of a friend of a friend of Drew's boy. It's always complicated explaining how you know people through such tenuous connections. In another context, you'd be surprised how often I've had to explain, when asked "How do you know so-and-so?": "Well, her brother and my ex-roommate went to the same math camp...."

Thanks, Dad....

Only a few days after my confusion about Keira Knightley's true age (I'd pegged her for her mid-twenties; she's only eighteen), imdb.com points out that today is the birthday of Audrey Tautou, star of Amelie...and she's only twenty-five. I would have guessed thirty. Clearly I'm not very good at gauging the age of breathtakingly beautiful women.

One of my boxes sent from England 5 weeks ago arrived yesterday. The shipping charge was about £44, and for some inexplicable reason the Post Office decided that the best way to do this was to use one £1 stamp and about 150 28p stamps featuring a mischeviously smiling Prince William. The stamps covered every square inch of the box that did not contain the address or tracking label.

I am now a bit scared as to what the £80 box due to arrive in San Francisco will look like...

Oh yes, Gigli. Haiwen will no doubt contest everything I say here, but I might as well be honest: it's overlong and overwritten, and it's slack in places, and there are long stretches where nothing at all seems to be going right…but once you accept that the movie is going to run the whole "cute retard" thing into the ground and isn't going to make a damned bit of sense, it's generally pleasing, especially in the second hour. Which is to say: it's never boring, it looks and sounds great, and it contains a handful of juicy, juicy acting moments and memorable bursts of violence and comedy. I'm not saying that it's a great movie, or even a good one, and I'm certainly not recommending that you rush out and see it tonight...but I certainly don't think it deserved the reception it's received. Bad movies are always boring, but Gigli never is, and it's more memorable than a lot of conventionally tasteful movies I could name. There's something heady about its sudden shifts of tone, and I eventually came to feel a vague sort of affection for its willingness to make odd detours and its refusal to go anywhere in particular: as I tried to explain to Haiwen last night, Gigli sometimes feels like Punch-Drunk Love made not on purpose.

Noah, I'm sorry to hear about your grandmother. I hope that your weekend goes well.

So one of my grandmothers died today, which means I'll be headed home early for a funeral. This means I'll miss Dave's move in, but it means he'll have a bed. It also means I'll be visiting Ross... Should be fun if really weird.

I also discovered that JetBlue's flight changing policy is that you can switch tickets to any other open one for just the difference in price plus $25 extra if the difference is below $100. Not bad at all.

Probably won't get to post until tuesday or so.

British people barhopping on their summers abroad are highly amusing. Met this cute british girl from bristol, too bad she's only here for 4 days...

More info, courtesy of Google.

• MLB's Announcement of the policy.
  
• Reaction in Toronto.
  
• More Canadian opinion.
  
• The athiests' perspective.
  
• A marginally more intelligent perspective.
  
• The theists' perspective.
  

"God Bless America" update: I read in the Minneapolis paper that on Sunday at the Metrodome, the top of the seventh inning ended in a close play, and Tigers manager Alan Trammell came out to protest, but was stopped short when he had to stop talking and put his hand over his heard for the playing of "God Bless America."

This report got me really ticked off again, so I determined to find out who was responsible and write them a nasty letter. I called the Twins' executive office, and the man who returned my call told me that there has been an order from Major League Baseball this year to play "God Bless America" at all ballparks during the seventh inning stretch on Sundays and national holidays.

"Does this apply to Canadian ballparks too?" I asked.

"Yes. The broadcasters in Toronto made fun of it the first time it happened."

"I see."

So I think I will proceed with this letter, though I now have far less hope of having any effect or even getting an explanatory letter in response. In case any of you would like to join my crusade and write your own letter, I will post the address I eventually get from MLB.

For once, Blogger's targeted advertising does its job (and no, I'm not referring to the Gay and Lesbian Blog list): I was unaware that The Simpsons third season is finally coming out on DVD later this month, but now that I know, I've got to say that this is the best news I've heard in a long time. I don't have TV these days, so I've been working my way through the flawed but worthwhile second season collection for the past few weeks. The second season is quite watchable, but it isn't until the third season that we get episodes like "Bart the Murderer," which I think is the first unambiguously flawless episode in the series. (I'm strangely fond of Fat Tony, who seems to feature in half of my favorite episodes.)

Some interesting stuff on Mike Tyson's bankruptcy proceedings from nytimes.com and The Smoking Gun. How do you spend $230,000 in two years on cellphones?

For Kevin Smith's take on Gigli and how its failure might (not) affect Jersey Girl, see here and here.

I think I actually may end up seeing this movie.

I hate to venture controversial artistic opinions on this blog, of course, but boy, do I love Casablanca. I was just revisiting its quotes page on imdb.com in anticipation of its sixtieth anniversary release, and it's just stunning how much power these lines retain, even after being quoted (and misquoted) so many thousands of times. My favorite moment is still: "I am shocked! shocked!" Also wonderful: "I'll hum it for you. Da-dy-da-dy-da-dum, da-dy-da-dee-da-dum...."

As I'm sure I've mentioned many times before, whenever I watch the first half hour of Casablanca, I get so caught up in the atmosphere of intrigue and the wonderful supporting characters that I actually forget that Ingrid Bergman is in the movie. When she finally appears, it is like seeing an old love at an unexpected moment, because I can never quite remember when her first scene is coming.

This is all prologue to the point that I'm going to be attending the anniversary screening of Casablanca at Lincoln Center this Monday, where Isabella Rossellini herself will introduce the film. I love New York, too.

Got my first rejection slip in the mail today. It stings, but not too badly.

I do enjoy reading Drew's blog. It's so crabbed and cryptic and manic that I often have trouble figuring out what precisely is going on, even when I was there at the time: "...and there is woe looking for a locksmith with the last four digits rubbed out, like an amputee who has only and only and only his thubm on his right hand, which is crucial, because Joephet is occasionally and intentionally (robot voice) inaccessible like the location of the minimal fixed point in Kripke's theory of truth...."

A couple of pleasant encounters yesterday: I met Sharon Harvey, Latin-teaching New Hampshire farmgirl and possibly the least pretentious girl in the world, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for a stroll and a chat about my empty life; and then Angela, who is far from the least pretentious girl in the world but is arguably one of the more interesting, for dinner and a chat about her extraordinary artistic schedule.

Sharon is always refreshingly direct; when I told her about my current job, she asked, "Doesn't that kill your brain?" We also agreed that Sharon is extremely competent in ways that will be useful when the apocalypse comes (farming, locksmithing, carpentry, groundskeeping, seamstress work, shelling lobsters), whereas my forms of competence, as limited as they may be, are entirely predicated on the continuation of our current civilization. When the apocalypse does come, I'll probably be eaten.

Angela also puts my competence to shame, but in the opposite direction: not only does she care deeply about art, but she makes it happen.

I also love it when a small change results in a measurable increase in my quality of life. Last week I switched from my old soft contact lenses, which had to be removed, cleaned, and stored every night, to these wonderful "night and day" lenses that Tamara told me about, which can be worn for up to a month without removal. These lenses are the best thing to happen to me in a long time; I can see the alarm clock in the morning and doze off on the couch with a clear conscience, and I've shaved a good five minutes from my getting-ready-in-the-morning routine. Almost as good as laser eye surgery, and this way, after ten years my eyes won't even fall out.

I love it when something inexplicable becomes explicable. For the past few weeks I'd been haunted by the word "cabotinage"; at night or while I was walking home, it would just pop into my head for no particular reason, even though I had no idea what it meant or how to spell it. I finally managed to track it down in the OED, and a quick Google search revealed how it became lodged in my brain: it's one of the words from Spellbound.

Posting again from pirated Wi-fi. The connection won't work from my desk so i have it propped up 2 feet in the air on a rolled up airmattress where it will work. The lengths I go to for my diplomacy fix...

Oddly google's targeted ads has decided we're no long "noah feldman" related, nor are we a beatles fan site, instead we are now a "gay and lesbian blog." I'm not quite sure how that has happened.

Today I won $5 on an initial investment of $3 playing 5 cent ante poker with a max raise of 25 and a cap per round of 50. Not bad at all, and this includes losing nearly 2 bucks having the lower of two full houses.

This is my first post from dave and my new house. Wi-fi pirating is great. I'm running off one of my neighbors networks. It's a little slow, but it'll do.

The bike ride down from this house is amazingly fun and exhilirating, my mornings just got a whole lot better. On the other hand the walk back from my old neighborhood is really really long.

This is my last post from my july room. I had a great time here, and its hard to believe it was only a month. Today was the first day I didn't sleep in. I got along splendidly with my roomates and got myself in with another set of math grad students who i knew but didn't hang out with so much. I drank way too much. I did a little math. Certain sad patterns involving places i've lived since graduation continued, but c'est la vie. And I'm really looking forward to the next place. And it'll be nice to come back and visit this one, after all it'll be downhill.

I don't know; despite the reviews, I have a hunch that I'd probably like Gigli more than, say, Seabiscuit, which is enormously enjoyable but a bit too beautiful and polished for my taste, which tends to run toward the messy and ill-conceived. I do have to agree with Roger Ebert's comment, though: "Affleck plays Larry Gigli, rhymes with 'Geely,' and one wonders, learning that they rejected several earlier titles for the movie, which ones could have been worse than this."

In any case, I have a hunch that Haiwen and I will end up watching American Wedding this weekend instead, if only because it has a character named Bear who may, in fact, be the first real Bear ever featured in a mainstream Hollywood movie. Besides Baloo, of course.

Watched (on TV) the Twins beat Baltimore 10-9 in 10 innings tonight. The Twins tried their darndest to lose the game, letting Baltimore come back every time they had a lead, but Baltimore worked even harder: up 9-8 in the ninth with two out and two on, the catcher (1) let the third strike get past him, and (2) threw to first, in plenty of time to get the batter (who had stood there stupidly for about 5 seconds before he realised he was supposed to run), but put it in the dirt so the first baseman couldn't handle it. The runner from second never stopped, and scored the tying run.

Much as I'd like to hope, this is not a playoff-caliber team. I guess I'll just have to root for my new adopted home team, the Giants (sorry Nat, the A's are just too evil), but my heart won't be in it the same way...