An hour early

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I stopped at A Taste Above on the way home tonight. It’s a take-away ready-to-go meal place just up the street. Pricey, but good food and I felt like some quick pasta for dinner. I got there around 6:15…closed. Wha? You’re catering to the busy after-work crowd and you close at 6 PM? Brilliant. Dear A Taste Above: a little advice…send whoever’s in charge of your company on an introductory business course. You’re welcome.

.:.

Esquire breaks down Jerry Bruckheimer’s Laws of Science. Example:

The Law of Inverse Emotional Importance

Oftentimes an event may appear significant when in reality it’s not. When confused, remember this simple rule: The significance of any event is inversely related to the speed of its motion.

Proof: Pearl Harbor, about the devastating attack that pushed the U.S. into World War II, features more slow motion than Samba Night at the hospice center.

.:.

Must…finish…assignment. But don’t…want…to.

Inside/friend voice says: suck it up, princess. It’s due Friday, and after that I’ve got a couple of weeks off before going away on course again. It’s just that everything else seems to be SO much more enjoyable right now…watching hockey, thinking about big problems (opportunities?) at work, spending time with Nellie, going to movies, drinking beer, even running at 6AM…I’m loving all of it right now. The last thing I want to do is more school work.

Good thing my wife is a) supportive of me disappearing into a book for several hours a night, and b) fond of television.

[tags]a taste above, esquire, jerry bruckheimer[/tags]

I guess a resounding caucus win'll do that for you

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Five days ago I read a post on Richard Florida’s blog, in which he pointed to an expert opinion on the upcoming US presidential elections:

Obama is going to win it all — Iowa, the nomination, the Presidency. And I think it ultimately comes down to the fact that he is a rare combination in American politics, in that he is both the “emotional” choice and the “electable” choice. … Traditionally, we’ve always had to make a tradeoff between the emotional and the electable choices … But with Obama the two sets overlap.

While that struck me as a bold claim, the author that Florida quoted is surely more knowledgeable about American politics than I, so while I couldn’t dismiss the prediction, I was certainly skeptical.

Then today I read another post on RF’s blog. Take a look at the chart in that post. As my friend Evan would say…”Shift Of Power!” Fine, these are only prediction markets (a description Florida takes a poke at, since they’re awfully reactionary) but suddenly what seemed dubious five days ago seems pretty smart now.

[tags]richard florida, barack obama, prediction markets[/tags]

Gulf of Tonkin, anybody?

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From The Independent:

The US and Iran have engaged in their most serious military confrontation in recent times, with American warships on the verge of opening fire on gunboats of the Revolutionary Guards which had threatened to blow them up.

Sound familiar?

The “Gulf of Tonkin Incident” defined the beginning of large-scale involvement of U.S. armed forces in Vietnam. Historians have shown that the second incident was, at its best interpretation, an overreaction of eager naval forces. [via Wikipedia]

[tags]iran, gunboats, gulf of tonkin[/tags]

Insufficient bandwidth

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I want to write something witty. Really, I do, but after a 3-mile run this morning and going pretty much non-stop all day and then leaving work at 7:00 and working on my corporate finance assignment all night, I’m tapped. I have all kinds of cool stuff in my starred Google Reader items that I want to read and blog about, like an article about the knowledge economy and a Chuck Klosterman piece from Esquire and a Mark Kingwell essay from The Walrus about Toronto fauxhemians/bobos and a Vanity Fair article about George Lucas & Steven Spielberg and a chunk of Macbeth…but I’m just not up to it. I need to go get my shit ready for tomorrow’s run and try to wind my brain down into sleep mode.

Sorry, internet listeners. I’ll try to do better another day.

[tags]insufficient bandwidth[/tags]

Underwhelmed

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I believe this is the second time in a week that I’ve quoted Sloan. Anyhoo…

I was pretty sick yesterday so I couldn’t do much other than lay on the couch and watch the Canadiens lose in OT (boo!), watch Team Canada win in OT (yay!) and watch some movies. Both Letters From Iwo Jima and World Trade Center were disappointing. I don’t understand the hype about the former — is it really that groundbreaking to show a war from the other side? — and the latter was so overwrought in the second half that I could barely finish it.

I’m feeling better today though. Just got back from having brunch with CBGB at Joy Bistro.

[tags]letters from iwo jima, world trade center, joy bistro[/tags]

These two things have nothing to do with each other

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Money woes add to Saskatoon Symphony’s troubles

The Saskatoon Symphony Orchestra is in debt to the tune of about $300,000, a musicians union official said Thursday.

“It’s effectively bankrupt,” Cam McConnell, vice president of American Federation of Musicians Local 553, told the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix.

Premier outraged Idol skipping Saskatchewan

Saskatchewan premier Brad Wall is calling on fans of Canadian Idol to lodge a protest after Saskatchewan was left off the list of audition locations this year.

Wall said he was outraged when he learned the reality TV talent competition would schedule auditions in 10 major Canadian cities, but leave out both Regina and Saskatoon.

[tags]saskatoon symphony, canadian idol[/tags]

"No one wins. One side just loses more slowly."

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There was a great article about the upcoming final season of The Wire in last Saturday’s Wall Street Journal. It talks about th…wait, where?

In the post-“Sopranos” world, “The Wire” is more central to HBO’s strategy than in years past. The network’s looking to the series to retain subscribers at a time when many in the industry say it’s on shaky ground. In many ways “The Wire” is HBO’s closest cousin to “The Sopranos” — they’re both gritty dramas and they’re loved by critics. (Slate’s Jacob Weisberg has called “The Wire” “the best TV ever broadcast in America.”) It doesn’t hurt that the season will be premiering in early January, against other lineups weakened by the writers’ strike — much of what’s being scheduled is reality television and reruns. “The stakes are higher this time,” says Brad Adgate, a media analyst with ad-buying agency Horizon Media. “The golden age of HBO is over, back when they had ‘Sex and the City,’ ‘Six Feet Under’ and ‘The Sopranos.’ ”

Named for the wiretap that a special police unit uses to listen in on members of a Baltimore drug ring, the show’s title doubles as a metaphor for viewers’ experience of listening in on worlds they’re not usually privy to. When the show first aired in 2002, it focused on a police investigation. In the four subsequent seasons, the program’s scope has spiraled out to include the stevedores’ union, local politics, the school system and the media — in short, it’s a portrait of a struggling American city.

I can’t say it often enough: if you’re not watching this show, start. What with the writer’s strike right now, there’s no better time to pick up the best show on TV today.

[tags]the wire, wall street journal[/tags]

"Hence I am cautiously optimistic."

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Interesting stuff found via Brijit, both of which relate to the book I’m reading right now: The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein.

From The Washington Post: A Chance to Defend Themselves (Thomas B. Wilner)

More than 300 prisoners remain at Guantanamo. Most have been there almost six years. We now know that the great majority were not captured on any battlefield. They were not even captured by U.S. forces. Rather, as the National Journal reported last year after an exhaustive study into government records, many were simply “innocent, wrongly seized noncombatants” who were “handed over by reward-seeking Pakistanis and Afghan warlords” in exchange for bounties.

From the New York Times: What’s Your Consumption Factor? (Jared Diamond)

The population especially of the developing world is growing, and some people remain fixated on this. They note that populations of countries like Kenya are growing rapidly, and they say that’s a big problem. Yes, it is a problem for Kenya’s more than 30 million people, but it’s not a burden on the whole world, because Kenyans consume so little. (Their relative per capita rate is 1.) A real problem for the world is that each of us 300 million Americans consumes as much as 32 Kenyans. With 10 times the population, the United States consumes 320 times more resources than Kenya does.

The outlook of the second article is more encouraging than the first, which at least ends with cautious optimism from the author, but its central issue is no less troubling.

[tags]brijit, naomi klein, guantanamo, jared diamond, consumption[/tags]

"Thundercats are go!"

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I’ve watched far too many movies lately to describe them all in a lot of detail, so here’s the nickel version of each:

  • Sicko (imdb | rotten tomatoes) was typical Michael Moore: silly, biased, irreverent and more than a little frightening.
  • Hostel Part II (imdb | rotten tomatoes) was rubbish, lacking what tiny scrap of appeal the original had.
  • Breaking and Entering (imdb | rotten tomatoes) featured a philanderer played by Jude Law, which must have been a stretch for him. Oh, and I don’t care how old Juliette Binoche is, that woman is sexy.
  • No End In Sight (imdb | rotten tomatoes) was a very slick documentary about just how fucked the Iraq situation is. In case you weren’t already aware.
  • Juno (imdb | rotten tomatoes) was about as twee as a movie can get, but it was also very, very funny and impossible not to like. Great acting from a great cast.
  • Atonement (imdb | rotten tomatoes) was supposed to this sweeping, romantic, epic tale. It was. It was pretty much just like every other sweeping, romantic, epic tale I’ve ever seen. It was decent and unremarkable and that’s probably what makes it so broadly appealing.

I’d say that Juno and No End In Sight were great films; Sicko was very good, and the rest go downhill from there.

[tags]sicko, hostel part ii, breaking and entering, no end in sight, juno, atonement[/tags]