iamverytall

I have been watching, How to Train your Dragon recently, because it’s on HBO all the time and it’s awesome. And I was really starting to get bugged by the fact that the dragon in the movie looked… familiar. AND NOW I KNOW WHY.


This website also has lots of other awesome/terrible discoveries. I particularly like this one:

Blue Valentine was not my choice. Granted, it seemed like a better idea than Never Say Never. However, it seemed like kind of a downer of a movie, even just from the description, in which the phrase “doomed marriage” came up front and center.

The movie follows two timelines, one tracing the initial love story, and the other its eventual disintegration. The story is fairly simple, and much of what distinguishes the movie is found in the details. The song that Dean plays, or the dance…

The inherent appeal of tumblr over a standard blog. Every so often, I just want to post a song link or something, and tumblr is way better for that than blogger. Facebook would actually be the ideal venue for everything, except the audience is too big. I don’t actually want everyone on facebook to see everything that I put down. And I don’t really want to manage a list of 500-600 friends, or what not. Blaaaagh.

Anyway, it’s a gorgeous day for once in Boston, and I am of course wasting it by…

The following link goes to a page with audio clips of Bill O’Reilly reading from his (assumedly) craptastic novel, Those Who Trespass. Here’s the Village Voice’s synthesis of the plot:

The murderer, Shannon Michaels, is pursued by an O’Reilly-esque cop, Tommy O’Malley. These two Irish-Americans share their author’s tough-talk, lust for power, and (alleged!) belief that the best way to seduce a woman is to seize her breasts, preferably as she showers.

People are understandably upset about the AIG bonuses - if a handful of guys bring down one of the largest companies in the world, they really shouldn’t be getting $1+MM paychecks. Fine, that’s settled, let’s move on.

The NYTimes reports that Eliot Spitzer has now cautiously weighed in on the subject, pointing out that the flap about bonuses is peanuts relative to the fact that AIG has actually passed out billions of dollars in bailout money to its trading partners, with the implication that…

And I really don’t miss it. As I may have mentioned before, television has been a time-sucking blight on my life for far too long. Anything that I’d want to watch on TV, I can get on the Internet if I really want to see it. Without having it around as a passive alternative to seeing friends, I’m actually feeling phenomenally better about life in general.

Eat it TWC!

Lee dropped the axe on Saturday. It took about fifteen minutes, and three years were over. Her friends showed up after that and I had to go, so there wasn’t much discussion. I knew this was coming for months and I’ve been bracing for it as best as possible. But it still feels like a piece of me’s been ripped out.

NB: Halfway through writing this, I realized that this is the most boring post that has ever been written. There’s really no reason to read it, unless you just want to know what’s going on with me.

It’s recently come to my attention that some people were worried that I’d lost my job. That’s my fault, since I haven’t really updated this sucker since I posted about layoffs at my firm. To all of my well-wishers, thanks. I still have my job and don’t have any plans for being laid off in the…

Steven Pinker isn’t an English Professor, but rather a highly regarded cognitive scientist. Even so, I really hope that his latest Op-Ed is right. Here are the money quotes:

Language pedants hew to an oral tradition of shibboleths that have no basis in logic or style, that have been defied by great writers for centuries, and that have been disavowed by every thoughtful usage manual. Nonetheless, they refuse to go away, perpetuated by the Gotcha! Gang and meekly obeyed by insecure writers.

…

Fascinating article in the NYTimes today about some findings in the newest issue of Nature about the science of love. I’ll let you read the article yourself, but in a nutshell, it talks about a study on prairie voles, one of the few mammals with the same level of monogamous tendencies as humans. Here’s the money paragraph:

When a female prairie vole’s brain is artificially infused with oxytocin, a hormone that produces some of the same neural rewards as nicotine and cocaine, she’ll…