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Last Randy Standing, Jeff Gurwood’s first stop-motion bloodtacular action short since the excellent Covert Operatives. The fun starts at about 1:50 in.
(0) #9/24/2008
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Diesel SFW XXX. XXX + SFW makes this sort of NSFW, but I can’t say more. And yes, it’s an ad. (via keithschofield.com)
(0) #9/24/2008
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Washoe County, in which I live, is under the political microscope at the moment. Sean at FiveThirtyEight.com reports that Democratic registrations may overtake Republican ones by Election Day, and the New York Times has a profile of Washoe as a swing county:
(0) #Nevada is divided in large part between rural and urban voters, newcomers versus old-timers, the contours of the political discussion formed by growth, energy and immigration. While the voters in the rural area of the state are almost certain to go for Mr. McCain, and Mr. Obama is seen as having an advantage in southern Clark County — home to Las Vegas — Washoe County is widely considered the place that could tip the state one way or the other.
9/23/2008
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Powell’s has a short interview with Neal Stephenson, whose Anathem I just started dipping into yesterday. He mentions David Foster Wallace, “who I think was the best we had, and who influenced me in the sense of making me try harder and wanting to do better.”
(0) #9/23/2008
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I keep getting that damn American scam spam:
(1) #I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800 billion dollars US. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you.
9/23/2008
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Ten years ago, a Lake Tahoe resident captured some fascinating photos of rare watersprouts (i.e., tornadoes over water) appearing above a deep section of the lake, some of the largest ever recorded. The RGJ has a reminiscence:
(0) #The largest spout, which formed about 9 a.m., was a monster. Its funnel was up to 275 feet in diameter, with the ring of spray at the lake’s surface about 500 feet across. Winds at the funnel’s base were likely between 100 and 125 mph, Golden said.
9/22/2008
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For those of you without HBO: as of this season, the network is providing full podcasts of Real Time with Bill Maher on iTunes. I am of the opinion that Real Time has the highest level of political debate anywhere on television currently, although sometimes the makeup of the panel leads to a dud. (Please, no more Robin Williams, but Ben Affleck is surprisingly good.)
(2) #9/22/2008
Boards of Canada-produced track for The Sexual Objects
Boards of Canada are coming out of hiding, sort of, producing a few tracks by Scottish band The Sexual Objects. You can listen to one of the tracks, “Here Come the Rubber Cops,” on MySpace. It’s the first track in the list, labeled as “The Sexual Objects” – the one with the The-Man-Who-Sold-the-World riff. (thx, endepth08)
More on an Infinite Jest film adaptation
That adaptation of Infinite Jest that I wrote about two years ago? Variety says it’s still in early production, despite DFW’s agent saying that the option ran out. I’ve read a draft of Keith Bunin’s screenplay and though it was well-written, I didn’t particularly like it. (Although if the rumor about a Jon Brion score is true, that would fit nicely.)
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Trailer for Synecdoche, NY, Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut.
(0) #9/18/2008
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McSweeney’s will be posting remembrances of David Foster Wallace every day for the rest of this week. (Although they are more about David Wallace the human than David Foster Wallace the writer.) The first batch include several from his former students, and a few from fellow writers, including Dave Eggers and Zadie Smith.
(0) #9/16/2008
An exchange on wallace-l
An exchange on the David Foster Wallace mailing list after reading this remembrance from a Pomona colleague:
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Here’s something that’s been around for awhile but is more relevant to read now: an anonymous letter written for the Grenada House about the writer’s time spent recovering there for drug addiction in the late 1980’s. This has been pretty much confirmed as written by David Foster Wallace. (And will strike a major chord if you’ve read Infinite Jest.)
(0) #9/15/2008
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Harper’s Magazine has made available PDFs of every David Foster Wallace piece they’ve published, including the essay often cited as his best nonfiction work, Shipping Out (AKA, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again). (thx, bill s.)
(7) #9/15/2008
DFW RIP
Based on how many of you have emailed me about David Foster Wallace’s recent death by his own hand, I perhaps don’t need to remind you all of how important his writing has been in my adult life. (But you can see how much I’ve written about him on this site.) I may have to sit with this news for a few more days before I can say more intelligently.
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The Big Picture’s photo series on the 2008 Summer Paralympic Games is fascinating for several reasons, but mostly because of how darn hard some of the events seem.
(2) #9/12/2008
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Roger Ebert on the “American Idol” candidate.
Addendum : Looks like Ebert can still take a beating.
(0) #9/11/2008
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I started reading fivethirtyeight.com several months ago, and somewhere along assumed I had already blogged it, but I haven’t. It has without a doubt the best statistical analysis of presidential election polling out there, with scores of easy-to-understand graphs. For example, today’s analysis shows that McCain’s recent bounce has been much stronger in states he already has secured than in swing states, increasing the chance that Obama could win the electoral vote without the popular vote. (And, of course, increasing the chance that McCain could win with both.)
(3) #9/11/2008
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Roger Ebert on the “American Idol” candidate.
Addendum: Looks like Ebert can still take a beating.
(4) #9/11/2008
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Ken Burns (The Civil War , Baseball) is working on a six-part, 12-hour miniseries on America’s National Parks, to be aired next year. I’ve been a yearly National Park Pass holder for 4 years now, so I’m looking forward to this one. (I’ve been to only 23 of the 58 National Parks -- I still haven’t been to Nevada’s one park, yet somehow the Dry Tortugas got a visit!) (via ecoscraps)
(0) #9/9/2008
