Work(ing Title)

Turn up your headphones and watch this fantastic animation of one of the choice soundbites from Pulp Fiction. It’s one of the best examples of motion graphics I’ve seen in a while. [via Josh Spear]

It started snowing about forty minutes ago, just as I arrived to work. So here I sit with my warm cuppa and battle the evil that abounds. I put on socks for the first time this week, which hopefully will help counteract the serious discomfort from yesterday. I must have eaten something that didn’t play well, because I went home in the middle of the day and just about fell asleep.

The rest of the week is looking up though. I’ll be in the gym for the first time in weeks, so I should continue to shrink out of my clothes. Also this weekend will be one of the few where all I have before me is cleaning my apartment and organizing my life, which is fun in a slightly spikey sort of way.

Thank you for the finest of the straight-talking chefs. Anthony Bourdain gives his opinions of the Food Network’s stars, but the finest and most humorous bit is all about Rachel Ray:

“Complain all you want. It’s like railing against the pounding surf. She only grows stronger and more powerful. Her ear-shattering tones louder and louder. We KNOW she can’t cook. She shrewdly tells us so. So…what is she selling us? Really? She’s selling us satisfaction, the smug reassurance that mediocrity is quite enough. She’s a friendly, familiar face who appears regularly on our screens to tell us that ‘Even your dumb, lazy ass can cook this!’ Wallowing in your own crapulence on your Cheeto-littered couch you watch her and think, ‘Hell…I could do that. I ain’t gonna…but I could–if I wanted! Now where’s my damn jug a Diet Pepsi?’ Where the saintly Julia Child sought to raise expectations, to enlighten us, make us better–teach us–and in fact, did, Rachael uses her strange and terrible powers to narcotize her public with her hypnotic mantra of Yummo and Evoo and Sammys. ‘You’re doing just fine. You don’t even have to chop an onion–you can buy it already chopped. Aspire to nothing…Just sit there. Have another Triscuit…Sleep….sleep….’ “

Fucking brilliant and utterly hysterical. [via Eric]

I managed to squeak by with minimal fanfare this year, and now I can just get on with being 26. So far the year has been excellent, with a pleasing if torturous dream topping off a pleasant night’s sleep, and a day of work that can thus far be described as productive. This afternoon will see a handful more text posts for Vista Week on 10, as well as some research into work-related travel in the coming months.

Eric has a tradition of making birthday resolutions as opposed to New Year’s ones, and I’m going to sample his kung-fu this year.

– I’m going to get much more aggressive about publishing my photos I take in a timely manner (as I hope to make photography one of my work responsibilities). I’ve been treating my Flickr photostream as more of a bucket than a stream, and that’s just not right. The increased output should help breath life into this humble blog once the ReDesign gets done.

– Also on the docket is to adhere my monthly life to some financial planning. Cha-Ching may help with this second goal, but for the moment one Excel spreadsheet is going to track my expenditures.

– My last idea comes from a quote by an unidentified friend of Supermarathoner Dean Karnazes:

“Life is not a journey to the grave with the intention to arrive safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming: Wow!! What a ride!”

This mantra should allow me some sufficiently reckless decisions (yipee).

Thank you to those who threw me some love yesterday. It is geniunely warming to see people reach out and show they’re thinking of me. I would’ve loved to share the day with each of you (some more than others), and hopefully you’ll all be able to make it to the as-yet-unnanounced 2007 Party Against.

The following is an excerpt from The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved:

“One of the key genetic rules in breeding dogs, horses or any other kind of thoroughbred is that close inbreeding tends to magnify the weak points in a bloodline as well as the strong points. In horse breeding, for instance, there is a definite risk in breeding two fast horses who are both a little crazy. The offspring will likely be very fast and also very crazy. So the trick in breeding thoroughbreds is to retain the good traits and filter out the bad. But the breeding of humans is not so wisely supervised, particularly in a narrow Southern society where the closest kind of inbreeding is not only stylish and acceptable, but far more convenient–to the parents–than setting their offspring free to find their own mates, for their own reasons and in their own ways. (”Goddam, did you hear about Smitty’s daughter? She went crazy in Boston last week and married a nigger!”)

So the face I was trying to find in Churchill Downs that weekend was a symbol, in my own mind, of the whole doomed atavistic culture that makes the Kentucky Derby what it is.”

The Nemesis of Evil sent me this article late last night. His simple mention of Thompson last weekend sent me to Powell’s Books in Portland, where I picked up Kingdom of Fear and The Rum Diary, the latter of which I tore through in one straight shot–a first for a slow reader like myself. Reading this essay has made me laugh out loud a half-dozen times this morning, and I haven’t even got to his description of the actual race.

Some writers just sync with my brain in a way I can’t describe. If pressed, I suppose the best attempt would be to say that they speak my inner language so naturally, I can read every 5th word and understand exactly what’s happening. Stephenson is one and Thompson’s another. Incredible.