happy Black History Month! I’m going to only read books by Black authors this month. started the graphic novel The Black Panther Party yesterday (+1 for library ebooks!); others on top of my TBR pile: Leave the World Behind, The Vanishing Half, The Sum of Us 📚
Category: microposts Page 14 of 73
finished a couple of good books recently, both contenders in this year’s Tournament of Books: Interior Chinatown, by Charles Yu, and A Children’s Bible, by Lydia Millet. they’re both weird, even somewhat surreal, but touching & thought-provoking. recommend x2 📚
I don’t know if the ideas in this post can or will be put into action by journalists, but boy they sound good
Effective today, you are no longer political reporters (and editors); you are government reporters (and editors).
Saturday’s beer: Oskar Blues Brewery’s Barrel-Aged Ten Fidy
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Not a can design worth writing home about, but very smooth, and rich enough to make the wait till Saturday worth it 🍺
…also always a sucker for prog-rock bombast:
In these scorched and pitted times, as the world smoulders, there might be nothing less trendy than an hour-long psychrock epic by a band of Canadian grandmasters. Then again, there might be nothing we need more.
listening to the brand-new album The Besnard Lakes Are The Last Of The Great Thunderstorm Warnings 🎵 their style isn’t usually my thing, but somehow they’re one of my favorites
good morning
Saturday’s beer: Modern Times’ Black House, Vanilla Latte edition
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Dark & smooth, like I like my… beer 🍺
finished The Animators by Kayla Rae Whitaker 📚 if I’d known this book was about the themes and situations it is, I don’t think I ever would have read it. but I’m glad I did; it was really good! perfect characterizations, good story & pace, just excellent
got a little choked up more than once today, but the good faith, professionalism, & sincerity on display in Jen Psaki’s day-one press briefing might be the highlight of the whole day. long may it reign
something special to commemorate a beautiful inauguration day: Destihl Brewery’s Dosvidanya
⭐️⭐️⭐️
goodbye and good riddance, you monster. may we never hear of you again outside of arrest reports and sentencing news
🍺
please note that, per ISO, the idiom “can of worms” has been deprecated in favor of the more tactile, visceral, and just plain gross “bag of worms”. usage remains the same.
thank you in advance for your cooperation
- the management
watched The Night is Short, Walk on Girl last night 🎥 (HBOMax recently added some good anime features). it was great: funny, sweet, and very weird
Saturday’s beer: Lagunitas Brewing’s Willetized Coffee Stout (2020)
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I thought this would be good when I picked it up, and it’s even better than expected. just excellent. 🍺
finished Uncanny Valley by Anna Weiner 📚 I don’t read much memoir, but really enjoyed this! as a member of the tech industry, it was fun & interesting to read this wryly observed outsider’s view. I nodded a lot while reading this; recommended.
we don’t see this every day in central Texas
Saturday beer: The Bruery’s Partridge in a Pear Tree
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tasty, solid quad. here’s to the new year 🍺
new post: Reading Goals, in which I declare victory on the common “I should read more” resolution
read: Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death. though written 40 years ago, long before the internet, let alone social networks, this short book is profound and eye-opening. took me a while to get into it, but well worth it 📚
this, from a social epidemiologist predicting post-pandemic life, is what I’ve been thinking, too. maybe streaming services won’t kill movie theaters, after all
This future, Christakis predicts, will not come until society has had time to distribute the vaccine… But the vision he lays out for 2024 and beyond is one filled with experiences pined for in isolation: packed stadiums, crowded nightclubs and flourishing arts.
slowly making my way through Postman’s amazing Amusing Ourselves to Death. On the bombardment of isolated “news” stories from around the world:
You may get a sense of what this means by asking yourself another series of questions: What steps do you plan to take to reduce the conflict in the Middle East? Or the rates of inflation, crime, and unemployment? What are your plans for preserving the environment or reducing the risk of nuclear war? What do you plan to do about NATO… the CIA…? I shall take liberty of answering for you: You plan to do nothing about them.
You may, of course, cast a ballot for someone who claims to have some plans, as well as the power to act. But this you can do only once every two or four years by giving one hour of your time, hardly a satisfying means of expressing the broad range of opinions you hold. Voting, we might even say, is the next to last refuge of the politically impotent.
The last refuge, of course, is giving your opinion to a pollster, who will get a version of it through a desiccated question, and then submerge it in a Niagara of similar opinions, and convert them into – what else? – another piece of news. Thus, we have here a great loop of impotence: The news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you can do nothing.
holiday movie-time continues: 🎥 watched Serendipity last night (not my favorite but my wife loves it; gotta like Cusack, too), and Netflix’s Klaus tonight, which was really nice. a very different Schwartzman character than we’ve been watching in Fargo S4 😆
Saturday beer: Buffalo Bayou Brewing’s Feliz Navidad
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The ancho chile isn’t a flavor I’d want all the time, but it’s good tonight 🍺
the whole family watched Die Hard tonight, a first for all of us. well written, funny, and clever. verdict: yep, it’s a Christmas movie 🎥
finished Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale: And Here My Troubles Began, by Art Spiegelman 📚
presenting the uncontested winner of Best Original Holiday Song of 2020 (emphasis on “2020”): It’s Christmas and I F*cking Miss You by Charly Bliss & PUP 🎵
a live script read of Elf with all the main stars, and it raises money for the Georgia senate race, too? Sold! (today, 12/13 at 3PM CT)
[updated with fixed link]
finished Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard today 📚 what a staggering work. lyrically written, much of it more like poetry than prose, her view of nature probing its ruthless violence as much as its unbelievable beauty. I’ll be rereading this for sure. maybe annually
watched Beastie Boys Story tonight 🎥 it was uniquely done, the narration by Diamond & Horovitz performed in front of a live audience, with video clips projected behind them. we were big fans at the time of the first two albums; there’s a lot of music I need to catch up on
our movies this weekend were two old classics, though from very different eras and styles. last night: Pulp Fiction (1994), tonight: Vertigo (1958) 🎥
Tonight’s Saturday beer is Goose Island Beer Co.’s Bourbon County Special #4 Stout (2020)
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First bottle from this year’s Bourbon County haul, it is silky smooth and just delish-delosh (a perfect phrase we learned from GBBS) 🍺
watched the new Shane MacGowan movie Crock of Gold. I don’t know the Pogues’ music as well as my wife, though I may have to change that. movie was uniquely done for a rockstar biopic: hard to watch and tragic at times, but fascinating 🎥