Category
cogitation
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09.05.08TO PULL BACK FROM DVORAK IS SO WHACK.Every time I read an article by stale (but darling!) old-media technocrat John C. Dvorak, I think about the time several years ago when I was sure that I saw him in an Italian restaurant; I stared him down, silently considering the propriety of approaching someone who may have just been an mildy-doughy, middle-aged, bespectacled, white nobody for an autograph, and finally decided to leave him be as I realized that he looked incredibly frightened of the wide-eyed, less-doughy, young-aged, bespectacled, black nobody who wouldn't look away.
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05.25.08YOU GET MORE WITH GORE.Gore Vidal is the sort of person whose interviews I read not because I enjoy or respect (or, erm, am familiar with) his work, but simply because I hope that some sort of internet-negotiated mental osmosis might bless me with his covetsome verbal acrobatics--I yearn for his ability to insult with a detached elegance; instead, my own sense of humor is increasingly shaped deformed by a Gawker Media-influenced sense of crude snark.1 Snark ain't in the dictionary? Get on it, Webster! You too Merriam!↩
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03.20.08CULTURAL CAPITAL: LOW, BUT RISING.I have not seen No Country for Old Men (and have little desire to), but I have noticed a tendency of those who [presumably] have to mention "No Country for Old Men’s Anton Chigurh" as a paradigm of acute brutality, which is just to say that I try to keep tabs on how chunks of arcane collective knowledge make their way into my working cultural vocabulary; it is a phenomenon I have attempted to chart for some time--indeed, I can tell you precisely how I came to unequivocally know who Paris Hilton is1, and will soon be done with charting ...
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02.04.08No, it’s not just a game.Gosh, my year-long hiatus from spider solitaire was much needed, but my return to the game has been devastating; I never expect to do well on the "hard" level, but I thought myself at least competent on the "medium" level -- alas, my previous card-playing heuristics must have escaped me because I am now finding myself stumped far more often than before and - with great dismay - taking my stats down with me; in the past I have taken the game to be far more serious than it actually is (deleting it from the start menu, for example, in ...