food

Wednesday various

  • Studios are increasingly stripping rental DVDs of special features. I ran into this over the weekend with The Informant. I’d be very interested in an audio commentary or any other behind-the-scenes material — it’s an unusual movie, based on a very unusual case — but I won’t buy it for that.

  • Incidentally, speaking of The Informant, I was amused by this user comment at IMDB: “…the main character in this film was just bad with the way his thoughts were and thinking the way he did.”

  • Meanwhile, I am not at all surprised that Ridley Scott’s new Robin Hood movie isn’t remotely historically accurate, despite his repeated claims to the contrary. Still, it’s interesting to go in search of the “real-life” Robin Hood. [via]

  • I’m not a big fan of cilantro, but I don’t hate it. Apparently, though, there may be a good reason why many people (like my father) do. [via]

  • And finally, the headline reads Black Hole Strikes Deepest Musical Note Ever Heard. [via]

Monday various

Tuesday various

  • New research suggests that reading cuts stress levels by 68%. Clearly these researchers have never tried reading Dan Brown or Going Rogue. [via]
  • New research also suggests that food portions have grown significantly larger in depictions of the Last Supper over time. [via]
  • Ever wonder what those ISBNs mean? We have several different ISBN prefixes at work, having purchased and integrated other publishing companies in recent years, and it’s often quite helpful to be able to tell at a quick glance where a book originated from. [via]
  • Are strong female characters bad for women? [via]
  • And finally, Ken Jennings on Gotham City’s museums, banks, and storefronts:

    Maybe I just don’t understand all the challenges that come with running a business in Gotham. It’s true that this is a place with a weird, weird economy. How does one city support five hundred abandoned amusement parks and toy factories?

Wednesday various

  • The very real problem of digital decay:

    Electronically produced drafts, correspondence and editorial comments, sweated over by contemporary poets, novelists and nonfiction authors, are ultimately just a series of digits — 0’s and 1’s — written on floppy disks, CDs and hard drives, all of which degrade much faster than old-fashioned acid-free paper. Even if those storage media do survive, the relentless march of technology can mean that the older equipment and software that can make sense of all those 0’s and 1’s simply don’t exist anymore.

    Imagine having a record but no record player.

    Does this mean the people in my office who print out a copy of everything are on to something?

    There’s also the fact that, on a purely aesthetic level, digital archives tend to be pretty boring things. A novelist’s handwritten notes, for instance, are a lot more interesting to future readers than his half-finished draft in Microsoft Word. I think Emory University’s archive of Salman Rushdie’s work — this “access through emulation to a born-digital archive” — is a neat way to address this fact. [via]

  • The writer and editor in me liked this: Sentenced.
  • Fed Up With Lunch: The School Lunch Project — a teacher eats her school’s cafeteria food every day for lunch, with pictures! [via]
  • I don’t know that being able to identify Star Wars figurines with your mouth really makes you much of a fan so much as just a really weird kid. [via]
  • And finally, FutureStates : Play [via]:

The city that never sleeps (though I do)

No weird sandwiches for lunch today, I’m afraid. At the office, we had one of our regular “brown bag lunch” talks, where they invite a guest speaker and give everybody free pizza or sandwiches. Today was a pizza day, which was okay, though I wish I could say the same about the talk. Ostensibly it was about New York, the love-hate relationship the rest of the nation (and New Yorkers) have with the city, and moreover how that relates to the current economic crisis. Wall Street fat cats, that sort of thing. And I guess it was that, but I just found it meandering and a little preachy, even when I agreed with some of the anti-corporate points the speaker was trying to make. In all, the free pizza was the best part of the deal.

This evening, though, I actually had a regular (albeit open-faced) Reuben for dinner. My mother and I picked my father up at the eye doctor’s — he’s doing well — and we had dinner at a pub/bistro around the corner. We actually just got home a little while ago, and I think I’m going to use this hour before bed to watch last night’s Lost. I tried watching it last night, but it just didn’t work out.