- You kind of have to love Umberto Eco’s answer to the question “What’s one thing you’re a fan of that people might not expect?” He said: “My last grandchild.”
- John Seavey pitches Evil Toy Monkey — The Series. I’d watch that.
- “It was nearly toast, but Coney Island Bialys and Bagels is on a roll again after Muslim businessmen Peerzada Shah and Zafaryab Ali recently took over the 91-year-old mainstay of the Jewish noshes.” Now if we could just figure out how the Middle East is like a bialy shop… [via]
- Ken Jennings suggest weaning ourselves from our GPSes:
But as much as I love GPS, I worry that wayfinding is yet another part of our brains that our culture has decided it’s okay to outsource to technology. A famous 2000 study on London cab drivers showed that the hippocampus, the brain’s seat of spatial knowledge, grows physically as our geographic knowledge increases. Many people believe their sense of direction is hopeless, but in reality, that just means they need more practice. In experiment after experiment, researchers have learned that repeating a few simple exercises can turn lousy spatial thinkers into good ones. Without that exercise, our skills get flabby.
- And finally, Firefly the Animated Series. Oh, if only. [via
]
new york
Tuesday various
- I put no stock whatsoever in the Tarot (beyond what the individual being “read” reads into it), but Alexander Chee’s article on it is surprisingly interesting:
Fortunetelling is easy to ridicule, frequently misunderstood, and, for some people, extremely powerful. Unfortunately, what’s very tough to predict is what reading futures will do to the person with the cards. [via]
- Terry Gilliam on the making of Brazil. [via]
- Jack The Cat Found After Two Months In JFK Airport. There’s no way the film rights to this haven’t already been bought. [via]
- 13 Punctuation Marks That You Never Knew Existed. Unless, of course, you did. Or unless, like me, you think some of these are maybe more accurately referred to as typesetting marks. But, hey, a list!
- And finally, Google lately seems bound and determined to make their products more difficult to use, don’t they?
All the news that fits, we print
Today was an okay day.
We had another of our regular “brown bag” lunches at work, this one with Robin Pogrebin, a journalist with the New York Times, who talked about her own history with the magazine, the general state (and likely future) of print journalism, and answered some of our questions. It wasn’t as interactive as last month’s improv session, but it was interesting.
This evening, after work, I took the subway downtown to the NYU campus to hear novelist (and NYU professor) Zadie Smith talk. She wound up mostly reading from her novel-in-progress, a novel she’s apparently been working on for the past six or seven years — and which is quite good, from the sound of it. Afterward, she took questions from the audience. I stayed for most of that, but sneaked out a little early near the end. Smith’s a funny and engaging presence, but I had me a train to catch. (I also had yet to have dinner, and it was already half past 7.)
All in all, a pretty okay day.
Tuesday various
- “They were digging a new foundation in Manhattan / When they discovered a slave cemetary there” 19th-c. African-American village unearthed in what is now NYC’s Central Park
- Drug Dealers May Have Wiped Out “Uncontacted” Amazon Tribe [via]
- Where’s WALL-E? [via]
- If the Kindle is $0 next August, I’m totally buying one. Otherwise, not so much.
- And finally, A tear jerking story about Animal Crossing [via]
Hello, Saturday
Went into the city this evening for dinner with my parents, sister, and brother-in-law, followed by The Book of Mormon on Broadway. It was, if I remember correctly, my mother’s birthday present to my father. (His birthday was several months ago, but tickets are hard to come by.) A good time, I think, was had by all.