Category: words mean things (Page 209 of 223)

Survivor is back. It’s too early to pronounce sentence, but until they really started to get nasty with one another about a third of the way into the second episode Thursday night, I was wondering why I was even watching. While I have a handle on most of the “personalities,” it’s hard to remember even which tribe they belong to. Right now, they just seem like a bunch of snapping turtles, emphasis on the snapping. You just can’t recreate the newness that washed over the Pulau Tiga beach last year. Because they all know how to play the game, they don’t play a very interesting game, if you know what I mean.

I think my S1 favorite, Colleen, summed it up quite well when she was talking about one of the later challenges, which took the form of questions and answers: “I got so excited because I thought, ‘We’re going to be on a game show!’…And then I realized, *we are* on a game show.”

Last week, I left my steady job to enter the exciting and frightening world of full-time freelance. It’s exciting because the doors to the world are thrown open, with no limitations except your own talent and drive – the exact same things that make me feel a little (sometimes more than a little) queasy inside. What I’m most excited about is the opportunity to make the web whatever I want of it; I can’t imagine a medium with more potential. If I can communicate that excitement to even a few people, I’ll have enough work to sustain me, especially in my current anti-consumerist frame of mind. I’m sure I’ll be writing more about this in the days and weeks to come.

Did I mention I need work?

All fans of stupefyingly bad movies must be told of perhaps the zenith of the art form: Zardoz. A middle-aged Sean Connery, alternatively dressed in an orange diaper and a full wedding dress, wanders through this post-apocalyptic tale of, well, I’m not sure exactly. There are giant projection-screen televisions, lots of bread baking, discussions of erectile dysfunction, topless women on horseback, huge stone heads spewing rifles, embryonic pod people, and a bunch of other stuff I must have blocked out.

I have absolutely no idea what this was about, and only vaguely understand what in fact happened, if anything. Go rent it, now, and let me know what you thought.

I have a problem with magazines. I love them, and while I still have the attention span necessary for a novel, my brain is wired more for the quick hit of a magazine article. I used to think of magazines as additions to my library – it was just as difficult to throw out an issue of Macworld as a collection of John Cheever stories. But after many, many moves, you begin to understand that these babies are heavy. And how often am I going to refer to an Utne Reader from March 1999? It’s been a hard lesson for me to learn: pass them on or toss them. Let’s face it, people who save years of newspapers are considered crazy.

I read Adbusters, and I also read Revolution. Is that wrong?

Signs your life is spiraling out of control:
1. You alight on a TV movie about the Osmonds, and you want to change the channel, but you can’t. It’s weirdly fascinating. The giant hair and lapels. You watch almost the entire thing, frozen in a sort of hypnotic daze.
2. You download “Paper Roses” and “Puppy Love” from Napster.
3. You admit this on your weblog.

Watched “A Man for All Seasons” last night, a movie whose only flaw is appearing not to have any. Literate dialogue, amazing photography, wonderful performances. (Stay away from the Charlton Heston TV remake.) The writing here is some of the best in movies, ever.

Thomas More: You could be a good teacher, perhaps even a great one.
Rich: And if I were, who would know it?
More: You, your pupils, your friends…God. Not a bad public, that.

Amen, brother.

winter in madison

Channel surfing last night (an activity much less rewarding than web surfing, but sometimes you just don’t have the strength), I came upon a commercial for a new magazine, Lucky. This is a magazine proudly and baldly devoted to…shopping. Shopping. Clearly, we are thisclose to having “specially-targeted messages just for you” beamed straight onto our retinas and therefore into our brains, making a visit to Boston Store as instinctual as a visit to the restroom. This is not a good thing.

Not sure how I feel about this whole Blogger mess. I’m still sorting it out. But the bottom line is, they worked hard to create something cool for everyone on the web to use. And that’s worth applauding, no matter what the outcome. Now that all the “buy dog food online” foolishness is burning off, maybe we’ll get closer to what the web should be about: community and ideas.

Glad to know that my enormous melon head has some positive aspects.