My birthday was this past week, and Joni Mitchell’s The Circle Game has grown to be one of my favorite songs. The link not only has the lyrics, but also a link to listen to the song. Give it a chance and let me know what you think.

And they tell him, take your time, it won’t be long now
‘Till you drag your feet to slow the circles down.

Melissa says her favorite weblog tagline was my long-standing one from Fight Club, “How’s that working out for you – being clever?” Her praise fills me with happiness.

I was actually thinking of making that my permanent tagline. But I really enjoy changing them. Anybody recognize where the current one comes from? (It’s pretty obscure.)

Just got back from Final Fantasy, an amazing cavalcade of sights and sounds with very little story or characters to intrude. I guess this is to be expected in such an ambitious first effort of this kind; new technologies in entertainment often overshadow the more human aspects. Still, it’s wonderful entertainment for the geek side of us all – “How did they get her hair to move like that?” and etc. Worth seeing, if only for it being the first step on a really interesting road.

What occurred to me is how the human voices (Ming-Na, Alec Baldwin, Donald Sutherland, and a funny Steve Buscemi, among others) took us so far into accepting these pixels as humans. Computers can do (relatively) convincing skin, eyes, and hair, but they’re nowhere near ready to simulate a human voice that would fool anybody. Imagine how the impact of HAL in 2001 would have been blunted without Douglas Rain’s soothing, creepy voice. And what if Spielberg’s “mechas” in A.I. had standard, “computer generated” voices? Maybe the human voice is the real final frontier in computer simulation.

Ever since my mildly-successful venture into creating a meme with the Top 10 movies, I’ve been thinking of all the other great, great movies that didn’t make my list, but are so fantastic they have to be mentioned:

My Dinner with Andre, Once Around, Clockwatchers, The Truman Show, The Matrix, The Straight Story, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Aliens, Babette’s Feast, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Series 7, Broadcast News, Limbo, The Abyss.

As per Melissa, movie I hated that everyone else in the civilized world loved: Field of Dreams. What a load of bunk.

Here are three nicknames I was once called, and one fake one:

1. Howdy Doody
2. Mr. Potato Head
3. Dondi
4. Odie

Can you guess which is the fake one?

My friend Kevin likes to watch squirrels. I was on my daily constitutional this morning, and passed over a sort of double driveway shared by two adjacent houses. There were about 10 enormous squirrels rushing hither and yon around the driveway, and chattering in that unnerving chirping noise they have when they are, I suppose, talking to each other. I was momentarily spooked. And it occurred to me, a squirrel is pretty much a rat with a big fuzzy tail. That big fuzzy tail gets them thought of as “cute,” rather than the rat’s “disgusting, gross, scary” rep. If the driveway had been filled up with rats, I think I (and many other sane people) would have at least crossed the street. That fuzzy tail has gotten the squirrel pretty far.

Sadness. Gets funnier and more interesting as you read through it. A fascinating commentary on advertising and consumer culture, masquerading as a one-note joke. (via Tin Man)

A new wrinkle in the infomercial world: they’re now producing half-hour infomercials for movies. I don’t know if the JP3 producers are just itching to jump on this new advertising bandwagon, or they’re so deathly afraid that no one’s going to want to watch the computer-generated dinos yet again that they’ll do anything to rustle up some business. Advance word on this has been surprisingly good for a third go-round; we’ll soon see which one it is.

It’s hot.

The heat saps your strength, seeping into everything – every space, every pore of your skin. The humidity makes each breath a chore, and turns the air into a shimmery old glass window, where everything’s distorted. The sun becomes the enemy, turning 5 p.m. as hot, if not hotter, than noon.

I’m always amazed at how people who’ve lived in Wisconsin all their lives can complain so bitterly about the winter. You live in Wisconsin, for god’s sake. It’s coming around again next year too, buddy, so quiet down. Me, I never complain about the winter, even when I’m lying on a sheet of glare ice underneath my car, as happened this past season. But the heat and humidity of summer, well, that’s another story. It sucks. My opinion is, you can always get warm, but you can’t always get cool.

I need to get cool.

After finally getting my IKEA look-way-more-expensive-than-they-really-are bookcases put together (thanks, Paul and Keith), I took the occasion to go through all my books, including a box I hadn’t even unpacked when I last moved because there was no room. Now, there’s room. And a pleasant side effect of this process was I found quite a few interesting books that I had purchased along the way but never read:

The Difference Engine – William Gibson/Bruce Sterling
Gates of Eden – Ethan Coen
Pale Blue Dot – Carl Sagan
The Age of Missing Information – Bill McKibben
Silent Spring – Rachel Carson
Manufacturing Consent – Noam Chomsky

I probably have a whole summer’s worth of reading here. This is fun. (I also rediscovered my love of B. Kliban cartoons – the weird ones, not the cats – since I found a whole set of those softcover cartoon books of his.)