I haven’t read all of the short stories in Stephen O’Connor’s collection Here Comes Another Lesson yet, but I’ve read enough to recommend this book. O’Connor’s prose reminds me a little of some of Frederic Seidel’s poetry.

Below is an excerpt from the story, The Professor of Atheism: Here Comes Another Lesson, in which a failed [...]

After watching the Giants game at my mother’s Sunday, we turned  on Turner Classic Movies. In the Venn diagram of things we can all watch, TCM is where the  overlap is.  We caught the last few minutes of Forbidden Planet, which reminded me of these lyrics from the song Science Fiction / Double Feature:
Science Fiction [...]

I hope I can catch this on TCM sometime. I’ve never seen it. If not, maybe we can rent it from Netflix

Off for a late dinner to The Meatball Shop. Never been, but the hype is pretty good.

This will be the third specialized restaurant in 5 days — we hit S’Mac (Mac & Cheese) and Rice to Riches (Rice Pudding) on Saturday.

In one of his better recent posts, “Advertising’s Collateral Damage”, The Last Psychiatrist breaks down this Blackberry commercial:

Excerpt:
Blackberry isn’t targeting gays and limber blondes, it’s pretending they are already on board so you don’t feel like a dork without a touch screen.
In other words, the target is the uptight khakis and Polo salarymen who are [...]

– The title sequence from last night’s The Simpsons features a Chinese sweatshop where people, pandas, and unicorns are exploited in the process of animating the show and producing its merchandise. Funny stuff:

– Somewhat related, Clive Crook’s Financial Times column today, the latest of several columns by different pundits in the same vein, [...]

Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen
As good as his last novel, The Corrections. Worth reading. Prior to writing The Corrections, Franzen had written an essay criticizing most contemporary literary fiction for being boring, pretentious, and unreadable (I don’t remember if he used those exact adjectives, but that was the spirit of it). The Corrections was Franzen’s attempt [...]