I just got back from my second U of M Women's Basketball game, which the team lost. The Gophers also lost the first game I attended this year. I think I'll stay away from The Barn for the rest of the year....
Well, it appears that Blu-Ray has won the high definition DVD war with HD-DVD, so now I can get off the sidelines and upgrade my DVD player. It's been starting to skip and do other crazy things, so Toshiba's announcement is right on time!
Since I've not been posting as much to this blog so far in 2008 as I did in 2007, I thought that I would slip down the rankings of UThink blogs with the most entries, but I've actually climbed to #29, my highest level ever. Weird. Since today is February 13 it must be #13 in effect; tomorrow I'll drop down to #39 or something....
EW.com has posted a (highly subjective) list of the greatest moments from the past 25 years of science fiction TV and film. Although I would change a few things (like swap the positions of #2 Battlestar Galactica and #4 The X-Files), it's a pretty good list. Check it out.
It appears that the Writers Guild of America and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers have reached a tentative agreement to end the writers' strike. I hope so, 'cause I need some new episodes of my shows!
Yesterday's Ad Bowl was filled with the worst Super Bowl commercials ever, I think. The San Diego, CA paper said something like, "there were a handful of good ads, a few more horrible spots, and the rest were too boring for commentary." Indeed! My bottom-dweller (careerbuilder.com "follow your heart to a better job") came in at #39 on the Ad Meter, and my #1 (Diet Pepsi Max "Night at the Roxbury" allusion) was #8; their #2 (FedEx carrier pigeons) was also my #2, so we were in agreement about some things. I don't know how the f&%*, though, people liked the Tide stain commercial (Ad Meter #10) and E*Trade baby spots (#s 14 and 15)....
I just returned home from a four-day trip out of town. I was able to stop delivery of my snail mail, but suspected that a couple of packages from amazon.com would show up via UPS, so I asked a homie to roll over to the crib to pick them up on Saturday. She was not able to get over here, and sure enough, there were packages on the front porch today (three of them). What was missing, however, was the Sunday paper, which has always showed up each week for almost four years. So some theives stole the paper but left three boxes alone? Weird....
From William Kittredge's Who Owns the West? (Mercury House, 1996):
"Many of us...lose track of the story of ourselves, the story that tells us who we are supposed to be and how we are supposed to act."
"It isn't any fun, and it doesn't just happen to people; it happens to entire societies. Stories are places to live, inside the imagination. We know a lot of them, and we're in trouble when we don't know which one is ours. Or when the one we inhabit doesn't work anymore and we stick with it anyway."
"We live in stories. What we are is stories...."
"We need to inhabit stories that encourage us to pay close attention. We need stories that will encourage us towards acts of the imagination that in turn will drive us to the arts of empathy, for each other and for the world. We need stories that will encourage us to understand that we are part of everything, that the world exists under our skins, and that destroying it is a way of killing ourselves. We need stories that will drive us to care for one another and for the world. We need stories that will drive us to take action."
"[C]omplexity is actual."
Indeed.