Fun Archives
July 18, 2008
Time for Some Campaignin'
Time for Some Campaignin' - from JibJab on YouTube
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July 02, 2008
"Sources Warn Miley Cyrus Will Be Depleted by 2013"
The Onion: Sources Warn Miley Cyrus Will Be Depleted by 2013
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April 17, 2008
These Yorkies love riding on the Piaggio MP3
Useful Yorkie Stuff | Piaggio MP3
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January 01, 2008
Ring bell for psychic?
Doesn't the "psychic" know you're there?
Unclear on the concept.....
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December 30, 2007
Christmas in NYC
Spent a lovely five days and nights in NYC at Christmas.Saw two fun shows - "Spamalot" and "Is He Dead?" - and the Christmas show at Radio City Music Hall - all highly recommended.
Enjoyed several evenings wandering through the holiday shops and watching the ice skaters at Bryant Park. Although the ice rink at Rockefeller Center is the famous one, Bryant Park is beautiful and it is not crowded so you can watch from the rink wall, shouting out encouragement to the newbies of all ages. Great fun, and some of the skaters are excellent.
In front of the ice sculptures at Bryant Park
Took youngest child to see Santa at Macy's. Although the Macy windows were a disappointment (the Bergdorf Goodman and Lord & Taylor windows were much better), the Santa we visited at Macy's was the REAL SANTA! The beard, the voice, the laugh, the Santa outfit - SPECTACULAR! And despite having dealt with crowds for hours, ALL the elves were smiling and full of Christmas cheer.
Window at Lord & Taylor
The Macy's Santa Train Conductor
Macy's Santa Elf "Lightfoot"
SANTA!
The Christmas tree at the Met was, as always, beautiful and worth the trip.Had an outstanding meal in Chinatown at Sanur and good dim sum at The Chatham. Also had a very good lunch at Toasties and enjoyed the jazz brunch at Rare Bar & Grill in the Shelburne Hotel.
FDNY: "Chinatown Dragon Fighters"
The holiday train show at Grand Central is always fun.Midnight Mass at St. Malachy's on West 49th had good singing and music - good homily, too!
The 7-day unlimited ride Metro card for only $24 made it easy to go all over the city using the subway and buses. An amazing bargain.
Merry Christmas!
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The Best 19 Movies You Didn't See in 2007
From "The Best 19 Movies You Didn't See in 2007," by Alex Billington, FirstShowing.net, Dec. 24, 2007
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
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December 29, 2007
Ring bell for psychic?
Doesn't the "psychic" know you're there?
I'm unclear on the concept.....
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June 20, 2007
Can you read this?
From a friend:
Spelling reconsidered! All that time wasted learning spelling words!
fi yuo cna raed tihs, yuo hvae a sgtrane mnid too
Cna yuo raed tihs? Olny 55 plepoe out of 100 can.
i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno't mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Aza! nmig hu h? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt! if you can raed tihs forwrad it.
More
- The Simplified Spelling Society
- The Simplified Spelling Society - from Wikipedia
- NuSpeling: New Spelling & other Replacement Writing Systems
- Mark Twain quotes about spelling
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April 19, 2007
The other white meat ... tastes like chicken?
[Ted Stevens] is officially the Senate's longest serving Republican in U.S. history. It's worth noting -- though hardly news to anyone -- how political longevity is so closely associated with a steady diet of pork. For instance, Senator Robert Byrd remains the longest serving senator ever. No word yet on whether scientists have concluded that this species of dinosaur also tastes like chicken.
"Ted Stevens," by Jonah Goldberg, The Corner, April 13, 2007
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April 12, 2007
Easter 2007
It's NOT this Easter Bunny....
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March 30, 2007
Stick a feather in your cap and call it macaroni
Might as well stick a feather in your cap and call it macaroni.
Never understood that as a kid, but I accepted it. Yankee Doodle was silly, so he thought his feather was cheese-drenched pasta. Of course, it meant something different; the Macaronis were fashionable young men who’d been to Italy and picked up Continental Affectations; famous dandies given to peering with exaggerated longeur through glasses mounted on a stick, they were regarded as amusing fops by real men. So when Mr. Doodle thought a feather made him a member of the Macaroni Society, it just showed what a provincial hick he was. I loved learning that. It made the past seem so much more real in a brief and vivid way -- until then, perhaps, I didn’t think they had slang.
"Ah, let’s see," by James Lileks, The Bleat, March 30, 2007
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March 14, 2007
For parents with teenagers ... how to handle road rage
Trunk Monkey #6 - Chaperone Version
How the Trunk Monkey handles road rage
More Trunk Monkey videos
Sample Teenager Driving Contract is here.
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March 13, 2007
Wales - sign and CD
The sign was in Wales, the CD in an Edinburgh airport shop
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March 07, 2007
Wales - Cardiff Castle
Cardiff Castle, Cardiff, Wales
Cardiff Castle - Wikipedia
Cardiff Castle - Castles of Wales
Cardiff Castle - Great Castles of Wales
Aerial image - Wikimapia
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March 06, 2007
Wales - uh, interesting food
As seen at Tesco
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March 04, 2007
Don't Drop Me!
Because last year's was dropped....
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March 03, 2007
"He was not of an age, but for all time."
In June 2006, I was scheduled to fly back from a trip to Sicily via Frankfurt am Main. Having seen the airport many times but not the city itself, I decided to spend a few days there. But as I discovered when I went to book a hotel, there was a little problem. Germany was hosting the World Cup that month, and the city was swarming with soccer fans come from all over the globe to watch the nail-biting zero-zero ties on jumbo TVs strategically placed around the city--one even floating on a barge in the middle of the Main.
. . .
Foreign producers of Shakespeare like Groß and Wilms evidently don't find his work alien to their own experience, and, given the popularity of the plays around the world, the same may be said of theater audiences everywhere. As far as I can tell, the only people intent on questioning the timelessness of Shakespeare's plays today are literature professors in the English-speaking world. In recent decades it has become increasingly fashionable among Shakespeare scholars to deny that there is anything intrinsically great or universal in his plays. They view Shakespeare as a product of the narrow horizons of his own day, and label him a distinctly English phenomenon. Indeed his greatness is often treated as a cultural construct, something invented or even manufactured in England. His plays are said to be the product of a culture industry, which first imposed his works on England, then on the English-speaking world, and finally on the whole globe, as if he were a skillfully marketed commodity, the Guinness Stout of the Renaissance.
In this view, Shakespeare is the ultimate Dead White European Male. He was canonized by the cultural establishment of England and then used to impose English values around the world (especially throughout the British Empire). In their efforts to cut Shakespeare down to size, and find something contingent, even arbitrary, in his reputation, Shakespeare scholars sometimes speak as if the cultural establishment could have taken any one of his contemporaries--say, Ben Jonson or Thomas Middleton--and through clever packaging and marketing built him into the world's most famous poet. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you! The only reason the general public pays attention to Shakespeare scholars is for their help in understanding his greatness, and yet some of them are now actively engaged in debunking that greatness as a cultural myth.
. . .
Shakespeare most often crosses the border as a liberator, not a conqueror. Indeed, cultural exchange is generally more like free trade than imperialism.
"Playwright of the Globe," by Paul A. Cantor, Claremont Review of Books, January 8, 2007
hat tip ALD
If you want to see Shakespeare presented with a focus on the language and not the sets, we give our highest recommendation to Shenandoah Shakespeare at Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton, Virginia. The drive from Washington is beautiful and well worth it.
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February 18, 2007
Don't rail at idiots...
“À force de nous inquiéter des imbéciles, il y a danger de le devenir soi-même.”
“By dint of railing at idiots, one runs the risk of becoming idiotic oneself.”
-- Gustave Flaubert to Louise Colet, June 28-29, 1853 (trans. Irving Babbitt)
via Terry Teachout
or:
"If we keep troubling ourselves with imbeciles, we run the risk of becoming imbeciles ourselves."
See also Terry Teachout
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February 17, 2007
Wales to visit Keith, November 2006
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February 15, 2007
Sonny Rollins on the road - with Bret Primack
Bret Primac has a fantastic channel on YouTube - JazzVideoLand. We love this video of Sonny Rollins, but check out the entire channel: JazzVideoLand.
Sonny Rollins is such a beautiful artist, and this video really brings that out.
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February 02, 2007
Photos to CD
ShoeboxReprints.com - put your old photos on CD for $49.95 per 1000 photos - add proof books with 25 images per page to allow rapid viewing
MyPublisher.com can make books from your photos
Picasa - from Google
"Creating Your Own Photo Book Becomes Easier," by Walter Mossberg, The Wall Street Journal, December 6, 2006
"A lifetime of photos on a single disc," by William M. Bulkeley, The Wall Street Journal, January 31, 2007
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January 27, 2007
Best thing I read this week
That I have arrived at 70 without ever having golfed is one of the facts of my biography to date of which I am most proud.
. . .
I don't much mind being mildly out of it, just as I don't finally mind growing older. George Santayana, perhaps the most detached man the world has known outside of certain Trappist monasteries, claimed to prefer old age to all others. "I heartily agree that old age is, or may be as in my case, far happier than youth," he wrote to his contemporary William Lyon Phelps. "I was never more entertained or less troubled than I am now." Something to this, if one isn't filled with regret for the years that have gone before, and I am not, having had a very lucky run thus far in my life. At 70 it is natural to begin to view the world from the sidelines, a glass of wine in hand, watching younger people do the dances of ambition, competition, lust, and the rest of it.
. . .
If the game is to be decently played, at 70 one must harken back as little as possible to the (inevitably golden) days of one's youth, no matter how truly golden they may seem. The temptation to do so, and with some regularity, sets in sometime in one's 60s. As a first symptom, one discovers the word "nowadays" turning up in lots of one's sentences, always with the assumption that nowadays are vastly inferior to thenadays, when one was young and the world green and beautiful. Ah, thenadays--so close to "them were the days"--when there was no crime, divorce was unheard of, people knew how to spell, everyone had good handwriting, propriety and decorum ruled, and so on and on into the long boring night of nostalgia.
Start talking about thenadays and one soon finds one's intellectual motor has shifted into full crank, with everything about nowadays dreary, third-rate, and decline-and-fallish. A big mistake. The reason old people think that the world is going to hell, Santayana says, is they believe that, without them in it, which will soon enough be the case, how good really can it be?
. . .
I also grew up at a time when the goal was to be adult as soon as possible, while today--the late 1960s is the watershed moment here--the goal has become to stay as young as possible for as long as possible. The consequences of this for the culture are enormous. That people live longer only means that they feel they can remain kids longer: uncommitted to marriage, serious work, life itself. Adolescence has been stretched out, at least, into one's 30s, perhaps one's early 40s. At 70, I register with mild but genuine amazement that the movie director Christopher Guest's father played keyboard for the Righteous Brothers or that the essayist Adam Gopnik's parents, then graduate students, took him in their arms to the opening of the Guggenheim Museum. How can anyone possibly have parents playing keyboards or going to graduate school! Impossible!
"Kid Turns 70: And nobody cares," by Joseph Epstein, The Weekly Standard, January 29, 2007
Turning 70 reminds me of something Benjamin Franklin said (paraphrasing):
If you would not be forgotten when you are dead and rotten, write something worth the reading or live the life worth writing.
Although I don't fit either of those categories, I do like the fact that as an editor and publisher I get to help others "write something worth the reading."
Mr. Epstein says that
At 70 one encounters the standard physical diminutions. I am less than certain how old I actually look, but in a checkout line, I can now say to a young woman, "You have beautiful eyes," without her thinking I'm hitting on her.
One of the things I like about being in my mid-50s is that I can now call every female over the age of 21 "dear" as in "Thank you dear" and no one gets offended. (I've also noticed that my teenage daughter has started calling her friends "Hon" - it's very Baltimorian and it strikes me as a very friendly greeting.)
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January 01, 2007
Vacation home rentals - HomeAway
HomeAway is a web site that lists vacation home rentals in the US.
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December 21, 2006
George Gershwin - oxygenator
The writer and playwright S. N. Behrman observed that George Gershwin "oxygenated" any room he entered. Other friends agreed. Commandeering the piano with a cigar clenched between his teeth, Gershwin dominated any gathering, yet instead of sucking the air out of a party he enlivened it. In the same spirit he oxygenated American music, inspiring a new and expanded sense of its possibilities, from pop songs to orchestral works to opera. Nearly 70 years after his death at the age of only 38, he remains America's most protean and popular composer.
"Fascinating schism: How the uniquely gifted George Gershwin fashioned masterpieces in both popular and classical music," by Ken Emerson, a book review of "George Gershwin: His Life and Works," by Howard Pollack, in The Boston Globe, December 17, 2006
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December 07, 2006
new blog - Ask Sister Mary Martha
St. Rose of Lima was aware that if her beauty caused boys to have...bad thoughts...she was causing them to sin, which by the way, is a sin on her. Somebody needs to explain this to Brittany Spears, post haste.
"I feel a headache coming on," Ask Sister Mary Martha, December 1, 2006
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May 29, 2006
Life
"The pleasures of the table, and of life, are infinite."
-- Julia Child
"My Life in France," by Julia Child, Alex Prud'Homme (Knopf 2006)
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May 28, 2006
Pictures from Easter break, 2006
The Apple House, Front Royal, VA
Monticello, VA
Monticello, VA
Monticello, VA
Monticello, VA
Monticello, VA
Stables at Rhodes Farm, Nellysford, VA
Stables at Rhodes Farm, Nellysford, VA
Vesuvius, VA
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August 23, 2005
web sites from Rob Cockerham
Rob Cockerham has some very funny web pages
- How much is inside? My favorites:
- Pranks - I like
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August 21, 2005
Low Morale - crush me
don't know why but this resonates with me ...
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jcb, by nizlopi
Yi Wah - you'll enjoy this music video.
jcb, by nizlopi
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Street entertainers
The next time you stop and watch a street entertainer, think about these articles:
- "Essays: Steven Ragatz on Busking," March 1992
- "Primer on Busking With a Special Focus on Balloon Entertainment," by Larry Moss
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August 16, 2005
Interactive Chessboard with Diagram Generator
"Just click a piece, then click the new square for the piece. When the board looks like you want it, click the Make Diagram button to generate a JPG file." ... Interactive Chessboard with Diagram Generator ... cool ...
via J-Walk Blog
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August 14, 2005
Pogo stick on steroids
MUG had a post about the Flybar ... a pogo stick on steroids ... a lot cheaper than a Segway
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Zorbing
Zorbing: you are harnessed "into a VW-sized, transparent ball of plastic" and then rolled "down a steep hill at 25 mph." ... sounds like a great time if you love riding roller coasters ... via Gadling
. . . 
The Zorb itself is a gigantic inflatable pvc ball standing about three metres in height, which contains another smaller ball that is suspended into position by thousand nylon strands of varying colours.
From Zorb South
"Have a ball with a Zorb," by Jayne Clark, USA TODAY, June 15, 2004
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