Archive for January, 2006
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31 Jan 2006
I apparently haven't seen enough movies this year. Of the top categories of 2006 Academy Awards nominees, I've seen:
Category # seen Best Picture 0 Best Actor 0 Best Actress 0 Best Director 0 Best Screenplay 0 Best Adapted Screenplay 1 I've got five weeks. I wonder how much I can improve those numbers.
Update, 6 Mar - I saw only a single additional top-Oscar-nominated movie in the five weeks since this post was made: Match Point, nominated for Best Screenplay. Out of the Oscar winners for all of the categories, I saw only two: The Constant Gardener (Rachel Weisz won Best Supporting Actress) and Wallace and Gromit (Best Animated Film)
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24 Jan 2006
Way back in August 2004, I posted about Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About, an amusing list of petty arguments. As you read the tome, it becomes less of a bullet list and more of a pithy British comedy. If you scroll to the bottom, you'll see that Mil Millington, the author, turned the website into a novel roughly based on his real-life life. And then he turned that into a career as a novelist.
His latest book, Love and Other Near Death Experiences is quite high on my to-read list.
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23 Jan 2006
I want to get some Icehouse pieces (from the maker of Fluxx and Chrononauts). It's a game system (analogous to a deck of cards), and there are dozens of games for them. Unfortunately, they recommend getting 4 "stashes" (a stash is 15 pieces in one color) at $8 each. They used to have a nice 5-stash boxed set, but it's out of print.
Either way, I don't want to throw down $40 on this stuff if there's not going to be anyone willing to play with, though. I'm afraid I might have to go to an Anime/SciFi convention to play this (and other Looney Labs games), since I hear they're hot shit.
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15 Jan 2006
M's last medical residency interview was Friday. Her rank order list isn't due until February 22, but she's already separated the group into "desirables" and "less desirables". Above the fold are Brown in Providence, BU and Mt. Auburn in the Boston area, and George Washington in DC.
Stay tuned for more developments as they happen!
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9 Jan 2006
My mind tends to wander. The other day it wandered to the following question: "What is the oldest surviving piece of written music?" I knew that modern musical notation was a relatively recent creation (probably less than a thousand years old), but I was certain that there must have been earlier techniques for writing down music.
The answer is the Seikilos epitaph, a 2000-year-old tombstone in Turkey with a song written on it, even including Greek lyrics. The way the music was written quickly reminded me of cantillation, the symbols written above the Hebrew in the Torah that guides the chant.
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4 Jan 2006
I wrote Three words, five minutes this morning after about a year of procrastinating. It was initially going to be big and complicated, but since that was the source of the procrastination, I made it a single frameset with Writeboard as the writing interface. TWFM makes it surprisingly easy to just go and get a little writing exercise, and even if it doesn't inspire something longer, then it was worth it.
Nomad has been ignoring work with it all day.
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3 Jan 2006
Among my New Years resolutions this year is to resume writing. I wrote a lot of angsty poetry and some short stories in high school and college. It tapered off, though, and this year, my goal is to write a 1000+ word story every week. I'd also like to participate in NaNoWriMo in November.
If it's not too terrible, I might post some of the stories here.