LAST CALL.
I went to a taping of Last Call with Carson Daly this evening. I’m not a huge fan of the show, but the guest was Horatio Sanz, who was hysterical, and the show is taped in Studio 8-H of 30 Rockefeller Center, which is the studio where Saturday Night Live is broadcast. So, it was pretty neat. Thanks, Ludmilla M.!
MOVIE REVIEW: ADAPTATION (2002) * * * 1/2 (3 and a half stars out of 4).
I loved this movie. It’s by Charlie Kaufman, the writer of Being John Malkovich, and it’s about his struggle to write an adaptation of the book, The Orchid Thief (which I’m currently reading). At the same time he’s plagued by resentment and jealousy of his identical twin brother Donald who also wants to be a screenwriter, and is a hack writing a formulaic action movie. it’s a really great movie that I’m still trying to make sense of in my head, and which is really, really worth seeing.
I’M GOING TO GIVE AWAY SOME OF THE PLOT OF THE MOVIE NOW, SO STOP READING IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN IT AND YOU PLAN TO.
Apparently, and according to Roger Ebert, there isn’t really any such person as Donald Kaufman, even though he shares a writing credit for the movie. What’s most interesting to me is this. All along, Charlie says he wants to make a movie with integrity. There’s no love story, there’s no car chases, there’s no mystery. It’s just about being disappointed, and not growing or learning or changing, because that’s what real life is like. But right after he asks his hacky “twin” to help him, suddenly the movie turns into a thriller. The twins go to New York to spy on Susan Orlean, the writer of “The Orchid Thief”. They follow her to Florida where she has an affair with the subject of her book. There’s a car chase, a gun fight, and a few terrifying killings, and, suddenly, it really, really works as a thriller. And when Donald is gone, we sort of see that he was really a part of Charlie all along, exactly the way the characters in Donald’s screenplay “the 3” are really all just aspects of the same person. It really works on a lot of different levels, including the surface level.
BOOK REVIEW: NO WAY TO TREAT A FIRST LADY * * 1/2 (2 and a half stars out of 4).
I love Christopher Buckley, but his latest novel is definitely not his best. It attempts to satirize both Bill Clinton’s infidelity and the O. J. Simpson trial by combining both into the ultimate “trial of the millenium,” in which the first lady is on trial for murdering the President. The result, though, is a bit muddled, both in terms of plot and in terms of the satiric message, and the book’s serious tone makes fun of itself more than it does its intended victims.
Much better are Christopher Buckley’s masterpieces Wry Martinis (a book of his hilarious columns from the New Yorker) and Thank You for Smoking, a brilliant satire of the marketing of cigarettes, alcohol, and firearms. God is my Broker: A Monk-Tycoon Reveals the 7 1/2 Laws of Spiritual and Financial Growth, about the mixing of big religion and big business, is not too bad at all.
BOOK REVIEW: WHEN YOU RIDE ALONE, YOU RIDE WITH BIN LADEN * * 1/2 (2 and a half stars out of 4).
Bill Maher’s newest book, When You Ride Alone You Ride with Bin Laden: What the Government Should Be Telling Us to Help Fight the War on Terrorism, is mostly trite, and not very funny. It talks only briefly and superficially about Maher’s brush with censorship shortly after 9/11, when he said that we shouldn’t call the 9/11 attackers cowardly, because lobbing a cruise missile into Afghanistan is cowardly, but staying in the plane when it hits the building is, whatever else you want to call it, not cowardly. Bill Maher does make one very excellent point, however. He criticizes the commercial which memorably premiered during last year’s Superbowl that suggested that buying marijuana was sending money to terrorists. That connection is very tenuous, at best. But when you drive your car on frivolous trips, the money you spend on gasoline is going directly to governments in the Middle East that support terrorism.
WELCOME TO THE NEIGHBORHOOD.
When I first listed myself on geoURL, my furthest neighbor on my neighbor screen was 187 miles away. Now, there’s only room for neighbors within 57 miles. It takes exponential growth to keep that number shrinking at a constant rate, since the area covered is directly proportional to the square of that radius. Despite this, that number actually seems to be shrinking faster and faster. The geoURL’s “meatspace” is still small, but it’s growing quickly. It’s cool how there are very few commercial establishments there. It’s just like the Web was at the beginning, before the big commercial interests took over. Oh, that reminds me– I should register my commercial establishment.
SO, HOW MUCH FOR A CHEESEBURGER?
Welcome to New York, home of the $50 hamburger.
BLACKPEOPLELOVEUS.COM.
You’ve got to check out blackpeopleloveus.com! It is so funny! It was made by my friend Jessica D.‘s friend Chelsea.
NEW FORMULA, SAME GREAT CONVERSION.
If you’re like me, you find the formula of F = 9/5 C + 32 for converting Fahrenheit (F) temperatures to Celsius (C), to be totally unworkable. Even if I could remember that formula, I can’t multiply a 2 digit number by 9 in my head, and then divide that three digit number by 5 in my head. Unless you’ve got some time to kill, and a calculator or a pen and paper, that formula is good for nothing.
So I’ve come up with a much better formula for converting Celsius into Fahrenheit that is easier to remember, and which most people can do quickly in their heads. It goes like this.
Take the Celsius temperature and double it. Add 30. Now, if you stopped right there, you’d have a pretty decent estimation, which would never be wrong by more than 5 degrees for Fahrenheit temperatures between 0 and 100, and is more accurate the closer it is to 50. Let’s call this number “E” for estimate. Now to get the Fahrenheit temperature exactly, for 10 degrees difference between E and 50, get 1 degree closer to 50.
That’s it. Double the Celsius temperature, add 30, and get 1 degree closer to 50 for every ten degrees from 50 you are.
Let’s try some numbers to see how this works.
Take zero degrees Celsius. Doubling it is still zero. Adding 30 makes 30. Now you’re 20 degrees below 50, so add one tenth of 20, which is 2. That’s 32 degrees Fahrenheit, which everyone know is the same as zero Celsius. Note that just doubling it and adding 30 was a pretty good estimation.
Here’s another. Take 22 degrees Celsius. Doubling it makes 44. Adding 30 makes 74. That’s 24 degrees above 50, so subtract 2.4, leaving 71.6 degrees Fahrenheit, exactly. Note that 74 was a pretty good estimate. This is as hard as these get, folks, and I still bet you could’ve done that one in your head.
A couple more. Take 10 degrees Celsius. Doubling it makes 20. Adding 30 makes 50. That’s exactly 50, so there’s nothing to add or subtract.
Last one. Take -12 degrees Celsius (that’s MINUS 12). Doubling it is -24. Adding 30 makes 6. That’s 44 degrees from 50, so add 4.4, making 10.4 degrees Fahrenheit, exactly.
Let’s compare some of these with what you would have had to do with the old formula. Let’s take one of the harder ones from above, 22 degrees Celsius. For the first time in this essay, I’ve got to whip out a calculator. 22 times 9 is 198. 198 divided by 5 is 39.6. 39.6 + 32 is 71.6. Can you do that in your head? I guess I could if I sat here long enough. Let’s take the other tricky one: -12 degrees Celsius. -12 * 9 = 108. 108 / 5 = -21.6. -21.6 + 32 = 10.4.
Yes, the comparison is clear: my formula is much, much better than the formula people have been using for hundreds of years. It’s the difference between doing third grade math and doing sixth grade math. Which would you rather do?
You want proof? Here’s proof.
Here’s my formula. Note that “+ ( ( (50 – (2C+30) ) / 10)” is a fancy way of saying “for every 10 degrees you are from 50, get one degree closer.”
F = 2C + 30 + ( ( (50 – (2C+30) ) / 10)
Adding the 50 and the 30 in the numerator yields:
F = 2C + 30 + ( (20 – 2C) / 10)
Dividing by 10 yields
F = 2C + 30 + 2 – 1/5 C
And adding that all up yields
F = 9/5 C + 32, which is the old, stupid formula.
But forget all that. From now on, just double the Celsius, add 30, and then get 1 degree closer to 50 for every 10 degrees you are away.
SHUT UP.
The links to my comments were sporadically down yesterday and last night. No comments have been lost, though! Enetation.co.uk, the provider of my comment software, has this to say:
“We are experiencing very high server loads at peak times during the day which may prevent some comment links from appearing. Thanks to very generous donations over December we are in a position to add two servers this weekend to the existing cluster which should minimise any risk of system overload. (We were expecting the new servers added in November to be good for 6 months, but due to the fantastic growth in users it looks like we’ve managed 6 weeks!) Please keep donating!”
YOU’RE INVITED.
Who: You, Your Friends, Lovers and Confidantes
When: February 7, 2003, 6:00pm EST
Where: Zanzibar, 645 9th Avenue (at 45th Street)
Why: Because we all need make some new friends in this cool, cool town … and an excuse to maybe casually bump into the blog-crush of your choice.
RSVP to Jane at nerve_wracking@hotmail.com.
I’ll be there.
I GOT A NEW CELL PHONE.
I finally bought a new cell phone. I got the LG 5350, and continued my Sprint membership. I’d had an old Motorola phone. I absolutely love my new phone. It’s got a full graphics color display that fits nine lines of text. My last phone had a four line, black and white (grey and green, actually), text-only display. My new phone can go to practically any Web site– not just Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) enabled sites. My old phone only went to WAP sites. My new phone is about two-thirds the size and about half the weight (3.8 ounces) of my old phone. And my new phone has all kinds of features that I’d always hoped for, and some that I’d never even thought of. For example, I always wished my phone had a calculator. It’s not a big thing, but it seems like such an easy thing to add on to a phone, since you’ve already got the math processor and the keypad and everything. This one also has a scheduler, dozens of downloadable games and ringers, customizable ringers for each caller in your address book, voice-activated calling, and a voice recorder to take spoken notes. It has a program that uses a dictionary to figure out what word you are typing, using only one keystroke per digit (e.g., it knows that 232889 is “BEAUTY” and not “ADCTVX”). It lets you start recording a phone conversation while you’re talking (the other party hears a warning beep). It has an “airplane mode” that turns off the phone part, so you can still play games or look at your scheduler or whatever while you’re on a plane. It has a standby mode that puts the other party on the outside speaker (the one that rings when someone calls) so you can put the phone down while you’re on hold. It lets you program a custom button to be a one button shortcut to any feature you want (I picked the calculator). And it has more features that I’m forgetting. At only $150, it seems like a real bargain to me, considering how much it’s improved my life, how much I use it, and how long I’ll probably keep it. I only wish I’d gotten it sooner.
Thanks, Greg D. for helping me pick it out.
NYC RESTAURANT REVIEW: NONG * * * 1/2 (3 and a half stars out of 4).
This pan-asian restaurant on Park Avenue South at 18th Street has something for everyone. The food is delicately spiced and fresh and delicious. I did find it to be more than a little overpriced, with lunch entrees ranging from $12 for a salad to $19 for a steak.
I STRAIN, YOU STRAIN, WE ALL STRAIN FOR EYE-STRAIN.
Thanks to Sean S. for his selfless assistance in making the little round corner thingie graphic into a new color for me, and for giving me some tips on helping people avoid eye-strain.
I LIVE AT THE CENTER OF EVERYTHING.
As I mentioned, The geoURL server is my second nearest neighbor, according to the geoURL server. It’s about a four minute walk to the south.
Well, my sixth nearest neighbor, about a mile north of me on the Upper West side, is Dan Egnor, the winner of the 2002 Google programming contest, for his geocoder, a method of searching the Web by geographic location.
A coincidence? No. I really do live at the center of everything. As I write this, I am sitting two blocks north of times square, and three blocks south of the geographic center of Manhattan. A north-south block in New York is about 1/20th of a mile, or about a one minute walk at a normal walking pace.
COLOUR MY WORLD.
For the first time, I saw another blog that used my same template, and it totally creeped me out. So, I messed around with the colors a little. Here’s an example of what it used to look like. As you can see, the changes are pretty subtle. Unfortunately, there is a little graphic where that round edge is between the blue corner and the light beige background, and I’m totally clueless how to mess with that. So, I left the corner and the main background the same.
MOVIE REVIEW: HABLE CON ELLA (TALK TO HER) (2002) * * * (3 stars out of 4).
This movie, about two women trapped in hopeless comas and the men who love them, was good and smart and hauntingly funny. But I didn’t think it quite lived up to the incredible reviews it’s gotten.
COMMENTS, ANYONE?
I just added a commenting feature to my blog. It is powered by enetation.co.uk, a free service.
GEOURL.
Here’s another way to surf the Web– by geographic location! Thanks, Dav, for the tip.
Take a look at some of my nearby neighbors by clicking this button: 
.
Interestingly, and presumably by coincidence, my second nearest neighbor is the GeoURL Server.
MORE NOTICE FOR MY REVIEW OF SLANDER.
I found yet another link on the Internet to my review of the horrible book, Slander.
RAIN, RAIN, GO AWAY?
Here in New York City, It has rained every day this year so far. And there’s supposed to be freezing drizzle early tomorrow morning, and snow flurries on Friday. Also, it rained on December 30 and 31, last year!
THEATER REVIEW: DEBBIE DOES DALLAS * * * (3 stars out of 4).
I really wanted to give this new hit Off-Broadway musical 2 and 3/4 stars, but I decided a long time ago not to give out quarter stars. Anyway, I can certainly see why this campy, sexually provocative play is so popular, but I had trouble seeing why it is such a critical success. The story, of a high school student who has been accepted to be a cheerleader for the Dallas Cowboys and forms a company with her cheerleader friends to raise money for her travel, is pretty faithful to the original movie, with a few clever and ironic twists thrown in. But aside from being silly, and maybe 30 seconds of exposition about how we all make too many compromises in life, there isn’t much to it, except for a lot of pretty actresses bouncing around on stage in cheerleader costumes. But, then, hey, that’s something, right? So, it was good, but didn’t meet my high expectations, after I’d heard such good reviews for the play. Also, the music was okay, but I was disappointed that none of the original music from the movie was used, as I think some of it is quite catchy.
THEATER REVIEW: THE MERCY SEAT * (1 star out of 4).
This new play, starring Sigourney Weaver and Liev Schreiber takes place in downtown Manhattan on September 12, 2001. Unfortunately, it’s a very mediocre play, with very un-clever and unrealistic dialogue, that would never have been produced, if it weren’t for this little gimmick being shoe-horned in about the World Trade Center attack. Basically, here’s what’s wrong with this play: 1) the two characters are so absurdly and unsympathetically self-absorbed and cruel to each other that they are thoroughly unlikable, and their relationship together seems absurd. 2) On 9/12/01, not one person in the country, much less downtown New York (where I lived at the time), was talking about anything at all except the 9/11 attacks. If someone had another comment about something else, it would slip by in passing, in between long conversations about the events of the day before. However, in this play, the situation is reversed, and they barely mention the World Trade Center, even though they can see it smolder from their window. I guess it’s a testament to how far we’ve come, that we’re so willing to put up with this trivialization and exploitation of the events of 9/11.
NYC RESTAURANT REVIEW: JOHN’S PIZZA * * * (3 stars out of 4).
I ate at the 44th street John’s last night with Manny F. his cousin Helen and some of her friends, and I’ve previously eaten at their Bleecker street location. While it is very good pizza, and is better than the best pizza in your town (if you don’t live here in New York), it is, in my opinion, too often suggested that this might be the best pizza in the city, which it definitely isn’t. I’m not sure if I’d put it on my top ten.
MOVIE REVIEW: STAR TREK NEMESIS (2002) * 1/2 (1 and a half stars out of 4).
The tenth Star Trek movie, definitely defies the superstition that the even numbered films are the good ones. While the film benefited from my diminished expectations, after seeing some terrible reviews, it still was managed to disappoint. Here’s the thing: if they would just have taken the most minor, common sense precautions, that anybody would, of course, take when dealing with unknown, alien races and artifacts, then, well, there simply wouldn’t have been any movie. So it was particularly distressing to see the bad guy bragging that Picard fell into his irresistible trap, when the trap only works at all if you assume that Picard and Data will be absurdly careless and reckless, which they are. Also, the ending doesn’t really sit very well with me.
BOOK REVIEW: BUSH AT WAR (2002) * * * (3 stars out of 4).
Bob Woodward’s latest was good, but a little dry compared to his recent books about Clinton and the Supreme Court. I was impressed with how much decisive leadership Bush seemed to display, according to the book. I always picture him as bossed around by his advisors, and I always think of his supporters’ harping on that scene of him spontaneously addressing the rescue workers at the World Trade Center site as damning with faint praise. But it sounds like he had a real vision for the way in which America should respond to the terrorist attacks, and that that vision has guided a lot of what’s happened since 9/11/01.
Here’s the thing about Woodward’s books. They always seem to revolve around one leak. He never tells you which person is the leak, and, ostensibly, it’s a secret. But the thing is, there’s always one guy who’s in every scene, and whose innermost thoughts and feelings Woodward professes to know. So, for example, in The Agenda, George Stephanopolis is always the one person who’s at every meeting. Years later, Stephanopolis “admitted” to being Woodward’s source, which is one of the reasons he left the White House. In Bush at War, the guy in every scene is Colin Powell. I suspect that he spoke very freely to Woodward in making this book.
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