HELLO MY FRIENDS.
I added a list of my blogged friends on the left. Check ’em out! If I know you in real life, and I left you off, please email me at david @ danzig . com (without the spaces)!
MOB RULE.
I joined MOB #2, today in Herald Square. I got an email, I’m not sure from where, telling me to meet at one of four bars, based on my birthday (i.e., I went to the Holiday Inn bar, because I was born in April, May, or June). Then, A fellow in a trucker hat, gave me and the other fourth of us directions of where to go, which was the rug department on the 9th floor of Macy’s flagship store. We all gathered around a particular rug, which we were told was to be called “The Love Rug,” and contemplated buying the rug, but ultimately decided against it, as we had planned. It was a fun New York sort of happening, and was really amusing in the moment. There were about a hundred people there, or so, and it was quite an interesting scene. Here’s a picture I found at Satan’s Laundromat, which includes me:
I’m just below and to the left of the word “collection,” with dark brown curly hair, and no hat.
We discussed whether to buy the rug, with people shouting out pros and cons in a surprisingly orderly fashion. We discussed the price, a little under $10,000, which actually turned out to be not all that much per person. Things like the price, the size, the material, the fact that it was manufactured in Pakistan (our new friend in the war against terrorism), and the possibility of rug burns, all were discussed reasonably and intelligently. After exactly ten minutes we voted. There was a small chorus of yeas, and an overwhelming thunder of nays, and we quickly dispersed.
HOW TO COMPLETELY REVITALIZE THE US ECONOMY.
Apparently, the main reason for the US economic slowdown has been the reduction in purchases of new computers, right? And people are buying fewer new computers, because they feel their current ones are fast enough for everything they want to do, and the main thing they need to increase the speed of their computer is to increase their connection speed to the Internet.
If you want people to buy new computers, you need to make a “killer app” that requires a new computer to run well. I don’t know about you, but I bought my last computer so I could play Quake and Doom. If Intel would make some great, great games and utilities and suchlike that everyone wanted, but that would only run on a Pentium 4, and then give them all away free, they’d sell a whole lot of chips.
THEY SHOULD CALL IT “A BEING READ TO.”
I went to a reading at the Telephone Bar in the East Village last night. There was a decent short story by writer Greg Sanders, a laughably bad excerpt from “This Won’t Hurt a Bit” by author Timothy Sheard, and a not-even-funny-how-bad-it-was reading of some song lyrics by Katherine Pritchard (maybe it’s better with the music?).
But the highlight of the show was the reader I came to see, my friend Jessica Delfino, who wowed the crowd. She read a collection of actual letters she wrote to people who advertised positions for hire. She wrote ridiculous replies, designed to ensure she would not be hired. They were great, as are the responses from her would-be employers. Her archives aren’t working, but go to her Web page, and read the entries from April 17, 2003 and June 14, 2003. They’re really funny! Unfortunately, they’re missing the replies from the prospective employers.
How about it Jessica Delfino? Why don’t you republish your archives, and also put up the responses from the employers?
PASTRAMI.
I had a fun and yummy lunch Thursday with fellow blogger Blake N., who I had not seen in about four years, at our high school reunion. The food was delicious, the conversation engaging, and the company delightful.
MY DANISH COUNTERPART.
Check out creamy.com’s Danish counterpart, creamy.dk.
TWO TASTELESS JOKES.
Here are two tasteless jokes I thought of.
ONE.
I was a member of triple-A, the American Automobile Association, but I just quit. I switched and joined the North American Man Boy Automobile Association. I really just joined NAMBAA because their rates are better, but I was reading some of their literature, and it really makes a lot of sense. I mean, it’s just ridiculous that you have to be 18 years old to drive a car in New York. I mean, when you’re eight yours old, you could be raped by your uncle. If you’re old enough to be anally raped, you’re totally old enough to drive a car.
TWO.
Okay, this isn’t so much a joke as an idea for the beginning of a sketch, about how African Americans are bothered by security guards in stores. As an African American man walks into a store, there’s a white security guard dressed in a black suit, like a secret service agent. As he sees the African American walk in, he talks into a microphone on his shoulder, and loudly says, “Code black! Code black! I repeat, we have a code black!”
THE MUSEUM OF BAGS.
After the charity auction (see the previous post) ended, I wrote to the guy who won:
I really wanted to be winner of this auction, but, obviously, you wanted it more than I did. I don’t know how often you bid $5,000 for an item at a chartiy auction, but it’s kind of a big deal for me. So, I just wanted to take a moment to congratulate you on winning this auction.
If you don’t mind my asking, and I certainly understand if you do mind, I’d love to know what the maximum bid was that you had entered?
Sincerely,
David D[.]
—
He replied,
Thank you. I do not normally bid that much on a charity auction item, and I glad that you stopped, because I was at the end of my budget. However, I am starting a Museum of Bags. (www.themuseumofbags.org)
My wife and I have about 3,000 paper bags and paper looking bags. We have bags made of paper, ceramic, cellophane, burlap, cardboard, glass, copper, wire, leather, china, wood and artificial turf.
Let me know where you live, and we will keep you updated on our progress.
Howard F[.]
HOW I JUST RAISED $3,949.00 TO FIGHT AUTISM.
Did you see the recent special “A Night of Too Many Stars” on Comedy Central, to benefit the Autism Coalition? It included a Charity Auction, which included a paper bag that had been sat on by every guest on the Conan O’Brien show for a month. I was the second place bidder for it at $5,250, and the third place bidder dropped out at $1,376. The final price was $5,350. So, while I’m disappointed that I lost the auction, I am pleased that I did get the final price up so high on that item, resulting in a lot of extra money going to McCarton Foundation to help Autism.
MY GOD, IT’S FULL OF SARS.
Sean S. cracked me up by finding this:
THE SUM TOTAL OF ALL HUMAN KNOWLEDGE.
That’s the promise of the Internet, that it will be the sum total of all human knowledge, every library in the world at our fingertips, right? Obviously, it’s not there yet, but I just had a great experience of how it could be. I was talking with my brother on the phone, and he said that according to a Rabbi he spoke with, there’s no evidence that Cain slew Abel, since Cain denies it to God. That didn’t sound right to me, so I went to Google, and entered cain slew abel. The first hit was this page, a seemingly exhaustive collection of six quotes from Genesis (2), Matthew, Luke, Hebrews, and John, supporting the claim (quite convincingly, I think) that, according to the Bible, Cain did indeed slay Abel. It was just like magic, getting the exact answer to what I wanted to know. The shame is that such experiences on the Internet are the exception, rather than the norm.
CRISIS = DANGER + OPPORTUNITY.
We’ve all heard that thing about how the Chinese word for “crisis” combines the Chinese words for “danger” and “opportunity”. That is true, as far as it goes, but I think it’s easy to read too much into that. You see, that’s just the way Chinese is, combining words from a relatively small pool that are often only tangentially related to the idea they represent. For example, the Chinese word for “breast” is literally the words “milk house”. The Chinese word for “uterus” is literally “children’s palace”. The word for “sofa”, which just takes the phonetic sounds “sho” and “fa” without regard to their meanings, literally means “sand hair”. Apparently, there are only a few thousand basic words in Chinese, and every other word is a combination of two or more of these.
I’ve actually been studying Mandarin a little bit lately, but only a very little bit. Most of this stuff above comes from my Shanghainese friend Sophie W.
MONEY DOES GROW ON TREES.
Money is made out of paper, and paper is made out of pulp, and pulp is made out of trees. That’s so weird that everybody uses that expression, that money doesn’t grow on trees, and yet it’s never occurred to me before that it does.
THEATER REVIEW: JESUS IS MAGIC * * * 1/2 (3 and a half stars out of 4).
I think I would have given Sarah Silverman‘s one woman show 4 stars, but I was miffed by how much of the show I’d already seen from seeing her stand-up routines around the city and on TV. If you’ve seen much of this, there’s very little new here. But if you haven’t seen her before, and if you like irreverent, self-deprecating, offensively-stereotyping comedy, you will love this show.
THEATER REVIEW: DREAM A LITTLE DREAM: THE MAMAS AND THE PAPAS MUSICAL * * (2 stars out of 4).
Papa Denny Doherty more “hosts” than “stars” in this play. If what you want is a concert in which you here Doherty with some okay backup signers, then you’ll get it. If what you want is a superficial, name-dropping, self-serving history of the Mama’s and the Papa’s, you’ll get that. But, as a story, and as a musical, it falls very flat. It seems quite under-rehearsed. This seems deliberate, to create a sense of casualness and intimacy, but, to me, it created more of a sense of seeing something that was under-rehearsed. If you are really into the Mama’s and the Papa’s, then you should definitely check this out. But if, like me, you have only a passing interest in their music, you will find that they don’t really have much of a story to tell.
THEATER REVIEW: INTRIGUE WITH FAYE (2003) * * * (3 stars out of 4).
This new play starring Benjamin Bratt and Julianna Margulies gets a lot of credit for being innovative and different. The play incorporates video images, mostly filmed by the actors on stage, in a novel, intelligent way. But it does require a little bit of a leap of logic to buy the premise (which I won’t give away, as it’s not revealed until the end of the first act). And the acting seemed a little stiff. I think that’s largely because the actors had to be so careful to say their lines word-for-word, since they would sometimes be incorporated with previously recorded audio or video. Still I liked the play very much, and I recommend it.
MOVIE REVIEW: BRUCE ALMIGHTY (2003) * * 1/2 (2 and a half stars out of 4).
Jim Carrey‘s latest movie passed the time well enough, but didn’t have the sort of depth or insight that the subject matter deserved. And the commercials gave away the whole movie.
SARS TAN LINES.
Yeah, I think that picture is probably a fake, too. But I’m sure it’s really happening to people.
MAJOR GEEK.
I scored “42.80079% – Major Geek” on The Geek Test.
OOMPA LOOMPA DOOMPADEE DAX MACHINE.
Tim Burton is reportedly going to direct a remake of Willy Wonka and the Chocoloate Factory! Burton’s dark, colorful vision is best demonstrated, I think, by such films as Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (1985), Beetlejuice (1988), Batman (1989), Edward Scissorhands (1990), James and the Giant Peach (1996), and Mars Attacks! (1996).
MEMORIAL DAY WEAKENED.
I had a great weekend with Pete and Samara. We ate at some of the best restaurants in the city (The Carnegie Deli, Balthazar, Serindipity 3) and saw a few shows (Jesus is Magic, The Mamas and The Papas Musical), and had a few relaxing drinks. A good time was had by all!
GET IT AT HOME.
Here’s an interesting rundown of the distributed computing projects you can have your computer work on for the betterment of humankind while it is idle. The oldest and best known is seti@home, the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence, which has recently exceeded 1.4 million years in total CPU time.
PETE AND SAMARA.
I’m being visited by one of my best friends, Peter B., and his wonderful and pregnant wife, Samara. They got into town yesterday, and they’ll be here until Tuesday.
MOVIE REVIEW: THE MATRIX RELOADED (2003) * * (2 stars out of 4).
I loved the first Matrix movie, so I was extremely disappointed by this sequel. It starts off extremely slow, but without clearly explaining the convoluted plot. Then, there are some nifty fight scenes, but which go on too long, and don’t come close to the creativity and visual appeal of the first Matrix. And then, the movie ends with a cliffhanger, promising “To Be Concluded.”
The Matrix was one of my favorite movies, with a brilliant story, and amazing visual effects. In a way, every fighting movie since then has been a sequel to the Matrix, and its once-stunning visual effects have since been over-used to sell cars and beer. But this new movie is not even as visually interesting as the first. And the fascinating, thoughtful story of part one has been replaced by a trite, boring, over-complicated story.
I haven’t seen part 3, of course, but I suspect that parts 2 and 3 could have been made as a great, single movie, instead of in two halves, where at least the first half really drags.
MOVIE REVIEW: X2: X-MEN UNITED (2003) * * *
The story is a little thin, but the special effects in X2 are great and beutifully conceived, and worth the price of admission.
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