Madison Avenue’s Vision of Love

During regular season, baseball fans endured a summer full of extreme close-ups of a big-eyed girl demanding constant cute-isms of a weary boyfriend; she looks panicked when nauseating terms of endearment are not tripping off his tongue. In a voiceover, the anxious male—trying to avoid what we must understand will be an inevitable “scene” if he does not cough up a coo—nimbly saves himself by pronouncing his drink (Sweet Tea) and his dessert (Pie). Sweetie Pie is briefly assuaged, but her staggering insecurity demands more and so the ante is upped as she mews, “aw, Chipmunk …”

Cue jingle: da-da-da-dah-dah, I’m lovin’ it.

Except viewers aren’t loving it

NPR on Alan Jacobs' "The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction"

Look for my review in Comment later this summer!

Oh technology

When I was a teenager and had first discovered the Internet (I am not
that old, but I grew up in a very rural area and we had dial-up till I
graduated from college and moved away - and yes, I earned an entire
technology degree on dial-up! Good times), the warm weather seasons
were a time of guilt because I had things I had to / wanted to be
doing indoors, but I continually felt as if I should be outdoors.
After all: growing up in a perpetual land of snow and ice means you
feel as if you ought to be grateful for good weather when you find it. But this post is simply out of gratefulness and to say that now,
thanks to the Apple gods, I am answering email and editing documents
and basically being productive outdoors in a bench in a park. And
thanks to the urban gods, it’s a safe family park that my tax dollars
pay to landscape and mow and maintain.

Being a grownup rocks.

Tonight’s Observation

“Better Off Ted”: surprisingly funny show. Surprisingly poorly named.

A Declaration

It’s decided: I love summer break. I am working just as much as I do during the semester, and I have just as many projects, but I get to camp out in a Brooklyn cafe three blocks from
Home and let Australian baristas make my coffee and watch people walk by as I pound out my thousands of words, and I won’t lie: that definitely beats a cramped, noisy shared office on the fifteenth floor of a certain landmark building that can’t seem to maintain phone service, working elevators, and hot water all at once. Academia has major benefits. It’s worth the paper-grading stretches.

Get Over Where You’re From

“I am from the San Fernando Valley. For many years, I was ashamed of this fact, thinking if I was not from the big city of New York or the farm fields of Iowa that I had nothing to say. Once I got over who I was and where I was from, I found my love for Los Angeles.” — P.T. Anderson, in the introduction to the shooting script for Magnolia

Turns out

It does.

I am testing Posterous

Posterous has long intrigued me as a web service that has the potential to save me time, but I haven’t had much time to fiddle with it until recently. So I’m testing my first post, which should show up on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and my blog. 
Let’s see if it works.

[Martin] Sheen, who is still married to Templeton, has been sober for 20 years and is now a devout Catholic, having had his faith restored by a series of meaningful conversations in Paris in 1981 with Terrence Malick, the director of Sheen’s breakthrough film, Badlands (1973).

From “Apocalypse Sheen: The Sheen clan and The Way to redemption” at Independent Woman.

Awesome.

(via pejohnston)