Category: Posts
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Podcasts of the moment
It’s been nearly three years since my last podcast lineup check-in, so time to see where things stand in my good ol’ Apple Podcasts feed. Comparing all the previously check-ins, it’s interesting to see which shows have endured and which I merely visited for a limited time. I try to be extra judicious about what/who…
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Reading with your feet on the ground
Mandy Brown on reading and the limits of empathy: To reduce reading to the practice of empathy is to divorce it of its real power and pleasure: to enjoy the fruits of another person’s creative effort, to think with the writer and their characters, not becoming them, but becoming more fully yourself. But this means…
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Why should I change?
From the Wired story More Typos, Fewer Em Dashes: Writers Are Creating an Anti-AI ‘Literary Counterculture’: Across journalism, criticism, creative writing, and especially among compulsive LinkedIn posters, writers are converging on a set of choices that implicitly resist the trappings of AI-generated prose. The style mostly takes shape through negation, often of the obvious AI…
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On Glen Hansard, grace, and goodbyes
Glen Hansard died. I’ve been listening to and writing about him and his music for damn near 20 years, so this is a gut punch. A few years ago I wrote an essay for Cinema Sugar about how seeing Once in the theater in 2007 completely changed how I viewed movie musicals, and much more.…
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Critters of the moment
An occasional series A freshly molting cicada: A night heron: A fox in our backyard: A yellowjacket stuck between our window and the screen: A great egret: A snapping turtle spotted in the section of a creek under a road underpass (the lines are reflections of the ceiling): A Photinus pyralis, i.e. a good ol’…
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Recent Views
More photography here. Proud of capturing the 3 year old midair right before splashdown: Windshield bubbles: Our frontyard lilac in full bloom sandwiching our backyard redbud: Books on books on books at the library: Raindrops just hit different in the morning: Ahhh, ahhhhhh: Caught this airplane lifting off mid-cloud during my 7 year old’s soccer…
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Hot new laptop features
I’m obsessed with this “laptop” our 7 year old made: I asked him what the different features were. Check out these specs: He just whipped this together on a whim while listening to a Yoto. Kids, man. Time, space, and materials for the win.
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Myself on Shelf Source
Zachary Kai runs a series on his site called Shelf Source featuring “readers who share books they love on their sites.” He reached out about me completing the questionnaire, and as I am all too eager to talking about books and reading I was happy to obliged. Check it out here to learn which book…
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‘National Treasure’ is a national treasure
I don’t believe in the concept of guilty pleasures (just watch and read what you want!). But if I did, the beautifully bonkers 2004 history-nerd film National Treasure would top my list. Read my America Month piece at Cinema Sugar celebrating all the reasons why the Nic Cage-est of Nic Cage movies still endures, if…
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Lovin’ Spielberg’s ‘Lincoln’
Just published a new essay at Cinema Sugar as part of America Month called Lincoln is the Better Angel of Biopics. It’s a celebration of Spielberg’s masterpiece as both a biopic—a genre I’m generally suspicious of—and a portrait of the man beneath the myth at a crucial juncture in history. Regular readers of this blog…
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We Went Wild Kratts
Last weekend we went to Wild Kratts Live! on stage in Madison. It’s basically an extended, supercharged episode of the show, with Chris and Martin Kratt in various animal costumes and doing silly antics while teaching about creature powers along the way. It was a thrill to be in a large amphitheater packed with kids and grownups…
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Links of the moment
An ongoing series Several of my interests in one: Steven Spielberg on The Rewatchables talking 2001: A Space Odyssey. Wikipedia as a Windows XP desktop. Shoutout to the Night Witches, (unfortunately) not an awesome band but an all-female Soviet bomber regiment who attacked the Nazis during World War II.
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Media of the moment
An ongoing series This Is A Gardening Show. Heard about this new Zach Galifianakis limited series on Netflix from friends, and it’s a delight. Funny, informative, family- friendly. Great hang. Project Hail Mary. Saw this with some dad friends, which felt appropriate since it’s both very dad-coded but also widely appealing as its box office…
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Color commentary
I was at the library last weekend with my two boys and we were playing a board game with pieces of all different colors. My 7 year old son picked a purple piece, and another boy who was a little older than him and at the same table as us said, “Why did you pick…
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The Kenny Rogers principle of dead websites
Thanks to Chris Coyler for spotlighting the Internet Archive’s new book Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record (available in print and as a free e-book). Going right to the top of my to-read list. Chris reflects on the report’s findings about how many websites have and have not been preserved by the…
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Stupid questions
I’ve worked in libraries for a decade, much of that time at a public info desk answering people’s questions. And do you know what drives me absolutely crazy? Whenever someone starts their question with “This might be a stupid question, but…” You know why? Because there’s no such thing as a stupid question. To be…
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Links of the moment
An ongoing series Love this deep dive on the color theory behind why so many control rooms were seafoam green. What happened to movie taglines? I cannot believe the leaf sheep slug is a real animal. What a world. The Extrapolated Futures Archive maps real-world scenarios to the sci-fi stories that explore them. A clock that displays…
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Paging The Falconer
Yesterday I took the boys to a community cleanup event tied in with Earth Day and one of the exhibitors was a local raptor conservation group that brought live birds. Two key takeaways: 1. The turkey vulture was ugly AF but had an insane wingspan. The falconers were also impressed by all the turkey vulture…