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Giving Thanks
Today is clear and unseasonably warm again, but yesterday, Thanksgiving Day, was a day of cold driving rain that lasted from before we woke until after we went to sleep. This made our driving up to and around Connecticut for the holiday much more difficult this year. What would normally be four and a half… — read more
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Orphans Against the Day
Two events, rare in my adult life, occurred yesterday: a new Tom Waits album (all 56 songs of it) was released and a new Thomas Pynchon novel (all 1,085 pages of it) was published. I had a very busy day at work, so I didn’t get a chance to listen to the album, but I… — read more
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Game, Set,…
Amazon did manage to beat Apple into the movie download business by less than a week, but today, Apple managed to beat Amazon in almost every other way. Apple already had more television shows available than Amazon announced, and its client, iTunes, was already far nicer than Amazon’s. Amazon offered higher quality video files and… — read more
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Pushing the Broken Car of Windows Media
There’s an episode of Married… With Children in which Al Bundy ends up pushing a succession of cars home from work because they keep breaking down. At one point, his son points out that it would make more sense for him to simply walk to and from work, but his daughter protests, “That’s too far… — read more
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That’s Why He’s the Decider
Gerald Ford only told New York to drop dead. It took George W. Bush to actually do something about it. — read more
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Well, I’m Baffled
A couple of weeks ago, I read Liesl Schillinger’s review of Marisha Pessl’s Special Topics in Calamity Physics in the New York Times, which begins as follows: Whoever coined the phrase “everybody loves a winner” probably wasn’t one. When the news came out that a distractingly pretty actress, playwright and Barnard College graduate named Marisha… — read more
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The Great Pathetic Joy
I’ve been reading Edward Conze’s translation of The Perfection of Wisdom in Twenty-Five Thousand Lines, a far longer and more elaborate discussion of emptiness than The Heart Sutra. In a section describing the thought of enlightenment–the selflessness that makes ordinary generosity, patience, discipline, exertion, meditation, and wisdom infinitely more effective–there are lists (as is often… — read more
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What Could Have Been
With a tip of the hat to Meg, some entries I never got around to writing: Digital media content providers have blown it. Because of their obsession with preventing everyone who hasn’t paid them directly for the privilege from enjoying digital versions of their content (an obsession they didn’t develop to such an exaggerated degree… — read more
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I Am Jigme Tsöndrü
Last weekend, I took my Refuge Vow. So for a week now, I’ve been a Kagyu Buddhist named Jigme Tsöndrü–the name is Tibetan (Jigme means “without fear,” Tsöndrü means “exertion“). I decided to take my Refuge Vow six or eight months ago (around the time I shifted from saying things like “The Buddhists believe…,” to… — read more
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…Or Maybe It Is the End Times
Pat Robertson says, “I go away at the end of each year to pray, and if I heard the Lord right about 2006, the coasts of America will be lashed by storms.” If he heard the Lord right? Meaning that prophets might mishear the Lord? If a tsunami doesn’t hit the Pacific Northwest this year,… — read more
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