May 2013
5 posts
That thing where a friend comes to you in tears because some friend of hers who you never liked just hurt her feelings pretty badly; and you helpfully point out that she doesn’t need someone with a weird fucking face and raging case of “crazy eyes” in her life anyway; and you both start laughing uncontrollably because, even though it’s wrong to build a case against someone based on their weird...
C: Gwyneth Paltrow and Kate Moss aren’t getting along.
R: Did they both reach for the same cigarette or something?
April 2013
3 posts
March 2013
5 posts
A lot of my conversations about television-watching are couched in deliberately vague language to obscure the fact that I stream everything to my Roku box via Amazon-Netflix-Hulu like some survivalist weirdo.
I’ve never said “fuck you” or “go fuck yourself” to anyone in my life. It’s not my steez. I have, however, said “be well” on a couple of occasions when I really meant “fuck you” and “go fuck yourself.”
(And while we’re on the subject: “Take it easy” is pretty much the worst thing one human being can say to another.)
1 tag
February 2013
10 posts
There ought to be a word, if there isn’t already in Portuguese or Japanese or Viennese, for the unbearable lightness of watching someone strenuously attempt to befriend one of your friends solely and conspicuously via social media; for that particular orgy of at-signs, superfluous photo-comments and automatic reblogs.
(Maybe the word for it is bruxism.)
Betazoid →
Originally, Gene Roddenberry conceived Betazoid females as having four breasts. He was persuaded not to use this idea by writer D.C. Fontana.
That Gene Roddenberry was one horny guy.
1 tag
If Higgs Boson Calculations Are Right, A... →
Without warning, a bubble of true vacuum could nucleate somewhere in the universe and move outwards at the speed of light, and before we realized what swept by us our protons would decay away.
Almost poetry.
R1: Who do I call about renting a food truck for a party?
R2: I think you dial 911 and it just shows up.
1 tag
January 2013
11 posts
2 tags
C: I think my mom has a thing for British dudes.
R: I think everyone’s mom has a thing for British dudes.
The only lyrics I seem to remember from 1996’s Evita are Madonna singing “Watch out! Buenos Aires! I’m gonna get all up in you!”—which, C____ informs me, are actually not the words to anything.
Coupe de cheveux
R1: You look so boyish with your hair so short.
R2: Just imagine what this haircut would’ve done for Robin Williams in “Jack.”
We were deciding where to eat dinner.
“Let me see if H_____ wants to join us,” J__ suggested. “Do you know the quickest way to reach him? Should I email him? Text him?”
“Here’s a crazy idea,” I offered.
I told Siri to dial H_____ at his office.
He answered on the first ring.
“Wow, no one ever just calls anymore,” he laughed.
I...
We’d been drunkenly talking about The Princess Bride for several minutes before we both drunkenly realized we’d been drunkenly calling it The Princess Diaries.
December 2012
16 posts
I remember once, when I was a kid, my mom needed to fax something. The inner workings of the machine in the den were a mystery to her, so I walked her through the steps.
After the document had been transmitted, I handed it back to her. She stared at me blankly: “I thought you faxed it.”
At this point we both cracked up. I couldn’t decide if she was giving fax technology too much credit (Star...
1 tag
Iced Goldfrapp, cyborg whale song, deliquescent...
“There is no immortality that is not built on friendship and work done with care....”
– Robin Sloan, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore
So, The Hobbit in high-frame-rate 3-D: At times it’s like watching Ridley Scott’s Legend unfold under the klieg lights of Monday Night Football—but at others, it’s something else entirely. The feverish immediacy takes some acclimating, but the mind is quick, the mind adjusts; an open mind adjusts more quickly.
I think the aesthetic considerations are different from those of...
“And he was silent again, for who is not silent when someone is dead, who was a...”
– Alan Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country
Ack, sweatdrops
(Venn diagram of white girls who address one another as mamacita on Facebook and people who publicly lamented Hostess Brands’ Chapter 11 bankruptcy.)
Automatic
At a shoot yesterday, I was helping a friend grab some equipment out of her car. Her arms full, she asked me to close the trunk. After several seconds of watching me search fruitlessly for a button that would accomplish this, she sighed and pushed the lid down manually.
2012 ended with a whimper late Friday afternoon, when a writer for Deadline Hollywood characterized How I Met Your Mother’s lightly serialized sitcom storytelling as an “overarching mythology.”
iMessage
I was texting someone else. Your number came up because your name is a subset of the recipient’s name. You and I haven’t spoken in years.
I pressed my finger to your name, watched it rise in a little green capsule. After a moment, the capsule cycled to blue, and I knew the tiniest thing about you.
Name-wise, Amalgamated Dynamics is the Frusen Glädjé to Industrial Light & Magic’s Häagen-Dazs.
