Another Useless Talent Exhibited

My assistant brewer, Dave, is good at incredulity, among other things. He’s smart, a fount of the kind of quasi-useful knowledge copyeditors excel at (e.g., they are vocal cords, not chords; the word is actually supersede, not supercede, although some style manuals now accept the typo as a new “variant”), he knows a lot about movies, [...]

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Glimpses of the Magic Kingdom

If you remember when the Wonderful World of Disney was on ABC on Sunday nights, then you also remember their wonderful world of “color! color! color!” and this first picture is for you:

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Better shared than in private?

Does music seem better on the radio than when played on your own personal sound system?

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Kwestions of a Digi Qlutz

I’m looking at my new Canon EOS XTi. I’ve stopped procrastinating about buying a digital SLR camera and have only just begun procrastinating on figuring out how to use it.
 
It has all kinds of mysterious little logos and symbols. Both on the body of the camera and in the diagram explaining the LCD screen. It comes [...]

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Comics, Superheroes, & Neoteny

Superheroes were different when I was a kid. They mostly lived in comic books. Superman later became a TV show, but the special effects were so hokey you could practically see the strings propeling him in flight around the stage. We didn’t mind. We were kids. It was understood that childhood imagination, pretending, was part of the [...]

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Of Widows, in Water

I’m pretty omni-movirous, meaning I like a variety of movies, so long as they’re moderately plausible and the stories are well told. There are not many genres I avoid, really — given that I want a good plot and don’t want to suspend disbelief like a hangman working overtime. So when we put Water in our Netflix [...]

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Fallingwater

On our last full day in western Pennsylvania, we drove southeast of Pittsburgh down to Fallingwater, the Frank Lloyd Wright house built over a stream.

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Visiting Pittsburgh

  We spent four days in Pittsburgh this month, not a lot of time to get to know a city well, but enough to get a strong sense of the place, and it felt very insular to me.

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Gone to the Birds

I’ve found a “new” song I like. It’s the theme to the Reebok commercial “Join the Migration.” The singer’s voice is gorgeous, and the song has this alluring, haunting quality. I like it so much I’m almost ready to buy one of their t-shirts. It begins with men looking slowly skyward and includes bird imagery; [...]

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Beads!

Mrs. Ombud’s been busy at The Crucible lately. A little glass, lots of color, a few tools, some focused fire, and you can see her beady handiwork in this photo:

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