- Blog
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Sally Field, Phil Hartman, and Everyone’s Jesus
My wife Jessica dug up this old SNL clip today, and I love it. //player.theplatform.com/p/NnzsPC/widget/select/media/5mtKnN9OGzHe?disableEndCard=true Let me tell you why I love it. First, Sally Field commits. This is not some half-baked celebrity-host cue-card phone-in. She becomes this Jesus-loving woman entirely. It’s just grand. Second, Phil Hartman is the perfect Jesus. Not because he “looks…
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Zelda, Bottles, Glasses, Etc.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gvWFqrKcsU&w=500&h=281]
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The Power and Pathos of Optimus Prime
As you might know, I am a great fan of the old-school Transformers, the 1986 Transformers animated film in particular. (I even hosted a whole podcast episode about it.) For all their flaws (which are plentiful), the franchise was a watershed moment for me, introducing me as a child to a kind of storytelling, a style of…
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Here Come the Apologetics from “Some” Mars One Candidates
The true believers of Mars One have begun to respond to the criticism the program is facing, most specifically from the excellent investigative work of Elmo Keep, whose pieces I have now cited twice on this blog. Yesterday, I wrote about how Keep’s reporting reveals that Mars One is beginning to look less like a…
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Mars One is Amway-Meets-Heaven’s Gate
In November I wrote about an investigative piece by Elmo Keep on the Mars One initiative, which is supposed to be screening candidates for a one-way mission to Mars in the next decade. Go read that post to get caught up. (And read all of Keep’s original article, which is amazing.) In my post, I…
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Now I Wire Me Up to Sleep
You know how when you’ve had a good night’s sleep, you wake up the next morning rested, refreshed, and ready to start your day? Well, I don’t. In fact, I have never felt this way. Regardless of how many hours of sleep I get, whether I remember dreaming or not, or whether or not I’ve…
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My Son and Papa Dreadnoughtus
You may recall that last year they announced the discovery of a dinosaur species which they called Dreadnoughtus, thought to be the single largest land animal to ever live. Cool, right? Suck it, Argentinosaurus! Anyway, my 5-year-old son has a project this week in his preschool class on dinosaurs, his favorite subject. He had to choose one to…
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To Persist, to Ponder
Neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi died on March 9 of lung cancer. He was, as I am, 37 years old. He had, as I do, a young daughter. (I also of course have a son.) Before he died, Kalanithi wrote about his mortality, the change in his experience of time, and what held meaning for him in his last…
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Just Let People Use Their Damn Gadgets
Here’s Federico Veticci on iPads as cameras: And yes, I think I’d look silly shooting photos with an iPad in public. But, to put it bluntly, whatever. At the end of the day, any device that facilitates memories is a welcome addition to our computing lives. I’d always been put off by the hostility from…
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Oliver and I are Going to Die
Oliver Sacks thinks differently from me. He will be dead soon. He’s handling it much better than I would.
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You Got Taylor Swift in My Trent Reznor!
I am not generally impressed by Taylor Swift. I like some Nine Inch Nails and respect Trent Reznor, but I also think the whole act is a little overwrought and silly sometimes. I had no idea that the two, not unlike peanut butter and chocolate, could be so good together. And now, of course, “Shake…
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Why Not-Being in the Future Completely Sucks
Adam Frank at NPR’s 13.7 blog on why we shouldn’t be hung up about death, even though there’s no afterlife: [E]ven though none of us existed 1,000 years ago, you don’t find many people worrying about their nonexistence during the Dark Ages. Our not-being in the past doesn’t worry us. So, why does our not-being…
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Industry as an Intrinsic End
Alan Jacobs foreswears the Internet of analytics: Twitter and Tumblr […] have something important in common, which they share with most social media sites: they invite you to measure people’s response to you. For many people this probably means nothing, but for me it has always had an effect. Over the years I developed a…
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Comics on Tablets: A High Bar Easily Cleared (Addendum to “The Tablet Reconsidered”)
It occurred to me that after my 3400-word opus on how the tablet is being squeezed out of its reason-for-being by big phones and sleeker laptops, that I owed it to myself and my tens of readers to give a serious look at one use-case for large tablets that I suspect no other device can…
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The Tablet Reconsidered: A High Bar for the Middle Space
The tablet computer as we know it is about to turn 5 years old. Yes, tablet computers in some for or another existed before then, but on January 27, 2010, Steve Jobs introduced the iPad, which truly formed the basis for what we currently understand a tablet to be. Whatever we considered a tablet computer…
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