Further evidence of just how damn cool this InterWeb thingie really is: My old high school buddy Keith now lives in New Jersey. Today, he needed to go into The City — which us provincials refer to as “New York” and/or “Manhattan” — on business and he wanted to know where he could go for a good lunch. So what does he do? He shoots off an email to none other than Brian Greenberg, a guy Keith has never met but whom he “knows” from Brian’s comments here on Simple Tricks, and my own links to Brian’s blog. Keith explains his connection to me and his situation and then asks for a couple of recommendations; Brian, good egg that he is, immediately sends back a list of possibilities, and forwards the whole conversation to me for my amusement and/or enlightenment.

I love that this sort of thing is now possible. No, not only possible, but downright routine. There are a lot of things about life in the 21st Century that I really, vehemently don’t like — the apparent apathy of the general public towards US-sanctioned torture, a media obsession with extremely young and poorly behaved people who make far more money than I do, those little condiment packets at all the fast-food places that you can never open without getting the stuff on your hands — but the idea that someone writing a personal blog in Utah can facilitate enough of a social connection between two strangers who live on the East Coast for one of them to ask the other for a restaurant recommendation… well, I do love that.

As I said to Brian when I emailed him back, it’s like the whole country, and to a lesser extent the whole planet, is becoming one big small town, where everybody seems to know a guy. Keith, I hope you enjoyed your lunch. And Brian, thanks again for helping a guy out…

Continuing with the holiday theme, here’s a prototype Christmas card my buddy Chenopup sent around for comment the other day:

What do you all think? Looks like the kid’s had enough shopping to me…

I have something of a fascination for Japanese culture, which seems to my admittedly uneducated eye to be equal parts beautiful, mysterious, and childish. Japanese TV is the greatest, a often baffling exercise in… well, silliness. Consider the following, which seems to be something like the old Candid Camera show here in the US. We’ve got a Spanish speed-walking champion out on the track doing his thing, and a group of phony samurai poised to see if they can get him to break his stride:

I love the dramatic Godzilla/anime-style music as the samurai chase this dude around the track, and the way the speed-walker actually thanks the TV show when he finds out what’s going on, as if he’s thrilled to have had a practical joke played on him. (He says, “Arigato,” which, thanks to the immortal song-writing capabilities of Dennis De Young, we know means “thank you.”) And who would’ve guessed that the Japanese for “stand by” is… “stand by”? Fascinating…

Okay, I feel kind of silly asking, but I’d like all of you reading this to do something for me. It’s like this: I’ve got this co-worker who has built a website for his wife… only she doesn’t know about it yet. For some reason, he’d like to get the hit count up before he tells her about it. Or, in his own words:

…last week my wife had a pretty tough week. And to top it off, she smashed her big toe with a large ceramic pot. So I decided to start building her site.

 

She doesn’t know it exists yet, and I’m hoping to keep it that way for as long as possible. I’d also like to have as many visitors as possible before the inevitable happens and she discovers it. So spread the word, to everyone (except her). My goal is one hundred thousand visits before she finds out.

As of my visit tonight, he’s had a mere 104 visitors. So, if you have a second, click on over there, will you? Just for a second, just to register that the site has had a new visitor. And if you’ve got a blog or friends with Internet access and nothing better to do, spread the word, will you?

Well, kids, if you’ve been looking for a definite sign that the Christmas season is upon us, the picture above is probably it. That’s the giant tree in New York’s Rockefeller Center, which was lighted last night in a televised ceremony that I — grinchy-grinch scroogemeister that I am — did not see. Fortunately, however, our special Manhattan-area correspondent Brian Greenberg was on hand to document the whole thing. Click the photo above to see his complete Rock Center Christmas Tree photoblog, or follow this link here. He’s got some really cool shots of the behind-the-scenes preparations (which I guess aren’t really very “behind the scenes,” since anyone walking down the street could see them, but they’re nevertheless things a lot of people wouldn’t ever see). He also provides some amusing commentary that’s worth reading, so be sure to take a minute or two to savor the text instead of just flicking through the pics. (I loved the story about Josh Groban. See, that’s the difference between New York and Salt Lake; here, people are too polite to tell an opera singer who sucks to pipe down, let alone somebody who can really sing!)

Be warned that Brian’s photoblog doesn’t seem to like Firefox, so you’ll have to use *shudder* Internet Explorer. But that’s alright… there are compensations…

I got out of work early today for the long holiday weekend, and found myself a little taken aback by the unaccustomed pleasure of seeing an entire afternoon stretched out before me with nothing on the agenda. I considered a number of options for what I could do with my free time. I ended up taking the light rail up to the U of U campus and meeting a buddy of mine for lunch, with a detour along the way to the U Bookstore.

I haven’t set foot in the Bookstore in years, possibly not since I graduated a decade and a half ago. The whole experience filled me with deja vu — it’s not much different now than in my own student days, aside from the flat-screen TVs and life-size Master Chief statue in the lobby — but the most evocative aspect of the scene was the music playing on the PA system, a song I remember very well, “Crazy” by Icehouse. Here’s the video:

Two thoughts occurred to me as I wandered among racks of familiar-looking red t-shirts while listening to a band whose name I had to really work to retrieve from the memory banks: can I really have been out of school long enough for the music that was popular when I was in school to become “golden oldies retail ambiance”? And if so, is the Bookstore’s manager simply playing the same damn tapes he had way back then?

On any other day, this epiphany would’ve made me feel positively ancient. Today, though, I was walking around free during my normal working hours, feeling vaguely like a kid playing hooky. And it was just plain good to hear this song again… and on that note, Happy Thanksgiving everyone…

I’ve heard it said that women don’t remember the pain of childbirth, not really, because that’s the only way they’d ever be willing to go through it again.

Raking up autumn leaves is kind of like that. Oh, I like the raking part well enough. It’s what comes after, the scooping them into garbage bags so you can haul them away, that’s really tedious. I never remember from year to year how sucky that part of the process is.

Oh, well… it was still a gorgeous day and good to be outside.

It’s a beautiful, sunshiney afternoon here in the SLC, with blue skies and temperatures in the high 60s, probably for the last time this year before winter’s cold, clammy hand closes its skeletal fingers around the valley (how’s that for an image of impending gloom?). I should be outside, making myself some vitamin D and raking up my leaves before tomorrow’s rain turns them into heavy, sodden mush. So what am I doing? I’m surfing the web, naturally… life in the 21st century. Sigh.
Can’t help it, though… I keep finding interesting stuff that leads me deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole. So, just in case you, too, are not playing outside like the good kids ought to be, here’s a special Saturday edition of Drive-By Blogging linkage:

Continue Reading…

Check out this wild Guinness advert:

Apparently, there’s not much to do in those small Argentine villages. Details on the making here.

You ever wake up with a song already stuck in your head? Yeah… mine this morning is “My Head Hurts, My Feet Stink, and I Don’t Love Jesus,” by Jimmy Buffett. Make of that what you will…