You may recall that last week when I posted up the photo of what I can see from my home office, I invited others to share their views as well. The Girlfriend has decided she wants a piece of that action, so here’s what Anne can see from her apartment:
As amusing as it was to learn of the former Captain Picard’s fascination with female cinematic nudity, I find that I’m still looking for a reason not to re-create the famous stunt from The Poseidon Adventure (the original one, natch) by hurling myself out my office window and onto the skylight of the nightclub down below. I think I need some heavier ammunition to knock me out of my current funk… I need… the power of The Shat!
I don’t know about you kids, but I’ve had a bad week. One of those butt-kicking, every-day-I-hit-the-ground-running, too-much-to-do-and-not-enough-time-to-do-it-in, my-pointy-haired-boss-is-talking-again-why-won’t-he-just-shut-up! kind of weeks. A big, long, five-day gruel-fest of petty annoyances and mounting frustrations that has me thinking that maybe, just maybe, it was a bad idea for that primordial ooze to start assembling itself into proteins in the first place. In other words, I’m totally knackered.
So what do I need at the end of a week that has seen me gobbling Excedrin by the fist-full? If you said, “Irish whiskey,” well, yes, of course, you’re right, but I am still at work, so I’d better hold off on that option until later. In the meantime, how about a video clip of respected, dignified Shakespearean actor (and TV and movie star) Patrick Stewart telling an aspiring writer all about his own screenplay, a vanity piece about a man with the psychic ability to remove women’s clothes? Ah, yes, that’ll do nicely…
For some reason, YouTube won’t allow me to embed this clip here at Simple Tricks, so you’ll have to click the link above and go watch it elsewhere. Or, if that’s too much trouble, you could click this one. Trust me, it’s worth the effort…
In a comment on the previous entry, Cranky Robert asked if all you folks out there in InternetLand “could get a shot of the newly refurbished Bennion Scriptorium.” Well, it just so happens that I have such a shot handy at the moment:
A couple weeks ago, political blogger Andrew Sullivan tried an interesting experiment: he asked his readers to send in photos of the view from their windows. The idea was to try and get more of a feel for who his readers are by seeing the places they call home. The experiment was an unqualified success — he got hundreds of submissions, so many that his corporate overlords saw fit to gather some of the more interesting ones into an official feature on their website (for the record, my favorite shot is the final one, of a misty morning in the Hollywood Hills).
Never one to let a good Internet fad get away from me, I thought I’d do something similar and share with you what I can see from my home office. This inspiring vista is my back yard at the Bennion Compound; the shot was taken two weeks ago, on a drizzly Sunday afternoon. Click on it to get a better look. FYI, the green thing in the top foreground is an awning/gazebo thingie that shades my deck; the big grayish thing in the bottom foreground is the cover for my hot tub, currently drained and unplugged because it wasn’t worth maintaining for the amount of use it actually received. As I said, inspiring, eh?
I intend to post up a photo of the view from my day-job office, too, whenever I remember to bring a camera into work. If anyone would like to share their views a la Sullivan’s readers, feel free to send them along…
Hey, kids — sorry for the long period of radio silence, especially after the big build-up I delivered for my planned “Talkin’ Books” week. I had — and still have — some major ambitions for that topic, but unfortunately Real Life last week wasn’t very conducive to ambitious blogging, or much of anything else, either. The short version: my load at work has been heavier than expected (I was told things were due to start slowing down for the summer; as Wayne and Garth might say, “shyeah…”), my allergies have been fearsome (the tissues around my eyes were so swollen and dark on Saturday that I looked as if I’d lost a bar fight), and I just haven’t had anything left to give at the end of the day. So rather than dragging my sorry rear-end home and blogging about books until bedtime, I’ve been dragging my sorry rear-end home and sitting insensate in a darkened room with a cool, damp cloth over my face.
I’m hoping to get around to some of the book-related posts I’ve got in mind later this week, but in the meantime, here’s a little something to take the edge off your Simple Tricks jones:
I love the DVD — the clarity of the image, the supplemental materials, and even the physical object itself. It’s such an elegant thing, a small, shiny silver disc that costs relatively little and takes takes up minimal space on my sagging, overloaded bookshelves. Even so, I was a late adopter of the format, and I haven’t entirely given up watching my old videotapes, either. My reasons for this insanely masochistic behavior are largely economic. You see, I have a huge financial investment in the outmoded VHS format, and I just can’t bring myself to flush all that money down the toilet just because there’s something better on the market, at least not all at once. I’m also philosophically opposed to our society’s wasteful paradigm of planned obsolescence and throw-it-all-away-for-the-latest-and-greatest consumerism; even though I always give in eventually, I hold out as long as I can before I upgrade. So, curmudgeon that I am, I keep on watching those inferior, deteriorating cassettes. But I also have to admit I’ve also got a kind of sneaky nostalgia for VHS tapes, especially the ones I recorded myself. I don’t think younger folks, who have been awash in home entertainment of increasing quality since they were born, fully understand what it was like to be able to bring home a movie or record something off TV for the first time ever, or why someone would still want to look at one of those horrible, lo-rez anachronisms today when there are so many flashier alternatives.
For the kids in the audience, Lileks explains:
The Girlfriend was quite taken with something I showed her yesterday and thought I needed to share it with my other loyal readers, so here you go, the very first Simple Tricks and Nonsense Reader Request:
You’re looking at a 20-story-high, automated car-storage facility built by the Volkswagen company in Wolfsburg, Germany. (Click the photo to enlarge it.) It’s apparently part of an automotive theme park where, among other things, you can buy one of the new cars stored in this tower. After you place your order, the robo-garage retrieves the requested car and brings it down for you without any human intervention. All very high-tech and futuristicky. Reminds me of the factory scene in Minority Report. Wild stuff.
Credit goes to Boing Boing for bringing my attention to this, as well as Boing Boing’s source for this item, The Cool Hunter. Click here for a couple more photos of this amazing (if gimmicky) monument to the car industry…
This makes me smile: it seems a gang of German anarchists is dressing up as superheroes, knocking over gourmet food markets for high-end chow instead of money, and giving the booty to the poor:
The gang members seemingly take delight in injecting humour into their raids, which rely on sheer numbers and the confusion caused by their presence. After they plundered Kobe beef fillets, champagne and smoked salmon from a gourmet store on the exclusive Elbastrasse [in Hamburg], they presented the cashier with a bouquet of flowers before making their getaway.
The latest robbery is part of a pattern over the past several months, suggesting that the thieves deliberately set out to highlight what they perceive as the inequality inherent in German society.
The linked article notes that “The gang are also behind black market cinema tickets which they distribute free to the poor, and they have printed leaflets telling passengers how to dodge ticket inspectors on the city’s underground and buses.”
No word as to which superheroes they are dressing as, however. Personally, I like to imagine Green Lantern handing out purloined steaks and forged movie tickets. Green Lantern is cool…
Oh, my… here’s a interesting development: it seems that Scalzi came across the post I wrote about him and has linked back to me in a post of his own, using my full name and everything.