Hee hee!

I just recently went high-tech and got a smart phone. How much do I want to carry it around in this cheeky little case??

(A lot.)

5 coolest words in the English language

I am loving "desiderium" (an ardent desire or wish; a longing, properly for a thing once possessed and now missed; a sense of loss).

Check out the rest here!

Do you have any favorite words? I've always loved "ineffable".

Typography nerdery

For all you designers out there, or all you general typography nerds, this New York Times piece is just great.

“I think sometimes that being overly type-sensitive is like an allergy,” said Michael Bierut, a partner in the Pentagram design group in New York. “My font nerdiness makes me have bad reactions to things that spoil otherwise pleasant moments.”

One of my favorite proofreading marks is "wf" for "wrong font." You'd be surprised how many times a little something ends up in the wrong font. Usually this happens with quotation marks, and it's easy to tell because some are curvy and some are not. (Once, I proofed something for Chris and he read the "wf" mark as "wtf." I told my boss that we should introduce that mark ASAP.) Now I feel like re-watching Helvetica!

image via Flikr

Friday dorkdom

I get so much satisfaction from Clorox-wiping my desk, phone, mouse, and keyboard on Fridays. So much.

Greatest game idea ever

This thing needs to be released, pronto! (Yes, the family is hilarious. Note how the young girl keeps taking sips from her water bottle, because this is an active video game.)

When it is released, I demand a Buffy the Vampire Slayer game, so when I walk by that thing, it'll be all like, "Well, well, if it isn't the Slayer?" And then I will open up a can of virtual whoop-ass and take out all my commuter's aggression on a CGI vampire. NICE.

Play ball

[Warning: Long post about baseball. Feel free to skip.]

Why baseball? Up in the nosebleeds in 50-degree weather on Sunday, watching two teams in which I have no personal investment, I couldn’t have been happier. Of all sports, why does only baseball hold a romantic allure for me? I could say it’s all those hours spent at the Little League fields while my brothers moved from tee ball to real ball to fall ball to all-stars. But I think it’s more than that.

Baseball has a wider appeal. It’s not just for the jocks who stuffed your skinny stepbrother into a locker. Your skinny stepbrother loves baseball, too. He brings a notepad to the ball field and crunches numbers. He knows batting averages, records, dates. He gets respect for this, because annotating the annals of this sport is important. Baseball has a history and a mythology of its own, deep and entire, yet inextricably tied to the history and mythology of America.

And baseball’s not just for rich folks or the incredibly tall or for ruffians. It’s for everyone. It requires minimal equipment. It can be played anywhere. Even professionally, it is not played under cover. Wind, rain, and beating sun affect the players just as they’d affect anyone else.

As for baseball players, they make mistakes. Heck, this is a sport with a statistical designation for “error,” right up there on the JumboTron for everyone to see. And so we understand baseball players—they’re like us somehow. Even with the major leagues, we feel like the players are boys we’ve known forever. We give them nicknames as if we used to share after-school milk and cookies. When we watch them play, they’re not covered in pads, strapped to skates, or otherwise burdened by equipment. They are men. First, foremost, visibly.

Baseball is not only mental or only physical; it’s both. It’s not just a team sport or just a solo sport; it’s both. Golf is a game of a guy with a stick and a ball; baseball holds more appeal for the showdown factor—a guy with a stick and another guy with a ball, and nine unfolding innings of the infinite possibilities of physics contained in the 60 feet between them.

So, why baseball? I guess the appeal lies mostly in the players. It is this factor, I suppose, that makes baseball steroid stories so upsetting. The game is then no longer real, the players no longer human. It’s Hollywood; reality-plus: a 65-year old person without laugh lines. Players who juice pollute the dreams of kids who believe the ball player's life is something to aspire to and ruin the romance for adults who like to believe that you can know a person. After all, we like our game built the way our country was: From the ground up, equal parts emotional fortitude and elbow grease.

Wii would like to play

If you happen to have the extreme good fortune of already owning a video game system (like our Nintendo Wii), getting your game on at home is a recession-friendly way to have some hilarious fun. Plus, you might be able to catch your boyfriend pretending he is Rafael Nadal.

Tweets from space

Ever since I read this New York Magazine piece back in February, I've been intrigued by Twitter, but haven't latched on. I've had trouble understanding why it would be a good addition to my arsenal of Interweb distractions. Friend updates are cool, but Facebook has that. And so what if John Mayer had salami for lunch? If Oprah's having a bad hair day? But this is officially fuckin' cool:

NASA astronaut Mike Massimino is sending "tweets" from space. His first update:

"From orbit: Launch was awesome!! I am feeling great, working hard, & enjoying the magnificent views, the adventure of a lifetime has begun!"

Vampire weekends

We has Buffy. As Chris put it, a smorgasboard of Buffy. Am I becoming a vampire junkie?

If I am, I'm not the only one; some scholars can't stop re-examining Bram Stoker's Dracula over a century after its publication. There's a real vampire trend right now, and I'm sort of on the fence here. Sure, I liked studying Dracula in my Gothic Lit class back in the day, but then there's Twilight. 

I saw the movie Twilight when it came out, without really knowing what I was in for. I thought it was pretty much awful. (Side note: I saw a great Twilight-backlash t-shirt on our trip to Disney: Vampires don't sparkle in sunlight, they burst into flames and DIE.) Regardless of my opinion though, the Twilight novels have sold millions of copies. They're breeding a whole new race of vampire junkies. And I'd rather steer clear of that camp.  

On the other hand, the Buffy series is so good it makes me want to up my vampire media intake quotient. I've read some terrific reviews of HBO's True Blood, but the promo for the second season looks kinda too-scary for me. Anybody seen this? Thoughts?

I guess what's really so great about Buffy is that it falls between the soft-and-cuddly Twilight world and what seems to be the pretty scary realm of True Blood. It's dangerous, but not unbeatable. With the right amount of strength and smarts, a girl can come out on top. Best of all, it shows us that there's a little bit of slayer in all of us. So maybe I'm not a full-fledged vampire junkie...but for sure a vampire-slayer groupie.

Have you been sucked into the vampire trend? Why can't we humans get enough?

Slay On, Slayer

I just began watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer from the beginning, and I am completely hooked. I never watched this show when it was on TV because a) I never watched much TV in those years, and b) the show is called Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Really, now?

However, Chris is in love with the writings of one Joss Whedon and has always assured me that I'd love this show. On his recommendation, I finally got around to giving it a shot. Maybe it's the sweet '90s outfits, or the major girl-power factor, or the sexy vampire love interest (Robert Pattinson, eat your heart out). Who knows. Now, this blog is in immediate danger of becoming a Buffy tribute site, full of creepy fan-fic and what have you. But let's stop short of THAT. The servers are down at work today, so this is what you get:

Obsession: Mail chutes

My favorite thing about visiting the dentist would have to be the mail chutes in the old, old building. I'm obsessed. The Cutler mail chute was invented in 1883. According to Wikipedia, there are still 900 active chutes in New York City. I am dying to see one in action.

I strongly feel my quality of life would be improved if I could send mail via chute. Or anything via chute, for that matter.

Photos via Flickr: top by ReefRaff, center by teknorat, bottom by joshuaseye.

Blog-iversary and rehearsal day

Wow, it's already my 1-month blogiversary! And in honor of rehearsal day, an orchestra joke...

A local orchestra was performing Beethoven's 9th Symphony. While a stunning piece, there are long passages during which the bass section does not play a single note. On opening night, the bassists decided to make good use of this time by slipping out to the pub across the street. After pounding some drinks, they stumbled back just in time to play their parts in the last movement. A violist noticed their entrance.
"Maestro!" he hissed at the conductor.
"What's the problem?" the conductor asked.
"It's the bottom of the 9th and the basses are loaded!"

More music lessons

Orchestra humor never gets old. In honor of normal rehearsal day, a snippet from last night's Mozart run-through:

Concertmaster: "This is allegro non troppo."
Second violinist: "Yeah, allegro non stoppo."

Regal Ewok

Went to the movies in Times Square this evening. Anyone else like to refer to the Regal E-Walk as the Regal Ewok, or is that just me?

Excellent shot of the Regal by mulmatsherm on Flickr.

Music lessons

In honor of rehearsal day, a short music lesson by my stand partner, Craig.

Supreme Court divided on issue of apostrophe s

Hehe, fun article.

"As one of its final acts last term, the U.S. Supreme Court issued Kansas v. Marsh, a case involving the constitutionality of a state death-penalty statute. The 5-4 decision exposed the deep divide that exists among the nation's intellectual elite regarding one of society's most troubling issues -- namely, whether the possessive form of a singular noun ending with the letter 's' requires an additional 's' after the apostrophe."

full article at law.com

I happen to be firmly in favor of adding the extra s. It may get bulky, but to me the logic is almost mathematical.