Tuesday, January 31, 2006

Nelly song

In one verse of one song, Nelly manages to rhyme

ensemble
mambo
combo
Cabo
Tae-bo
Volvo
Diablo
Rhino

Is there a song that consists entirely of end-rhymes?

Monday, January 30, 2006

SXSW Interactive

One of the coolest events to occur in Austin every year is the SXSW film, music, and interactive festivals. This year's South by Southwest Interactive Festival features a keynote "conversation" between two of our favorite bloggers: dooce and kottke. The problem is, the rest of the festival doesn't really interest me and a single badge costs $275. So, for the wife and I to attend this one lecture it would cost us about $550. Now, I really like these bloggers, but I'm leaning towards saying no to the $550 cover charge.

Saturday, January 21, 2006

Bibliomania, part 2

One of my New Year's resolutions is to consume less media in order to write/create more, but I appear to be failing (see Netflix mention below). Maybe I will post a short story soon.

Reading/recently read:

Black Hole by Charles Burns / This is the guy who draws the cover of The Believer every month. This is an awesome book, part teen horror comedy, part sci-fi thriller, part Daniel Clowes.

The Areas of My Expertise by John Hodgman / Former Professional Literary Agent and renowned smoking-jacket/Tolkien/attack-ad expert Hodgman takes us on a tour of Complete World Knowledge. For example:

WERE YOU AWARE OF IT?

Jorge Luis Borges was editor-in-chief of Games magazine from 1980-81.

WERE YOU EVEN AWARE OF THIS FACT??!!?!?

There is the famous list of 700 hobo names and a study of the Lycanthropic cycles and their antidotes.


Warlock by Oakley Hall
This is a New York Review of Books reissue of a classic western about a Tombstone-like town called Warlock. It's supposed to be this end-all, be-all Western myth, and I am so far very impressed with the writing style and plot.

Memories of a Catholic Girlhood by Mary McCarthy

I'm re-reading "To Kill a Mockingbird" and my favorite detail I'd forgotten is the way the country kid Walter Cunningham answers in the affirmative: "Yeb'm."

Also, we just subscribed to Netflix and our first two movies were "Broken Flowers" and the Johnny Depp "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory." I really didn't want to like the Tim Burton "redoing" of a classic, but I have to admit that I really liked it. I thought "Broken Flowers" was OK--a lot of Jim Jarmusch trying to be unpredictable (which I like) and Bill Murray as his own sad clown (which was good the first couple of times, but felt kind of half-hearted here, like Murray was getting tired of it. I'd like to see Bill Murray team up with Harold Ramis and do "Stripes 2" or something like that. Any suggestions for the queue?

Sunday, January 15, 2006

Apparently


Murray=Sutter
Originally uploaded by mattbucher.
Bill Murray was elected to baseball's Hall of Fame.

Saturday, January 14, 2006

electrical fire


electrical fire
Originally uploaded by mattbucher.
We had a small electrical fire the other day.