Month: May 2008

Image of rock concert at Great American in SF in 2008

What is it about concerts? (part I)

I’ve been meaning to write about rock shows for a while now.

The Carolinian approaches the Kannapolis, NC Amtrak Station, May 28, 2009

Contrasts

This kind of thing (previously) seems to tend to happen right around the time I’m about to take a long trip on Amtrak. Or maybe that’s when I most notice it.

I did ride 13 hours on Amtrak last Thursday, and it was pretty uneventful and relaxing. It was also supposed to be an 11-hour ride (which is a fairly typical delay, I think). And I’ve had a great time in North Carolina with my family. But how long, I wonder, will my scheduled 13-hour trip from Kannapolis to Manhattan take tomorrow?

Speaking of NYC, I enjoyed Yankee Stadium way more than I expected to.

This is old news

I was a little embarrassed that only a few days after scoffing at how dangerous Oakland is, I got shot. I intended to post about it, but I just never got around to it. Each time I thought about it, it moved farther away from “kind of scary” and closer and closer to “old news,” but it never quite became a blog entry.

Anyway, one Wednesday night last fall,

Bob Barr declares for President…

as a Libertarian… and he has some interesting things to say about the two major parties.

I find it very interesting and very revealing to hear a Southern Republican former Congressman (and Reagan appointee!) say this about the party he was in for decades:

The one thing that matters to Republicans above all else and to the exclusion of virtually everything else — other than raising money — is to elect people to office and keep people in office.

Principle and substance has no longer anything to do with what the party stands for, particularly at the national level.

He also touches on the fact that the “Democrat” [sic] Party has “fallen into the same trap: the trap of incumbency.”

Younger than John McCain

Maybe a riff on Barack Obama is your new bicycle (or at least a very interesting counterpoint), here are some things younger than John McCain. Included are—well, I won’t spoil the surprise. Just visit the site.

I know it’s silly and clichéd and unoriginal for me to say this, but I love the Internet.

RIP, Robert Rauschenberg

“Robert Rauschenberg, dubbed by the New York Times as a “Titan of American Art,” has died, aged 82.

I grew up seeing his work over and over again, and it has had a subtle but lasting impression on me. He was a master of capturing the energy and imagery of the mid- to late-20th century.

All Your Baseball Questions Are Belong To Us

This is a great read for anyone who loves baseball, and I know you do:

Bill James Answers All Your Baseball Questions (from the NY Times “Freakonomics” blog)

I really need to get some Bill James books.

Saving the world, whatever that means

While I’m not blogging or anything, go ahead and read this post detailing The Top Root Causes of Everything Wrong With the World. Let me know what you find out. That is an early entry on a blog I probably want to read. I’m noting it here so that it will enter my consciousness every time I check to see whether or not I’ve posted a blog entry lately [I haven’t]).

I have been commenting on other websites a lot lately, which strikes me as, if not stupid per se, then at best wasted energy. Why should I provide my awesome content and insights to other websites, when I have one right here dying from lack of care and feeding? There is no good reason save sheer laziness. (I think there are other, bad reasons, though.)

Good old King Kaufman got me going on a bunch of tangents tonight by listing a few bloggers he liked a lot. That distracted me from my main task of the moment, which is (shh!) updating my online portfolio. Not just updating it — completely creating a new one almost entirely from scratch, since my current portfolio site was designed sometime around 2001 or 2002 and was last updated in 2004. Now that it’s “time for a change” (imagine me saying that in my best Bill Clinton voice), a new portfolio is due.

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