Rathaus

June 12 | 12:12 pm | Vienna

Men of Tomorrow

I just finished reading Men of Tomorrow, a book about the birth of the comic book industry. As usual, I stumbled upon it while wandering aimlessly though the library, though I do remember hearing good things about the book when it came out and may have even given it to a friend as a Christmas gift a few years back. While I found some of the writing a bit labored, the book presents a ton of information in a well-organized and coherent way. You don't need to be a comic book enthusiast (or former enthusiast) to enjoy the book, but it certainly would help. Still, there's enough really interesting stuff about the socioeconomic history of comics, especially in the first half of the book, to appeal to anyone who is interested in the history of mass media, business, entertainment, labor, or politics.

Thai Not?

Thai is the gateway drug of ethnic food.

I said this during a discussion about ethnic food today. I was trying to be funny, but I think it's pretty accurate.

It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World

I normally don't pay much attention to the Emmys in particular and award shows in general, but I was pleased to hear that one my favorite shows, Mad Men, won the big prize last night. If you haven't been watching, you should tune in. If not for its richly developed characters and intricate plot lines, then for the influence it will soon have over everything that you wear.

Peeping Hi

Poor Hi - it looks like Lois has thwarted his favorite Saturday afternoon activity - sitting around the house "reading" his porno mags. I guess "Peeps" could be interpreted as a play on People Magazine instead of a stag rag, but sitting around the house reading People is arguably an even more depraved activity for a wholesome family man like Hi. A final possibility is that he subscribes to some sort of weird underground Mashmallow Peeps fetishist magazine, which is certainly the most depraved interpretation of them all.

Juror #47

A few weeks ago, I received a jury duty summons. I'd never been called to serve on a jury before, so I was kind of excited but, like any good American, I was also kind of dreading the whole thing. As it turned out, I didn't get called to serve on a jury. In fact, no one in the pool of potential jurors was called to serve. I was a little bummed, but I guess it was better than having to be one of the alternate jurors on a trial that spends two weeks in deliberation and ends in a mistrial.

Immaculate Reception

September 13 | 6:22 pm | Grand Rapids, MI

The Gay Nineties

I finally got around to checking out Hulu. It's pretty cool and all, but that's not why I'm mentioning it here. I wound up watching a recent episode of The Simpsons that essentially rewrote the entire history of the series. It was kind of shocking, though I've been paying so little attention to The Simpsons lately that perhaps this kind of stuff is happening on weekly basis now. In case you don't feel like watching the episode, it's a flashback to Homer and Marge's post-high school courtship, during the early 1990s. The Simpsons has often taken a fairly laid-back approach to geography and the passage of time, and the show has even pointed out its own inconsistencies for a laugh a few times, but as far as I know, the show had always treated the past as a fixed point a time. I guess that's no longer the case. I'm not angry or anything, the Simpsons is still one of the all-time great TV shows, even if it's gotten a bit long in the tooth as of late. Still, it is a little disappointing that they felt the need to upend the entire Simpsons space-time continuum just to cram in a few lame jokes about grunge rock, political correctness, and Bill Clinton.

Days of Thunder

I've seen more movies in the theaters this summer than I have in a long time. I think it has more to do with circumstances than a noticeable uptick in the quality of the films being produced in Hollywood. That being said, I did enjoy Tropic Thunder on my most recent trip to the local cineplex. It wasn't as quotable as I thought it was going to be, but it was still funny. One of my favorite characters in the star-studded cast was the special effects assistant, an actor named Dempsey Silva with a single line on his IMDB resume. If there's an Oscar for rookie of the year, he's my nomination.

Beyond Compare

I had a friend in high school who was a Dinosaur Jr. fanatic. In fact, he was such a huge fan that he refused to call them anything but their original name (Dinosaur). So while I've been familiar with Dinosaur Jr. and many of the original member's side projects for a long time, I never actually got around to listening to any of their music until recently. I recently picked up Beyond, which I later learned is result of the band's recent reunion after 19 years apart. It's a great album, and it's the first time I've really gotten excited about anything new in the rock/alt rock genre in a long time. I think that one of the reasons I've never been too big on a lot of the alt rock/indie rock bands is a lot of them don't rock all that hard. The stuff on Beyond rocks pretty hard. It's generally more of a punk influenced sound than the blues rock sound that I really dig, but I've never had a problem with punk rock, providing that it actually rocks.

As an aside, in addition to just getting around to discovering Dinosaur Jr., I'm also still getting my feet wet in the digital music world. I was considering just purchasing a single track from the album (This is All I Came To Do), since it was the only one I was familiar with before making my purchase, but I decided against it. While I like the idea of being able to pick and choose songs individually, I still think that for any reasonably serious artist, the album, while it may be a completely artificial construct in the digital music world, is still an important artistic statement.

Lucky Kitchen

We've been having some good luck in the kitchen lately. I mentioned to my Mom last week that we had a lot of eggplant and tomatoes from our farm share. As luck would have it, she came across a recipe for eggplant and tomato stacks that she sent our way. We tried it last night and it was incredible. I'm not a huge fan of eggplant, but I loved it in this dish. We made a number of modifications to the recipe, including omitting the zucchini since we didn't have any on hand, substituting dried oregano, basil, and parsley for the fresh herbs that the recipe called for, and reducing the amount of olive oil and cheese, but it was still delicious. If I ever own my own Italian restaurant, this is going on the appetizers menu. Full disclosure: I generally find Williams-Sonoma (the source of the recipe) a tad pretentious (we certainly didn't bake our stacks in a 12 in. cast iron fry pan ($120.00) as the recipe suggested), but a good recipe is a good recipe.

This morning, I decided to make omelettes. I started by sauteing some onions and fresh garlic in a little olive oil. As an aside, we've been getting fresh garlic from our farm share, and I'm completely hooked on it. It is so much better than the pre-minced garlic that we had been getting from the grocery store. I then added the eggs, some Monterrey Jack cheese, and some diced tomatoes to the onions and garlic. The end result was delicious. Omelettes are the casserole (or fried rice) of breakfast; you just throw in whatever ingredients that you can find and see what happens. The best omelettes tend to be the ones that have the least amount of planning, and this was no exception.

Jamaican Me Crazy

June 12 | 11:00 am | Vienna

Good Knight

We finally went to see The Dark Knight last weekend. It's as good as everyone says it is, for the most part. It's certainly the darkest of all the Batman films (though, oddly enough, it probably has more daylight scenes than any of the recent Batman movies). All I can add to the litany of praise heaped on the film are my own, mostly geography-related observations. For one, it appears that Gotham is both a city and a state (or perhaps a city-state) since all of the cars in the movie had Gotham licenses plates. These license plates look very similar to those of the State of Illinois, which leads me to my second observation - Gotham City looks a lot like Chicago in this movie. As it turns out, most of the movie was filmed in Chicago. I thought it was kind of strange, since I had always assumed that Gotham City was a synonym for New York City, but as it turns out, the real-life location of Gotham has been a subject of considerable debate for quite some time. This isn't a case of slopping filmmaking however, Christopher Nolan, the director of the Dark Knight, deliberately used Chicago as the prototype for the Gotham City of his movies. Finally, (mini spoiler alert) I thought that scene at the beginning of the movie where the Joker shows up at a meeting of Gotham's criminal underground was a subtle reference to the 1960s Batman movie, but I'm not sure if that's something that a director like Nolan, who has succeeded brilliantly at rescuing the Batman franchise from its descent into camp and idiocy in the late 90s, would even want to do.

Wardrobe Malfunction

I really enjoy biking to work, but scrambling to stuff my backpack with a change of clothes before heading out the door had been a bit of an issue. On Monday, I forgot to bring a change of socks, so I had to wear my loafers with my white athletic socks. Today, I remembered the socks but forgot my shoes. Thank goodness for the relaxed dress code of the 21st century office.

IZSM

I've been listening to a lot of IZSM lately, a band that I recently discovered on last.fm. I'm particularly enamored by a tune called Izmus, which you can download (legitimately) here, if you're interested. I don't really know a whole lot about the band, other than that they're from Venezuela. The have a MySpace page, of course, but it's in Spanish. Two of their MySpace friends are Living Colour and Vernon Reid, which is a strong endorsement, at least in my book.

Collective Bargaining

If nothing else, the opening ceremony for the Beijing Olympics sure featured a lot of people. At the time, I joked that it was simply due to China's huge population; they have so many people that every square inch of space is occupied. My second, slightly less lame take on that joke was that it was an immense make-work project. Anyone who has ever visited China should know what I mean; transactions that usually only require a single salesperson in US seem to require two or three in China. Leave it to David Brooks to see something more sinister at work. He sees the opening ceremony as a collectivist challenge to the individualism of the west. Whether or not he saw the same threat to western values during the opening ceremonies of the 1998 Nagano Olympics, the 1972 Sapporo Olympics, or the 1964 Tokyo games, all of which took place in Japan, a country with a culture that is much more suspicious of individuality than China, he doesn't say. I suspect that you getting a better insight into what he's thinking if you replace collectivism with another -ism beginning with c, but that also doesn't really work since China wouldn't be hosting the Olympics right now if they hadn't decided to start ditching most of their communist economic system 30 years ago.

This piece, along with this rebuttal from The Economist, tie in well with the book that I just finished reading, Edward O. Wilson's On Human Nature. Wilson's thesis echoes The Economist's view that humans across all cultures generally act in their own best interest. Furthermore, Wilson argues that there is a common genetic basis that constrains the full range of human social behavior and that cultures can change quickly under the right conditions and humans can quickly adapt to different cultures. In fact, two of the examples that he used to demonstrate humanity's cultural flexibility involved Chinese immigrant populations in Jamaica and Guyana.

On Human Nature is as heavy as its title implies, but it was still a fascinating read. Had I had the proper amount of time to dedicate to it, I certainly could have read it from cover to cover in one sitting. The book is now 30 years old, but as far as I can tell, still incredibly relevant. I picked this book up because my interest in evolution and evolutionary psychology has been sparked over the past few years by all of the intelligent design nonsense that's been in the news. It has certainly motivated me to learn more about science in general and evolution in particular and I hope that it's had a similar effect on others.

Smoke of the Water

August 2 | 10:20 pm | Providence, RI

Air Supply

With the Beijing Olympics officially getting underway today, there have been plenty of stories in the news about the air quality (or the complete lack thereof) in Beijing. I certainly noticed the pollution when I visited China last fall, but it didn't really affect me physically. Had I not been able to see the haze, I don't think that I would have noticed that the air quality was any worse than a typical American city. Of course, I didn't attempt any strenuous physical activity while I was over there. The morning we left Shanghai, there was a road race going on right in front of our hotel. Although the air quality hadn't bothered me up to that point, the idea of running a 5K in the middle of Shanghai did make me feel a little queasy. In a strange way, I was almost disappointed that I didn't find breathing the air in China as uncomfortable as I thought I would. It's been such a big story for so long that it's almost become a tourist attraction.

Unleash the Beast

I've been laughing all day at this lame joke from today's installment of The Box of Paperbacks Book Club that for all intents and purposes, I shouldn't even understand. It's a recycled joke from some 1980s hack comedian whose name has been lost to the ages. Ready for it? What does HBO stand for (ca. mid 1980s)? Hey!, Beastmaster's on! Beastmaster, of course, is a 1980s sci-fi/fantasy movie that was in heavy rotation on cable during my childhood, but I've never actually seen the movie. I think I knew some people who were big fans of the movie, but I'm not even sure. For whatever reason, I've always found Beastmaster amusing, and I watched so much bad stand-up comedy on basic cable in the late 80s/early 90s that I can picture in my head the exact kind of comedian who would make a joke like this one.

Red Red Wine

June 10 | 12:06 pm | Paris