Steve Dublanica wrote one of my favorite blogger-makes-good books called Waiter Rant, in which he tells the world what he thinks about restuarants and the dinning public at large. He lived and died by how much he was tipped-and he hated people who didn’t tip, much as an Assembly Line Portrait Photographer hates people who don’t buy. In Keep The Change, Steve ventures into the universe of tipping. Being a poor schmuck myself, my own tipping activities are limited to restuarants with wait staff and my semi-annual haircut. And I’ll be honest, I’d rather not tip the random woman at…
Category: random thoughts
Battle Royale
Following the recent obsession with The Hunger Games and the talk that it’s just a ripoff of Battle Royale, I thought I’d take a look at it. There are a few similarities in the story and feel of the Hunger Games and Battle Royale. Both have an evil government putting kids in a battle to the death through random selection. Both follow the Survivor model of a running tally as the little group gets smaller and smaller. Both reward the sole survivor of the contest. And both have too many characters that are, for all intents and purposes, identical and…
Dear Suzanne Collins
Are you a fan of The Matrix? I love The Matrix, it’s a near perfect film with it’s classic hero’s story. I loved the characters, I loved the story, and I loved the look of the film. Then the Wachowski Brothers were seduced by all the money that a successful movie gave them and they forgot the story and characters in favor of special effects. The next two films had so little in common with The Matrix that they might as well have been set in another universe. I love The Hunger Games. It was original and amazing and gave…
Absinthe & Flamethrowers
How cool is a book that gives you detailed instructions on how to make gunpowder? Pretty damned cool. Turns out there is more to making black powder-as author William Gurstelle prefers to call his gun powder-than Captain Kirk made it look when was kicking Gorn ass with a bamboo cannon. For one thing, you need pure ingredients. William advices that you make you own charcoal, since the stuff you use in a barbeque is full of all kinds of impurities. He recommends buying the sulfur and saltpeter. Once you have made the black powder you can go on to make…
Moonwalking With Einstein
I like books about memory and the brain. I must have read The Memory Book by Harry Lorayne when I was still in high school-not that it helped me with my studies, but I did learn how to memorize all kinds of random items. I really loved Superlearning as well. There is something amazing about how the mind can be trained to sort this and that-and in my case, pretty much useless info. Which brings us to Moonwalking With Einstien. We start off following a reporter covering the mindnumbingly dull U.S. Memory Championships-which involves watching people memorize all kinds of…
Skyjack-The Hunt for D. B. Cooper
In 1971 a man with a briefcase hijacked a Northwest Orient 727 flight. He ransomed the passengers for $200,000 and then jumped out of the plane. He has never been heard from since, leaving the end of his story open for everyone to write their own ending. Geoffrey Gray tells the story of D. B. Cooper, including every bit of minutia, every theory, and every crackpot who has claimed to be Dan Cooper since 1971. Geoffrey Gray also reads the audio book and he can’t help but ham it up every once in a while. There is also the occasional…
Extra Lives
I then realized I was contrasting my aesthetic sensitivity to that of some teenagers about a game that concerns itself with shooting as many zombies as possible. It is moments like this that can make it so dispritingly difficult to care about video games. ~author Tom Bissell I’ve been an adventure game addict since I bought my first computer back in the Dark Ages of 1982-the game that hooked me was Infocom’s Zork. My latest video game love is The Witcher 2, an adventure game with a lot more fighting and running than puzzling and thinking. I still find myself…
Change Anything
The idea here is that you can change any aspect of your life-if you are just willing to follow a few simple steps. The problem, of course, is that most of us are unable to follow a few simple steps. Near the beginning of Change Anything we are told that a recent study found that ALL diets work-if people are willing to do exactly what any given diet plan calls for. Most of us are pretty good at starting things, but not so good at the follow through. So Change Anything takes a slightly different tack to the problem-it offers…
Writing and~Uh, Not Writing
I’ve got a couple of weeks off. It’s not all that unusual, but it’s not all that common either. So I am writing. Sort of. I have the better part of a rough draft, which is the easy part for me. I need to add a snappy opening, slap in a few transitions here and there, and viola! it will be ready for that dread 2nd Draft. Then I go back and make sure everything makes sense and start to re-write a bit of the dull parts and try to pour some life into them. Editing has always been my…
American Top 40 ~from my glory days of 1978
Ah, those were the good old days One of the local Oldies radio stations has started playing reruns of Casey Kasem’s American Top 40. They were playing one from June 17, 1978 and it was likely one that I listened to when it first aired all those years ago. This was back when the Top 40 was an amazing mix of styles and artists, before music charts became so specialized that virtually anyone who releases a single will end up with a number one somewhere. I caught the top twenty or so songs of the broadcast, and I was surprised…