Out With a Bang

It's the end of the year so why not end it with a Top Ten list? These are ten fun ideas, theories, or terms that have entered the Jon lexicon in 2008. Without further ado, the list:(1) The Persistence TheoryWe've determined that persistence and proximity is the way to a girl's heart. I hope you'll agree.(2) Intervention TeamsEveryone makes bad decisions in life, here's what needs to happen when your friends make one. Or fifty.(3) My So-Called LifeAre the days slipping on by? Forget what you're doing year by year? Everything blending together?...

Crazy Love

From EW's 2004 review of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, possibly my most romantic movie of all time:"[Jim] Carrey has often played timid, stammering nerds, but this is the first time he has eradicated any hint of stylization. He makes Joel a deeply vulnerable ordinary man, too 'nice' for his own good, haunted by dreams of romance he's scarcely bold enough to voice to himself. We can see why he's attracted to Clementine -- she's the sort of highly eroticized, let's-try-anything girl who's a geek's idea of romantic danger -- and, more mysteriously,...

Eros

Earlier this year I introduced the the world to the life timeline. Its purpose was for remembering, analyzing, and just using the power of Excel to get some perspective on your life. Well, it's nearing the end of 2008 and I'm ready to drop another life spreadsheet on you. Introducing the Relationship Worksheet. The idea behind it is dead simple. By now, if you are around my age, you've probably had a few relationships under your belt. If you're...

Bolt (2008)

I can't quite figure out if Pixar did the animation for this movie. I don't think so since everything I can find out about it only indicates that John Lasseter helped produce Bolt. We waltzed into the movie past the previews but just in time to catch a Cars remake of Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, which was probably better than the actual Cars.While Bolt is definitely geared toward younger audiences, it's got enough entertaining elements to...

The Secret

"There are few things humans are more dedicated to than unhappiness. Had we been placed on earth by a malign creator for the exclusive purpose of suffering, we would have good reason to congratulate ourselves on our enthusiastic response to the task. Reasons to be inconsolable abound: the frailty of our bodies, the fickleness of love, the insincerities of social life, the compromises of friendship, the deadening effects of habit. In the face of such...

The Beautiful Game

And from a recent Secret Santa (we used this site, which was awesome, Elfster.com), I received this book, "The Macrophenomenal Pro Basketball Almanac" written by the great team behind freedarko.com. Basically the book celebrates and profiles some of the NBA's more interesting stars. Their manifesto focuses on the beauty of the game, the game beyond wins, losses, and stats. It's beautifully illustrated and a must-read for every basketball fan....

Gang Green

The Celtics are 23-2, have won their past fifteen games in a row, and are approaching a record setting start. There's even talk that they might be the best Celtic team ever. Now I know that's hyperbole, especially considering they've only won one championship, but they are really good and a joy to watch. I'm still childishly giddy about how successful they are.I mean, last year the team was thrown together, happened to gel and coalesced into championship...

And Justice 4 All

Listening to: Betty Everett, "It's in His Kiss (The Shoop Shoop Song)." But only on Youtube as performed by Aretha.A few weeks ago, there was a Yelp holiday party. You had to email a special address and ask to be invited. I'm not really a yelper (although I was onto it way early thanks to Ameer) but I thought I'd be a shoo-in. When the time came for George and Dann's excited "We got in!" announcements, I had to hang my head in shame because I...

Stuff I've Been Reading 12

BOOKS READ:Evil Genius - Catherine JinksTop of the World: 2008 Boston Celtics - Peter May24 Girls in 7 Days - Alex BradleySex and the Single Girl - Helen Gurley BrownA Step From Heaven - An NaGood Omens - Terry Pratchett & Neil GaimanShenzhen: A Travelogue From China - Guy DelisleSpeak - Laurie Halse AndersonSo I've been keeping this column for a year now. It's proven to be useful in remembering what I've been reading but beyond that I'm not sure it's served much purpose. I do enjoy writing it though and it's been fun to go looking through...

Looking Glass

"It is easier to read a book than to write one; easier to listen to a song than to compose one; easier to attend a play than to produce one. But movies in particular suffer from this user asymmetry. The intensely collaborative work needed to coddle chemically treated film and paste together its strips into movies meant that it was vastly easier to watch a movie than to make one.A Hollywood blockbuster can take a million person-hours to produce and only two hours to consume. But now, cheap and universal tools of creation (megapixel phone cameras,...

Slumdog Millionaire (2008)

Stop right here if you plan on seeing the movie. I'm going to spoil a few things, if not plot details, at least the emotional ride that is best experienced first hand. To begin with, the film is incredibly engulfing. It's almost impossible not to get drawn in as you experience the childhood scenes of young vagrant Jamal and his brother, Salim. The story is structured around Jamal's amazing success at the Indian version of "Who Wants to be a...

The Air Up There

"The rap on [Brett] Favre over the years has been his lack of impulse control, his confident conviction that he can 'make something happen' by dint of his will and a strong right arm. That's what accounts for the interceptions: forcing passes into bad situations.But it also accounts for his success. It's what makes him exciting, what his fans most admire in him -- and most often cringe at. Like any mythological hero, he is thus undone by the very...

Our Space

Listening to: Janelle Monae, maybe the next big thing? Like Andre 3000 plus Lauryn Hill. Can't decide if I actually dig her music yet but her fusion of punk rock soul is interesting.I'm fighting a gradual slide into being a nocturnal person again, which is a bit disappointing because I've been waking up at ten-ish (or earlier) for the past three weeks. I suppose I shouldn't fight it too hard because the time nears when I'll soon have to start...

Hi Eliza

I've been thinking about starting a podcast (topic: unknown) but I haven't decided if it's a good idea to have another frivolous online habit. My ideal podcast would just be me sticking a microphone in my friends' faces and asking them ten questions. It would be short in length but long in effort. So while I have that idea swimming in my head, I found out about Odiogo, which takes words and translates them into computerized speech. That allows...

*Clap*Clap*Clap*

Since the book is so close to completion, I've been given the go ahead to write out my dedications and acknowledgements. The dedication was easy, I knew/know who I want to dedicate every one of my books to because she's the one that's always championed my writing career (Hi Lilly!). Heck, without her there would be no writing career. So dedicating this book to Lilly was a no-brainer. Plus, in an egregious oversight, I wasn't given the chance...

All the ladies who truly feel me

"But it is disappointing to watch what some have called the 'year of the woman' come to such an embarrassing conclusion. This was an election cycle in which candidates pandered to female voters, newsweeklies tried to figure out 'what women want,' and Hillary Clinton garnered 18 million votes toward winning the Democratic nomination. The assumption was that these '18 million cracks in the highest glass ceiling,' as Clinton put it, would advance the prospects of female achievement and gender equality. It hasn't exactly worked out that way.In the...

Twilight (2008)

A seventy million dollar opening and the new blockbuster franchise is here. Twilight is already too big to be a guilty pleasure so it's really just a pleasure. I'm totally biased about this movie but I'll just put it up front, "I loved it!" The movie wasn't the greatest thing in the world, as any review will tell you, but it had enough of everything to make it a thrilling experience.For this entire Twilight experience, I've been riding along sort...

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?

Malcolm Gladwell's got a new book coming out. It's called "Outliers: The Story of Success." Even if you're not familiar with Gladwell, it's doubtless you've seen The Tipping Point or Blink. His books have their detractors and their faults but they are certainly entertaining and thought provoking. In fact, I believe Gladwell's work is overlooked a bit because his books are so easily accessible and populist. I'm not sure if he started the trend...

No Bull

"I'd never taken an accounting course, never run a business, never even had savings of my own to manage. I stumbled into a job at Salomon Brothers in 1985 and stumbled out much richer three years later, and even though I wrote a book about the experience, the whole thing still strikes me as preposterous -- which is one of the reasons the money was so easy to walk away from.I figured the situation was unsustainable. Sooner rather than later, someone was going to identify me, along with a lot of people more or less like me, as a fraud. Sooner rather...

Step into a World (Rapture's Delight)

In my mind, when I first heard hip hop, I loved it. That's how I tell the story anyway. Like I heard Tribe, instantly gravitated towards it, and become a fan of the entire genre. Then again, upon really thinking about it, that's not the story at all. If I really want to date when I got into hip hop, it was probably college. I mean, my musical life started at Meatloaf, wound around 10,000 Maniacs and Yanni, and firmly planted itself with Alanis...

Stuff I've Been Reading 11

BOOKS READ:Chuck Klosterman IV - Chuck KlostermanSex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs - Chuck KlostermanNo one belongs here more than you - Miranda JulyLove is a Mix Tape - Rob SheffieldGeek Magnet - Kieran ScottModel Spy (The Specialists) - Shannon GreenlandWestminster Abby (S.A.S.S.) - Micol OstowCindy Ella - - Robin PalmerPlus many other YA books flipped throughI can't really report that I finished my stated goal of reading a dozen YA books. Goal, unaccomplished. However, starting and finishing are two altogether different things and in that respect,...

(Next) Summer Lovin'

It's like really official, the book is nearly complete. I have advance copies of it sitting right here and it looks amazing. I wasn't expecting a full blown cover or anything, just the words set up and printed out, but the advance version looks just like the real thing. Technically this version (advance uncorrected proof, "not for sale") is sent out to be read for minor corrections, last minute changes, and that type of thing, but it feels absolutely...

Rachel Getting Married (2008)

So the director of Silence of the Lambs comes out with a movie about a messed up, troubled, and still in rehab Anne Hathaway returning home for her sister's weekend wedding. Hathaway's Kym snipes at everyone, is desperate for attention, and basically kind of ruins everything. But it's not like she hasn't done this before. The two sisters show how you don't necessarily need to be a sociopath to rip people apart -- just family will do. They eviscerate...

Bo-po-mo-fo

More iPhone fun. Seriously, I can't understand why people don't just get an iPhone. It's not even that expensive anymore. It's the greatest device ever and totally life changing. People who hate on it just because it's Apple or for some other absurd reason should try one for a week and see if they change their tune.Here's something totally amazing. You can write in Chinese (and other languages)! Our dear fake-FOB friend showed us what an amazing...

Mux It Up

Doing a mix tape just isn't the same anymore. The barrier to entry has gone down too much, the ease of transferring songs between two people has ruined it forever. That's how I feel about the current state of mix tapes anyway. Then again, maybe that's just me and creating a mix tape is still magical if you do it with passion. I can't recall the last mix tape I made or received, although it's something I used to do all the time. Mix-CDs actually....

W. (2008)

I recently watched Thirteen Days, a movie about the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Thirteen Days also features actors playing well known politicians. The difference here, of course, is that there's hardly a laugh to be found in Thirteen Days. This movie is played strictly for laughs. I found myself entertained throughout, and even if the whole thing is a bit over the top as a caricature, it does capture something about how we feel about Dubya.I...

A Heartbreaking Work

I just wrapped up the last few pages of Rob Sheffield's "Love is a Mix Tape" and I gotta say, it's got me feeling sad and blue. I don't know why I never read the thing -- what a great title -- or ever spent more than twenty seconds flipping pages but the book is amazing. I guess I avoided it because I thought it was all about music and when I looked at the mix tape songs that introduced each chapter, it was all music I'd never heard of or didn't...

Infinite Jest

"He [David Foster Wallace] talked about a kind of shyness that turned social life impossibly complicated. 'I think being shy basically means self-absorbed to the point that it makes it difficult to be around other people. For instance, if I'm hanging out with you, I can't even tell whether I like you or not because I'm too worried about whether you like me.'"-Rolling Stone, link from kottke.o...

Bubble Boy

You remember that fun game we like to play? Which wedding would you go to if it was scheduled on the same day? Friend A or Friend B's? Well, a real life example of this has happened and not only are the stakes high, the person involved is a possible bridesmaid for both weddings. I don't know what the proper protocol here is but I'd assume it's first dibs. Which is kind of terrible if you think about it because then it's like someone's basically...

Bring It Back

I've never seen The Last Unicorn. Is that criminal? Did I miss something? There are certain things that I feel like you need to watch at a certain age otherwise the magic is just not the same. Stuff like Labyrinth or The Secret of NIMH, maybe even The Princess Bride or Goonies. If you didn't catch this stuff when you were a kid, watching it now just isn't the same. On the list of things like this that I missed out on: The Dark Crystal, Legend,...

You live, you learn

It's true, I just spent a good five or six hours doing a re-design for this site that incorporated the (sort of) new Blogger widgets and ding dongs. I wanted to take the blog in another direction and was so excited for it all to happen. The trouble was, my coding skills are pretty rudimentary -- if copy and pasting can be called "skills" -- so everything took much longer than expected. When I finally got a working copy ready to show the world,...

Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist (2008)

I was pretty psyched to watch this movie. Aside from having an awesome title, it seemed like it might be the teen answer to "Before Sunrise." I kept my expectations low however and that was probably wise. There's no denying that the title is still amazing and that Michael Cera and Kat Dennings as Nick and Norah are fabulous, but the movie just could have been so much more.It was cute. It had some good lines. It had a happy ending -- that's giving...

Didn't I Blow Your Mind

Oh what I would give to have John Hollinger's job. Watch the NBA all day and then apply fun statistical models to everything. As the new season approaches, Hollinger has given a break down for every player and even better, did individual scouting reports on all of them. That's insane! Seriously, like every player has a scouting report.It revealed great things like how Tony Parker rarely uses his left hand, even on layups. Or how Dirk Nowitzki...