These Are Days

A month or two ago, I had the chance to hang out with Lara Zielin, fellow Deb and author of "Donut Days." It turns out she's the editor for my college's alumni magazine and was flying around meeting Wolverines -- she's interviewed James Earl Jones before! -- and stopped by San Francisco. We had a really great time (successfully) wandering around Chinatown in search of dim sum and spent a few hours talking writing and books. She was the very first...

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009)

Can you believe there will be eight of these things once it's all said and done? I was listening recently to a Harry Potter podcast and someone mentioned that they wouldn't mind seeing a BBC style super long series with almost all the scenes, characters, and lines intact. That would be something wouldn't it? As it stands now, the Potter movies are pretty much what you'd expect. I saw the first four, missed the fifth, and have decided to try to...

Of Demand

Listening to: New Buffalo, "Recovery."Things I learned flipping through a recent issue of Fast Company: Experts predict that fish stocks will be overfished by 2048. The world population in 2050 will be 9 billion; it's currently at 6 billion and climbing. Forty percent of the homeless people in San Francisco have been there for less than three months. Olive Garden and Red Lobster are owned by the same parent company (Darden Restuarants) and have average check prices of $15 and $19, respectively.In sum, I'm glad I'll be close to death when fish...

Passing Me By

It's been an incredibly entertaining NBA offseason and the first game of the Celtics' sure fire eighteenth championship season is still three months away but I gotta talk about something right now. It's been killing me. Yao Ming, the pride of China, the great seven and a half foot center, is going to have foot surgery. Again.If he were a normal young man of twenty eight, this wouldn't be too terrible. As a middle aged athlete, this is horrific,...

500 Days of Summer (2009)

There's not much out of the norm in 500 Days, but the charisma of Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel are hard to resist. I'm not sold on Zooey as a great actress, but she definitely embodies a particular "girl of your dreams" type really well. We never get to know her character much but Deschanel makes her feel familiar and perpetually out of reach at the same time.In comparison to the other quasi-indie romantic comedies recently, Nick &...

Might is Write

Listening to: Common, "The Light (Kero One remix)." It's been awhile since I've found any hip hop I've liked. Well, here's a throwback. Kero One is from SF, he's Asian, and he raps/produces/everything. Seriously, read about his skills here. I plugged him into Pandora and got all sorts of good stuff spilling out. Love it.I'm not entirely sure how much time most people take to kick out a first draft, but I'm aiming to crank one out in about a...

The Hurt Locker (2009)

What else to do on a lazy Saturday night but go hit the movies by yourself? Ever since reading Black Hawk Down and watching Three Kings on cable, I've become really enchanted with (desert themed) war movies. The Hurt Locker is a top contender. The film follows three members of a bomb disposal squad in Baghdad as their rotation winds down. It's powerful, tense, and not a typical war movie at all. Everything you'd expect to see in a war movie is...

She's Your Queen to Be

Listening to: Ron Sexsmith, "This Is How I Know." I was just tweeting the other day about how I didn't like this nobody's version of Feists' "Secret Heart." But then I found out that he's Feists' co-writer so I guess that was okay. Something about this particular track appeals to me deeply.Earlier tonight, my mom called me downstairs in an excited burst. "You have to come see this! I have something to share with you!" I lollygagged because she...

Midas' Cupid

"No evolutionary biologist will ever tell you that humans have evolved to mate for life. Lately some of them will tell you that humans have evolved to pair-bond for four-year increments (about as long as it takes to get a child up and running), which seems about right. This information is not particularly hard to come by. But a weird thing about the show [Millionaire Matchmaker], and about American culture in general, is that we are so eager to hear and believe scientific and pseudoscientific explanations of why people "fall in love," but then...

Whistle While You Work

Listening to: The Bird and the Bee, "Diamond Dave." I'm not sure what jazz-influenced electro pop is supposed to sound like but I sure like this band. I mean, what a great name right?Remember that thing I was talking about two weeks ago? I had a public reading as the end project for my class? Well, I was given the opportunity to do a write up about the experience over at Kearny Street Workshop's blog. Head over there to check it out. I had a great time and only wish the class had gone on longer."What we learned was that humor often bubbled...