Category Archives: miscellaneous

To Smartphone or Not To Smartphone

First-world prob­lems, I know. Begin­ning tomor­row, I’m eli­gi­ble to upgrade my Ver­i­zon phone. I’m think­ing of get­ting a smart­phone, but I can’t decide whether I should or not. On the plus side, they are shiny and I have wanted one for ages, and they’re so con­ve­nient, and I could really use a Map func­tion, not to

New OK Go video: yup, I still love Rube Goldberg machines

And, of course, OK Go. Here’s “This Too Shall Pass”: Here’s what the band says about the video: Directed by James Frost, OK Go and Syyn Labs. Pro­duced by Shirley Moy­ers. The offi­cial video for the recorded ver­sion of “This Too Shall Pass” off of the album “Of the Blue Colour of the Sky”. The video

Reasons to Love Olympic Curling

So lots of peo­ple talk about lov­ing the finesse of great curl­ing  —  how it’s all about pre­ci­sion, putting exactly the right spin and force on the rock and manip­u­lat­ing the ice so that the rock goes exactly where it’s sup­posed to. I say oh sure, but there are plenty of other rea­sons to love curl­ing! Teflon shoes.

Rhapsody in Blue

I miss the piano. I had twelve years of piano lessons, many of them with a jazz musi­cian. As a result, my piano-playing has always been intu­itive rather than scripted: I pay atten­tion to chords, but not really to the music as writ­ten. Some­times this makes me a lazy piano-player, since I can get the gist