I just started at a new place in December and, good lord, there really hasn’t been a spare moment since. I have to say, however, it’s wonderful. Smart people, smart work, and challenging. It reminds me that when everything is sync’d properly and all of the incentives are aligned in the right way, it’s actually “easy” to do good, challenging work.

This song . . . I have to say, this song is something I’ve been looking for, literally, for like 15 years. And I finally found it. It was sampled on Digable Planet’s Blowout Comb on the very last song and . . . I have to say, finding it was a pleasure. It’s great when the sample that a song you like relied upon is as good as the song you like originally.

Such funky flute — Listen here

Beloved Manhattan.

Alright, so I tried to video the whole walk home.  Uh, not happening.  As it turns out, while the camera has the memory to record at its highest definition for two full hours, the battery lasts only for 50 minutes (the walk is about an hour and thirty minutes).  Nice! 

It didn’t turn out exactly the way that I had hoped anyway; after 1/3 of the way through, I figured out that I needed to be more sensitive to the way that I was pointing the camera — always in the direction of general movement and not the exact direction of every movement.  This change created a general visual continuity, albeit frenetic.

Either way, I think I need a steady cam.

Even though it’s about a seven and a half mile walk from midtown to my house.  And even though much of it is kind of not so pleasant.  And even though, during the hottest days of summer, I was sweating through my pants and shirt almost immediately.  And even though walking over the Manhattan Bridge can be deafening because of the four trains lines that rumble over the bridge right next to the walkway . . .

Sometimes, while you’re walking over the bridge and that cool breeze coming from the north washes over you, you see a nice moment in time that you only get a minute or two to take in before it’s gone . . . and it makes the whole walk nice.

I think HAL has a dreamy job description:

“the accurate processing of information without distortion or concealment”

Sad . . .

I was looking at the poster for the Expendibles in the subway this morning and noticed suspiciously even height amongst the actors in this movie. So I decided to re-size everyone based on their actual heights. There may be some give or take because of perspective, but . . . Dolf Lundgren is still taller than everyone there. Mouse over for the result.

Update: someone just told me that Sly is closer to about 5’6″ and not 5’10” as I had so carelessly googled. I always thought that he was shorter than that . . . shoulda dug further.

Expandable

I searched for myself today and realized two things:

1. There is only one other person in the country who both has stuff on the internet and has the same name is me.  And he lives in New Jersey.  And he played baseball in college.
2. The pile of things “about me” on the internet keeps getting longer and longer and longer.  That is, it’s not getting smaller.

About six years ago, I agreed to participate in a documentary about “modern relationships.”  I was still on the edge of thinking that reality television wasn’t so bad and, hey, who wouldn’t want to have their relationship documented, particularly if it ended up being the relationship that ended in marriage, family, and, ultimately, shared death?  It’d be a nice memento.

It did not work out like this.  Almost immediately, I felt this sense of being trapped by what I had said but could not clearly remember having said: there was this sense of “what did I say? I hope I didn’t say it the way that I remember saying it.  Did I actually say that? I hope that doesn’t make it into the final product.”

This, in a sense, is how I feel about the parts of my life that have been indexed by search engines.  I search for them, find them, and while I understand them in the context that they were created, I’m pretty sure that someone else might not.

Anyway, to be fair, one of the other major reasons I didn’t do the documentary was because the guy who was directing it was totally crazy, one time requesting that a friend of mine who made a witty quip repeat it, three times, into the camera:

“Wait, what did you say?!”

“I said, ‘he has a Ph.D. in pussy-whipped.'”

“Say it again! This time on camera!!”

“He has a Ph.D. in pussy-whipped.”

“No, like you said it before!”

“He has a P H D  in pussy-whipped.”

“One more time!”

*sigh*  “He has a Ph.D. in pussy-whipped.”

It was then that I knew the “documentary” wasn’t going to turn out well — like Disney pushing lemmings to their death in the “documentary” White Wilderness.

Why am I walking home on a 100 degree day?