Blowing & Drifting

Uh, wow. Big honking news! Holiday Gift-Buying for all the Moms You Know (Including Yourself) Faithful readers! In just a few short weeks, in mid-December (exact date to be determined; I will update you!), my first book will be released by Booktrope Publishing. (OMG! Insert screaming and jumping up and down here.) A comprehensive handbook [...]

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More or less on a whim, I kept track of every single thing I read – online or off; blog post, newspaper article, magazine essay, or book; for work or pleasure or by accident – during August 2011. You can find the complete rundown on my Tumblr blog, My Reading List. Two takeaways: I needed [...]

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Shannon’s reading of her essay in Torn went very well! The house was packed with about 25 people (including the girls and Shannon’s parents, who came down to surprise her); her fellow essayist, Katy Read, did a wonderful job with her own piece; the Q&A was smooth and interesting; and of course Shannon read beautifully [...]

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The nordic skiing world championship in Oslo are well under way now, with five great races down. Even better (after lackluster crowds at the 2009 and 2007 worlds), the Norwegians are turning out in force: 70,000 turned up on Sunday to watch one of the premiere events, which was won by Norwegian Petter Northug: The [...]

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My fourth movie of February was the amazing, hilarious, and captivating “documentary” Exit Through the Gift Shop, which purports to be about the British street artist Banksy and the international scene in which he works. The street art – graffiti, if you like – is mostly wonderful: funny, cutting, imaginative, beautiful. Banksy’s work stands out [...]

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The third movie of February was the documentary Straight No Chaser, a sorta-biopic about the jazz pianist/composer Thelonious Monk. I didn’t realize, beforehand, that the film was so old – from 1988, just 6 years after Monk’s death. When I learned that, my view of the film changed a bit. On watching it, I thoroughly [...]

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Tonight’s film – number 2 of the projected 28 – was another animated movie: Fantastic Mr. Fox. I haven’t seen a Wes Anderson flick since The Royal Tenenbaums, so this was overdue, and sets me up to see A Life Aquatic and Darjeeling Limited. Mr. Fox was really good: the spectacular animation perfectly extended a [...]

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An amazing and beautiful year in the back yard of a house in Oslo.

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I’m going cross-platform with this here Facebook “meme,” which asks you to use “shuffle” through the first fifteen songs that come up on your iPod. These showed up when I shuffled my iPod Touch, which doesn’t have all my music on it but does have most of the music I like to hear. Thelonious Monk, [...]

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Last night I finished Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith, an examination of the violent extremes to which Mormons have gone to defend themselves and their religion. In Krakauer’s telling, this violence has often come as Mormons attempt to extend or maintain the institution of polygamy, which is still [...]

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Starting my ride this afternoon, I rode past plumes of dust and chaff from the soybean harvest across the road from our house: Just a minute later, I had to stop for wildfowl: a group of wild turkeys meandering along the road after being driven from their home fields by the harvesting. I stood stock [...]

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As I often say, one of the best things about working at Carleton is going to all the excellent events that the College sponsors. Tonight’s example was a wonderful lecture by the cartoonist/graphic novelist Ben Katchor, best known for his comic strip, Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer – a strip I discovered in the Chicago [...]

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One item on the long list of great things about working at Carleton is that I can attend the weekly presentations offered by the College’s Perlman Center for Teaching and Learning (which is, perversely, called the “LTC”). Today’s presentation , conducted by a geology prof, a psych prof, and a student, was great: Digital Nation: Electronic [...]

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This evening we had our second family movie night. Shannon set out a delicious finger-food dinner and popped popcorn to eat while we watched the classic Disney version of Cinderella from 1950. The movie was fabulous. Some of the shots, especially early on, exhibited wonderful draftsmanship, and of course the animation was marvelous, too: I was [...]

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So I’ve watched a bit of the World Cup so far, and more than anything else except the actual fun of watching soccer being played, I’m impressed by the presentation of it. The broadcasts are almost the opposite of American sports broadcasts. First of all, the commentary is relatively subdued. A John Madden is impossible [...]

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