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Andrew Lindemann Malone's Internet Playpen |
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Monday, 3/31/03 The new In My Changer is up. This week's theme: Troubled Times and the Music I Am Listening To During Them. That's in between the customary endless digressions. I think I'm updating this more because writing it is more enjoyable, which is not to say that reading it has become more enjoyable. I'm toast in the tourney challenge, with no possible points to earn, althought I did have Syracuse in the Final Four. V-Tsien is in the 96th percentile of the millions upon millions who entered the ESPN sweepstakes, though, so let's transfer all our lucky thoughts to him.
Saturday, 3/29/03 It's actually Sunday by 22 minutes as I write this, but whatever. Yesterday my Maryland Terrapins men's basketball team lost, capping a season full of flashes of both true dominance and extreme submission. I wrote my own take on why the season was so weird and ulcer-inducing. It's in the Sport-Watching Life section. Yes, I do actually believe all that psychological mumbo-jumbo!
Friday, 3/28/03 I left "In My Changer" at work again. Do any of you actually care? I think I'm speaking to a void. It's actually liberating. I used to worry about whether I was getting hits, whether people were telling people about my site, harbor dreams of Web supremacy. Now I've given completely up on that and I'm just having fun for myself and splitting infinitives and anything else I wanna do. After an opening two days that left me in the 19.7th percentile of the ESPN.com Tournament Challenge, I'm now at the 62.7th. Keys to this: I called most of the second round correctly, and so far I'm 3 for 4 on the Sweet 16. I'm better than most! That's all I ever asked. I'm in a completely silly mood today. I did more voices at work than I think I did in the entire first six months of my employment. People seem to be adequately convinced that I work hard, so I can now be silly. I'm going to be supersilly when Maryland wins its game against MSU tonite (knock on wood!). Spam-O-Maticker and Ball-O-Matic (Duke Sux) member V-Tsien Fan still looks set to kick my ass, though. And about that title of my group...
Thursday, 3/27/03 I wrote most of the new "In My Changer" at work today but forgot to e-mail it home so I could put it up. I'll have it up tomorrow. Today I was looking at my Netscape home page (which I load in Internet Explorer because I enjoy irony) and I saw something that I thought said: White People Find Pages It actually said White Pages Find People The issue of race is inescapable in our modern society. In news of people I like, my lovely and talented sister Ellen is off to a good start at her new job, and Gregorio Villalobos has decided he can best appreciate the Spam-O-Matic at a distance and is moving out of Georgian Towers, The Official Building of the Spam-O-Matic For Now, and down to Dupont Circle. This means he will be a lot closer to movies he likes and the places he attends synagogue and a lot farther away when I don't feel like cooking and want someone to go out to dinner with or want to shoot the excrement about the day's frustrations or want to round someone up to watch a film of the kind Gregorio likes. For him, sure, this is a great move. But this is my site! And I have no choice but to condemn it. Just kidding.
Wednesday, 3/26/03 Much of the time in my life, I want to be with people and hear their talk and celebrate and lament and play with them. But for just as much, if not more, of my life, I want to step back; and for a certain amount of time I want to disappear. (For me, learning social skills eventually amounted to the art of appearing to be in the world without actually expending the effort; saying "How are you?" and "That's some nasty weather" and such is an effective way of showing that you like the person you're talking to without having to say anything of substance. I didn't know how to do this for a long time.) I don't think this is unique to me; I suspect it's true of most people, even if the proportions are different. The thing that's at least uncommon that I'm dealing with is: I have no idea how I should interact with the website when I want to disappear. The obvious answer is not to update it, but I've been feeling lately that the same kind of politeness that demands a smile and a "How are you?" when I'm not feeling too talkative demands a piquant remark or two even when, as last night, I feel like reading and sleeping and doing nothing else. Any opinions? Pass 'em along. I can tell it's spring in Silver Spring because:
Spring is fun.
Sunday, 3/23/03 Maryland won again. WOOOOOOO!! Woe betide those who underestimated us. Billy Packer said several ridiculous things in the course of announcing our win, including (last night) that "Xavier's as good as any team in the tournament" and (today) "Bad shot" just before Drew Nicholas's three flew through the rim without touching anything but sweet, sonorous nylon. In fact, Drew's three—taken with something like ferocity after Xavier had cut the Maryland lead, at one point 18, down to 4, was undeniably the momentum-changing play of the game, as Maryland came out playing hard and smart thereafter and beat back the Musketeers. But you'd never hear Billy Packer admit it. My bracket is looking slightly better due to this win, Butler's entry into the Sweet 16, and the Florida loss to Michigan State, all of which I called. Of course, I'm still most likely in the bottom 20 percent of participants. I have an "In My Changer" basically written In My Head, and I will try to put it In a File tomorrow so it can be put In the Usual Place on My Website.
Saturday, 3/22/03 I'm still euphoric from yesterday. WOOOOOOO!! I'm also very tired, as I did in fact have trouble getting to sleep. But it was worth it! WOOOOOO!! My neighbors must hate me! Screw them just this once! They've been pretty loud on occasion too! WOOOOOOO!!
Friday, 3/21/03 WOOOOOOO!! Most amazing final few plays ever! WOOOOOOO!! I'll never get to sleep now! WOOOOOOO!! • The NCAA tournament has begun its annual drama-packed first weekend, in which Thursday becomes a weekend day and seven million games are played at once. With the much-beloved annual First Weekend also comes the less-celebrated but just as annual Systematic Demolition of Andrew's Bracket, in which Andrew's upset picks fall just short and Andrew's lordly overdogs trip all over themselves to get out of the tourney. Last year, Andrew actually picked the champion and three out of the Final Four correctly, but did so poorly in the first two rounds that he never even challenged the eventual winner of the Diamondback pool. Not that Andrew held out any hope of that happening after he overheard the Diamondback's astonishingly prolific sportswriter Patrick Stevens discoursing intelligently on Mississippi State's guard play. Or at least it sounded intelligent. A lot more intelligent than anything I could have said about Mississippi State, anyway, which was at the level of "I'm sure they have guards. Tourney teams have to have those."
Wednesday, 3/19/03 We're at war. I am full of dread. I hope that it ends soon. • I had thought to favor you with capsule predictions, involving some amount of humor, of each of the men's college basketball games that will constitute this coming March Madness, the 2003 NCAA men's basketball tournament. My dreams were bigger than my muse, it turns out, as just looking at the brackets made me quail at the idea of trying to make up that many actual amusing jokes. Then I tried one (Oklahoma versus South Carolina State) and it was very, very stupid. "This is the freshest this humor is going to get," I said to myself, "and you've got nothing. Give it up." So I have. Nevertheless, I wanted to involve all my readers in a communal celebration of March Madness somehow, so I created a group for us to gather in for ESPN's Tournament Challenge. The group is named "Ball-O-Matic (Duke Sux)". I put that parenthetical addendum on in order to show even casual passersby in the ESPN.com universe that I take every conceivable opportunity to heap scorn upon the overhyped men from Durham and their coach (group motto: "Because Krzyzewski is so hilarious when he pouts"). Duke may have 10 McDonald's All-Americans, but McDonald's lost money last year. I have them going out in the second round against Creighton. And my only concern in making that pick was that I thought they might well lose to Colorado State in the first. Who do I have winning? Let's just say that if everything goes as I have picked it, College Park's downtown business district will be set back fifty years. My bracket is, therefore, composed of one part commonsense assay of the facts and seventy-five parts wishful thinking (except in the case of Duke, in which I have impartially evaluated the evidence available to me). Come beat my ass in picking the tourney if you so choose. Ball-O-Matic (Duke Sux), baybee.
Tuesday, 3/18/03 We're going to go to war soon. I wish we had come up to it differently, with less cowboy talk and less inept diplomacy, but I have decided over the last few weeks that I'm in favor of a war to remove Saddam Hussein. Iraqi civilians will suffer, but I don't honestly think they will suffer as much from a war as they would from the continued rule of Saddam Hussein. The fact that their suffering is in part due to sanctions the U.N. imposed is immaterial; if Saddam had disarmed, the sanctions would have been lifted. He doesn't plan on disarming, as the last few months have pretty obviously demonstrated. He offers the world a small concession when the heat turns up and then goes back to thwarting inspections at every turn. Why would this suddenly start working after 12 years when it hasn't? I can't give a good answer to that. And because I don't think inspections would work and because I think Iraqi civilians will be better off in five years if we remove Saddam, I'm in favor of war. Barely. I still shudder when I think of it, and I hope with all my might that it is a quick war and a painless war for everyone except Saddam and his ruling cronies. And that is what I have been thinking about all day today.
Sunday, 3/16/03 Today I was able to go see George Pelecanos read from and sign copies of his new book, Soul Circus, at the Bethesda Barnes & Noble. I have recommended Pelecanos to many of you, for his purposeful, fat-free prose, his precisely observed dialogue, his exciting plots, and his willingness to engage issues such as race, urban poverty, and criminality without preaching or exploiting his subject matter. But one of the pleasures of reading Pelecanos for me is the way he, unlike many writers from outside this city, treats D.C. and its suburbs as real places where real people live. Specifically, Pelecanos is from Silver Spring, as am I. I have been thinking a lot lately about my attachment to Silver Spring: why I love it so much. (I make fun of it a lot, of course, but I do that to all the things I love.) I don't think I can quite express it yet, but I would like to quote Pelecanos writing in the (third-person) voice of Terry Quinn in Right as Rain,the first in a trilogy of which Soul Circus is the third volume, on the subject:
I'm not Terry Quinn, and I like the city for (somewhat) different reasons than he does. But for me, that passage touches something on the lower frequencies, as Ralph Ellison would say. • One album you'll never find me reviewing on this site is Looking For—Best of David Hasselhoff. Far be it from me to attempt to duplicate the eloquence you'll find displayed by the Amazon.com reviewers when you click that link. As many of these reviewers note, track 6, "Hot Shot City," is particularly good. A fine tribute to a musical genius who could lick Mozart with both his hands and his tongue tied behind his back. Today I am sending my tax returns off in the mail. I am using the address stickers that say "Teach Tolerance" on them. I want all the subliminable messaging I can get to get the IRS and Maryland State Comptroller to give me back the money they unexpectedly owe me. (I say "unexpectedly" because the last two years I've been hit pretty hard come April thanks to my 1099-MISC nonemployee compensation, which this year, as I discovered, represents a far smaller portion of my income.) I decided yesterday that I need to let my silly side out a lot more in my writing and not worry about it, which explains the lead to the Jean Sibelius review in "In My Changer," which is good because nothing else could possibly explain it. Just thought I'd warn you, let you know, or both.
Saturday, 3/15/03 "Soon" is a relative term. Anyway, new content! "In My Changer" makes its triumphant return after a wait of merely half the two-month wait on the last one. It's a grab bag of Chuck Brown, Jean Sibelius and Ludwig van Beethoven (I'm sick of jazz for a while after putting out so much for Jazz Times in the last month). We now have links to the CDs on Amazon, so that my reviews can inspire your impulse shopping. Spam-O-Maticker Christina Nunez has decided to take time out from her busy schedule to ride a bike 60 miles. Why, you ask? To benefit the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, of course. No one just rides a bike 60 miles for the fun of riding a bike 60 miles anymore in these anxious times. I happen to be against the existence of MS myself, and would ride a bike 60 miles to help stamp it out if only I had one. Giving Christina $10 was a lot cheaper than buying a bike. If you also think the existence of MS is more bad than good and do not wish to bike 60 miles yourself to prove it, you may wish to donate some money to commemorate Christina's anti-MS biking of 60 miles. You can do this here. Under "Gift Information," be sure to select "Bike Contribution" and type in "Christina Nunez." Also, please visit Pastepunk.com, my buddy Jordan's effort to save punk from itself, a site heroically maintained in the face of mounting law school-related insanity. Do you have a site that you think Spam-O-Matickers would enjoy and that you think should be on my page of other people who have websites? Then e-mail me and let me know, and I'll hook you up with a mention here and a permanent outpost there.
Sunday, 3/9/03 We'll get back into the more regular updates soon, I promise. I was written out for a bit after finishing up that article. Plus sometimes they want me to write things at work. Today I am putting up an old humor feature about the time I saw Carmen Electra and a huge-ass hot tub on the northeastern corner of Union Square Park. I am putting it up because I mentioned it to Spam-O-Maticker Sei Young Kim and then realized I could not tell her to go look at the site to find it. I plan to do most of my backupdating in response to situations like this. I will start in on the rest of the movie reviews after I figure out how to organize them. Dan Bengero, an excellent human being, has suggested that the system of dividing them up alphabetically would be unbearably lame, which, now that I think about it, it would definitely be. He suggests beefed-up genre categorization: movies with cool fights and no sense, movies for intelligent people in search of real drama, etc. This will be what eventually happens, although I have to think of what all the categories should be. Send suggestions here. It will probably eventually happen sometime in May.
Thursday, 3/6/03 Today I accidentally thanked the wrong publicity person for helping set up my Regina Carter interview. There's a part of me that thinks I should not feel at all embarrassed, because it's their job and publicity persons understandably expect us writers to be out of it and strange. Most of me still thinks I should be embarrassed, due to basic notions of devotion to truth and proper expression of gratitude, and that is the dominant emotion right now when I think of what occurred. So I apologized for my carelessness. This apology has probably made me look even more out of it and strange, because I don't think normal people would care about what I did. But I feel better for having made the apology. This is how a lot of my life goes. I ate at the counter at the Tastee Diner here in beautiful Silver Spring for dinner tonite: a bacon cheddar burger and a chocolate milkshake, with fries and applesauce on the side. I'm proud of myself for being (almost) done with this Regina Carter article. I also like the wonderful feeling when I'm silent in a room full of people chatting, saying soft "hello"s to the people who sit down next to me, reading Newsweek casually (but paying special attention to the Martin Marty article — he used to pound back beers with my granddad when they were in seminary). People playing Keno, people flirting with the waitresses, people discussing Tastee Diner history, people getting their kids to settle down, people arguing about what to play on the jukebox, people dissecting the Redskins' latest rash of free-agent signings...I love to listen to people talk, the way people put their words together, the way people come to mean what they say, the negotiations and tonal shifts and consonances. I have my own style, but like everyone else's style, mine is made of the things I like in what I hear, and it's always rejuvenating to sit down and, without anything clouding my mind, be able to hear.
Tuesday, 3/4/03 I apologize for the lack of content lately. It is entirely due to writing this feature for Jazz Times. I have only so much ability to write in one day. In a week it will be over and I can get back to writing essays and reviews and acerbic index-page paragraphs for youuuuu.
Thursday, 2/26/03 At least one of you has noticed that most of the links in the "Movie Reviews" section don't work. I blame myself! This whole system of organization by year is proving to be way more trouble than it's worth. Sometime after March 10 (when my Regina Carter article is due) I will scrap it and replace with with an alphabet (A-F, G-M, N-S, T-Z or something like that). Today I learned that the dude who wrote my introductory macroeconomics textbook is now chief of the Council of Economic Advisors to President Bush. Does this mean that, because he taught me, I am fated to agree with everything he says? "Hey, I trust Greg Mankiw! He wrote the book on that one!" I'll say repeatedly. Maybe I shouldn't go to graduate school in economics.
Tuesday, 2/25/03 I no longer feel like I'm immersed in molasses. I did the same crap I always do and it worked. Still n-for-n on that one. I apologize to Brian Philips, Spam-O-Maticker of much devotion, for saying I had managed to see "all my NYC peeps" when in fact he resides in the NYC area and I did not get to see him on my recent trip. The fact that I only knew in a vague way where he lived does not really excuse that one. Accuracy does not take excuses from ignorance. There are actually a few other people on Spam who I did not get to see up there either due to extreme lack of time. Sometime I will have to have a longer trip and see everyone. Lately, I have seen a lot of yuppie-looking folk around Silver Spring. We (I am united with the other residents of my urban area) now have a Starbucks and a Caribou Coffee within two blocks of each other. We'll soon have a Panera Bread. I'm worried that Silver Spring is going to be overrun by the kind of people who drive up property values, who get upset when people play their stereos loudly at all hours of the night, who think there's something wrong when the hallway in my building smells like a Snoop Dogg concert, who won't add to the astonishing ethnic diversity in our restaurant offerings but will ensure that new and far more expensive restaurants take over prime real estate, who will use terms like "prime real estate" to refer to the vacant lots along the west side of Georgia Avenue.Well, that last one is good. But in general, these are not the kind of people I want to live next to. If I had, I would have scraped together the cash to rent in Bethesda. My dad has reminded me that the blocks upon blocks of auto repair shops in southern Silver Spring aren't going anywhere, which is reassuring. Still, this influx of development—Discovery Channel HQ, the American Film Institute, Borders, Pier 1, another hotel, more office space, Panera in the empty building that used to house the drug-dealer Rite-Aid—as welcomed as it is in many ways, will take some getting used to.
Monday, 2/24/03 That update below was supposed to be up yesterday, as you probably guessed, but my FTP was broken. Credit WorldWebHosters with getting it back up. For $25 a year, they provide top-notch service. If it was $25 a month, I'd want better service, but it's not and this service is top-notch. Lately I feel like both my brain and body are constantly immersed in molasses. Everything is slow to come to mind and come to fruition. Normally I just keep doing the same old crap I always do and the feeling goes away, albeit not without some soul-searching about whether this is the time that doing that stuff isn't going to work. Then it works eventually. I wonder what will actually happen when/if it stops.
Sunday, 2/23/03 I just got home from a weekend in NYC spent interviewing violinist Regina Carter for Jazz Times and seeing all my NYC peeps, which means I had a fun weekend and that I am very exhausted right now. I have a vague idea of how I will write the feature article that is supposed to result from the interview. Hopefully this idea will become less vague over the coming days. There may not be much writing on here for a while as I wrestle with it. I would like to call your attention to Neal Pollack's hilarious smackdown of writing on the stuttering march to war in Iraq. (Credit where it's due: I found the link here in Slate.) I have had enough of these tropes and arguments and excesses of text as well. I particularly have had enough of poets insisting that they be allowed to participate in the political discussion when they don't even have the mental acuity to realize the complete artistic inadequacy of their poems. I've liked Neal Pollack ever since I saw him, in a freestyle poem entitled "I'm Bad" (not after LL Cool J, but none the worse for that), assert that he was "as bad as the nachos at Wrigley Field." (This means that he is one fearsome motherfouler indeed.) Because I saw him assert this in New York, I was, for the umpteenth time in my life, the only person in the room laughing. I hereby declare him the funnest of the McSweeney's crew. Dave Eggers abdicated this post when he devoted his novel, apparently (I have to confess that the reviews left me with no desire to pay $22 for or read it), to childlike criticisms of capitalism.
Tuesday, 2/18/03 Right now the owner of the car that drove off the road and was abandoned in a snowdrift on Sunday is digging the car out. Some people who own a car about ten feet away from the first car that was so far below the snow I didn't even notice it are working on that car. My streets are clear. The sun is shining. The sky is relatively blue compared to the undifferentiated oppressive gray mass it has been. I bet I have to go to work tomorrow.
Monday, 2/17/03 Why do we need friends? According to some spam I got at my Duke-Sucks.com e-mail address (get yours today! It's free and accurate!), we need friends for the following gramatically and semantically haphazard reasons:
We need friends for many reasons,
Thank you so much for clearing that up. Remember, my friends, that I am always here if you need me to listen to outo solve you. Right now I don't need friends so much as I need somewhere besides this studio apartment to go for a couple hours. The snow is frustrating this desire by causing places I normally go to be closed. This includes my workplace, which is not going to be open tomorrow. The Tastee Diner is open, and I may well get lunch there tomorrow just to get lunch there instead of from my cabinets. Maybe tomorrow AMC City Place will be open and I can see "Shanghai Knights." Of course, as always, I have plenty of work around here that I could/should be doing. I blame my lethargy on lingering aftereffects of Friday's wisdom tooth extraction, although most of the time it doesn't hurt anymore at all. Hey—maybe I can do the vast majority of the work I need to get done tomorrow AND have some fun! Based on the past few days, not likely.
Sunday, 2/16/03 Ladies and gentlemen, there is a lot of snow outside my window. Two vans that have been parked all day will, in another couple hours, have their tires completely covered in snow. A small car just now veered from the road and nestled itself deep in a drift, leaving four men to walk away from the car wondering what to do. The winds have been fierce enough to bow pedestrians who brave the icy swirl. No plow has been down my roads all day, though off in the distance Second Avenue has been hit a couple times, to not much effect. The TV informs me that this could be the second-worst snowstorm in Washington history. I wish I knew some little kids in other apartments so we could go out and play in the snow and make it our own. Right now, looking out on a world now completely white, all the weather says to me is "Don't go outside, not even to see 'Shanghai Knights.'" I appear to be almost completely recovered from my wisdom teeth extraction. That didn't take very long at all. Kudos to Dr. Terry Sweeney on that one. He actually was kind enough to call Friday night after I had the surgery. "Hi, this is Dr. Sweeney," he said. "Is Andrew doing okay?" "He's fine," I said, without missing a beat. • Taco Bell was just on my TV asserting that its Monterey Chicken Quesadilla can create a "Monterey Matchup" between comely young lads and lasses, who apparently start breathing harder and snapping to attention upon first bite into the aforementioned mass-produced food product. Bad Mexican food is an aphrodisiac! Just another thing I have learned from the TV. My personal take on the controversy surrounding the hiring of Steve Mariucci as head coach of the Detroit Lions is now up. As usual, I take a dubious view of everything Matt Millen does, but even I don't think he should be punished for sating his Steve Mariucci lust. At least, in a formal, legal sense. I still reserve the right to fire his ass myself. Your comments are welcome.
Saturday, 2/15/03 You all have been waiting very patiently for an update about my status after my oral surgery. No e-mails at all! Anyway, I'm better than I could have expected right now. I'm not feeling any pain, with the help of Aleve, and I didn't feel much yesterday, although yesterday I had to douse it with Percocet. This evening shall mark my first solid food as I contend with a sausage-and-spinach (gotta keep that protein up) pizza from Armand's. Mostly I'm getting stir-crazy from being in the apartment for the past two days with only one break (to go send some mail and ask about why the peephole in my door hasn't been fixed yet. When those drunken people come rumbling through the hallway, I like to be able to look out at them without them looking in on me). The 2001 movie reviews are now all up. This makes me happy for some reason. I am continuing my progress on fixing the links in the movie reviews section. I didn't screw those up while I was on Percocet, I'd just like to note. Here's a quick rundown of the cinemagoing highlights of 2001 for me: Ten Best (alphabetical) Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring Five Worst (descending order of quality) Just 2000 and 1999 to go in the archive now. • Oh, man, I have a problem now. I just learned from the Internet that I can switch to GEICO and save $100 off my current car insurance (which randomly increased by $200 this period, which is what prompted me to traverse the Internet gathering quotes). Can I, in good conscience, subsidize the existence of that stupid computer-animated gecko? There has to be a better quote from an insurance company with better commercials.
Wednesday, 2/12/03 I'm almost done with the 2001 movie reviews. I got "Valentine" up in time for everyone's favorite holiday. It's one of my better rips. I've been using Dreamweaver at work lately in an attempt to help redesign my section's website, which in part accounts for the lack of updates here, since I now associate Dreamweaver with something used at work and not at home. Before you say "But you use Word at work and at home," I use WordPerfect at work. Yeah, I don't really know why either. They told me that they still used Word Pro until recently, which caused me to break out laughing. I mean, freaking Word Pro? Might as well go back to Wordstar! I used to rock that pretty hard on my parents' Kaypro 8086 with its commodious 5 MB hard drive and convenient 5.25-inch floppy drive back in the day.(Yes, back in the day when floppy disks bent groovily and exposed themselves heedlessly to the elements unless they were besleeved.) I shouldn't front on my workplace, though, as they have seen fit to hook me up with a surplus 21-inch monitor on which to play with Dreamweaver, which I will install tomorrow and which will make my good ol' Rev. A iMac look puny and weak (though not any less pretty). I'm not writing much lately, but then, I'm not feeling like writing much lately, so everything in the universe is balanced, at least.
Sunday, 2/9/03 Possibly entertaining irony: In the fall, I saw a personal ad in the Washington City Paper that I felt I should respond to. The City Paper offers two ways to respond to personal ads: the traditional nerve-wracking phone message, or the new-style, emotionally far less hazardous e-mail to an anonymous account. If you know me at all, you know I chose the latter, far more confident in my ability to say what I meant to say in writing than orally. The only problem was, the City Paper requires that you buy five "e-stamps" at a time. Nothing happened with the girl I contacted in the fall (first e-mail got her interested, second e-mail disabused her of that), and now I've been reading the personal ads for a few months looking for anything worth using my four remaining e-stamps on. Comes this week and there are three very interesting ads. I wonder at the bounty suddenly before me. Then I realize: these women all want dates for Valentine's Day. This would be fine except that the three wisdom teeth remaining in my mouth will be extracted from it on February 14th, under general anesthesia and with Percodan (I hope) to take home with it. This will not make me a very interesting or interested conversational partner, I suspect: "You say you're not happy with your roommate situation? That's too bad. Did I mention I'm in constant blinding pain? And why couldn't we have gone to a restaurant that serves soup, anyway?" In case you are wondering, and at the risk of pitying myself (on a blog! Imagine that! I didn't think it was possible to be toxically self-involved on a blog!), I did in fact originally schedule the surgery with the idea of distracting myself from my anticipated lack of romantic entanglement on that hallowed holiday of corporate-sponsored material displays of passion. Well, it's doing a bang-up job, as you can see. The fact is that I have declared a moratorium on efforts in this area until I don't feel totally incompetent to confront the quandaries posed by attempts to date, and right now I still feel toweringly incompetent (unable to discern lack of interest in potential date, unable to discern interest in potential date, and unable to coherently express interest in potential date, which pretty much covers it). To the extent that surgery enforces the moratorium, it's probably a good thing, overall. It snowed six inches on Thursday night when I swore we wouldn't get any, so it's going to snow a foot tonight so I can get off work tomorrow, right? Right? Please?
Saturday, 2/8/03 The Red Line train I rode downtown today was delayed for 15 minutes because, according to the train operator, "a train ran over a shopping cart" at the Rhode Island Avenue station. You know, a lot of people complain about Metro's service interruptions and blame them on incompetent management. Perhaps they're often right to do so. But what if a large proportion of Metro's service interrruptions is caused by world-class dumbasses, such as this one was? When you think about it, when traffic is backed up on the Beltway because some moron drove his SUV into a Honda Civic while talking on his cell phone, we don't say "I blame the Federal Highway Administration for its incompetent management." No, we say, "I blame that world-class dumbass." (Substitute freely to obtain desired profanity level.) Why do we hold the Washington Metropolitan Transit Authority to a higher standard than we do the Federal Highway Administration? Or, perhaps more correctly, why do we assign dumbasses a higher level of responsibility on the highway than we do on the subway? The Dead Rapper Edition of In My Changer is now up, featuring KMD, whose late member is Subroc, and Big L, who is also no longer among us. It's a good thing we have these amazing recording devices that can play back things people MCed at one time, is all I can say.
Thursday, 2/6/03 Today I had the worst beer I have ever tasted. Its name is Pete's Wicked Strawberry Blonde. It calls itself a Golden Blonde Lager with Natural Strawberry Flavor. It tastes like Kool-Aid. NutraSweet KoolAid, actually—that weakest of all Kool-Aids. When I want alcoholic Kool-Aid, I'll buy one of those little packets and mix it with two parts water and one part vodka, thank you. The worst part was that the rest of the dinner was so damn good: Goya black bean soup simmered with strips of proscuitto and jalapeño slices, cranberry sauce, fresh French bread courtesy of my bread machine's labors as I toiled at work. A pleasing mixture of textures and tastes. Then I was drinking freaking alcoholic Kool-Aid. Weak, nearly flavorless alcoholic Kool-Aid. Soon (when I get a few free hours and a head of steam) I will debut the Spam-O-Matic Consumer Reports section, in The Rest of Our Culture. It will feature a list of my favorite products, occasional reviews of consumer products, and the series of capsule reviews I'm eventually supposed to do of every restaurant I am familiar with in Beautiful Silver Spring. This last is not only for my friends but also for the Discovery Channel, whose big ole headquarters building looks just about ready to go two blocks down Georgia Avenue. Those people are coming from Bethesda and they need to know where to eat. I must tell them.
Wednesday, 2/5/03 I have the power to stop conversations. For example, when I go out to dinner, and people order chicken, I can say, "I certainly hope that chicken was raised and tested in accordance with the relevant provisions of the National Poultry Improvement Plan, found in parts 145 and 147 of title 9 of the Code of Federal Regulations. Why, just the other day, I was writing a regulation that would authorize the use of a rapid ruthenium immunoassay so that testing for Salmonella bacteria will be quicker and cheaper. You should see the stuff they have to do now to test for that bacterium." Or if someone should happen to discuss the new car they purchased, I can say, "You know, I was reading the most interesting advanced notice of proposed rulemaking the other day that indicated that meat and bone meal rendered from 'downer' cattle —of course, that refers to cattle too weak to move that must be euthanized on the farm — or cattle that died on the farm may not be used in food products because of the risk of transmission of any bovine spongiform encephalopathy that may be present, so they can use it in industrial plastics as long as their construction is isolated from the food-production stream! That means your bumper could be partially made of diseased cow! How about that?" The sad thing is, deep in my heart of hearts, I think this stuff is really interesting now. I mean, cow bumpers! Well, actually, no matter what you regulata haters say, that is interesting. And fun to say. Cow bumpers! Beat that. One of my all-time favorite disses, among other reviews, is now up in the 2001 movie reviews: "The Low Down." Beloved by critics who weren't me, dissed heavily by me, out of theaters in a week.
Tuesday, 2/4/03 The other day I used the word "antediluvian" in casual conversation—actually, not very casually at all, as I was condemning Montgomery County's liquor laws and landed on the word pretty hard to emphasize my disgust. But I didn't mean to use it; it just spilled from the tongue. There was a time I would have been massively impressed with my casual verbosity, but that was a time ago, and I felt like I had verbally farted. Or worse, preeningly flexed my verbal muscles—for that's exactly what using a word like "antediluvian" in casual conversation is, unless you don't mean to use it. Which I swear I didn't. And which I realize is pretty unlikely. Today's interesting link (not that there will be one every day; I don't have the necessary leisure time for that one) comes to me from Jason Walther's blog. It shows the world the English subtitles on a bootleg Asian DVD of "The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers." This would make a whole new viewing experience if only I had access to the actual DVD. Of course, if I did, Jack Valenti would probably break down my door himself and lead me off in cuffs, so that's probably for the best. In my continuing effort to get my 2001 movie reviews up, we now have the much-loved Method Man and Redman interview for "How High," which features the following quote:
Pauline Kael herself could not have said it better.
Sunday, 2/2/03 I don't have anything particularly piquant to say about the Columbia disaster. It's amazing to me that there have only been two major catastrophes in the history of the U.S. space program, given the fact that these are vehicles designed to do something utterly unnatural. (After all, as the saying goes, gravity's not just a rule, it's the law.) Dedicated people lost their lives to risks they embraced in the spirit of scientific and public service, and that should always make us think about what we can do to further similar goals. I hope the disaster reminds us of the great things that our collected resources can accomplish and that we have come to take for granted, and of the ennobling quality of goals that rise above the quotidian. I have a bunch of piquant things to say about the go-go concert I went to last night in the always-personable company of Spam-O-Matickers Ellen Malone, Tyler Higgins and Christina Nunez. Thanks again for going with me, ladies and gentleman. My clothes still smell like smoke and my right ear is still ringing, but those are only reminders of how much fun I had. (Does anyone know how to make this ringing stop, by the way? I don't need to be reminded this forcefully.) (Gregorio Villalobos has noted that I should have used earplugs. Christina was actually kind enough to give me a set of earplugs, which I then proceeded to not use during E.U.'s performance, which undoubtedly was the reason I had this ringing in my ear presently. It's very human to perversely take a course of action that causes pain when we could be taking a course of action that at least avoids pain even if it involved shoving foam-rubber cylinders in my ears. It's also very human to realize how dumb this was only afterwards.)
Friday, 1/31/03 Happy February Eve! The problem with a blog, which I anticipated, is that not all that much funny stuff happens most of the time. You either have to go out and find content to make fun of or have an interesting observation to make. I have neither of these on a day when I locomoted primarily, it felt, by yawning so gapingly that the act of intaking so much air propelled me forward and through the various penances the day exacts from me until I fell into bed, as I did at 7:30, and am writing now at 11 before I go back to bed. Oh, I do have one thing to note:
Well, Julius, you may have brought your "A-plus-plus" game, but you still took the L. (And Steve Blake outscored you!) That's what happens when you don't fear the turtle, beeyotch.
Wednesday, 1/29/03 Today was a frustrating day. For one thing, after eating dinner, I could not get myself to leave my bed except for the last thirty minutes, during which time I found out that the Thai cooking class I wanted to take in Montgomery County's continuing ed program was full of other people. Before I left work to go home, my chief informed me that one docket I wrote was accurate two months ago when I wrote it but may not be accurate now that it's ready to move through review. Ten minutes before then, I had a moment of satori about how to write one of my dockets, after I had spent the entire day (almost) wrestling with it, but I couldn't do anything with my satori since I only had ten minutes to go before I heard that one of my other dockets may now be inaccurate and then left for home. And I didn't write anything tonight because it's cold and I wanted to stay cozy under my covers and not sit at this cold computer. But I really want to do a new "In My Changer," a piece on the Mornhinweg firing, and an essay I'm writing on why I sometimes feel uncomfortable in Bethesda, and I do plan to do them. Yes, I'm allowing this to turn into a semi-blog.
Tuesday, 1/28/03 "Be nice to me," it says on a sticker I got today after skilled technicians drained a pint of my finest A-positive. "I gave blood today." As I noted to my co-workers, it is legally binding to read the sticker. They wondered whether they had to be nice to me forever or just for today. I said there was no time limit on the first sentence, just the second, and that they were obligated to be nice to me forever. We'll see how well that one works. Today also I learned of yet another essayist making lazy, unsubstantiatable generalizations about the great city of Washington, D.C. Fortunately, I learned of it from an article that took the essayist to task, as Peter Carlson of the hometown Post laid the smack down on Harper's scrivener Wayne Biddle in his always-entertaining "The Magazine Reader" column. Harper's does not have the stones to put this up for Internet perusal, apparently, which is fine because Carlson does not exactly make one eager to read the essay. Someone (yes, me) needs to write an essay about how easy it is for people to imagine Washington to be a den of whatever kind of iniquity they want it to be a den of, and how this affects a city full of people who might want to be taken seriously despite their lack of K Street clout or closets full of identical blue suits. Of course, this would mean I would probably have to buy an issue of Harper's, a magazine so doggedly sanctimonious and uninteresting that I rejected their offer to extend my subscription for a mere six bucks a year. (I didn't know what I was getting into, and at the end of a year was super-eager to get out of it.) I guess I could go to the library and Xerox it. There's still the problem of reading it, though. There was not the problem of watching Super Bowl XXXVII, which I have now reviewed. I love not having to edit myself quite as much nowadays. I hope you love it as much as I do.
Monday, 1/27/03 Should you enter the "City of God"? Not unless you're prepared for it. Fortunately, I went to Bethesda to get the low-down for you. I have a bunch of stuff to write about football, which I will try to get to tomorrow, but I want to note my awesome joy at the fact that MARTY MORNHINWEG FINALLY GOT FIRED! The only problem is that Matt "If I Express My Opinions Forcefully, It Will Disguise Their Stupidity" Millen in still in charge of hiring his replacement. He looks set to hire Steve Mariucci, but I don't trust Millen not to screw that up somehow. I wouldn't trust Matt Millen to pour milk in my coffee (if I drank coffee). I wouldn't trust Matt Millen to spell words of more than four letters correctly. I wouldn't trust Matt Millen to pick out the terrorist from a lineup featuring Joey Harrington, James Stewart, Osama Bin Laden and Herman Moore. There's not a lot I'd trust Matt Millen to do, except get his ass out of the office after I fired him, which I may well go up to Detroit and do my damn self one of these weekends.
Thursday, 1/23/03 A review of "Catch Me if You Can" is up as promised. Sometime this weekend I will take care of some marginalia I need to write for it. Today I would like to alert you to the existence of Pancake City, the blog of Jason Walther. Who is Jason Walther? He founded the Cow Nipple, the University of Maryland's finest and only humor magazine. More importantly, he is the funniest writer I know. Yeah, out of everyone. His blog reflects this judgment, is all I can say. I have also started to put up the 2001 movie reviews. There are 68 of them. I'm doing my best.
Tuesday, 1/21/03 I'm back now from Chicago, after a very fun weekend spent with Mark Knoblauch, a charter member of the Spam-O-Matic. I saw Second City and marveled at how much better at comedic improv they are than I am, saw "Catch Me If You Can" and will eventually review it (in a very informal manner), and ate the best food I have ever eaten, or at least the best since last time I visited Mark. Are you a heterosexual male? Do you enjoy coy juvenile humor? If you answer "yes" to either of the previous two questions, I would like to recommend that you visit GiveBoobs.com, which exists so that a young woman can solicit donations to go towards breast implants. Yes, for herself. This site's existence would be another sign of the quickening destruction of American society were the proprietress not pretty skilled at punmaking and semi-witty riposte (check out the web mail page). Those of you who dislike puns may well feel that they amplify the depressing premise of this site, of course. Comments are hereby solicited. If you all are sufficiently piqued by the sociocultural issues this site's existence engages, I may share the e-mail I wrote the proprietress.
Tuesday, 1/14/03 I wrote a poem. It's called "Bubbles." Read it if you want to. Otherwise I haven't felt much like writing anything.
Wednesday, 1/8/03 On Slate, there has been going on for the last week or so an interesting discussion among its critic, David Edelstein; Vogue's critic, Sarah Kerr; one of the NY Times' critics, A.O. Scott; and Roger Ebert about the best movies of 2002. Midway through this discussion, Edelstein solicited feedback via e-mail. Noting that Edelstein disliked "Adaptation." and I rather enjoyed it, I sent him my review, explaining that I thought I had a new perspective that could contribute to the discussion. While my thesis went unplumbed by this illustrious group, I did get quoted. A nice big fat quote. With my name on it. Check it out here. So now my name is in front of four important people as someone who wrote something quotable. In the long run, it might not mean anything or it might mean a great deal, but it sure is satisfying to see it there. No new content for now. It's been a tubulent time. I hope to get back to doing "In My Changer" next week. I'm close to feeling like my poem is ready to go up.
Friday, 1/3/03 "The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers" review is finally here in Movie Reviews. (We're going to pretend it's 2002 as long as I'm seeing movies that came out in 2002, which will be for a while now, in part because I don't want to make the new page.) This review employs yet more English-major thinking, although I forego French deconstructionist theory, no doubt to your great relief. I have to say this about Peter Jackson: he's made two movies I found almost impossible to review. The first review, in fact, trips on the very dilemma I (hope I) explicate in the second. I'm going to try to put up the 2001 reviews soon so I can refer to them in the course of reviews. "Soon" is a relative term here. We also have a factual correction to my Talib Kweli review, because the title of the Common/Mary J. "TQOHHS" Blige song I used for comparison purposes in said review is "Come Close" and not "Come Closer." This correction comes courtesy of Christina Nunez, who has an early 2 to nothing lead on the rest of you in suggesting factual corrections to the new Spam-O-Matic. No, the standings do not carry over from the e-mail list. Finally, I might have a poem up soon! I want to play with it over the weekend, but I like it pretty well. This makes me very happy.
Tuesday, 12/31/02 I greet the New Year with about half a "LOTR:T3" review done, a couple ideas for other stuff, and a burning desire that Maryland win the Peach Bowl. I greet you with wishes that your New Year will be productive and prosperous and filled with love of the various kinds that make life fuller and richer. I also greet you with some questions about business cards. The Spam-O-Matic needs business cards so that I no longer have to write the address on ugly, non-attention-getting scraps of paper. VistaPrint has some cheap-ass business cards that look OK, and even offers some business cards for free. (They put a little ad on the back and charge for shipping.) Most of the free cards, with their amazing unattractivness, remind me of how stupid people are, but I could see using the first and third in the right-hand column on this page. Of the cards that cost money, most also remind me of how stupid people are (check out these nausea-inducing designs). I would probably go with the third one down in the left-hand column on this page to reinforce an already-present design motif. (I don't get to pick the color.) So: Do you know anywhere else this cheap that might have better designs? Or do you have an idea for how the business card should look? Should the main line in bold say The Spam-O-Matic or www.spam-o-matic.org? If the second, what should the line under the main line say? (I want to have my name as the contact name, so "Andrew Lindemann Malone's Internet Playpen" is out due to overrepetition.) Do any of you have any opinions on anything? E-mail me and prove my fears wrong.
Thursday, 12/26/02 I have to say, I was a little optimistic in thinking I would have anything interesting to say about "LOTR:T3." The movie has just about exactly the same faults and virtues as the first "LOTR" did, and I would be repeating myself if I catalogued them again—except in the view of this site, which doesn't have the "Fellowship of the Ring" review up. On the other hand, I don't feel like putting it up right now. Eventually it will be up, along with some very sketchy explanatory text applying its points to the new film.
Wednesday, 12/25/02 Yes, it's Christmas morning and I'm updating my Web site. No, I don't even have anything to post. I am posting because, in the event that you might happen to cap your day of food and family and presents and otherwise commemorating the pagan holiday that early Christians appropriated to celebrate Jesus' birth with a visit to the Internet's finest source of my writing, I wanted you to know that I am grateful. For Christmas is not only a holiday on which we celebrate Jesus' birth and material acquisition and having our families together once again; it is a holiday that makes us think about the people who are special in our life and how thankful we are that they are here. Perhaps it seems a bit silly to express such gratitude to people who, in some cases, I've never met. However, writing is the work I'm best at and the work I love, and having people to witness my struggles and experiments and failures and triumphs in attempting to become better has always made the labor lighter and its rewards more fulfilling. So: I wish you the best on this holiday and in the coming new year. May life give you the chance to do what you want to do and may fortune treat you with grace. And I'll continue to write, and I hope you'll continue to read, and I hope this can serve as my year-round gift to you.
Monday, 12/23/02 Plenty of Christmas Eve Eve content today, although not "LOTR:T-cubed," which will have to wait until later in the week. But fret not, cinephiles: we do have "Adaptation," the new metafictional opus from screenwriter Charlie Kaufman about screenwriter Charlie Kaufman trying to write an adaptation. This review mentions French people without any real prompting and also has a boatload of marginalia, including a review-length essay on why the movie isn't bad, after the review explains why it is good. We also have a review of Talib Kweli's Quality, which originally was going to dwell in "In My Changer" but grew to 750 words and earned its own spot. "In My Changer" is thus a little shorter than usual, especially considering that many of the discs I have been listening to most have been CDs I bought for friends and family for Christmas, and if you think I'm revealing those, well, fat chance. I'm pretty happy with how the stuff has been coming out lately. I'm doing things I wouldn't have done while writing for the Diamondback with my reviews. Now I have to start writing humor and write some poems that I actually feel like showing anyone else. I must work hard and be patient.
Friday, 12/20/02 If you're like me, the issue that's been bugging you the most recently is that cold treatment to kill Oriental fruit fly is still required for Ya pears imported from the Hebei province of the People's Republic of China into the United States. After all, Hebei hasn't had any fruit flies for at least three years, and climatic conditions do not favor their development in that province! Well, to settle this score, I've taken the regulations into my own hands, with Docket No. 02-084-1, the first docket written entirely by me to be published in the Federal Register. See just how unrecognizable my prose style can be given proper government editorial smackdown in PDF format here and in text format here. (Also note that, for legal purposes, while I wrote this docket, its author is the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service. You get the Hobbesian distinction.)
Monday, 12/16/02 Thanks to all my friends and family who showed up for the ComedySportz workshop show yesterday. (Was it really so short a time ago?) Your presence made a great day even better, so much better that I'm afraid I might have given my thanks with almost unrealistic enthusiasm at our brief meeting afterwards. But hey, I meant it and you deserve it. The new "In My Changer," a birthday tribute to Ludwig van Beethoven, is up. Otherwise I have been using my free time to work on stuff for pay and to bake cookies for my out-of-town relatives in honor of the winter holidays and to ponder deep philosophical questions and methods I can use to squirm out of coming up with real answers to them. Don't expect much more content this week, although the weekend should bring a viewing and then a review of "Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers" (or "LOTR: T-cubed," as Robert Kahn puts it).
Sunday, 12/15//02 Today's the big day—my ComedySportz performance! I'm so excited! If you're only now becoming excited, please remember that you can call 703/486-HAHA and make a reservation for the 1 pm workshop show today and check out ComedySportz's website for directions. A brief post-performance beer-oriented celebration will be held, after which I have to mail the cookies I made for various of my lucky relatives and friends yesterday at an Arlington post office because the schedule for the Silver Spring post office doesn't work for me. Also: I now have a DVD player! It's actually a changer, and is doing double duty as my primary CD player. I don't even have the good audio cable in there and it already sounds better than my old CD player did: less cloud around the sound, a brighter tone. More like how I heard these speakers in the store when I bought them lo these many years ago. More content soon, I hope...
Tuesday, 12/10/02 Some factual corrections for the latest "In My Changer" have been suggested to me by my mother, who probably does in fact remember my childhood listening habits better than I do, and implemented by me. Also thanks to Kevin Hawkins for prompting me to fix the link to Frank Rich's anti-D.C. salvo in "Start Spreading," and for giving me a link to the puffery of another pro-N.Y., anti-D.C. blowhard in the Atlantic Monthly. I'll give you a couple days to Spot Them Obvious Fallacies and then I'll take care of it myself. I had no idea this was going to be an ongoing defend-D.C. series, but the bell has rung and I appear to be standing in the ring, regardless of whether mainstream media is taking notice of it. It has become apparent that Webmail here is not really a big draw, so I am withdrawing the Special Promotional Offer made on 11/21/02. Is there anything specific that you would like to see here? Let me know and I'll see what I can do.
Sunday, 12/8/02 My phone is now working, meaning that you will no longer encounter those awful three rising electronic notes and a message that my number does not exist when you try to call me. Considering the deluge of e-mails that I did not get when my phone went out, I don't think any of you were terribly discomfitted. I'm not sure how happy to be about that. A link to the Maryland Cow Nipple and what I hope is a suitably grateful message to my editors there has been added to the Acknowledgements page, and a couple of my favorite items from my tenure at the University of Maryland's finest and only humor magazine have been added in the Humor section. I feel embarrassed that I had not mentioned the MCN on the site before; while, towards the end of my time with the mag, I was not happy with very much of what I wrote, it was always a renewing experience to be with people who felt the University was as absurd and banal and weirdly, obliviously dark as I did. (At least I projected those thoughts onto my writing comrades.) Also they liked amazingly juvenile humor as much as I do, and occasionally liked it a lot more than I do, which was not always good. But at our best we did some uproarious work. The new "In My Changer," a special holiday edition, is also out in The Rest of Our Culture.
Friday, 12/6/02 If any of you have tried to call me today, you may have noticed that my phone service is disconnected. This is because I was supposed to be switched yesterday from the evil monopolists Verizon to fighters for capitalism Starpower, but they didn't show up until too late to switch the phone because of the six inches of snow the D.C. metro area got. Then they didn't show up today for no apparent reason. I'm hoping I get my phone back tomorrow. If you really need to talk to me, e-mail me or IM me (Bismarck71) and I'll call you. Sorry about any inconvenience I may have caused. I do now have a cable modem, which would allow you to call me while I was on the Internet if my phone wasn't disconnected. It allows me to get broadband speed at home, and this speed reminds me how boring the Internet really is if you're not looking for porn. I do, however, enjoy this site, based on one of my favorite movie quotes, which should not be accessed anywhere where sounds might make you embarrassed.
Tuesday, 12/3/02 The radio and TV say we're going to have several inches of snow tomorrow night. I guess the supermarkets had unsalable surpluses of milk, bread and toilet paper again. Today I have taken the time to inform you that Pizza Hut's Chicago Dish pizza is awful, in "Making it Suck." "But we already knew that!" you say. "But I spent money to learn it," I say. "HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!" you say. "I know," I say.
Sunday, 12/1/02 I know I said "In My Changer" would be every week, but for the past week my receiver has been acting funny and my headphones have been broken, and so I have not been listening to as much music as I might like. So no go this week. I'll put up some other stuff tomorrow to temporarily sate the Internet's unceasing lust for content, probably old stuff. People from the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area should not only note the existence of ComedySportz, a fine improv comedy show that takes place in the name-based juvenile humor mecca of Ballston, Virginia, they should also note that I have been taking a workshop there to learn the art of acting silly in a structured manner, and that they can view the results of said workshop in the form of a show. This show will take place at 1 pm on Sunday, December 15, and tickets to it cost $5. Which is better: "Eight Crazy Nights" or watching me make a fool of myslf (along with seven other people whose writing is not featured on this website) for an hour and a half? Call 703/486-HAHA to make a reservation. (Just say on the message that you want to attend the workshop show at 1 pm on December 15.) More info on the location, ways to get there, and shows that do not feature Andrew can be found at ComedySportz's website I'm going to move some of the updates to an updates page so this page will continue to load at near-blinding speed even over a dialup. If for some reason you wish to view the old updates, they are available at the Updates Archive at the bottom of this page (or earlier in this sentence).
Saturday, 11/30/02 Yes, I'm still watching art films occasionally. Such as "Solaris," the latest from Steven Soderbergh and the capper to a fun Friday evening. I can't say I'm better than ambivalent about the film, but I know some of you will enjoy it quite a lot, and I hope I have explained why. Some of you won't like it at all, either, and I hope I have made that clear too.
Thanksgiving, 11/28/02 What better way to celebrate the luxuries of living in Western civilization than going to see the new Bond movie? "Die Another Day" is even actually good. And my review of it features a bonus outtake from the never-before-seen film "Walther Lamm: Ass Demolisher" in the marginalia! It's that time of year when we think about what we're thankful for, and I am thankful that you read this site, even if it is not actually Thanksgiving when you read these words. Writing can survive without readers, but readers make it a lot more fun than it otherwise would be. I hope you all are having (or had) a wonderful, tasty holiday.
Tuesday, 11/26/02 I said "In My Changer" would be every week, and I was almost right. So sue me. Two classical records and two rap singles come in for discussion. Speaking of rap singles, MP3s of "Nuthin' but a Gaul Thang" and "Big Ole Braine" are now available for your delectation over in the Lindemann the MC page. (I apologize for having had this statement up (and the links up) two days before the actual MP3s were up. I was going to post them but realized that I needed to call some people, and all I got right now to get to the Internet is my phone line. Won't happen again.) Coming up soon but not tonight: Bond. James Bond. Should he "Die Another Day" or just give it up? I'm theorizing that putting this teaser up on the website will shame me into actually writing it soon. I'm still getting used to not writing these on a deadline. I used to write all my reviews immediately after I saw the movie, which had certain advantages (I obsessed about the review of "The Lord of the Rings" for two weeks before actually writing the freaking thing, which was annoying) but also had certain disadvantages, like an inability to express any subtle thought. Of course, sometimes that wasn't called for. Anyway, Bond, here soon, hopefully.
Thursday, 11/21/02 First 10 people to e-mail me saying "Yes, I want the Special Promotional Bonus!" get a free 5 MB e-mail account, yourname@spam-o-matic.org. This can be accessed through the Web or regular mail software. I happen to like the idea of a having a bunch of people with the devotion to associate themselves with the site so closely. Of course, you can also use it to get mail from commercial websites that demand an address, but I'd prefer that you use it for higher purposes. Just for fun, I put up "Returnello," a humor piece about books, CDs and mental deficiencies that I wrote three years ago and remain quite fond of.
Monday, 11/18/02 Look at this! Daily content! Today's is an essay called "Start Spreading," a line-by-line analysis of various silly/inane criticisms of Washington, D.C. made by New Yorker writer Jeffrey Frank. I was just getting sick of this whole NY-DC battle. We gotta get along to move along, people. Much love to my NY and DC peeps. (11/19/02 brings a correction to "Start Spreading," making it better.) Remember to show the Spam-O-Matic to your friends, enemies, creditors, etc. Start some arguments, enjoy some laughs, gain some insights. All here for you.
Sunday, 11/17/02 Two weeks is an eternity in Web time, I know, but it's been raining for the past two weeks and I've been tired and uncreative. I'm not particularly interested in punchy daily updates—there are plenty of people around who do that better than I could. I'd rather put up stuff that takes a while longer to chew and digest. But inaction equals death on the Internet nevertheless. New things up include "The Price Is So Right," in Arguments, and "In My Changer" in The Rest of Our Culture. "In My Changer" is a little what-I'm-listening-to feature that will allow my various musical tastes to commingle, with, it is to be hoped, enlightening results. It will also provide weekly content, so you'll have an incentive to at least tune in on Sundays and see what else new might be converted to Spam format. Old things newly up: The entirety of my 1998 movie reviews! With all the charm and flaws of amateurism. (There will be a little more editing, but mostly to add links.) It's amazing to me, in retrospect, how dedicated I was to writing stuff for free just for a bunch of people on an e-mail list to enjoy. Right now I feel like I've forgotten how to write anything I'm not writing on deadline for money. I'll figure it out, though.
Sunday, 11/3/02: Debut of the new Spam-O-Matic Well, partying people, I have to tell you that I had a time there during the summer where I considered whether I ever wanted to write anything humorous, critical or argumentative again. I thought about going to the park and picking wildflowers for all my leisure-time activities, or reading the works of people who can write better than I can, or simply perfecting my toffee-chocolate chip cookie recipe, or some such. There is a toxic effect to writing too much; you start to think of words chosen at leisure as your primary way to interact with the world, and miss out on such charming pleasures as getting shot down by random women in public and being told you are gay by homeless men. However, a summer of interaction with the world seems to have cured that one. So: This site isn't done, but it's here. You'll notice that only the 2002 movie reviews are up, and the humor cupboard is extremely bare compared to what I've actually written. But there's plenty to waste your time for now, and there's some new stuff for the veterans. Here's a little tour of the highlights: Movie Reviews: Five new ones, four about low-ambition action movies. You can see the difference between getting passes to see movies for free before they come out and me actually spending my own money. But there will be some more diversity soon, I assure you. The Rest of Our Culture: Archived material plus my review of Wynton Marsalis's All Rise, easily the most talked-about "serious" composition of the last year. Humor: Vintage material, including the complete Journal Club, A Senator's Garden of Impeachable Verse, and a David Foster Wallace parody that I never sent to the list. Plus, for the first time anywhere, the fully documented version of my correspondence with Dave Barry. Arguments: My economics column, without unfortunate typos and edits born of necessity! Plus a detailed report on the farm bill. The Sport-Watching Life: I predicted the Mornhinweg disaster before anyone else (or at least at the same time as everyone else). Also has updates to all the other Sport-Watching Life stuff. Creative Scribblings: For the first time anywhere electronic, poems and stories! Hopefully soon I will write some more, so all the material doesn't date from 1998 and previous. Lindemann the MC: One MP3, a bunch of lyrics files that most of you haven't seen. About Various Things: Explanations of everything you could want explanations of. Author photo will change every month. This has been a lot of work, but I'm happy with how it's come out. For now. Tell me how you like it, what you like about it, and what you'd change. Don't expect me to work up too much enthusiasm for making wholesale changes any time soon.
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All this tasty writing ©2002-11 by Andrew Lindemann Malone. All rights reserved. |