Words to live by
I've tried to boil down what matters to me into a few key maxims.
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Do not take us for consumers of cheap tricks
Look, Peter Jackson. I was skeptical at first about “The Hobbit,” but you won me over by unveiling characters that showed you understood and cared about J.R.R. Tolkien’s work (if not in the original spirit of the bedtime-story “Hobbit.”)
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Magic as plot and magic as system
Whenever a work of fiction creates a world that doesn’t abide by our familiar rules, there’s a choice: how much do the creators constrain themselves by writing the new rules?
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Stupid airplane tricks
Having just gotten back from a trip in which I took four plane flights in under a week, I thought I would briefly post links to two old reports underlying how much of the hassle travelers undergo these days is entirely pointless and doesn’t accomplish the stated reasons.
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Designated hooey
The Designated Hitter rule in baseball may make the game more exciting. It’s still a travesty.
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SMBC on why Kant was right and Mill was wrong
That may or may not be what Zach Weiner was intending to get at here, but this is definitely a blow for deontology and against consequentialism:
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"Last Resort": ABC is trying to tempt me back to TV
A new drama from ABC promises to combine two of my favorite concepts: civilization-building, and submarines.
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Walking off right
Longtime Cubs pitcher Kerry Wood retired today in the most fitting fashion possible: with a K.
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This western life's no paradise: "The Idiot" then and now
Stan Rogers wrote “The Idiot” 30 years ago, but listening to it last night I was struck by how a song written about Alberta in the early 1980s applies to North Dakota in the early 2010s.
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HDR success
It looks so cool, but it’s far from easy. I’ve made a half-dozen attempts at taking HDR pictures lately, and until today all of them had turned out terribly. In fact, the first one I tried today didn’t come out, either. But on my second set of shots on a trail around Devil’s Tower National Monument in Wyoming, I managed to produce this:
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Spare the spoilers
For millennia, we struggled with insufficient information. Now our bane is getting too much.
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Earnest and the Snarks
Want to get the zeitgeist of our times? Check the reactions to the Olive Garden review.
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Not in the business
Media companies deserve piracy if they make life too difficult for consumers. Or do they?
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Monday night miscellany, part 5
Brief looks at weird calendars, "RAS Syndrome" and upcoming movies.
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A baker's dozen short
On "The Hobbit," dwarves and why Peter Jackson is right to deviate from Tolkien's classic.
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Monday night miscellany, part 4
A roundup of odd thoughts about nefarious lefties, Sherlock Holmes and G.I. Joe.
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The dangers of armies vs. navies
Which poses a greater danger to domestic liberty — a standing army or a standing navy?
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The perils and promise of a liberal arts education
Is a liberal arts education a waste of money or the best possible use of it? It turns out it might depend on who you are.
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Monday night miscellany, part 3
A random thought on game design inspired by too much time-wasting.
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Hollywood's Rule of Pairs
A look at Hollywood's tendency to release multiple similar movies close together.
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What's in a league?
I propose a new way for Major League Baseball to draw its division boundaries.
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Movie review: "Contagion"
The title of the 2011 movie “Contagion” refers to the deadly infectious disease sweeping over the world that drives its plot — but also to the social contagion that spreads even farther and faster than the killer virus.
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Get off the reading rainbow?
It’s never an easy thing to hear someone suggest that something you love and value isn’t actually worth very much. But that’s the experience I had reading the most provocative article I’ve seen in some time, Marshall Poe’s “Death to the Reading Class.”
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Monday night miscellany, part 2
Siri, space nukes and Tintin.
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"Arrested Development" fans protest series changes
A possibly ill-advised parody mashup of "Arrested Development" and the "Star Wars" prequels.
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Real road-tripping: Heartland loop
A travelogue of a 3,000-mile road trip around middle America.
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Rooting rules for the 2011 MLB playoffs
Who should any self-respecting baseball fan be cheering for this postseason? I’m glad you asked!
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Baseball at its best
The best baseball games are masterpieces, with moments of individual brilliance and failure (frequently on two sides of the same play) interwoven in to an emotional sea of rallies and collapses, all marked by baseball’s true defining characteristic: timelessness. There is no clock in baseball, no inevitability, no moment at which victory becomes impossible until the moment it is achieved. As long as you’ve got an out left, your chances of winning remain alive.
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My Sept. 11, 2001 memories
When the death of Osama bin Laden was announced in May, I wrote up a post on how that news resonated with me, compared to how I experienced the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks almost a decade prior. The death of Osama bin Laden, I wrote, felt like it brought closure to the epoch of time kicked off that dark Tuesday morning a decade ago.
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Book review: "The Magicians"
If you’re reading Lev Grossman’s “The Magicians” and you think he’s ripping off Harry Potter, just keep reading — eventually he’ll rip off Narnia just as thoroughly. But that won’t matter, because by then you’ll be hooked.