PSA: You have too many spaces
Just a brief interlude for those of you laboring under misconceptions — “Typing two spaces after a period is totally, completely, utterly, and inarguably wrong.”
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Fake road-tripping: Atlantic Canada
Unable to take an actual vacation, I put way too much effort into planning an imaginary one through some shockingly desolate parts of North America.
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Dub-stop
Here’s a pet peeve: I can’t stand bad voice dubs.
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Movie Review: "Cowboys & Aliens"
The new movie “Cowboys & Aliens” makes a great show of playing with film conventions, but the film’s most striking departure from convention involved neither six-shooters nor space ships. Instead, it was this: Jon Favreau’s camera spends more time lingering on star Daniel Craig’s chest than it does on co-star Olivia Wilde’s.
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I love my team, please destroy it
Why the only thing worse than a bad team is a bad team that won't admit it.
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Just how uncanny is that valley?
Steven Spielberg unleashed the full trailer for his upcoming motion-capture epic “The Adventures of Tintin” yesterday, and it’s brilliant. Or awful.
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Four degrees to South Sudan
A look at a distant connection with a deceased warlord.
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Why I blog
On introversion and writing.
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Movie review: "The Secret of Kells"
In 2009, Irish director Tomm Moore released an idiosyncratic animated film, “The Secret of Kells.” It was widely praised by critics, but apparently made less than a million dollars at the box office.
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Ghosts of great games past
This past weekend, the New York Yankees came to Wrigley Field for the first time since 2003. A stirring Cubs victory in Game 1 and competitive play throughout most of the subsequent two games briefly made me concerned that I’d have the singular pleasure of eating my words, but true to this year’s form the Cubs dropped the final two games of the series to continue their disappointing, uneven season true to form.
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Game of Thrones Spin-Off Showcase
Spin-off. Is there any word more thrilling to the human soul?
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One of those years...
Eleven days ago, I gave up on the Cubs.
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Movie review: "X-Men: First Class"
It’s a funny thing about “X-Men: First Class,” the latest film based on the Marvel Comics team of superheroes – large chunks of it aren’t much better than the deservedly derided previous two films in the series, “X-Men 3: The Last Stand” and “X-Men Origins: Wolverine.” And yet the overall movie is a far superior work than those two critical duds.
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Book review: "Empire of the Summer Moon"
Ages ago, I picked up S.C. Gwynne’s 2010 book “Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History.” I think I’d seen a positive blurb on it being nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction, and so picked it up to get an Amazon order up to SuperSaver shipping status. Then it sat around on my bookshelf, gathering dust, until a week or two back I heard an NPR interview with Gwynne about the book.
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A story about a boy who hated stories ("Game of Thrones" mid-season analysis)
Adapting a beloved work of literature for the screen can be a dicey prospect in the best of times. When you’re dealing with a television adaptation of a book written in part as a deliberate revolt against the constraints of television dramas, the pitfalls are quite evident. And that’s the precise challenge that HBO gave itself when it decided to turn George R.R. Martin’s fantasy series “A Song of Ice and Fire” into an epic miniseries.
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Bringing it all back home
The town where I worked for more than two years out of college, until eight months ago, found itself back in the news today – ironically for an event that had never occurred while I was there despite writing about its possibility for two springs in a row.
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Great films I need to see
Growing up, it’d be hard to describe me as a cinephile. I went to the movies regularly – but not frequently, and rarely to see films targeted at adult audiences (as opposed to kids or the mass-market, wide-release movies). Similarly, at home we’d watch movies on TV or VHS (and later DVD) periodically, but not with any regularity. Books, and then computer games, interested me more.
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Do you want to know a secret [door]?
I've got relatively reasonable ambitions when it comes to money. But if I should happen to find myself fabulously wealthy for one reason or another, there's one useless luxury I'd love to be able to dump money into — a secret-riddled home.
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Head in the clouds
Google has finally debuted (for a June release) its Chromebook laptops, bare-bones netbooks running Google’s new Chrome OS. This has some people very excited about a new way to consume media. Should I join them?
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Campaign Songs
An audio-mashup of the delightfully weird campaign songs of the 2007 French presidential candidates.
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Mr. Smith Goes West
The conceit of the 1962 movie “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” is the collision between two very different people: a tough, gunslinging rancher and an urbane, peaceful lawyer, thrown together in a frontier town where both men’s talents will be needed to free the townsfolk of their oppressors.
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Silence will fall — cleverly
The venerable but spry British science fiction television series “Doctor Who” has returned for another season – and judging by the opening pair of episodes, it’s going to be a doozy. Not, however, a doozy for the uninitiated.
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Bookends of a decade
On Sept. 11, 2001 and the death of Osama bin Laden.
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Standing athwart history yelling "hard to port!"
The computer game "Europa Universalis" and the joys of alternative history.
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Not my type
I have an irrational appreciation for Myers-Briggs personality profiles.
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Off-the-cuff music recommendations
Six album recommendations for people with eclectic tastes in music.
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Weirdos
From economist Bryan Caplan, this may be part of why I want to have kids so much:
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An amazing year at the movies
The underappreciated cinematic joys of 2006.
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Monday night miscellany
Boringness, booze and blogging about the Civil War in real time.
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Just a little of that human touch
I don’t own an iPad and have no plans to get one, but that doesn’t mean I don’t secretly lust after one.