Walking off into the sunset

...Yeah, I did do this once before a few years back for several months, but I think it's time to pull the plug on this blog for now.

A lot of blogs I once followed religiously have gently faded away, with shiny newer toys taking their place, and my post count has steadily dropped the past year or so. I've gone from a couple hundred posts a year to barely managing to post once a month. The engagement level has gone away, too, moved on to other social spheres. Not to sound self-obsessed, but you don't want to write a nice long post about this or that and have it sit there ignored without comment. And now that I work in online media, I have to admit in my "off time" I'm more inclined to spend it away from a screen if I can.

But more or less 8 1/2 years of blogging is a pretty good track record for a rather new medium of writing. There's many other avenues I can explore these days from my day job to the off-the-cuff banter of Facebook and Twitter. It's too tempting sometimes to just keep doing something because you have been doing it for a long time and I've never particularly liked getting stuck in that mold. An awful lot has changed for us in the past 12 months and is continuing to change this year, so it's a good stopping point.

It's been a good run - 1228 posts, made lots of great new friends and spewed forth about everything from music to comics to movies to politics to moving to another country. I'll still be out there in the Net somewhere, and I'll keep the archives alive here, but it's time for a change. Thanks for following along, folks!

If the devil is six, then God is seven

So apparently I've been doing this blog thing for SEVEN YEARS as of today. Which is like nearly one-sixth of my LIFE. Good god. That's a lot of bloggery. Blogging is such a relatively recent phenomenon that there's no real determination of its life span yet. Do blogs live forever? There's probably not a blog out there much more than 10 years old at this point. Am I at the end of its life or the midpoint? If a blog falls in the forest does anyone hear?

I dunno. Like most people who've been doing this for more than a year or two I've had a love-hate relationship with the blog, sometimes, even going so far as to take a long hiatus last year. But I'll keep on keeping on at least until we develop the technology to beam my ramblings directly INTO YOUR MIND. Sure we've got Facebook and Twitter to play with as well, but can I go on about old Peter Sellers movies, concert reviews and mix tapes for 1000 words at a time on there?

Also, I've recently changed the url or address of this site to my own goshdarned name, so it's now nikdirga.com -- although the old address works just as well. I mainly wanted to scoop up my own domain so the thousands of speculators out there eyeing it don't steal it first. You also may need to update RSS feeds/bookmarks accordingly!

And as always, thanks to those of you who keep reading my occasional scribbles. Thanks!

A change is gonna come

... So I haven't been blogging as much as I once did, because, well, blogging is on the wane, says The New York Times, so it must be true. After some initial trepidation, I have to admit I've been spending a bit of time on trendy Twitter, while Facebook is also one of my frequent haunts. But as I approach the end of year 7 (!!!) of blogging here, I don't imagine i'll entirely give it up in the near future. Twitter is specious, fluffy and highly short attention span -- but it's also a valuable news and networking tool, as I particularly noticed during the Christchurch earthquake down here last month. Yet I do like to ramble on for longer than 140 characters as well, so my aging Spatula Forum still has its place, even if I only get on here four or five times a month now. I don't see any need to give up one platform in favour of another. Part of the digital world these days is sorting out all the noise and figuring out what tools work best for you.

The landscape changes very, very fast online these days. What was hip a year ago can become forgotten overnight (hey, remember MySpace or LiveJournal?). I picked up my first iPhone the other day, and it is a fantastic, utterly addictive tool -- just 10 years ago it would've seemed something out of science fiction that I could download, say, the works of Shakespeare in an app for free and have it in my pocket. I'm a creaky old gent of nearly 40, and it's hard to imagine what tech will be considered everyday when little Peter is my age. My iPhone 4 will likely seem a charming antique (unless of course our ape overlords have taken over by then).

As a sign of the times I'm starting a new job next month too -- diving wholeheartedly into the digital journalism realm which is where an awful lot of my industry is going. I'll be working for NZ's biggest newspaper web site and am quite excited about the bold new realms I'll be exploring. There's still a lot that "dead tree" newspapers still have to offer, but any journalist or media company that is ducking its head in the sand over this Internet "fad" is going to be facing extinction. On to the brave new world!

Like blogger, like son

I reckon I've been blogging on and off 6 years or so now and it's time to let the younger generation do their thing. Allow me to hype to you my wee boy's blog, showcasing the remarkable variety and creativity of his swell and nifty art creations! With a little help from Mum, it's Peter's Creations! Go check it out.

500 words or less on why I'm here

To blog or not to blog? ... The question that's been rattling about these last 10 weeks or so since I 'gave up' regular posting on here. I tend to over-think most things that aren't really important enough to overthink, so the question of whether I should keep blogging or not took up a lot of brain space the last couple months of 2009. In the end I thought I'd pull the plug on "Spatula Forum." But I kept feeling that itch to express myself, and while I've also done other creative type pursuits -- taken up sketching a bit more, done various freelance movie and book reviews for papers down here -- in the end the free-form, whatever-the-hell I want to say allure of a blog is mighty compelling. I placed arbitrary "rules" on myself about how much I should post and I think that contributed to a lot of my feeling burned out by the whole thing at the end of the year.

So anyway. After seeing Pavement last week I felt darned itchy, wanting that outlet to blather about the cool gig -- brief comments on Facebook aren't really enough. The itch only went away when I just rambled out a little blog entry on it (and it was cool to see the several hundred hits I got writing a review of a well-known indie rock band's first gig in 10 years).

So I'll dust off the blog, change the design a bit (I've switched from Haloscan commenting so all the old comments are going away, I'm afraid), and I'll scratch this itch sometimes, putting aside any self-defeating notions of "how much" I should blog (a lesson I shoulda learned in 6 years of doing this, I know) and just doing it when and where and why I feel like it. That's why the Internet was put here in the first place, ain't it?

'Tis the season to be covered in swaddling

• There's nothing more disturbing in downtown Auckland than the creepy Santa statue for the Farmer's Parade every holiday season. Nothing, that is, except for Horribly Disfigured Shrouded In Bandages Mummy Santa Claus instead. (I know, they're going to "unveil" the Santa's new look in a week or two, but I still think it's really disturbing to have a giant mummified Santa Claus looming over downtown Auckland in the meantime.) "Daddy, why is Santa bleeding?"

• I found this piece a quite interesting (and discussion-provoking) musing on the future of the "blogosphere," even if there is such a thing. I have to admit that after nearly 6 years of doing this I don't know how much longer it'll go on, and several other bloggers I like have called it quits this year. Anyway, it's a good look at the longevity of blogging, which is something few really consider when they start it up. It's strange that suddenly thanks to Twitter and Facebook, blogging, which was like totally now in 2004, suddenly seems a bit retro in 2009. It's a damn fast world.

• Speaking of twitting, I am fairly Twitter adverse, I'm afraid, but have to make an exception for The Fake AP Stylebook, which is actually done by several fellow bloggers I "know". If you're a journalist and know AP style, this is hilarious, but it's funny even if you don't.
As in:
Guerrilla soldiers use unorthodox tactics. Gorilla soldiers are awesome.
or
References to Canada as "America's Hat" are frowned upon. The correct terminology is "Gateway to Alaska."
or
The passive voice should be avoided by you.

• I'm getting ready for my parents to make their every-few-years trek to New Zealand next week, and there's some family issues coming up as well, so posting is likely to be even more anemic than normal for a little while. Cheers!

In which I answer a few questions from you, my people

Rightio, then, to the mailbag for reader questions, with the first missive from young Lain H. of somewhere in the dark and gothic Southern US, who asks:

While living in New Zealand, did you ever cover a story about a movie musical starring Hugh Jackman? 

Also, what can I do to get gravy stains out of my formal morning jacket?

A: 1. If you play any of the "X-Men" movies while listening to Elton John, you get a delightful experience.
2. Remove jacket, set on fire.

On to the right honorable Roger Green, Esq., of New York State, a man with many questions indeed of a more serious bent than the redoubtable Messr. H. However I shall only answer three:

What is the schedule of releases in NZ for movies, music, books, etc. vs. the United States? What are the one or two things that NZ does SO much better than the US? And vice versa?

Arthur @ AmeriNZ has talked about the "end of the earth" thing, how far away you are from pretty much everything. How does that affect you? Do you have a reserve fund in case you have to make an emergency trip to the US or are you settled on the idea that there will just be things you can't get back for?


A: 1. It's curious -- some movies come out much later; some come out at the same time [your big blockbusters and the like], some come out a lot earlier [often British fare like the quite funny "The Boat That Rocked" about pirate radio]. Music and books pretty much come out at the same time. The biggest annoyance for us is TV, which can be years behind the US sometimes. Even being a couple months behind can be frustrating with a show like "Lost," where you have to frantically avoid any spoilers on the internet.
2. Um, on the pro-NZ side socialized medicine and the mandatory four weeks of paid vacation a year springs to mind... NZ also does open-mindedness a bit better than the US, where too much partisan hysteria holds sway for my taste. (People just don't get so worked up about culture wars here.) It's a very secular society, which has ups and downs. Things the US does better? Well, space and scenery (NZ *is* beautiful, but there's a lot less of it), friendliness (I find Americans, while they can be loud, are more open-hearted sometimes) and deep-discount shopping comes to mind (Wal*mart is a curse and a blessing, I think).
3. We try to get back every 2-3 years, but it is hard in a mixed country relationship knowing you will always be far from one of your families. We are prepared if I have suddenly have to fly back, though. We're quite glad we're here now as my wife's father is ailing, but it's tough as my parents age knowing we aren't always there.

We also hear from Troy Hickman, talented author, leader of men, fondler of badgers and administrator of wedgies, who asks:

Tell them what exactly it is you love about ME...

A: It's your mind, Troy, not your body.

An old work friend of mine (Hi Becky!) asks about the 5 years or so I lived in the gorgeous Lake Tahoe area of California/nevada (It should be noted the North Lake Tahoe Bonanza is a friggin' NEWSPAPER, Troy 'n' Jay in the peanut gallery, although there is a nifty Bonanza the TV show theme park right there in town too, where you can pose with the stuffed corpse of Lorne Greene for a fee):

What do you miss most about Tahoe in particular, not just the U.S.?

A: I do love Tahoe, and the whole Sierra Nevada mountain area where I grew up -- utterly gorgeous as New Zealand is, the granite hills and tall pines of Northern California will always be the landscape of home to me. It was fantastic to live at Tahoe for a few years, although it had two big drawbacks -- the flood of tourists in summertime, and the 10 feet or snow for 5-6 months in the wintertime. I love snow but in a bit of moderation. Tahoe was always really expensive for anyone in the middle class to live. Why is it the nice places are always the popular ones, anyway?

Thanks for the queries, all! More blogging imminent.

In which utter apathy wins out in the end

Meh.

Man, I'm in bloggus got-no-idea-us mode lately. So to avoid total radio silence on here, I'll throw the door open to anyone who wants to ask me a query about whatever -- life in New Zealand, journalism, music, movies, Hugh Jackman, et cetera. Leave comments on the end and I'll dive in later!

You are now entering another dimension

So it's school holidays this week and on my turn, I took Peter for some daddy bonding with "Ice Age 3 in 3-D". I hadn't seen a 3-D movie in the theaters, oh, since, "Megaforce" back in the early 1980s (which now that I think of it, may not have actually been in 3-D). Anyway, "Ice Age" was all spiffy digital 3-D so it was a novelty to check out -- and while the story on these movies never quite grabs me the way the best Pixar or Disney can, it is, undoubtedly, an amazing technological achievement -- the razor-sharp clarity of the computer animation combined with pretty astounding 3-D is worth seeing at least once. A couple of scenes involving floating soap bubbles or falling snow were so remarkable that the illusion truly felt three-dimensional to me. That said, though, I still have trouble seeing 3-D as much more than a gimmick rather than a storytelling tool – yeah, it's an "Ice Age" movie so not Shakespeare, but I've yet to see 3-D be integral to a story. And the glasses, darn it, fancy as they are now they still get a bit uncomfortable after an hour or so I think. (Reportedly James Cameron's upcoming "Avatar" will take the medium in a whole new direction, though, which could be interesting indeed to see.)

Elsewhere on the internets:
• Marvel at the wooden iPod! I'd love one of these made of NZ kauri.

• If you haven't seen the newly famous "naked Air New Zealand safety ad," here it is. (Google Ads service seems to be frequently running it right here on this blog, which makes me feel kinda funny.) I just find it all rather odd, myself (the body paint is rather hard to see as body paint, really, so it's like they're just wearing tight clothes), but hey, 1,000,000 hits on YouTube can't be wrong, it's doing the job as publicity. (And what is it about New Zealand and naked advertisements, anyway? Mind you this one is a lot more, er, titillating.)

• We got an actual chain letter in the mail yesterday. In the year 2009! Don't they know that email spam is the way to go in our modern age? On the other hand, they are promising us $70,000 ***GUARANTEED*** income in six months.... Hm....

Random thoughts on Borg, Jedi and Twitti

When you start off a Monday morning with a migraine so bad you think your eyeballs are going to explode, it's never a good sign.

Ah well. Random links and short musings then:
• A nice profile appeared in the Sunday Star-Times of my father-in-law Peter Siddell and his ongoing experience with a brain tumour. I'm inclined to bag on my fellow journalists more often than not but other than a few errors this story is pretty good, I think it captures his voice well. And they managed to spell my wife's name correctly, which is always a plus.

• I have rediscovered the joy of "Star Trek" thanks to the new movie, and the swell "Fan Collective" series of DVD box sets which are perfect for the non-obsessive fan like me, offering a nice sampler of 20 or so episodes spread amongst the five series and organized by themes such as "Borg," "Time Travel" and "Klingons." I like a lot of "Trek" but freely admit even the best of series had its share of duds and am not interested in mammoth 7-season box sets, so these "Fan Collectives" are an awesome way to get my "Trek" fix without breaking the budget. Heck, I even found an episode of the hugely mediocre "Enterprise" on there that wasn't half-bad!

• ...I am sad to see that it seems like a lot of blogs I like to read have gone dark in favour of Twitter apparently. I don't want to be the grouchy old guy going on about the newfangled technology, but I have to admit I'm just not into Twitter. The forced minimalism doesn't appeal to me. Hell, I can barely keep my blog posts below 1400 words, let alone 140 characters! Anyway, although there's little reward sometimes in this bloggin', I guess I'll keep bloggin' away in the old media for a while... "Follow" me if you will! (And yeah, that's why I'll soon have Google Ads on the site.)

• So it was 10 years ago today that "Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace" (whew!) opened. Hard to believe, harder still that a movie went from being so hugely anticipated to so hugely maligned in just a decade. I admit it's not a great flick, although curiously 5-year-old Peter digs all the prequels (except "Episode III" which is a little intense for him). We stood in line up at Lake Tahoe to watch it on opening day and according to my journal entry of the time, "fantastic movie." I guess the disappointment took a while to set in, or perhaps it's the nature of fan obsessions to curdle a bit in the light of time. I wonder if part of the failure of the prequels to take is that they were viewed by 20- and 30-somethings who watched the originals as kids and who couldn't get into the same mindset again? But then I remember Jar Jar Binks and Jake Lloyd and pidgin-Asian speaking aliens and think again. It did have Liam Neeson and Darth Maul going for it, though, and 10 years on I still remember the thrill when Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon zip on their lightsabers for the first time. Give Lucas another few years, maybe he'll release a "reimagined" "Phantom Menace" that cuts down on the flaws.

Five years of blogging and not one post that was actually about spatulas

Until now.

From wikipedia:
A turner (in British English), or fish slice, is a kitchen utensil with a long handle and a broad flat edge, used for lifting fried foods. Though the word spatula is used in British English, it refers solely to a mixing and spreading implement. Often the plate scraper is referred to as a spatula. In some parts of Scotland (e.g. Glasgow or Victoria Halls) the spatula is also known as a tosser which refers to the tossing of omelettes or pancakes.

The word spatula, known in English since 1525, is a diminutive form of the Latin term spatha, which means a broad sword (as in spatharius) or a flat piece of wood and is also the origin of the words spade (digging tool) and spathe.

Lightning round!
Want to see the biggest spatula in the world? Glad you asked.

Want to chill out with some beats and think about spatulas? Spatula City Records is your place to go. Or trance-rock out with Mystical Spatula. Alternatively, get heavy with the metal band Spatula (who really should get an umlaut and be called Spätüla).

Spatulas are not trowels.

Would you like a virtual spatula? Share with someone you love.

If you're an ichthyologist, perhaps atractosteus spatula is more your speed.

A cinemaniac? Meet Spatula Boy. Or another entirely different Spatula Boy.

...Hungry for more blogs that have spatula in the title for no apparent reason? My soul brother at Giant Spatula. Which is a far better name really. Or Little Spatula. Learn about the Golden Spatula Institute. By god, Or Lick The Spatula.

Or just abandon all hope with the Spatula Of Death.


And the final word, from Weird Al:


Happy fifth blog-iversary to me!

997, 998, 999...

This is my one thousandth post.


(...and coming up in a week or so, my fifth blog anniversary as well. Gee whiz!)

The one in which we repeat old sentences

Stolen (or is that tagged?) from bloggers Roger and Gordon, a meme of the year that just was: you randomly select a line from your blog - one post per month for the past year - and then post the lines (and links) publicly. So consider this a Spatula Recap of 2008; and later this week I'll post my final thoughts on 2008 stuff and then we'll finally move on to 2009!

January 2008: (Sir Edmund) Hillary was a remarkable soul, and while there's been the typical amount of hyperbole one gets when someone this famed dies – let's rename mountains after him! let's declare a national holiday! (all ideas he would've hated from most accounts) – there's also been a fair amount of soul-searching as to what being a Kiwi means.

February: Now he is a mighty four-year-old and the baby days are rapidly fading into the past...

March: The Conchords on the other hand are particularly Kiwi as they focus in on the idea of the Kiwi man, a stoic "bloke."

April: Underneath everyday doings like feeding your cat and playing a jazz record lie the potential for strange abysses indeed.

May: It is perhaps the finest moment of Cher's life.

June: Spidey uses fists, webs, construction equipment, even, in a dazzling sequence illustrated by the young John Romita Jr., a loaded gas tanker.

July: Clark's biggest foe is the general impression she's "had long enough" and even though NZ has done pretty well under her, it's been a dismal year with the economy slowing and a steady drumbeat of violent crime and gang worries.

August: It was strange coming back to my homeland after nearly two years away, and seeing what had changed and what hadn't.

September: What I wouldn't give to be working at my old paper for that one day!

October: Biggest regret in life: When I interviewed Alice Cooper a couple years back, I didn't ask him about "Muscle of Love."

November: When he spoke of 106-year-old Anna Nixon Cooper tonight, and her journey from "a time when there were no cars on the road or planes in the sky" to today when "she touched her finger to a screen, and cast her vote," for a moment I felt the quivering membrane of history, and how quickly something can change.

December: Running across some of the few remaining giant kauri is a bit like coming across a solid wood wall in the middle of the forest.

Greetings from the first country to be in 2009

...Wish you were here. This whole summer-in-January thing ain't so bad, really.

(Regular posting to resume soon; between brief zippy holiday getaways and a traumatic works schedule that has me doing a lot of 4.30am [aarrggh] starts in recent weeks, I haven't had much time for blogging. Posts on my favorite books of 2008, "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" and more to come sooner or later.)

He's in the best selling show. Is there Life on Mars?

• This is the coolest thing I've seen all week. Yep, it's a sunset. On Mars, man!! Tell me that isn't awesome.

• Hey, AllMusic Blog is doing what I did a year ago - namely, looking back at the best albums of 1977, one of music's finest 365 days. Check out their groovy critics' lists here.

• Another reason to vote Barack: Bob Dylan has endorsed him. I mean, really, was that a surprise though?

• I've done the MySpace thing, and now I'm hip with the cool kids over at Facebook (which I have to say has much smoother functionality than the clunky MySpace). Because I really need another way to waste my time. Anyway, friend me if you know where to find me, mates!

'Stand' in the place where you live...

• What do you do with a sick 4-year-old and torrential rains on your day off? We try to limit the lad's TV watching, which means daddy's brain gets stretched to the max filling up the time. Lego car death match!

• So after several weighty nonfiction tomes recently, I felt the urge for some good ol' Stephen King, like the craving for a big messy cheeseburger and fries. So I'm reading "The Stand" for the first time in many years; all 1100 pages (urk!) of it. It's a fine companion on rainy afternoons. I won't say King's the finest crafter of sentences on the block, but no matter how highbrow my literary tastes might get I still find the man can tell a ripping yarn like nobody else (I've plowed through 500 pages of "The Stand" in a couple days). It's interesting to see how books change when you return to them after a few years – the horror of 99% of the world's population being knocked off in a plague hits home to me far more now that I'm a father and husband than it did when I read this as a single 20-something. Sure, the characters sometimes seem a little more one-note than I recalled, but the essential primal notes King hits in this saga of an empty America still sting, as I read and wonder, "what would I do?" Like many folks, I'm a sucker for "end of the world" tales, and this one in its epic biblical sweep and everything-including-the-kitchen-sink storytelling still works for me. (It's funny to read a story originally written in the 1970s that's set in 1990 while you're in the year 2008, though.)

• Hey, congratulations to reader Lefty Brown, who wins the little contest I offered up a week or so back in honour of my Fourth Blogoversary of Spatula Forum. Lefty gets my "NZ Mx" CD featuring 21 of what I consider nifty tunes by New Zealand musicians including SJD, The Chills, Phoenix Foundation, The Clean, Flight of the Conchords and more! Cheers mate, and email me your address so I can zip that out to you!

Now we are four

Egad, can you believe that it's really been four years since I began this blogging business? That's right, on April 8, 2004, I took a hit off the blogging crack pipe and lordy, I ain't never laid down that wicked drug since. Blogs are addictive, kids.

I started this as an editor at a medium-sized paper in rural Oregon, with a bouncing baby boy just a couple months old; I plod on 48 months later living clear on the other side of the globe in New Zealand, still working in newspapers, with that bouncing baby now a rampaging 4-year-old and all in all, it's been quite a wild trip.

Nothing too much to belabor the day or overstate here, but four years in blogging years is like 10 in the "real world" (many of the blogs I read back in 2004 no longer exist, I think). I've come and gone with the inspiration, and definitely post less often than I used to, but I still enjoy sharing my random thoughts on life Down Under, music, movies and books with those of you who stumble on by. Thanks to all the more constant readers who leave comments, as you're the fire that keeps the blogging crack pipe alight (last time I use that metaphor, I swear).

Heck, in honour of Spatula Forum's Fourth, we'll have a little contest – it's been many moons since I had one of those. Here you go -- leave a comment below and you're automatically entered. In a week or so I'll randomly pick one of you out of a hat and send you something nifty from New Zealand. Deal? Deal. Cheers, and thanks again for reading, mates!

I blew up the blog

Technical difficulties. Somehow accidentally deleted critical bit of coding. Normal service will resume when I figure out what the hell I did.

Update: All right. Been thinking of changing the templates anyway since last time I did was in 2005 apparently, and that was the easiest way to fix the problem. So here's a new look for the Spatula, minor tweaks to come as I have time!

...In which I get all William S. Burroughs on your arse*

(*The cut-up technique, that is.) Surfing randomly I found this nifty book meme which I rather liked:

1. Take five books off your bookshelf.
2. Book #1 -- first sentence
3. Book #2 -- last sentence on page fifty
4. Book #3 -- second sentence on page one hundred
5. Book #4 -- next to the last sentence on page one hundred fifty
6. Book #5 -- final sentence of the book
7. Make the five sentences into a paragraph:

And thus...

"Run here, my towhead grandchildren, and let this geezer dandle you upon his knee. 'Whaddaya think one of these babies would fetch?' a worker asked me, running his hand licentiously over my VCR. Your sister told me the other day that Noboru Wataya raped you. The girls wear skirts and black leather jackets. The bitch is dead now."

...How disturbing a casserole that was, frankly. Picked at random from the library wing -- (1) "Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung" by Lester Bangs, (2) "Near-Life Experiences" by Jon Carroll, (3) "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" by Haruki Murakami, (4) "A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius" by Dave Eggers and (5) "Casino Royale" by Ian Fleming.

Tag, you're it, anyone who wants to play along.

A little of this, a little of that

Random notes! I have my 57th cold of the last few months (or at least what feels like that with Peter the Human Plague Boy living with us and constantly infecting us with day-care germs), so nothing too ambitious today. Scattered thoughts, floating about like the glowing green mucus in my skull (isn't that a pretty image):

Did I mention Patrick has relaunched his Califoregonian blog as the crazy multimedia explosion of groove, Big Plastic Head? Well now I have. Patrick, I want my $5. Go check it out, though.

Did I tell you one of my favorite authors Michael Chabon wrote a cool intellectual article on superhero costumes for The New Yorker recently? "An essay in unitard theory" -- how can you pass that up? Go read.

Did I say I watched the movie "Zodiac" the other night and it was terrific? If you're expecting "Se7en Part II" from director David Fincher, you won't get it, but it's actually a very moody, trippy dive into obsession and madness about the years-long search for the Zodiac serial killer who wreaked havoc in the San Francisco Bay Area in the '60s and '70s. Amazing period detail and great performances by Jake Gyllenhaal and Robert Downey Jr., a serial killer movie more about the hunt than blood splattering the screen.

Did I point you in the direction of Angry Journalist.com? Why are we all so angry? Well, unfortunately, I can attest that for a business about communication newsrooms are hives to some of the most socially retarded folk out there; and a lot of nice amigos as well. I've been quite happy with my last few jobs but I know in my past I've had journalism jobs that left me thinking, why do I bother with this? It's a profession that unfortunately breeds a lot of bitterness, I think. Anyway, this site features anonymous journalists ranting anonymously about their lives. Voyeurism! (Oh, and just to balance it all out a bit -- HappyJournalist.com, which naturally features a little less posting.)