It appears my fascination with Peeps is at least a decade old, which makes it all the stranger that I’ve somehow previously missed The Washington Post’s annual Peep Show diorama contest, celebrating Peep-based renditions of the past year’s news.
Consider “OccuPeep D.C.”:
Or “Just Peep’ed”:
Delicious.
When I was growing up, my parents would read to my brother and me before we went to bed. My mother would read a chapter of one book to me in my room, while my father read a chapter of another book to my brother in his, and then they’d swap.
My mother’s taste ran to Dickens and Bronte, while my father’s fell closer to Herbert and Tolkien. Between the two, I had listened my way through an exceedingly wide array of novels before my tenth birthday.
I think it was that nighttime reading, more than anything else, that instilled in me a love of fiction, kept me tearing my way through books in all the years since. But though I’ve dug deep through literary fiction, I must admit I’ve mostly strayed from fantasy and sci-fi.
A few years ago, on the strong recommendation of the inimitable Sarah Brown, I picked up and quickly devoured the His Dark Materials trilogy. Those books reminded me that there’s very little as deeply engrossing as an entire parallel world, carefully detailed and full of intrigue.
Even so, I still don’t think of fantasy as a genre I really read. Which is why, perhaps, I’m so late to the game in discovering both the Hunger Games series (thanks to Jess) and the A Song of Fire and Ice series (thanks to HBO’s Game of Thrones).
If you, too, haven’t read either or both (or the aforementioned His Dark Materials, for that matter), pick them up, and clear out some time in your schedule. Once you start, you won’t put them down.
TechCrunch is more or less required reading in the tech world. Yet slogging through the huge number of posts previously took me nearly twenty minutes each day.
Recently, however, I started routing TechCrunch’s RSS feed through [FeedBurner](http://feedburner.google.com/), to create a daily summary email – each of the posts boiled down to just 300 words. Now I can skim the headlines and summaries, and click through to the rare article I want to read in its entirety, all in about two minutes.
Bullshit.
I headed to Barnes & Noble this morning to pick up a copy of Sarah Brown’s new book, Cringe, which just went on sale today.
Cringe is “a compilation of real teenage diary and journal entries, letters,
songs, stories, and lists–along with biting commentary, background, and self-examination from the now so-called grown-ups who wrote them.”
Which includes me. And also a great lineup of people far, far funnier than I am.
And, lest you think I’m biased, when I was checking out with the book, the B&N sales girl started paging through, laughed out loud several times, and made a note on a sticky to head upstairs and pick up a copy for herself.
As previously mentioned, I’m dangerously susceptible to television. Turn one on while I’m in the room, and I’ll watch it, no matter what’s playing. Commercials, re-runs of Full House; it doesn’t really matter.
But, at the same time, there’s relatively little I’d be too upset to give up. No more American Idol? I’m pretty sure my life would go on.
There is, though, one exception: Bravo’s Top Chef, which starts a new season this evening.
Prior to discovering the show, I already considered myself a bit of a foodie, having eaten my way through much of New York, taken an array of cooking classes, and stocked up on key kitchen gadgetry. But over the course of even my first month of Top Chef episodes, I found myself appreciating cooking, really appreciating cooking, in a way I’d never before.
It was Top Chef that led me to read Heat, The Making of a Chef and Kitchen Confidential, that got me subscribed to Cook’s Illustrated, that got me taking wildly over-long and over-expensive culinary school professional development courses (thank you, thank you, Jess!).
And, more than anything else, it was Top Chef that led me to an ever-deeper exploration of the principles of cooking, rather than simply cooking recipes rote. This weekend, for example, when testing out a new red wine and mushroom pan sauce for the flank steak I pan-roasted, I could puzzle through how much stock to use to balance out the wine pre-reduction, knew to toss in shallots, mustard, and balsamic vinegar to balance tastes, could explain why I chose to ‘monte au beurre’ as a final step.
In other words, I’ve now moved past ‘foodie’ and into ‘total asshole’. And I have Top Chef entirely to thank.
Tonight at 9:00 on Bravo. Bon appetit.
An inside tip for any New Yorkers whose taste for cultural events exceeds their budget for cultural events: join play-by-play.com.
The idea is simple: theatre producers don’t like empty seats at their shows, as it makes people wonder whether they made the right choice in shelling out big bucks for tickets. So producers turn to services like Play-by-Play to fill unsold seats.
Conversely, theatre-goers can join Play-by-Play for $100 a year, then pay $3 a pop for any of those seat-filling tickets.
The obvious question is: what kind of crappy production has to resort to free seat-fillers?
And the answer is: surprisingly many.
Yesterday, Jess and I scored tickets to Things We Want (directed by Ethan Hawke, and starring Paul Dano and Peter Dinklage), which we’d long wanted to see. As those two tickets would have run us north of $150 on Ticketmaster, the annual cost of Play-by-Play membership paid itself off in a single evening.
This Saturday, similarly, we’re off to see Molissa Fenley and Dancers premiere Dreaming Awake and Calculus and Politics at the Joyce; another $80 saved.
What else can you find? Some Broadway, more Off-Broadway, and even more Off-Off. Plus dance, music, comedy, staged readings, and the like. For $100 a year, it’s a hard deal to pass up.
Given my job, it’s a bit embarrassing to admit that I rarely watch movies. And I don’t mean rarely watch them in theaters – a common condition; I mean rarely watch them at all.
There was a time, early in the life of Cyan, that I was cranking my way through a good five or six a week – my own little Good Will Hunting hundred bucks of Netflix membership rather than hundred thousand of NYU tuition film school. By now, if I see one movie a week, I’m doing well.
Terrible, I know. And much as I wish I could blame this on Jess, she watches many more movies (and reads more books and magazines, is generally just far better informed on both popular and high culture) than I.
I have no good excuse. Sure, long work hours, helping run a gym, work and play social obligations, etc., all make it tough to block out two solid hours of time at a stretch. But lots of movie buffs have waaaaay crazier lives, yet seem to make it work.
So I’m particularly glad that, in the last four days, I’ve seen two movies. Even better, I’ve seen two movies in theaters. Granted, one (The Golden Compass) was a disappointing atrocity, and the other (The Great Debaters) might have made even Lifetime viewers roll their eyes. But still, I watched them! The whole way through! Both of them! Mere days apart!
Even better, for the first time in months, there are scores more movies out I really do want to see: Juno, The Savages, No Country for Old Men, just to name a few. So I’m trying to build this new momentum, to get back in front of a big (or at least small) screen ASAP. If nothing else, as one of the few people who can write off movie tickets as a business expense, I figure I should do my best to abuse that privilege.
My wily brother rounded up excellent free tickets to tonight’s Yankees / Mariners game. So he, Jess and I will be headed off to the ballpark to drink bad beer, eat sketchy hotdogs (assuming we’ve recovered from the even sketchier hotdogs served yesterday at Colin’s Labor Day BBQ), and generally revel in the nearly deciding game of the close American League wild card race.
Play Ball.
[Also, beginning this evening and carrying on through the balance of September, I’ll be doing my best to make up for my irregular blogging by instead at least briefly moblogging via Twitter and Flickr. Oversharing narcissism knows no bounds.]
As previously extensively blogged about, I wasn’t really a television watcher before I met Jess. When she moved in, however, for the first time I had cable installed in my (or, rather, our) apartment.
Jess watches relatively little TV. And, when she does, it’s mainly as relaxing background noise while multi-tasking: replying to emails, paging through magazines relevant to her job in the world of fashion design.
I, however, am far less able to healthily cope. Sitting at our desk, with my back to the screen, I find myself frequently swiveling around to catch more of what Heidi, say, might be saying to Spencer on the latest episode of The Hills. I even watch the commercials. And then I try to discuss them with Jess, who, having built more effective defenses against the tube, stares at me blankly, having completely ignored such unwanted interstitial content.
I don’t know if I’ll develop similar immunity with practice, or if I’m simply congenitally unable to sit in a room with television playing and not pay attention.
Either way, though, at least for the time being, if anyone needs to know exactly what Sanjaya said to Paula this week, or who does the Marshall’s celebrity voice-over, I’m pretty much your go-to guy.