Month: January 2007

  • Bits ‘n pieces

    I fly a lot. About 70 segments last year. That being the case, I don’t waste a lot of time at airports. I get there when I need to be there, not any sooner. LGA is part of my extended nervous system. But JFK can still be a bit of a mystery. It’s the damn…

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  • I’m IT!

    Brunobaby done tagged me, and now I’m it. I didn’t even know I was in the game! But I’m a good sport, so I’ll play along and, nouvelle vague-style, submit to the interview. Please picture me as a 14-year old Antoine Doinel as I respond. 1) Name a book that you want to share so…

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  • To Daffodils

    Fair daffodils, we weep to see you haste away so soon; as yet the early-rising sun has not attain’d his noon. Stay, stay until the hasting day has run but to the evensong; and, having pray’d together, we Will go with you along. We have short time to stay, as you, we have as short…

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  • Greed and Wickedness

    Bert‘s travel piece in yesterday’s Globe and Mail on seven deadly sins getaways has a nice resonance with Orson Welles‘ Lady from Shanghai. To represent the sin of greed, Bert picks the Chinese city of Macau. This immediately brings to mind the classic exchange between Welles and his real-life estranged wife, Rita Hatworth: Michael O’Hara:…

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  • Harlem Saturday Night

    In “I’m Waiting for the Man”, Lou Reed heads up to Lexington and 125 with 26 dollars in his hand. Our night begins a few blocks over, getting a fix that only cost us 20 bucks. I can’t remember which jazz great it was who said of heroin: “if God made anything better, he kept…

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  • Billsers

    It was a late fall night in 1994. Living at the time in the cheerily dilapidated, spaciously boho upper two floors of a house on Concorde Avenue in Toronto. Not home long when the doorbell rang. Downstairs, the six-year-old girl explained to me that her kitten was trapped on the roof of the house next…

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  • Some RSS Evangelism

    A while back, I wrote a piece singing the praises of CSS, a great technology for developing web content. Now, I’m passing on the tip about RSS, a great technology for accessing web content. RSS, and it’s first-born son, Atom, are feed technologies that generate updated XML whenever a web site posts updates. You can…

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  • Marion’s Gastrointestinal

    Owing mostly to an administrative error, and, I guess, partially to my “only-dining-below-14th-street” edict that was passed as of late, we ended up having dinner at Marion’s tonight. Now, the thing you have to know about Marion’s is that it has always been a fun place to have a cocktail–a wacky cocktail, that is. I…

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  • What’s up with the blog, anyway?

    As much as I was allured by the ubergeek appeal of running a site based on slashcode,  it  eventually became more trouble than it was worth.  For a couple of reasons, I needed to update my server to the most recent version of Redhat Fedora. Slash only runs on a very specific, and very ancient…

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