I wonder whether the natives will eventually learn how to spell the name of that big expanse of recreational space that separates the east side from the west side north of 59th Street.
On the other hand, you have to admire their tasteful and sophisticated sense of humor when it comes to altering the instructions posted on hotel elevators.
The only "D" I got in high school was for 12th grade calculus*.
Even today, I don't think the poor mark was because I was bad at calculus - which I'm sure I would have been - it was just that I literally slept through almost every class. But I had a good reason: At the beginning of my senior year, I knew that I was just months away from starting college, and I knew that college students often stay up until very late at night, and I reasoned that I should start, well, training for that particular aspect of college. Yes, I would train my body for those crazy late nights of college that were sure to come by just... staying awake until 1:30 or 2 a.m., as often as possible.
So every Monday through Thursday night, after I had finished practicing the violin and doing my homework (except for my calculus homework, of course), I'd watch the 11 o'clock news, and then the Tonight Show (this was in the pre-Leno days, when it wasn't awful), and then watch reruns of Benson and/or Cheers followed by as much as possible of the Letterman show. (Unlike other, normal cities, Baltimore in the 80s apparently couldn't handle going right from the Tonight Show to Letterman.)
That meant I was getting somewhere around four hours of sleep every weeknight. The remedy: A 48-minute power nap during calculus. The result: My beloved "D."
All of which is to say that I'm puzzled about the math in this hard-hitting CNN.com article.
The piece explains that actor Adrien Brody was to be paid $1.5 million for starring in a movie that nobody will ever see. It says that he has been paid $960,000 so far (which sounds pretty decent for a direct-to-DVD flick) and that Mr. Brody is still owed $640,000, which would seem to total up to $1.6 million - not $1.5 million. At least I think that's right - maybe there's some weird rule about adding dollar figures that I missed in calculus.
* Actually, it's possible I got a D in trigonometry, too. But there's no idiotic story behind that one.
I can finally sleep at night, knowing that the United-Continental merger is done.
Except that - even though I don't care very much about either company - I just don't get the decision to keep the United name but drop the well-known United "U" logo in favor of the Continental typeface and the incredibly bland Continental globe icon, which could easily be the logo for just about any company in the world.
I guess United and Continental leadership both needed to save face, but in doing so, I have to imagine they cost themselves an immeasurable amount of brand equity. I hope everyone at what used to be Continental is totally stoked by their big win - getting the signature typeface and unremarkable logo of a now-nonexistent company to survive. Nice going.
Oh, also, I appreciate the airline's assurance that the integration - matching up all of that frequent flier data, route codes, in-flight snack offerings, etc. - will go smoothly. Except that it seems they haven't quite figured out how to code an email yet. To wit:
My ability to write anything remotely interesting has obviously deserted me for the summer. But given the proverbial worth of a picture, I believe these two photos would add up to approximately 2,000 words worth of new material. Which isn't too shabby.
I took them last weekend during a quick anniversary-celebration escape with the world's most superbly awesome wife, in Ojai, California. (Have you ever had a one-day/one-night mini-vacation that was so fun and relexing that when you got home you felt like you'd been on an actual vacation? This was one of those.)
“I want to plead guilty, and I’m going to plead guilty 100 times over." - Times Square bombing failure Faisal Shahzad in Federal District Court (Reported in The New York Times)
I'm hoping that you've noticed that SFTC has been on the downlow for the past few weeks.
I apologize for the lack of hilarious anecdotes and wry observations. Although, in fairness, none of you wrote in to ask if I was OK. If I were you, I'd have been worried about this sudden and unexpected online silence. "Oh no!" I might have thought to myself. "SFTC might have had his hands cut off by a combine in a tragic farming accident."
But I (overly dramatically) digress.
The real reasons for the hiatus were that I was unusually busy with my other kind of writing - the kind I get paid for - and that I promised that I wouldn't post again until I came up with a monumental blog post, a captivating story truly worthy of my triumphant return to blogging.
I have since reconsidered on that second point, in favor of "whatever the heck I could think of on Wednesday." So here it is:
My aunt is the queen of non sequiturs. Conversations often take odd left turns, making it an adventure to keep up. Emails often contain random mixtures of topics, often completely out of context. Like the one she sent last night.
It read: "Did u know Paula Abdul is Jewish? Guess where I am? xxoo "
I wrote back: "I didn't know that about Paula. I also don't know where you are, but given the setup, I'm guessing Paula Abdul's bat mitzvah."
It turned out she was just in Baltimore. But I was pretty close.
About nine months ago*, I wowed and amazed you** with a photo-and-video scrapbook of my visit to Los Angeles' famed Wiltern for a rockin' good concert by The National. Saturday night, I returned for the first time since then. For a concert. A concert by The National. I'm nothing if not creative.
Further evidence of that creativity? Today's post will be a photo-and-video scrapbook of Saturday evening.
I haven't been to a whole lot of music venues in L.A. yet, but I've decided that the Wiltern is one of the best in town, thanks in part to its kick-ass marquee, which on Saturday, looked a lot like this:
Another thing I love about the theater is that the name is an amalgamation of WILshire Boulevard and WesTERN Avenue, which intersect near its entrance. The name would have been even catchier if the theater had been built where Jackson Street runs into Kass Avenue, but, sadly, whoever was building art deco theaters in L.A. in the early 1930s missed a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. (Also, there's no Kass Avenue in Los Angeles, but whatever.)
The National mixed in several songs from its newest album, High Violet, including Bloodbuzz Ohio, which I especially like, and Conversation 16, which is a favorite of my exceptionally gorgeous wife.
Among its other wonderful qualities, Conversation 16 includes this rather snappy lyric: I was afraid I'd eat your brains I was afraid I'd eat your brains Cause I'm evil Cause I'm evil
And one of the highlights of the concert was hearing lead singer Matt Berninger explain the deeper meaning behind those words. "That song," he said, "is a metaphor for this one time that I ate a girl's brains while she was sleeping."
We in the audience assumed he was kidding, of course, and we got a good chuckle out of that metaphor.***
Another cool part of the night was meeting - in person! - my online friend Violette, a music connoisseur with whom I've been exchanging tweets since that first National concert last August. Violette has a great (and recently redesigned) music blog, which you should check out, so long as you finish reading this post first.
OK, enough with the words. How 'bout a few of my very favorite photos I took Saturday night, and a couple of videos that I might or might not have shot with my digital camera, depending on whether I needed the band's express written consent to videotape anything ...
The stills If you were in a band, you'd put this on an album cover, right?
My favorite picture I've taken in a really really long time.
Motion & Sound
Start A War
Mistaken For Strangers
The band's remaining 2010 tour dates, you ask? Right here.
* Tip for all of you aspiring writers out there: This strikes me as a potentially dramatic way to start any story not involving the birth of a child. ** Well, two or three of you. *** For more metaphor-inspired hilarity, please don't hesitate to read two other recent SFTC posts, this one and this one.
Hillary Clinton: "She greeted me with her bald head painted with my name on it and asked me to fight for health care." (See "Here I stand / Head in Hand," August 27, 2008)
Charles Rangel: "I have decided unilaterally that you have asked more than your share." (See "Playing House," July 11, 2008)
Posts
