Feaverish

I’ve been doing this Netflix thing for a few months now. Two problems:

1) I end up getting a lot of movies I’d be way too embarrassed to rent in person. By way of example, my last two selections were Be Cool and National Treasure. Movie Madness would revoke my rental card if I tried to get out the door with either of those.

This is tangentially related to why I don’t like cable TV. I end up watching too much, thinking “I’ve got hundreds of channels here, there must be something good on.” There isn’t.

2) They don’t have a lot of my favorite foreign movies ââ�¬â�� movies which aren’t available on DVD ââ�¬â�� so I end up going to the video store a lot anyway.

Recently, I got a hankering for Alain Tanner’s excellent Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000. Netflix doesn’t have it, and I had to walk all the way down the street to the library to get it. I know! Like a sucker! Once I get something delivered to my door, it’s tough to go back to having to fend for myself. I’m like a polar bear that way. Only with Netflix instead of zookeeper flesh, and with walking to the library instead of eating penguins.

Incidentally, if you’re a foreign film fan living in Portland, you should really check out the Library Catalog. They have everything, and you can put movies on hold and have them delivered to the branch nearest you. A couple years back, when I was between jobs and taking some time off ââ�¬â�� ostensibly to write a screenplay ââ�¬â�� I would watch two or three films a day, mostly foreign, and all free from the library. When you’re writing a screenplay, that’s called “research.”

P.S. “Ostensibly” isn’t le mot juste (see how I snuck in that foreign phrase? Right after I mentioned foreign movies? See?), since I was actually writing and did eventually finish the screenplay. It’s never been “optioned,” though, or “purchased for six figures,” or whatever term movie types apply to successful screenplays. Maybe after I’m dead L will discover the lost masterpiece in a drawer and sell it for big bucks. Frankly, I’m not sure the world we live in now could handle a film like Fart Camp.

From Pierce

Number of Books on the Shelf
Uncountable, but well over 1000 ââ�¬â�� at least 300 of which were purchased by me personally over the years. The rest were added by my roommates: L, a fellow English major and violent consumer of novels, plays & poetry, and S, a hedonistic communist whose books have the words “Oppression,” “Lies,” or “Halo 2: Player’s Guide” in the title.

This kind of situation is unavoidable when you live within walking distance of a city of books.

Last Book Purchased
Hard to say. The last book I remember buying from Amazon was The Zen of CSS Design, by Dave Shea and Molly Holzschlag, but I rarely make it out of Powell’s without a four-dollar used paperback (chosen for its cover design as likely as for its content).

Book Reading Right Now
I just picked up The Great Gatsby, which I haven’t read since my freshman year of college and which I can’t remember.

Last 5 Books Novels Read (I can’t remember the order)
1. Motherless Brooklyn, by Jonathan Lethem ââ�¬â�� private detective with Tourette’s
2. The Razor’s Edge, by W. Somerset Maugham ââ�¬â�� young man’s quest for the meaning of life
3. Flaubert’s Parrot, by Julian Barnes ââ�¬â�� historian searches for the truth about Flaubert
4. Prague, by Arthur Phillips � North American expatriates bring Western sex to recently-decommunistified Prague
5. Cosmopolis, by Don DeLillo � media tycoon spends a day in his car

Passing the torch to…
Jim
Jared
Anne
and Sloop

It’s been exactly a month since I got the Clap Your Hands Say Yeah album and it’s still on very heavy rotation. According to iTunes, I’ve listened to the song The Skin of My Yellow Country Teeth 108 times. Spread over 31 days, that’s nearly 3Ã�½ listens per day. Not too shabby. Here’s my Top 25 Most Played playlist from iTunes (click for full-size version):

The album’s only $11.99 at Insound, and you’re gonna have to buy it if you want to figure out any of the lyrics.

This article by Noah Baumbach made me laugh harder than I have in a long time. This week’s New Yorker also had a special treat for us urban cyclists (click for full-size version):

I’m not sure I understand the message it’s trying to get across, but I like it. Last week’s New Yorker had a bike-y full page illustration by SempÃ�© ââ�¬â�� one of my favorite illustrators, incidentally (again, click to see full size):

And yes, my address label does read “Feaverish Design Collective” (or at least “Feaverish Design Collecti”). I think it’s kind of catchy. Not as catchy as my Netflix labels, though, which read “Feaverish & Co. Deep Sea Dynamiting.” I think I had just seen The Life Aquatic.

Can I just get it off my chest right now how much I love yoghurt? Yoghurt yoghurt yoghurt. It’s sweet, it’s tart; what’s not to love? If I were stranded on a desserted deserted island and had to choose just one food to take with me and eat for the rest of my life, it would be a carnitas taco from OlÃ�© OlÃ�©. BUT if I got to take two foods, the second would be Lowfat Vanilla Yoghurt. How passionate am I about yoghurt? Haiku passionate:

White, creamy, oh wait
Please don’t say white and creamy
Those are both clich�©s

I’m always loath to link to humor sites, partly because I’m usually like three years behind the rest of the internets in discovering them (OMG Homestar Runner! Funny!), but mostly because I’m kind of a sponge when it comes to other people’s writing (especially funny writing) and I’m afraid my readers will figure out that I’ve just been ripping off (verbatim!) funnier sites all along.

That said, I’ve been really enjoying Toothpaste for Dinner lately. And by “enjoying,” I mean obsessively reading through his entire archives, emailing cartoons to friends, and driving my girlfriend to distraction with “Hey baby come in here you gotta see this oh my god it’s so funny what are those suitcases for are you leaving me?”

I bought L a TFD shirt (Bad Poetry, Oh Noetry!) a while ago, and she wears it whenever she has a poetry unit at school. The cartoons on the site mirror in a lot of ways my own life, from the coffee and Minesweeper obsessions to the hipster disdain to the coworker ordeals to the left leaning politics.

Still, if you’re gonna spend some time on the site, I’ve got a couple of tools that’ll help. The first is Linky, a Firefox extension that lets you select a bunch of links on a page and open them all at once in tabs. This works great for the Toothpaste archives, though in my experience Linky craps out if you select more than 30 or so links at once.

The second is only tangentially related, but it needs to be noted that the Minesweeper Firefox Extension is way faster than the Minesweeper Dashboard Widget.

Some of my favorite Toothpastes for Dinner are, in alphabetical order, here here here here here here here here here here here here here here here here here here here here here here here here here here here here and here.