Friday, May 28, 2010

Best Coast - "Sun Was High"

Not sure why Levi's is sponsoring sets in bathrooms, but no matter. Wonderful version of this song. California surf-inspired music by Bethany Cosentino, the daughter, apparently, of a member of the funk-rock 70s band War.

Thursday, May 27, 2010

The Day After - petro version

Remember the old made-for-TV movie, The Day After (1983), about the aftermath of nuclear armageddon? The gushing BP deep water spill is turning out to be our own unforeseen Day After. So many truths to be found here. The absolute unregulated nature of big oil under Bush/Cheney, the overreach of technology and confidence in progress, profits over safety/human wellbeing/the environment. Elizabeth Kolbert (New Yorker) mentioned recently that this is a direct result of peak oil, the need to push for increasingly scarce oil reserves and our willingness to take increasing risks to keep it flowing.

Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Our new Mazda5

Kind of same as the old car, but much, much smaller.



It speaks to the inner-tuner in me. Or as my hair person said today, "it's urban." I think she meant it as a compliment.

It's on the top 20 list of cars cheapest to insure, gets the highest gas mileage of any other minivan (if you can even call it a minivan), and it's on the auto site Jalopnik's approved list of boring cars that might still be a little fun. All I know is that the air conditioning isn't failing and it's warrantied for years and years, unlike the last couple of "preowned" cars we've had.

The classic shelves


Big Boy spends time perusing some shelves of classic fiction in his classroom. Apparently, the teacher inherited this block of books from a previous teacher, and she kind of embarrassingly checked with us about whether BB should even be looking at them. But they're in the classroom, so at least something is right at his very uptight public school. I doubt there are many other kids checking them out.

In any case, he's looked over some H. G. Wells, Robert Louis Stevenson, and today some Poe. He's into the story with the secret code and gold scarab, which would be the very famous "Gold Bug" story. There's also the one about the "vulture eye" ("Tell-Tale Heart," of course), but he's partial to the detective stuff, not so much the horror. I don't think we've even believed he had access to such texts at school, but I'm pretty thrilled. We need to put together a book shelf of all these books I have buried away in boxes and in the basement: Huck Finn, Treasure Island, She, The Time Machine. We're talking beyond Laura Ingalls Wilder and Charlotte's Web here, and I couldn't be happier.

We printed out "Gold Bug" tonight for a copy at home. (My Poe anthology is buried deep in some box.)

Sunday, May 9, 2010

"Happy Mother's Day Motherf--kers"

I'm jumping on the Betty-White-on-SNL bandwagon. Exuberant nastiness in an 88-year-old woman is hard not to respect. Here's Betty White goes metal, in a parody of the Golden Girls theme song. Wait for it.