September, 2005


16
Sep 05

The Emmys and My Favorite TV

This is a great piece on who’ll win at the Emmys written by my favorite TV critic — someone I practically always agree with 100%:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/09/16/DDG6AENT7M16.DTL&type=tvradio

My favorite performances of the year: Ian McShane as an incredibly great bad guy in "Deadwood," Jeremy Piven as a talent agent in "Entourage," Glenn Close who blew me away with a season on "The Shield," and everyone from "The Wire" and "Arrested Development" — the best 2 shows on television for me. "Entourage" is getting good fast, though.

Oh — and about "Rome," HBO’s newest period drama. It’s good, but not great. Sure looks expensive. I’m a sucker for that period in history (world war between Pompey & Caesar!), so I like it a lot so far, through 3 episodes. It’s been a little slow so far though. I’m hoping that like most HBO dramas, it’ll start to pick up steam around the 5th episode.


12
Sep 05

Read This: Divided (by 9/11) we stand…

An op ed piece on boston.com written by Carie Lemack, who used to be at Reactivity. Read it.


10
Sep 05

Sam the Lens

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about watching the Little League World Series — and in particular, how it was fun to think about Sam growing up and participating in sports (or whatever he decides to participate in).

What I’ve discovered over the past couple of weeks, especially in watching the coverage of Katrina, is that Sam has in many ways become a lens through which I view the world. Here’s what I mean: the effects of Katrina were indisputably horrible. The human toll was (and is, and will be for a long time) horrendous. I think that with or without Sam I would have felt that way. But with Sam everything becomes more vivid, more real. Makes me think about how hard daily life would be in a situation like that. Pregnancy & childbirth & the first 8 weeks of Sam’s life was tough enough here in the Bay Area, and we’ve got everything, really. Support from people who love us, a stable home environment, jobs, etc. Not to mention little things like hospitals, doctors, diapers, water or an environment mostly free of disease & bacteria.

And that’s such a simple, obvious example. It seems funny/amazing to me that such a little guy, without a lot of the abilities that we typically call "human" — being able to talk and communicate, really, or sympathize, or some of the more sophisticated emotions — that he’d lend such a profound humanity to everything I see.


10
Sep 05

Eragon, by Christopher Paolini

This is the first in a trilogy of books that’s an epic fantasy quest in the style, more or less, of The Lord of the Rings. It’s a reasonably good book, but most notable in that it was started by Paolini when he was 15 years old (about 5 years ago) — it reads like it was written by someone pretty young.

But for all that, I enjoyed reading it, and am reading the 2nd book, Eldest, now. Reminds me of when I was a kid & reading slightly crummy but fun fantasy books — all in the style of unknown, underapreciated kid in a remote town has something horrible happen to him/her, then goes on a quest to right the wrong/figure out why/etc, and finds out that he/she is actually a child of destiny — who goes on to save the world. Lots of trilogies like this.

Predictable, but fun anyway.


10
Sep 05

Read this: KlepBlog

Was catching up on some blog reading during a sleepy-time nap for Sam & caught up  on my friend Scott Kleper’s blog. Really liked his latest post about personal finance. Everyone should take a look.