Why you can never be Lance Armstrong – Or an olympic runner. For you see, these people are genetic freaks. 😉
Author Archives: Danny Silverman
NBC sucks, real Olympics fans watch the CBC – Canada wins again!
Julia Child dead at 91 – She made cooking fun. She wasn’t afraid to be herself. She will be missed.
Finishing up work, spending a last weekend in (stormy) Newport, playing with my new desktop, packing, packing, packing, trying to tie up loose ends.
Where has all the time gone?
The Bush administration uses intelligence for political gain at the cost of compromising critical anti-terror operations – Critics of the Bush administration from both parties as well as some U.S. intelligence experts are now wondering whether the administration is completely incompetent in the handling of classified intelligence of strategic importance…
Do adventurers dream of underwater sheep?
It’s your typical Indiana Jones setup. Running through caves, something to do with a Toyota Land Cruiser, lots of cursing aloud at the evils of the Enemy — in this case, Martha Stewart Omnimedia. Thinking the car is about to explode, or fall through a trap door, or something, Indy runs round a corner and unexpectedly falls into an enormous hole where there should have been cave floor. What follows is an incredibly long and sickening fall, past criss-crossing wooden beams that he miraculously avoids. We’re right behind him, crashing into the water below, exhilirated but almost in shock from the cold of the water and the pain of hitting it at high speed.
Indy surfaces, looks around, but it doesn’t look safe, and a dirty man missing several teeth beckons to him from the distance. Just then Indy sees a person-like shape moving under the water, obscuring a bright light. He dives, dives, down and forward, under a metal mesh that he knows will make it impossible to resurface should he run out of air. As he approaches the shape, he realizes that the light is provided by a large candle, miraculously burning and bubbling under the water. The shape turns out to be another man, one who looks a little younger, a little kinder, even if there is a tinge of craziness in his eyes. He is breathing! Indiana hesitates but then, feeling his lungs are about to explode, takes a big gulp of water, fearing the worst.
It works! He hasn’t drowned. The water is full of oxygen, and although it feels pretty weird going into his lungs, he can breathe it. The man offers him some wonderful looking rolls, miraculously unsoggy for having been baked under water. Indy declines, and swims past the man to explore the rest of this portion of the cave, which vaguely resembles an inventor’s workshop that just happens to have an incredibly high, meshed-in ceiling. And cave walls. And is under water.
As he moves towards one end of the room, we pan back to the crazy man, staring affectionately at his bread. Zoom in on the bread, where small lumps are moving around just on the surface, some strange, unseen creatures preparing to burst free, Alien-like, from the loaves. He pats the bread affectionately and begins to laugh maniacally. The Jaws music starts playing in the background. The lumps move faster and faster, tugging at the dough. Something…BAD…is…about…to…happen.
I wake up.
Goss: “I am not qualifed” – Yeah, out of context. 😉 Still, shouldn’t the new director of the CIA know how to use a computer? Oh, and be non-partisan? Yeah, that also seems important.
Woman arrested for having 400 rabbits in her house in 1999 was arrested for having 160 rabbits in her house – See, she’s getting better! And the article conveniently includes a picture of a rabbit, in case you don’t know what they look like.
Crucial Unpaid Internships Increasingly Separate the Haves From the Have-Nots – They always have, its just that as the job market gets more competitive and a college education is the norm, college increasingly becomes like high school — more loading on of extraneous crap so you can get it all on your resume. And people with less money continue to get the short end of the stick.
John Leonard on the new Tom Cruise movie, Collateral:
Cruise, for the first time since Born On the Fourth of July, actually acts instead of impersonating a kitchen appliance.
September is “national preparedness month” – What have the last 35 months been? And why is this so precisely timed with the Republican National Convention in New York? Oh, why am I even asking.
Reading The Tipping Point, recovering music, tweaking servers, spending a standard weekend at home, and, of all things, writing a paper.