Haunting the Web Since 1999
The picture in the top left was getting kinda stale (and I’d lost the beard a few months ago), so I pulled out the digital camera today and took a few shots of me and Berkeley. Here’s the results:
No king of England if not of France. Alas, the NY Times didn’t think much of Henry V in the park. I caught it a few weeks ago and enjoyed it better than this reviewer, for sure. Given recent events, I do wish they’d turned up the satire a notch (“We doubt not of a fair and lucky war,” as the posters proclaim) and Bronson Pinchot’s Balki-esque schtick as Pistol seemed wildly out of place. But all in all, I thought the show made for a lively summer evening. And as a fan of the McKellen Richard III, I enjoyed the WWI motif Liev Schreiber & co. were aiming for.
“He is the actuality of the schoolboy notion that anybody has a chance to be President.” Dubya? No, Warren Harding, but close enough. Hey y’all…sorry it’s been quieter than usual around here lately. Most of my time right now is spent in my summer research employ, which basically involves going down to the NYC Public Library at 40th St. and reading as many TIME magazines from the early 1920’s as possible. (In effect, I’m blogging 1923 at the moment.) I’ve also started getting serious with the orals prep, although not so serious that I didn’t create a goofy subsite to monitor my progress (and impel me to read faster.) Either way, I expect updates here will remain lighter than usual for the next few weeks, but y’never know.
Well, I’m off to San Diego/Santa Barbara for the next week or so to catch up with college friends, so I expect updates to be intermittent. See y’all in a few.
Meant to blog this last week but forgot: FPS games increase brainpower. Experienced players of these games are 30 percent to 50 percent better than nonplayers at taking in everything that happens around them…They identify objects in their peripheral vision, perceiving numerous objects without having to count them, switch attention rapidly and track many items at once. Glad to hear my endless logged hours of Day of Defeat have not gone to waste. And considering I rented Enter the Matrix over the weekend and spent an unhealthy amount of time beating it, I must be operating on a Zen plane right now.
Now that was a tough long weekend. I spent all of the past few days (and I do mean all of the past few days) finishing up the copy for a history textbook website. But it’s done now, so updates should get more frequent around here…
Doh! I’d been planning for a couple of weeks to take part in The May Day Project, but when the day finally came around, I’d completely forgotten. As it turned out, though, I took some pictures that evening in the midst of my summer debearding (a la Richie Tenenbaum), and I suppose they’ll have to do.
Unfortunately, I only got about a day to relish my completion of the MA before I found out that my Columbia summer funding application was denied, which means another summer of scrounging for remunerative employ in the Dubya economy. At least this time around, I did a slightly better job of preparing for this worst-case scenario, and have one freelance assignment already lined up. That being said, if any readers out there know of any temporary writing or research gigs in the offing, let me know.
Having – finally – finished the research paper on Herbert Croly that has been weighing on me lo these many months (I’ll probably post it here once I’ve received some professorial feedback), I’ve now completed all the requirements for the masters degree and should be receiving an MA next month. Next stop on the PhD train, the MPhil, which I’ll receive upon completing my orals exams (based on the absorption of 250 or so history books) sometime in the winter. I hope to have some interactive fun with the whole process and to post the lists somewhere on this site, with commentary on each book as I get through them. But we’ll see…the best laid plans of mice and men and all that.
