The Donkey Attitude

Ok so this came as one of those forwards from one of Garry's aunts and I usually don't pay much attention to these things and it's sure to upset anyone who cares about animal rights, but I kind of liked the takeaway message here =)  Enjoy.

The Donkey

One day a farmer's donkey fell into a well. The animal cried piteously for hours as the farmer tried to figure out what to do. Finally, he decided the animal was old, and the well needed to be covered up anyway; it just wasn't worth it to retrieve the donkey. 

He invited all his neighbors to come over and help him. They all grabbed a shovel and began to shovel dirt into the well. At first, the donkey realized what was happening and cried horribly. Then, to everyone's amazement he quieted down. 

A few shovel loads later, the farmer finally looked down the well. He was astonished at what he saw. With each shovel of dirt that hit his back, the donkey was doing something amazing. He would shake it off and take a step up. 

As the farmer's neighbors continued to shovel dirt on top of the animal, he would shake it off and take a step up. Pretty soon, everyone was amazed as the donkey stepped up over the edge of the well and happily trotted off.

Moral of the story: Life is going to shovel dirt on you, all kinds of dirt. The trick to getting out of the well is to shake it off and take a step up.

The lack of good movies to queue up in Netflix is f-ing depressing me.

Okay, so I do have 499 movies in my queue currently (the limit is 500), but still.  Once upon a time there was no end to the number of good movies I wanted to watch.  I mean, obviously, otherwise I wouldn't have so many in my queue.

But I was just browsing the "popular new releases" section of Netflix and came across this page where there were exactly two movies that were rated above 3 stars, one of which I'd already seen (Slumdog Millionaire...and that wasn't even as good as City of God).  Maybe because I used to dream about making 4- and 5-star movies...but this is really f-ing depressing, man.

At least I can somewhat get my fix through TV on DVD--there are so many amazing shows from the last few years.  And I just bought both seasons of Carnivale on Amazon for like $40, a steal!

(Happy Friday!) Why Harper's Bazaar subscribers have it better.

Posted simultaneously to wearability.posterous.com.

Besides the fact that the newsstand price is about $4/issue, and I pay just $10 flat for a whole year's worth of magazines. No, what I'm talking about is a fact little-known outside this special club of people who subscribe to the magazine on a regular basis: we get different covers.  Better covers, I must say.  

Harper's Bazaar newsstand covers don't really stand out from every other magazine out there--huge faces with loud words graffittied all over them.  "Fabulous at Every Age!" is a popular Bazaar saying.  "Bags! SHOES! 437 New Looks! Beauty STEALS!"  I really hate how these kinds of covers treat us like we're stupid.

But oh, the subscriber covers! I'm not sure if other magazines do this, but I prefer Harper's Bazaar to most other fashion magazines because of it (the only other one I love is W, with its awesome photography in that fabulous large format).  Every month I look forward to receiving that delicious piece of artwork in the mail, showcasing that issue's lovely celebrity in some sweeping, epic gown, striking a whimsical, gestural pose against a cinematic backdrop.  Oh, how I love it.  So much that I painstakingly collected some of the most striking covers from the past couple of years and created diptychs so you can compare the subscriber covers to the regular newsstand covers.  You're welcome.

The Music of Braid: the Game

A few weeks ago, Garry, Mark, Sanny and I stayed up until the obscenely wee hours of the morning to play this fantastic and ingenious game called Braid, on the XBox 360.  The game is conceptually profound, created by indie game developer Jonathan Blow (no kidding!), with artwork by David Hellman.  It follows a protagonist, Tim, through various puzzles that explore the flow of time, in different worlds in which time behaves according to different rules:
  • Time and Forgiveness
  • Time and Mystery
  • Time and Place
  • Time and Decision
  • Hesitance
  • World 1
By the way, Braid is quite possibly the most depressing game ever--at least the overarching themes.  The look is a bit like Zelda or Super Mario Bros., but the mood and feel of the game are on a whole different plane, and I attribute that in part to its haunting, gorgeous soundtrack.  It's a bit Celtic or new-age in style, but not super cheesy like a lot of new-age-y music is.  And in the context of the game, it is simply otherworldly, mysterious, and multi-dimensional.  And it's especially bemusing juxtaposed against the relative simplicity of the graphics, yet totally befitting the complexity of the gameplay.

Here are a couple of my favorite tracks, but the whole list of songs from the Braid soundtrack can be found here.

Dear coworker: please don't use antiquated American idioms like "soup to nuts" in a meeting.

Especially when more than half the people in the room are international in some way:

  • One Scotsman by way of Malaysia
  • One Albanian from Kosovo
  • Two Russians
  • ...and a second-generation ABC like me.
Seriously dude.  Just say "end-to-end."

FYI, the phrase "soup to nuts" is fully explained on Wikipedia.  I don't think I'd ever heard the phrase explained before and I'm really glad I asked.

Random thought for a Monday afternoon: What do cheer captains think of Taylor Swift?

Seriously, she does a great job slandering them in "You Belong With Me" and some of her other songs.  Apparently cheer captains wear high heels, short skirts, and have no sense of humor. (I can only see one truly negative thing in that list of character traits.)  

But I have a hard time believing that Taylor Swift was ever the awkward kind of girl sitting on the bleachers in a band uniform and headgear.  Everything about her reads "blonde bombshell," so maybe the cheer captains can identify with her after all.

Interesting, non?

She wears short skirts, I wear T-shirts
She's cheer captain and I'm on the bleachers

She wears high heels, I wear sneakers
She's cheer captain and I'm on the bleachers

Mmm yeah, I don't think this girl is exactly suffering from "ugly duckling" syndrome:

Shwedagon Pagoda: Just a gorgeous picture my mom sent me.

The national landmark of Burma, the Shwedagon rises 320 ft. from the ground and is totally covered in pure gold.  You can see it glowing in the night from many parts of the city of Rangoon.  I visited it a few years ago and it is even more beautiful in person.  Just wanted to share.

From Rudyard Kipling's From Sea to Sea and Other Sketches (1899):
"Then, a golden mystery upheaved itself on the horizon, a beautiful winking wonder that blazed in the sun, of a shape that was neither Muslim dome nor Hindu temple-spire. It stood upon a green knoll, and below it were lines of warehouses, sheds, and mills. Under what new god, thought I, are we irrepressible English sitting now?"