Offhand Remarks

Story of Our Lives

Jenny and I met at a reading at Kepler's Books in Menlo Park on May 17, 2000. We both knew Charles Baxter from our college days. Jenny had taken a couple of classes from Charlie at Michigan. I'd met him when he was a visiting writer at George Mason. We hadn't both seen Charlie since before we got married. In fact, we hadn't seen him in a very long time -- not until his recent appearance at Stanford University, where he read from his new book, The Soul Thief, and was as charming and wonderful as ever. It was good to catch up with him after all these years. Here's a blurry photo to commemorate the occasion...

It's not a bug, it's a feature

I stopped looking at the Yahoo! homepage a long time ago, but on this first day of the post-Microsoft-takeover-bid era, I thought I'd check in and see if the big Y had anything to say for itself. Instead, I found my favorite kind of Yahoo! insanity, which I used to think was a big fat aberration that no-one could manage to fix. Now, I realize that putting inane "Featured" content front and center, while footnoting mass casualties in consumer-irrelevant parts of the world, is actually the strategy, not a sign of incompetence. Good for you guys! Stick to your guns. Enjoy...

Flickr has video

The Oscar Pool

Here are the results. Tony and John will have to arm-wrestle for the full-screen copy of Minority Report.

John: 15 right out of 24 total categories (Only person to get Tilda Swinton. I guess he knows about morally compromised legal counsel...)

Tony: 15 (This is tainted by gettting Best Picture wrong. Atonement?)

Harold: 12 (I should have gone with Bourne where it was nominated. I'm kicking myself, since that was clearly the year's best movie...)

Kyle: 11 (a solid showing, with correct answers well distributed throughout the show. Your Transformers picks hurt you, though. I don't think that was actually nominated for Best Original Screenplay...)

Beau: 10 (I would congratulate you on an good effort, but you chose "Happy Working Song" from Enchanted as Best Original Song, so I will be shunning you. Permanently.)

Emily: 10 (You hated Michael Clayton, but thought it would win Best Screenplay. This says something very troubling...)

Andrea: 5 (Well done, in light of the fact that your haven't actually seen a movie since The Great Muppet Caper.)

Charm: 4 (next time, Charm, ignore your heart, use a dartboard.)

The landslide consensus correct picks were Daniel Day-Lewis. Ratatouille, and Sweeney Todd for Art Direction (I missed that one. Oops.)

The landslide consensus incorrect picks were No Country for Old Men winning Cinematography and Julie Christie for Best Actress. You all listened to the hype on that last one, since I know hardly anyone saw that film.