May 2005

What a great book! I just finished reading “Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions“, and I feel like I need to take a nap. It’s a thrilling, true account of a group of college kids that managed — in two years! — to fleece the big casino corporations out of over $3million by using stastics and good memories to kick ass at blackjack. It will keep you on the edge of your seat, and have you rooting for the Robin-Hood-esque kids the whole time. I highly recommend it.

Coca-Cola has been on sale at UF for four decades and was the only line of soft drinks available for the past six years. But soon Coke will no longer be the real thing on the University of Florida campus.

“Florida has signed an exclusive 10-year agreement with Pepsi Bottling Group in a deal that could bring more than $27 million to the university.

I can’t imagine getting a Pepsi at a Gator game. It’s sacrilegious. Who the hell wants a “Jack and Pepsi”?

Am I the only one that is just completely amazed that the Voyagers are still going strong? “NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft has entered the solar system’s final frontier, a vast, turbulent expanse where the Sun’s influence ends and the solar wind crashes into the thin gas between stars.” That’s really crazy. Voyager I is about 8.7 billion miles from the sun.

This part is insane:

“For their original missions to Jupiter and Saturn, the Voyagers were destined for regions of space far from the Sun, so each was equipped with three radioisotope thermoelectric generators to produce electrical power for the spacecraft systems and instruments. Still operating in remote, cold and dark conditions 27 years later, the Voyagers could last until 2020.”

I can’t get a cell phone with a battery that lasts more than a year, and twenty-something years ago NASA was making batteries that don’t even need THE SUN to charge them?!

So I had a bit of a bug on Saturday and spent most of the day in a deep Alka Seltzer Plus-induced sleep. At one point I awoke to find a curious message on my answering machine. A little kid somewhere in the San Bernardino area code called with a get-well message for Eric Gagne, the Dodgers pitcher. “I’m your biggest fan,” he said, “and I hope your leg gets better really soon.”

I considered calling him and pretending to be the dominant closer, but (a) I have no idea what Eric Gagne sounds like, how he talks, or what in the world you’d say to a kid that thinks you’re a hero and (b) I feared that since he’s sort of close to LA, he might have a classmate or something that does know Eric, and then I’d get the kid or the pitcher in hot water with a lie …

It would be tragic if I was to pretend to be someone I’m not and then have him brag to all his friends and get busted for it. So I just hoped that someday the kid gets to catch a pop fly at a game, that Eric’s leg is on the mend, and then hit delete.

Gee, I haven’t been involved in a meme in quite some time, and I’m currently nursing a wicked sinus infection and suffering from post-Sith syndrome, but I’ll play along. It’s a music meme, and everyone knows I’m a sucker for both. I should note that my copy of iTunes has 6811 songs, some 500+ of which were puchased via the iTunes music store in the 18 months since I got my first iPod. (The other 6300 or so are ripped from my own personal CD collection.) Anyone who thinks mp3s are the death-knell of the music industry is a moron. I should also note that I ripped all of the original soundtrack anthology about two weeks ago and have been listening to almost nothing else lately.

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I saw the 8:30pm showing at the AMC 14 in the Century City mall. I somehow managed to avoid seeing even one preview during the last three or four months. It was good. It was beyond good. It was nothing like Episode I or Episode II, and it was everything like Episodes IV, V, and VI. You will not be disappointed.

Grab the new Song of the Moment!

I suppose $499.99 is a bit too much to pay for a toy at my age … even if it would be the absolute coolest toy in the history of all time … even if it would be a toy I dreamt of owning for the better part of the first half (fifteen years) of my life … even if it would be something that would, perhaps, escalate me to Level III.

What is sad is that it is a toy that I could probably never explain to my (potential) children. It’s a toy that even now is likely only understood by an ever-shrinking number of still-awestruck twenty-five to forty-one year olds. It’s so, so difficult to explain a revolution to those either too young to have known the world before it or too unlike you to care.

And really, when you want to profess your love for someone, what could be more meaningful than biting off each other’s ring finger?

“… it had to be our ring fingers. We were both just out of rough relationships, and wanted to both reclaim and be rid of those fingers… this has a permanence to it as well. You can take a ring off your ring finger, but you can never put your ring finger back on once you take it off. It’s something that will last forever — it’s a physical testament to how much I actually do love him.”

Are you as surprised as me that this is not on ESPN right after the poker and billiards championships? Apparently there is a new “sport” sweeping the country by storm: Cup Stacking, in which teams attempt to stack — and unstack (maybe that’s the “sport” part?) — specially designed plastic cups.

File under: Decline of Western Civilization

There was massive construction along most of the mathematically-convenient 100 miles between Daytona Beach, FL and Gainesville, FL for the entire 4.75 years I was in college. The State repaved almost all of SR40 and made major improvements to I-75 in that time. Work was mostly done between 10pm and 4am so it was not tragically intrusive to the commute I made dozens, if not hundreds, of times.

Compare that to the laughably inefficient way that Los Angeles is handling the Santa Monica Boulevard Transit Parkway Project. I daily have to deal with roads ripped into pieces comparable to the Big Dig in Boston. The main difference is that the work in LA is only over about a 3 mile stretch. Oh, and they only work between the absolutely most-inconvenient hours of 7am and 4pm. And I don’t believe they have a snowball’s chance of hell in being done in the projected 3+ years. What a joke.

This list of my favorite books has been floating around my site for about a decade now … Originally I had it prefaced with:

“This is my list of the all-time best books ever written. If you get a chance, read at least one of these before you die. The WWW is great fun, TV is great, the radio is always playing, but nothing compares to a good book. Please, do yourself a favor, read. I’ll add more as I come across them, but the truly great are rare.”

I’ll revise that now to simply say that it’s a list of what were my favorite books in the 90s. Some of them I still consider faves. YMMV.
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