I was listening to the Smashmouth song, Walking on the Sun, on my MP3 player on my way back from BART this afternoon. A former acquaintance of mine once dissed the song to me by pointing out that the initial lyrics were ripping off the Coke ad “I’d like to teach the world to sing […]
Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino
Amazon link I borrowed this from my girlfriend Lilia, who had it recommended it to her by one of her planner friends. It’s a little bit hard to describe. Nominally, it contains Marco Polo’s descriptions of cities to the emperor Kublai Khan. But it’s more about the exploration of different aspects of what makes cities […]
Recipe for a good conversation
I was at a dinner party last night and had a great time. It was a good mix of people, with good conversation ranging over a variety of topics. Afterwards, my friend and I were discussing what made for a good conversation. I’ve pondered this before, because I really like good conversations, and I previously […]
Enlightened Selfishness
Picking up on yesterday’s anarchy post, I was thinking about what it takes for anarchy (or even capitalism) to work as a society. I was talking with some other friends last week about the concept of enlightened selfishness, and I think that is one of the keys. What do I mean by enlightened selfishness? It’s […]
Anarchy is Progress!
A friend of mine pointed me at this email, where a reader of Gizmodo criticizes them for having the temerity to insult the Queen of England. In particular, he says: Some institutions in the world, like the church, must stay intact or it causes a breakdown in civilization. There must be a counterbalance that allows […]
Ultimate photo
I was checking the website of the league I play in today, and noticed a link to some pictures a photographer had taken of some league games. Intrigued, I went and glanced through them, and sure enough, there are a couple of me. Check out these action shots, one of me having been beat on […]
Cubicle Zen
A little while ago, a friend of mine was complaining over IM about their stupid coworkers. In a moment of levity, I replied “Welcome to the world, young grasshopper. You must bend with the stupidity as the reeds bend with the wind. Stupidity is an unstoppable force – it can only be diverted, not ignored […]
Silent but still kicking
So I last posted a week ago Saturday. Sunday afternoon was another concert, Monday evening was ultimate, Tuesday was a much-needed night off, Wednesday through Saturday evenings were concerts. Through all of this, I was telling myself, “I just need to make it through Saturday and everything will be fine.” My body apparently took me […]
Beethoven’s Ninth
We’re in the middle of doing a seven performance run of Beethoven’s Ninth in the chorus. Reviews and stuff, if you’re interested.
Context, cognitive subroutines, and collectives
In my last post, I mentioned that I wanted to think about how to connect the ideas in this post, where I describe how we have different groups of people in different contexts and often find them difficult to identify them outside of the context in which we know them, and this post, where I […]
