Some Rufus Wainwright fan I am. Lately I haven’t visited the official message board much, and so I didn’t find out until now about an article (with three audio clips) in Sunday’s Times featuring our guy: “Rufus Wainwright Journeys to ‘Gay Hell’ and Back.”
Also, more news and music are available at rufuswainwright.com, now that Dreamworks finally decided to put some effort into the site. Bravo.
I was looking at the Post webcam just now, and was surprised to see a huge streak of light in front of the Capitol. Have extra-terrestrials finally taken Washington? Not quite. It turns out tomorrow night there’s to be an NFL kickoff concert on the Mall. The official, long-form title given at NFL.com is “NFL Kickoff Live 2003 Presented by Pepsi Vanilla.” Of course. (Okay, fine, I guess I could be a little less snarky about it. I do enjoy watching the occasional 49ers game on TV, so I’m not completely alienated from the sport. But what is it about professional football that always seems to require a glitzy, pyrotechnic musical extravaganza? I suppose no one in those NFL meetings ever says, “Isn’t this a bit much?”)
[Update: I looked up the concert telecast on TiVo, and the keywords are “Football, Music, Sports Non-Event.” Ha. Yeah, I get it, but I can’t help saying, “Oh, all that hoo-ha on the Mall? It’s a non-event.” Also, an article on the commercialism controversy over broadcasting the season opener, ads and all, on Jumbotron screens on the Mall: “Ad Rules Relaxed for NFL Bash” (link via the always entertaining Beaverhausen Blog).]
Yeah, I know, it’s been forever–well, “forever” as reckoned in blog time–since the last entry. I’ve been busy at work (ugh) and at play (yay), but more on that later. I’m just taking a break from my lovely holiday weekend to say: whoa, September already? How’d that happen?
Latest cutie on my radar (not gaydar, though): new While You Were Out host Evan Farmer. He’s wearing a shirt emblazoned with the number 68 in the latest episode, which Thom and I watched last weekend. Thom quipped, “Does he need one more for a sixty-nine?” Glad we’re on the same wavelength. I used to avoid WYWO for its cheesiness–the quizzes are kind of inane–but now I think I’ll be tuning in more often. Mmm, eye candy.
How sweet was last night’s Sex and the City? I got especially misty-eyed during the prom scene at the end, set to Chicago’s “If You Leave Me Now” (everyone, sing along, you know you want to), where Stanford and Marcus make up. So cute.
Other bits: I’ve grown increasingly indignant with Boy Meets Boy, and yet I can’t stop watching. Also, I’m getting into The O.C., partly because my mom watches it. I can’t remember the last show we both followed–her most recent TV addiction was American Idol (Clay was her darling), but I stayed clear of that. So far The O.C. is actually not bad, so we’ll see.
I’m a little sad. The Amazing Race is over. Watching the season finale last night, I was a nervous wreck. But in a good way, of course. When Reichen and Chip reached the finish line and broke down into tears when told they had won, I couldn’t help but get a little emotional. Over the course of the race, the final teams had stopped in a total of 24 cities on four continents and logged 44,000 miles circumnavigating the globe–a mentally and physically grueling, but, I can only assume, rewarding experience. This ain’t no sleepy vacation. Good for them. I even got a little verklempt all over again watching the interview and finale clips on The Early Show this morning. Seriously, for a travel geek like me, The Amazing Race is one of the most compelling (and vicariously exciting) shows on television. (Just please don’t call it “reality,” and lump it with all the other dreck out there.)
The Friday Five, which I bring you a week late, once again:
1. How much time do you spend online each day?
I don’t know, three hours. Okay, five. Six? It’s just that in addition to the time I spend online in the evenings at home, my job involves working at a computer most of the day, so I usually sneak in some web time there.
2. What is your browser homepage set to?
My Yahoo. I’ve customized it to display news headlines, stock market quotes, weather, TV listings, movie showtimes, and airfares for a long list of cities. Very convenient.
3. Do you use any instant messaging programs? If so, which one(s)?
Yeah, AIM. My screen name is dcboy1492. Feel free to chat me up if you see me logged in.
4. Where was your first webpage located?
While a freshman at Stanford (1995-96), I taught myself HTML, and using nothing more than Emacs, put up my first webpage, with its annoying backgrounds, frames, and all.
5. How long have you had your current website?
Rebel Prince has been up and running since Sept. 2001, and I started blogging per se in Jan. 2002.
Information design guru Edward Tufte articulates what we’ve all come to know is true: “PowerPoint Is Evil: Power Corrupts. PowerPoint Corrupts Absolutely.” An excerpt:
Particularly disturbing is the adoption of the PowerPoint cognitive style in our schools. Rather than learning to write a report using sentences, children are being taught how to formulate client pitches and infomercials. Elementary school PowerPoint exercises (as seen in teacher guides and in student work posted on the Internet) typically consist of 10 to 20 words and a piece of clip art on each slide in a presentation of three to six slides–a total of perhaps 80 words (15 seconds of silent reading) for a week of work. Students would be better off if the schools simply closed down on those days and everyone went to the Exploratorium or wrote an illustrated essay explaining something.
Indeed. Now I’m picturing Linus using a PowerPoint presentation to explain to Charlie Brown the meaning of Christmas. Ha. (Link via Arts & Letters Daily.)
Talk about recherche-ing for le temps perdu. My alarm went off at 7 a.m. this morning, and I was surprisingly awake and alert. Did I flit about the apartment, getting ready for work? No, I took my sweet time watching TV and IM-ing, and arrived at the office at… well, let’s just say “later” than I had hoped.
Thus I posit a slacker’s theorem of time management, which I formulated while standing at the bathroom sink, shaving: just as a gas expands to fill a given space, so does procrastination expand with time. (Don’t ask me if procrastination has density or volume. Smart alecks.) This is to say, the more time you give yourself to do a certain task, the more you’re just going to let it slip through your fingers (like sands through the hourglass, if you’ll forgive the allusion to a certain long-running daytime soap opera). For example, say I decide to go home early so I can get to bed at a decent hour. Umm, what fantasy world are we living in? That’s crazy talk. I’ll spend all that extra time on low-priority websurfing, thereby negating all the good-intentioned effort.
Then again, my sample size is one and only one (i.e., me), so your results may vary.