Must See HTTP

Trust me

2009-01-13T04:27:37Z

If you watch only one lipdub video of Flight of the Conchords' "Hiphopopotamus vs. Rhymenocerous" today, make it this one:

Hiphopopotamus vs. Rhymenocerous from Bryan J Busch on Vimeo.

Specifying minimum font sizes in Mail.app

2009-01-09T17:42:22Z

Great tip: Specifying minimum font sizes in Mail.app. [via Airbag]

Steve Jobs lives

2009-01-06T20:14:55Z

If this was a turtleneck, I'd buy it.

Do you remember?

2008-12-31T20:32:17Z

I've been a little bit in love with this video of Gavin Creel singing Pasek and Paul's "Do You Remember?" for a while now.

It's a really sweet song (one of several written for an abandoned Peter Pan musical project) and Gavin Creel does it beautifully. (I've also never seen his hair look better.) The video is from a showcase of Benj Pasek and Justin Paul's music at the Zipper a few months ago. It seems as fitting a note as any on which to wrap up 2008. Happy new year!

Slip a sable under the tree, for she…

2008-12-26T05:08:41Z

Eartha Kitt has died. She was 81, and pretty much the ultimate "sex kitten", always. She was...si bon.

Still merry, still (more or less) bright…

2008-12-25T06:00:35Z

Yep, that's me circa 1969, posing for a photo on Santa's knee. It would be first of seven photos taken with the old fella (and one of the first laps belonging to strange men in which I'd find myself sitting over the years, a practice that happily continues). You can see the whole gallery of my visits with Santa on Flickr.

As you read this, I'm celebrating Christmas in the Land That Dial-up Forgot with my mother, a warm hearth, a lovely tree and enough food to feed a platoon, should you know any Marines you'd like to send my way. From my ancestral home to you and yours, a very Merry Christmas!

Netflix for impatient people

2008-12-25T01:30:08Z

Nice: Instant Watcher, "Netflix for impatient people". A utility to help discover what's available to "Watch Instantly" on Netflix.

Yes, Virginia

2008-12-23T17:36:54Z

Yes, Virginia, there is still a Santa Claus.

Holiday greetings from The Wet Spots

2008-12-20T20:28:31Z

So long, Lwaxana

2008-12-20T14:19:31Z

Majel Barrett Roddenberry has died. She was 76.

What a dame! She was so protective of Gene Roddenberry's vision for Star Trek and for the future, and she was a witty actress into the bargain. Once several years ago, when she was visiting St. Louis for a fan convention, I was in the autograph line waiting to meet her. As I approached the table where she was signing and graciously chatting with star-struck fan after fan, I overheard her say to an assistant that she'd like to have sushi for dinner and to find out a place they could go.

When it was my turn at the table, she inscribed my photo and we traded a few pleasantries. As I was leaving, almost as an afterthought, I recommended the name of a good local restaurant that I knew to have fine sushi. Her face lit up and she called the assistant back over. "Take this down," she said, and encouraged me to repeat the recommendation. "No, wait," she said. "Get this man's telephone number. You're coming to dinner with us!"

And so I did. I dined with Nurse Chapel, Number One, Lwaxana Troi (sans Mr. Homm). For almost three glorious hours, she held forth with stories and laughter, sake and sushi, and we closed down the Kirkwood eatery I'd recommended. When we parted company, I got a warm hug and a peck on the cheek which, combined with the evening's company, I'll treasure more and longer than any autographed photo.

So long, Mrs. Barrett-Roddenberry, and say hello to your beloved Great Bird of the Galaxy.

Cute things falling asleep

2008-12-18T16:17:31Z

Brace yourself for incoming adorable: Cute Things Falling Asleep (Matt Damon not yet included).

Fuck you, penguin!

2008-12-16T15:36:31Z

Let's talk dirty to the animals! Fuck you, penguin!

Get Dropbox!

2008-12-16T05:12:31Z

I have little Mac utility chubby for Dropbox, and based on a few weeks of use, I highly recommend it. It's the easiest way I've found to keep files synchronized among a number of remote computers, and it's saved my bacon—along with my files—several times. Installation and use couldn't be simpler, and it's available for Mac, Windows and Linux. It's free for up to 2GB of files (more than enough for me so far) and $9.99 a month for up to 50GB. Awesome!

Van Johnson

2008-12-12T21:53:31Z

Van Johnson has died. He was 92.

Gaming the system

2008-12-12T18:51:31Z

Here's an art project having a little fun with Google Maps Street View: A Street With a View.

Run, Obama, run!

2008-12-10T20:55:31Z

Ladies and gentlemen, your Headline of the Day:

Proposition 8: The Musical

2008-12-03T23:14:31Z

It's Proposition 8: The Musical! Warning: Contains Jack Black.

While it's not Mr. Shaiman's best foot forward, there's certainly a chuckle or two to be had in this star-crammed satire. It's only a shame this wasn't made a couple of months ago; there's nothing like musical comedy to rally the troops!

She’s on her way

2008-12-03T16:31:31Z

Folk music legend Odetta has died. She was 77.

I had the opportunity to meet her a few years ago when she was in town doing a concert at the Sheldon, which I reviewed for the Post-Dispatch. She was so gracious and, although she was not in the best voice that evening, gave a performance that held the audience rapt. Many encores were demanded and many given. It hurts my heart a little bit to know that there are young people who don't know her name or her legacy; I'll try to do my part to share the music on down.

Gladys on Ellen

2008-12-01T19:26:31Z

Oh man! I am gonna start using the line Gladys gets off at 4:00 on a regular basis.

One-man “Thriller”

2008-12-01T14:23:31Z

I love this. I have no idea how one accomplishes something like it, but I love it. One guy performs "Thriller". Dayum.

“We’re just trying connect in a sea of voices…”

2008-11-26T20:36:31Z

In such times as these, I believe, it is important to laugh—at ourselves, with others. And vice-versa.

So far, so good

2008-11-25T13:00:31Z

"Women are most fascinating between the ages of 35 and 40 after they have won a few races and know how to pace themselves. Since few women ever pass 40, maximum fascination can continue indefinitely." — Christian Dior

It's true. Today is my 40th birthday. How do I feel? As always, better than yesterday and not as good as tomorrow.

I know I repeat it every year, but that's simply because it's true: my life gets better and richer and more fulfilling day by day. I'm greatly blessed, with so many dear friends, relatively good health, a career that I love, a marvelous home in a beautiful city...it's an embarrassment of good fortune.

I'm so grateful for the many gifts in my life and, as I prepare to begin my fifth decade, so very excited to find out what's coming next!

There are literally months of celebrating planned to mark this august occasion. We had a kick-ass happy hour or five in St. Louis last night, and I'm taking the party on the road. Find out when I'm coming to your town and join the punishment of my liver.

The Daily Otter

2008-11-24T06:09:31Z

Oh my goodness! I might expire from the cute at The Daily Otter.

A Conversation From the Bar Scene

2008-11-17T18:06:07Z

Jeff: So you're turning 40 soon, right?
Brad: Yep.
Jeff: It shows.
Brad: I'll have you know that, until very recently, I had the body of a 23-year-old.
Jeff: Well, the economic downturn has affected us all.

You want to know what love is?

2008-11-06T20:25:47Z

If you read only one personal story on the web today, please make it my pal Jake's about his chosen family. Then take a moment to think about the thousands upon thousands of stories yet untold it represents.

Then get up and go change the world. Thank you.

It’s just my policy…

2008-11-04T22:44:27Z

(Thanks to faithful reader Devon for sending this along, based on an earlier tweet.)

Let freedom reign

2008-11-04T05:01:55Z

"The people reign over the American political world as God rules over the universe. It is the cause and the end of all things; everything rises out of it and is absorbed back into it." — Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

With hope

2008-11-03T22:10:44Z

I voted last Tuesday afternoon, casting an absentee ballot at the Board of Elections in anticipation of the work and travel that will keep me away from the polls tomorrow. Without comment on any of the other issues and races on the ballot, it will come as no surprise I suppose when I tell you that I voted, freely and proudly, to elect Barack Obama the next president of the United States.

I will not directly encourage you to do the same. Voting in a democratic republic is a sacred right, and it is also an intensely personal one. To me, the most important thing is that you do it: inform yourself, engage yourself and then vote in accord with your mind, heart and beliefs. If they differ from mine, well, that too is a sacred right which we rightly fiercely defend. If we differ in thought, so long as those differences are expressed deliberately, thoughtfully and—most importantly—respectfully, then you and I will be find each other to be good and challenging company.

Respect, along with an effort to move beyond and above the coarseness that has attended campaigning for the presidency in recent years, is what I have seen in Barack Obama. Respect for his opponents, respect for the deep and deeply-felt differences among the people of this country, respect for the democratic and diplomatic processes upon which our nation is based, respect for thought and debate, respect for language and learning—all of these are things I believe we as a nation need to embrace and should see in our leadership. Not fear. Not threats. Not anger. Ultimately, policies and promises aside, it is what I see of Senator Obama's respect for the American democratic ideal that has brought me to support him, his seemingly whole and heartfelt belief in and embrace of what we are and what we strive ever to be: good.

We live in difficult times but, truly, it has ever been so. The election of one man, or one Congress, or the passage of one bill, or the enactment of one measure will not fix what divides or troubles us. But it is a beginning. And if there is to be what has been so often promised by so many during the past few months, if there is to be change, then it will not happen on November 5. It will not happen by pitting red against blue. It will not happen at all, unless we do it together.

I don't know if Barack Obama can bring us together as a nation. But I do know that his candidacy and his promised dedication represent the best opportunity I've seen for it to happen in my lifetime.

Whether you agree or not, I hope you'll take time tomorrow to do what I did last week: please, vote.

Causes

2008-10-14T20:02:00Z

"At times, one remains faithful to a cause only because its opponents do not cease to be insipid." — Friedrich Nietzsche

Ply it forward

2008-10-09T01:36:00Z

I agree with Scott: Let's make this a Thing That People Do.

A Conversation From the Bar Scene

2008-10-08T07:19:13Z

Jeff: Take a look at him. He's hot. Nice tan too.

Brad: That's not a tan. I believe he's a Native American.

Jeff: Mmmmmm. He could poke-a my hontas any time he liked.

Brad: You don't even listen to yourself talk anymore, do you?

Jeff: I...I do not.

Mmm…daddy like!

2008-10-08T04:49:29Z

Neil Patrick Harris and my future husband Jason Segel totally making out? Yeah, that's going on my fantasy highlight reel. (It's an outtake from season three of How I Met Your Mother. Video here.) Hubba hubba!

The good old days of Google

2008-10-02T16:51:29Z

To celebrate its 10th birthday, Google has briefly brought back its earliest available index, from 2001. Back then, I was number one.

An empty seat at the Mighty Wurlitzer

2008-09-29T23:22:43Z

It seems as though every day another obituary signals the clock running down on the time when people deserved to be called "entertainers". Stan Kann has died. He was 83.

With no offense intended to the achievements of a certain local sporting legend, for those of us in the entertainment business, Stan Kann was "The Man".

Paul Newman 1925-2008

2008-09-28T05:41:08Z

"The trick of living is to slip on and off the planet with the least fuss you can muster. I’m not running for sainthood. I just happen to think that in life we need to be a little like the farmer, who puts back into the soil what he takes out." — Paul Newman

But I don’t…

2008-09-28T04:17:50Z

Sometimes, I wish I knew what to say about all of this.

David Foster Wallace

2008-09-14T02:42:53Z

Author David Foster Wallace has died. He apparently hanged himself in his Los Angeles area home. He was 46.

I spent the day with Wallace in 1997, shortly after he'd received the MacArthur Foundation grant and while he was on the road touring for the publication of Infinite Jest, and interviewed him for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

David Foster Wallace sits at a conference table in the International Writers Center at Washington University's West Campus in Clayton, sipping coffee and chewing toothpicks, an oral substitute for the cigarettes he forswore a few months earlier.

"I'm 35 years old," the author of Infinite Jest says as he begins to describe himself. "I've been doing this for 13 years. I think I'm pretty good, but I don't think I'm real good yet."

This is a rare moment of conciseness for Wallace, whose prose is filled with convoluted but perfectly logical sentences that sometimes seem to go on for pages. Hailed by critics as the most gifted chronicler of his generation, he clearly doesn't believe — or read — his own press coverage.

Although his first two books, a novel and a collection of short stories, showed the promise of a rising new writer, Wallace really caught the attention of critics last year with Infinite Jest, his second novel. It's a 1,079-page work set mostly at a tony tennis academy and a drug rehabilitation halfway house in the near future.

Infinite Jest is actually an assortment of loosely related stories. At its center is the tale of three brothers, the Incandenzas, and the shadow cast over them by their father's suicide. A side plot concerns a band of wheelchair-bound terrorists seeking to control the eponymous "Infinite Jest," a film believed to be so entertaining that it puts anyone who views it into a blissed-out haze. Another side plot follows Don Gately, a drug addict who will found a new religion.

It is a complex book that Wallace insists is just as long and involved as it needs to be.

"The version that I turned in was about 500 pages longer than what came out," he says, "which in and of itself isn't terminal for me, but there's a lot of that 500 pages that didn't really need to be in there. It was very hard for me to listen to the editor, but I did it."

When Little, Brown published Infinite Jest, the book hit store shelves accompanied by an intense six-month publicity campaign. That, coupled with the critical notice Wallace's previous work had garnered, established the media-shy writer as the new literary celebrity.

Wallace, however, is pragmatic about the "publicity tsunami."

"Because of the economics of selling books right now, it has a lot to do with the big stores and with (the publishers) not getting a lot of returns," he says.

"The publishers don't really care if anyone actually reads it, they just want (consumers) to buy it from Barnes & Noble so they don't get a lot of copies back.

"I would rather that fewer people bought it and the people who bought it actually read it, but that's coming from my own ego."

His ego, Wallace acknowledges, is fragile and a large part of why he doesn't care to read reviews of his work.

The high that comes from celebrity, he says, is too seductive and too dangerous to the work of writing to succumb to it. Although first noting his respect for their work, he points to the examples of friends and contemporaries who enjoyed early success and weren't as sheltered from the hype.

"I thought, for instance, Bret Easton Ellis' book Less Than Zero — it's not Dante, but for the guy's age and for the moment — there was magic in it," Wallace says. "And I thought the same thing about Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City."

Wallace tries to put the attention paid to him in perspective, and he gets a lot of help from his friends.

"I'm protected in a lot of ways that I think certain other people aren't," he says. "I'll have this chat with a newspaper, which will mess me up for a few days because it makes me feel more important than I really am, but then it'll go away and I'll go home and my closest friends aren't writers and life is very real."

Home for Wallace is near the campus of Illinois State University in Normal, Ill., where he teaches writing and literature. He grew up in Urbana, where his father was a philosophy professor at the University of Illinois and his mother an English professor at a community college.

"I mostly teach the freshman classes that the other professors don't want to teach and think I'm very gracious to do so when in fact I much prefer it," Wallace says.

Part of the joy of teaching entry-level courses, Wallace says, is introducing his students to works that engage them on their own turf.

"There's an Amy Homes story called 'A Real Doll' about a pubescent boy's affair with his sister's Barbie doll and that story's actually created a few literature majors at ISU," Wallace says. "They had no idea that a story could be that sick and smart and spiritually sophisticated and speak a language that's the same language as their own."

Wallace is taking the year off from teaching, thanks in part to a fellowship he received earlier this year from the MacArthur Foundation, the organization behind the so-called "genius grants." The five-year award, worth up to $75,000 annually, has given the author the freedom to concentrate on his own work.

While giving him the luxury of a sabbatical, the grant has also brought an odd kind of pressure into Wallace's life.

"There are a whole lot of things about it that are real nice that aren't what people would imagine," Wallace says. "They very nicely did a thing in my hometown newspaper that made it sound like you get all the money at once and it's tax-free, so every friend of mine who is some wacko investor came to me with ideas about silver futures and like that. In fact, what it is is like five years of a teaching salary.

"But I quit smoking a few months ago, so I haven't been working very well. It's very easy to run this guilt thing on myself, like when your parents are paying for college and you're screwing off. You feel like 'Oh, God, I just cost the MacArthur Foundation 50 dollars and all I did was watch a movie.'"

Wallace is working on several projects now, mostly short fiction. He says he feels no real pressure to produce another work on the scale of Infinite Jest anytime in the near future.

"I don't have any real desire to have a best seller," he says, "mostly because I think the sorts of books that become best sellers are not really books. They're sort of like television you can carry around with you."

He's content just to write and enjoy his time away from academia. He's not concerned with the critics who have branded him the literary spokesman for his generation.

"I feel that there's such an irony about anybody talking about a spokesman for my generation," Wallace says. "By definition, there can't be a spokesperson because there isn't a collective.

"I do love the term 'Generation X,' though. I don't know why people roll their eyes at that.

"A generation identified by a variable. That's deep."

Helen Weiss has died

2008-09-09T15:44:57Z

PR maven Helen Weiss has died. Our city has lost another top-notch flack. Helen was a model for what a corporate publicist should be, and a hell of a dame into the bargain. I shall miss her.

Not necessarily the news

2008-09-09T03:12:22Z

Not necessarily the news. Print magazine looks at the folks who create the fake news graphics for shows such as The Daily Show and the Onion News Network.

OB08

2008-08-23T23:54:32Z

Proposed campaign slogan: "One house, one spouse: Obama/Biden '08."