I’ve long admired the hyperbolic and parabolic arc that is the narrative of both Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow and the line of flight traced across the sky, screamingly (famously), from Peenemunde in Prussian Germany, across the Channel’s choppy waters, the whiteness of Dover, to land, long after Brenn-schluss and with a smack that arrives only later, in London, east side.…

My fantasy football ending… Directed by the Coen brothers and featuring John Turturo as a struggling author engaged in a self-destructive attempt to write a B soccer picture for a major Hollywood studio, while taking copious quantities of mind-altering psychopharmaceuticals and leaning at just the right angle towards a flat panel broadcast of ESPN’s cup coverage, peering, at a remove…

FIFA Pres says the Russian ref (and when did Russians care that much for playing by the rules of the game?!) should have been given a yellow card himself. I say it shoulda been a pink slip…. What a chaotic game that was. For a while there it seemed the whole metaphorical distance between sports and war might collapse and…

John Tierney writes today in the NY Times that soccer’s been no fun to watch because it lacks the excitement of the spectator games we’re accustomed to (that’s the gist of if, tho he gets there by a weird comparison to Greek tragedy and war, as if war were a spectator sport, or a good example of an event made…

There’s a line in This is Spinal Tap that audiophiles love to quote. It’s when the band’s spiritual distraction (I’m not going to say guru), St Hubbin’s girlfriend, asks if the album’s recorded in Dobly. Nigel takes the piss out on her for that; as we do when we quote the scene. I do it still when I’m shopping for…

Well I was thinking of sleeping in tomorrow, at least past 6 am, but it was so worth it to hoof it down to the haight this morning, streets glowing sunrise pink as the mascara smeared on the cheeks of ragged haight street dolls (as well as on a couple of england fans, red though that paint was meant to…

i have a vague memory of eating pizza in a huge hallway, a real, heavenly pipe organ delivering sound to the minions stuffing face and gobber with below-average (and below-ground) Italian-style pies and oversized soft drinks… pretty good memory as far as memories of hell go. and the pizza joint was real. (unless it was in okemos, michigan… i wasnt…

Besides the obvious perks a profession as a professional matchmaker might offer, the scientists on last night’s broadcast of the BBC’s Secrets of the Sexes were having, or getting, none of them. Not only did they not benefit from the matchmaking trade, they learned that for all intents and purposes their science was “insane, and its methods, unsound,” if I…

I’m at Meshforum, just heard Jon Lebkowsky and Zack Rosen speak on the “Art of Networks.” Both discuss the Howard Dean campaign, which used social networking famously and to infamous ends. In Deanspace, everyone hears you scream…. A member of the audience points out the fact that a social network is a hierarchical network turned upside down. I’m reminded of…

Walking through the botanical gardens today I kept thinking “too much…. we’ve got too much social”… Nature-generated content will do that to you… Colbert’s live roast at the White House Press Conference was apparently among the most talked about events in the planet’s history. Could it be that it’s form, as video, played some role in this? I’ve been wondering…