Last week, I took a work-related trip to Winston-Salem, NC. The actual work portion of the trip went well and the travel was mostly hassle-free, despite traveling on Thanksgiving week. The only delays were brief, although they did necessitate some extra-brisk walking between gates in order for me to make my connecting flights both on the outbound and returning portions of the trip.

I did pick up one bit of airport bar know-how: always specify the serving size of the drink that you order. I long ago learned that airport bar prices are in the arm-and-a-leg range, and I recently learned to expect relentless up-selling (“Want to make that a double for just two dollars more?”). This time I learned that if you want one pint of beer, order one pint. A generic beer request will result in your beer arriving in the largest flagon in the barkeep's arsenal. The upside is that I was supremely relaxed for the initial leg of my return trip.

On the second leg of my return trip, I was lucky enough to sit next to a gentleman who had spent several months working in Newcastle, England. One of his co-workers had some kind of connection to Newcastle United and so, as part of his indoctrination as a fan of English Soccer, he got a chance to tour the St. James' Park club house and meet Michael Owen and Nicky Butt. So, we chatted about the EPL for most of the flight from Cincinatti to Rochester, no doubt annoying many of our fellow passengers.

Posted by ksmoker at 9:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I took Ben earlier this summer to see Ratatouille when it was in the theaters. Brad Bird and Pixar have really put a little masterpiece together here. At just nine minutes shy of two hours, the run time might be expected to strain the attention span of a five-year-old, but Ben was mesmerized throughout. Nutshell plot: Remy, a rat, yearns to express himself through food preparation. Linguini, the bumbling garbage boy, becomes the vehicle through which Remy achieves his goal. Remy tastes success, the deception is soon uncovered, livelihood and lives are threatened, adversities are overcome, and the rat and his boy triumph.

There are a couple of nits I can't resist picking. First, despite being set in France and despite being surrounded by the French-accented supporting characters, the main characters speak with distinctively American accents. Second, you'd expect some involuntary audience revulsion at the sight of rats (even cartoon rats) in the kitchen. Maybe it's because of the subtly expressive animation, but these objections barely register a blip while viewing the movie.

In addition, the be-all-you-can-be message is heartwarming and uplifting. Bird perfectly paces the action and builds the tension so that at the moment of Remy's triumph I couldn't help shedding a tear. The oft-repeated motto, “anyone can cook,” might be misinterpreted as “everyone can cook,” but that's clearly not the emphasis here. As with the Incredibles before, Bird is intent on showing that individual talents are unique. It's up to each person to use those talents as best they can.

Which brings us to the theme of Brad Bird's first major work, the conventionally animated Iron Giant. Nutshell plot: a giant alien robot crash-lands near a New England town during the height of the Cold War. A boy, Hogarth, discovers and befriends the giant. He teaches the giant, who has suffered amnesia or memory erasure, how to behave in a civilized society and tries in vain to conceal the giant's presence from the pesky G-man assigned to investigate reports of strange activity. Tensions escalate, nuclear war is threatened, and the giant acts against his own programmed nature to save the day. Here the motto was more bluntly: “be who you choose to be.”

Of the two movies, Ratatouille is more technically brilliant, but Iron Giant is more heartfelt. Either way, they are both a lot of fun and hopefully are just the beginning of more brilliance to come from Brad Bird.

Posted by ksmoker at 12:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Just a few stats and observations:

• # of attendees: at least 50
• # of pies: 11
• my ping-pong record: 0 wins, 3 losses--Tim claimed that his ping-pong skillz were “rusty,” but Ted, as an impartial observer, thought that our matches weren't as close as the scores would indicate.
• For the second time in three years, there was no Turkey Bowl, I'm not sure why.
• This year, foosball was added to the mix of post-prandial activities.
• Christopher thought it would be fun to inaugurate his first Thanksgiving by singing the Bob the Builder theme song during the mealtime prayer.
• The awesome cranberry relish made a repeat appearance (Jane's recipe, I think?).
• Brendan is just about as cute as a baby can get.

Posted by ksmoker at 9:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Weak post title for sure, but my recent post on the EPL's managerial shooting gallery needs an update. After only six months on the job and only three months into the season, Wigan boss Chris Hutchings has been sacked.

Posted by ksmoker at 10:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Stole this meme from Hillary. And no, having watched the movie doesn't count.

These are the top 106 books most often marked as 'unread' by LibraryThing's users (as of some time in the past). As usual, bold what you have read, italicize those you started but couldn't finish, and strike through what you couldn't stand. Add an asterisk to those you've read more than once. Underline those on your to-read list.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion* (yes, I am a geek)
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose*
Don Quixote
Moby-Dick
Ulysses
The Odyssey*
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler's Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian: A Novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World*
The Fountainhead
Foucault's Pendulum*
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel
1984*
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver's Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
Dune*
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela's Ashes: A Memoir
The God of Small Things
A People's History of the United States: 1492-Present
Cryptonomicon*
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-Five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake: A Novel
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics: a Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an Inquiry into Values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity's Rainbow*
The Hobbit*
White Teeth
Treasure Island*
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

Hmmm, seems like I need to brush up on my Dostoyevsky. There's plenty on this list that I would like to read, but I've only marked “to-read” those books that are actually sitting on a shelf/pile waiting to be read in the near future.

Posted by ksmoker at 8:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

by Rebecca Goldstein

This is not the definitive Gödel bigoraphy; instead, Goldstein focuses on mainly on Gödel's early years in Vienna and on the Incompleteness Theorems themselves. As part of Norton's Great Discoveries Series, this book is written by a (primarily) fiction writer with the goal of bringing the story of one of history's great scientific breakthroughs to the lay public. Goldstein does this quite well, although the story might not be the one that all readers might expect. For those interested in insights to Gödel's notorious paranoia and reclusive nature in his later years, look elsewhere. For those interested in the influence that the Theorems had on future thinkers, look elsewhere. For those looking for a lay understanding of the Theorems (without necessarily needing to understand their larger context) or those who are interested in how Gödel fit into the famous Vienna Circle (or didn't fit in, as it turns out), then this is the book for you.

Posted by ksmoker at 6:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

This widely-praised film, directed by Clint Eastwood, portrays one of the more famous campaigns of WWII from a perspective that most Americans are unaccustomed to seeing. Of course, we've known at least since Tora, Tora, Tora that the Japanese are people too, but what Eastwood does here is depict in stark detail how, thanks to a bellicose Japanese leadership, the lack of adequate supplies, and the weight of a samurai warrior culture, for most soldiers--and even the field commanders-- life essentially became a long, drawn-out exercise in slow, excruciating mass-suicide.

Obviously this is not a suitable flick for the kiddies, but it is an instructive (and even entertaining) study of the futility of war.

Posted by ksmoker at 11:06 PM | Permalink

by Max Barry

I haven't been keeping up with my media consumption lately, so I'll be using the next few posts to do some catching up.

This book is a fun little satire of corporate culture and the rise of management “self-help” industry. As a manager myself, the book is fun to the extent that one doesn't take it too seriously; however, the satire is biting enough that it sometimes hits close to home. I don't want to give away the central conceit, but the moral is mundane enough to share: companies who stress productivity and efficiency and profitability at their employees' expense (no matter what the cold, technical data might support), will never be truly successful.

Sounds boring enough, but the story is carried along grandly by the abundant (black) humor and snappy prose. Max Barry knows how to make cynicism fun.

Posted by ksmoker at 10:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In a speech given today at the Heritage Foundation, President Bush attacked Congressional Democrats, invoking Hitler to help make his argument.

He even called out MoveOn.org and Code Pink as the masterminds behind the Congressional foot-dragging. I mean, it's not like Congress is responding to the will of the people or anything, right?

Posted by ksmoker at 9:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)