Entering the 17th and final race of the 1997 FIA Formula One World Championship, held October 26 at Jerez, Spain, Jacques Villeneuve, in only his second year in F1, was trailing Ferrari driver and two-time world champion Michael Schumacher by one point. Schumacher, of course, went on to become the greatest the sport has ever known, but this day—and the season—belonged to Villeneuve. Watch him as he recounts his dramatic, title-winning performance.
“A smart person who is given a five-hour job by their boss at four o’clock in the afternoon will get to work, expecting to finish at nine and get some brownie points. But people like me, who hate working, have better things—like dates—to do on their evenings, so they will rack their brains for ways of getting the work done early. And that’s when innovation happens.”
Haruaki Deguchi
chairman & CEO, Lifenet Insurance Company
Everything about Rachel Toor’s column in Saturday’s Spokesman-Review is absolutely spot-on.
Well…almost everything.
Toward the end she writes, “As a professor, I’ve learned no longer to be shocked…”
Anything seem off about that? What if it were “As a professor, I’ve learned to no longer be shocked…”?
I’m not sure whether Toor chose the former construction so as to avoid splitting the infinitive—doubtful—or whether it just sounds better to her ear. Or heck, maybe it’s legit and I’m just not smart enough to know it. (FYI: You’ll never lose money betting on the Aaron-is-an-idiot side.)
Doesn’t really matter, though, because two sentences later she gives us “Writing well is hard, hard, hard, hard, hard.” Forget everything else in the column. If just one person I know reads that line and remembers it, Ms. Toor deserves to be canonized.
simultaneity (noun) The simultaneous representation of several aspects of the same object.
Linda had heard of the concept of simultaneity before; she just didn’t dream she’d have the chance to witness it. Yet there he stood right in front of her: Aaron the witty raconteur, Aaron the devilishly handsome rogue, Aaron the selfless and caring idealist. It was almost too much to take in all at once.
Based on this interactive map from the good folks at candystore.com, Utah is a terrible place to spend your childhood. (Though, to be honest, I’m not sure we should trust anyone whose ranking of Halloween candies is as fundamentally flawed as theirs.)
“Look, anybody can write a book,” says Jason Raish. “That’s not the same as saying it’s easy, only that writing is the one truly democratic medium because the use of a language as craft is available to all who speak it.” It’s also not the same as saying that anybody should write a book. Consider the unholy mess that is Uncommon Type: Some Stories by Tom Hanks…
If anyone out there reading this would like to compensate yours truly for the hard work I do, day in and day out, to provide you not only with what you need to know but also what to think about it, this would be a good place to start. Pretty sure it’s tax-deductible.
I saw Blade Runner in 1982 at the Liberty Theater in Lewiston, Idaho. (Apparently, there weren’t that many of us who bought tickets to the original, since it grossed only $27.5 million.) It mesmerized me then; it remains one of my favorite motion pictures of all time. So it was with some trepidation that the missus and I took out a small loan to pay for a pair of tickets to an IMAX showing of Blade Runner 2049 over the weekend. I mean, let’s be honest: Most sequels are terrible. And a sequel released 35 years after the original? Gotta be a cash grab playing on audience nostalgia.
I hate to admit it, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. Visual feast, cautionary tale, morality play, character study, pop art, plot-driven action flick: Blade Runner 2049 is all that and more. I’ll need to see it again to confirm my suspicions, but I think it might actually be better than the original. For reals.
This is a great film. You need to see it. Right now.
Back in 2001 when I was writing music criticism for the Local Planet, my editor gave me a copy of Spiritualized’s Let It Come Down. He didn’t necessarily want me to review it; he just wanted to know what I thought. If I remember right, I ended up including the album in my year-end best-of list. (Trying to be clever, I wrote something about how it sounded like a cross between 1970s-era Pink Floyd and the Hezekiah Walker Love Fellowship Choir. It really doesn’t.)
I still have that CD—and a whole lot more from Spiritualized that I’ve picked up in the years since. And while I wholeheartedly recommend Let It Come Down, I’d rather you started with the band’s 1997 masterpiece: Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space. Pitchfork does a nice job explaining why:
Bolder than the term Britpop might suggest, more focused than the term psychedelic might imply, Ladies and Gentlemen is one of the great triumphs of the 70-plus-minute CD era. Alternately chaotic and meticulous, thundering and quivering, Ladies and Gentlemen finds power in conflict—between restraint and excess, addiction and isolation, and ultimately, love and hate.
For some reason I dusted the album off yesterday (figuratively, of course, since it’s in my iTunes) and gave it a listen. Then I listened to it again. And then a third time after that. Maybe it was the timing, maybe it’s this crazy mixed-up world in which we live, maybe it was just the mood I was in. Who knows? Either way, damn. It really is that good.
“The initial thought behind Baileys Irish Cream took about 30 seconds,” writes David Gluckman in the Irish Times. “In another 45 minutes the idea was formed.” His captivating tale has it all, from a crazy gamble on “a lovely May morning” to the initial label designs to the worthless focus groups (seriously, why does anyone do these?) to the billionth bottle sold in 2007.
There’s one part of the story, though, that hits a little too close to home for me:
“Names can be tough and often really easy to reject with a comment like ‘I just don’t like it’. Being words, not graphic designs, they are within everyone’s purview so anyone can reject them.”
Boy howdy, is that ever true.
“Fears are growing in Sweden over packs of radioactive wild boar moving north, ravaging forests and farmland.”
We should probably just go ahead and ban pumpkin spice.
The Very Short Introduction series from Oxford University Press is “something like a top-of-the-line Canon camera: it’s wonderful, but most people will still just use their phone.”
“People in their 20s and 30s…are ‘constantly striving for individualism’, which is reflected in what they spend their money on.” Naturally, then, we now have “hackable furniture.”
Here are the 70 best horror movies on Netflix right now, according to Paste. Since number 68 is Zombeavers—which is about “toxic waste-spawned zombie beavers”—I have no doubt whatsoever that the list is totally legit.
Sure, we could be like everyone else and talk about our education and credentials, and how we collaborate with our partners to leverage synergies across multiple channels while updating our stakeholder matrices, but then you wouldn’t really know us, would you?
With that in mind, I approached Shirlee, Courtney, and Skooch with the following scenario: You’re on death row, and tonight’s your date with the executioner. Prior to shuffling off this mortal coil, you get to choose (1) a beverage, (2) one menu item, (3) someone to punch in the face, and (4) a song to listen to as the walls close in and you slip into unconsciousness. Here are the results:
Shirlee would begin the festivities with a shot of Patron and a plate of candied bacon, punch whoever ratted her out to the cops, and meet her maker to the tune of “Under the Bridge” by the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
Courtney would demand a Piña Colada from Grandview Resort on Priest Lake, a bowl of macaroni and cheese, five minutes alone with Colbie Caillat, and the sweet sweet sounds of Bill Withers’ “Lean on Me.”
Meanwhile, Skooch would start with an ice-cold Rainier and some hot wings. He’d then deliver a well-placed knuckle sandwich to his math teacher from his sophomore year in high school. And Aerosmith would usher him into the hereafter with “Livin’ on the Edge.”
As for me, well…I’m the law-abiding type, so I wouldn’t be in prison in the first place.
Frances Glessner Lee (1878-1962) was the first female police captain in the U.S. She’s considered the mother of forensic science. She helped to found the Department of Legal Medicine at Harvard University.
As if that weren’t enough, Lee also crafted a series of 19 “Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death”: dollhouse-sized dioramas of “exquisitely detailed miniature crime scenes” that are still used in forensic training.
These things are badass. And they’re about to go on their first public display.
Because it’s Thursday—which means we’re mere hours from Friday—and because the boss is out of town, we’ve decided that a list of lists will have to do for today’s blog post. Enjoy…
7 Classic TV Shows and When They Jumped the Shark
13 Devilish Facts about Rosemary’s Baby
The 19 Types of Food Snobs, Ranked by Obnoxiousness
The function of music, says Wadada Leo Smith, is “to transform that [observer’s] life in just an instant, so that when they go back to the routine part of living, they carry with them a little but of something else.”
Cooking with Nikolai Gogol: “Delicious beyond description!…Pies you couldn’t imagine in your wildest dreams: they melt in your mouth! And the butter—it just runs down your lips when you bite into them.”
“I wish I could say that Banned Books Week, which blessedly ends tomorrow, is so stupid that it makes my brain hurt,” writes Matthew Walther. “It’s actually so stupid that it makes me wish I didn’t have a brain.”
Is there a comedy line Mel Brooks won’t cross? “I personally would never touch gas chambers or the death of children or Jews at the hands of the Nazis,” he said in a recent interview. “Everything else is ok.”
So much has been written about the wisdom of Theodor Geisel’s words, crafted for the delight of kids but, at times, disquieting to adults. While the same is true for many children’s book authors who use stories to push against social norms, today, I’m honoring Dr. Seuss in light of his “Midnight Paintings”—another side of his artistic expression.
Oh, the power of Seuss. To this day, I’m still frightened of the pale green pants in “What Was I Scared Of?”—one of four stories from The Sneetches and Other Stories.
“I do not fear those pants with nobody inside them.” I said, and said, and said those words. I said them, but I lied them.
And, in the end:
I was just as strange to them as they were strange to me.
Are Geisel’s words relevant today? I think so.
And for a glimpse into even more unexpected Theodor Geisel work, you’ll want to explore Boners by Those Who Pulled Them. Oh, Teddy, I suspect that I shall never see / A wonder, a marvel / As gigglicious as thee.