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This is everything that I have purchased from Amazon.com since... it looks like 1999. See if you could spot my purchases trending upward when I hit dotcom pay-dirt in 2000 and hit investment bank pay-dirt in 2002. This is probably 90% of the books, DVDs, and video games I have consumed in the past 6 years, which really isn't that bad, considering. I had to munge the output from the Amazon.com order history webpage with a bit of Perl and some other tricks so that I could hide the order numbers and recipient names (no, I didn't buy Pat the Bunny for myself, or, unfortunately, the large-ass television). In the process I lost all the links to the item detail page for each individual item; when I get around to it I'll try to merge the links back, so you could easily figure out what something like V is. Books 100 Selected Poems by E. E. Cummings 15-Jan-05 2003 Children's Writer's & Illustrator's Market 23-Aug-03 A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius 19-...

I wish the legacy 34 archives were still up somewhere so that I could link to all my previous postings about time-related articles in the Times , which are my favourite things. I could also link to the bulletin board postings containing my arguments in a class discussion about determinism and causality in David Z. Albert's class back at Columbia. But that's all gone (if you consider things from the past gone), so linking to tomorrow's mishmash of a Science Times article about time travel, complete with David Z. Albert quotes, will have to do. I stopped reading the Science Times years ago, when my high school science-nerd-lab teacher stopped assigning us weekly article summarization, because I really don't think they do just to most of the topics they try to cover. The article might serve to get people to realize that time is a fundamentally interesting concept that isn't nearly as straightforward as one would naturally assume, but when every other paragraph attemp...

Modest Mouse played Central Park tonight, and I was there with an entire generation of Kerchners. I like Modest Mouse a good deal, which, I'm not sure if that's something that one has to defend, but I'm not going to anyway. The setlist was skewed towards tracks off of their most recent album, Good News for People Who Like Bad News , which is understandable and all right, as it's a great album (perhaps not the best of 2004, as Adam maintains, with Interpol's Antics also having come out last year). They incorporated some (slightly) older stuff into the mix, notably "Dramamine", "Breakthrough", "Paper Thin Walls", and an 8-minute or so jam of "Tiny Cities Made of Ashes" which worked reasonably well, as far as 8-minute jams go. Ending with "Doin' the Cockroach" was an odd choice, and we were privately and ineffectually lobbying for "Talking Shit about a Pretty Sunset". All in all, a nice time was had. I fo...

More trends: CC '02 people on the telly. First Akil , (okay, first Petey on CNN), and now Rachel Nichols has her own damn series on Fox.

Continuing the trend of things falling from the sky very close to where I happen to be, a helicopter crashed into New York Harbor directly across from my office in downtown Brooklyn on Tuesday. And then, um, another one crashed into the East River today, though I wasn't particularly near this one (I wasn't particularly far away, either). Times quote of the day from the article about today's crash: At least three bystanders jumped into the water after seeing the chopper go down, officials said. One, a Fresh Direct employee, helped pull a victim to the shore, then left to go back to work. "He said, 'Hey, I've got to go,'" Mr. Kelly said. "We tried to get him to stay." There was also a large fire two block's from my mother's place in Sea Gate this morning, which I was nowhere near. As far as I know, I have nothing at all to do with the shit out in California .

I have a list of things that I've intended to blog about and haven't, and most of the items no longer signify anything to me. This is frustrating rather than being cool in some postmodern content-free manner. Other list elements are vague beyond the point of helpfulness ( books , eh? That's it, I'll blog all about books , and follow up with a posting about film ). Schnäck, though–I remember Schnäck. I went on down to Schnäck , way the fuck on the other side of the BQE with Adam a few weeks ago. It was reviewed in A Hamburger Today , and Josh had mentioned it for a while, so why not? The burgers at Schnäck are not nearly as diacritical as the name suggests. They were fairly tasty, though definitely not up to Blue 9/In-N-Out snuff, with a definite salt-n-peppa flava to them. There's a shaker full of homemade hotsauce on each table, and I dabbled with that, ketchup, french fries, and cheese on my four mini-burgers. I forget which topping tasted the best, as this was s...

Whoomp . (ed.: now with link that goes someplace)

Ryan, Sarahs, and puppy came down to the beach in Coney Island on Sunday. It was a grand ol' time. I prepared some salmon and what I believe to be a torta-thing (though I might be wrong) while they were down. The torta came out very well, I think. Here's what I did: I sautéed spinach with some salt and olive oil in a large pan. I took the spinach out, added more olive oil and a lot of crushed rosemary, heated that up, and semi-fried some thinly sliced potatoes. Then I put the spinach back in, added about 6 beaten eggs, and put it all in the oven at an ambiguous temperature (my mother's oven believes that kinetic energy is best pondered in the abstract) for an ambiguous amount of time (I believe that time is best pondered in the abstract). When it all came out it had set nicely and was easy to slice off into wedges.

While I've tried to explain to many of you what's been going on at work, sometimes you just need a damn cartoon .

Things that I have learned since last posting: how to juggle, how to make whipped cream (heavy cream + sugar + immersion blender, serve with the strawberries that are now in season). Things that I have read since last posting: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (very good), The Jump: Sebastian Telfair and the High-Stakes Business of High School Ball (not very good, but I know a lot of the people from Lincoln). Things that I have done: not much.