My first order of business upon returning from watching the marathon was to get this guy out of my apartment:
That appears to be a silver-haired bat, one of the most common species, but one usually found in more forested areas. He got into my apartment because, after taking the screens out last week for the window washers, I didn't feel a crushing need to put them back in. (I do now.)
I didn't hurt the little dude. I opened the bottom half of the window and then encouraged the bat to go through it with a few blasts of compressed air:
(It's hard to see in the video, but I stopped closing the window well above the bat.)
How Parker missed him is beyond me. The bat was sleeping right at nose level by a window Parker frequently looks through. Even when Parker came over to investigate what I was doing with the compressed air, he didn't smell or see the bat. Good; last thing I wanted was to test Parker's rabies vaccination.
At this writing (about an hour later) the bat has gone elsewhere, and my windows are closed or screened.
No kidding:
A group of dedicated Doctor Who fans tracked down at least 100 long-lost episodes of the show gathering dust more than 3,000 miles away in Ethiopia.
The recovered episodes from the 60s include much-loved scenes from The Crusade, The Enemy of the World and The Ice Warriors series.
In the four-part Crusade story [the First Doctor, played by William] Hartnell, and his assistant Vicki, played by Maureen O’Brien, arrive in the TARDIS in Palestine in the 12th century just as King Richard the Lionheart is doing battle with the Saracen ruler Saladin.
After each airing only once between 1964 and 1969, copies were sold to the Ethiopian Agency and the BBC then lost or wiped the originals.
The BBC hopes to announce this discovery next month on the 50th Anniversary Special.
Some astute readers may have gathered that spending time in a different neighborhood plus complaining about the government shutdown affecting mortgages implies something is changing at Inner Drive Technology Worldwide HQ.
For now, I'll just say that a happy side-effect of all this disruption is an unusually clean and orderly house.
More details as the situation develops.
New York magazine's Ann Friedman explains why she did:
New York is increasingly a city for people who are already on top, not for those looking to establish themselves. I've always been partial to the friendly guy who doesn’t know how hot he really is (Chicago) or the surprisingly intelligent, sexy stoner (Los Angeles) as opposed to the dude who thinks he’s top of the list, king of the hill, A-number-one.
In an excerpt from Goodbye to All That adapted for BuzzFeed, Ruth Curry describes the heady infatuation with New York that I never managed to feel: “The city lent itself especially well to a mental configuration in which you were an extra in an artsy, high-budget movie and saw everything as if through a camera on a set.” Part of that infatuation is a willingness to consider New York from a cinematic distance, overlooking the city’s many irritants except insofar as they add grit and drama to your story. This seems like the general approach of many New York evangelists, who complain vigorously about little things like subway hardships and bedbug plagues, and then post Instagram photos of the skyline at sunset. A not-insignificant number of the vehement New York lovers I know — especially the young twentysomethings — are actually pretty unhappy day to day. I picture the prom king’s girlfriend sitting near him at the party, ignored but still kind of proud to be in the room and on his arm — and incredibly defensive should you suggest she break up with him for someone who dotes on her more. When I describe my West Coast existence (sunshine! avocados! etc.) to some New Yorkers, they acknowledge that they really like California, too, but could never move there because they’d get too “soft.” At first this confused me, but after hearing it a few times, I’ve come to believe that a lot of people equate comfort with complacency, calmness with laziness. If you’re happy, you’re not working hard enough. You’ve stopped striving.
For my part, I moved back to Chicago after three years because I didn't want to hate New York. It worked. I still love New York, but in the way a person can love an ex: I keep up with what she's doing, and we have coffee every so often, but that's about it.
Today, it turns out, is "National Punctuation Day;" however, that does not give anyone license—beyond whatever one's local political system grants him—to misuse one's keyboard/mouse/other text-entry device (including voice recognition tools) in furtherance of inappropriate text markings.
I'm hoping we can get a diacritical mass of people on board with this.
It's also the last night game this season at Wrigley, and therefore the last game I'll attend until next April. We won't see a lot of drama as the Cubs have already lost 92 games and the Pirates clinched the division wild card slot yesterday (at Wrigley).
If I care enough, I'll post pictures tomorrow.
Today, though: remember the difference between "let's eat, Grandpa" and "let's eat Grandpa."
The question just came up in an email exchange with a friend's friend's sister: what are my favorite pubs in the world?
After a couple minutes' thought, I got here:
1. Duke of Perth, Chicago. Obviously; it has been my remote office off and on for over 20 years.
2. Southampton Arms, London. If I ever live in the UK, this may switch places with the Duke. It's just hard to say a place is my favorite when it's 6,000 kilometers away and I only go there twice a year.
3. Tommy Nevin's, Evanston, Ill., my former remote office.
4. Nag's Head, Hoboken, N.J. Another that used to be my remote office—but in the days before Wi-Fi and ubiquitous laptops. I still visit if I have time while I'm in New York.
5. Guthrie's Tavern, Chicago. Since the Duke of Perth is halfway between my house and Guthrie's, I don't get there as often as I used to. But it's worth the trip.
Some honorable mentions:
- Bucktown Pub, Chicago. I'm starting to warm to the place, especially after many trivia nights there. Unfortunately, I don't live in Bucktown.
- Peddler's Daughter, Nashua, N.H. (A former temporary remote office.)
- The Bridge, Amberley, England. A real, live English country pub.
- Kennedy's, San Francisco. By day, on its patio, it's wonderful. At night, it gets a little too loud and crowded, and there are too many TVs. Still, I almost always stop in when I'm out there.
- Tigin, Stamford, Conn. My then-girlfriend lived right around the corner.
And some that are no more, and missed: Abbey Tavern, New York, where I hung out weekly from 1997 to 2000; closed in 2006. And The King's Head, Earls Court, London—which was really great before the new owners turned it into a trendy gastro-pub.
I'm always looking for suggestions.
I live for this kind of thing:
What did Shakespeare’s English sound like to Shakespeare? To his audience? And how can we know such a thing as the phonetic character of the language spoken 400 years ago? These questions and more are addressed in the video above, which profiles a very popular experiment at London’s Globe Theatre, the 1994 reconstruction of Shakespeare’s theatrical home. As linguist David Crystal explains, the theater’s purpose has always been to recapture as much as possible the original look and feel of a Shakespearean production—costuming, music, movement, etc. But until recently, the Globe felt that attempting a play in the original pronunciation would alienate audiences. The opposite proved to be true, and people clamored for more. Above, Crystal and his son, actor Ben Crystal, demonstrate to us what certain Shakespearean passages would have sounded like to their first audiences, and in so doing draw out some subtle wordplay that gets lost on modern tongues.
[D]espite the strangeness of the accent, the language can sometimes feel more immediate, more universal, and more of the moment, even, than the sometimes stilted, pretentious ways of reading Shakespeare in the accent of a modern London stage actor or BBC news anchor.
Next trip to London, I want to catch an OP production at The Globe.
Just a brief note, when I should be sound asleep. I caught up on Aaron Sorkin's Newsroom tonight, and realized that the episode ended the story.
I could be wrong. I called my dad immediately, asking for some assurance that I wasn't insane about it ending all three* of the basic conflicts that make up the story, but he hadn't seen it yet, as he's two time zones west of me.
So, all you've got until I get his reflections, dear readers, is an amateur opinion. But as far as I can see, the story has nowhere to go after tonight.
I'll very likely address this later in the week with spoilers. For now, I welcome—I encourage—arguments against my hypothesis.
Tonight's show was the season finale. But for expletive's sake, was it also the series finale? Maybe my confusion was I didn't realize it was a season finale. So all the threads coming together seemed like the end to me—but I could be wrong.
My aforementioned dad reminds me that show business is best expressed thus:
Show
business
Of course. Yet I like stories, and I like good writing, and I like getting carried away. From tonight's Newsroom, I worry that it's another four years until I get to watch Aaron Sorkin's writing again.
I would have hoped the business let the show go on for another season. Except...I think the story ended tonight. And no matter what Sorkin might do for a third season, it will have to be a different story. I'm sure the suits know that. They may not have a fiber of creativity to share amongst them, but they know damn well when the party's over.
All I can conclude from this is that Sorkin needs to write features. Not TV; features. He can't keep doing this to his fans in 20 episodes. (Disclosure: I really liked Studio 60. But he really ended it after one season. Is that what happened tonight?)
Will-Mac; Maggie-Jim; Everyone-Reese.
Well, I've signed up for Divvy, Chicago's bike-sharing program. Now that the weather is getting cooler, I think I'll be able to commute by Divvy without arriving at the office a sweaty mess.
Long-time readers know I used to bike a lot, until my knees decided it was time to stop. Divvy bikes should be a lot easier on my knees than my Felt.
If I use it just a few times rather than taking cabs—for example, tonight, from pub trivia—the sign-up fee will be worth it.
More as events warrant.
Remember the Google Street View Tardis Easter egg I mentioned? It's real:
That's right in front of the Earl's Court Tube stop this past Sunday.
Apparently the Doctor has installed a CCTV camera on his roof...hmm...