Movie review: Match Point
12 August 2006
Not great. It had likeable moments but suffered from a few problems:
- Scarlett Johansson can’t act her way out of a moist paper bag.
- Too long by an hour.
- Jonathan Rhys-Meyers is okay, but not that great.
- Lack of neurotically self-involved intellectuals wandering the streets of Manhattan.
Humorous French ad for Canal TV
12 August 2006
This is funny and I recommend that you watch it.
Amazing paper gun models
11 August 2006
[via paper forest] Wow. This is a great collection of paper gun models with removable clips and/or bullets. It’s in Japanese but no explication is really necessary.
Click thumbnails to see bigger images/download plans.
DIY tips
10 August 2006
I might wind up doing a lot of apologizing if I apologize for every boring post here, so I won’t. But feel free to skip this one and my feelings won’t be hurt.
Just a few things I’ve discovered about DIY recently:
- Gloves: latex for most jobs, heavier duty chemical-proof for solvent-based stuff. Really nice not to get stuff on your hands. This applies especially to tinkering with mechanical stuff (bike). No grease under fingernails. Get a big box of latex exam gloves.
- Recycle brush cleaners: I clean paint off brushes in an old jar, then put the used spirits in old jars with lids. After a few days, the paint comes out of solution and clumps on the bottom and sticks to the sides - the spirits can be re-used. This is also a great tip for cleaning bike parts, for instance in gasoline. Used gas can be filtered through cheesecloth (or old teeshirt) to remove large fragments of grime.
- Paint stripper: stay away from this horrible stuff. It burns the hell out of your skin on contact. I’d consider using it for restoring old furniture or something where you can take your time and just work on small areas, but not for removing lots of paint off woodwork.
- Stop at near-perfect: I realized at some point that the trick to doing things that require smoothing such as plastering and the like is to stop just short of perfect. There is always that moment when it is just about perfect and you think you can just smooth that bit a little more and it’ll be perfect, and then you screw it up worse. I’ve decided the trick is to learn to know just how close to perfect you are likely to get, and then stop right there.
Tag der Arbeit (Workday)
9 August 2006
Extrajetzt has this excellent li’l flash game called Tag der Arbeit (Workday) - protagonist is a li’l punk rocker, object is to smash as much stuff as possible before being rounded up by the polizei. Radical! Be sure you have the sound on. Update: Just discovered that in addition to breaking windows, you can light cars on fire. Hold space bar while standing next to car, when power reaches max, car lights.
Guide to ludic repurposing of corporate office space
7 August 2006
Centennial Society brings us this charming 16-pg. wordless guide to trashing the workplace and entering a postmodern pastoral mode. They suggest sending complementary copies via business reply mail.
Inaugural
5 August 2006
Well. This is the new blog after several abortive attempts in other places. The nice thing about starting again is that I can pilfer content from previous incarnations when short of anything to post here. I’m using WordPress as it seems to be one of the easier means to get this blog going, and time permitting, hoping to use it to do some other web-publishing stuff or at least to get a little more php-savvy so I can modify it/write some of my own scripts for publishing. Time is seldom permitting, though, and I have a dozen or so other little projects in mind. At least. Anyhow, if all goes well I will be occasionally posting something of interest here. Welcome!

