This morning, as soon as I got on the A train to go to work, a New York Times reporter came on and asked to interview me. I was happy to comply, though I didn't feel I had anything fascinating to say--I'm happy just to be lucid at that hour. She explained that it was for a web series about commuting. As promised the story appeared later in the day. Here's my paragraph:

Looking more Williamsburg than extreme Upper West Side, Jay Klein, 26, moved here three years ago because his office was in the area. “It’s about the only place in Manhattan I can afford to live,” he said. “I grew up on the Upper West Side, so I guess psychologically it was important to me to stay in Manhattan.” His job has since moved to Midtown, but Mr. Klein is staying put.

The spread and mutation of the double-is, as in the thing is is... or the point is, is..., continues apace. Language Log analyzed the phenomenon in 2004, and I wrote about it later that year.

Yesterday I heard a strange variant at the office: The point that you're missing is is that...

Somehow it sounds especially wrong when the is is is separated from the point.

Via Foreign Policy magazine's Passport blog, a fascinating and sad episode of This American Life about the Republic of Nauru, one of the tiniest and most remote nations on the planet. It's an island in the Pacific with an area of 8.1 square miles. Nauru's size and location have apparently caused it to become involved in several bizarre incidents, some comical and some tragic, and mostly of an income-generating nature. They strip-mined the island of its only resource, phosphate. They tried to aid the US in accepting defections from North Korea by establishing a fake embassy in China. They became a money laundering center so attractive that it sucked up a sizable portion of the Russian economy.

In high school we laughed about this place after finding it in an encyclopaedia, and I had an intermittent fascination with it for a few years after that, but I don't think I ever knew most of these stories.

Interesting how the country's tribulations and exploits echo those of Tuvalu, which is in danger of sinking entirely into the ocean, and which raised money by selling it's top level domain name .tv for use by television-related web sites.

So I've gone and redesigned the entire site. The effort to do so started about a year ago, with off-and-on efforts since then. The motivation was largely aesthetic and to some degree functional. The new site also reflects a lot of my learning over the past year or more about web standards and css (cascading style sheets).

Some of my primary influences in the new design were Daring Fireball, kottke.org, and Subtraction. I've tried to achieve a modest level of originality while taking a lot of ideas from other sites or standard approaches.

And now, remarks on details of the new design that will probably be of little interest to non-geeks:

• I took the idea of entry dates on the left from the default Tumblr template.


• I've finally done away with categories in favor of tags--the categories have been all but useless for quite a long time.


• In redoing the sidebar I tried to choose elements that would be, well, of use to readers. "Below the Fold" are the entries that have most recently fallen off the front page, compensating for the lack of pagination of the index.


• The element I agonized over the most was the Calendar. Few popular blogs have this, because they tend to post more than once a day. For me it's always been a quick way to see how frequent my posting has been, but even that is lacking at the beginning of a month, and the utility is questionable to readers. I doubt anyone ever clicks on the dates to see the entry from that date. So if I can manage to post consistently for a while perhaps I'll remove it.


• The master archive index turned out to be the biggest hassle. I really wanted good usability for this page. I liked Subtraction's approach of showing individual entry titles for the last few months, and then a less granular view of all the preceding months in the blog's history. The difficulty of this gave me a new appreciation for how much effort these guys have put into their sites. The key plugin turned out to be MT-SomeDays, but the documentation is pretty awful--the only example code it contains is a recreation of the calendar, which is already included in Movable Type. By the way, you'll notice on the Subtraction page that after the granular view of the most recent few months, those months are repeated in the overview with all the less recent months. It seems this is impossible to get around with what's currently available, so I separated the two elements more to make it less obvious.


• The static non-blog elements of the site, such as the music pages, "reading room", and access to the whole rare word dictionary, are not linked from the home page for now, and still have the old look. These haven't been updated in a long time, and get very few visits, even compared to the blog. At some point I may try to bring them back into the fold.


• Some other plugins that helped me: Amputator, which properly encodes ampersands for XHTML validation, Compare, which enables some conditional logic in templates based on comparisons, and Archive Date Header, which also helped with the archive index.

That ought to do it. Please do not hesitate to let me know if you see any problems or have any feedback on the design. I've given it a once-over in IE 7 and Safari as well as my home turf of Firefox, but nothing exhaustive. You can see the old index and the old archives page for comparison. Hope you like it.

Via Slashdot, an article in the Seattle PI reports that TSA officers at Sea-Tac airport are being trained to examine facial expressions of passengers as part of selection for secondary screenings. This sets off all sorts of dubious and emotional arguments about the effectiveness and fairness of such a practice. It caught my attention because the term 'microfacial expressions' used in the article makes it clear they are using the techniques of Paul Ekman, which I wrote about in 2006.

At that time I was frustrated by the lack of any available video to show what microexpressions looked like in reality, and therefore any proof that they really existed. There is now on Youtube a video of Ekman from British TV talking about Kato Kaelin and a research subject. The Kato Kaelin video is quite helpful, that of the research subject somewhat less so. But then, showing that microexpressions exist is not at all the same as proving that they are connected to emotions in the way that Ekman claims. Some real evidence for this would probably do a lot for Ekman's reputation.

The "Micro Expression Training Tool", which I purchased on CD years ago and which now has a new version in development on the web, was pretty much a travesty in its earlier incarnation, for reasons well expressed by the only user review on Amazon. It consisted of a test with still pictures of expressions being flashed for a fraction of a second between pictures of neutral faces, which is quite different from observing facial expressions in their natural environment. Instruction about the links between expressions and emotions followed, and then a repetition of the test. The new site says that previous users of it include government agencies. If this is the only training that the TSA is getting, and forms the entire basis of the claim that people can learn to recognize microexpressions with a bit of instruction, then I highly doubt we will be catching any more bad guys than if the TSA officers were simply told to look out for subtle behaviors and expressions, which I'm sure they already were. The only thing that version 1 of the METT showed, sadly, is that if you answer a set of questions, then receive instruction related to those questions, and then answer those same questions again, you will probably do better the second time around.

Update: The New York Times looks at the body language of Roger Clemens in his recent appearances denying the steroid allegations. They don't discuss microexpressions at all, but these types of appearances seem likely to provoke them if they do exist, and I've been wondering if anyone would discuss Clemens in this context, but I've missed all the appearances myself, and I'm dubious that the quality of Youtube is sufficient to reveal them.

Via the Fireball that is Daring, Heather Powazek Champ of Flickr offers her technique for reading the New Yorker. She skips around a lot; I'm a straight-through cover-to-cover type myself. Lately I've had to force myself to start skipping some articles so I have time to read books. I also still skip the fiction, unless the author is one of a certain few, and usually the Dance critic. The most idiosyncratic part of my technique is that I don't read any of the cartoons on a pair of facing pages until I am just about to turn the page. This is a form of my slightly obsessive tendency to 'save the best for last.' It's a bit odd though, because I don't enjoy most of the cartoons that much at all, especially compared to the articles. Maybe it's not so much that they are the 'best,' but that they are cognitively restful, or a visual break from the dense language.

Last week's article about the UN mission in Iraq was one of the most heartbreaking articles I've read about the conflict.

Lastly, I've been noticing ever since this year's Fashion issue that the magazine has gotten a lot more liberal with illustrations and photos accompanying articles. It's now not at all uncommon for an article to have more than one, and a political article from a few months back, for the first time that I've seen, had a map of the country and the locations discussed.

Am I the only one confused by the current state of the writers' strike? The late-night network talk shows, and now the Daily Show and the Colbert Report, have returned to the air. According to what I've read, only Letterman made a deal that allowed his writers to come back to work. And here is where I get lost:

• I originally thought from the news articles on the topic that the other shows had also made some kind of deals with the guild, only not ones that allowed them to use writers. It now seems that they must have sought to make deals without success.
• The shows have been picketed.
• "But in both cases, the protesters took pains to emphasize that their quarrel was with NBC and its parent company, General Electric, and not the hosts themselves." (The New York Times)
• The hosts all emphasize their solidarity with the writers.
• For the most part, the hosts offer no explanation for why their shows should be allowed to return, to their own advantage and weakening the writers. John Stewart says the interim agreements can "put pressure on the big guys," which I guess must mean that the interim agreements are giving the writers what they want.
• The writers are angry at Leno for writing his own jokes, but not at Conan (or Stewart or Colbert, as far as I know). I find it hard to draw a such a well-defined line between 'writing' and, I suppose, improvising. No doubt Conan, Stewart, and Colbert are gifted at improvisation. But how could people whose whole life is thinking of funny things to say stop thinking about what to say on their shows before the camera is rolling? How much thinking and memorizing are they allowed to do? Drawing the line at the physical act of writing seems impossibly arbitrary.
• If they're having trouble booking guests because the guests are seen as "crossing the picket line," even when they are not writers, then how are the hosts not doing the same? And if that's the case, what does it matter whether they are writing their own jokes? Isn't crossing the picket line the basic offense worthy of punishment?

Please enlighten me.

There was an issue until today with comments; they were being caught by the spam filter after I tried out increasing the "aggressiveness" from 0 to +2 (on a scale of -10 to +10). I then failed to check for false-positives, until today after a blizzard of 100 or so spam comments that the filter still failed to stop. I should have realized that most real comments, with no links in them, get only a +1 score. I believe all the held up comments have now been published. I was beginning to wonder about the deafening silence on the redesign. Sorry about that!

JV has suggested that after posting a comment one should be redirected to the main page. I think for some situations this might be confusing, because you may not have come from the main page. It may also require writing a plugin or changing the source code of Movable Type. But given that JV is my best customer and probably responsible for over 50% of the comments that have ever been made here, I will definitely give it my all.

I always wish I could read the articles about The Wire, but I'm only gradually catching up with the show on DVD, and spoilers are not my friends. I'm currently up to the middle of Season 3. When I do catch up I'll want to go back and read everything that's been written, but how will I keep track of it? That's why we have the kottke.org page of all posts tagged with 'thewire'.

Food was a major focus of my preparation for our trip to Spain. As usual I got a lot of my information from eGullet. I visited the sites of individual restaurants and consulted this Spanish Food Dictionary when necessary. I made some use of CitySearch-type sites and general travel sites, but I find those are best utilized when you already know what you are looking for.

For me it's pretty intimidating to call a restaurant in another country from the US and try to make a reservation. Not being face to face, the person on the other end has no way of knowing what language I might speak, and we can't use gestures to get by. Someday I'll get the hang of it, but right now I really appreciate it when restaurants offer online reservations.

The other challenge was that our trip, from August 5th - 19th, was forcibly timed with the European peak vacation season, and in Spain at least, restaurants and other businesses close for anywhere from a day to the whole month of August. This seemed to reach a defined peak on the 15th, when Valencia became a ghost town and I had to confront my fears by calling at least a dozen restaurants to ask if they were open. (Usually if they picked up the phone at all the question was already answered, so there wasn't as much pressure on the conversation.)

I ended up making two online reservations for dinner in Barcelona before we left, one for Cinc Sentits and one for Comerç24. Some of the eGullet people make reservations for nearly every lunch and dinner on their trip, which I think is insane. I wanted to keep our schedule open in case we had jet lag troubles, and there were budgetary limits of course. Cinc Sentits ("Five Senses" in Catalan) is widely regarded as one of the best restaurants in town, with a fairly international style. Comerç24 is a more experimental place that flirts quite a bit with molecular gastronomy. Many eGullet reviewers say they are inconsistent but can be very good. We had fantastic meals at both, but I will have to save full descriptions for their own entries to keep this to a reasonable length.

My friend Ed warned me before the trip that although there is good food to be had in Spain, it isn't "in your face" the way it is in many other places. Boy was he right. One reason Maya usually won the argument about whether we should sit down in a restaurant to get breakfast or lunch was that there was simply no other way to get food. There are no street food vendors. The closest thing would probably be ice cream shops, and ice cream makes an odd breakfast to say the least. There are a few food chains similar to Au Bon Pain, but even at these, you will usually get your food on ceramic dishware. "To go" is either not an option or just not seen as the thing to do. Even in Paris, the land that takeout forgot, you can at least walk around with a baguette under your arm.

I also saw exactly one of what we would call a supermarket. Even discounting size, there were very very few retail food shops. I really have no idea how the people that live in these cities get their provisions, unless they always go to the central market (shamefully, we never made it there). The only convenience store chain we saw was Opencor, owned by the equally ubiquitous department store El Corte Ingles. I was thankful for its late hours; their idea of 24/7 is 18/7, but that's still pretty revolutionary for Spain. We made several trips there for Fanta and gummi bears and bottled water, among other things.

I would like to bring attention to what I shall call the chocolate and churros fallacy. Many web sites and travel books propagate the notion that after a night of clubbing, Barcelonans like to go to cafes around 6am and have hot chocolate with churros, which are rod-shaped sugared pieces of fried dough--they sell them from street carts in my neighborhood at home. The churros are to be dipped in the thick hot chocolate. Gridskipper provided an extensive list of Xocolaterias. We didn't do any all-night clubbing, but I assumed that if they were open at 6am they would also be open about 11pm. Not the case! The latest closing time I could find was 10pm, and most restaurants didn't even open for dinner until 8pm, so we were never done eating before 9:30, and nothing was ever in walking distance. Of course now I can't even dig up any links that make the claim about late-night churros, so perhaps the myth has died.

The hours kept by restaurants in general were troublesome to us. Most of them close between the lunch and dinner hour, roughly between 4pm and 8pm. We often didn't get up until noon or later, and we always ended up ready for lunch at right around 4. One day we were desperately walking along a row of restaurants on the beach in Valencia, getting these comical "Nooo...."s and "X" arm gestures from each place, until finally one agreed to feed us. The most ridiculous instance was the day we spent at the amazing Oceanografic aquarium. This place had 3 genuinely good looking restaurants and cafes, rare for an amusement park, and they all closed as soon as we were ready to eat. We're a captive audience here! Who's going to leave the aquarium for a siesta in the middle of the afternoon? The only nourishment left to us was the concession stand at the Dolphinarium. Fortunately it turned out to be not all that bad.

I intended to include capsule reviews of the restaurants we visited here, but this is already too long, so that also will get its own entry.

Several days ago Language Log picked up on talk of "Yo" as a gender-neutral third-person pronoun in Baltimore. This is interesting, because certain parties have been pushing for a long time for the creation of such a gender-neutral pronoun, to 'demasculinize' our language. Alternatively there are such existing techniques as s/he, singular they (a frequent topic at Language Log), or simply using she as the default, sort of like grammatical affirmative action. A single gender-neutral pronoun would undoubtedly be the most graceful solution, but no proposal has ever taken off. Now, the creativity of Baltimore schoolchildren to the rescue! My favorite usage examples from the paper, as observed by the researchers:

• Yo been runnin' the halls.


• Yo look like a sack ass gump.


• Yo is a clown.


• Yo sucks at magic tricks.


• Yo needs to pull his pants down.


• Yo goin to put that chicken in his mouth.


• Yo, looka that dude pants. Yo is a clown.

They were probably talking about me in the cases of the chicken, the magic tricks, and the pants.

Without further ado, remarks on some of the places we dined in Spain.

Barcelona

Neyras
Via Laietana, 41
We wandered into this place on our first night in town. It turned out to be a perfectly serviceable tapas restaurant, and a very satisfying meal after the exhausting flight. Our eyes were a bit bigger than our stomachs: we ordered a paella for two, buñuelos de bacalao (codfish fritters), mussels, calamari, a salad, and the local staple pan amb tomaquet (bread rubbed with tomato).

Hostal de la Rita
Arago, 279
This one was recommended by a friend, and has good reviews on VirtualTourist. It was clearly popular and we waited about 15 minutes for a table. The menu was only in Spanish and Catalan, but I enjoyed the challenge and the authenticity--the crowd seemed entirely local. When we ordered the waiter asked if it might be too much, but before I could respond he said "no, ees okay." We had gotten into the whole tapas thing, you see, but it turned out that this was not actually a tapas restaurant. It gradually became clear that we had ordered four appetizers and three entrees. We made the best of the situation and ate at least some of everything, and all of some things. We had tomatoes and fresh mozzarella, an asparagus dish, an arugula salad, a tuna steak, a 'filet iberic' with patatas bravas, and a beef steak "paris style." The food was good enough, but it was in a very international style when I was looking more for cuisines unique to Spain.

Taxidermista
Plaça Reial, 8
This was a desperate move. We were walking up the Ramblas after a frantic final day in Barcelona, very tired and hungry. The Plaça Reial was pleasant at dusk and the Taxidermista was a familiar name from my readings. It's right next to Les Quinze Nits, which regularly draws insane lines that stretch halfway across the plaza. This easily avoidable situation is clearly perpetuated by the restaurant, catering to people who have come to expect that everything they do on their trip should require a wait in line. Taxidermista is then presumably a barnacle on its hull, absorbing those defeated by the line. We had lamb and roast duck, neither of which was very good.

Tapaç24
Diputacio, 269
On our last night before coming home we decided to try Tapaç24, the newer and more casual restaurant from the proprietor of Comerç24. It was extremely popular and we were lucky to be seated quickly. The menu, printed on paper bags that held napkins and silverware, along with a chalkboard of specials, was the most indecipherable of all that we faced, for not only was it in Catalan, but it followed the trendy practice of giving the dishes smart-alecky names that do not always tell you much about what they are made of. The waitress was willing to answer questions, such as "what is this?", but she was so busy that there were a limited number we could ask before she zipped off again. Here are the names of the dishes we ordered, and explanations: Croquetes de pernil iberic (bread stuffed with ham and cheese), Bombes de la Barceloneta (codfish fritters--Barceloneta is the old fishing village by the port), Bikini Ç24 (triangular ham and cheese sandwiches), Tomaquet amb "huevas" de Tonyina (tomato with "eggs" of tuna), Pebrots Padron (fried hot peppers), Calamares (whole grilled squid from the day's catch), Coca Tomaquet (something with tomato, I have no memory what). Some of the dishes were more pedestrian than their names suggested, while others were amazing, in particular the Bombes, the hot peppers, and the squid. Some of the menu items we didn't try: Tapa d'or, McFoie Burger, Russa amb "regañas", "Boquerones al limon", Truita de trempo. It's hard to know what to make of the scare quotes.

Valencia

Casa Bodega Montaña
José Benlliure, 69
This was the essentially the best restaurant in Valencia that was open during our trip. It's a small place not far from the beach, with beautiful décor and a casual atmosphere. We ate there once for lunch and once for dinner. Among other things, we had: Salmorejo, an awesome cold tomato and bread soup; Lomo, paper-thin slices of pork loin; Torta Serena, melty cheese on a slice of baguette; Chorizo chunks in cider; Clochinas, steamed small mussels; Boquerones, or anchovies, three ways: fried, in vinegar, and whole; and more whole grilled squid. Our meals were uniformly excellent. It perhaps bears mentioning that these boquerones/anchovies are nothing like the ones we get on pizza here. They are marinated in a mixture of olive oil, white wine vinegar, garlic, and other spices. A packaged version imported from Spain has been available at Zabar's on Saturdays for a while now, and I'd been enjoying them tremendously for a few months before the trip.

Rincon Gaucho
Conde Altea, 51
This was the best surprise of the trip. Almost nothing else was open, so we weren't expecting much. The atmosphere was casual and unfussy, just a nice neighborhood place. I'd never been to an Argentinian steakhouse before, so excuse my naiveté, but goddamn do they know how to cook steak! We weren't familiar with any of the cuts on the menu--every culture does it a bit differently I gather--so we asked the waitress for guidance and were not disappointed. The steaks were brought on little mini-grill boxes to keep them warm. They had a much more naturalistic shape than the flat slabs we are used to. They were perfectly cooked and had an amazing and intense flavor. I've been meaning to find out how they do this. My only guess is that it involves a lot of marination and precise management of heat.

Italo Spagnolo
Corregeria, 7
This place had some good reviews on the web, so we tried it for dinner, though it took a few tries to get there when they were actually open and serving food. The concept is innovative tapas and a combination of Italian and Spanish, but the execution is lacking. Most of what we had was just plain weird. This included a dish with avocado and apple slices--an unfortunate mix of textures--and an entree of cod with way too much honey. Plenty of other people there seemed to be having a good time, so we concluded one might have to be a regular to get the most out of it. That, or just drink a lot.

Whatever its flaws as a movie, "Cloverfield" seems to make an instructive case study in marketing. Not that I know anything about the subject. But as a consumer it was interesting to observe how I and others reacted to its presentation, from the first teaser trailer to the theater at the film's end.

The trailer was unconventional, especially for an action movie. Instead of a quick and flashy montage, it was the first chapter of the movie condensed. We saw the testimonials being given at the party, then the unearthly sound and brownout, going up to the roof, huge explosion, running down to the street, and then the big moment when the Statue of Liberty's head comes flying off a building and crashing onto the street. All the blogs linked to it and said things like "Now that's a trailer." The J.J. Abrams name and lack of a title added to the excitement.

Then there were the viral marketing websites, most of which turned out not to even have anything to do with the film, and the emergence of the title. The people behind the film originally denied that "Cloverfield" was the title, saying it was only a codename, but of course it did turn out to be the title, and people were surprisingly angry about this. The Wikipedia page says that they kept changing the title during this time.

From this point until the opening, I personally became rather tired of seeing more and more posters and ads featuring the decapitated Statue of Liberty. The shock of the image wore off pretty quickly and it had lost all impact for me.

I was pleasantly surprised when the movie opened and got pretty decent reviews. I didn't read any of them, but only looked at the rotten tomatoes score. I saw it on opening weekend because I didn't want to be tortured by the desire to read the reviews and commentary or accidentally hear about it from friends.

I'll skip over any commentary on the movie itself for the benefit of those who haven't seen it. At the end in the theater there was a curious mixture of applause and shouts of "WHAT?!" I think this reaction, along with everything else that happened before, showed the fundamental problem of this movie: all the hype and mystery made people expect a big reveal, a big idea behind the curtain. The teaser forced the question, What could do that? But whenever I thought about it, I realized that no answer could really live up to the expectations that had been built. Any attempt would either have to be a beloved franchise, like Voltron as some speculated, or be so outlandish that it would likely become the butt of a year's worth of jokes on Best Week Ever (though it probably will anyway).

A lot of art house films, and some recent mystery flicks, have made me accustomed to a complete lack of explanation for what happens in a story. But I'm sure a lot of people in the audience were expecting the part where at least something is explained and sorted out. Not that this is the only complaint they could have had. I think the movie had more things simultaneously wrong with it and good things going for it than any I've seen in a while.

After nearly four years, the power adapter on my Powerbook has finally given out. For quite a while I've had to twist it around to get it to light up. And now it lights up no more. I should feel lucky, as a lot of people have experienced failures much sooner and more often. But it still sucks to not be able to use my laptop even if there's nothing at all wrong with the laptop itself.

That isn't quite true though. Another recent development was that the laptop would no longer stay closed by itself. Something must have happened to the little hook that comes down, but I couldn't even see what it might be, let alone try to fix it. So instead I have to put a weight on top of it to get the computer to remain closed and asleep. There's something terribly undignified about it, very reminiscent of old age in humans.

On Friday's commute I shared the subway car with the pastor of the Narrow Path Church. From 125th Street to the terminus at 207th, he delivered a sermon that was by turns pedantic, hateful, and paranoid. What set him apart from your typical raving maniac is that he was a well-dressed man who, if not for the words coming out of his mouth, would have seemed entirely normal and middle-class. He started out with the usual Jesus talk, and peppered everything with scriptural references, but often veered into what I will call 'generalized raging asshole' territory. Some highlights of his sermon:

• "Everyone listens to their iPods these days. You wear the headphones so other people can't hear you. But you've got it so loud that they can hear you even if you're standing on the other side of the subway car! And what is that doing to your ears?"
• "You put your food in microwave ovens, and what does it do? It changes your food at the molecular and atomic levels, so instead of being nutritious, it becomes toxic! But you don't want to do the research.
• "Oh, I got another one." [Obligatory statement that the WTC was brought down by "implosion devices placed strategically throughout the buildings."] "You would know that if you did the research!"
• Several minutes of anti-gay material, culminating in the impersonation of a stereotypical gay man's walk while saying "When a man walks like this, it's not right! A man's hips were not meant to do this!"
• Recitation of various Biblical story fragments, followed by the rhetorical question, "Is that too deep for you? Am I getting too deep?"
• "People think Christmas is celebrating the birth of Christ, but how can that be when Jesus wasn't even born in the winter? How can Easter be celebrating the resurrection when bunnies and chocolate have no...correlation...with the way...that we celebrate Easter? Last year Easter was before Passover. Jesus died during Passover. How can he be resurrected before he died?!"
• "People might tell me to shut up, they might call me an idiot. But how can they do that when they don't even know that the word 'idiot' comes from the Greek idios, meaning 'for yourself'?"

The reason I was able to identify him is that he at one point gave us the URL of his website: NarrowPathChurch.com. There you can order his books and DVDs, and gain insights such as how he grew up "in a CULT CHURCH and how he got DELIVERED from this CULT known as the United House of Prayer for All People."

It's interesting how he sprinkles grains of truth and obscure facts into his messages, a time-honored tactic to be sure. There's also a very long tradition of church movements that seek to steer us back to morality, assailing us for our sinful ways. But I really have to wonder about the size of this guy's congregation when he keeps telling everyone what idiots they are. Oh, sorry--guess I shouldn't use a word if I don't know what it meant two thousand years ago.

A quick shout-out to the Criterion Contraption, where an aspiring screenwriter is watching and writing about every DVD released by the Collection. You can use the index to read each piece in order of spine number, and that's what I've been doing whenever I have a dull moment for the last few weeks. He started off a bit rough but quickly found his voice, offering great trivia and insights that are magnificently film-geeky without being annoying or esoteric. Sometimes even when he thinks the movie is bad he still makes me want to watch it.

I can relate a bit to the completism that inspires/plagues the author. There was my dictionary project, in which I read through a significant portion of the Oxford English Dictionary to pick out the collection of words that now appear as "Random Rare Word" on the home page of this site. And in college when M2 showed their entire library of videos in alphabetical order, I watched as much as I could and recorded on three videotapes the videos of the bands that I liked, many of which I had never seen before and had no other way of seeing. Unfortunately the quality of the VCR was pretty bad. Fortunately we now have Youtube and DVD collections.