Glenn Gaslin's Astonishing Tales of Danger & Wonder

Links. Because I'm Online All Day, So Why Not Share, Right?

David Foster Wallace short story called "Good People" and comprised of enormous paragraphs, in The New Yorker.

Amber Mac, Canadian TV reporter with a site like a bag of Skittles.

New Bad Sweater Guy comic.

Film Experience, roundly funny movie blog I haven't been reading, but will be.

Tod reading Parade way too deeply, and then making it funny.

What's really wrong with LATimes.com

Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie getting some great free press

Blow by blow, with in-depth numbers and strategy, of Ryan winding his way through a poker tourney.

Pictures of Chewbacca.

Tuesdays With Mayrav: Glow Grow Gadget

New column today about the strange glowing garden we now have in our kitchen, and my wife's longing for real dirt.

Gardening - real gardening - is sexy. The fecund soil, teeming with life and grit and potential. Soft, delicate shoots revealing themselves slowly before an eager sun. The vulnerability - to drought, to rain, to wind, to bugs - adds to the thrill of every surviving, thriving plant.

Beautiful stuff, of course, but I see this hydroponic gadget as a more optimistic omen, a sign about The Future of Food, a preview of the vast caverns we'll maintain beneath the surface of Mars, overgrown with mint and cilantro and heirloom tomatoes, all thriving under 18-hour fluorescent days.

Dean Karnazes, Please, For the Love of God, Why Can't You Leave Me Alone?

During the last few weeks, as I've decided to ramp up my running routine and take it seriously, as I battle an unrelenting series of colds and flus and infections that keep from doing so, Dean Karnazes has been—I swear—stalking me.

You probably know this guy. He's the ultramarathon man. Or rather, The Ultramarathon Man. He just finished running 50 marathons, in 50 states, in 50 days. He thinks nothing of running for hundreds of miles, for days on end. And then he blogs about it. He sleeps four hours a night. He gets up at 4 a.m., runs 20-25 miles—and then takes his kids to school. He makes it look easy. So easy.

And there he is in my WIRED magazine, talking about how we mistake comfort for happiness, and we can't truly be happy unless we push ourselves more and more and more, and that's just not comfortable and you're going to have to deal with it. And there he is in the one issue of Outside magazine I buy a year, going on about how he eats grilled salmon every night but gorges on fast food while running his marathons. And there he is on the back of my flax-soy-dried blueberry granola box, looking all lean and sweaty, running right at me. He will not leave me alone, this guy.

Dean, listen. You can stop hounding me. I get it. I'm on it. Starting Monday, I'll see you out there.

Two Boys and Their Dog

On the morning walk, South Carthay, Los Angeles.

Nice Job, There, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, You Lazy Chickenshit Buncha Cowards

I loathe and detest the Oscars, as should you all, and I can only even discuss their grand idiocy after unplugging my heart and detaching myself from caring about who gets nominated, who wins, and the whole stupid business.

So I'll say only this and be done with their safe, surprise-free, so-last-century batch of noms: Really? You're nominating another World War II movie, another Clint Eastwood movie, and snubbing the finest war flick made in the 21st century, not to mention the best pic this year, by far: United 93? Shame on you all.

Cowards.

That is all.

Tuesdays With Mayrav: Salty Liquids and Episodic Binging

In today's column, my wife admits she cries at, well, everything. Mostly movie trailers and commercials.

I believe it might be congenital. Like I was simply born with an overactive schmaltz processor, some area in my brain that retains images of small kittens and children overcoming adversity and breaks them down into a salty liquid.

And I forgot to post last week's look into our TV-on-DVD binging habits, and how creepy we got during the week we watched every episode of Twin Peaks. As always, more Mayrav right over here.

If Jack Bauer Gave You Your Life Back, What Would You Do With It?

Okay, let's fantasize for a second that I'm not going to watch this sixth season of 24, that I've watched two hours of the really-just-too-long four-hour premiere, and I've decided I've seen—and enjoyed—just about enough of the show's particular brand of excitement, that I don't need any more. Maybe, during the last five years, I've seen all the torture I need to see, that I've digested all the bureaucratic backstabbing and Bauer badassness a body really needs, that I've had it with otherwise sane presidents hiring totalitarian thugs in their cabinet. Maybe there's nothing new I can learn (well, I didn't know Jack could kill a guy by biting off a chunk of his neck), so maybe I won't watch.

If I don't, though, I'd like to do something useful, meaningful with that extra hour every week. Structure it. Use it. Make it add up to something. A few ideas.

1. Write about not watching 24, which is, come to think of it, what I'm doing right now. But maybe I start a blog, and it gets big, and I get rich, and I can take some time off to just sit and catch up on the Season Six DVDs.
2. Take some kind of class that'll make me wiser, or more limber.
3. Take up another show, the DNA of which I haven't completely digested. Heroes, or something.
4. Watch 12 Great Movies I've never bothered to see. Lawrence of Arabia, for example. Haven't seen that, if you can believe it. Might be a better investment of time than 3 hours of 24, right?
5. Write a short book of poems. Assign myself one hour per week to complete a new bit of verse, perhaps keeping themes and meter in close orbit to Jack's world. Ode upon Eric Balfour's facial hair.
6. Every Monday night, I could call a long-lost friend or family member and catch the hell up.
7. Use the time as a dictate to do something I hate doing. Like the bills. Do the bills every Monday at 9. Or else...this country won't survive.
8. Watch the "previously on 24" bit, then turn if off and drink by myself in the dark for an hour, imagining what evil comes to Jack's door this week, and with what flavor of justice he answers.
9. Stay at work an extra hour every Monday, and then after 24 weeks, take three days off. I'm sure they'll go for that.

But who am I kidding here. I'm going to spend that time doing one of two things:

1. Explaining, over and over again, to my TV-nerd friends why I stopped watching 24, fending off their pleas that it's the best season yet, I'm crazy not to watch, I have to catch up, we can't be friends anymore, etc., etc.
2. Watching 24.

Technorati Tags: 24, jack bauer

The Global Beverage Watch Continues

Idon't know what the story is with these cans, or who that woman is, or what's up with that hawk on her shoulder, or even what language that is. All I know is that I love it.

UPDATE: Thanks to Michael, I'm now a hell of a lot smarter about these cans. Which I still love. More than ever. See, they're part of a Coke promotion with World of Warcraft in China. And she's a Night Elf. Duh.

RAW: RIP

Robert Anton Wilson is, apparently, if you believe today's reports and not the many and apocryphal previous reports, dead. My list of The Most Influential Writers On Young Glenn Gaslin is now, pretty much, mostly dead (Douglas Adams, Hunter Thompson, etc.). I've read a few thousand pages of Wilson's prose, most of it during college, most of it during intense reading binges that lasted for a few days, and I'm better and stranger for it. Though nobody who knows me and knows his stuff would peg me as a RAW fan/freak. I've posted more on this over on Big Action!

It's Not You, Richard Linklater, It's Me

So I fell asleep watching A Scanner Darkly the other night, and maybe it was that I was tired, that it was Friday, that I should really just go straight to bed instead of making a big dinner and watching a movie or a week's worth of television, which is what I normally do. Maybe I just can't get as much out of a Friday night as I used to, or once thought I could, or incorrectly remember myself doing for all those years. Or maybe it's that Richard Linklater's movies, no matter how interesting or odd or likable, no matter how well put together and original and mind-blowing, just simply put me to sleep.

The thing I remember most about Slacker is waking up in the theater, at about 2 a.m., wondering what happened to those guys who were talking about Madonna's pap smear or whatever was happening when I fell zonked out after, I do admit, a long day of drinking. Waking Life, I napped through the middle third, and that was on a Saturday, maybe even in the afternoon. School of Rock and Dazed and Confused, however, you had my full attention. As far as I can remember.

I was enjoying Scanner Darkly, too, especially Robert Downey Jr.'s excellently lucid paranoid, a la Hunter S. Thompson, and I was laughing, or trying to, or dreaming I was, at the scene with the stolen bike. And blinking in and out of consciousness, eyes half open, the rotoscope animation looked live-action, crisp and real and washed out by the sun, like pretty much any day in Orange County. An even cooler effect than he intended, I think.

Maybe there's something about the pacing, the motion of his movies, that lulls me to sleep. The back and forth and back and forth conversations that don't really go anywhere, the evenly paced cuts between two people who barely move, rocking in their own personal inertia grooves. Whatever it is, it's not unpleasant, it's a movie experience unlike others, and I wonder if I could capture, repeat it, rely on it. Put it in a bottle, take it whenever I need it, like a little Linklater pill.

Technorati Tags: a scanner darkly, philip k dick, puppy, richard linklater