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wJeremiads |
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"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored." -Aldous Huxley
You've stumbled upon the website of Jeremy Lott. (To learn more about me, go here.) I can be reached at JEREMYAL123 -- AT -- YAHOO.COM.
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wFriday, August 27, 2004 |
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D.C. BOUND: I'll be in the D.C. area the 28th through the 3rd to close things down. Odds are, I'll make it out to Jay's at least one of those nights.
posted by
Jeremy at 1:23 AM
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wThursday, August 26, 2004 |
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OIL AND PETROCHEMICAL REFINERY STATE: I saw Garden State last night. Hmmm. Reactions: The movie wanted to be a great big statement but it took a while to decide just what it wanted to say. The first half hour to forty-five minutes (at least) is great satire. It goes from briefly ridiculing Hollywood to ridiculing suburban New Jersey. Children of privelege turned into adults but never bothered to grow up. My favorite cheap shot comes when a cop pulls the wonderfully named Andrew Largeman (Zach Braff) over, and it turns out they're old high school, uh, friends.
There was one point at which I believed it was going to be a much darker movie: When Largeman watches his old best friend (Mark, played by Peter Sarsgaard) rob the jewelry off a dead body as he digs a grave, the phrase that came to mind was "Let the dead bury the dead." My largest problem with the film (which I did enjoy)is that I just don't buy the salve that it offered. Romantic love is overrated.
posted by
Jeremy at 1:10 PM
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wWednesday, August 25, 2004 |
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CONTRACTS ARE A GIRL'S BEST FRIEND: First, I'd like to thank the Academy, er, Best Buy, for the speedy and professional service yesterday. The tech fixed the desktop in about 15 minutes and the laptop is on the road to recovery. Other quick items:
1) Radley Balko should stick to politics, especially the bare knuckles contests of all against all. Vice he understands.
2) There are some issues that the Hulk motiff just does NOT work for.
3) I may head back to D.C. next week to cut some loose strings.
posted by
Jeremy at 3:09 PM
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wTuesday, August 24, 2004 |
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TECHNOLOGY IS UGLIFUL: So I bought the new computer just in time for the laptop to start acting screwy. There is the long-term problem of the battery not holding much of a charge, and this was joined by a new slowness. The computer scrapes and pauses like an actor who can't remember his lines. Oh but it gets better because yesterday, as I was doing the editor thing on the desktop and listening to Lou Reed, the CD player on the NEW machine decided to cease to function. Off to Best Buy. We'll see if my service agreements are worth the paper they're printed on.
posted by
Jeremy at 1:59 PM
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wMonday, August 23, 2004 |
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FRUSTRATION: Not sure what's come over me lately. I usually refrain from READING reader comments on blogs, and until the other day it had been some time since I actually mixed it up. Well, first there was the bit over at the Agitator about transubstantiation (which taught me that Radley's readers are morons). Then I welcomed Matt Yglesias to the wonderful world of the hack. Then I told Brooke Oberwetter's audience to make up their own damn minds about the sanity of Michelle Malkin. Finally, I penned a letter to my good friend Tim Carney, defending, of all people, David Frum.
I'd like to say that will be the end of it, but I'm not so sure. The comment threads are a good way of letting off steam and I've got plenty of that lately. Take the weekend: I had to cancel a mini-vacation to Seattle because I found out the Spectator is pulling the plug at the start of September [UPDATE: The link explains it but I should add that the magazine isn't shutting down]. So I stayed home to do the whole resume sending out thing.
But on Friday, the old piece of crap desktop that I used to use to print things refused. It resisted attempts to download the right file and then I found out that the disk drive was broken. So I drove to my father's office and attempted to use his printer, but ITS disk drive was broken. By the time I got the ink on paper, the mail room was closed. So I said, oh screw this, drove to Best Buy and bought a new computer, a nothing fancy desktop (http://www.emachines.com) that should at least solve my printing woes. The package included home installation but I was told that the installer wouldn't be able to make it until Sunday afternoon, and that I should under no circumstances hook it up to the Internet in the meantime.
I thought Saturday would be better but - ha! - what were the odds of that happening? I hightailed it from BC (where I'd had brunch with an old friend) to Bellingham to take care of a financial transaction. Drove through sheets of pouring down rain and beat the bank's one o'clock closing time. Then I went to start my '91 Sunbird. Five hours later, after much wetness, after having several people out to look at it, after waiting as our horrible towing service FAILED to find a local towing company, the car just decided that it wanted to work again, and I drove it to the family mechanic...
And that's enough of that. Over brunch with the redhead, I came up with an idea for a book of Jeremy Lott one liners to lift people's spirits. To wit:
1) You will probably fail.
2) The world IS out to get you.
3) Only the paranoid even stand a chance.
4) Sometimes even the air conspires against you.
And, my favorite, a little anti-beatitude to usher in the week:
4) Why worry about today when tomorrow could be so much worse?
Then there's the cover blurb:
A book you can't afford to ignore -- and therefore will.
posted by
Jeremy at 2:40 AM
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wSunday, August 22, 2004 |
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HOLD THE RICE: I was NOT married earlier this year in San Francisco.
posted by
Jeremy at 11:47 AM
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wFriday, August 20, 2004 |
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IT'S VERY TRANSUBSTANTIAL: I hesitate to draw attention from my plight (see post below) so instead of reprinting it here I'll simply say that I'm involved in a heated exchange over at theagitator.com.
posted by
Jeremy at 12:27 PM
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GOODBYE SEATTLE, AND D.C.: Well I won't make it to Seattle this weekend. The reason is sort of tricky. I had quit the Spectator effective July 1 but agreed to stay on as a contract employee for a while, and that's just what I did. And it worked out fairly well: I continued to solicit, edit, and post articles from this sleepy little town; kept in close contact with the Wladster; assigned and posted the artwork; etc. In fact, I was thinking of trying to codify this new relationship. I wouldn't get rich off of it, I figured, but there were other compensations, and maybe I could pick up some other work on the side to make the whole effort more comfortable.
But anyone familiar with my history knows that good things only happen to me by accident. Today I found out that the magazine has hired a new editor and she will take over my responsibilities, effective August 30. So this weekend marks the innaguration of my quest for a new job. I will be carpet bombing newspapers and magazines with resumes, and trying to get more freelance work to tide me over in the meantime. I'm not asking readers for direct financial assistance but any help that you can render will be appreciated.
posted by
Jeremy at 1:10 AM
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wSaturday, August 14, 2004 |
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THE PHYSICIST VERSUS THE ANTS: Heads up for those of you in the D.C. area: I have a review in this Sunday's Washington Post Book World. It begins thus:
I began reading this book in earnest on the hottest day of the year. Through all of western Washington state, from the 49th parallel through Seattle and on to Oregon, thermometers pushed above 100 degrees, and some gauges registered much higher. Homeowners saturated their lawns to try to keep them from roasting in the sun, vehicles broke down, and people did what they could to cope with the heat.
Home air conditioning is considered a luxury in the cooler climes of the Evergreen State, so the malls, restaurants and movie theatres were jam-packed -- and some ad hoc lemonade stands did enough business for the little gougers to start college funds. Interstate 5 was choked with cars heading to Canada to try to find relief -- though it was scarcely much cooler north of the border. If the warm air had been accompanied by the kind of humidity that residents of Washington, D.C. are used to, it's likely that corpses would have started piling up. If that sounds far-fetched, recall that nearly 15,000 people died from a heatwave in France last summer. In July 1995, a week-long hot spell in Chicago killed more than 700 people.
Sometimes the natural seems tranquil, maternal even. When winter gives way to spring, only those with severe allergies fail to be moved by the sunlight and the flowers and the wonderful warming breeze. But then a hail storm or a heat wave hits, and our dealings with Ma Nature take on shades of "Leiningen Versus the Ants." In Human Nature, George Mason University physicist James Trefil offers his expertise on such climatological tussles. He says that science is about to give mankind the tools to tame nature and argues that we should use them [more]
posted by
Jeremy at 12:36 AM
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