Postmodern, Contemporary Food

I don't have tons of blogging time available, but I do want to reward your reading commitment by passing along three recent links I really enjoyed. Here they are, with the briefest of introductions:

• A wonderful and sad excerpt from Frank Bruni's soon-to-be-published memoir. Bruni, the The New York Times food critic, delves into a childhood of overeating and bulimia. I'm fascinated by autobiography--and, really, any instance of conscious remembering--and this piece is particularly rich because the childhood remembrances are so obviously related to Bruni's career. Bruni's a fantastic writer, writing about his passion and his relationship to his passion. Really strong stuff.
• Wired magazine's compendium of etiquette for the contemporary age. A lot of this has to do with basic rules of social networking civility, but I was most impressed by the recommended healthy media consumption pyramid.
• The Los Angeles Times' Jacket Copy blog's list of 61 essential Postmodern works of literature. I've read 9 from this list. It also includes a helpful key of defining postmodern characteristics, including "author is a character," "disrupts/plays with form," "comments on its own bookishness," and "blurs reality and fiction." I have some nits to pick with the list (I think Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 needs to be included in any list of this type), but I appreciate the effort that went into compiling what may turn into the reading list for the next several years of my life.

Friday Collection of the WorldWide Internet

I'm back with more of the internet. Let's jump right on it.

• The Spanish basketballers scoff at political correctness. Jason Kidd raises an interesting point: If the American team had pulled off a similar stunt, NBA Commissioner David Stern would have been none too happy, and suspensions or fines would be expected. But, wait a second, there are NBA players on the Spanish team; what's going to happen to them? Nothing, that's what. From the Yahoo! Sports article: "And for his European peers, well, Kidd suggested, 'They won’t do anything to them. It’s a double standard.'”
• This has been getting lots of internet press lately, and for good reason. The Parallel Universe Film Guide is basically IMDB for movies that never existed. I thought at first that this guy collected fake movies mentioned in other media, like Troy McClure's complete filmography. But it's not. This guy made up all these movies that were never filmed and wrote brief summaries of them. The scary part is how detailed the thing is: he created this whole universe of movies. The fake actors and directors are used consistently throughout the database. So if Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon is getting boring for you, you can play Six Degrees of Marshall Fair, who, remember, isn't real.
• Here's a really tough WorldWide Internet time-waster: How many of the 100 most common English language words can you name in five minutes? It's cool to think about how we use words and which ones are most common.

We'll end off with some youtubery. The first is of Chris Chambers of the Classy Chargers football squad doing cool things, and the second is of (allegedly) Kelly Clarkson and two of her backup singers drunk at Fenway Park singing Sweet Caroline. I watched the video a coupla time and can't for the life of me verify that this is actually Clarkson, but this guy seems very certain.

Friday Collection of the WorldWide Internet

The founding principle of this blog remained just as true yesterday as it was nearly 20 months ago when this blog was founded. And it continued to be true during the frequent four-month hiatuses. The principle I'm referring to, of course, is: This blog suffers from a serious lack of direction.

But today marks a hesitant baby-step towards a modicum of internal structuring. For today witnesses the beginning of a new feature at TDS. And it's the first ever recurring feature at TDS. I proudly present the inaugural Friday Collection of the WorldWide Internet. Every Friday that this blog, the internet, and the universe exist, you'll receive a smattering of the things that I found interesting from the week that was. Most of these things will be collected from either deadspin.com or kottke.org because they most consistently deliver the goods. You should probably just read those sites instead of mine. And judging by their daily hits, you probably are doing that already. But only here, at TDS, will you be able to find my pithy remarks on the stuff I find cool. Sorry, joseph, for the blue, underlined words.

Let's get right to it.

• A kid I went to high-school with is a big NY Giants (American Football) fan, was planning a trip to Nicaragua, and decided to search out the Patriots Super Bowl Champions (they lost) paraphernalia which was sent to Central America to clothe the naked. He found one. And wrote about it for the Boston Herald. Which was reported by Deadspin. I'm not at all surprised by this: he had one of the best jump-shots in the Yeshiva League. Speaking of bitter Boston sports memories, I have a pennant at home proclaiming the Red Sox to be the 1986 World Series Champs, which they, famously, were not. I didn't have to go so far to get that, but I did have to spend time in Boston.
  
• My favorite of the hundreds of reports being filed by American reporters on the utter weird- and gross-ness of China.
• Thorstein Veblen wrote this awesome book in 1899 called The Theory of the Leisure Class. He talks about how in cities, where residents are surrounded by strangers, objects which communicate economic and social stature grow in importance. He calls this conspicuous consumption. Here's the best example I've ever seen of that.
• This article is nothing so special, but, my God, look at the comments. I never knew there were that many possible donut puns.
• Didn't Ennismore do this for a color-war breakout once?
• I'm sick of Favre already--SportsCenter this morning devoted the opening twenty minutes of their hour to only Favre--so it's good that the NY media tends to be a laid-back bunch.
  

That's enough for now, I believe.

One last FYI tidbit--I'm leaving Denver on Sunday after having a raucously good time. This may affect my blogging, since I'm not sure what I'm going to be doing with myself come Monday morning. If I find gainful employment, there's a chance I won't be able to continue the every-weekday blogging schedule. But if I remain unemployed for a bit, I might accelerate the pace. But I might pick up some other hobbies--like origami--which will take me away from TDS. In short, don't be surprised if there are a whole bunch more origami-themed posts coming your way.

Enjoy the weekend.