Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Food Critic Link With A Side of My Past

So, it's high time I linked to another fellow blogger. Check out MC Slim JB's food reviews and blog.

We're weirdly connected:
A) He knows one of my siblings through professional connections.
B) He's an old friend of the ex-I-thought-was-the-one-but-who-instead-broke-my-heart-into-a-thousand-tiny-pieces-that-took-four-years-pick-up.

He's a decent food critic, if given to hyperbole on occasion. And, I sense he's got the usual hostility most writers have towards editors who dare monkey with their deathless prose.

But, as I said, he's a decent writer and critic, and by all accounts, a good guy, so go read his stuff.

Oddly, I've never met the man.

Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Was Frank Hebert a Boston Street Planner?

Okay, so I'm trying to find an alternative method of getting home from my office during Red Sox game nights....and I Google map a certain portion of a route I know, but wanted to explore a bit further. I call it "the back way".

And either Frank Hebert once lived in Mission Hill, or he was a street planner for the city of Boston in a former life.

Or possibly, this is just a weird, weird coincidence.

Gurney Street runs into Halleck Street in Mission Hill.

I kid you not.

Is a picture still worth any words? I think so....

I've had enough professional experience to learn a thing or two about design and photography. However, we live in such an image-predominant age that I feel like those mediums have lost a considerable bit of power.

Whether graphic or industrial, design and photography are relatively new when compared with writing, yet their evolution has been lightening-fast. Perhaps this seemingly endless explosion of imagery is responsible for diluting their strength?

That said, I still come across some arresting things now and then. For your consideration, here are two of them:


(Getty Images, May 19, 2009, Hebron)



(Flickr, Official White House Photostream)

Thursday, May 7, 2009

My Girl Crush on Shelley O. Continues Unabated

My supreme adoration of this woman just keeps growing.

Monday, May 4, 2009

Too Sleepy to Write This

There is simply no way I'm going to make it through the rest of this day without a 15-minute chair nap.

The art of the chair-nap is subtle, but highly skilled. You must be able to maintain a heightened state of awareness (to listen for footsteps) yet nod off enough to achieve a refreshing nap-esque state.

You must also do pre-nap prep: Be able to look immediately attentive, alert, and busy if your chair-nap is interrupted. I keep a highlighter and some important-looking papers handy; that way, if someone surprises you, you can instantly appear to be doing some reading!

If you choose this route, you should also have a work-infused salutation at the ready:

"Oh, hi....no, I'm not busy....just reading this study about cardiovascular interventions in minority populations...what's up?"

Now, there are those who ascribe to the "facing the monitor" version of the chair nap. Those who choose this option have the capacity to chair-nap with hands on the keyboard, so that in the event of chair-nap interruptions, they look like they're writing, designing, reading email, working on a spreadsheet, etc. I could never manage this. I do better with a hard copy document.

For pre-nap prep here, open a document and leave it up. Be sure to adjust your "sleep" mode though, because if you don't touch the document, you don't want your computer to lock you out--a sure sign of not working. The document should be a copy of something important; if you actually fall completely asleep, you don't want to hit a delete key and nuke an important piece of work.

Okay. Enough. I'm exhausted.

Off to chair-nap!