Jeff and Dayna

Ellington's on Eighth

The sound of Jazz came wafting out the door and gently called my attention away from this beautiful Washington day. I'm on their back poarch drinking a Tusker Lager from Kenya Breweries Ltd. and composing this post. Staring at the elephant on the Tusker's label and fully satisfied after a heveanly brunch at Georgia Brown's, winner of Washington's best brunch for 2003, 04, and 06, I'm looking forward to seeing my friend Melissa from the Senate. She's penciling me in between dropping her mom off at National Airport and a meeting in Patomic. She's the shit now for a high profile election in Maryland. I'm going to Europe for a month. I think I win.

Tough Guy.

Tough Guy.
Originally uploaded by jeffbridges.

Test test test test post.

And Stewart's Response...

I know they're both like a year old, but still totally worthwhile.

John Stewart is great.

And I hate Tucker Carlson.

MacBook Pro

This seems to be the universal reaction to the MacBook - totally awesome, but why just the 15 incher, why so heavy, what's up with the short battery life, and why the ExpressCard slot instead of the old PCMCIA?
http://tuaw.com/2006/01/10/macbook-pro-one-step-forward-two-steps-back/

Macworld's got a good review, too.
http://www.macworld.com/weblogs/editors/2006/01/keynotereax/index.php

Skydiving World Record (Not set by me.)

This is totally cool:

Credit: Norman Kent/NASA

       

A team of skydivers set a canopy formation world record as dusk descended on rural Florida. The team, with a record 81 people, included three Kennedy Space Center Engineers: Dave Hillebrandt of United Space Alliance, Kevin Keenan of Lockheed Martin and NASA's James Bolton. The skydives took place Nov. 25 and 26, 2005, over Lake Wales, Fla.

Absolutely Stupid

I mean, really, how can anything get much stupider than this?

Jan. 5, 2006 — A new chord was scheduled to sound Thursday in the world's slowest and longest lasting concert that is taking a total 639 years to perform.... Entitled "organ2/ASLSP" (or "As SLow aS Possible"), the performance began on Sept. 5, 2001 and is scheduled to last until 2639.

But really, what else should we expect from the guy who wrote "'4'33,' a piece comprising four minutes and 33 seconds of total silence, all meticulously notated."  Apparently there are recordings of this piece (yes, recordings with an s as in multiple recordings), and there are people (if you can call them that) who collect various recordings of 4'33.

I HATE modern art and modern music, because it's stupid.  Here's one from my own home town:

If the horse were sitting down at least it would be funny, but he's not.

What ever happened to being able to call crap for what it is?

Lazy Sunday - Narnia

Great SNL video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch.php?v=zLElfJ9YCh0

In My Country There is Problem

Borat is a character played by Sasha Baron Cohen on his HBO series "Da Ali G Show."  In one of these episodes he performed a song at a country western bar called "In My Country There is Problem."  A video of his performance is included in this post, or is available here.  It is in very bad taste.  VERY.

Bortat claims to be from Kazakhstan.  The Kazakh government doesn't like this, and has actually taken the time to officially denounce Borat and shut down his www.borat.kz website.

In an MSNBC story today, I learned that "After 16 years of humming the same tune on state occasions, Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev has decided to change [the country's national anthem] and add some lyrics of his own ahead of his inauguration for a new term next week."

So why exactly does this guy have a problem with Borat?  Is it maybe that he's just afraid of the competition?

 

Tag Hierarchy

Ok, so hopefully this will be my last post on tags...  I'm a recent convert to "tag" hierarchy over multiple-level (folder) hierarchy.  I would much rather have a list of tags on the left side of my Outlook window than those confusing and poorly utilized folders.

The tipping point for me in the folder vs. tag fight was when I realized that tags DO in fact have a folder-like hierarchy, it just changes depending on where you want to start looking for something.  For example, you can tag a document with "iraq, war on terror, voting."  Then when you want to go find that document you don't have to remember if you put it in your "War on Terror" folder or your "Iraq" folder.  Maybe you put it in your "Emails from Joey" folder - who knows.  (I lose a ton of stuff.)  But as long as you know that what you're looking for is about Iraq and the War on Terror you're going to find it no matter where you start.  "Iraq" is a subset of "War on Terror," but if I only wanted stuff about voting in Iraq I could start with "Voting" and then move to the "Iraq" subset.

I love it.