Latest Parries
December 2012
Some Consumer Affairs
I’ve tried to enjoy schlepping water, thinking that it serves to keep us to some human roots.
April 2012
From Nokia N95 to iPhone 4S
Annoyances and upsets with the iPhone 4S have been more than offset by its screen, the silkiness of its surfaces, the camera, and the third-party market for both software and hardware.
February 2012
2001: A Space Odyssey: Dry, Juicy, Linear, Luminous
After they finished watching the Bond movies, I figured the next series John Gruber and Dan Benjamin would discuss on The Talk Show would be Stanley Kubrick’s oeuvre. But Gruber refused — too personal for podcasting, he said. Disappointed, I rewatched 2001.
January 2012
A Scheme of a Number of Friends
Instead of acknowledging the wisdom of leading from behind, the Right jumped on the Obama administration’s handling of Libya as yet another example of at best incompetence. They lost me there.
October 2011
The Mouse and the Cantilever
Steve Jobs we lost at the age of 56; when Frank Lloyd Wright reached that age it was still only 1923, the time of merely his second comeback with Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel.
March 2010
Friendship is for Weenies
It’s amazing, given the adulation he enjoyed elsewhere, that the Israeli public knew from the start not to trust this US President.
Before the Setup
Nobody from usesthis.com has asked me what my setup us, nor is likely to anytime soon. So I’m just going to mouth off here about it. But first, some background.
February 2010
Walter Russell Mead steps gingerly into the Wieseltier/Sullivan imbroglio
On the Leon Wieseltier/Andrew Sullivan spat, Walter Russell Mead seems to want to have his strudel and eat it too.
October 2009
My Hope: Obama’s Change
Defeat in the Olympics bid may focus the mind in the Oval Office where it should be: Afghanistan.
July 2009
At Modi’in Mall
There’s nothing else around here except empty desolate pretty hills. The Israel Trail passes by a bit to the west. It’s a hot July Wednesday morning. Things are reasonably busy. The shops are mostly franchises, almost all homegrown — Super-Pharm, Aroma, Tzomet Sfarim, Cup O’ Joe’s, LaMetayel, Mega, Fox, Castro, H&O.
I ’m listening to the Hugh Hewitt show here in Brighton, England, feeling a mite embarrassed of that foreign fact as workmen trudge down the path not a few feet away from this here kitchen and can probably hear the twang. Hewitt notes that his friend James Lileks is celebrating ten years of The Bleat.
A web site updated five days a week without fail by one person: now, I can do that. Back in 1997 I too was interested in this thing, the web. I’d already built a site for a legal company in New York. I’d already begun and quit my own site, a weekly piece of criticism of Star Trek:Voyager entitled Voyager Voyeur.
I am a quitter. Give me something to quit, I quit it. This despite my understanding from Napoleon Hill and his Think and Grow Rich that “a winner never quits and a quitter never wins.” I like writing. I may even be quite good at it. Not perhaps as skilful as Lileks can be — reading him makes me want to say the word “threnody” out loud and it seems like a bird flying — but doing it for ten years will bring some skill to even Stephen. So. The technology we have: I build sites for a living. The ability we have: I can string together a sentence or at least point out the errors in others’. Therefore — and dammit, it’s about time — I’m going to launch a blog once again. I’m going to call it Parries, a diminution of paragraphs. A parry is yin to the yang of thrust, evocative of swordsmanship yet homey and cute as well. And this is it, you’re reading it.
What the workmen are doing here is building a coffee shop, its back facing our back. Someone is hammering something right now, and “I’ll be there shortly” is being said into a telephone. I have offered them hot water for tea in what, as a newly implanted alien, I imagine is being nice and friendly to the Englishman.
But the coffee at this new establishment will doubtless be, as it is at almost every other cafe here, swill. So I’m girding up the courage to tell Kevin the owner that the only good coffee I’ve had in this town is at Red Roaster, where it not only tastes as it should but they are as skilled as any Roman in making patterns on the froth; a couple of days ago the redhead there made me a delightful fir tree. Be a Red Roaster disciple, Kevin, and you got me. Now, how to say this the How to Win Friends and Influence People way?
Halleludjah and see you on the morra.
Previously
Thoughts on Spidey II (spoilers!)