Selfish Crab

Ya gotta love referel logs. From my trusty sitemeter, I have learned of several other active Columbia bloggers.There’s Jen Schnidman, a University Senator. She mentions me as a citation for that panorama of the Tribute in lights I posted about last week. She caught whiff of this blog from the not-so-infamous Columbia Spectator article about weblogs. I wonder if she ever stumbled upon my snarky comments about it.

There’s also Jax Russo who is also an University Senator. She used to write for the Spec. I know this because she once wrote a god-awful terrible article about CSC’s Lunar Gala. By “god-awful terrible”, I mean she must have been hungover and recovering from an addiction on heroin with the shivers and the hallucinations and all when she wrote the article.

Each of these guys have a blog list, that I need to check out. Some faces I’ve seen before actually. I’ll do a quick list, don’t have time to read them out now: ec653, ml1067, tw2004, and lcw2001. Wow, there’s quite a number of CU bloggers. I had no idea that so many people know how to capitalize and use punctuation correctly (this is a jab at annoying Xanga people).

# 2003 Sep 28    {Columbia, Links, rompin' years}    #

I’ve been blogging frequently.

# 2003 Sep 23    {rompin' years}    #

Another Times link. I know I know. Nytimes registration should not be required for this blog. Anyway, I saw the trailer for this french movie To be and To Have (review) when I went to go see American Splendor. It has school children and is set in the ol’ French countryside. Can’t wait to check it out.

In the arena of movies-I-have-actually-seen, Lost in Translation finally came out on Friday and I saw it. The trailer for the movie had me tingling in anticipation for the movie. My opinion? I was a bit disappointed by it. It is a nice, pretty movie with delightful culture-clash scenes, some gorgeous scene choices, and solid acting. But there was not enough substance for me, dialogue to be exact. Looking back at the trailer, it seems they did not just bring together the best dialogue; I think they took all of it and put it in there. The movie has lots of critical acclaim. I suspect this stems from Sofia’s hipster cred, being the princess in the Coppola family entertainment empire.

Followup:What Else Was Lost In Translation - translations to parts of the Japanese dialogue in the film. It’s great to see the foreign language parts actually fit into the story well.

# 2003 Sep 22    {rompin' years}    #

Recently added to my list of pet peeves: computer science majors that use Internet Explorer as their web browser of choice. I mean, come on, they should just know better. Regular users have an excuse; they don’t follow techie news and just may not hear about the other web browsers out there.

But, the comp sci majors know there are all these alternatives, like the open-source Mozilla, that are clearly superior (more features, loads webpages better) and they just ignore them. I can’t understand why. I downloaded a copy Firebird onto my girlfriend’s laptop, and she loves it (she likes how the tabs avoid taskbar-clutter).

# 2003 Sep 19    {nerd, rompin' years}    #

This is a great Star Wars fan film, with lots of Hong Kong fight choreography. Wee. [via a Slashback]I’m working on moving this blog to my own domain space. I worry I will lose all the page rank karma that I have accumulated in this blog’s two year life span. But I will prevail.

# 2003 Sep 18    {nerd, rompin' years}    #

Columbia has gotten quite a bit of Times coverage in the past week. First, there’s this monstrous article on Columbia expansion plans and their ever-struggling relationship with the community residents. I read the article in print; it’s huge. It was half the front page of the New York Region and it continued onto one full page inside. There was also this neat little map (that did not make it to the online edition) of all the property Columbia owns or is shopping for.

In the same thread of thought, there’s an article in the education section about the opening of the new Columbia private elementary school that’s intended to lure professors to the school (with their school-age children in tow.)

And then there’s an article about how fucking expensive college textbooks are. Anecdotes throughout the article are taken from Barnard and Columbia College students and there’s a nice little picture from inside our humble bookstore. dogears.net gets a nice little mention at the end of the article (one of the quoted students cites it as a respite from the inexorbant price of new textbooks)

Note: I recommend you check out the links before they pass behind the pay-only shroud of the NYTimes archiving system.

# 2003 Sep 17    {Columbia, rompin' years}    #

This is an amazing panorama of the tribute in lights. While you are there, check out the top of Mount Everest.

# 2003 Sep 9    {Links, rompin' years}    #

Yesterday I had a fucked up dream. I dreamt about an African Messiah. The transition into the final Being required a ritual. His family was involved, helping him get to the Place, with all the proper ingredients. The authorities were trying to arrest him. There was flying and leaping and escape. And this all took place in parking lots along Route 35 in New Jersey.

# 2003 Sep 9    {rompin' years}    #

I have been meaning to get around to tracking down a copy of the video to Johnny Cash’s cover of the Nine Inch Nail’s “Hurt”. And when I finally got around to it after the VMAs, for which the video was nominated six times, I was absolutely mesmerized. What a powerful work. Highly recommended.

I was poking around some more, and I found out Rick Rubin was the producer behind Cash’s latest album, American IV: The Man Comes Around. Talk about a career. Rick Rubin has produced some amazing albums. He co-founded Def Jam records, broke the Beastie Boys, and produced everything from LL Cool J (his first album) to Red Hot Chilli Peppers (the amazing Blood Sugar Sex Magik) to Slayer, for crying out loud.

The video was the inspiration of director Mark Romanek, who is responsible for some seminal music videos: Lenny Kravitz’s dread-flying dome-party of “Are You Gonna Go My Way”, Fiona Apple’s porn-basement “Criminal”, the Janet and Michael duet megabucks-video “Scream”, and Nine Inch Nail’s “Closer”, which has the most intense and disturbing series of imagery in a video, ever. Romanek is also the director of One Hour Photo.

It’s the intersection three amazing careers: musician, producer, and video director. It could only have turned out so well.

# 2003 Sep 1    {rompin' years}    #