By day I work for a company that has just reached its tenth year of existence. Everybody knows the traditional first-year anniversary gift is paper, the third-year anniversary gift is bananas, and the fiftieth-year anniversary is gold. But I was until recently unaware that the tenth-year anniversary is tin or aluminum. As a ten-year aluminum gift, my company has given me an aluminum water bottle. This is awesome, because I’ve been wanting one for kind of a while now, but the only ones I could find are like twenty or thirty dollars. Well, now I don’t have to look and I don’t have to spend any money.

I tried it out this last weekend by taking it to rehearsal. Ohmygod it’s the best. Seriously. The feeling of environmental friendliness is so inviting, and the health benefits make me even more powerful and ninja-like than ever before.
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Filed by Bil at 10:59 pm under Pop Culture, The Arts, The Science, Environmentality
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I’ve discovered a fantastic blog called Lucid Movement (http://www.lucidmovement.com). It’s basically an archive of clips of things breaking, bouncing, exploding, wafting, etc. filmed with high-speed cameras. It’s excellent. Here is a taste of what you’ll get over there:

I can watch this stuff for hours.
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Filed by Bil at 11:25 pm under Pop Culture, Politics, The Science
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…the relevance of existing cultural activity.

These are the last six words of the mission statement of a theatre company which, like a newborn galaxy, is ready to burst into existence with a grand display of shining stars and gravitational hullabaloo. (…Except without all the stars.)

Every now and then, I think about how much art there is that I don’t see. Especially temporary art, like plays that only run for a certain amount of time and then are never produced again. Or some orange gates in Central Park. Or ice sculptures.
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Filed by Bil at 9:08 pm under Social Issues, Pop Culture, The Arts
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Last Sunday I ran the Shamrock Shuffle here in Chicago. The Shamrock Shuffle in Chicago is generally not run until well after St. Patrick’s day, but nobody cares. It’s still cold on the seventeenth of March.

The event is as big as a marathon in terms of numbers of people participating, even though it’s only an 8K run. So much money is needed to put up an event like this that Bank of America sponsors this thing. Bank of America is huge. The upside is the swag, lots and lots of swag. The downside is that all of the swag says “Bank of America” on it.
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Filed by Bil at 8:05 pm under Pop Culture
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I’m currently reading Maureen Dowd’s terrific 2005 best-seller Are Men Necessary?: When Sexes Collide.

Dowd is a gender/political columnist for the New York Times, and her book is witty, engrossing, and very well-researched. I may have a crush.

In addition to the evolutionary/biological tidbits I am picking up (some scientists believe that all men will be sterile within 125,000 years!) (within my lifetime, a lesbian couple will be able to conceive a child by implanting DNA from one egg into the other egg–no sperm needed!), Dowd has a lot to say about dating, sex, and post-feminism gender games. Fascinating stuff.

I shall here quote from Chapter Four: Why the Well-Hung Y is Wilting, Even as the X is Excelling. In this part of the chapter, Dowd confronts the oft-lamented double standard whereby men who sleep around are seen as studs, and women who do the same are labled sluts. It’s been talked to death, of course, but I particularly like this quote from Natalie Angier’s book Woman, which I guess I’ll have to pick up next (as soon as I finish reading that book I lifted from Lucas’s NYC apt without his knowledge):

“Women are said to have lower sex drives than men, yet they are universally punished if they display evidence to the contrary — if they disobey their “natural” inclination toward a stifled libido. Women supposedly have a lower sex drive than men do, yet it is not low enough. There is still just enough of a lingering female infidelity impulse that cultures everywhere have had to gird against it by articulating a rigid dichotomy with menacing implications for those who fall on the wrong side of it. There is still enough lingering female infidelity to justify infibulation, purdah, claustration. Men have the naturally higher sex drive, yet all the laws, customs, punishments, shame, strictures, mystiques and antimystiques are aimed with full hominid fury at that tepid, sleepy, hypoactive creature, the female libido. “
…
“Would a man find the prospect of a string of partners so appealing if the following rules were applied: that no matter how much he may like a particular woman and be pleased by her performance and want to sleep with her again, he will have no say in the matter and will be dependent on her mood and good graces for all future contact; that each act of casual sex will cheapen his status and make him increasingly less attractive to other women; and that society will not wink at his randiness but rather sneer at him and think him pathetic, sullied, smaller than life? Until men are subjected to the same severe standards and threat of censure as women are, and until they are given the lower hand in a so-called casual encounter from the start, it is hard to insist with such self-satisfaction that, hey, it’s natural, men like a lot of sex with a lot of people and women don’t.”

Heady stuff. Smart, too. I’ve always said there’s no such thing as “casual sex,” but these ladies say it better. You can link to Angier’s article, Men, Women, Sex, and Darwin here and you can get Dowd’s superb book here. If you’re so inclined. By which I mean female. Because, let’s face it, I don’t think many of you (hetero) guys are clamoring to see yourselves painted with her brush. Though, in one of my favorite quotes in all literature, Dowd admits, “I don’t understand men. I don’t even understand what I don’t understand about men. They’re a most inscrutable bunch, really.”

Filed by Chelsea at 11:58 am under Pop Culture, Gender Identity, The Media
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As you may or may not have heard five billion times by now, New York Democratic Governor Eliot Spitzer is in some hot water because he hired a pricey hooker after a career of prosecuting powerful men who hire pricey hookers. We have all seen this before, and if there’s one thing that we as a nation should be able to agree upon by now (but for some reason aren’t), it’s that political party really has nothing to do with the fact that some politicians are just plain old douche bags.

Okay, sure, perhaps Eliot Spitzer should resign, perhaps not. Honestly, as a resident of a state that is NOT New York, I don’t think I could make a valid argument either way. I don’t know what their funny laws are. Is prostitution illegal up there? Isn’t it illegal in every state but Nevada?

NY Repbulican threaten to impeach Spitzer

Let’s just slow down a little bit though. Who said anything about impeach?
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Filed by Bil at 5:27 pm under GOP, Pop Culture, Politics
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Recently, Devon and I acquired a new vehicle. It was a tough choice between a Scion xD and a Honda Fit; ultimately, the xD won the prize. The choice was unusually hard – a car is not something you want to buy now and regret later. And it’s not like you can just get another car if the first one doesn’t work out. We’re very happy with our little Scion, especially considering that we drove the shopping carpool this afternoon making trips to PetSmart, CostCo, and Trader Joe’s (three people and three cats will be fed for many weeks to come) and we were able to cram all our groceries into the car with no problems.

The timing could have been better – the day we drove it off the lot was the start of a week of snowfall. But aside from that, it’s really the ideal car for us – it’s a hatchback, meaning it’s bigger on the inside than the outside would let on. This is good if you have a ton of groceries or a ton of theatre props. I can’t imagine we’ll ever get a plain old sedan ever again. Also, it gets great gas mileage. It’s not a hybrid, unfortunately, but we’ll still be able to stay away from gas stations more than we were able to before. So, again – we’re both really, really pleased with the car we got.

The decision to get the car was easy enough; without it, Devon would be taking a series of busses to get to Skokie for work. But the decision on which car to get did not come lightly. It was the result of roughly one week of intensive online research (conducted by Devon) into what cars had the best mileage, safety, interior space, warranty, MSRP, etc., etc., etc., followed by about two weeks of searching the ad websites like cars.com, Vehix, and AutoTrader, test driving cars, phone calls to dealerships (conducted by me), and – finally – about a week and a half of waiting for the dealer to search a five-state radius and find us a Scion xD that wasn’t silver or white.

This is about the same length of time it took me to decide on which albums to purchase with an iTunes gift card I had received for Christmas.
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Filed by Bil at 9:39 pm under Social Issues, Pop Culture, The Arts, Politics
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I had no intention of commenting on Heath Ledger’s overwhelmingly tragic death today, as the surfeit of news coverage — particularly in the online gossip rags — would render any words of mine entirely redundant. However, while combing through TMZ just now, I found something that really irked me, regarding Ledger’s family:

They are particularly distraught over media reports that he may have taken his own life. The family says he was not that kind of person.

They never are. You can take my expert word on that one.

EDIT: I’ll admit even I didn’t see this one coming: apparently Westboro Baptist Church (if you’re looking for a link, forget it) is planning on picketing Heath’s funeral due to his involvement with Brokeback Mountain. And honestly, I hope they do — just imagine the shit-storm that will await them. I’m all for free speech and freedom of assembly, but freedom and license are two very different things. John Cameron Mitchell’s mother taught me that.

Filed by Trevor at 8:15 pm under Pop Culture
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“I like it in the city when two worlds collide: you get the people and the government, everybody taking different sides. Shows that we ain’t gonna stand shit; shows that we are united.” — Adele, “Hometown Glory”

I took a nap after teaching this morning and woke up with “I Dreamed a Dream” from Les Miserables stuck in my head. It’s still in my head, actually, and I find it sadly appropriate given what today is.

Anyway.

If Amy Winehouse decided to cover Regina Spektor, you’d have Adele. As always, I’m weak in the knees for a strong low alto with a good straight tone — her album drops next Monday, but until then you can check out her cornucopia of material on YouTube and Myspace.

(EDIT: This one is the unaltered tagline for American Spectator magazine. So there!)

Filed by Trevor at 3:26 pm under Pop Culture, The Arts
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Filed by Stephen at 7:32 am under General, Pop Culture, The Arts
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