"Limitless Paper in a Paperless World..."

Odds, Ends, Musings, Upcoming Projects

Taking a break from slogging through my Evidence textbook (put it this way: if someone even so much as uses the word "privilege," I'll flip out) to come at you live from the confines of my bed with my new wireless router, which I love so much I want to take behind the middle school (you know the rest...). Nothing here to warrant a full post, so off we go:

a. Random Notes

• Horrible news.
  
  
• Been playing my brother's copy of Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction and if it's not reason enough to buy a PS3, it's damn close.
  
  
• In a similar vein, here's a link to a kickass trailer for Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, set to "Dissolved Girl" by Massive Attack.
  
  
• Granted, I did just crush my brother in fantasy football (60+ points victory) and I'm now 5-4 after opening a disastrous 0-3, but, I have to ask: is my cash game fantasy football team cursed? Thus far this year, I've lost the following players to injury: Andre Johnson (out since week 3 with a mysterious leg condition--ever since week 6 most news sources have said "he'll likely be back next week," only to repeat that exact assessment days later), Ronnie Brown (one of the top 3 pointgetters in the whole league before being felled by an ACL injury), Larry Johnson (hurt his ankle on Sunday and is now out for at least a week), Marvin Harrison (knee), Anthony Gonzalez (no clue). The last two are especially strange...and here's why: Harrison--my first round selection--is renowned as one of the most durable players in the league, having missed only six games due to injury in his previous eleven seasons (186 games), yet has now missed two of the last three games entirely and was virtually useless in the one that he did play in. So, anyway, hearing that there was about a 25% chance that Harrison would play this week against the Patriots, I picked up Gonzalez (Harrison's backup) to take his place. And, sure enough, A-Gon went down with an injury less than halfway through the game. The fuck? I now have a sneaking suspicion that Johnson is dead and/or has had his leg amputated and Yahoo! doesn't have the heart to tell me.
  
  
• TV tip for those, like me, that tape Chuck from 8-9 while you watch HIMYM, but then have nothing to do from 8:30-9 unless you're willing to debase yourself and watch the truly awful yet--amazingly--moderately popular The Big Bang Theory (insert your own "well, I guess the one good thing about the WGA strike is..." joke here): tune in to the second half of the surprisingly watchable Dragon's Den on CBC, which combines the most addictive elements of American Idol (the perennial willingness to embarrass yourself on national television) with, say, Mathnet. (I know, I know. You thought you'd go the rest of your natural life without hearing "Mathnet" again. Sorry, friend. You were wrong.) Hell, throw in a little bit of the wheeler-dealer aspects of Dallas while you're at it.

b. Upcoming Projects

• Gravity's Rainbow: I've decided that the best way to handle the book that's haunted my dreams that I've started multiple times without coming anywhere close to finishing it is to shamelessly copy Ryan and blog about my reading experience. Note to Thomas Pynchon and his controversial National Book Award winning novel (but skip the section on the plot, dammit!): you're on my list...of things to do. Shit. That doesn't sound tough at all. Rather unhelpfully and yet not at all surprisingly (as Pynchon is an inscrutable fuck), Gravity's Rainbow, 885 pages all told, contains no chapters, but is rather broken down into a series of (unnumbered in the text, of course!) episodes--81 in all. The plan is to read two or three episodes at a time, resulting in 35 total blog entries. Regular features will include Progress (how far I am into the book), a brief Plot Summary, pithy (I hope) Analysis, and Approximate Level of Irritation with the (notoriously difficult to read) Book (1 = actually looking forward to reading; 5 = semi-dreading my next go-round; 10 = throwing book against the wall, then jumping up and down on its pages, while pulling out my hair and screaming "fuck you, Pynchon! Fuck you!!")



• Best of the Decade: inspired by Misha's challenge to me to create a list of the top 10 albums of this current decade [note: challenge accepted], this project will entail a series of "best of" lists for the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and 00s. Tentatively, I'm looking at listing the best films, TV shows, albums, books, and video games for the five decades in questions. Disclaimer: I'll need to find an alternative for video games for the 60s and 70s (unless we can all agree that cup and ball is eligible)--this may end up being best sports moments, or potentially something a bit more esoteric. The plan at the moment is to tackle one decade a month, starting in January. There may or may not be an upcoming poll posted on my blog to let reader(s) vote on which decade they'd like to see first...which may or may not be shamefacedly removed from the site by me after receiving fewer than four votes total.



• The Wedding Blog (official title pending): that's right, we're barely three months in to my career as a blogger and I've already gone mad with power. The first manifestation of this: did someone say spinoff? More on this another time.



• The Top 25 Sports Movies of All-Time: hopefully fairly self-explanatory.



• Shuk and I have talked about doing a Top 25 Arrested Development moments, but one of us (me) has been pretty derelict in his duties, so this one will have to wait until '08.

c. Upcoming Posts
Carrie and I are off to Ireland on December 20th, which, by my count, is roughly seven weeks away. That, combined with the vagaries of school--three exams, studying for said exams, and one paper--means that my blogging year is rapidly drawing to a close. (Carrie swears they have the internet in Ireland, but I remain unconvinced.) What you can count (more or less) is the following:

• The Top 15 Movies of 2007
• The Top 15 Albums of 2007
• The Top 15 TV Shows of 2007
• The Two-Thirds(ish) NFL Recap
• A Kid Nation Season (slash--probably--"series") Finale Running Diary
• The first (of--in theory--35) Gravity's Rainbow entry

The first three are certain; the next three are subject to time constraints and/or availability of material.

And, when I get back in January (presumably): The Top 25 Ways I Embarrassed Myself and My Fiancee's Family in Ireland (just kidding, baby! Five, tops. Maybe seven). Failing that, count on a blathering (not to be confused with "blistering") review of Joyce's Ulysses, which I plan on reading on the trip.