Amazon.com: The Bourne Ultimatum is a good vacation book in that Robert Ludlum seems to exhibit a knack for taking a page to say what could have been said in a paragraph, which means one book will last the entire vacation. Still, sections of this book were tight, tense, and gripping. I enjoyed my first Bourne book (the last written by Ludlum, though there are others), and think Ludlum may have underestimated Bourne’s potential by aging his hero (50!) too quickly.

Depressing! A good movie, but not at all what I expected. Clive Owen was excellent in a movie that was essentially a string of chase sequences with a smattering of social speculation.

Colin Farrell has turned into the type of actor who can reasonably carry a 90 minute film. Unfortunately, Alexander was two hours and forty five minutes. Oliver Stone’s epic was too muddied with flashbacks and strange colors, though the actions scenes excelled.

This is a classic that had been sitting on my shelf for years. It’s a great story — aristocrats of the future use advanced technology to rule a distant human colony as the gods of the Hindu pantheon — and it’s extremely thoughtful and well-written. On top of that, it’s basically a story of increasingly bad-ass people doing increasingly bad-ass things: totally awesome.

Man, I really wanted to like this. It’s… fine, I guess? But, on one listening, the only song that stands out in my mind is the one that’s been on TV. Sorry, Sir Paul.

A White Bear said a really smart thing yesterday that I want to remember:

I realized today that I assume all these things about the people I know—that they at least are against things like genocide and rape—and that I’m not wrong, exactly, but they’re so busy thinking that genocide and rape are beside the point, somehow, that they don’t mind sitting around laughing at man-hating feminists and stupid hippies who talk about rape and genocide as if they’re problems. Ann Coulter’s groupies seem like that to me. They’re so busy laughing at humanity in that stupid, scornful way that they can’t hear someone saying “Please don’t make fun of the death of my son. Really. Please.”

I’m sure this isn’t universally true of everyone on the other side, but it’s at least one possible answer to the rhetorical question I often find myself directing to the ceiling: “What the hell is wrong with these people?” I wonder what it is that can make one so fixed on being superior that they can lose all touch with empathy?

Real open-minded empathy can be scary. No one wants to look at their beliefs or actions and conclude, “Oh crap, I’m an asshole.” And of course the right and just course is to recognize that, yes, sometimes I am an asshole, and when I realize it I ought to change. But it’s much easier to throw up defenses.

And, more disturbingly, I wonder if the same impulse is behind my disdain for, say, vegans and Dennis Kucinich? Am I too busy scorning the dirty hippies to recognize that they have some valuable things to say?

John Perkins has come a long way from when he was rigging economic reports for a high level government consulting firm and Amazon.com: Confessions of an Economic Hit Man is his memoir of those days and the soul altering transformation he went through. There is rampant, but subtle, 20/20 hindsight which detracts from the overall story as Perkins is, at times, naive and other times seemingly omnipotently prescient. This book would have been better as one of those long articles in Vanity Fair that I don’t read.

We did a mustache conteste at work and I’m afraid I let all of you down. I think I was penalized for the fact that although my hair is brown, my mustache is mostly red. Also, I think the judging should have been done in person instead of from a photograph, as my mustache does look marginally better in the photograph posted here than the photograph posted there. This clearly depicts a flaw in the system as it seems to be all about lighting for me. Either way, I’m keeping it for a while. I like looking in the mirror and seeing myself in disguise.

As an aside, what do people who actually have a mustache think about all of the people that have mustache contests? For people who know me, if they were to see me they’d say, “Oh, you have a mustache.” People who don’t know me, however, wouldn’t notice anything different. As far as they’re concerned, I always have a mustache. Anyone with a mustache care to comment?

Someone needs to make a procedural cop show set in Middle Earth and call it Law and Mordor.

That is all.

Cute, funny, sad, and, if nothing else, short. One of the reviews on the back compared it to Jane Austen, and the completely omniscient narration of the characters’ thoughts motivations and thoughts had that 19th Century feel to it; I guess it’s a writerly choice, but it feels like a bit of a cop-out. It is a novella, so I suppose we must allow that some of the threads in the story will not be tied off, but one enduring mystery is why Dan and Catherine Buttersfield, a working-class couple from Vermont, would name their daughter Mirabelle.