Apparently Snakes on a Plane came about at a Hollywood Happy Hour when people were trying to come up with the worst movie pitch ever. It’s clear why this movie won. Bumped from 1 star to 2 stars in admiration of the way the filmmakers unabashedly and repeatedly allowed snakes to kill people by having the snakes clamp down on a human appendage.

(Bonus: This video played during the closing credits and I bet you can’t watching it without wondering if it’s a satire.)

Our best haul all summer from Ledge Ends inspired a rather delicious dinner.

Caprice salad (or insalata caprese, if you prefer) is pretty simple to make, and we got so many tomatoes it seemed ridiculous not to. The basil was delicious, and adding watermelon seemed the thing to do.

Someone at the vegetable pickup mentioned an edamame dip, and since we got a huge bunch of fresh edamame it seemed like a good idea. I found this recipe thanks to Google, and sort of improvised something similar.

It was crazy delicious, and this may well be one of my new go-to potluck contributions.

I took issue with the pre-season power rankings on Hashmarks by Matt Mosley and he addresses my complaints in his column.

Some reaction from other fans: “The above post is the stupist thing I have heard” and “Best Fan Email ever.”

I have to say I’m pretty psyched to have my words featured on ESPN.com, it’s not the Sportsguy, but it’s close.

The Departed was based on Mou gaan dou a 2002 movie from Hong Kong. It was really interesting to see pretty much all of the same things happen in this movie as in The Departed, but in a different sequence. There are currently 2 other movies in the Infernal Affairs series.

I’m not going to bother rating Citizen Kane because to some people that would be blasphemy. I guess I’m glad I watched it, so that I can say that I have, and some of the shots were great, but I didn’t see as much greatness as I expected. At least I know what Rosebud is, though.

Here is an insanely depressing article (pulled out of this somewhat less depressing article (you have to watch an ad)).
It’s great in the MAYBEISHOULDKILLMYSELFNOW kind of way in that it only details the problem and makes no effort to offer any solutions. Basically, all the plastic that has ever been created is still around in some form, mostly in the ocean. No one knows exactly what all this plastic is doing to our environment or our bodies, though some scientists think our genes our going to mutate until we can’t procreate anymore. Which will be good, because then we won’t make any more plastic.

It’s not often that I get worked up about anything because I don’t like to sound shrill. But I hadn’t really considered the impact of plastic bags because I thought they were being recycled. We’re trying not to use plastic bags anymore and hopefully you’ll avoid it as well.

This list of entrance music for baseball players shows me that 1) baseball players aren’t very original and 2) baseball players don’t have very good taste. I guess I shouldn’t judge.

I was going to go through and pick a couple to point out, but there’s too much ridiculousness going on. Needless to say, many pitchers consider themselves “The Jungle” and enjoy welcoming hitters to themselves.

The blurb on the back of this book really gives nothing away, so I feel honor-bound to be somewhat circumspect – suffice it to say this book is at all about what I thought it would be. Ishiguro does an excellent job of drawing you into the story and provides just enough hints to allow you to figure out what’s really going on at a satisfying pace. (An interesting topic for discussion might be: why didn’t Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth just run away?) As in The Remains of the Day, he gets a lot of mileage out of a restricted narrative voice, although the weirdly stilted (stylized?) dialogue was a little distracting at times.

This book seems to be an exemplar of the kind of book that the world admires, my friends love, and I sort of shrug at. Maybe it’s because I’m a man, maybe it’s because I’ve never read Mrs. DallowayThe Hours struck me as overwrought and somehow fake. There are some real insights here, and some genuinely beautiful prose, but everything about the book – the characters, the story, the message – comes across as a performance, looking for the audience’s reaction out of the corner of its eye.

Can I say “a ripping yarn” non-ironically? It’s an inventive alternative history, a proud homage to hard-boiled detective fiction, a love letter to the lost Yiddish culture, and a cautionary tale about the dangers of our (real life) leaders whose attitudes towards Israel and the Middle East are colored by their apocalyptic religious mania. And, for all that, it’s a hell of a story that seems to be set at once both firmly in our time and in every era of Jewish hardship.