Good Morning Internet

My dad’s pho­tog­ra­phy open­ing was a huge suc­cess last night! I saw a lot of fam­ily and fam­ily friends I haven’t seen in years. None of them have ever seen me with a beard before, and I got a wide vari­ety of reactions.

• Every­body (after doing a double-take): “Oh my god! I almost didn’t rec­og­nize Gavin!”
• Male rel­a­tives and friends: “It looks good! You should keep grow­ing it.”
• Males my father’s age: “I remem­ber when I could grow a dark beard. Now it would be all white!”
• Female rel­a­tives and friends: “Inter­est­ing! So, are you going to keep it?”
• My mom (to a friend): “I’m going to buy him a gift cer­tifi­cate to a bar­ber shop.”

Today, we’re tak­ing my grand­mother out to din­ner for her 85th birth­day. She’s had my favorite reac­tion by far.

• My grand­mother (repeat­edly today): “Wow!” and “That beard!” and “I will never get used to that beard!” and “I don’t like that beard!”

I started the beard on New Year’s Day, and the plan was to keep it through Feb­ru­ary and then go back to my clean-shaven look at the begin­ning of March, just in time for my birth­day. But now part of me wants to keep it, just to col­lect more reactions.

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This is the first of a weekly series. Each Fri­day, I’ll write about one of my friends’ blogs and tell you why you should be read­ing it, too. To kick things off, I’ll start with one of the blogs I’ve been read­ing the longest.

My friend Rachel, whom I’ve known since high school, has an amaz­ing way with words over on her blog, Diary of Why. Just back from a seven-day trip to Spain, she’s returned to Paris with some pho­tos and sto­ries that are not to be missed.

Each entry starts with “Why”, and her blog’s tagline is “Ques­tions with­out answers, and answers to ques­tions that nobody asked.” It’s a great for­mat, one I think I sub­con­sciously stole from her a cou­ple times.

Her sto­ries are at once hilar­i­ous, heart­break­ing, insight­ful, and always inter­est­ing. She’s one of the few peo­ple I know who keeps up with her blog in an intel­li­gent, engross­ing way that inspires me to step up my own writing.

Ear­lier this month, she wrote a jaw-dropping story called “Why I’ve gone from Mary Pop­pins to Cin­derella” about baby-sitting for a rather tightly-wound Parisian woman with an expen­sive apart­ment and fancy floors. She takes the reader by the hand and walks through the entire ordeal in a man­ner that has you dying to find out what hap­pens next. This is the sort of blog that should be com­piled into a best­selling book and then optioned for a block­buster movie.

So click on over to Diary of Why for some read­ing on your Fri­day afternoon!

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Being unem­ployed is weird and tough. It’s like a sur­prise unpaid vaca­tion (but you don’t go any­where) and also your health insur­ance runs out. It’s stress­ful, espe­cially when I’m not sure what I want to do next.

But with all this free time on my hands, I’ve been able to catch up on my friends’ blogs, pod­casts, and other cre­ative endeav­ors. I can take the time to absorb the things my friends are say­ing and doing, instead of just skim­ming over posts like I did when I worked full-time.

As it turns out, I have really cre­ative, smart, funny, per­cep­tive friends. Many of them are much bet­ter writ­ers than me. Most are bet­ter pod­cast­ers and they’re all infi­nitely more inter­est­ing. Also, I’ve dis­cov­ered that I start my day with the “Friends” folder I’ve cre­ated in Google Reader before I hit any news site to catch up on head­lines from overnight.

So, in the spirit of the #fol­lowfri­day meme on Twit­ter, I’m going to spot­light one of my friends’ sites each Fri­day. I visit dozens of friends’ sites, so that’s easy mate­r­ial right there! Also, I’ll be able to single-handedly take credit for dri­ving traf­fic to their sites. Up to–and in some cases includ­ing–ten extra visits!

I’ll put up my first post about a smart and cool friend later today.

 

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I don’t have cable TV or a DVR right now. I can­celed my Com­cast ser­vice last fall when I com­pleted a year at a pro­mo­tional price for TV and Inter­net and they dou­bled my monthly rate to the “reg­u­lar price”. Instead, I have a good old-fashioned antenna hooked up to my HDTV, and as long as it’s bal­anced just right on top of my shelf, it gives me fan­tas­tic pic­ture for prime­time high-def pro­gram­ming. The Super Bowl was stun­ning. Jack Bauer’s wacky Mon­day night adven­tures come in crystal-clear.

Still, with­out a DVR, I refuse to re-organize my life around pro­gram­ming sched­ules. Hulu takes care of a lot of time-shifting for me, but for the past two Fri­day nights, I’ve sat at home and watched my new favorite block of geeky TV.

On a night when most peo­ple go out, I’m at home with a big stu­pid geek grin on my face. I starts at 8:00 pm with Ter­mi­na­tor: The Sarah Con­nor Chron­i­cles. I don’t care that it has a much slower pace than the movies, or that we haven’t seen a really good ter­mi­na­tor fight in months. I can even for­give the shame­less and bla­tant prod­uct place­ment. This sea­son has been a lot of set-up, and I’m dying to see how the knock it all down for the remain­der of this year’s episodes.

At 9:00 it’s time for Joss Whedon’s Doll­house. Whe­don is one of my all-time favorite writ­ers, and not just on TV. He can put together the kind of story that is packed with action, yet still has a lot of the­matic under­cur­rents, but he doesn’t beat you over the head with them. It pre­miered just two weeks ago, so if you haven’t watched, I strongly, strongly rec­om­mend you check out the first two episodes over on Hulu. Just like with Whedon’s past projects, he’s weav­ing a long story arc, and I can’t wait to see where it goes. I embed­ded the pilot episode at the top of this post to make it super-easy for you to check out.

At 10:00 I have to shut off Twit­ter because the rest of the world is watch­ing Bat­tlestar Galac­tica. If you’ve never seen it, start at the begin­ning. Don’t start now. Too much has hap­pened, and there are only four episodes left. This has been the absolutely most com­pelling tele­vi­sion in the past four years, with maybe the excep­tion of The Wire.

Because I don’t have cable, I can’t get Sci Fi and watch live. I step away from Twit­ter to insu­late myself from spoil­ers. (Peo­ple in the Twit­ter­verse love to post spoil­ers, I learned the hard way.) But Sci Fi drops the ball here. New episodes aren’t avail­able until eight days after their broad­cast. Eight! I’m sure it’s a ploy to get those of us with­out cable to head over to iTunes and shell out a few bucks, and I’m sure that it works.

For two hours, Fri­day nights are my geek-out nights. If you haven’t checked out Doll­house, you should give it a try and, if you like it, you should join me while I immerse myself in a world of killer robots from the future, high-tech per­son­al­ity imprints, explo­sions, femmes fatales, and sci­ence projects gone awry. I’ll be on Twitter.

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This great clip is a cou­ple weeks old and has been kick­ing around the ol’ Google­tubes for a while now, but I just hap­pened to stum­ble upon it again and thought I’d share it in case you haven’t seen it. Seth sums up every­thing about the whole Michael Phelps pot-smoking thing per­fectly on Week­end Update with his seg­ment, “Really?!?”. Also, it’s nice to see SNL stick­ing up for a fel­low Baltimorean.

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Yes­ter­day, the Maryland-based Gazette news­pa­per ran a great arti­cle about my dad. He has pho­tos on dis­play at the Visions Exhi­bi­tion Space of the Bethesda North Mar­riott until April 24th, and there will be a recep­tion on Fri­day, Feb­ru­ary 27th.

St. Ours’ art has not been con­fined to a sin­gle medium; within his 35-plus year career, he has pro­duced hand-carved mar­ble sculp­ture as well as large-format prints of his dig­i­tal images and panoramic pho­tog­ra­phy. The art forms have at least one major aspect in common.

“All art and design, includ­ing pho­tog­ra­phy, is best taught through the exer­cise of draw­ing,” St. Ours observes. “There is a vocab­u­lary in the visual lan­guage of draw­ing, a vocab­u­lary that includes line, form and struc­ture, all of which can be read for mean­ing, and the cor­rect study of draw­ing in a well-taught art class can exer­cise this vocab­u­lary so as to strengthen and increase the brain’s abil­ity to cre­atively solve problems.”

Damn, he’s a smarter guy than I’ve given him credit for all these years! (Just kid­ding, Dad.) Read the arti­cle here.

If you’re in the area, I encour­age you to stop by and check out his amaz­ing work! You can get a pre­view on his site. Oh, and if you’re a fan of Lost, you’ll espe­cially dig the photo he took when he vis­ited the set in Hawaii. See if you can spot it. I want a copy of that one for my apartment.

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My friends over at Planit have put together a series of com­pletely awe­some PSAs for the Cleaner Greener Bal­ti­more ini­tia­tive. You should pop over to their Vimeo page to check out all of them. Here are a cou­ple of my favorites:

 

(Great work, @dwplanit!)

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Just a few min­ues ago, I was catch­ing up on Ter­mi­na­tor: The Sarah Con­nor Chron­i­cles on Hulu when a com­mer­cial came on and reminded me of some­thing that hap­pened this past weekend.

On President’s Day, I hap­pened to find myself in a Ver­i­zon Wire­less store and thought it would be inter­est­ing to see a Black­Berry Storm. Even though Ver­i­zon is in the mid­dle of an adver­tis­ing blitz for the smart­phone, I haven’t read many good things about it. Still, I wanted a lit­tle hands-on time with the device to give it a test-drive, just out of curiosity.

It’s been a long time since I’ve been in a Ver­i­zon store, and not much has changed. Instead of real, oper­a­tional demo phones, Ver­i­zon still has plas­tic “dummy” phone mod­els with a pic­ture of an oper­a­tional screen glued on. I always had a big prob­lem with that. I already know what your phones look like, Ver­i­zon, I don’t need a replica. I want to see your actual phones and how they operate.

Of course, the friendly sales rep told me if I was inter­ested in a par­tic­u­lar phone, he’d be happy to go into the back and get one for me to try out. But the Storm hap­pened to be one of the half-dozen phones they didn’t have in stock. Since it’s appar­ently com­pany pol­icy to not have demo units, there was no way I could try it out. Lamesauce.

But that’s when the employee star­tled me with some hon­esty. “I have to tell you, we don’t stand behind that phone at this store. We’ve already had more than a few units come back to us with bad screens, so we don’t rec­om­mend it.”

I would like to applaud that Ver­i­zon Wire­less store employee for not steer­ing high-end phone cus­tomers toward faulty hard­ware. But I still find it odd that, when­ever you turn on the TV or watch some­thing on Hulu, chances are you’ll run into one of those John Krasin­ski–voiced Black­Berry Storm com­mer­cials. Ver­i­zon is pay­ing for a huge adver­tis­ing cam­paign on a sub-par prod­uct its own employ­ees can’t stand behind.

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I don’t know what this says about me, but after the real­ity of being let go from my job this morn­ing set in, the first real panic moment was when I real­ized I’ll have to cut back on music pur­chases for a while. With that in mind, here are a few albums I wouldn’t mind pick­ing up, even if it causes me to eat beans and rice for a few weeks.

The Apple­seed Cast — Sagar­matha

I’m not quite sure how The Apple­seed Cast does it, but they’ve found a way to put out reli­ably great albums. Maybe it’s just my mood, but the cou­ple songs I’ve heard from Sagar­matha seem like the per­fect sound­track for cold Feb­ru­ary walks. I also feel like this is an album that could eas­ily reveal new details with each lis­ten­ing, espe­cially if you’re wear­ing headphones.

Admit­tedly, I’m a lit­tle late to the party when it comes to this band. I am famil­iar with a song here and there, and have always really, really enjoyed what I heard. But for some rea­son, I haven’t really paid all that much atten­tion. As I go through these tracks, I find myself com­pelled to explore the back cat­a­log, span­ning the past decade, and that it’s very likely I’ll dis­cover some gems I missed along the way.

[iTunes link]

[Ama­zon link]

Boston Space­ships — Plan­ets Are Blasted

No, I’m not sur­prised that Boston Space­ships already have a sec­ond album. That makes two full-length releases within six months. I wouldn’t expect any­thing less from my per­sonal rock idol and ex-Guided by Voices front man Robert Pollard.

As much as I liked Pollard’s solo records, the last Boston Space­ships album, Brown Sub­ma­rine, was the first Pol­lard project that really brought me back to the sound that made me become a diehard GBV for the first time when I was 13. On Plan­ets Are Blasted, the high qual­ity song­writ­ing con­tin­ues. Songs like “Headache Rev­o­lu­tion”, “Queen of Stormy Weather”, and “The Town That’s After Me” make me for­get this isn’t a new Guided by Voices record. It’s truly great music, and I can’t wait to spend some seri­ous time with this album. I missed their show in DC last Sep­tem­ber, so it’s time for them to hit the road again, maybe with a stop in Bal­ti­more this time.

[iTunes link]

[Ama­zon link]

 

 

M. Ward — Hold Time

 She & Him made just about everybody’s “best of 2008″ lists with Vol­ume One. So here’s half of that effort, M. Ward, with a follow-up to Post-War, but def­i­nitely still in the low-key mind­set of She & Him. Not that that’s a bad thing. The vocals are more breathy than what peo­ple might be used to from “To Go Home”, but the dirty dis­tor­tion of “Never Had Nobody Like You” (which fea­tures She & Him coun­ter­part Zooey Deschanel) reminds you that this is def­i­nitely his solo outfit.

[iTunes link]

[Ama­zon link]

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Sure, today might be the day I was let go from my job, but it’s also the day I got my tick­ets for the Bal­ti­more Ori­oles’ home opener against the New York Yan­kees on April 6th. That’s only 48 days away! Observe the excitement/intensity:

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