Overheard at the Farmer's Market

1. "I have six ears."

2. "When my significant other talks to me, he meows."

Planning a Trip to Scotland

Me: Apparently George Orwell spent time on the island we're going to visit. He wrote 1984 there.
Him: The Van Halen album?

Copley Square Farmer's Market

Something about sun-dappled berries and veggies makes me happy. Or maybe it's just all of the colors at every booth.

Kindle Drawbacks

I hate the idea of reading any type of fiction on a screen (and any nonfiction longer than an article), but this blogger uncovers a drawback to the Kindle and its progeny that I hadn't even considered:

Matt is reading David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest on his Kindle, which is pretty convenient for a book that weighs in at more than 1,000 pages. But Matt doesn't get the signaling benefits of the dead-tree edition; that is, he doesn't get to show the rest of the world that he's reading such a hefty, ponderous tome.

Riding the T would get a lot more boring if I wasn't able to make snap judgments about people based on their literature of choice...

Bruno Reviewno

I was excited to see Bruno because it seemed a sure bet to deliver some good laughs. (I loved Borat.) Unfortunatley it was pretty lousy. The obvious reason, which would plague any movie, was that it had no point, not even a flimsy one like Borat's journey across America searching for Pamela Anderson. Bruno was just a series of scenes strung together. The end had no reason to be the end except that it was the last scene.

I've read some reviews by Bruno-offended gays, but I didn't find him in any way offensive, and the audience at the theater, largely homos, didn't appear to either. I've seen Borat; I get Sacha Baron Cohen's joke. And, let's be honest, there are some pretty Bruno-esque gays out there.

Funny scenes included Bruno complimenting the "dick-sucking lips" of a "former homosexual" and Bruno going on a talk-show with his African baby, who he swapped for an iPod.

On the other hand, many of the situations he creates made me uncomfortable in a bad way. Depending on how controlled these situations are, SBC is a pretty brave dude; brave or totally insane. Take the scene where he stages a gay make-out session at a cage-wrestling match in Arkansas. How he can stay in character when raging rednecks are throwing bottles and chairs at him, I don't know. Moments like that were a bit too much. Borat illuminated the underbelly of America, but Bruno didn't show us anything we didn't already know. In fact it was all too familiar. A lot of times I felt like we were one second away from witnessing a Matthew Shepard moment, and that's not something I want to pay $10 to see.

In which I finally see the Shepard Fairey exhibit at the ICA

Once when we were eating lunch at our favorite place in Chinatown, Maggie pointed out a Shepard Fairey graffiti on the building across the street. I said "Oooh" and felt cultured.

On Saturday I finally made it to the ICA to see his exhibit.

The Andre The Giant stuff, the various portraits, record covers, concert posters -- these were all cool. Bold, clean lines on hyperdetailed mini-image collages could keep your eyes interested for hours. I'm not a museum person and suspected I'd feel self-conscious "looking at art," but the detail in the stuff made me want to examine it. I don't much care about the "meaning" of a piece as much as I liked to get right up close to see how he put them together.

But while I was looking at this stuff -- which was cool & interesting but only cool & interesting -- the Obama Hope poster was on my mind. Would it be there? Or was the little Obama portrait in the portait room with Johnny Cash and MLK all I was going to get?

The exhibit didn't disappoint, of course: the Hope poster is there -- it has a wall to itself and is much bigger than I imagined. I pretended not to be phased by it as I walked up to have a look, but it has the wow factor the other pieces lack. I felt very satisfied to see in person one of the most famous images in the world.

While the Fairey exhibit spanned four or five large rooms and showcased dozens of pieces (several as big as highway billboards), the rest of the museum was pretty skimpy. But Chris reminded me that the ICA isn't strictly a museum -- I guess there's other things going on on the other floors.

The building is art in its own right. It sits right on Boston Harbor and has huge glass walls that offer a mesmirizing view of the city.

All in all a worthwhile visit.

Obama Abroad

It's strange to me that foreign countries are pasting our president's picture on our flag, not to burn, but to wave around as though he were the Beatles. But of course that's exactly what I hoped for when I voted for him.


Six months into his presidency I give him mixed reviews. He's more cautious and less bold than I think the times call for, and I'm getting impatient on the gay stuff. But everything he's done and said abroad has been pretty much exactly what I wanted.

As a side note -- but maybe not too much to the side -- practically everyone I know is either currently abroad or is planning a trip abroad. At this moment I know someone visiting England, someone visiting Sweden, someone visiting France, and two unrelated people visiting Spain. Other upcoming trips include Scotland, Vietnam, and Canada. Even little old insular me is starting to get the itch for foreign travel.

For people my age, the entirety of our adult lives thus far was spent under the Bush Administration, during which, if we went anywhere, we said we were from Canada. Now I think we've got our dignity back, and it's making us want to explore.

Southwest Corridor

For more than two years, I have worked near the east entrance to the Southwest Corridor that runs parallel to Boylston Street. I guess I always thought it was just another sidewalk.

Today I learned how wrong I was - I took the passageway to Mass Ave to get to Whole Foods. It's beautiful! Parks and flowers and a tennis court and lots of dogs walking and playing!

Top 10 Reasons Not to get Haircut on Lunch Hour

10. Hair in your sandwich.

9. Hair in your tea.

8. Hair in your keyboard.

7. Hair clogging the laser of your mouse.

6. Hair sweat-stuck to your palms.

5. Hair falling into your shirt into your underwear into your buttcrack.

4. Hair in your eyeball when your boss is talking to you.

3. Um.

2. Actually, it was kind of

1. convenient.

Webster Makes Lame Words Official

The latest edition of the Merriam-Webster dictionary will include the following new words:

frenemy - one who acts like a friend but is really an enemy
locavore - one who eats only locally-grown food
vlogs - a blog that contain video material
webisode - a TV show you can watch online
staycation - staying in your home area while on vacation from work

There are others, such as flash mob and waterboarding, but what irks me about the ones I've mentioned above are that they are two words mashed together. In addition to how generally annoying that is, it makes me worry about the future of our language. Everything is getting shorter (from newspapers to blogs to Twitter; or letters to emails to texts, for example).

Will we soon (read - in a few hundred years) come full circle back to communicating in grunts?