I love to see what Netflix recommends for me based on how I rated other movies. Apparently because I enjoyed “Madonna, the Video Collection” and I enjoyed “Maurice” (based on the novel of young homosexual love, by E.M. Forster) Netflix is sure that I will enjoy, “Pet Shop Boys: Pop Art”.

Truth is…they are probably correct. I just love how they put those two things together to get the other. Damn good algorithm!

I have no idea what made me think of it…(I think it was a dream last night)…but this book blew my little 10-year old mind.
Ah, the worlds, creatures and visions that suddenly became alive in my mind.

thank you erb

from xkcd.com

Inigo’s brother?

“Improvisation, it is a mystery. You can write a book about it, but by the end no one still knows what it is. When I improvise and I’m in good form, I’m like somebody half sleeping. I even forget that there are people in front of me. Great improvisers are like priests, they are thinking only of their God.”
-Stéphane Grappelli (Jazz violinist)

New Album - Oct. 2 - Songs of Mass Destruction

“Perhaps the most indispensable thing we can do as human beings, every day of our lives, is remind ourselves and others of our complexity, fragility, finiteness and uniqueness.”

Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain
- Antonio Damasio

Now I think of myself as very pro-gay and I’m opposed to bigotry, however I was really taken aback this morning while listening to Dire Straits “Money For Nothing” on a Cable music channel (it was the 80’s channel if you must know) and they chose to totally blur out (not omit, just make electronically funny sounding) every part where they say ‘faggot”. For some reason I’m not down with that. It just kind of ruined the song.

I don’t know what “THE line” is, and I’m sure THAT debate will wage on for years and years. However, I just think we should all be a bit more considerate and a bit less sensitive. Does that make sense?

Because I apparently love lists tonight (The Guardian’s 100 Greatest Novels of All Time: (with italics denoting the one’s I’ve read, bold means I read it and I LOVED it.)

1. Don Quixote - Miguel De Cervantes
2. Pilgrim’s Progress - John Bunyan
3. Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Defoe
4. Gulliver’s Travels - Jonathan Swift
5. Tom Jones - Henry Fielding
6. Clarissa - Samuel Richardson
7. Tristram Shandy - Laurence Sterne
8. Dangerous Liaisons - Pierre Choderlos De Laclos
9. Emma - Jane Austen
10. Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
11. Nightmare Abbey - Thomas Love Peacock
12. The Black Sheep - Honore De Balzac
13. The Charterhouse of Parma - Stendhal
The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
15. Sybil - Benjamin Disraeli
16. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
17. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
18. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
19. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
20. The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
21. Moby-Dick - Herman Melville
22. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
23. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
24. Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
25. Little Women - Louisa M. Alcott
26. The Way We Live Now - Anthony Trollope
27. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
28. Daniel Deronda - George Eliot
29. The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoevsky
30. The Portrait of a Lady - Henry James
31. Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
32. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson
33. Three Men in a Boat - Jerome K. Jerome
34. The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
35. The Diary of a Nobody - George Grossmith
36. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
37. The Riddle of the Sands - Erskine Childers
38. The Call of the Wild - Jack London
39. Nostromo - Joseph Conrad
40. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
41. In Search of Lost Time - Marcel Proust
42. The Rainbow - D. H. Lawrence
43. The Good Soldier - Ford Madox Ford
44. The Thirty-Nine Steps - John Buchan
45. Ulysses - James Joyce
46. Mrs Dalloway - Virginia Woolf
47. A Passage to India - E. M. Forster
48. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
49. The Trial - Franz Kafka
50. Men Without Women - Ernest Hemingway
51. Journey to the End of the Night - Louis-Ferdinand Celine
52. As I Lay Dying - William Faulkner
53. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
54. Scoop - Evelyn Waugh
55. USA - John Dos Passos
56. The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler
57. The Pursuit Of Love - Nancy Mitford
58. The Plague - Albert Camus
59. Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell
60. Malone Dies - Samuel Beckett
61. Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
62. Wise Blood - Flannery O’Connor
63. Charlotte’s Web - E. B. White
64. The Lord Of The Rings J. R. R. Tolkien
65. Lucky Jim - Kingsley Amis
66. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
67. The Quiet American - Graham Greene
68 On the Road - Jack Kerouac
69. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
70. The Tin Drum - Gunter Grass
71. Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
72. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - Muriel Spark
73. To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee
74. Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
75. Herzog - Saul Bellow
76. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
77. Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont - Elizabeth Taylor
78. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - John Le Carre
79. Song of Solomon - Toni Morrison
80. The Bottle Factory Outing - Beryl Bainbridge
81. The Executioner’s Song - Norman Mailer
82. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller - Italo Calvino
83. A Bend in the River - V. S. Naipaul
84. Waiting for the Barbarians - J.M. Coetzee
85. Housekeeping - Marilynne Robinson
86. Lanark - Alasdair Gray
87. The New York Trilogy - Paul Auster
88. The BFG - Roald Dahl
89. The Periodic Table - Primo Levi
90. Money - Martin Amis
91. An Artist of the Floating World - Kazuo Ishiguro
92. Oscar And Lucinda - Peter Carey
93. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting - Milan Kundera
94. Haroun and the Sea af Stories - Salman Rushdie
95. La Confidential - James Ellroy
96. Wise Children - Angela Carter
97. Atonement - Ian McEwan
98. Northern Lights - Philip Pullman
99. American Pastoral - Philip Roth
100. Austerlitz - W. G. Sebald

Recent lyric love:

How come no one told me
All throughout history
The loneliest people
Were the ones who always spoke the truth
The ones who made a difference
By withstanding the indifference
I guess it’s up to me now
Should I take that risk or just smile?

What do you know
It happened again
What do you know

-Kings Of Convenience