Circular Reasoning: Darwin To Purrington And Back Again
I admit to a certain amount of Internet vanity. While Google alerts for “Hal Stern” most frequently turn up the Cal professor of statistics or the Arizona real estate agent who share my legal name, Google Analytics tells the colder, bolder truth about my public persona: about 300 people a week pay attention. Discounting for [...]
Right To Art: Cory Doctorow’s “Pirate Cinema”
“I sampled your voice, you was usin’ it wrong” – Jay-Z, “Takeover”, from 2001′s “The Blueprint”, which itself contains samples of The Doors “Five to One” (which contains the lyric “no one here gets out alive” which became the title of a Jim Morrison biography, so either I’ve proved the point I want to make [...]
A Christmas List
I’ve been listening to Christmas carols in my car this week, mostly checking out the traditional and pop holiday stations on XM, finding that I know most of the old school songs due to seven years of playing clarinet in a variety of school concert bands. We didn’t use “holiday” as a placeholder for “Christmas” [...]
Tend Your Garden: Three Views of Rush’s “Clockwork Angels”
“Hey Dad, play that ‘We Are Young’ song again” asked my then-four year old son. Referencing by chorus rather than title, I knew he meant Rush’s “Dreamline” and the request was another case of life imitating art reflecting life again. He’d heard it as the opening song for the Rush show at the PNC Bank [...]
What Happened to the Novel?
[Mild spoiler alert, but if you read this all the way through, hopefully you won't buy or read either Michael Chabon's "Telegraph Avenue" or JK Rowling's "Casual Vacancy", the two novels I'm about to skewer.] What has happened to the art form known as the novel? I’ll drop the superlatives of “great” and geographical restriction [...]
Hockey (and WordPress) Book Update
Author Amy Julia Becker neatly summarizes what it takes to write a memoir, and upon further reflection I think that’s what my now decade-long effort to write “the hockey book” has become. Ten full seasons ago, I began scribbling notes on the back of printed rink directions and in a small reporters notebook I kept [...]
“Game Face” Part 2: Yaroslavl Lokomotiv memorial
Here’s the second half of my fictional, hockey-themed short story. We pick up in a locker room in Chicago. For the next three hours, we have more fun. It’s a repeat of yesterday’s pond adventure. We beat the two-time defending Stanley Cup champion Blackhawks, in their building, snapping a five-game losing streak. We win our [...]
“Game Face” Part 1: In Memory Of Yaroslavl Lokomotiv
A year ago today, the plane carrying the Yaroslavl Lokomotiv team of Russia’s Kontinental Hockey League (the NHL of Russia) crashed with only one survivor. The outpouring of support from the hockey community was incredible. My only familiarity with Lokomotiv was via a web site that sold Russian hockey jerseys, and my connection to the [...]
Doctorow Short Stories (And A Long One)
In anticipaion of today’s mail drop, I re-read “Another Time, Another Place”, the short story contributed by Cory Doctorow to the Chronicles of Harris Burdick anthology. Without spoiling it too much, it’s a great story about hope and possibility. As much as I’m a fanboy at MAXINT volume for all of Doctorow’s work, I tend [...]
Review: “Life on Mars: The New Frontier”
Unrelated to the TV series, other books with similar titles or even the Governator in Total Recall, Jonathan Strahan’s collection of short stories is a superb glimpse into what life might be like on the red planet. What sets it apart is that all of the stories are related through the eyes of its intended [...]