Obscurorant 2.0

“Look eye! Always look eye!”

Been enjoying Sippican Cottage a lot recently, so I added it to the blogroll. Added The Fat Guy while I was at it.

This Saturday morning I’ll turn in my last assignment of the semester.
Sunday? A book sale at the Thomas Crane Library, followed by The Good, The Bad and the Ugly at the Brattle.  Let me know if you want to come along.

Last week The Telegraph published a list of the 50 best cult books. Let leave aside the question of what exactly a ‘cult book’ is, and focus on the important thing here – me. I consider myself fairly well-read, but it turns out I’ve only read six of the fifty books listed.
The Catcher in the [...]

I love this picture: Brendan Behan and Jackie Gleason. Now that must have been one hell of an evening.

Submitted for your consideration: a post on the 30th anniversary of The Silmarillion. Much less popular (and read) than either The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion contains what may be my favorite passage, or story, in all of Tolkien’s work: the tale of Beren and Luthien.

Not only was I unaware that such a thing as the Culinary Arts Museum existed, I had no idea there was an entire exhibit devoted to diners. Might be a nice day trip, if you can get there before June of this year (when the exhibit ends).

Tomorrow the first four Replacements albums – Sorry Ma, Forgot To Take Out The Trash, Stink, Hootenanny, and Let It Be – will be reissued, in remastered form with bonus tracks, by Rhino Records. My initial reaction was ‘meh, I don’t really need to buy these albums again,’ but this article may have changed my [...]

Speaking of Dark Tower, did you know that you can play it on line? Or that Orson Welles touted the game way back in the day?

When I was a kid I was fascinated by the prop-driven war planes of WWII. Back then I filled a sketch book with drawings of those aircraft but now the internet provides grist for that particular mill:
Brutal-Looking Airplanes at 2blowhards.
Creamer’s Dream from Shorpy.
More than 60 years ago six P-38 Lightnings and two B-17 bombers [...]

Oh, the humanity: va-rice-ity!

There was no reason for my eyes to blink open at 6:20 this morning, as my alarm had yet to go off.
Nor was there any reason for the theme song from Arthur to be running through my mind almost as soon as I became conscious of being awake.

So I’m listening to a podcast interview with Julie Andrews and I realize I’ve never seen The Sound of Music. My question to you, my half-dozen or so readers, becomes: is this something I should rectify? Or something for which I should be thankful?

I’ve written previously of the limited selection of LPs in my house growing up, and the fact that any LPs my sister and/or I liked were absolutely played to death. My sister favored Annie and Free To Be You And Me, while I tended towards the Clancy Brothers and my anthology of cowboy songs.
I can’t [...]

Over at Stainless Steel Droppings Carl V. posted all sorts of cool stuff that he found across the intertubes, with a heavy emphasis on the work of fantasy and sci-fi illustrators. I found these fascinating: Gelaskins – removable art prints for iPods and laptops. In place of the Playstation 3 I’d been dreaming of [...]