As part of our dinner conversation last night: off the beaten path spots for the M&M road trip. Tips from around the table:
1) Middendorf’s in Pass Manchac, Louisiana. You’ll never get a better fried seafood platter and its thin-filleted fried catfish — made with the same recipe since 1934 — is famous. I just […]

that will piss you off! Listen to this NPR interview to learn about the shadowy cabals known as hedge funds and how the Bush administration is assisting them in screwing the world. Yeah, that means you. (No better, the Dems regulatory response: huh? who, us? uh…) Warning: listening to this may make you want to […]

I know I said the curation of the recent portrait exhibit at the Long Beach Museum of Art fell flat, but the paintings themselves left an impression on me. I found myself thinking a lot about the high level of technical performance required to create the hyper-real portraits in the the show. So when — […]

Wow, things are suddenly so busy here — only time to bang out a roundup.
Doing: With Val’s hot, under-the-hood stylings, I’m redesigning a new and streamlined CaliforniaAuthors [sketch], with a simultaneous rework of thenightnote [sketch]. Also: I’m still on board with Claudio, helping him with the lightning-fast launch of his dream practice. While he works […]

… as covered in the Grunion Gazette, now officially the only newspaper that cares about me, and conversely …

Divide the $608 Billion spent on Operation Iraqi Freedom through FY 2008 [1] by the population of the U.S. and you’ll see that the war is costing every US man, woman and child about $2,400 — that’s just through the end of this fiscal year. Now, take note that public broadcasting costs about $1.53 per […]

Duane Kaiser, the talented creator of the now-famous Painting A Day blog/movement, has a series of nice time-lapse movies of his beautiful still life technique. Enjoy the one below and check them all out here.

Happy birthday to my mom Libby Barclay Buuck. We are so happy you were born into this world! Here you are on the steps of the little house on Birch Street in New Orleans — as cute and fashionable then as you always are!
For her birthday, Val and I have given mom a cool Netflix […]

Californiaauthors.com is celebrating the paperback release of Ed Humes’ Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion and the Battle for America’s Soul with a cool giveaway. We’re having a drawing! And, two lucky winners will get an autographed copy of Ed’s book. Visit CaliforniaAuthors to learn more. And get on over there, because the drawing is Friday. […]

Okay, dragging my ass home from Fluklahoma — as slow as the Greyhound local, stopping at every little bumfuck town from here to Wellville. I got a euro-postcard from M&M. Yeah, got to keep in touch. So here’s a little news from the road back to Normal (wherever the hell that is).
Listening to: Amy Winehouse. […]

Night Note friend and partner at californiaauthors.com, Donna Wares, has launched a website for her cool new travel book Great Escapes: Southern California. Last Sunday, she had a nice splash in the LA Times travel section (complete with a cool google map and pictures), with another story in the offing for this Sunday. My opinion: […]

A very cool HD broadcast of the Red Hot Chili Peppers in Milan. Very sharp! (It was on MTV’s HD channel. Here’s a link to the channel’s incredibly lame web site [don’t bother] [these people really need to talk to Ethan] and here’s a link to a You Tubed bootleg of one of the numbers […]

… to xkcd — a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language. It is geek-larious. You should read it! Here’s a sample (click the comics to see them full sized:
Kayak:

Writers’ Strike:

Lisp:

More: The Blog Fractal, Join MySpace, Ninja Turtles, Perspective, Regular Expressions.
Okay, what kind of geek are you?A laughing one? Yeah, me too.

… is that Futurama is in heavy rotation on Comedy Central. Obsessively watching it is great preparation for the series’ triumphant return! Read about it at wired.com. Thanks to a little YouTube bootleggery, here’s a canape for connoisseurs of geek comedy.

Whoa! Writer’s strike guilty pleasures update: American Gladiators returns tonight. P.S: Hey, they just promo-ed […]

I got my new book on Epicurus today and a new word for 2008, ataraxia. Ataraxia is the goal of Epicurean thought: peace of mind.
No advocate of 21st-century-style hedonism — as is the popular idea of Epicurean philosophy — Epicurus advocated friendship, freedom, thought, prudence and just living. He is one of the great […]

I watched this BBC series that aired on PBS when I was in my late teens and really enjoyed it. I think I identified with the working class heroine, who with pluck and ambition and foibles a-plenty, creates a grand life on her own terms. I mean, pluck, ambition and foibles were about all I […]

Last night Val and I had a little Shrimp Remoulade and settled in to watch Helvetica, a stylish documentary about typography, culture and the influence of — and controversy surrounding — the Helvetica typeface, which turned 50 in 2007.
Yes, controversy. You see, in the world of graphic design, the ubiquitous typeface is a divider, […]

Friend and californiaauthors.com co-publisher, Donna Wares has a new book coming out in May: Great Escapes: Southern California. The book also features images by Night Note friend and renowned photographer Rick Rickman and a first person story on fighter-pilot fun by Val Cohen!
Today, the book’s cover went up at Amazon. Wee! Let the pre-orders […]

Thanks to Mark and Michelle, the Cohens are now part of the largest distributed computing project in history! Among the many marvels of our new Playstation 3: the ease with which we are suddenly folding@home. Wikipedia will tell you that means we’re letting Stanford University use our playstation’s “downtime” to “perform computationally intensive simulations of […]

I was exactly like a kid. The box came and I saw that I’d received the coolest possible holiday present — I squealed, I called my friends and I ran around the house until I bonked. Seriously. So, I have that weird exhaustion usually reserved for excited sugar-rushers on xmas morning, the kind where they […]