Today is August 16th, which means an entire month has passed since my last post here. I believe that’s a first in the six-year history of Long Pauses. My blogging time has, instead, been spent over at my other site, 1st Thursday, where are a bunch of us are breathlessly anticipating what is shaping up to be a ridiculous film festival. Despite the fact that I’ll be in Toronto for 11 days with a Festival Pass that allows me to see as many as 50 films, I’m slowly coming to realize that I’ll still have to pass on a lot of great movies. It’s an embarrassment of riches, really.
In other news:
I’ve finally joined the 20th century and gotten a cell phone. Because I’m a whore to Steve Jobs I bought an iPhone, and it is, indeed, awesome. I can’t stop touching it. Here’s my first custom wallpaper.
I’ve almost completely stopped buying DVDs, but after watching Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People and Leopard Man recently, I happily sent $39.71 to Deep Discount for the Val Lewton Horror Collection. It’s quickly proving to be my favorite film experience of the year.
A word of advice: Think twice before buying a 30-year-old home. 30 years seems to be the exact timespan required to exhaust a home’s infrastructure — things like, say, air conditioning units. Ours died on a day when the heat index here hit 105. Good times. Another word of advice: When the contractor says it’ll take 2-3 weeks to relandscape and get the pool working again, he really means, “You might see me and my ‘crew’ a couple times over the next two months, but don’t worry, we’ll stop by often enough to totally destroy your yard. Oh, and I hope you weren’t planning to swim at all this year. Because you won’t.”
Because I spend 9-10 hours a day hunched over a computer in a windowless office, I’m always on the lookout for things to keep my mind occupied, and my latest obsession is the Charlie Rose archive. Granted, Rose is a bit of a tool, and he frequently commits the Great Sins of Interviewing — not listening to guests and interrupting them — but his archive is really deep. And his site allows the sharing of videos. Let’s see if this works: