Jason B. posted an article on Simple Tricks and Nonsense - Mar 7, 2011, 11:48 pm
Well, that was a fast mission... STS-133 is already winding down, just as I was getting used to the idea. Discovery undocked from the International Space Station early this morning and is now pulling away a little more with each orbit, heading for a planned Wednesday landing at Kennedy Space Center ...
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Jason B. posted an article on Simple Tricks and Nonsense - Mar 6, 2011, 11:46 am
Here's another entry that probably won't be of much interest to anyone except me and possibly those readers who grew up in Utah or are otherwise familiar with the place, but I've been utterly enchanted by this find and want to share it with somebody. It's a 30-minute film called Desert Empire, which...
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Jason B. posted an article on Simple Tricks and Nonsense - Mar 3, 2011, 11:52 pm
Yeah, I know, I'm a little late with this one. Usher, would you please show that heckler to the door? Thanks. I'll wait until he's... oh, okay, good now we can talk. Last night, I was trying to look something up when I realized that I never got around to doing my customary overview of the books, mo...
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Jason B. posted an article on Simple Tricks and Nonsense - Mar 3, 2011, 2:38 am
During my glorious teenage years back in the Awesome '80s, the annual AutoRama car show was a must-attend event for every red-blooded young male in the valley. No, not because of the cars, although they were neat enough -- seeing ZZ Top's Eliminator hot rod in the flesh, er, steel was a real treat, ...
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Jason B. posted an article on Simple Tricks and Nonsense - Mar 3, 2011, 1:53 am
I struggled all last week to compose one of my occasional political cris de couer, this one motivated by the nonsense currently going on in Wisconsin. If you've been in a cave for the last month -- and I know at least one of my Loyal Readers whose circumstances could be described as such -- Wisconsi...
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Jason B. posted an article on Simple Tricks and Nonsense - Feb 24, 2011, 7:12 pm
With her solid rocket boosters burning a brilliant orange against a steel-blue late-afternoon sky, the space shuttle Discovery lifted off today on her final voyage before retirement. Discovery is the workhorse of the shuttle fleet with 38 prior missions to her credit, including the deployment of the...
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Jason B. posted an article on Simple Tricks and Nonsense - Feb 21, 2011, 11:36 am
...I'm available. Weddings, mitzvahs, whatever, man. Of course, whatever you want will have to wait until I finish my cocktail. Why don't you pull up a chair and have one with me? Just take it easy, man. Dudeism. I finally found a religion I can hang with...
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Jason B. posted an article on Simple Tricks and Nonsense - Feb 18, 2011, 7:26 pm
Oh, what the hell... since I brought it up earlier, here's the video for Wilson Phillips' number-one smash hit, "Hold On": Pretty silly stuff, I know... so sweet and earnest and self-helpy. So "just between us, girlfriend." So very 1990. (This will probably sound weird, but the music of the '90s so...
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Jason B. posted an article on Simple Tricks and Nonsense - Feb 18, 2011, 11:57 am
I was flipping through CDs at the library the other night, about to give up on finding anything I actually recognized -- I am so out of touch with current music, and by current I mean "released in the last 15 years" -- when a familiar cover caught my eye. It was the self-titled debut album by Wilson...
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Jason B. posted an article on Simple Tricks and Nonsense - Feb 17, 2011, 12:16 am
After several days of unseasonably warm and springlike weather, winter came back tonight, riding on the back of an avenging wind that wanted to drive the breath from your lungs and teach you a lesson for having dared to believe that you'd seen the last of him for another year. The snow was just sta...
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Jason B. posted an article on Simple Tricks and Nonsense - Feb 11, 2011, 1:49 am
I have this friend at work, a guy about my age who shares my somewhat, ahem, old-fashioned tastes in entertainment, and we often have a good time discussing stuff no one remembers except us. A couple months ago, we were in the midst of one such conversation when we came to an unexpected epiphany. It...
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Jason B. posted an article on Simple Tricks and Nonsense - Feb 10, 2011, 1:43 am
So, I've continued to dip from time to time into Vega$, that late-70s TV show starring Robert Urich as a T-Bird-driving private eye which I briefly discussed last summer. I haven't made it through the first season yet, and honestly, I'm not sure if I'm going to bother completing it. The show is ente...
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Jason B. posted an article on Simple Tricks and Nonsense - Feb 8, 2011, 5:00 pm
It seems like I've been mentioning Doctor Who quite a bit lately, and even though I always try to include sufficient background information when I'm blathering about something I suspect my readers might not know about, I imagine this show remains pretty esoteric for a lot of you folks. So in the spi...
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Jason B. posted an article on Simple Tricks and Nonsense - Feb 4, 2011, 7:36 pm
A couple days ago, I had a random burst of inspiration and decided to google the movie Mother Lode, a nifty adventure flick from 1982 starring Charlton Heston and a very young Kim Basinger. I was curious to see if there were any rumors about it finally coming to DVD, even though I didn't really expe...
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Jason B. posted an article on Simple Tricks and Nonsense - Feb 4, 2011, 1:47 am
SamuraiFrog was first on the block with this Star Trek-themed meme, and it looks like I'll bringing up the rear, as I've seen that it's already made the rounds. Still, I can't resist doing this one, even if it's already passe...
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Jason B. posted an article on Simple Tricks and Nonsense - Feb 3, 2011, 6:49 pm
Barring any mechanical problems that require her to go back to the Vehicle Assembly Building, space shuttle Discovery has made her final journey to Launch Pad 39A. She's scheduled to launch three weeks from today, February 24, bound for the International Space Station on her last flight before retir...
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Jason B. posted an article on Simple Tricks and Nonsense - Feb 3, 2011, 12:00 am
I don't know why I feel compelled to observe the deaths of celebrities the way I do. I only know that I always have, going all the way back to a couple of brief sentences I scribbled in an old pocket calendar on the day Elvis Presley died in 1977. (I was seven years old at the time.) A former girlfr...
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Jason B. posted an article on Simple Tricks and Nonsense - Feb 1, 2011, 12:02 am
The next couple of entries probably aren't going to be of any interest to anyone except me -- and isn't it cute that I think any of my entries are of interest to anyone except myself? -- but these are housekeeping-type things that I feel obligated to do in order to satisfy my own OCD-fueled mania fo...
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Jason B. posted an article on Simple Tricks and Nonsense - Jan 31, 2011, 1:09 pm
A number of blogs have already commented on yesteday's passing of film-music composer John Barry, aged 77, and I have little more to contribute except to note that a number of his scores rank among my all-time favorite music of any genre. (Yes, this formerly mullet-wearing rock-and-roll fan does hav...
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Jason B. posted an article on Simple Tricks and Nonsense - Jan 27, 2011, 6:48 pm
see more Lol Celebs I can live with that. Sirius was awesome, with his surface-level air of the swashbuckling rogue -- I've always been drawn to those rogues -- but also a grim and regretful side, which is much more like, well, me. Perfect.
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Jason B. posted an article on Simple Tricks and Nonsense - Jan 26, 2011, 11:57 pm
Just to keep you all up to date, the son of a bitch who killed my coworker Julie Jorgenson has been charged with second-degree felony manslaughter, as well as driving under the influence of a controlled substance and assorted misdemeanors related to driving like a f**king idiot. You can read the det...
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Jason B. posted an article on Simple Tricks and Nonsense - Jan 26, 2011, 1:00 pm
My main man Rick has been doing a lot of press lately in support of his memoir, Late, Late at Night, but sadly, many of the TV interviews I've seen have been pretty embarrassing, either filled with tittering "I loved you when I was 13!" silliness or focused too much on the salacious revelations in t...
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Jason B. posted an article on Simple Tricks and Nonsense - Jan 22, 2011, 12:42 pm
If you've been following this blog for a while, you probably know that I've long been fascinated by the so-called "Poe toaster," the mysterious figure in the hat and white scarf who for 60 years visited the grave of Edgar Allan Poe in the middle of the night on the writer's birthday (January 19) to ...
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Jason B. posted an article on Simple Tricks and Nonsense - Jan 22, 2011, 12:21 pm
I don't know about you, but after vomiting up that extremely long post on the Persian Gulf War, I could use a little palate cleanser. Here's something that's been making the rounds (and which I posted on Facebook a few days ago), so apologies to those who've already seen it, but I'm really amused by...
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Jason B. posted an article on Simple Tricks and Nonsense - Jan 21, 2011, 7:58 pm
Earlier this week, Josh Marshall reminded us that Monday night was the 20th anniversary of the start of the Persian Gulf War, and then he remarked that he's "not sure which is more surprising: that there's not a peep about this in the news or that, my god, the Gulf War was 20 years ago." I second t...
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Jason B. posted an article on Simple Tricks and Nonsense - Jan 20, 2011, 3:26 pm
Comments are switched off again, following the arrival of 500 or so new spam messages in the past 12 hours. And that's with a pretty aggressive filter setting. Just to make things extra challenging, everyone who left comments in the previous entry got filtered into the junk folder, so I had to go lo...
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Jason B. posted an article on Simple Tricks and Nonsense - Jan 18, 2011, 12:35 pm
If you were paying attention over the past 48 hours or so, you probably noticed a whole bunch of new entries appearing in and around ones that were already published days or even weeks ago. I probably ought to explain what's going on, and highlight the newly published stuff in case you didn't notice...
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Jason B. posted an article on Simple Tricks and Nonsense - Jan 14, 2011, 5:17 pm
Police have officially released the details of what happened the morning my coworker Julie Jorgenson was killed. It sounds like the rumors I posted the other day were all right on target, with one added tidbit: the dipshit driving the pickup not only had iced-over windows and was going way too fast ...
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Jason B. posted an article on Simple Tricks and Nonsense - Jan 13, 2011, 5:50 pm
You may recall me mentioning a while back that the classic sci-fi TV series Doctor Who was filming an episode right in my own backyard, specifically Utah's Monument Valley. Well, now you can catch a glimpse of the result in the official trailer for Series 6. (In case you don't know, the Brits call a...
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Jason B. posted an article on Simple Tricks and Nonsense - Jan 13, 2011, 1:39 pm
Inspired by a conversation with my coworkers, here's Harrison Ford's big-screen debut, in a 1966 crime thriller called Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round: Dead Heat starred James Coburn as a criminal who's pulling various con jobs as he gears up for a bank heist. It actually sounds like a pretty good fl...
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Jason B. posted an article on Simple Tricks and Nonsense - Jan 12, 2011, 12:17 am
What a strange, somber, frustrating, and seemingly endless day this has been. The memorial service for Julie, my unfortunate coworker, was held this afternoon. I planned on attending -- I even wore a shirt with a collar! -- but as the time to leave approached, I found myself with a job sitting on m...
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Jason B. posted an article on Simple Tricks and Nonsense - Jan 9, 2011, 12:05 pm
For any Loyal Readers who may be interested, Julie Jorgenson's obituary is now online. Much of my initial shock has subsided now, but I'm still sad about a friendship I never quite made, and horrified by the manner of her death, and I suspect those things are going to bother me for a long time. I'm...
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Jason B. posted an article on Simple Tricks and Nonsense - Jan 7, 2011, 6:45 am
Just a reminder that I've turned off the commenting feature due to those golmonging spam-bots ("golmonging" being a highly technical terms utilized by Lloyd Bridges in the original Battlestar Galactica, naturally). If you'd like to respond to anything I've written or otherwise contact me, you can se...
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Jason B. posted an article on Simple Tricks and Nonsense - Jan 7, 2011, 1:47 am
I have the good fortune of working with a lot of really incredible women, many of whom are young, smart, ambitious, and almost preternaturally glamorous. They are exactly the sort you expect to encounter in this crazy advertising industry, and you can tell within moments of meeting them that they're...
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Jason B. posted an article on Simple Tricks and Nonsense - Dec 31, 2010, 7:47 pm
I don't know about all you fine folks out there in InternetLand, but as far as The Girlfriend and I are concerned, midnight can't come soon enough. Not to be a drag or anything, but the past twelve months have been a real suckfest for the two of us. And no, I'm not just grumbling because 2010 is end...
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Jason B. posted an article on Simple Tricks and Nonsense - Dec 28, 2010, 6:15 am
One of the more amiable examples of Salt Lake street life is a man by the name of Eli (pronounced "Elly") Potash. With his scruffy beard and missing-teeth grin, he basically looks like any other homeless guy (although my understanding is that he's not quite homeless; he may spend lot of time out on ...
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Jason B. posted an article on Simple Tricks and Nonsense - Dec 23, 2010, 8:33 am
So, I've been taking four-day weekends ever since Thanksgiving in an effort to burn up some unused vacation time. My corporate overlords subscribe to the "use-it-or-lose-it" philosophy, apparently buying into some misbegotten notion that if you forbid your overworked, stressed-out staff of type-A pe...
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Jason B. posted an article on Simple Tricks and Nonsense - Dec 21, 2010, 8:15 am
Here's a NSFW-ish but very funny song that does away with all those tedious metaphors and slang and just says what every other pop song is trying to say: And it's catchy, too! I could make some kind of over-intellectualized case for how this is a snapshot of the state of American pop culture at the...
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Jason B. posted an article on Simple Tricks and Nonsense - Dec 20, 2010, 11:47 pm
One of the hardest things about being "not of The Body" when it comes to the Christmas season is feeling like you constantly have to explain why you're not as hap-hap-happy as everybody else is this time of year. It doesn't matter that you -- by which I mean I, of course -- have already explained it...
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Jason B. posted an article on Simple Tricks and Nonsense - Dec 20, 2010, 12:05 pm
On the original Star Trek, Captain Kirk seduced the alien babes with the help of his trusty Universal Translator. The Colonial warriors of the Battlestar Galactica (1978 vintage, of course) carried a gadget called the Languatron while on patrol, just in case they ran into non-English-speaking creatu...
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Jason B. posted an article on Simple Tricks and Nonsense - Dec 18, 2010, 5:18 pm
Kids, I really hate to do this, since interacting with readers is one of the primary pleasures of having a blog, but I'm at my wit's end. After several months of constant and steadily increasing comment-spam, I have decided to just shut the damn commenting feature off. You win, you grubby little spa...
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Jason B. posted an article on Simple Tricks and Nonsense - Dec 18, 2010, 3:38 pm
Congress has just voted to repeal Don't Ask, Don't Tell. Good. It was a stupid and short-sighted policy from the start. Honestly, it really doesn't matter what you think about gay marriage or gay people generally. If someone is willing to wear the uniform and carry a weapon, and they're physicall...
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Jason B. posted an article on Simple Tricks and Nonsense - Dec 14, 2010, 12:12 am
A couple days ago, I mentioned that the novel Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams contains a wisecrack about my hometown of Salt Lake City. (Actually, I guess SLC is better described as the urban core of my home region, as opposed to my actual hometown, which is a little burg ca...
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Jason B. posted an article on Simple Tricks and Nonsense - Dec 10, 2010, 3:21 pm
I wasn't planning on writing anything on the anniversary of John Lennon's death. I figured there would be plenty of other voices on the InterWebs this week paying tribute and remembering, and anyway I honestly didn't think I had much to say about the subject because, as crappy as this is going to so...
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Jason B. posted an article on Simple Tricks and Nonsense - Dec 9, 2010, 7:14 pm
I think most of my Loyal Readers are probably familiar with The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy -- that sublimely silly sci-fi spoof by Douglas Adams -- in one or another of its many varied forms. (It has been a radio show, a low-budget BBC television series, a big-budget Hollywood feature film, an...
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Jason B. posted an article on Simple Tricks and Nonsense - Dec 9, 2010, 6:35 pm
I think the headline above is all the set-up this requires: Taken from the deeply cynical, often vulgar, frequently profane, occasionally offensive (even to me), but almost always funny someecards.com.
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Jason B. posted an article on Simple Tricks and Nonsense - Dec 9, 2010, 12:15 pm
Big news from the Final Frontier: SpaceX, the spaceflight company started by Paypal and Tesla Motors founder Elon Musk, has become the first to successfully launch, orbit, and recover a spacecraft that was designed, built, and operated entirely by a commercial entity, rather than a government agency...
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Jason B. posted an article on Simple Tricks and Nonsense - Dec 6, 2010, 12:54 pm
Starting off the week with a dim, gray, and rainy Monday. I think we need a happy video to liven things up, don't you? Today's selection will probably not make a lot of sense to some of my Loyal Readers, but for all you folks who are about to be baffled, trust me: this is very cool and funny. This ...
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Jason B. posted an article on Simple Tricks and Nonsense - Dec 4, 2010, 10:32 pm
Well, SamuraiFrog and Jaquandor have already done this Star Wars meme, so I guess it's my turn... can't resist the opportunity to babble about Star Wars now, can I?
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Jason B. posted an article on Simple Tricks and Nonsense - Dec 1, 2010, 6:47 am
A few days ago, I received a much-appreciated email from my friend Karen, who'd read my annual holiday mope and wanted to let me know my dark feelings weren't all that unusual. She also wanted to forward something she thought I'd like, a poem she'd seen that "seemed very much like something have wri...
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