Category Archives: Recommendations

Chances are, you haven’t heard of Kevin Smith’s penultimate film Red State, which was released on DVD, Netflix, etc. yesterday. That, assuming you’ve even heard of Kevin Smith. Best known for what are affectionately known as the “Jay & Bob” movies, Smith got his start shooting the now iconic Clerks on a lark, for less than $30,000, mostly on his own credit cards. Clerks was a smash hit at Sundance that year and Kevin Smith went from living in his parents’ basement to being an established writer/filmmaker.

If you’re wholly intolerant to science fiction, adult situations, or raw language, then Misfits is not for you. The show could most readily be described as a fantastic hybridization of the BBC show Skins* and NBC’s strong-starting but fizzle-finishing Heroes. Six young people of an indeterminate age are assigned to the same community service detail as punishment for their various acts of criminal delinquency. During their first assignment, a strange thunderstorm pops up and blankets the area first with boulder-sized hail, then with ominous lightning. All five youths and their supervisor are struck by said lightning, but survive unharmed, if not unchanged. This is, like any superhero origin story, the part of the premise that you just go with.

I can’t remember just how I came across William Gurstelle’s Absinthe & Flamethrowers: Projects and Ruminations on the Art of Living Dangerously, but I’m extremely glad that I did. Although it includes outlandish projects such as making your own gun powder and rocket fuel, Absinth’s 195 pages stray from Gurstelle’s previous project-centric books such as Backyard Ballistics and Woosh, Boom, Splat!. Instead, Gurstelle takes a meandering stroll through his personal philosophy that responsible yet real danger is not only a lot of fun, but right good for us.

“A lot of people are widely read. Not me. I’m thinly read.” — Eddie Izzard

My wife rolls her eyes at me when I say this, but it’s a perfect description of my reading habits. I love literature, but I have never really been a reader. I love audiobooks and tear through many over the course of the year, but my rate of actual book reading is usually three books or fewer per year. So imagine my surprise when I …

It’s been a while since I did a recommendation. Not because I’m lacking in fabulous things that I’d like the world to embrace, but because I’ve been otherwise busy. However, about a month ago I was introduced to the music of Jonathan Coulton and I’m not the same.

Music recommendations are always really tricky because

With so many choices of channel and programming, it’s easy to feel like great television is getting harder and harder to find. I don’t think that’s really the case. Instead, I think that the gap between really awful television and truly spectacular television has actually widened. TV has been a wasteland of shlock for most of my lifetime, but since the late ’90s and the advent of “reality” programs, a trip to the icky bottom of the barrel now requires …

Once in a while a brilliant omission turns something very familiar and ordinary into a work of disturbing genius. Garfield minus Garfield is one such brilliant work. The premise: what happens when you take the predictably mediocre yet lovable Garfield comic strip and remove its animal stars? You’re left with Jon and his lonely, bipolar insanity. Ranging from hilariously bizarre to mildly disturbing, this fractured look into the world of Garfield has definitely made me look at this iconic comic strip in …

Lately I’ve become a big fan of Fast Company magazine. I started reading it about a year ago and was lucky enough to receive a subscription as a birthday present this year. Fast Company is one of those rare tech-savvy publications that isn’t antiquated by the time it makes it to print. Its mix of technology, the business of technology, and how innovation can and does affect our global society is consistently insightful and interesting. I especially love how I …