Massless

W.S Merwin once remarked to Bill Moyers that "poetry, like all arts, is an expression of faith in the integrity of the senses and of the imagination."

That appropriately describes part of my relationship to poetry or art, but I know so many artists who derive work from where their senses fail, due to depression, aphasia, intoxication, to name a few.

Some of these artists are aware that their art is due to their idiosyncratic experience of the world. And a few I've spoken to have little faith that their senses are consistent or even accurate. They instead capture the moment of the failure, or of the disconnect with life, and I think that moment's oddity can be a rich invention; valuable, too, as it may inspire new lines of development for artistic creation in others.

Kevin Spacey just a made a movie with Dame Judi Dench, one of the most beautiful actresses alive, and allegedly commented:"She is not a bad pool player, which many people may not know. She does, though, cheat at ping-pong, and it's important that as many people as possible know this."

She was also quite the pretty young thing in earlier days, as well.

If you want to work at Interview magazine, the super-slick collection of ultra-hip ephemera that's cooler-than-a-Chloe + White Stripes threesome, then you'll have to pass this Pop Culture Test that's included in their employment application. Brought to the world by the archives of The Smoking Gun.

The Afghani equestrian game, buzkashi, involves two opposing groups trying to gain possession of the carcass of a headless calf. Related items include: the Buzkashi Yahoo! group and the ESPN Buzkashi / NFL comparison chart. (Whose jokes I don't get, Dear Reader, but since you might know about the NFL more than I...)

You can hear the angry, strained hiss of my ethernet hub from every room in my apartment.

Opening day for the Lord of The Rings, Pt. 1 came and went and the Hobbit Name Generator managed to survive the traffic. Which wouldn't be remarkable for other actual commercial sites, except the generator is just sitting on a little 333MHz Intel box in my apartment. No less than 60,000 page views (and millions of hits) a day from the 19th to the 24th. The bottleneck is the DSL line I have, and the little router, which froze twice on the 19th.

Some guru I am...only 40,000 page views per day were getting through before because I missed an obvious setting in the IIS snap-in which improved matters. Thanks are due to Matt Haughey, who's had some experience with rapidly scaling sites.