I think Eagle vs. Shark deserves to be the next cult classic. Please patronize it when it comes to a theater near you.
(PS: you don’t actually have to wait for the movie to buy the wonderful music of the band that composed its soundtrack, The Phoenix Foundation.)
In Peacemakers, you play a leader of either Israel or Palestine. To win as Israel, you have to earn a high approval rating with the people of both Israel and Palestine. To win as Palestine, you must win the hearts of both Palestinians and residents of other parts of the world. If your approval rating with either of your constituencies sinks below a given threshold, you lose. The simulation is illustrated with video footage from actual news reports. Ernest Adams writes it up for Gamasutra.
After seeing Life of Pi yesterday on the shelf, picking it up for the nth time, and perusing the dust jacket, like always, I thought to myself, “I should get this book. It has been recommended to me by many readers I trust. It won the Booker Prize. It sounds like a rollicking good read. It meets the page 69 test.” And then I put it back on the shelf. I’m still not sure exactly why, but I think I’m getting closer to an answer: I hate the cover. The illustration makes me unhappy, the fonts make me retch, the color offends me. It is an aesthetic aversion for which I can offer no defense whatsoever. None. I just gotta confess. It’s irrational, I know. I’m depriving myself of cultural delights, I understand. But I think something about that cover makes me really not want to read that book. Anyone care to make a similar confession, or am I the only insane one here?
I’m finding this Beliefnet exchange between Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan delectable. Just the juicy, metaphor-happy game of Pong alone would be enough to make me happy. But the real fun of it is watching these two completely irreconcilable worldviews in two supremely intelligent heads honestly, respectfully clashing, striving for reconciliation. The thing is, you know that this debate isn’t going to solve or change anything, or even end in any reasonably cathartic way, and I don’t think I walked away from reading it with a single additional nugget of wisdom in my head. Except maybe that this is the way all hard questions in life should be fought over and decided.
I’ve eaten it.
I just got back from an eight-day vacation in Rio de Janeiro. Having consistently been told to try every unfamiliar fruit we came across, my travelmates and I raided the fruit stands and juice shops for the new and exotic. We appreciated açaí, the crazy caloric berry goop that’s somehow acquired a reputation as a quasi-health product. We loved the omnipresence of mango and passion fruit. But the flavor that obsessed us at the juice shops was something the locals called “graviola,” which we didn’t find at any fruit stands, so we didn’t know what it looked like. At the fruit stand, we fell for a spiny, green confection called the custard-apple.
On one of our last days in Rio, we passed by a street market where all kinds of fruit were being sold. There, we discovered a fruit called the “cherimoya,” described to us as a hybrid of the graviola and the custard-apple. I bought three.
The cherimoya tastes like a glazed orgasm marinated in ecstasy. “Custard apple” is a reasonable description, although it fails to capture anything of the fruit’s divinity; it’s got a texture resembling custard, and the apple probably comes closest in taste. Fittingly, one can only eat the cherimoya in little tantalizing bites; the seeds and shape prevent you from taking a mouthful. I’m thinking God added the seeds right after He kicked Adam and Eve out of Eden for eating the thing.
If this had been what Turkish Delight tasted like, I would totally understand Edmund’s willingness to become the White Witch’s man-whore.
Brazil also brought me my first tastes of ostrich, which was yummy, albeit a tad overhyped; and piranha, which except for the minor thrill of hypothetical cannibalism was unexciting.
Disclaimer: After all this hype, three of you are going to go to Brazil and tell me you find the cherimoya too sweet. To each his own. For you, the graviola, the custard-apple, or the sugar-apple might be the devil’s fruit. I’m guessing the entire Annona genus has been forbidden by God.
Still catching up on RSS feeds (only 3,692 items left to go!), and so far, this is the best April Fool’s page. Google’s entries were kinda disappointing.
Aurgasm was my favorite music discovery of last month, if only for this wonderful remix of the song “Kiss the Girl.”
I’m catching up on weeks of RSS feeds. (Actually, I’m about to go to bed, and I’ve barely made a dent. Sigh.) Everybody’s going nuts over these Ira Glass videos on storytelling. Robin probably won’t point it out, so I will:
a) these have been around for a while. I want him to do another set of them now that he’s conquered another medium. Hey, co-blogger, could ya work on that?
b) Current’s actually got a ton more of these, not only with Ira Glass, but with Sarah Vowell, Dave Eggers, Elvis Mitchell, Robert Redford, Orville Schell, Xeni Jardin, Bonz Malone, Catherine Hardwicke and Jonathan Caouette. Go marinate in narrative goodness.