Posts by matt

I tried to reform. After leaving college, I had to confront the fact that my activities during those four years were not socially acceptable. I assiduously removed all references to that lifestyle, reforming some of those dead-giveaway behavioral tics, brushing up on new conversation topics, even tweaking my music collection.

It was hard. It had been a wild four years, and I was still in the thrall of college a cappella. I had to move on.

But last week, my former a cappella group’s CD was released, it arrived in my mailbox on Thursday, and folks, I have backslid completely. I have not stopped listening to this thing since I got it. I am absolutely swimming in six-part harmony cover versions of contemporary pop songs, and I’m no longer going to hide it. Call me a degenerate. I don’t care anymore.

In fact, I’m posting three snippets of the album, three of my favorite parts. How I love this stuff.

• Sample 1 – Change the World
• Sample 2 – Song for Holly
• Sample 3 – Don’t Change Your Plans

He’s awesome. Can’t say I was the most inspired interviewer, but this was fun to do.

Update (7.14.2011): I’m updating this post 6 years later because Tim Carmody pointed out that the Fresno Bee link no longer works. Try this one.

The interactive short story Fa

It was really nice to see the President showing us the meaning of freedom on Independence Day. (Via.)

—ooooooooooooo…

This is kind of awesome. The website for Wedding Crashers (the upcoming movie with Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn) is allowing anyone to digitally insert herself into the movie trailer. Thus ensuring that new pseudo-movie-stars like my friend Ryan McGee become the viral marketing brigade for the film.

Workmanlike RSS feed for the Romenesko sidebar. Not pretty, but it gets the job done.

Update: This feed had stopped working properly after the Wotzwot RSS tool’s hiatus. I’ve updated it to scrape the page properly again.

Wotzwot = busted. Here is the new feed, courtesy of the awesome Feed43.

Have you seen the movie Crash yet? Phenomenal, and I’m very excited about the prospect of it being turned into a TV show.

Timely, too, considering you still read stories like this:

A group of white men set upon three black men on the streets of Howard Beach, Queens, early yesterday, beating one with a baseball bat and fracturing his skull, the police and prosecutors said.

The white men, who emerged from a black 2005 Cadillac Escalade before dawn, sent the black men fleeing into nearby swampland and through the streets of the largely white, insular neighborhood. …

Mr. Minucci, the accused, said that the three black men might have been looking at his jewelry earlier last week, and that he was responding to that when he came across them around 3 a.m. yesterday. For their part, two of the black men, according to police, admitted under questioning that they had been in the area with hopes of stealing a car.

Sad. Every which way.

I take it all back. Sorry, Mark Danner. David Foster Wallace clearly gave the best commencement speech this year at Kenyon College, filled with his trademark meta-metadiscursion, but much less pithy than his usual fare. It teeters at one point right on the edge of trite, but slams it all home marvelously, I think.

Hmm.