If you ever find yourself looking for a Christmas movie involving a grown woman trapped in a magical snow globe, I’ve seen two. Also, Holiday in Handcuffs, the Buffalo ’66 of the genre.
PS: Luke, read more, you philistine.
Journal
The MFIC
Luke, it was great meeting you and hanging out, although we could have spent more time together. I was planning on working on my enigma persona, but you were too much fun.
MFIC, RM.
That was the first of thousands of emails from my then “new boss” (MFIC stood for “Mother Fucker in Charge,” borrowed from Mayor Young) the day after we left Coachella in 2004. There was a time when I almost considered him a best friend and a time when we didn’t talk at all. We had so many plans and ideas and it was all electrifying and none of it panned out.
I’ve been missing him dearly for about a year now and looks like I’ll be missing him for the rest of my life.
Taking this one to heart, and in the future trying to remember these two things: don’t wait to do things you wanna do, and to let go of stupid shit.
Hope to see you again, Bob.
Love,
Luke
June 25, 1956 – June 8, 2018
Bourdain was a hero to me.
Today is a reminder.
To travel more.
To eat more good food.
To have more sex.
To really listen to others.
To try my best to never lose hope.
Dice
I learned this game at a bicycle shop in Brooklyn that had a liquor license.
Supposedly they had great brunch as well.
It requires at least three dice.
Each player antes one dollar into the pot and they then take it in turn throwing the dice.
The object of the game is to score the lowest total amount by adding up the spot values of all three set aside dice but counting 3s as zeroes.
Each player has up to three rolls of the dice (or more if you have more dice. One roll per die).
You must set at least one aside after each throw. Once a dice is set aside, it may not be rolled again.
The best possible score after all the dice have been set aside is zero (all threes).
In the event of equally low scores, tied players either play again or have a shoot-off with one die per person.
The winner takes the pot and rolls first in the next game.
Milos Forman has passed.
In my formative years I often felt like an outsider and Forman’s best films – One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Man on the Moon, The People vs. Larry Flynt, Hair and Amadeus– sang to my rebellious heart.
Site Update
Not sure what I am doing here.
But I I like that.
Feel like this is an attempt to put all the pieces together, even if I don’t know what it is I am building.
If that makes me Winston with a puzzle, so be it.
Tired of not doing the things I want to do.
That includes being tired of missing the things I used to do.
In the past year or so I’ve built and discarded about five or six skateboards online.
I finally pulled the trigger. Mark Gonzales deck, Spitfire wheels, Independent trucks. Life is too short to be missing out. To fear other’s perceptions. If you get any sort of joy from something harmless, let that shit ride.
(One last Gonz video for good measure. Apologies for the low-quality. As far as I’m concerned whichever service makes old skate videos available wins the streaming wars.)
On Reading
Still deleting/sorting old bookmarks. Found several related to reading.
Which is something I need to do more of. One day I’ll read books and not just buy them.
Farnam Street recommends trying to get through 25 pages per day. They see this as a clear path to completing works that might otherwise seem daunting:
Then I thought about all of the other great works I wanted to get to in my lifetime. Caro has four (eventually five) books about LBJ that are masterpieces on 20th century American politics. I want to read Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I want to read Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and War and Peace. I want to read Boswell’s Johnson. Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. More of Ron Chernow’s biographies.
Let’s say that two days out of each month, you probably won’t have time to read. Plus Christmas. That gives you 340 days a year of solid reading time. 25 pages a day for 340 days is 8,500 pages. 8,500. What I have also found is that, when I commit to a minimum of 25 pages, I almost always read more. So let’s call the 8,500 pages 10,000. (I only need to extend that 25 pages into 30 to get there.)
With 10,000 pages a year, at a general pace of 25/day, what can we get done?
Well, The Power Broker is 1,100 pages. The four LBJ books are collectively 3,552 pages. Tolstoy’s two masterpieces come in at a combined 2,160. Gibbons is six volumes and runs to about 3,660 pages. That’s 10,472 pages.
Bill Gates thinks you should dedicate an hour at a time to reading and has some pretty good thoughts on how to read.
Austin Kleon also has good advice, including carrying a book with you at all times and keeping a stack to read nearby.
And throwing your phone in the ocean.