Inessentials: The Blog

Although less vocal about it, I’ve been just as concerned about the future of NBC’s Chuck as the professional TV critics and major TV bloggers. It is the very peak of television entertainment right now. There are certainly better shows, by the standards of quality that apply to television, but there is none that is [...]

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Over this past weekend, Yale’s first (annual?) Environmental Film Festival ran. Although there were a number of films we wanted to see, we were only able to make it out on Sunday, when we saw Disneynature’s Earth and an independent production called Saving Luna.
Disneynature’s Earth (not to be confused with BBC’s Planet Earth, whose success [...]

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Let me take this opportunity to plug one of my favorite bands of the moment. Since they are getting a lot of buzz right now from places like NPR Music and are back at SXSW, it’s time to give them their due. I’m talking about the gloriously folky, countrified rock of The Avett Brothers. They [...]

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In listening to the new U2 album, I decided to record my reactions to each song as it was playing. You’ll get my initial reactions, including the rating I gave the song in iTunes. (Note: I constantly re-rate songs in iTunes, so these numbers will change. Also, iTunes ratings for me often have less to [...]

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Nicole had off work for the past week. (In Connecticut, schools have a one-week February break and a one-week April break, which seems nice until you realize that the school year runs into late June.) After a week of low-key sitting around, we went to New York for a couple nights this weekend. (Only after [...]

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Friday was my birthday. I won’t say how old I am now, but let’s just say it begins with a “3″ and ends with a “0.”
It was a low-key day. I tried a demo of World of Warcraft, sat around, and went out for a nice dinner with Nicole, who also brought me home a [...]

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One complaint I’ve heard about the new TV on the Radio album is that there is no “Staring at the Sun.” By this is meant that the album contains no stand-out track. This is in part due to David Sitek’s production, but he’s so well respected that no one wants to say the album is [...]

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One of my favorite songs over the last year has been “Failsafe” from Then New Pornographers’ Challengers, a song derided in most reviews but that I’ve come to love. The Choir Practice’s version has been a favorite in our household the last couple weeks.
But now I’m bothered by one of the lines in it. “Another [...]

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Normally, I don’t buy DVDs of any TV shows that aren’t comedies, since I find that it’s only the funny ones that I want to re-watch. Arrested Development, 30 Rock, Firefly - if it makes me laugh, I’ll watch it again and again. And if I’m not going to re-watch it, it’s not worth owning it. However, two [...]

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Congratulations to the Epson marketing campaign. They set up an ad on last.fm that allowed me to create a graph of my most-listened artists from the past three months. Click on the thumbnail to the left for the full image.
And in case you didn’t know, you can always listen to the music that I do [...]

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