clock — watching time, the only true currency

I didn’t enjoy Night Train from Martin Amis. The author is famous for many things, including being famous as a contrarian public intellectual. (English authors pull that off even better than the late Norman Mailer did in this country.) He’s not famous for this book, and he shouldn’t be. It’s brief, and the female policewoman [...]

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The library “books you should read” table got me again. No complaints about this one, though.
John Le Carre is a known entity, but not to me. Smiley’s People is my first Le Carré read, though I did catch a recent movie.
Despite missing the first two books of the trilogy, I fell in with Smiley’s return [...]

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The post-Thanksgiving tradition continues. I ran the 5K in the Run Wild event this morning. A month ago, I was targeting the 10K, but a few weeks out of commission due to a back strain left me less confident of my fitness, so I stayed with the familiar.
I finished in 18:46 officially, 29th place overall [...]

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I have a lot to be thankful for. I’d like to add a clean inbox to the list, so time for a link smorgasbord.
Randy Pausch’s video lecture is old news, but I haven’t set aside 90 minutes to watch it. Everyone who has says it was worth it.
California is still the #1 state where people [...]

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I choose to spend less time posting my wit and wisdom (?) here at clock. But some themes of interest remain constant.
For instance…
I had a lot to say about TimesSelect when it was introduced in September 2005. Two years later, when the wall came down, my first inkling came from this blog post. The only [...]

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Fifteen years after the author signed it, I finally finished The Rascal King: The Life and Times of James Michael Curley (1874-1958); An Epic of Urban Politics and Irish America. Read a little on Google Books if the topic interests you.
The author, Jack Beatty, was a senior editor at The Atlantic Monthly during my time [...]

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I’m always impressed when a well-done magazine excerpt sharpens my anticipation of a book, rather than removing the need to read the full-length work.
I first read about Michael Oher in Sports Illustrated (Sep 25, 2006). Michael Lewis’s full book The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game goes deeper and broader, to great effect.
The game is [...]

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Looking for a bit of light fun on a Friday evening, our thoughts turned to The 40-Year-Old Virgin. Great call. After enjoying Steve Carell in Dan in Real Life recently, and laughing endlessly at Knocked Up this summer, it was a blessing to not have seen this Apatow film yet. Just moved Superbad to the [...]

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No Country for Old Men is bleached with violence. But the menace remains, so the gore doesn’t deaden you to the story. I haven’t read Cormac McCarthy’s book, but the Coen brothers certainly know how to make a movie which doesn’t feel like anything you’ve seen before.
The Texas countryside is beautiful, but blasted by sun [...]

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Last week, we saw Dan in Real Life, with Steve Carell and Juliette Binoche. Metacritic only cites a 65 — but I enjoyed this film. Family story, with humor coming from small realities and inter-family dynamics that really never change once they get set early on. People grow up, but that doesn’t mean they change. [...]

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