What I'm Doing Instead of Shoveling

A few observations on this brisk Saturday morning before I get the walk and driveway cleaned off:

• First, a belated happy 85th birthday to the great Dave Brubeck, whom my ♥GF♥ and I had the pleasure of seeing a couple of years ago. What a cool guy! He and Thelonious Monk tie for second place in my ranking of favorite jazz musicians. Duke Ellington comes in first.
• Looks like I have at least one thing in common with Jake Gyllenhaal.



• Thanks to Polyglot, here's the official blog of the Ig Nobel Prizes and of the Annals of Improbable Research (AIR). Here's the AIR main site. The thing that caught my attention was the following: Today marks the beginning of a new undertaking: Project Professor-Professor. Project Professor Professor is a prodigious international effort to identify and list all active research professors whose first and last names are identical. The first two professors celebrated by Project Professor-Professor are Abraham Abraham and Warren Warren.
• In the Chicago area this weekend or next? You'll want to make sure to stop at the Facets Multimedia Clearance Sale. Every obscure indie, foreign, art-house, silent, drive-in, you-name-it movie you've always wanted but could never find will be there.
• Here's the new blog of As If! (Young Adult Authors Supporting Intellectual Freedom). (As long as they were going for acronymic conveyance of adolescent attitude, they should have called it "Ya... As If!")
• I'm almost halfway through John Battelle's book and it's really good; I recommend it to anyone who is interested in that sort of thing. It's interesting to reflect back just a few years to see the way the geography and culture of the Internet has evolved. It's funny to read about people who threatened lawsuits against early search engines because they didn't want to be involved in any of these new-fangled "page-rankings."