world

Casablanca

July 1, 2009

Mr. B and I finally got around to watching Casablanca, rounding out the last two people in the Western Hemisphere who have not seen this film.  Because my attention span has been derailed, much like an actual train, by Twitter, my ever-growing RSS feed, and, not being able to watch a black and white movie for more than ten minutes before yelling at our TV to stop being ‘so 1956′, we had to take two nights to do it.  Here ...

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Sands of Saudi

June 23, 2009

I recently read The Desert Contract by John Lathrop. As a novel, it was ok.  I mean, it had all the things a novel needs to have: characters, plot, and setting.  The characters were so flat I could probably inflate them with a helium tank and they would still collapse like failed Macy’s floats onto the Sands of Saudi Arabia, which are featured prominently in the book.  Oh yeah, I should probably tell you that the novel is about an ...

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Empty TEUS: Poetic, haunting empty boxes

February 26, 2009

One of the things I track at work are the movements of  TEUs (twenty-food equivalent units.)  These are the containers that you often see if you drive by ports, and sometimes on trucks.  It’s based on the volume that a box 20 feet long holds.  These boxes can hold anything from cigarettes to sardines to motorcycles and it’s how we track world trade.  The reason they’re called equivalent units is that they often don’t have a standard height, meaning that ...

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