If you've been following the Tour de France doping scandal, particularly the allegations against Floyd Landis, you should read all the posts on the Free Floyd Landis blog. The author makes some compelling arguments about not trusting the results of the testosterone/epitestosterone ratio test that Floyd failed.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 30 July 2006 at 10:12 PM

Netflix Subscribers: If you're interested in the new NBC dramas "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip" or "Kidnapped" you should add them to your Netflix queue. The pilot episodes of both new dramas will be available exclusively from Netflix starting on August 5th. This is more than a month before the shows will premiere on NBC. Here are the links to the shows on Netflix: Studio 60 and Kidnapped.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 19 July 2006 at 3:45 PM

Okay, book talk isn't complete without some book/tv overlap. One of my favorite novels from last summer was Darkly Dreaming Dexter. The protagonist, Dexter, was a forensic technician/serial killer. Think Horatio Caine from CSI:Miami (the book is set in Miami) except, in his spare time, H kills and dismembers people. It's an interesting premise and it made for a great book. (I also recommend the second book in the series, Dearly Devoted Dexter.)

Here's where the TV connection comes into play. Showtime has ordered twelve episodes of a series based on the Dexter novels. The P-D's Gail Pennington reports that it will be a bit of a gore-fest. I'm not a fan of gross-out TV, but I'll probably watch regardless.

The Showtime website also has some details on the show.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 19 July 2006 at 9:01 AM

Poor Tom Boonen. He wore the maillot jaune (the yellow jersey worn by the over-all Tour de France leader) for four days in this tour and was second in the points competition (green jersey). But now he's out with some kind of unknown ailment. Reuters is reporting that he had trouble breathing on the descent from the Col de l'Izoard. The QuickStep team spokesman says that "He lowered his pace and when he was trying to step up a gear, it was worse. He was powerless, he could not go on." And so goes Belgium's hopes for a top Tour finish.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 18 July 2006 at 12:24 PM

Let's talk books. In the past week I've read three that I'd like to discuss with you: Black Swan Green, Academy X, and JPod. All are decent, but one is better than the rest.

Black Swan Green by David Mitchell is a coming-of-age story set in Margaret Thatcher's England. This is the best of the bunch, far and away. The premise sounds trite and predictable, but the book hits all the right notes. I picked it up on a lazy Saturday morning and didn't go to bed until I had finished it. It was a great, great novel.

Academy X is a roman a clef set in a NYC prep school. Academy X was also a quick read, but mainly because it was short. Its protagonist was a slightly pathetic school teacher. After giving a bad grade to a rich student, he had to fight for his job. Pretty basic stuff and nothing to write home about.

JPod is your standard Douglas Coupland novel about 20-somethings at a software company. In many ways, JPod was a bit of an enigma. It's long, but its length is deceptive (twenty pages were devoted to printing out the first 100,000 digits of pi, for example). The characters are quirky, but not engaging. (The novel argues that all of its main characters are autistic. This may be so, but it doesn't make me like them.) But mainly, the novel is just too self-aware. Douglas Coupland gives himself plenty of references before he shows up as a character in the second half of the novel. Also, if you've read Microserfs, Coupland's famous GenX novel, you can pretty much predict all the main plot points of JPod. This leaves Coupland with the unenviable task of trying to engage us through minor plot points. These can be interesting at times, but eventually they become too unbelievable. Perhaps if Coupland were ten years younger and a little hipper (in the novel, he describes himself as looking like a TV dad) he could have pulled this off. But then the book would have been called Microserfs. This was the book I was most looking forward too. And it wasn't bad. But it was the biggest disappoint of the group.

So, in summary, you should read Black Swan Green. JPod and Academy X aren't bad, but there are better options out there.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 17 July 2006 at 10:15 PM

A litle get together was held this evening for my birthday, michael's birthday, and Fritz's birthday. The video below shows us at dinner, then the arcade at Swin-A-Round Fun Town, and then us playing mini golf in the dark.

In addition to playing mini golf and eating dinner at CJ Muggs, go-karts were ridden, air hockey was contested, and foosball was played. A very fun night.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 8 July 2006 at 1:06 AM

It's lease renewal time here at Apartment 6. Rather than just signing on the dotted line, Jeremy and I did a bit or research and checked out some other options. The video below is footage of the best apartment we found. On the plus side it has washer and dryer hookups (although not in the unit itself) and nice hardwood floors. In the minus column parking would probably be a bit tricky and it's a bit more expensive than the current place we have. In the end, it seems like it probably isn't worth the effort to move. But what do you think?

Comments: 2 Posted by david on 6 July 2006 at 6:00 PM

The bikini turns 60 today. George W. Bush turns 60 tomorrow. Coincidence? Physics makes it clear that it is not. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. In layman's terms, balance must be maintained. This means that the introduction of the bikini (something good) must be counter-balanced by the birth of W (something bad). Or vice versa, depending on your perspective. Just imagine: if guys weren't so girl-crazy, we wouldn't be stuck with Bush II as our president.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 5 July 2006 at 6:11 PM