I never knew

A couple favorite blurbs from Nick Hornby’s A Long Way Down, his latest. Better than About a Boy, not as good as High Fidelity.

How many times can you be called a fag before you snap? Not that I mind being called a fag, blah-blah-blah-blah, and some of my best friends, blah-blah, but to me, being a fag is about whether you like guys, not wether you like Don DeLillo—who is a guy, admittedly, but it’s his books I like, not his ass. Why does reading freak people out so much? Sure, I could be pretty antisocial when we were on the road, but if I was playing a Game Boy hour after hour, no one would be on my case. In my social circle, blowing up fucking space monsters is socially acceptable in a way that American Pastoral isn’t.—JJ

And that’s me: I suffer from a failure of imagination. I could do what I wanted, every day of my life, and what I want to do, apparently, is to get walloped out of my head and pick fights. Telling me I can do anything I want is like pulling the plug out of the bath and then telling the water it can go anywhere it wants. Try it, and see what happens.—Jess

One of his own states and his number one lap dog, Blair, are sidestepping Bush with a “Global Warming Pact”.

Another dumb fuck circuits touching move by Paul Tracy, running straight into Alex Tagliani. He’s got as much sportmanship in him as Shumacher AND he’s an ass.

There’s an amazing thing taking place in the economy that gets lost in our obsession with that myth. There are lots of small businesses run by men and women of every race, creed, lifestyle and political belief, who are making lots of money on the Internet without ever making it onto TechCrunch. In fact, there are lots of folks selling tens of thousands of dollars of merchandise on eBay each month who have never even heard the term Web 2.0. You think there is a proliferation of Web 2.0 startups? It’s nothing compared with the numbers of small businesses that are started offline every week.—Observations on Jason Fried and being a big ‘small business’

Man skydives with turbine engines strapped to his feet. And it worked (although what can you trust on video nowadays)

We must wean ourselves off the obsession with the competition. If we’re constantly trying to one-up them—or even just stay up with them—how does this really serve the users? How does it help the users kick ass if we’re so focused making sure our feature lists kick ass? But it’s hard to do.—Ignore the competition

Children of Men looks like it’s going to be excellent. Great bunch of actors too; Clive Owen, Julianne Moore, Michael Caine. (via toine on AIM)

Lately on the blogs I follow there’s been quite a bit of talk about .Net magazine which features, among others, a slew of Brit Packers and I’d like to have a look at it.

There’s a couple of magazine places I checkout weekly but I haven’t seen .Net since reading the first posts about it. Andy mentions the old unsatisfying directions the magazine had and I remember that so it’s definitely been available in Montréal before, I just haven’t seen it this month. If you know a place that carries it, please share.

(I know stuff is more up to date on the web but I like reading magazines so no need to comment in the “all you need is the web” direction :-p )