Dear Red: (original) Thank you for 1986; and all the others, but thank you for 1986. That was the year I learned to love basketball: packed around a little television in my dorm, watching the fuzzy images of Bird and Parish and McHale storm through the league. My dad scalping tickets for the playoffs. 36-6 in the third quarter. The Celtics. Thank you.

Commentary on the Sony Reader (which you can get at Borders in the Cambridgeside Galleria right now, if you don’t feel like waiting till December for it to ship online): It’s better than any e-book experience I’ve ever had. The form factor is superb; it’s a smidge larger than a normal paperback, and much thinner. There’s very little distraction from the screen. The screen is excellent — e-ink is way easier to read than an LCD screen. The only quibble I have is the flash when you turn a page. I think it’s just how e-ink works, and I think I’ll get used to it, but it’s a tad annoying right now. ...

While I have done a number of fairly embarrassing things in my life, I have never… No, I don’t think I can describe it. Go here. (original) For another view, try this. Perfectly work-safe. The words “forty million dollar elbow” are involved, but it’s not a sports story. Wow.

Questions came first. Is it a pale shadow of Infernal Affairs? Will Scorsese have the guts to sail to the wind and let the bleakness blow through him? Will Nicholson be too much? Will DiCaprio be enough? Can Scorsese make it tight enough for us to feel the pain? Is it Boston? Yeah, it’s Boston. The original was a tense, restrained exercise in suspense and pain. It was good, or better than good. The Departed takes the plot — the same lines, in places — and spills it out on a canvas made of Boston’s racial tensions and class divisions. It’s an equal to its predecessor through an alchemical transformation of mood, theme, and locale. William Monahan is from Boston. He was born ten years before me, which means he grew up watching South Boston riot when black kids showed up at their schools. That’s where the movie opens; that’s where it’s from. ...

It’s time for the Lost Badass List to reappear. We last examined the question of the island’s badassery after the seaon finale. This list categorizes badasses over time, but is heavily weighted towards the current storyarc. This year, since the Others are regulars and since I cannot deny the force of nature that is Benry (credit for neologism to S.), Others are eligible for the list. Without further ado! 1. Benry (aka Ben Linus, aka Henry Gale){{ double-space-with-newline }} 2. Sayid{{ double-space-with-newline }} 3. Jin{{ double-space-with-newline }} 4. Sawyer{{ double-space-with-newline }} 5. Juliette Comments and spoilers after the jump.

As of September 24th, the first two Skylark books by E. E. Smith are listed on the Distributed Proofreader site’s list of Silver E-Texts. This means that they’re gonna hit the Project Gutenberg (original) archives soon. This is awesome. Sadly, the Lensman books look like they’re still a few decades out.

You guys catching this Keith Olbermann stuff (original)? Oughta be.

Spirit of the Century (which is cool, buy it if you like pulp gaming) has an interesting character generation system that reminds me a tad of Lexicon. Hm, Wikipedia has failed yet again; there’s no page for Lexicon. That one, I might actually fix. Anyway. Spirit’s character generation is a group activity that ensures pre-play connections between characters. I think it can be played out in blog entries. Let’s try it. ...

The MacArthur Fellows always cheer me up, as much for the people I don’t recognize as for those I do. It must be such a neat surprise to be named. And look! David Macaulay. I love his books. Josiah McElheny! I don’t know you but you’re not Dale Chihuly. Terence Tao, way to be smart. Luis von Ahn, thanks for inventing CAPTCHA. I love that people invent stuff that seems obvious afterwards. And John Zorn, yeah, there’s a lot right about that. ...

Hey, are you hiring sysadmins in the Boston area? Do you have a NOC position for someone with a few years of experience in desktop support and NOC work (first-tier monitoring and response) or a position for a solid mid-level Windows sysadmin with a ton of hardware, EMC, Veritas, and Windows work under his belt? Let me know; I might know people who would fit your needs.