Bill Simmons and Malcolm Gladwell talk about sports and such. My favorite bit:

We had lunch a few weeks ago and discussed the parallels between music and basketball. The structure is fundamentally the same: You have a lead singer (the NBA alpha dog, like LeBron or Kobe), the lead guitarist (the sidekick, like Pippen or McHale), the drummer (an unsung third wheel, like Parish or Worthy), the bassist (a solid, reliable and ultimately disposable role player: like Byron Scott or Anderson Varejao); and then everyone else (the other rotation guys). Bands can go different ways just like successful basketball teams. McCartney and Lennon were two geniuses who ultimately needed one another (like Young Magic and Older Kareem, or Shaq and Young Kobe), whereas MJ and LeBron were more like Sting or Springsteen (someone who could carry the band by themselves). And if you want to drag hip-hop or rap into it, the best parallel would obviously be Jordan’s post-baseball Bulls: MJ was Chuck D, Pippen was Terminator X, and there is no effing doubt that Rodman was Flavor Flav.

I set up a separate tumbly thing on this domain. Here's the feed for the tumbly thing. This whole operation was no doubt inspired by the blog/tumblr separation that Austin Kleon and Ryan Coleman have been doing for a while. Not too long ago Ryan also shared some thoughts on rolling up your content that helped decide the matter. The tumblr will be a nice place to gather bits of influence and inspiration---hopefully both more frequent for you and less time-consuming for me; I'll reserve the home page here for personal stuff and bigger projects TBD. I might clean up the tumblr styling later, and will probably break things in the process, but it's up and running and good enough for now. Enjoy.

What Johnny Cash likes:

I love songs about horses, railroads, land, judgment day, family, hard times, whiskey, courtship, marriage, adultery, separation, murder, war, prison, rambling, damnation, home, salvation, death, pride, humor, piety, rebellion, patriotism, larceny, determination, tragedy, rowdiness, heartbreak, and love. And Mother. And God.

I'll be spending the weekend in Baltimore. No big plans except for a visit to Fort McHenry and catching the Sunday afternoon game at Camden Yards.

A couple years ago, Stanford hosted an evening with Leonard Cohen and Philip Glass. Over an hour of conversation (pdf transcript), AND they made the audience submit questions via notecards! A good bit from Glass:

Someone recently was showing me a book that this person was writing and she said, do you have any advice? I said, Yes, my advice is: Don't stop working before the book is finished. And I quickly added: Because it's in the last moments of the work that the quality appears. It doesn't happen at the beginning; it happens at the end.

Facing Ali could be a really cool documentary. (It's taken me a while to realize I kind of like boxing, for better or worse.)

This nice appreciation of Susan Boyle reminded me of the hip vs earnest bit from Randy Pausch's book:

No matter how much we mock those we consider beneath us, it's much more satisfying to be reminded that everyone has dignity...

Eventually, we'll all feel like outcasts, and none of us wants to be laughed at. The Susan Boyle Story suggests we won't be...

Whether or not that moral is true in the real world, it's alluringly true in the Susan Boyle Story. By participating in the narrative that television has constructed for her, by cheering her on and watching her video over and over, we can not only feel good about graciously welcoming an outsider, but also feel relief for helping create a world that will someday welcome us.

[via marginal revolution]