Category: Out there and interesting

So I’m getting my morning beverage at Philz Coffee, as I’m wont to do most weekdays, and a tall skinny gentlemen in line behind me hands me a postcard. It’s for a production of the play "Corpus Christi" written by Terrence McNally and staged this weekend  at the San Francisco School for the Arts.  In "Corpus Christi", the story of Jesus is re-imagined with Jesus as a gay man living in Corpus Christi, Texas in 1950.

It’s only after I get my coffee sit down and begin working that I look at the card again. The man who handed me the card is the same fellow playing Jesus. Which I interpret to mean that Jesus invited me to an evening at the theatre. To observe a dramatic retelling of his death.

I’m flattered. And a little weirded out

According to this story in the New York Times, newly-minted college freshman are increasingly receiving an iPod and/or an iPhone when they arrive on campus.

The always-on Internet devices raise some novel possibilities, like
tracking where students congregate. With far less controversy, colleges
could send messages about canceled classes, delayed buses, campus
crises or just the cafeteria menu.

While schools emphasize its
usefulness — online research in class and instant polling of students,
for example — a big part of the attraction is, undoubtedly, that the iPhone
is cool and a hit with students. Basking in the aura of a cutting-edge
product could just help a university foster a cutting-edge reputation.

I think when I came to college in 1991, we got toiletry kits. So while I’m tempted to say, "My how times have changed!" I would not count on my own university changing with them.  We got a full fledged art center in the late 1990s. An off-camera medical reporter for ABC was once a graduation speaker.

Yes, chilins, my beloved Johns Hopkins is about as cutting edge as a ball point pen. Sigh.

I’ve been meaning to go to the Conference on World Affairs, held every April in Boulder, Colorado, since I first read Roger Ebert’s writings about it when I was a teenager. Ebert, who has attended the conference 38 years in a row, summed it up thusly..

“Why is this week like lifeblood for me? Once we settle into our life’s careers, most of us charge the line
     with our heads down, doing our jobs and trying to get ahead. We become specialists, and develop tunnel vision. I have a tendency, for example,to think the world revolves around movies. Once a year at the Conference, I am forced to think on subjects not of my own choosing. I get to talk to people from other worlds.”

Celebrating its 60th anniversary this year, the CWA is the granddaddy of the get-a-bunch-of-smart-people-in-a-room-and-have-everyone-benefit-conference mold that would later give birth to the Idea Festival and TED.

For me, the Conference on World Affairs seems to perennially fall in that netherworld between recovering from SXSW and gearing up for the San Francisco International Film Festival. But this year, it’s coming in early April, a full two weeks after Austin and before SFIFF.

It just may happen this time around.  Look at who’s coming already.

So I was not in Brooklyn this weekend and thus could not attend the annual meeting of the Corduroy Club. The CC get together on 11/11 (because the date resembles the cut of the fabric) to pay tribute to this most ribby of cloths.

The New Yorker profiled the group last year and sadly, little mention is made of Corduroy the Bear, a hero of my childhood whose sainthood or at least fan club is long overdue.

Next year in green overalls (via Mental Floss).

Someone sent me this. You can make your own cubist drawings. I dig dig dig (dig cubed).

Check out this photo (via my friend Sara) of snowy New York. Any wonder why it’s not much of an auto culture out there?

Okay, does anyone not get why Dave is stealing chairs? There’s kind of an explanation in this post (scroll to bottom).

Dorothy Geeben is 96 years old and running unopposed for reelection as mayor of Ocean Breeze Park, Florida. This makes Ms. Geeben the nation’s oldest mayor. She’ll be 3 months shy of her 99th birthday when her next term is up.