the real Chris Lee

Oh really, AT&T?  You want me to switch to your internet service but I can only view your offer site in IE?  Awesome.  Not like that limits your market or anything.

Or: my strong apologizes for making your strong look like cottage cheese.  Word.

God, I love promo posters.  There’s nothing better to get you excited about new seasons — and I don’t just mean in the television sense.

I saw plenty of promos for season 2 of Mad Men on my recent trip to New York.  I don’t know if there’s anything particularly symbolic about this imagery, but man I really need to start watching this show.

I know some were dissatisfied with season 2 of Heroes, but I actually didn’t mind it so much.  Veronica — er, I mean Kristen Bell — probably had something to do with it.  I’m excited to see where they take this season with Sylar returning, and it even looks like they’re going to resurrect the alternate future.  I’m a sucker for time travel and alternate realities.

I haven’t even seen Season 4 yet, but the Entourage crew will never cease to look cool.  Don’t know about that tag line, though.  Can you believe they’re already on Season 5?

Lastly, I don’t actually know anything about the new 90210 but I’m curious to see what Rob Thomas does with it.

We’ll look at more posters as they surface.

So I’m perusing the fiction page on the New Yorker website looking for my next story to read when I realize that T. Coraghessan Boyle has not one, not two, but three of the most recent 25 stories listed.  Really, New Yorker?  Really???  Not only do you give John Updike two stories, but Coraghessan gets THREE?  This is almost worse than discovering Joyce Carol Oates has suddenly put out another novel, as she’s so prone to doing.  I think I’ve been down this rant before so I’ll keep it short — I don’t actually have anything against Coraghessan, I just really wish the New Yorker would spread it around a little bit more.

Thus I resolutely plunged into The Headstrong Historian by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a writer who, though not unsuccessful (so Wikipedia tells me) isn’t usually entitled to five New Yorker stories a year.  The result was pretty inspiring: Adichie has crafted a nice family history of a Nigerian woman named Nwamgba who first lives through her husband, then through her Anglicized son, then finally through a granddaughter who manages to grow up and recover Nwamgba’s lost culture long after she’s gone in the span of a few breathtaking sentences.  It’s a refreshing peak into another culture that doesn’t feel exoticized or forced.

Well, this was pretty unexpected.  That huge launch of the App Store I was so excited about earlier has actually resulted in extremely little change in my day-to-day living.  I’ve only installed a handful of apps and have been mostly unimpressed.  In fact I think I still prefer the mobile web version of Facebook over its Facebook iPhone app, if one can actually believe that.  It sounds like the paid marketplace is actually doing ok for itself, but what’s really mind-boggling is the fact that there doesn’t seem to be a must-have networking app that everyone else with an iPhone is using — that or I’m just not hip enough yet.  At least the I Am Rich app brought a smile to my face.  Anyone have any killer apps they recommend?

While on the train a couple weeks ago I found these words written in feminine script on the back of a discarded receipt from Miami International:

I also learned on this trip that I continue to grow & love you more.

This line has stuck with me for so many reasons.  Consider:

1. I’m a huge believer in personal growth.
2. I believe in the power of travel to bring perspective to life.
3. I love people who take the time to document their learnings from a trip.
4. The “also” implies that this was just one of a set of revelations.
5. “Grow” comes before “love”.
6. It’s just a great melodic sentence — it sounds just like a Miranda July title.

Who were these words directed to?  A lover?  A god?  A city?  The writer herself?  Maybe all of the above.  And as I flew back in to San Francisco Sunday night and reflected on the recent brush with death, the ridiculously beautiful friends and all the incredible work that lies ahead of us, I recalled this note and found myself thinking, “Yeah, it’s kinda like that.”

I’m probably not going to be getting a new iPhone anytime soon.  Frankly I was a little underwhelmed by the V2 design, primarily because my biggest gripes (poor battery life, an amazingly sub-par camera) weren’t addressed.  Plus that whole rate bump for 3G service makes me think my V1 iPhone might still be the better deal.

But the most interesting thing will be seeing what happens with the App Store.  If anyone can execute on this model it’s Apple; Facebook has proven (mostly through failure, unfortunately) that a certain level of regulation and editing is needed in order to make the app market for an open platform successful.  Otherwise, you’re just facing way too much noise from all the wannabes trying to cash in on the latest marketing channel.  To be clear, it’s not certain the App Store will pull it off — can they regulate enough to help users make sense of it all?  e.g. how many different location-based social networking apps do you expect to see? — but again, I wouldn’t want to bet against them.  With functioning Android handsets delayed even further, I think Apple’s in a great position: they’ve got true first-mover advantage and an ultra-early adopter rabid user base that creates exactly the right network for mobile apps to succeed.

I’ve just updated to 2.0 and successfully re-activated.  I can’t wait to see how all of this unfolds.

Alice Munro’s latest story in the New Yorker is called Deep-Holes.  You can read it here.

To me the sheer scope of this piece ends up getting in its own way.  The story spans at least a couple decades, and its characters (a family with three children) pass through time so quickly that it’s difficult to get a lock on their personalities, ambitions and perceptions.  The story is a third person limited from the perspective of Sally, the mother of the three children and spouse of an academic geologist.  Munro’s prose is crisp as always and I like the theme of the estranged favorite son, but some of the plot points make these characters turn more quickly than I feel comfortable believing: an accident changes a boy forever, a sudden death in the family is received differently than one might expect, a dramatic fire (Munro’s own adjective) brings the family back together.  The story does possess one of the more satisfyingly ambiguous endings I’ve read, but overall the piece still ends up being a little too cold from all the temporal distance it needs to cover.

30 Rock episodes are broken into one teaser and three acts.

Lost episodes are broken into one teaser and five acts.

Battlestar episodes are broken into one teaser and four acts.

Heroes episodes are broken into one teaser and five acts.

HBO has no commercial breaks.

There are twelve cylon models.

Today is a special day: the new iPhone is introduced, my favorite actress turns 27 and I finally start using Facebook. The new world begins today.