Have you ever read Kate Beaton’s freakin’ hilarious comics? If not, you’re missing out on some of the best humor on the web (according to my vast and comprehensive survey).

With my new job came a 5-day-a-week train commute. I love it. As a result, the number of books I’ve read this past month has spiked dramatically. After reading a brief synopsis of the plot, I picked up Cormac McCarthy’s The Road over lunch. By the next evening, I’d finished it.

The plot, to frame it in a manner as spare as McCarthy’s style, follows the journey of a father and son traveling by foot across a portion of the U.S. in a world roughly a decade (give or take) after an apocalyptic occurrence, which has left both the earth and humanity barren and blackened.

McCarthy’s style is, apparently, quite spare as a matter of course, so I’m not sure if The Road is in line with his other books or even more stripped down than usual. Either way, the tale is delivered with a simplicity and clarity that I’ve hungered for in so many other situations, but hadn’t received. McCarthy’s style is a kind of poetic prose. It has all of the weight and careful crafting of poetry but its payload is delivered with the unassuming clarity and directness of prose. The typesetting is deceptive and adds pages to what is a fairly brief novel, but I found it to be the perfect length. At its opening, we join the man and boy in the midst of their journey, as though we’ve encountered them in the fog along one of the long-deserted highways. In the end, we leave just as quietly, knowing that our time with them was simply a crucial scene, rather than the full story.

From beginning to end, I was pulled into the relationship of the man and boy (who are also father and son) and deeply touched by the questions and emotions it brought to the surface. There were moments in the telling of the tale that cut straight through to my core in the best possible ways. The post-apocalyptic setting is a still but savage canvas upon which McCarthy makes stark strokes, evoking an emotional depth and enfolding sense of place. The immersive completeness of it was surprising, given how little context and few details are given. The effortless simplicity of it all belies the great skill clearly at work in its construction.

I wholeheartedly recommend The Road to everyone. It’s not an easy read, emotionally speaking, but its rewards are proportionally great.

Half a year! Well, more than that now because a man’s gotta work... by sitting at a computer... but I have to do specific things at that computer, not blog about things! So here we are now.

Anyway, Blackbird (which is a nickname, for those who don’t know) is on the verge of some child-like behaviors and is moving quickly out of the infant stage (characterized by functioning much like a soft, adorable appliance that cries and converts liquid to poop).

As time passes, and with my new full-time job, I’m taking less photos of Blackbird. We have quite a bit more video, but I haven’t had the time to edit and export anything. Perhaps before the next update I'll put up some full-motion Blackbird, which is probably good, as her personality is coming out more and more in her movements and sounds.

I’m watching the NBC coverage of the Olympic Games opening ceremony and two things occur to me:

1) Someone please pack the commentators into a van and make them disappear. I didn’t even know it was possible to be that inane.

2) I don’t have an image to link to at the moment to support this, but I would like to officially announce here that I’ve renamed China’s “Bird’s Nest Stadium.” The new name is The Va-China.

Zoë Keating’s album One Cello x 16: Natoma is a piece of music everyone should listen to. I’m not sure I have the musical vocabulary to place it or articulate it with any skill. But if I had to put words to it, I’d describe it as intense, deep and abstract, but still accessible string work that can transform any space you’re in while listening to it. It’s the kind of thing that’s easy to turn into an “atonal nightmare of pretension” (to quote President Bartlett of The West Wing’s assessment of modern composing), but Keating never does. I am immediately drawn into it and my emotions are wrapped into its resonant rumbling, slow majestic soaring and exotic tonal modulations. The craziest thing is that, I’m pretty sure there are no instruments but layered recordings of the cello. Additionally, I understand that she creates these loops on the fly with foot-triggered hardware in such a way that no performances are ever the same.

That description alone will probably make you want to preemptively hate it, but why don’t you just sample some of it here? Or maybe you should just buy it right now.

Don’t worry, it’s coming soon. Consider this a stopgap until then.

It was good to be back. I missed last year’s TypeCon in Seattle, so I was very happy when I purchased my pass and booked my room for this year’s TypeCon in Buffalo. It was my third, and it was great.

So, Alisa and I are planning to make some old-fashioned sloppy joes with turkey burger, minus the ’shrooms (as they are basically MOLD, people). This lead to the following exchange ’twixt her and I:

Alisa: I really like that it has celery in it.

Me: ::mildly befuddled look::

Alisa: I mean, it’s basically a Bloody Mary with meat.

Me: ::mildly appetized, mildly horrified look::

So, dear readers, I turn to you with the following query: Bloody Mary with meat. Yea or Nay?

Bonus question: if yea, what meat?