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November 30, 2004

Looking for Someone Else?

Some people occasionally come to this page looking for the contact info for one of my relatives. So, with the realization that you might be looking for someone else when you come here, let me provide some contact info that you actually want:

Dr. Sylvia S. Christakos
Department of Biochemistry, University of Medicine and Dentistry of NJ
973-972-4033
christak at umdnj dot edu

Dr. Manny E. Christakos
North Jersey Thoracic
973-779-2270
mechristak at aol dot com

Peter Christakos
Elias Christakos
Famous Pizza House
203-838-6100

Posted by Dean at 1:17 PM | Comments (2)

November 29, 2004

Culinary Adventures Over Thanksgiving

Yes, I had the standard set of traditional Thanksgiving fare while visiting my family. After Thanksgiving, however, I got a chance to visit New York and sample some local restaurants. Highly recommended-- sandwiches for lunch at Sant Ambrœus in the West Village. I had a bagel at H&H Bagels, one of NYC's main suppliers of bagels to establishments all over the city. Meanwhile, let me make a plug for NJ's Jersey Boy Bagels, a place that I make sure to patronize when heading back to Boston from my family's place in NJ.

I had dinner at the most unlikely of fusion cuisines, the Cuban-Chinese restaurant La Caridad 78 on the Upper West Side.

Future plans involve visiting Magnolia Bakery in Greenwich Village. Meanwhile, I'll have to check out the cookbook.

Posted by Dean at 10:45 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 23, 2004

Don't steal Santa

The Danish are seeking to annex Santa's workshop! This must be stopped!

Posted by Dean at 4:03 PM | Comments (0)

November 12, 2004

Expanding my music horizons

Wednesday night, I had the privilege of seeing Mulatu Astatke, the famous Ethiopian jazz artist perform with the Either/Orchestra at the Regent Theater in Arlington.

His music is not jazz-influenced Ethiopian music, but rather Ethiopian-influenced jazz. Those with a deep familiarity with Ethiopian music (not me) will recognize references buried within Astatke's compositions. Pretty interesting, considering that I don't normally see performances of Ethiopian music or jazz very often.

Another interesting tidbit of information I learned is that the Ethiopian calendar runs 7 years behind the western calendar, which means it's 1997, according to Ethiopia's ecclesiastical calendar.

Posted by Dean at 9:53 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

November 9, 2004

Great Music, Irritating Web Page

Monday night at The Middle East, I got a chance to see The Advantage, a band that specializes in covers of 8-bit Nintendo songs. They also need to be award a prize for the most headache-inducing web page design that doesn't include the use of the blink tag. The venue was crowded, perhaps owing to the band's being featured in The Boston Phoenix.

Now, one would think that having a Nintendo theme-song cover band would have good nerd-rock opening bands in the tradition of Man or Astroman? No dice, as we were treated to Confusatron, who can't quite figure out whether they're a death metal band, a surf rock band, or a nerd-rock band. So promising, and yet they don't deliver-- though that last surf-rock song at the end was a good way to finish an otherwise vapid set. They were followed by Menomena (WARNING: click on at your own risk), who, along with having an even more headache-inducing web page than The Advantage, can be best described as a nerd jam-band. Except that jam-bands aren't my thing.

Pictures to follow as soon as I get around to putting them up.

Posted by Dean at 11:12 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

November 5, 2004

Blast you, George Lucas!

The Teaser Trailer for Episode III has been released. Let's get a few things out of the way. First of all, I own the original Star Wars Trilogy on both VHS and Laserdisc. This is so that I'll have some preserved copies of what Star Wars was like before the Special Edition was released. Let's face it-- Greedo never shot first. Episode I and Episode II were both terrible. That said, here I am, with the new Episode III trailer, and I have to say that it's amazing, and I've been sucked in to planning to see Episode III on opening night. Yes, it will probably be awful, but George Lucas makes really amazing trailers that give me that, "no, this time, it will be good!" Thanks, George, for once again, despite everything I know, giving me a sense of false hope.

On a similar note, there is an exhaustive cataloging of changes made to the Special Editions of Episode IV: A New Hope, Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back, and Episode VI: Return of the Jedi, which have been released on DVD.

Posted by Dean at 8:51 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

80s Flashback

John Scalzi provides us with this "Unholy 80s Mashup", providing music that evokes disturbing memories. Adds a commenter:

They say that when you die, your life flashes before your eyes.

And that was the soundtrack.

I'm split. I'm known for promoting plenty of 80s nostalgia. On the other hand, do I really need more reminders of high school and middle school? And was the singer featured here really something we need to remember?

Posted by Dean at 8:42 PM | Comments (0)

Why this weblog exists

Via Metrokitty, I found this entry at Websnark commenting on why the author's blog doesn't discuss his personal life. He makes an insightful observation:

It's easy to think "this is mine. This is intimate. This is my diary." But it isn't. It's public. Even if you lock your entries to Friends, unless you know all of your friends well, you're still speaking to an audience.

I've received comments about why my weblog doesn't discuss more of my personal feelings and events in my life, since lots of non-topic-specific weblogs tend to discuss an author's personal musings, reflections, and emotional discussions on the author's personal life. Then, earlier today, someone made some searches through my weblog using search terms directly related to my personal life. As I said in my About section, I'm actually pretty open about that sort of thing, if you bother to ask me personally. I don't feel the need to use this as a sounding board to discuss these things in public. First of all, it's just not fair to other people who might appear in the entries to have descriptions of my encounters with them appear in public. They didn't ask for that. Next, while I, personally, might like to keep an account of the goings-on in my own life, that would be something for private purposes. I do keep a sort of diary, but it's a pen-and-paper diary on my Moleskine notebook, mostly so I can keep track of what I did on a particular day and write down thoughts and ideas that aren't yet ready for public consumption. It doesn't do anyone any good to have my entire life up on the web and recorded by The Way-Back Machine for posterity. Finally, this domain name is "Christakos.com", not "DeanThePundit.com" or "DeansAttemptAtFindingCatharsis.com". In a sense, I'm the caretaker of a domain name that represents my entire extended family. It just so happens that, for now, I'm making personal use of the domain, but I'd rather not have the rest of my family implicated in my personal opinions and goings-on in my life, which are my own and do not represent my family as a whole. Anyone doing a Google search for "Christakos" or "Dean Christakos" will pull up this page. It's not even remotely private, so whenever I write something, I have to wonder whether it's something that I want the entire world to know about, including family, friends, acquaintances, potential employers, etc.

As I consequence, I prefer to keep this weblog limited to discussing interesting things I've found on the web, making comments about encounters with art and pop-culture, technology issues that concern me, and musings about my travels. Sometimes I briefly mention politics, but that's the exception, not the rule. If I go to a party, I'll mention that I went to a party, but I won't mention whose party, what their address is, or who did what to whom while I was there. It's ok to blog your own life, but no one asked to have their life blogged by someone else.

On another note, I'm sorry that I haven't updated this, more. I have been quite busy all through the month of October, and haven't been able to make more frequent updates. I'll try to change that, and both of my regular readers will have something new to read on a semi-regular basis.

Posted by Dean at 10:10 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Stopping Comment Spam

Like many webloggers, I've been faced with a large amount of comment spam, lately. E-mail spam is bad enough. USENET has faced an avalache of spam on its newsgroups. If that wasn't enough, now the open comments in weblogs get clogged with advertising spam meant both to grab everyone's attention and to Google-bomb the search engines. It looks like I've found a solution that runs on the MovableType weblogging software. MT Blacklist is a plugin for MovableType that filters out spam in comments in much the same way that e-mail spam filters work-- by scanning and deleting comments that contain a large number of hyperlinks and match up with known spam already being circulated. We'll see how it works.

Posted by Dean at 9:56 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack