April 21, 2010
Had a routine nuclear stress test this morning. For all you youngsters who are not used to getting poked and probed (yet), it's this wonderful four-hour experience where you can't eat or have coffee for 12 hours before the test. They inject nuclear isotopes into a temporary IV in your arm, run you through a modified MRI machine, while insisting you put your arms over your head in a very uncomfortable position and not move for 15 minutes, then put you on a treadmill and increase the speed and angle of the treadmill until you are close to passing out, then they inject you with the nuke stuff, then run you through the MRI deal one more time. That's the short version. Believe me, it's a total laughfest from start to finish.

Came back to the office and took Stuart Rosebrook out to lunch for his 47th birthday. We went to El Encanto and he pitched me on several cover story ideas. I bought $25 and change, (biz account).

Speaking of biz, I forwarded a New Yorker business advice article to my good friend Charlie Waters in Las Vegas. He noted the items he thought worthwhile and sent it back to me so I wouldn't have to read it (I hate attatchments or links and rarely click on them). Here are his highlights:

"Just finished the excellent piece you sent me from The New Yorker. Thanks so much.

"I marked the following three things in it . . .

"1.) Publishing exists in a continual state of forecasting its own demise; at one major house, there is a running joke that the second book published on the Gutenberg press was about the death of the publishing business.

"2.) From the chairman and CEO of Random House: "If you want to make the right decision for the future, fear is not a very good consultant."

"3.) No matter where consumers buy books, their belief that electronic media should cost less---that something you can't hold simply isn't worth as much money---will exert a powerful force.

"I think all three apply to magazines and newspapers to some degree as well. So sayeth the dinosaur."

—Charles Richard Waters

Thanks Charles. Read about a weird Western in True West. Henry Beck made it sound rather interesting so I rented it from Netflix:

In a strange land where East meets West, two rival gangs -- the Heike Reds and the Genji Whites -- are locked in a deadly feud over a fortune in gold until a lone hero (Hideaki Ito) comes to town, meets the gangs' various victims and tries to restore order. Director Quentin Tarantino guest stars as a gunslinger in this visually stunning spaghetti Western from Japanese cult film director Takashi Miike.

Sukiyaki Western Django

Review later.

"Our energy is in proportion to the resistance it meets. We attempt nothing great but from a sense of the difficulties we have to encounter; we perservere in nothing great but from a pride in overcoming them."
—William Hazlitt