This year, my movie viewing habits prevented me from seeing any of the Oscar-nominated films ahead of the awards ceremony. Even those of the nominees that were already out on DVD did not find its way to the top of my Netflix queue until now. So the very first nominated…
Remember how at the end of this meme I promised to catch up “in the next year or so” on some of the yet-unread books on that list? Well, I am happy to announce that six months in, I managed to check off one single entry. Of course, me being…
I don’t get these victory parades. You stand in the crowd for several hours. You block passage for people who actually have business walking down the streets that the mob you’re part of is blocking. You have to exercise a significant bladder control above and beyond your normal exertion. And…
Consumer energy markets have been deregulated for a few years now. A household in New Jersey has a choice of buying their electricity and/or gas from a range of suppliers. In theory, that gives the consumer the opportunity to shop around for the best rates and save a bundle on…
My regular readers – however few of you are out there – likely could notice that I started a new series of posts in the last month, “My favorite sights of…”. Unpredictable person that I am, I now decided to pen a brief introduction to the series after posting a…
Turns out that even after not having lived in the UK for two and a half years and not having a single penny of UK-taxable income to my name, I still owe it to Her Majesty Revenue and Customs to fill out the tax return for the most recent fiscal…
Among the recent junk in our mailbox, Natasha received a cruise offer. Straight to the recycling bin, normally. Except! This one was addressed to her maiden name, correctly spelled in all its 13-character glory. And yet, it had our current address. How would a marketing company be able to tie…
After a family viewing of one of Becky’s favorite childhood flicks, worldly person that she is, she made a whimsical reference to her high-school friends about being fond of a Russian dub of a Japanese take on a French fairly tale. When the name of the story came up, Puss…
In our neck of comparatively multi-cultural suburbia, there is a fair percentage of people who hail from the former Soviet Union. Kimmy recently relayed an anecdote that illustrated that rather amusingly. She was having lunch in her middle-school cafeteria. A few girls sat together, as usual. Kimberly, Danielle, Gabriela, Emily,…
With a bit of spare time on my hands, I decided to change the way embedded pictures are enlarged to a more contemporary and elegant method. Feel free to click on any image within any post, and please do let me know if you come across any buggy behavior. Thanks!
Here’s the Twitter conundrum in its full glory: The simplest thing to do was to tweet something along the lines of “Took a professional test – piece of cake. Now certified in something I don’t actually expect to be focused on.” Instead, I wanted to elaborate, and link the occurrence…
When we lived in London, we made several trips to its Science Museum (for instance, as recorded in this old entry). But in all years of living in New Jersey, we have never visited our own Liberty Science Center. Today, Kimmy and Natasha rectified the glaring oversight (yours truly stayed…
Trying to think – not for the first time, mind you – what I would use Twitter for. I don’t care to share the tidbits of my life as they happen. Maybe, I did care a bit more during the years in England, but even then, I do not see…
One of those songs that I cannot get out of my head for days once someone plants it there. Maybe, if I pass it on to someone…
It will say in sufficiently large and light-reflecting letters: “If you see cars passing you on the right, MOVE TO THE SLOWER LANE, ASSHOLE!”
I have spent the last hour or so recovering my blog from backups after it was hacked by some f***ers who had replaced my WordPress installation with a single sound-hotlinked page in Arabic. On a plus side, I am pretty diligent with backups, so I was able to restore all…
I would really like to live in a place with no natural disasters or extreme weather conditions to disrupt the normal flow of life. No tornadoes, no hurricanes, no volcanoes, no earthquakes. No snow storms dumping ungodly amounts of snow on my driveway. No heat waves, for that matter. Fine,…
My wife’s brother’s wife’s sister’s daughter had her first child the other day. Yeah, I know, it’s not exactly a close relation, in-laws of in-laws, I’ve never had a chance to even meet them. Still, there is a certain implication in this new arrival. To that new baby, I happen…
A number of people whose blogs I read did this meme, where they took the recently compiled NPR list of Top 100 Science Fiction and Fantasy books and marked those they’ve read (or at least attempted to read at some point in their lives). At first, I just scanned through…
We’ve been back on the home soil for two years now. I felt a tiny bit of re-branding of the site was due. The word “[back]” was no longer appropriate as the modifier of our local status. So, welcome to “Burlaki on the Hudson”, all!