Chris Hardie's Weblog

Confession: one of my great pleasures/sicknesses when distracted is playing the game of reframing or rewording song lyrics and titles to be more thematically accurate, pseudo-politically correct, and/or appropriate for use in a scientific research paper.
For example:

My Girl by The Temptations becomes: The One Who is My Significant Other, and Also Female
I Believe I Can [...]

Doug, Scott, Brandon and I were all sharing a room at Chicago's Drake hotel while on a weekend school field trip early on in high school. I was having a miserable time for various teen-agey angst reasons I won't go into, and I was tired of being cooped up in our room watching JFK [...]

I have a lot of memories of visiting zoos as a younger person. There was the time my Boy Scout troop had an overnight stay at the Cincinnati Zoo, where we had behind-the-scenes tours of the habitats and infrastructure that made up the place; I was amazed at the intricate facades created for zoo [...]

As you're coming out of the movie 28 Weeks Later, you might be tempted to discuss the horrors of the events in the movie, the acting, the overwhelmingly and unnecessarily bloody gore, or the architecture in the London skyline. But I think we can all agree that the movie was, above all, a [...]

Some bits and pieces from life right now: I'm really proud of the RNR podcast episode from last night, even though I was tired enough that my production quality wasn't what it usually is and I mispronounced some names. But it's been an emotionally charged week and it was an emotionally charged evening, so [...]

My friend and college roommate Matthew Young just had his music featured on NPR's "Open Mic" program. Congratulations!!
I've seen Matt's studio in Austin and I'm so impressed with the "handmade" nature of so much of what he does - music, carpentry and beyond. He's quite a guy. You can check [...]

In a near coma from a holiday meal today, we ventured out to see The Pursuit of Happyness starring Will Smith. My resulting notes below contain some mentions of specific plot details, so if you haven't seen it yet and don't want anything spoiled for you, come back to this post later.
As a cinematic [...]

This is an ad for a really great Frontline episode called "The Persauders" - a thoughtful and thorough journalistic look at the world of advertising and how it affects us at all levels. It covered a wide variety of perspectives, from advertising executives to media experts to sociologists to counter-cultural ad-busters. Quote from [...]

I remember back in the day (i.e. a few years ago), when you wanted to put video on your website, you needed to think about disk space, bandwidth, media format compatibility and a host of other issues before you could even hope to have people looking at the actual video content. Today, sites like [...]

Just one reason of many, I'm sure: Borat film tricked poor village actors. Excerpt:
"Mr Tudorache, a deeply religious grandfather who lost his arm in an accident, was one of those who feels most humiliated. For one scene, a rubber sex toy in the shape of a fist was attached to the stump of his [...]