2 posts tagged “mini-review”

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The Sandlot

Oct 21, 2007
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Back in college my roommates and I performed the most exacting sort of scientific experiment to determine the greatest guys' movie of all time. We sat down in a closed room with several young men and women and watched a selection of several films. Among them, Top Gun, Unforgiven, Tombstone, and the Sandlot.

Reactions were varied, of course, but when we compiled our data we learned one thing: Men love this movie, women think it's cute. Men think this movie represents everything that was best about childhood, friendship, overcoming adversity, the triumph of imagination, and baseball. Women think it's about a bunch of boys playing baseball.

Conclusion? The Sandlot is the greatest guys' movie of all time.

And it's finally on DVD.

My sister, who understands me, even if she doesn't always get me, sent me a copy for my birthday. My wife, who gets me, even if she doesn't always understand me, sat down with me last night to watch the movie.

She thought it was cute; it was a nice movie about little boys and baseball. I laughed until I couldn't breathe, and then I laughed some more, thinking about the movie, and about where I grew up and about my friends, back then and now, and the things we bond over and the idiot things we do in the name of adventure.

Mini Review: Moleskine City Notebooks

Sep 3, 2007
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Moleskine Barcelona City Guide

Moleskine, the famed maker of small, hardback, quality notebooks, has recently released a series of city guides. The guides are designed to turn a travel journal into a useful guidebook as well. From the website:

A special guidebook, to buy for your own use or as a gift for your friends. Ideal for those who travel, whether to see the sights or for work, as a way of organizing your trip and to preserve it for your memory and your records.

I can admit to being a huge fan of moleskine notebooks. I have several and I have been using them for various things for years, so, when I saw that one of the first in the series was for the city of Barcelona, I picked one up.

It is a quality notebook, with the same high grade construction and durability as regular Moleskines. Further, the organization of the notebook was very nice, with maps at the front, then blank journal pages, then several pages of...annotation pages, with icons built into tabs on the sides of the pages, and lines dividing the page into small blocks. At the back of the book is the standard pocket. One other final design note, in place of the usual sewn-in bookmark, the city guides come with three.

Having said all that, I did not really find the guide very useful. Well, the journal pages got filled up very quickly and I loved that, although I would have preferred lined pages, and the maps were nice, but the rest was just wasted space for me. I found that the annotation pages would be really useful if I lived in the city and needed to refer back to that little tapas bar I found last week, but for one time visitors, it was not very practical.

To be very brief and to the point - the books are wonderful for people who live in the city, or for people who travel there often. If they make one for Tokyo, I'll definitely pick it up. For other places, though, I will stick with just a plain old notebook.