By Brendan Loy (Twitter/FriendFeed)

http://twitpic.com/9yh6q – Our new microwave’s auto-sensing popcorn popper setting is AWESOME.

By Brendan Loy (Twitter/FriendFeed)

Twitter is abuzz with the probably-fake “news” that Microsoft has acquired Twitter. Nothing gets Twitter buzzing like… itself. #techcrunch

By Brendan Loy (Twitter/FriendFeed)

Houston, we have central air conditioning!!

By Brendan Loy

Peggy Noonan has an unfortunate and well-documented history of doubletalk when it comes to Sarah Palin, but as last fall’s campaign wore on, the scales ultimately fell decisively from her eyes. Now, in her column today, she produces what I believe may be the seminal diss of Palin, explaining precisely and devastatingly why the unthoughtful, frivolous soon-to-be-ex-governor of Alaska “was bad for the Republicans—and the republic.” I won’t quote excerpts because the entire column is excellent, and absolutely correct. Read the whole thing.

By Brendan Loy

As a Tolkien nut, but a relative non-”purist” when it comes to Peter Jackson’s brilliant movies, I’ve always felt that The Fellowship of the Ring is the best adaptation out of the three films, whereas The Return of the King is the best movie on its own merits. And to that I hold. But, re-watching the first half of Fellowship with Becky the last two nights (in an effort to scare the baby into being born!), I found myself thinking of the movie — or, more precisely, the movie-as-adaptation — in a slightly different way: imagining myself as an anxious fanboy going to see the first LOTR film for the first time, wondering what it will be like — and being overwhelmed with glee at the result, particularly in the first 30 minutes or so.

I have to “imagine” this because, believe it or not, I was not really a “fanboy” when I went to see Fellowship for the first time in 2001. I hadn’t read the books in years, and although Tolkien references were deeply subsumed into my family’s internal lore and lexicon — for instance, we would routinely refer to barren-looking vistas as “Mordorish”; we used “Balrog” as a verb, meaning roughly “to bother”; my Dad and I used to play the “You cannot pass!” game frequently when we would cross a bridge on foot; etc., etc. — I hadn’t really given the actual books, the source materials for all this inside-baseball family nonsense, much thought in ages. Indeed, to give you an idea how much my little-kid Tolkien fandom had fallen by the wayside, I actually didn’t remember at first, when we went to see FOTR in the theater, that Saruman was evil!

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