Matter, Energy, and Life of Michaela A. Castello.

Category: Life

Short (and long) reads extracted from my personal life.

  • Why Cancelling Dollhouse Might Not Have Been Such a Bad Thing

    Don’t get me wrong, I’m almost as happy Dollhouse got picked up for another season as are the acolytes of Joss Whedonism. It had some real downers (I’m not sure I could really accept the “blind girl with camera eyes infiltrating a cult for ATF and FBI” plotline), but I think all but the querulous…

  • Review: The Forest of Hands and Teeth [Spoilers]

    I picked this book up thanks to the recommendation in the Goodreads newsletter and I wasn’t disappointed.

  • The Genre Debacle

    Ever since I started digitizing my music library, I’ve struggled with the pronunciation of the word “genre.” I started out saying John Ree, perhaps imagining him as a pioneer in the field of music classification; sort of a spiritual ancestor to the Music Genome Project. Later, I adopted the slurred buzzing intonation that inhabits a…

  • Barrier to Entry

    A while back (2006, to be exact) Coke started My Coke Rewards, a semi-digital version of those frequent customer reward programs. It’s supposed to be very simple: you buy Coke brand drinks and enter the code under the cap online. Apparently now you can even text the codes in on your cell phone (how delightfully…

  • Deadlights

    It’s been raining a lot around here lately, which means a lot of driving around with windshield wipers. A while back I replaced my broken wiper blades with new ones by Rain-X, followed quickly by replacing my blue windshield washer fluid with bright orange product also from Rain-X. The combination of the two has created…

  • Fahrenheit 451

    This was an excellent book—I especially loved the way Ray Bradbury ended it with the Afterward and Coda.

  • Oh, Heroes, What Have You Become?

    I just finished watching the season finale of Heroes, and it seems like they’ve managed to botch things up once again. They continue to rely on the standby plot devices of “kill a main character” and “bring back an old bad guy” in lieu of truely creative writing. They also feel compelled to set up…

  • The Religion of Science Fiction

    Good science fiction authors are at the same time remarkably prophetic in their thinking and humorously influenced by their own time. I remember laughing aloud when one of the characters in Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land began darning a sock. To me, it was hilarious that in a futuristic world with space travel, characters would…