How Simon created God
God did not exist, so Simon decided to create him. Basing it on the earlier model, his first design was erected purely out of ideas. The A Model was an omniscient multi-tasker. However, Simon’s inability to comprehend the motives of its parallel processing skills stalled the project at the design phase. Dismayed but not deterred,…
Perfectly at home on the ‘Range’
Despite its decades of decline, the Western, that grand and glorious American form, will never entirely succumb to the vagaries of taste and time. Expressing, no matter how crudely and falsely at times, some notions of ourselves as a people, it simply means too much to our history and more important, to our mythology. Its…
Get itchy and dirty this weekend
Okay, first things first: Ichi is pronounced “ee-chee,” not “itchy,” otherwise this would probably be the long-awaited feature-film debut of a certain ultra-violent cat-and-mouse team from The Simpsons. But that’s not to say Ichi the Killer (screens Saturday, August 16, at the Dryden) isn’t brutal in its own right. Believe me, when director Takashi Miike…
Beating the HEAP
It’s a cool million (plus) in grant money — and a few county legislators and advocates for the poor are searching through a procedural haystack for it. The grant in question is $1.5 million in federal funds that Monroe County recently received (via Albany) for the Housing Energy Assistance Program. HEAP is a federal-state-local…
News briefs 8.13.03
Growing up a golfer As a member of the Calhoun (Long Island) High Golf Team, I was a pariah of the jock-ular caste system. No cheerleader worth her pom-poms would have ever even considered dating me. It would have been an athletic faux pas of the highest order, almost as bad as saying “No” to…
Sit on the other side of the desk
It has been said that the best way to learn is to teach. What exactly will you learn: about the subject at hand, about the learning process, about yourself? Probably all three. And don’t forget the warm fuzzies: that glow you get from giving back to the constantly recycling education pool. If you look,…
Spanish without the bull
At first I thought he had a little something on the side. My husband would lie in the hammock, book open on his chest, murmuring and smiling to himself. In the evenings after pulling in the driveway he’d sit a little too long in the car, as if dreading to come inside. I was beside…
Fond memories of a big yellow bus
Fall is such a funny, nostalgic time. Even those of us who don’t particularly miss our school days can still fall susceptible to the classic fall-time itch: the one that makes you want to fill a backpack with new pencils and notebooks and go wait for the school bus. Maybe it’s the itch for new…
Reader feedback 8.13.03
AmeriCorps praise Through your newspaper, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Rochester AmeriCorps for giving me an opportunity to attend a five-week summer program on political science at Monroe Community College. I did not know I would have such an educational incentive to pursue the career I would very much like to…
An honest neighborhood spot
Michael Baumer grew up working for his father, Timothy, at Timothy Patrick’s. There, he developed an idea of the kind of restaurant he wanted to run. In 1998, he and his wife, Gretchen, built McArdle’s from the ground up. Five years later, the restaurant is a testament to Baumer’s vision, popular for the right reasons.…
In the dark
Peter Tautfest, a well-known European journalist who died this past winter, was truly a man of the world. He was born in Berlin, grew up in Chicago, was educated in Texas, and served as a foreign correspondent in Washington. His paper was Germany’s most interesting daily, Die Tageszeitung, which not long ago helped disclose US…
Shooting for the ‘Stars
Most 18-year-olds fret over waking up in time to make their English 101 class. Mike Magee has to worry about scoring on Zach Thornton and Pat Onstad. The New York/New Jersey MetroStars forward, who graduated from high school earlier this year thanks to an accelerated program, has six goals already this season — just one…
