More on silent-movie star Harold Lloyd: he did all those stunts (including, famously, hanging from the clock face) without the finger and thumb of his right hand. He was already a star when it happened, and the story is bizarre. For one of his movies, he was supposed to light a cigarette from a papier mâch&eacute ‘bomb’ to show his devil-may-care side. Except the bomb turned out to be real.

Snotty journalists bait minimum wage staff over at The Guardian.

‘I approach the counter with a copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses. “I bought this book the other day,” I say, “and I want my money back. It’s full of typing errors and there’s no punctuation.”

I saw Girl Shy at the Film Forum last night. Now I understand why people thought talkies would ruin the movies. I expected to show urbane appreciation for a period piece—it’s a Harold Lloyd movie from 1924—but it sucked me in. A piano-player pounded out the score on an old upright as the wiseass titlecards flickered. The dimpled arms and doe eyes of the women reminded me that our current ideals of beauty are both new and very local—Monsoon Wedding’s langorous heroine has the same softness as these twenties vamps.

As for Harold Lloyd, he’s a nebbish with the grin of a crazed angel, and I never thought him capable of the stunts he pulled off. The final chase scene, where he races to interrupt his beloved’s wedding to a mustachioed creep, is extraordinary. He bounces from car to bicycle to tram to motorbike to cart to horseback to firetruck. I looked for the tricks—the stunt doubles, the fake backdrops, the modern-day CGI—but there was Lloyd himself, up close, swinging under a galloping horse or balancing on the roof of a tram. It made Spider-Man, which I’d liked on Friday, seem pallid and safe. We knew that wasn’t Tobey Maguire, or even an unknown stuntman, loping through the canyons of Manhattan. But eighty years ago you could still smell sweat and greasepaint at the movies.

That’s also why I like blogs better than Sunday supplements. There are fewer rules and resources in a baby medium, and the stars don’t sit in trailers while someone else does the work.

Don’t believe anyone who tells you the recession is over. In New York, we are grasshoppers in winter. I have smart, talented friends who haven’t worked in months, who are surviving on whatever they stashed away in the foolish years. Rents are down, but they don’t have broker fees to move. Vindigo got 700 résumés last week from a single advert, and the people I meet at (rare) industry events have a desperate look as they press ‘Consultant’ business cards on one another. It’s a crazy time to look for a job, unless you have to.

When you’re rich, you don’t pay for drinks. Technology didn’t attract the kind of people who partied like Wall Street types, but still, all those liberal arts content producers had several freebie parties a night to choose from. It’s different now. During the boom, I never saw where my friends slept, but unemployed New Yorkers invite each other over to their tiny homes. Six-packs, we discover, cost less than Negronis. And Brooklyn is more fun than Manhattan.

I like the new way better. It’s as easy to catch up over a four-dollar bowl of pho as over arugula salad and grilled tuna. My credit card bills from the last few years make depressing reading now—I feel like a twit for spending thousands of restaurant dollars maintaining 120lbs of human meat.

I feel even dumber for spending my twenties in an office. Saturdays, late nights—I was expert at face time. Did I produce more that way? Absolutely not. Any parent dying to get back to a four-month old would churn out more work in six hours than I did in 12. But when everybody worked long hours, there were no playmates to lure me out. Staying at the office and making friends at the work saved me the hassle of getting a life. I thought it was perfectly fine to blow people off with ‘I have so much work tonight’, but some of them stopped calling.

It took a while to realize that I’m not going to be able to press Pause to stay 28 for a decade so that I could see the world and build a fine career and have a brood of kids while my body is young. So I’ve decided to take my savings and travel. I’ll fill a backpack with too much stuff and slowly discard bits and pieces over several months in Southeast Asia. In the meantime, I’ll fret about getting Internet access in Laos and what shoes to wear in Thailand and whether I’ll find anyone to watch my bag at the train station in Phnom Penh.

“Life is what happens to you
While you’re busy making other plans”

“Life is what happens to you
While you’re busy making other plans”

As a woman approaches 30, she starts to drag her feet in front of furniture stores instead of clothing boutiques. My heart quickened when Max described his new chair:

‘My new chair has just arrived, all the way from Italy, and I am sitting in it. It is red to the point of being orange. I am very happy.’

I confessed that I’d almost bought a set of three-legged Ant originals last week, even though there is no room for them in the backpack I intend to live out of for the next few months. Max is supportive:

More Christopher Hitchens, this time on George Orwell. I’ve been pressing Orwell’s Politics and the English Language on patient friends for years. If you bother with the English language at all, do read it. Orwell’s rules:

By the time the essay appeared in 1946, Mr. Strunk had already done a fine job of explaining how to write clearly. Orwell’s real aim is to explain why clarity matters. Warbloggers would do well to study this paragraph:

Things my girlfriend and I have argued about
Found this on Daypop and sent it to Mark, who is wise in the ways of the Web.

   Mark: (kindly) ‘Yes, I remember seeing this about a year ago when it was much smaller. Some of it is funny.’

It’s crushing to realize that your proxy witticisms are just stale You’ve-Got-Mail fodder. But I’m linking it anyway. Please send it to nine people you know. Your head won’t fall off and you’ll win the lottery.