Cyrus Farivar

I have two great seats for tonight’s game in the right-center bleachers, Section 144, seats 20-21. $60 for the pair, or best offer. I’m in North Oakland, very near freeway and Rockridge BART for the next four hours, or can meet you at stadium before gametime. $5 discount if you’re wearing a Dodgers hat, and another $5 discount for blog readers. Email me.

Xeni at Boing Boing brightened my day with a link to TacoTrucks.net a site devoted to Oakland taco trucks, one of my favorite places to get a cheap and amazingly delicious meal. I’ve known about Burritoeater.com and Burritophile.com, which are dissapointing because the former is exclusively focused on San Francisco, and the latter’s reviews are too spotty. I was just at El Ojo de Agua #3 (pictured above) last night, and seriously, I don’t think you can get a better…

This just came over the J-School ’05 email listserv: good ol’ j-school’s gonna raise $100 million: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/publications/journalism/ here’s what the yale school of music did with $100 million: http://www.yale.edu/opa/newsr/05-11-02-02.all.html just saying, richard

I’m going to the playoffs! The last (and only time) I went to a playoff game was in fall 2003 with my buddy Garett Ng. Today, the 2006 American League Division Series tickets just went on sale, and I snagged a pair of bleachers tickets for Game 1 or 3, and Game 5. Huzzah!

In what may be the geekiest literary matchup I’ve ever seen, I just found out that Tim O’Reilly wrote a biography of Frank Herbert in 1981. The bad news is it’s out of print, but the good news is that Tim’s put it up on his website, in its entirety.

The New York Review of Books; October 5, 2006: Cheney leaves no paper trail. He has not always felt the necessity to discuss what he plans to say in public with the usual offices, including that of the President. Nor, we learned from Ron Suskind, has he always felt the necessity, say if the Saudis send information to the President in preparation for a meeting, to bother sending that information on to Bush. Only on the evening of September 11,…

When I was a sophomore at Berkeley in 2002, I took a class with Prof. Anna-Livia Brawn, on French colonial films — given that I knew I would be headed to Senegal later that fall. One of the filmmakers that she introduced us to was Ousmane Sembène, a Senegalese director and writer who she highly lauded and suggested that if ever we had the chance to see a Sembène film, that we should, given that Sembène apparently is very finicky…

A Columbia cohort of mine, Sam Gustin, has just penned a sweet article for The Village Voice on Google’s plans to expand in the Big Apple: For the time being, by installing itself above Chelsea’s broadband “fiber highway” at 111 Eighth Avenue, St. Arnaud explained, Google can bypass many of the major telecommunications firms and interface directly with Tier 2 service providers such as Level 3 Communications or XO Communications, which also are located in the building. This will significantly…

Paul Boutin just pointed me to the fact that Google Maps has updated its imaging. It’s so good now that I can pick out the building that I used to live in in Senegal (click on the image to make it bigger). The red arrow marks my home from November 2002 – May 2003. The Université Gaston Berger is about 12 km east of the city of Saint-Louis, Senegal.

NYT: Aides to Mr. Bush bristled Monday at the notion that they were trying to avoid a chance run-in between Mr. Ahmadinejad and Mr. Bush in the United Nations hallways. Contending that they were giving no extra attention to the possible walking route of the Iranian delegation or the Iranian leader’s bathroom schedule, they said that to do so would only help to elevate the stature of a man they would rather diminish.