The American Mastodon

Geocaching

2010-05-27T09:17:00.001-07:00

Wait - where DOES the red fern grow?

Rooney

2010-05-26T07:03:00.000-07:00

DADT

2010-05-25T10:20:00.000-07:00

Gays in the military? What's next - straight men going to see Sex and the City??

/obviousjoke

HEY-OH, I'M BACK!!

MILEY CYRUS

2008-07-30T17:08:00.001-07:00

Is not an attractive young woman.

Sorry.

America: Most Greatest Nation

2008-07-01T07:18:00.000-07:00

Happy Fourth of July

Creation Museum

2008-06-23T05:02:00.001-07:00

The guy at the coffee shop was wearing a Creation Museum ball cap this morning. I don't know if adults who believe in creationism actually believe in creationism or if has more to do with identity and defiance.

"The Onion Movie"

2008-06-22T12:40:00.000-07:00

I wonder what The Onion AV Club reviewers would say about "The Onion Movie" if they were allowed to write about it. I'm guessing they'd slam it pretty hard for being a steaming pile of poo.

Was Jesus the Smartest Person Who Ever Lived?

2008-06-22T11:07:00.000-07:00

And if He was (and, for the doubters out there, I think I could strike up a pretty sound argument on behalf of the idea that - by definition - the son of God had to [and has to] rank right up there with the best of the best of the brightest), then is it reasonable to assume that he knew about gravity but didn't tell anyone? What kind of a dick move is that? Or that he knew that the Earth revolved around the sun but was like, "aw, I'll let 'em figure it out in a few thousands years, let a few people die trying to prove it, no skin off my back."

I mean, if you think about, here's a guy who performed miracles (e.g. turning water into wine) which clearly involved a pretty advanced understanding of chemistry and physics - advanced and unknowable even in this day and age. Yet he didn't even take the time to tell people about proper hygiene or simple mathematics that would have greatly improved and extended the lives of the people that he "died" in order to save.

Jesus, bro. No love for science. Disappointing.

CORY BOOKER DEMOCRAT

2008-03-31T11:39:00.000-07:00

Anyone who knows me knows that I am a pretty big Obama supporter. Mostly out of animosity for the Clintons and all Republicans, but somewhat because I genuinely like the guy and think he's got his head screwed on straight.

But if you want to know who I think is the most intelligent, inspiring, and incredible politician in America, there is no question that it is Cory Booker. If you haven't seen the Oscar-nominated documentary Street Fight, do so.

An if you haven't watched the most recent Bill Moyers Journal in which Cory Booker is interviewed, do so.

Cory Booker is just a damn inspiration. I am officially a Booker Democrat.

COMMERCIAL

2008-03-27T11:53:00.000-07:00

Last night, while watching television, I became angered at the premise of a commercial for a new line of healthy but delicious yogurt. You may have seen the ad. A young woman enters a laundromat/seamstress/tailor shop (confusing location is strike one) and hands the old woman behind the counter her clothes. She then proceeds to tell the woman that she needs her clothes "taken in" because of all of the delicious food she's been eating lately - key lime pie, Christmas ham, Boston Creme Pie, bacon, chocolate cake, Johnsonville brats, whatever - and naturally the old woman behind the counter smiles and, though she's a bit confused, politely, says, "okay then, you'd like them taken out." At this point the young woman gets indignant and says that no, in fact, she would like them taken in: like, der, you mean old lady. And then of course the kind seamstress is perplexed and tries to clarify the intent of the young woman - are you sure you don't mean you'd like the hem to be taken out?

To which the petulant young woman expresses her outrage that this older woman might think she has gained weight - take them in, dammit, and shut your pie hole, old lady! Geesh, I mean it's not like the young woman waltzed into the store and, unprovoked, immediately and oddly started rattling off all the fatty, unhealthy things she's been gorging on recently. Oh wait. That's EXACTLY what she did. And THEN the young woman has the cajones to get all huffy, simply because the polite lady behind the counter was trying to be nice and polite and respectful?

Do advertisers ever think about this stuff? Or do they just stay high 24 hours a day and write down stuff like: dancing bears, singing, creamy puffs, lots of hats, indie rock music, hot girl, swirly graphics, talking tree...

I don't get it.

It's Time, Homies

2008-03-26T06:50:00.001-07:00

Never been a better time to start posting again.

NEW YORKER SHORT STORIES ONLINE

2007-02-01T06:59:00.000-08:00

A TRANQUIL STAR by PRIMO LEVI
Posted 2007-02-05
Once upon a time, somewhere in the universe very far from here, lived a peaceful star, which moved peacefully in the immensity of the sky, surrounded by a crowd of peaceful planets about which we have not a thing to report. This star was very big and very hot, and its weight was enormous: and here a reporter’s difficulties begin. We have written “very far,” “big,” “hot,” “enormous”: Australia is very far, an elephant is big and a house is bigger, this morning I had a hot bath, Everest is enormous. It’s clear that something in our lexicon isn’t working.

GOOD PEOPLE by DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
Posted 2007-01-29
They were up on a picnic table at that park by the lake, by the edge of the lake, with part of a downed tree in the shallows half hidden by the bank. Lane A. Dean, Jr., and his girlfriend, both in bluejeans and button-up shirts. They sat up on the table’s top portion and had their shoes on the bench part that people sat on to picnic or fellowship together in carefree times. They’d gone to different high schools but the same junior college, where they had met in campus ministries. It was springtime, and the park’s grass was very green and the air suffused with honeysuckle and lilacs both, which was almost too much.

CELL ONE by CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE
Posted 2007-01-22
The first time our house was robbed, it was our neighbor Osita who climbed in through the dining-room window and stole our TV and VCR, and the “Purple Rain” and “Thriller” videotapes that my father had brought back from America. The second time our house was robbed, it was my brother Nnamabia, who faked a break-in and stole my mother’s jewelry. It happened on a Sunday.

HEIRS by AMOS OZ
Posted 2007-01-15
The stranger was not a stranger. Something in his figure repelled but also intrigued Aryeh Zelnik at very first sight, if it was indeed first sight; it seemed to Aryeh Zelnik that he somehow remembered that face, those long arms, almost down to the knees. Remembered vaguely, as if from an entire lifetime ago.

BRAVADO by WILLIAM TREVOR
Posted 2007-01-08
The leaves had begun to fall. All along Sunderland Avenue on the pavement beneath the beech trees there was a sprinkling, not yet the mushy inconvenience they would become when more fell and rain came, which inevitably would be soon. Not many people were about; it was after midnight, almost one o’clock, the widely spaced lampposts casting pools of misty, yellow illumination.

BEAR MEAT by PRIMO LEVI
Posted 2007-01-01
Evenings spent in a mountain hut are among the most sublime and intense that life holds. I mean a real hut, the kind where you seek shelter after a four-, five-, or six-hour climb and where you find few so-called comforts.

ON CHESIL BEACH by IAN MCEWAN
Posted 2006-12-18
They were young, educated, and both virgins on this, their wedding night, and they lived in a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible. But it is never easy. They were sitting down to supper in a tiny room on the second floor of a Georgian inn in Dorset. In the next room, visible through the open door, was a fourposter bed, rather narrow, whose cover was pure white and stretched startlingly smooth, as though by no human hand. Edward did not mention that he had never stayed in a hotel before, whereas Florence, after many trips as a child with her father, was an old hand. Superficially, they were in fine spirits.

THE FIRST SENSE by NADINE GORDIMER
Posted 2006-12-11
She has never felt any resentment that he became a musician and she didn’t. Could hardly call her amateur flute-playing a vocation. Envy? Only pride in the achievement that he was born for. She sits at a computer in a city-government office, earning, under pleasant enough conditions, a salary that has at least provided regularly for their basic needs, while his remuneration for the privilege of being a cellist in a symphony orchestra has been sometimes augmented by chamber-music engagements, sometimes not; in the summer, the off season for the orchestra, he is dependent on these performances on the side.

TANGO by THOMAS MCGUANE
Posted 2006-12-04
L. Raymond Hoxey bought an old mansion in Livingston, Montana, and converted the third floor into a delightful apartment with views of several mountain ranges, including the Absarokas, the Bridgers, and the Crazies. The second floor kept his print collection in archival conditions, with humidifiers and air-quality equipment. The first floor was divided into two small, comfortable apartments, one of which housed his assistant, Tessa Larionov, and the other, in the summer, a textile historian, employed by the Metropolitan Museum in New York, who was also a trout fisherman.

A RIVER IN EGYPT by DAVID MEANS
Posted 2006-11-27
The hot air in the sweat chamber—as the nurse had called it, ushering them in—was humidified to make it even more uncomfortable, and when he loosened his tie he was reminded that he was the type who felt it necessary to dress up for hospital visits, and for air flights, not so much because he had a residual primness left over from his Midwestern upbringing, which he did, but because he felt that he might receive more attentive service if he came dressed with a certain formality, so that the nurses and doctors tending his son might see him, Cavanaugh, as a big-shot banker instead of as an assistant art director who was known, if he was known at all, for his last-minute design fixes.

THE CONFIDENCE DECOY by ANN BEATTIE
Posted 2006-11-20
Francis would be driving his Lexus back from Maine. His wife, Bernadine, had left early that morning, taking their cat, Simple Man, home to Connecticut with her. Their son, Sheldon, had promised to be home to help out when the moving truck arrived, but that was before he’d got a phone call from his girlfriend, saying that she would be flying into J.F.K. that afternoon. So he was gone—when was Sheldon not outta there?—though the moving men were perfectly capable of unloading furniture without anyone’s help. What had Bernadine imagined—that Sheldon would have ideas about decorating, about what should go where?

NIGHT TRAIN TO FRANKFURT by MARISA SILVER
Posted 2006-11-13
They were going to boil Dorothy’s blood. Take it out, heat it, put it back in. The cancer would be gone. Well, that wasn’t exactly it. The treatment had a more formal-sounding name, thermosomethingorother, a word that was both trustworthy (because you recognized the prefix) and lofty, so that you didn’t really question it, knew you were too thick to really understand whatever explanation might be given you. “They’re going to boil my blood” is what it came down to, and this was what Dorothy had told her daughter, Helen, when she called her from New York.

GREENSLEEVES by HELEN SIMPSON
Posted 2006-11-06
“Gardening!” the girl said, and tilted back in her chair the way she knew would get a reaction. “It’s like knitting, isn’t it.”
“Stop that, Lara,” her mother said. “You’ll break the chair.”
“A sign of middle age,” Lara continued. “Old age. It’s what old people do when there’s nothing left in their lives.”

PAPER LOSSES by LORRIE MOORE
Posted 2006-10-30
Although Kit and Rafe had met in the peace movement, marching, organizing, making no-nukes signs, now they wanted to kill each other. They had become, also, a little pro-nuke. Married for two decades of precious, precious life, she and Rafe seemed currently to be partners only in anger and dislike, their old, lusty love mutated to rage. It was both their shame and demise that hate (like love) could not live on air. And so in this, their newly successful project together, they were complicitous and synergistic.

REPÚBLICA AND GRAU by DANIEL ALARCÓN
Posted 2006-10-23
The blind man lived in a single room above a bodega, on a street not so far from Maico’s house. It was up a slight hill, as was everything in the neighborhood. There was nothing on the walls of the blind man’s room, nor was there anywhere to sit, and so Maico stood. He was ten years old. There was a single bed, a nightstand with a radio wrapped in duct tape, a washbasin. The blind man had graying hair and was much older than Maico’s father. The boy looked at his feet, and kicked together a small mound of dust on the cement floor while his father and the http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.italic.gifblind man spoke.

STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN by ALEKSANDAR HEMON
Posted 2006-10-16
It was a perfect African night, straight out of Conrad: the air was pasty and still with humidity; the night smelled of burned flesh and fecundity; the darkness outside was spacious and uncarvable. I felt malarial, though it was probably just travel fatigue. I envisioned millions of millipedes gathering on the ceiling above my bed, a fleet of bats flapping ravenously in the trees below my window. But the most troubling thing was the ceaseless roll of drums: a sonorous, ponderous thudding that hovered around me. Whether it meant war, peace, or prayer, I couldn’t tell.
THE PHOTOGRAPH by RODDY DOYLE
Posted 2006-10-09
Getting older wasn’t too bad. The baldness suited Martin. Everyone said it. He’d had to change his trouser size from 34 to 36. It had been a bit of a shock, but it was kind of nice wearing loose trousers again, hitching them up when he stood up to go to the jacks, or whatever. He was fooling himself; he knew that. But that was the point—he was fooling himself. He’d put on weight but he felt a bit thinner.

LANDFILL by JOYCE CAROL OATES
Posted 2006-10-02
Tioga County landfill is where Hector, Jr., is found. Or his “remains”—battered and badly decomposed, his mouth filled with trash. He couldn’t have protested if he’d been alive, buried, as he was, in rubble and raw garbage. Overhead are shrieking birds; in the vast landfill, dump trucks and bulldozers and a search team from the Tioga County Sheriff’s Department in protective uniforms. For three weeks, Hector’s disappearance was in all the newspapers and on TV. Most of his teeth are broken at the roots, but those which remain are sufficient to identify Hector Campos, Jr., of Southfield, Michigan.

OTHER PEOPLE’S DEATHS by LORE SEGAL
Posted 2006-09-25
EVERYBODY LEAVING
The coroner’s men put James in the back of the truck and drove away, and the Bernstines, once again, urged Ilka to come home with them, at least for the night, or to let them take the baby. Again, Ilka was earnest in begging to be left right here, wanted the baby to stay here with her. No thank you, really, she did not need—did not want—anybody sleeping over.

FREIGHT by HENRY ROTH
Posted 2006-09-18
In February of 1939, having failed to establish myself as a screenwriter in Hollywood, I decided to hitchhike back to New York, where my future wife waited. It was a bland California morning, pleasant and calm.

BLACK ICE by CATE KENNEDY
Posted 2006-09-04
When I went up to check my traps, I saw that the porch lights at the lady’s place were still on, even though it was morning. “That’s an atrocious waste of power,” my dad said when I told him. His breath huffed in the air like he was smoking a cigar. The rabbit carcasses steamed when we ripped the skin off, and it came away like a glove.

KANSAS by ANTONYA NELSON
Posted 2006-08-28
The girls left early, the two-year-old being driven to Montessori by her seventeen-year-old cousin. Three of their four parents lay in bed hungover; the fourth had risen unsteadily to fix breakfast, nauseated by her new pregnancy. Standing dazed at the stove, Anna had felt grateful to her niece, Kay-Kay, for her morning cheer, her willingness to dress little Cherry Sue, settle her in at the table, wash her face and hands—one of them bound in a bright-green cast—and then carry her off to school. Cherry Sue had been singing about babies, waving her bandaged fist like a maraca. She sang about everything these days, gesturing wildly, as if her life were a musical.

HOW WAS IT TO BE DEAD? by RICHARD FORD
Posted 2006-08-21
The exact status of my marriage to Sally Caldwell requires, I believe, some amplification. It is still a marriage that’s officially going on, yet by any accounting has become strange—in fact, the strangest I know, and within whose unusual circumstances I myself have acted very strangely.

THE SPOT by DAVID MEANS
Posted 2006-08-14
Jack Dunhill, a.k.a. Bone, a.k.a. the Bear, a.k.a. Stan Newhope, a.k.a. Winston Leonard, a.k.a. Michigan Pete, a.k.a. Bill Dempsey, a.k.a. Shank, said, Not those waves but that little pucker on the surface out there is where the Cleveland water supply is drawn in, right there, and if you were to dump enough poison on that spot you’d kill the entire city in one sweep. Believe me, I’ve thought it out.

BAD NEIGHBORS by EDWARD P. JONES
Posted 2006-07-31
Even before the fracas with Terence Stagg, people along both sides of the 1400 block of Eighth Street NW could see the Benningtons for what they really were. First, the family moved in not on a Saturday or on a weekday but on a Sunday, which was still the Lord’s Day, even though church for many was now a place to visit only for a wedding or a funeral. Perhaps Easter or Christmas. And those watching that Sunday, from behind discreetly parted brocade curtains and from porches rarely used except to enter and leave homes, had to wonder why the Bennington family had even bothered to bring most of their furniture.

FIRST DEFEAT (1939) by ALBERTO MÉNDEZ
Posted 2006-07-24
We now know that Captain Alegría chose his death blindly, without having met the ruthless gaze of the future which greets those who do not live by the rules. He chose to fade away discreetly, without fuss, and never raised his voice again after having made his way across the front line toward his disbelieving enemy, holding his hands in the air, but not so high as to seem imploring, and shouting repeatedly, “I have surrendered.”

FOLIE À DEUX by WILLIAM TREVOR
Posted 2006-07-17
Aware of a presence close to him, Wilby glances up from the book he has just begun to read. The man standing there says nothing. He doesn’t smile. A dishcloth hangs from where it’s tucked into grubby apron strings knotted at the front, and Wilby assumes that the man is an envoy sent from the kitchen to apologize for the delay in the cooking of the fish he has ordered.

THE PHONE CALL by ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN
Posted 2006-07-03
TORPEDO
The filigreed hands pointed to five minutes past four. The bronze of the clock was lustreless in the dying light of a December day. A tall window looked down on bustling Kuznetsky Most. Maintenance workers trudged doggedly to and fro, scraping up the fresh snow that was already caking and turning brown under the feet of pedestrians.

CARNIVAL, LAS TABLAS by CRISTINA HENRÍQUEZ
Posted 2006-06-26
I enjoyed Carnival in the beginning. Back when I started going, I was like everyone else—that one weekend in February was all I looked forward to. But after going every year for the past eight years, since I was sixteen, and after going to Las Tablas, of all places, the bright and pulsing center of Carnival in Panama, after seeing thousands of people crammed into a few narrow streets and a town square, and being doused by water often enough that I slept in wet clothes, and being awakened by thumping tambourines, and dancing to the comparsas as they paraded down the streets alongside the elaborately attired queens, and baking in the sun, and feeding my flesh to the mosquitoes, and coming home four days later with my whole body sore, and realizing when someone asked if I’d had a good time at Carnival that I could hardly remember one thing that had happened the whole long weekend—after all of that, I’d had enough.

INNOCENCE by RUTH PRAWER JHABVALA
Posted 2006-06-19
Dinesh never became a famous writer, but he did become a writer, and he published several novels. I translated one of these from the original Hindi into English and tried to get it published here, but I was told that the background was too unfamiliar to be of interest to an American audience. Of course, it was very familiar to me; I had actually lived in New Delhi and was not only a witness to the principal events but a part of them.

ACCIDENT BRIEF by KAREN RUSSELL
Posted 2006-06-12
“Hooey,” Mr. Oamaru says, working his fork with silly urgency. A single pea is caught between his square front teeth. “That boy Rangi can sing. The boy just needs a friend is all. You be that, Tek. You be that friend.”

MY PARENTS’ BEDROOM by UWEM AKPAN
Posted 2006-06-05
I’m nine years and seven months old. I’m at home playing peekaboo in my room with my little brother, Jean. It’s Saturday evening and the sun has fallen behind the hills. There’s silence outside our bungalow, but from time to time the evening wind carries a shout to us. Our parents have kept us indoors since yesterday.

DIMENSION by ALICE MUNRO
Posted 2006-05-29
Doree had to take three buses—one to Kincardine, where she waited for one to London, where she waited again, for the city bus out to the facility. She started the trip on a Sunday at nine in the morning. Because of the waiting times between buses, it took her until about two in the afternoon to travel the hundred-odd miles. All that sitting, either on buses or in the depots, was not a thing she should have minded. Her daily work was not of the sitting-down kind.

GOD THE NOVELIST by HENRY ROTH
Posted 2006-05-22
The Home Relief investigator called on Thursday: a dark-complexioned, middle-aged woman, Jewish, wearing glasses. As soon as she entered my room, having climbed three flights of stairs to get there, she made for a chair and, panting, ensconced herself. She asked me about my writing—information she had evidently obtained from my Home Relief dossier. Was I close to completing anything I could sell? According to statements made when I first applied, I had said I expected to sell my first short story by June of 1939. It was now May, she pointed out. I was in a psychological jam, I explained, and that was one of the reasons I had moved uptown: to be near my agent—to consult with her. “I don’t like this room,” I said. “It’s small and without ventilation. I’d like to move if I could find a better one.”

CINDERELLA SCHOOL by LARA VAPNYAR
Posted 2006-05-15
The ad read, “CINDERELLA SCHOOL. Learn English to find your dream. Fast, affordable, flexible hours.” And, in smaller letters, “Russian-speaking English teacher wanted. English teacher’s diploma required.” I found it in Our Brooklyn, the thickest and the trashiest of all the Russian newspapers. I scrambled out of bed, dug up my diploma from the Moscow State Pedagogical University, and, without giving it much thought, carefully printed “and English” next to the words certifying that I could teach Russian language and literature.

ADINA, ASTRID, CHIPEWEE, JASMINE by MATTHEW KLAM
Posted 2006-05-08
Saturday night Julia sat staring at a candle. It was after eight. She needed to eat. She hadn’t felt tired yet. She’d had a perfect pregnancy—no rashes, no fat feet, working full time, doing it all. A cartoonist couldn’t have drawn a more adorable creature: rosy cheeks, pudgy nose, lime-green pregnancy pants drawn up over her stomach, white maternity smock.

ONCE IN A LIFETIME by JHUMPA LAHIRI
Posted 2006-05-01
I had seen you before, too many times to count, but a farewell that my family threw for yours, at our house in Inman Square, is when I begin to recall your presence in my life. Your parents had decided to leave Cambridge, not for Atlanta or Arizona, as some other Bengalis had, but to move all the way back to India, abandoning the struggle that my parents and their friends had embarked upon. It was 1974. I was six years old. You were nine.

AN AFTERNOON by WILLIAM TREVOR
Posted 2006-04-24
Someone had left a comic paper on the seat near where he sat and he read the strips while he waited. All the way to the bus station he had hurried because he liked being early for things. He liked to take his time, to settle himself, and he did so now. He knew she’d come.

THE TROJAN SOFA by BERNARD MACLAVERTY
Posted 2006-04-10
It’s dark—pitch black—and everything’s shaking and bumping. I’m not scared—just have some what-if knots in my gut. What if they have a dog? That would be me—well and truly. Or a burglar alarm, with laser beams, like they have in the movies. And when you walk through the beam, which you can’t see, the alarm goes off in the nearest cop shop. But my Da would’ve asked all these questions when he was selling. My Da sells anything and everything, bric-a-brac, furniture, you name it. He sells all over the place—fairs, car-boot sales, a stall in the Markets—but quality stuff, or as much of it as he can get. He’s good, friendly, knows what he’s doing.

IN THE REIGN OF HARAD IV by STEVEN MILLHAUSER
Posted 2006-04-03
In the reign of Harad IV there lived at court a maker of miniatures, who was celebrated for the uncanny perfection of his work. Not only were the objects of his strenuous art pleasing to look at but the pleasure and astonishment increased as the observer, bending closer, saw that a passionate care had been lavished on the smallest and least visible details. It was said that no matter how closely you examined one of the Master’s little pieces you always discovered some further wonder.

A BETTER ANGEL by CHRIS ADRIAN
Posted 2006-03-27
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” she told me the first time we met. Six years old, I was digging under a log, looking for worms. This was back when my father still had all his property, and I could walk for the whole afternoon without leaving his orange groves. I spent a lot of time amusing myself that way, making up games, inventing friends to play with, since I really had none of my own, or looking for buried treasure. My sisters were all much older and hated to have me underfoot, so they’d draw fake maps, age them by beating them in the sand with a baseball bat and burning them around the edges, then send me off on quests. I fell for this sort of thing for years.

GLEASON by LOUISE ERDRICH
Posted 2006-03-13
John Stregg opened his front door wide and there was Gleason, his girlfriend Jade’s little brother. The boy stood, frail and skinny, in the snow with a sad look on his face and a gun in his hand. As the president of the New Otto Bank, of New Otto, North Dakota, Stregg had trained his employees to stay relaxed in situations like this. Small-town banks were vulnerable, and Stregg had actually been held up twice. One of the robbers had even been a methamphetamine addict. He did not flinch now.

THE TRENCH by ERRI DE LUCA
Posted 2006-03-06
When I found the sewage pipe I was happy, but I couldn’t smile. Too many days of danger had hardened my nerves. With the pick, I made a hole in the top part of the drain, and inhaled the stink like the perfume of victory. I hadn’t gone crazy; on the contrary, I’d been saved.

THE BONE GAME by CHARLES D’AMBROSIO
Posted 2006-02-27
They’d only taken a simple wrong turn somewhere—taken a wrong exit off the freeway, then got caught downtown in the maze of Seattle’s one-way streets—but to D’Angelo it was as if they’d travelled back in time to the nineteenth century. He looked out the Cadillac’s tinted window and saw, through a haze of watery green, a few Chinese men in loose slacks, old coolie stock, it seemed to him, struggling up the steep hill, stooped over as if shouldering the weight of a maul. “Look at those Chinks,” he said. “I bet they laid some track in their day.” Kype finally found the street he wanted and steered the car north through Pioneer Square.

MY FATHER’S TEARS by JOHN UPDIKE
Posted 2006-02-20
Come to think of it, I saw my father cry only once. It was at the Alton train station, back when the trains still ran. I was on my way to Philadelphia to catch the train that would return me to Boston and college. I was eager to go, for already my home and my parents had become somewhat unreal to me, and college, with its courses and the hopes for my future they inspired and the girlfriend I had acquired in my sophomore year, had become more real every semester; it shocked me—threw me off track, as it were—to see that my father’s eyes, as he shook my hand goodbye, glittered with tears.

THE DEPOSITION by TOBIAS WOLFF
Posted 2006-01-30
The witness was playing hard to get. Statements he had made earlier to his girlfriend, another nurse, statements crucial to Burke’s case, the witness now declined to repeat under oath. He claimed not to remember just what he had said, or even to recall clearly the episode in question: an instance of surgical haste and sloppiness amounting to malpractice. As the result of a routine procedure—removal of a ganglion cyst—outrageously, indefensibly botched, Burke’s client had lost the fine motor functions of her left hand. She’d worked the reservations desk at a car-rental office; what was to become of a fifty-eight-year-old booking agent who could no longer use a keyboard?

SUNDOWNERS by MONICA ALI
Posted 2006-01-16
The Potts girl walked into the café preceded by her reputation so that everyone was obliged to stare. Even Stanton, who had been in Mamarrosa for less than a month, looked her over once more than was strictly necessary. Vasco, stuffed behind the grand Formica counter, served her with pineapple Sumol and unsmiling vigilance. The girl sat on the edge of the pool table, swinging her legs and examining her navel stud. Her hair fell forward, revealing an ugly brown hearing aid, and Stanton averted his eyes.

THREE DAYS by SAMANTHA HUNT
Posted 2006-01-09
It’s starting to get dark. Beatrice walks along the highway from the bus depot up to her family’s house. She avoids the roadway by walking just outside the guardrail in the long, dry grass that’s been matted down by road salt and rain, strewn with trash and the surprisingly bloated body of a dead raccoon. Beatrice imagines that every car and truck passing holds someone she once knew in high school. Inside their cars they are shaking their heads and asking, “Is that Beatrice? What the hell is she doing with a bloated raccoon carcass?”

THE CRYPTOZOOLOGIST by TONY EARLEY
Posted 2006-01-02
Fieldin was under round-the-clock hospice care, and the jagged, liquid rasp of his breathing made it almost impossible for Rose to think about anything other than his vain search for oxygen. Unable to sleep, she put on his old down jacket and stepped onto the back porch, closing the door quietly behind her. It was about two-thirty in the morning, the world silvered with frost. The orchard glittered in the harsh light of a near-full moon. The gnarled old apple trees seemed on the verge of movement, as if she had caught them marching in formation toward App Mountain, whose black shoulders sloped suddenly upward just beyond the last row of trees.

THE ALBANIAN WRITERS’ UNION AS MIRRORED BY A WOMAN
by ISMAIL KADARE
Posted 2005-12-19
To compare the Albanian Writers’ Union to a whore seems extremely vulgar, like so many overused metaphors, particularly the ones that have become common since the fall of Communism. Yet my plan to put together an accurate history of the Union (or, at least, its history from 1962 to 1967) has always awakened in me the vision of a certain woman named Marguerite. I am unable to dissociate one from the other; they are bound together like a fragrance to an almost forgotten memory.

TWENTY GRAND by REBECCA CURTIS
Posted 2005-12-12
On December 13, 1979, when my mother was thirty years old, she lost an old Armenian coin. That winter was cold, and she had been sleeping with my sister and me on a foldout couch in the living room to save on heat. We lived on a cleared ledge, a natural shelf, on a mountain high above a lake. The wind on the shelf was amazing. At night it leaped up to the blinking red light at the tip of the peak behind our house, then skidded back down across the pines and whistled past our windows, somehow inserting, through tiny cracks between the window and the frame, snow that piled, sloped and sparkling, on the sills.

LA CONCHITA by T. CORAGHESSAN BOYLE
Posted 2005-12-05
In my business, where you put something like forty to forty-five thousand miles a year on your vehicle and the sweet suck of the engine at 3500 r.p.m. is like another kind of breathing, you can’t afford distractions. Can’t afford to get tired or lazy or lift your eyes from the road to appreciate the way the fog reshapes the palms on Ocean Avenue or the light slips down the flanks of the mountains on that mind-blowing stretch of Highway 1 between Malibu and Oxnard. Get distracted and you could wind up meat. I know that. The truckers know that. But just about everybody else—Honda drivers, especially, and I’m sorry—they don’t even know they’re behind the wheel and conscious half the time.

WENLOCK EDGE by ALICE MUNRO
Posted 2005-11-28
My mother had a bachelor cousin a good deal younger than her, who used to visit us on the farm every summer. He brought along his mother, Aunt Nell Botts. His own name was Ernie Botts. He was a tall, florid man with a good-natured expression, a big square face, and fair curly hair springing straight up from his forehead. His hands, his fingernails were as clean as soap itself; his hips were a little plump. My name for him—when he was not around—was Earnest Bottom. I had a mean tongue.

LOVE AND OBSTACLES by ALEKSANDAR HEMON
Posted 2005-11-21
Before I opened my eyes, I listened: above the sound wall of the clattering train, I heard two male voices. One of them was deep and spoke with a southern Serbian accent; the other was mumbly and uttered words with the slurry inflections of a Sarajevo thug—the soft consonants further softened, the vowels stuck in the gullet. I wasn’t sure what they were talking about, but there was the gurgling sound of liquid in a bottleneck, the crackling of a burning cigarette.

THE BEST YEAR OF MY LIFE by PAUL THEROUX
Posted 2005-11-07
I got the appalling news as the whole family watched, all of them chewing and gabbling at the kitchen table, near where the phone hung on the wall. It was a few days before Christmas, so everyone was at home, all six of my siblings, the entire cast assembled at the footlights for this—not tragedy, since tragedy seldom visits the young—this cruel farce. I had just turned nineteen.

THE GOD OF WAR by MARISA SILVER
Posted 2005-10-31
Ares couldn’t help himself. He’d be standing in the circle, waiting for big Ernesto and the opposing oversized twelve-year-old center to fight it out for the jump ball, and he’d find himself yelling, “Irritation!” or “Horrible lack of judgment!,” and the boy’s hand would reach into the air a millisecond too late, by which time Ernesto would have slapped the ball halfway down the court with his big paw. Or, when the teams were lined up for a free throw, Ares would repeat the word “shame” in a low hiss until it sounded as though the nearby Salton Sea had broken its bounds and was roaring beneath the basketball court.

THE CHILDREN by WILLIAM TREVOR
Posted 2005-10-24
“We must go now,” Connie’s father said, and Connie didn’t say anything. The two men stood with their shovels, hesitating. Everyone else, including Mr. Crozier, who had conducted the funeral service, had gone from the graveside. Cars were being started or were already being eased out of where they were parked, close to the church wall on the narrow road. “We have to go, Connie,” her father said.

PATH LIGHTS by TOM DRURY
Posted 2005-10-10
One day, a bottle almost hits us. It’s a brown quart bottle that falls out of the sky. We are in the arroyo, the dogs and me, walking. They look at the bottle; they look at me. My first guess is that somebody threw it down from the rim of the arroyo. But then it would have bounced down the slope—it wouldn’t have stopped dead like this.

EARLY MUSIC by JEFFREY EUGENIDES
Posted 2005-10-03
As soon as he came in the front door, Rodney went straight to the music room. That was what he called it, wryly but not without some hope: the music room. It was a small, dogleg-shaped fourth bedroom that had been created when the building was cut up into apartments. It qualified as a music room because it contained his clavichord.

COMPANION by SANA KRASIKOV
Posted 2005-09-26
Since she’d arrived in America and got divorced, Ilona Siegal had been set up three times. The first man was not an ordinary man but a Ph.D. from Moscow, the friend who’d arranged the date said. When Ilona opened her door, she’d found the Ph.D. standing on her front steps in a pair of paper-sheer yellow jogging shorts. He was thin, in the famished way of grazing animals and endurance athletes, with folds of skin around his kneecaps and wiry rabbit muscles braiding into his inner thighs.

COWBOY by THOMAS McGUANE
Posted 2005-09-12
The old fella makes me go into the house in my stocking feet. The old lady’s in a big chair next to the window. In fact, the whole room is full of big chairs, but she’s only in one of them—though, big as she is, she could fill up several. The old man says, “I found this one in the loose-horse pen at the sale yard.”

COPING STONES by ANN BEATTIE
Posted 2005-09-05
Cahill—Dr. Cahill to those who knew him in his small town in Maine—had decided that his screened porch should be relocated. Wouldn’t it be better to winterize the current porch, adding a door at the far end which would lead to a new, smaller porch, perpendicular to the original? That way, he could walk out of the kitchen in the winter with his cup of freshly brewed coffee and his vitamin drink (those mornings when he went to the trouble to make it) and enjoy the late-blooming flowers on an enclosed, heated porch. In the summer, he could set up a makeshift desk—probably just the card table—and not have to worry that rain would ruin his paperwork.

CLUB DES AMIS by TONY D’SOUZA
Posted 2005-08-29
Wu’s story was simple: he’d come to West Africa from Shanghai in search of a better life. Throughout the nineteen-nineties, a number of Chinese herbalists had established themselves in the major and minor cities of Ivory Coast; Wu’s cousin was one of these, and he’d urged Wu to join him. Wu chose Séguéla, a dusty Muslim town in the north of the country, and spent his first few months there taking lessons in the rudiments of West African French and shelling out piles of his cousin’s CFA francs to entertain the city’s functionaries in the bars. Then he hung his shingle in the marketplace, and the patients began to come.

THE VIEW FROM CASTLE ROCK by ALICE MUNRO
Posted 2005-08-22
On a visit to Edinburgh with his father when he is nine or ten years old, Andrew finds himself climbing the damp, uneven stone steps of the Castle. His father is in front of him, some other men behind—it’s a wonder how many friends his father has found, standing in cubbyholes where there are bottles set on planks, in the High Street—until at last they crawl out on a shelf of rock, from which the land falls steeply away. It has just stopped raining, the sun is shining on a silvery stretch of water far ahead of them, and beyond that is a pale green and grayish-blue land, a land as light as mist, sucked into the sky.

THICKER THAN WATER by GINA OCHSNER
Posted 2005-08-15
In the spring of 1988, Vasya Brkic, waking from a dream in which she was a wolf, bit her husband's neck and killed him in the bed they shared. The following spring, Marti Cosic, a saxophonist in a klezmer band, went crazy and killed his fellow band members-all seven of them-then beat himself to death with his saxophone. One year later, after swimming naked in the newly thawed River Daugava, Semyon Iossel, an unemployed engineer, built a flying machine and died after falling from a great height. His grieving widow distracted herself for a year by giving lectures on the dangers of gravity, then succumbed to a mysterious urge to throw herself in front of the Riga-Tallinn train and was pulped on the tracks.

COMMCOMM by GEORGE SAUNDERS
Posted 2005-07-25
Tuesday morning, Jillian from Disasters calls. Apparently an airman named Loolerton has poisoned a shitload of beavers. I say we don’t kill beavers, we harvest them, because otherwise they nibble through our Pollution Control Devices (P.C.D.s) and polluted water flows out of our Retention Area and into the Eisenhower Memorial Wetland, killing beavers.

AWAITING ORDERS by TOBIAS WOLFF
Posted 2005-07-18
Sergeant Morse was pulling night duty in the orderly room when a woman called, asking for Billy Hart. He told her that Specialist Hart had shipped out for Iraq a week earlier. She said, “Billy Hart? You sure? He never said a word about shipping out.”

LONG-DISTANCE CLIENT by ALLEGRA GOODMAN
Posted 2005-07-04
He was at work when it began. We offer a choice of two plans,” Mel told the new programmer on the phone. On the desk, his computer beamed at him, along with Sam and Annie, in their school pictures, his grown son and daughter fixed in first- and third-grade amber. The office was relatively quiet, the open-plan space still cavernous, although Mel was drawing up contracts and issuing I.D.s as fast as he could.

ASHES by CRISTINA HENRÍQUEZ
Posted 2005-06-27
I’m at work on Saturday when I get the call. Carina, from the front counter, pages me over the intercom and when I finally get to the phone it’s my older brother, Jano, telling me I might want to sit down because he has upsetting news.

HAUNTING OLIVIA by KAREN RUSSELL
Posted 2005-06-06
My brother Wallow has been kicking around Gannon’s Boat Graveyard for more than an hour, too embarrassed to admit that he doesn’t see any ghosts. Instead, he slaps at the ocean with jilted fury. Curse words come piping out of his snorkel. He keeps pausing to readjust the diabolical goggles.

A MOUTHFUL OF CUT GLASS by TESSA HADLEY
Posted 2005-05-30
The house where Neil was born, in 1952, had been at the center of Birmingham, in a Victorian slum that was knocked down a few years later. Nobody lived there now; there were only roads and office blocks, and the people who’d lived in the slums had been moved out to the new estates that ringed the city. Neil told Sheila that the house he was born in had had a crack in the outside wall that let the rain and wind through, so that for the years he lived there he and his sister had had to sleep in his mum and dad’s room, because they couldn’t use the bedroom upstairs. His sister had slept in a cot until she was six; he had slept in the bed with his parents.

THE RUSSIAN RIVIERA by DAVID BEZMOZGIS
Posted 2005-05-23
"Some businessmen” was how Skinny Zyama had described the two gangsters from New Jersey.
“You want me there for a meeting with businessmen?” Kostya had asked.
“You have other plans on a Wednesday afternoon?”
“No.”
“Wear a jacket,” Zyama had said.

TWO’S COMPANY by JONATHAN FRANZEN
Posted 2005-05-16
And then the perfect couple, Pam and Paul, who first hooked up in college, co-writing operettas and co-founding a cabaret, went on to amaze their classmates by marrying in Reno six months before they even graduated, and finally, at a combined age of forty-three, set up shop in California as a comedy-writing duo. They were still only twenty-seven when NBC picked up their pilot for a series about suburban teen-agers with funny yesteryear hair styles and funny yesteryear teen difficulties. Every Wednesday night, for the next five seasons, tens of millions of smiling Americans watched the heart icon in the show’s closing credit (“a pamela burger ♥ paul mather creation”) twinkle once to the sound of a little chime.

THE ROOM by WILLIAM TREVOR
Posted 2005-05-09
"Do you know why you are doing this?” he asked, and Katherine hesitated, then shook her head, although she did know. Nine years had almost healed a soreness, each day made a little easier, until the balm of work was taken from her and in her scratchy idleness the healing ceased. She was here because of that, there was no other reason she could think of, but she didn’t say it.

ALONG THE HIGHWAYS by NICK ARVIN
Posted 2005-05-02
The two people inside the convertible—the combination of the two of them together—had the appearance of an illusion. Graham switched lanes to follow them through a left turn. The top was down, and he watched the mouth of the driver, Doug, open and close, and watched the passenger, Lindsey, nod and laugh. The wind fidgeted with her hair, and her gaze lingered on Doug’s opening and closing face with warm, inexplicable intimacy. For the first several miles, Graham pursued them through the crowded, car-clogged suburbs of Detroit only to corroborate what he was seeing, to verify his sanity.

THE ORLOV-SOKOLOVS by LUDMILA ULITSKAYA
Posted 2005-04-11
At first glance, they didn’t make much of an impression. Both seemed rather small, they weren’t particularly striking, and they were so taken with each other that they had no time for the rest of the world. A second glance, however, told you that they were kingpins, and after that it was impossible to recall the impression they had made at first. Nobody at the university could remember a time when they were not an item. They had met while taking the entrance exam, and even before the results went up, the two of them had hightailed it to his dacha. They returned five days later, on July 21st, the day the enrollment list was posted, and went straight to the dreaded bulletin board, which left all but three students trembling with fear. One of the three was Tonya Kolosova, an uninspired swot and, as they subsequently learned, the dean’s niece. They—Andrey Orlov and Tanya Sokolova—were the other two.

MALLAM SILE by MOHAMMED NASEEHU ALI
Posted 2005-04-04
He was popularly known as mai tea, or the tea seller. His shop was situated right in the navel of Zongo Street—a stone’s throw from the chief’s assembly shed and adjacent to the kiosk where Mansa BBC, the town gossip, sold her provisions. Along with fried eggs and white butter bread, Mallam Sile carried all kinds of beverages: regular black tea, Japanese green tea, Milo, Bournvita, cocoa drink, instant coffee. But on Zongo Street all hot beverages were referred to just as tea, and it was common, therefore, to hear people say, “Mallam Sile, may I have a mug of cocoa tea?” or “Sile, may I have a cup of coffee tea?”

SOLACE by DONALD ANTRIM
Posted 2005-03-28
They were children of parents who’d acted grotesquely, some might say violently, toward them, even when they were fairly little, and when, in their early thirties, they met and began sharing confidences, their discovery of this common ground—for that was how she thought of it—seemed to her a great, welcome solace. At last! she thought more than once during the weeks and months after they’d started going to bed together—always at friends’ places, because they were both in transitional periods and didn’t have anywhere comfortably private; she was saving money by sleeping on a foldout sofa in the living room of a one-bedroom apartment in the East Twenties that she shared with her friend Susan, while he, also recently forced to cut expenses, was installed uptown in a rented room in the apartment of an older, intimidating former co-worker, also named Susan. At last! Jennifer said to herself many times before falling asleep after sex in some friend’s or friend of a friend’s freshly changed bed. Then she would squeeze his hand.

A SECRET STATION by DAVID GATES
Posted 2005-03-21
At a decent interval after his seventy-first birthday, Martine sat him down: she was leaving him, moving to New York. To be with a man he presumed she’d met at that conference—last fall, had it been?—from which she’d returned two days late, after supposedly seeing friends and taking in the new production of “Così” at the Met. She would come up a couple of days a week to teach the rest of her classes, then figure out what was next. She would ask for nothing in their settlement. Well, no blame to her: if she lived to be ninety, as more and more people were doing, she had half her life ahead of her. She said, “The one thing I swore not to do, I swore not to be trite and ask you to understand.” Oh? Had she not also sworn to forsake all others? But he couldn’t very well get on his high horse about that.

MEN OF IRELAND by WILLIAM TREVOR
Posted 2005-03-14
The man came jauntily, the first of the foot passengers. Involuntarily he sniffed the air. My God! he said, not saying it aloud. My God, you can smell it, all right. He hadn’t been in Ireland for twenty-three years.

DELLA by ANNE ENRIGHT
Posted 2005-03-07
Della thought again about the stream, which was black and broad, and about the naked boys who played on its sloping banks, all very white. One of them reached toward the water with a stick, but the stick did not touch the water. She could see him leaning sideways off the steep bank. There was a scrubby tree leaning in from the other bank, and the leaves were small and grayish against the black water.

THE GORGE by UMBERTO ECO
Posted 2005-02-28
My memory is proglottidean, like the tapeworm, but unlike the tapeworm it has no head, it wanders in a maze, and any point may be the beginning or the end of its journey. I must wait for the memories to come of their own accord, following their own logic. That is how it is in the fog. In the sunlight, you see things from a distance and you can change directions purposefully in order to meet up with something particular. In the fog, something or someone approaches you, but you do not know what or who until it is near.

THE CONDUCTOR by ALEKSANDAR HEMON
Posted 2005-02-21
In the 1989 “Anthology of Contemporary Bosnian Poetry,” Muhamed D. was represented with four poems. My copy of the anthology disappeared during the war, and I can’t recall the titles of the poems, but I do remember the subjects: one of them had all the minarets of Sarajevo lighting up simultaneously at sunset on a Ramadan day; another showed the deaf Beethoven conducting his Ninth Symphony, unaware of the audience’s ovations until the contralto touched his shoulder and turned him around. I was in my mid-twenties when the book came out, and compulsively writing poetry every day. I bought the anthology to see where I would fit into the pleiad of Bosnian poets. I found Muhamed D.’s poems silly and fake; his use of Beethoven struck me as pretentious and his mysticism alien to my own rock-and-roll affectations. But, in one of the few reviews the anthology received, the critic raved, in syntax tortured on the rack of platitudes, about the range of Muhamed D.’s poetic skills and the courage he had shown by shedding the primitive Bosnian tradition for more modern forms. “Not only is Muhamed D. the greatest living Bosnian poet,” the reviewer said, “he is the only one who is truly alive.”

UP NORTH by CHARLES D’AMBROSIO
Posted 2005-02-07
We angled our heads back and opened our mouths like fledgling birds. Smoke gave the cool air a faintly burned flavor, an aftertaste of ash. A single flake lit on my wife’s eyelash, a stellar crystal, cold and intricate. I blew a warm breath over her face, melting the snow.

THE ROADS OF HOME by JOHN UPDIKE
Posted 2005-01-31
In his rented beige Nissan, in a soft but steady November rain, David Kern exited from the Pennsylvania Turnpike at a new toll booth and was shot into an alien, majestic swirl of overpass and underpass. For some alarming seconds, he had no idea where he was; the little village of Morgan’s Forge—an inn, a church, a feed store—which should have been on his left, had vanished behind a garish stretch of national franchises and retail outlets. The southern half of the county, a woodsy stretch of rural backwardness when, soon after the Second World War, his family, at his mother’s instigation, had bought back the family farm, was now a haven for Philadelphians, who were snapping up the old stone farmhouses for weekend retreats. There were even, he had been told, daily commuters—more than an hour each way, but for them it was somehow worth it. For his part, fifty years ago, Kern couldn’t get out of the region fast enough.

ICE by THOMAS McGUANE
Posted 2005-01-17
The drum major lived a short distance from my house and could sometimes be seen sitting pensively on his porch wearing his shako—a tall truncated cone of white simulated fur, with a strap that cut across his chin—while folding the Free Press for his paper route. I was reluctant even to wave to him, since this was a time in my life when my greatest worry—originating I have no idea where—was that I was a hopeless coward. Although we saw each other nearly every day at school, the greetings I had offered the drum major in the past had fallen on deaf ears, and I had long since given up on the idea of getting any sort of response from him at all. I did the route for the News, a competitor of the Free Press, so it wasn’t surprising that the drum major and I didn’t speak. But after he scored 156 on a school-administered I.Q. test, and then, one September day, single-handedly captured an awol sailor by boldly shouting, “Halt!,” and escorting him to the brig at the nearby base, I began to study him in a fixed and admiring way. I imagined that he might somehow hold the key to escaping my cowardice.

THE JUNIPER TREE by LORRIE MOORE
Posted 2005-01-03
The night Robin Ross was dying in the hospital, I was waiting for a man to come pick me up—a man she had once dated, months before I began to—and he was late and I was wondering whether his going to see her with me was even wise. Perhaps I should go alone. Our colleague ZJ had called that morning and said, “Things are bad. When she leaves the hospital, she’s not going home.”

READING LESSONS by EDWIDGE DANTICAT
Posted 2005-01-03
The first time Danielle remembers ever being aware of her breasts was when she was thirteen and her mother told her to rub crushed butterflies on them to make them grow. Not already dead butterflies but live ones, plucked from flower petals by her own hands. Saturns were preferable because it was easy to tell the pale females, which she needed, from the darker males, which she did not. Swallowtails and other species with black spots were considered unlucky. And she was not, no matter what, to mistake a thick-antennaed moth for a butterfly, for if she rubbed a poisonous moth on her dot of a nipple not only would she get a rash but she wouldn’t see another centimetre of growth for the rest of her life.

ADAM ROBINSON by EDWARD P. JONES
Posted 2004-12-13
TUESDAY
After the cab turned off East Capitol onto Eighth Street, Noah Robinson saw further evidence that trees were disappearing from Washington. Where were all the oaks and maples and birches, even the odd pear, apple, or peach tree, that had been there in the time when he did not yet know himself and the city seemed always as green as his grandparents’ idea of Heaven? Even when he had become responsible for a wife and children, the trees had still been there, reminding him year after hard year how far he had to go and how far he had come. Now the landscape of the city, high and low, seemed barren, no grand trees for children playing hide-and-go-seek, no spreading refuge for old people out in the fire of summer. Why had he not noticed the death of the trees before, at age forty, at fifty-five, at sixty? When he was seven and his family first arrived in Washington, he’d had a teacher at Stevens Elementary School who taught her students about the trees of the city. Mrs. Waters hung her eyeglasses on a pink string around her neck and told them how lucky they were to have trees in Washington. The boy loved the teacher and he loved learning about trees, and he loved the way the trees told him through the teacher’s words that he, pining for South Carolina, might yet be happy in this new world.

DISASTER STAMPS OF PLUTO by LOUISE ERDRICH
Posted 2004-12-06
The dead of Pluto now outnumber the living, and the cemetery stretches up the low hill east of town in a jagged display of white stone. There is no bar, no theatre, no hardware store, no creamery or car repair, just a gas pump. Even the priest comes to the church only once a month. The grass is barely mowed in time for his visit, and of course there are no flowers planted. But when the priest does come, there is at least one more person for the town café to feed.

FOREIGNERS by ANDREW O’HAGAN
Posted 2004-11-29
Aunt Jessie made a special effort to mispronounce our names, just to stress her hatred of my mother. She liked to sit for hours in the kitchen smoking those terrible Woodbines, chewing the air between puffs as if appraising the air’s goodness to breathe. It was all part of some ceremony of impatience, at the end of which she would open her mouth to free a volume of smoke, followed by whatever unkind words had been brewing in her head all day. “They have no business naming you all after precious stones, or exotic flowers, or birds from foreign places with giant beaks. I don’t mind telling you: it’s a piece of nonsense. They must think the rest of us were born in a sack of potatoes. Sean’s a good enough name for a person, or Bridget, or else Fergus, like your Uncle Fergus.”

THE JOKE by RODDY DOYLE
Posted 2004-11-22
If he went now, he’d never come back. He’d go and she wouldn’t know, or care. He’d come back and the same thing: she wouldn’t care. So what was the point? He wasn’t going anywhere.
And that made it worse. And made him more annoyed. And angry. And stupid.

MY HEART IS A SNAKE FARM by ALLAN GURGANUS
Posted 2004-11-15
I had a snake farm in Florida. Well, Buck really owned it, but I believe I’m still Board Chairlady. Almost overnight, he hand-sculpted a one-stop two-hundred-reptile exhibit right across the road from me here. At first it was very clean. It drew lively crowds from the day it opened: December 24, 1959.

TRIUMPH OF THE SOUTHSIDE LADYJACKS
by JAMES ELLIS THOMAS
Posted 2004-11-08
"Get up there, ball!” They used to be called the Southside Ladybashers, but Brenda Summers had effectively argued that a softball team full of black women from the Acacia Heights housing projects could do without the unflattering connotations of the name “Ladybashers.”

BREAKUP STORIES by JONATHAN FRANZEN
Posted 2004-11-01
Our friend Danni’s young husband had been intending, since before he was her husband, to talk about his feelings about having children, but because these feelings consisted mainly of reluctance and aversion, and because Danni, who was a few years older than he, was unmistakably determined to have a family, this conversation promised to be so unhappy that the young husband still hadn’t managed to begin it by the time Danni reached a career plateau and announced that she was ready. The young husband told her that he needed to go to Burlington, Vermont. He said he needed to replenish his store of antique lumber for his custom-renovation business. From Burlington he called Danni every few days, sounding worried about her emotional state, but it was not until Danni received a card from the postal service, confirming the young husband’s change of address, that she understood that he wasn’t coming back.

MEMOIRS OF A MUSE by LARA VAPNYAR
Posted 2004-10-25
As a child, I used to think that Dostoyevsky’s second wife, Anna Grigorievna, was his muse. I knew her story before I knew anything else about Dostoyevsky, before I’d even read any of his books.

OLD FRIENDS by THOMAS MCGUANE
Posted 2004-10-18
John Briggs was made aware of the fact that some sort of problem existed for his friend and former schoolmate Erik Faucher by the sheer accident of a request for information from their former class secretary, Everett Hoyt, who in the thirty years since they’d graduated from Yale had hardly set foot out of New Haven. With ancestors buried at the old Center Church, in spitting distance of both the regicide Dixwell and Benedict Arnold’s wife, Hoyt was paralyzed by a sense of generational permanence. People said that if he hadn’t got into Yale he wouldn’t have gone to college at all but would have remained at home, waiting to bury his parents. Now, in place of any real social life, he edited the alumni newsletter, often accompanying his requests for official items with small indiscretions. (He called these tidbits, which he delivered with a certain giddiness, “Entre News”; they generally concerned marital failures or business malfeasances, and they almost never made it into the alumni letter.)

THE ALPINE SLIDE by REBECCA CURTIS
Posted 2004-10-11
The first summer I was old enough to work, Jacques Michaud opened the alpine slide. The slide was ten miles from the lake, in the mountains. Over the years, various businessmen had leased it for a summer or two and failed to make it a success. But Jacques Michaud was from Canada, and maybe he thought that made a difference. Or maybe he hadn’t heard or believed the stories of previous failures, or maybe he thought the economy had changed. At least that was what he said when he hired us, and the economists were saying it, too.

THE SCHEME OF THINGS by CHARLES D’AMBROSIO
Posted 2004-10-04
Lance vanished behind the white door of the men’s room and when he came out a few minutes later he was utterly changed. Gone was the tangled nest of thinning black hair, gone was the shadow of beard, gone, too, was the grime on his hands, the crescents of black beneath his blunt, chewed nails. Shaving had sharpened the lines of his jaw and revealed the face of a younger man. His shirt was tucked neatly into his trousers and buttoned up to his throat. He looked as clean and bland as an evangelist. He bowed to Kirsten with a stagy sweep of his hand and entered the gas station. All business, he returned immediately with the attendant in tow, a kid of sixteen, seventeen.

THE DRESSMAKER’S CHILD by WILLIAM TREVOR
Posted 2004-09-27
Cahal sprayed WD-40 on to the only bolt his spanner wouldn’t shift. All the others had come out easily enough but this one was rusted in, the exhaust unit trailing from it. He had tried to hammer it out, he had tried wrenching the exhaust unit this way and that in the hope that something would give, but nothing had. Half five, he’d told Heslin, and the bloody car wouldn’t be ready.

HANWELL IN HELL by ZADIE SMITH
Posted 2004-09-20
I am looking to enter into correspondence with anyone who remembers my father, Mr. —— Hanwell, who was living in the central Bristol area between 1970 and 1973. Any details at all will be gratefully received by daughter trying to piece together the jigsaw. Please write back to P.O. Box 187.
I spent just one night with your father, in Bristol, thirty-four years ago. He was down on his luck at the time, as was I. We had both suffered dramatic reversals of fortune and recognized immediately that we had failure in common—a rare example of masculine intuition. Each sniffed out the other’s catastrophe. For my part, I had lost my livelihood and my house; I spent the spring of that year bewildered and outraged, almost unable to comprehend that I now lived in a gruesome basement flat in which lichen seemed to grow upon every damp surface. A crooked business partner who took cash under the counter, compounded by my own careless accounting, had separated me from my business (a small chain of Bristol off-licenses) so completely that I was reduced to a salesman’s existence. I hawked the new American fridge-freezers from a catalogue, door-to-door. It was a dismal job and one that required me to spend a humiliating amount of time—or so I thought then—with women. In the off-licenses, all my staff had been men, and I always appreciated the fact; emotionally men are so much simpler.

SPIDER BOY by JOYCE CAROL OATES
Posted 2004-09-13
"There are places in the world where people vanish.”
His father had said this. His father had spoken flatly, without an air of mystery or threat. It was not a statement to be challenged and it was not a statement to be explained. Later, when he had not seen his father for a long time—or what seemed to him a long time, months, or maybe just weeks—he would try to summon the words again, exactly as his father had uttered them, but by this time he’d become uncertain, anxious. Had he said, Where people vanish, or where people can vanish?

KANSAS by MARILYNNE ROBINSON
Posted 2004-09-06
Last night the two of us had a conversation. I doubt you will remember it. I told you that I might be gone sometime, and you said where, and I said to be with the Good Lord, and you said why, and I said, because I’m old, and you said, I don’t think you’re old. And you put your hand in my hand and you said, you aren’t very old, as if that settled it. I told you you might have a very different life from mine, and from the life you’ve had with me, and that would be a wonderful thing, there are many ways to live a good life. And you said, Momma already told me that. And then you said, Don’t laugh! because you thought I was laughing at you. You reached up and put your fingers on my lips and gave me that look I never in my life saw on any other face beside your mother’s. It’s a kind of furious pride, very passionate and stern. I’m always a little surprised to find my eyebrows unsinged after I’ve suffered one of those looks. I will miss them.

THE CAFETERIA IN THE EVENING AND A POOL IN THE RAIN
by YOKO OGAWA
Posted 2004-08-30
Juju and I moved here on a foggy morning in early winter. There wasn’t that much to move—just an old wardrobe, a desk, and a few boxes. It was simple enough. Sitting on the enclosed porch, I watched the small truck rattle off into the mist. Juju sniffed around the house, checking the cinderblock wall and the glass panel in the door, as if to reassure himself about his new home. He made little grumbling noises as he worked, his head cocked to one side.

MOTHER’S SON by TESSA HADLEY
Posted 2004-08-23
Someone told Christine that Alan Armstrong was going to get married again: the new girl was apparently half his age. Christine didn’t think she cared. She rarely spoke to Alan these days; there was no need for them to consult each other over arrangements for their son, now that Thomas was grown up and made his own arrangements. In fact, after the person told her the news, at a dinner party, Christine forgot it almost at once amid the noisy laughter and conversation, and remembered it again only the following afternoon, when she was sitting at home, writing.

THE FRACTIOUS SOUTH by GINA OCHSNER
Posted 2004-08-16
As a young boy, I learned many things from many wise people. It was Baba Lyuba, for instance, who told me that if a bird shits on you, that is considered extremely good luck. Before my father left for Afghanistan, he taught me that in the north a falling star was lucky, but in the south—in, say, Stavropol or Nazran—it meant that a bomber had dropped for attack. From Grandpa Ilya I learned that water is life and the quiet fish swimming in it a connection between this world and the next. And, finally, from my mother, who worked in those days as a censor and translator for the Main Administration for Safeguarding State Secrets in the Press, I learned that because we were Jews we were invisible. This, she added, was a common enough ailment for Jews anywhere, east or west. The only people more invisible than Russian Jews, she said, were Gypsies, and Baba Lyuba explained that the Gypsies had learned it from us.

ADAMS by GEORGE SAUNDERS
Posted 2004-08-02
I never could stomach Adams and then one day he’s standing in my kitchen, in his underwear. Facing in the direction of my kids’ room! So I wonk him in the back of the head and down he goes. When he stands up, I wonk him again and down he goes. Then I roll him down the stairs into the early-spring muck and am like, If you ever again, I swear to God, I don’t even know what to say, you miserable fuck.

THE SHORE by RICHARD FORD
Posted 2004-07-26
My client for this morning’s 61 Surf Road showing is a welding contractor down from Parsippany, New Jersey, Mr. Clare Suddruth, with whom I’ve already done the toilsome but crucial real-estate spadework over the past months, which means that I’ve driven him around the Sea-Brite-Ortley Beach-Seaside Heights-Lavallette area on what I think of as a lay-of-the-land tour, during which the client gets to see everything for sale in his stated price range, endures no pressure from me, begins to think I’m his friend (since I’m squandering all these hours and gallons of gasoline with nothing in writing), comes in time to gab about his life—his failures, treacheries, and joys—lets me buy him a dozen lunches, and realizes that we’re both pretty much cut out of the same coarse fustian and share many core values (the economy, Vietnam, the need to buy American even though the Japs build a better product, the millennium non-event, America’s troubled youth, how much we’d hate to be young today), though we probably don’t agree about the current Election 2000 impasse in Florida, which has the country at a standstill while the Republicans figure out how to steal it back.

MIRACLE by JUDY BUDNITZ
Posted 2004-07-05
"Don’t be surprised if he’s a little blue when he comes out.”
“A little . . . blue. All right.”
“I mean it,” the doctor says. “Before they start breathing properly, before the oxygen gets flowing. I don’t mean a bit blue, like a bruise. I mean blue blue, like this.” He taps her elastic-waist jeans.
“We’re not anticipating any problems, of course,” he says. “But it’s best to be prepared.”
“I won’t be surprised,” Julia promises. “I’ll act bored.”
“Atta girl.”

ELSIE BY STARLIGHT by JOHN UPDIKE
Posted 2004-06-28
It was his father, an accountant for a textile mill, who had urged Owen to get a practical, scientific education. Floyd Mackenzie’s experience of the Depression had been that engineers were the last people to be fired; he had seen it happen. “The kid needs to latch on to something practical,” he announced. “He’s in danger of dreaming his brains away.” The boy’s brains, he reasoned, could be best engaged by machinery, if not by the giant knitting machines, as long and heavy as freight cars, whose ill-rewarded servant he himself had been, then by some other kind of construction (bridges, dams, dynamos) whose indispensable utility was more obvious to the world than that of strict, honest accountancy. In a materialist age, matter must be trusted.

THE PLAGUE OF DOVES by LOUISE ERDRICH
Posted 2004-06-21
Some years before the turn of the last century, my great-uncle, one of the first Catholic priests of aboriginal blood, put the call out to his congregation, telling everyone to gather at St. Gabriel’s, wearing scapulars and holding missals. From that place, they would proceed to walk the fields in a long, sweeping row, and with each step loudly pray away the doves. My great-uncle’s human flock had taken up the plow and farmed among Norwegian settlers. Unlike the French, who mingled with my ancestors, the Norwegians took little interest in the women native to the land and did not intermarry. In fact, they disregarded everybody but themselves and were quite clannish. But the doves ate their crops just the same. They ate the wheat seedlings and the rye and started on the corn. They ate the sprouts of new flowers and the buds of apples and the tough leaves of oak trees and even last year’s chaff. The doves were plump, and delicious smoked, but one could wring the necks of hundreds or even thousands and effect no visible diminishment of their number. The pole-and-mud houses of the mixed-bloods and the skin tents of the blanket Indians were crushed by the weight of the birds. When they descended, both Indians and whites set up great bonfires and tried to drive them into nets.

SZMURA’S ROOM by ALEKSANDAR HEMON
Posted 2004-06-07
He stands at Szmura’s door, his left hand suspended in midair, reluctant to knock. Flanked by two suitcases, one of which is held together by a flayed rope, he is panting, out of shape and undernourished. He is clad in a dark coat, the collar striated with lint and dandruff, the sleeves tragicomically short, exposing his dirt-rimmed shirt cuffs. When Mike Szmura opens the door, wearing nothing but pajama bottoms and a front of frightening chest hair, Bogdan utters his lines in stuttering English. “Right off the boat,” Szmura says in a maliciously nasal voice and steps aside to let our boy enter the apartment, the roped suitcase banging at his ankles, the other one smashing against Szmura’s knee.

SUCKERS by V. S. NAIPAUL
Posted 2004-05-31
My father was ill. Not yet close to dying. I used to go down from London at weekends to see him. I used to think how shabby his house was, more a cottage than a house, how dusty and smoky, how much in need of a coat of paint, and that was what my father thought, too. He thought that it was too little to be left with after a life of work and worry.

THE SECRET GOLDFISH by DAVID MEANS
Posted 2004-05-24
He had a weird growth along his dorsal fin, and that gape-mouth grimace you see in older fish. Way too big for his tank, too, having outgrown the standard goldfish age limit. Which is what? About one month? He was six years old—outlandishly old for a fish. One afternoon, Teddy, as he was called then, now just Ted, took notice of the condition of Fish’s tank: a wedge of sunlight plunged through the window of his bedroom and struck the water’s surface, disappearing. The water was so clotted it had become a solid mass, a putty within which Fish was presumably swimming, or dead. Most likely dead. Where’s Fish? Where’s Fish? Teddy yelled to his mom. She came into his room, caught sight of the tank, and gave a small yelp. Once again, a fish had been neglected.

HELL-HEAVEN by JHUMPA LAHIRI
Posted 2004-05-17
Pranab Chakraborty wasn’t technically my father’s younger brother. He was a fellow-Bengali from Calcutta who had washed up on the barren shores of my parents’ social life in the early seventies, when they lived in a rented apartment in Central Square and could number their acquaintances on one hand. But I had no real uncles in America, and so I was taught to call him Pranab Kaku. Accordingly, he called my father Shyamal Da, always addressing him in the polite form, and he called my mother Boudi, which is how Bengalis are supposed to address an older brother’s wife, instead of using her first name, Aparna.

THE ABANDONER by MA JIAN
Posted 2004-05-03
In 1979, just a month before the one-child policy was introduced, the wife of the vice-chairman of the Municipal Treasury Board gave birth to a retarded daughter, Miaomiao. After the wife gave birth to a second daughter, who was normal, seven years later, the vice-chairman could often be spotted carrying Miaomiao down the street with a furtive look in his eye. His downturned mouth and sunken cheeks spoke of despair. Miaomiao’s expression was generally calm, but slightly bewildered. Neighbors remarked on how the pair of them seemed always to be on their way somewhere.

OLD BOYS, OLD GIRLS by EDWARD P. JONES
Posted 2004-04-26
They caught him after he had killed the second man. The law would never connect him to the first murder. So the victim—a stocky fellow Caesar Matthews shot in a Northeast alley only two blocks from the home of the guy’s parents, a man who died over a woman who was actually in love with a third man—was destined to lie in his grave without anyone officially paying for what had happened to him. It was almost as if, at least on the books the law kept, Caesar had got away with a free killing.

CAT ’N’ MOUSE by STEVEN MILLHAUSER
Posted 2004-04-12
The cat is chasing the mouse through the kitchen: between the blue chair legs, over the tabletop with its red-and-white checkered tablecloth that is already sliding in great waves, past the sugar bowl falling to the left and the cream jug falling to the right, over the blue chair back, down the chair legs, across the waxed and butter-yellow floor. The cat and the mouse lean backward and try to stop on the slippery wax, which shows their flawless reflections. Sparks shoot from their heels, but it’s much too late: the big door looms. The mouse crashes through, leaving a mouse-shaped hole. The cat crashes through, replacing the mouse-shaped hole with a larger, cat-shaped hole.

THE RABBIT HOLE AS LIKELY EXPLANATION
by ANN BEATTIE
Posted 2004-04-05
My mother does not remember being invited to my first wedding. This comes up in conversation when I pick her up from the lab, where blood has been drawn to see how she’s doing on her medication. She’s sitting in an orange plastic chair, giving the man next to her advice I’m not sure he asked for about how to fill out forms on a clip-board. Apparently, before I arrived, she told him that she had not been invited to either of my weddings.

SUPER GOAT MAN by JONATHAN LETHEM
Posted 2004-03-29
When Super Goat Man moved into the commune on our street, I was ten years old. Though I liked superheroes, I wasn’t familiar with Super Goat Man. His presence didn’t mean much to me or to the other kids in the neighborhood. For us, as we ran and screamed and played our secret games on the sidewalk, Super Goat Man was only another of the guys who sat on stoops in sleeveless undershirts on hot summer days, watching the slow progress of life on the block. The two little fleshy horns on his forehead didn’t make him especially interesting. We weren’t struck by his fall from grace, out of the world of comic-book heroes, among which he had been at best a minor star, to land here in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, in a single room in what was basically a dorm for college dropouts, a hippie group shelter, any more than we were by the tufts of extra hair at his throat and behind his ears. We had eyes only for Spider-Man and Batman in those days, superheroes in two dimensions, with lunchboxes and television shows and theme songs. Super Goat Man had none of those.

FATHER DAUGHTER by JIM HARRISON
Posted 2004-03-22
"I hope you share my alarm over the reports of sexual misconduct at the Air Force Academy.”
“Oh, God, Dad, chill. We don’t date those dweebs.”
Norton and Laura were lunching in a faux-French bistro in Colorado Springs, not far from the upscale private college where she was now a junior. His massive buffalo cheeseburger and her chicken salad had just been brought to the table by a server named Matthew, who had a silver thumbtack in his tongue and a ring in his nose. Norton had been tempted to ask his daughter the meaning behind these ornaments but was distracted by the thought that “chill” was the equivalent of his generation’s “cool it.” There were several Air Force cadets having Saturday lunch nearby with their glowing parents, but these particular young men, at least, didn’t seem to be burbling with surly lust.

PASSION by ALICE MUNRO
Posted 2004-03-15
When Grace goes looking for the Traverses’ summer house, in the Ottawa Valley, it has been many years since she was in that part of the country. And, of course, things have changed. Highway 7 now avoids towns that it used to go right through, and it goes straight in places where, as she remembers, there used to be curves. This part of the Canadian Shield has many small lakes, which most maps have no room to identify. Even when she locates Sabot Lake, or thinks she has, there seem to be too many roads leading into it from the county road, and then, when she chooses one, too many paved roads crossing it, all with names that she does not recall. In fact, there were no street names when she was here, more than forty years ago. There was no pavement, either—just one dirt road running toward the lake, then another running rather haphazardly along the lake’s edge.

LONG AGO YESTERDAY by HANIF KUREISHI
Posted 2004-03-01
One evening just after my fiftieth birthday, I pushed against the door of a pub not far from my childhood home. My father, on the way back from his office in London, was inside, standing at the bar. He didn’t recognize me, but I was delighted, almost ecstatic, to see the old man again, particularly as he’d been dead for ten years, and my mother for five.

CHICXULUB by T. CORAGHESSAN BOYLE
Posted 2004-02-23
My daughter is walking along the roadside late at night—too late, really, for a seventeen-year-old to be out alone, even in a town as safe as this—and it is raining, the first rain of the season, the streets slick with a fine immiscible glaze of water and petrochemicals, so that even a driver in full possession of her faculties, a driver who hadn’t consumed two apple Martinis and three glasses of Hitching Post pinot noir before she got behind the wheel of her car, would have trouble keeping the thing out of the gutters and the shrubbery, off the sidewalk and the highway median, for Christ’s sake. . . . But that’s not really what I want to talk about, or not yet, anyway.

LA RAGAZZA by ANDREA LEE
Posted 2004-02-09
The first time Orso sees the new maid, he thinks she is a living doll. Not in the dated American slang sense—with which he is familiar because he was once married to a woman from New England (that overeducated and thorny beauty would never have used the phrase, but somehow in her chilly Puritan environs he brushed against it and picked it up like a burr)—but in a literal sense: she resembles a doll. The maid’s name is Caterina Zupancic, and she is Romanian, like so many of the maids in Turin these days, the ones whom Orso hears his wife, Lili, and her friends discussing in minute detail, as women always discuss their domestic help. Each maid is invariably referred to not by name but as either la colf—short for collaboratrice familiare, or family helper—or la ragazza, the girl. This particular girl has a flat, almost perfectly round face. Her cheeks, slightly scarred by acne, have a puffy droop that suggests childish sullenness or a case of the mumps. Then there are black eyes that seem to be set flush with the surface of her skin, a conventional rosebud mouth, and, barely restrained with a plastic clip, an almost inhumanly abundant mass of black hair, thick and wiry, with a coarse gleam that makes it look synthetic. Like the most successful maids, she is not beautiful and not too young. If she is a doll—Orso amuses himself by thinking—she is a slightly battered one, dragged around by the legs, left out in the rain, undressed with the cruel energy of an excessively loving little mistress.

THE LAST WORDS ON EARTH by NICOLE KRAUSS
Posted 2004-02-02
When they write my obituary. Tomorrow. Or the next day. It will say, “Leo Gursky is survived by an apartment full of shit.” I’m surprised I haven’t been buried alive. I have to struggle to keep a path clear between bed and toilet, toilet and kitchen table, table and front door. If I want to get from the toilet to the front door, I have to go by way of the kitchen table. I like to imagine the bed as home plate, the toilet as first, the kitchen table as second, the front door as third: should the doorbell ring while I am lying in bed, I have to round the toilet and the kitchen table in order to arrive at the door. If it happens to be Bruno, I let him in without a word and then jog back to bed, the roar of the invisible crowd ringing in my ears.

DELICATE WIVES by JOHN UPDIKE
Posted 2004-01-26
Veronica Horst was stung by a bee, and it should have produced no more than a minute of annoyance and pain, but she, in the apparent bloom of health at the age of twenty-nine, turned out to be susceptible to anaphylactic shock, and nearly died. Fortunately, her husband, Gregor, was with her, and threw her fainting body, all but blood-pressureless, into their car and speeded careening through the heart of town to the hospital, where she was saved. When Les Miller heard about the event, from his wife, Lisa, who was breathlessly fresh from a session of gossip and women’s tennis, he was stung by jealousy: he and Veronica had had an affair the previous summer, and by the rights of love he should have been the one to be with her and to save her heroically. Gregor even had the presence of mind, afterward, to go around to the local police and explain why he had been speeding and careening through stop signs. “It seems incredible,” Lisa innocently told her husband, “that here she’s nearly thirty and apparently has never been stung before, so nobody knew she would react this way. As a child I was always getting stung, weren’t you?”

EMINENT DOMAIN by ANTONYA NELSON
Posted 2004-01-19
What caught Paolo’s attention was the smile, teeth extravagantly white and large, orthodontically flawless. Expensive maintenance in the mouth of a homeless girl. Around the smile was a pale, animated face, and around that a corona of wild purple hair. The owner of this gleeful mouth was drunk, her flame of a head swaying on the thin stick of her body, lit at nine in the morning on the front stoop of a condemned Baptist church.

BOHEMIANS by GEORGE SAUNDERS
Posted 2004-01-12
In a lovely urban coincidence, the last two houses on our block were both occupied by widows who had lost their husbands in Eastern European pogroms. Dad called them the Bohemians. He called anyone white with an accent a Bohemian. Whenever he saw one of the Bohemians, he greeted her by mispronouncing the Czech word for “door.” Neither Bohemian was Czech, but both were polite, so when Dad said “door” to them they answered cordially, as if he weren’t perennially schlockered.

DAISY by CHANG-RAE LEE
Posted 2004-01-05
The day that Daisy died was a lot like this one, early August, with the sun seemingly stuck right at the top of the sky, casting light and heat that made all the neighborhood kids vault over each other with glee and subdued everyone else, moms and dads and older folks and even the family pets. Daisy liked the heat, and though she didn’t know how to swim, she’d spend plenty of time in our back-yard pool, tanning in her plaid one-piece in the floating lounger or else dog-paddling with an old-fashioned life preserver looped under her arms. I tried to teach her how to swim a couple of times, but I’d end up all scratched around the neck and shoulders, Daisy lurching and pulling on me whenever I let her go, yelling if her face or scalp got wet. She wasn’t dainty or persnickety but for some reason she hated being submerged. She always showered with a cap and on alternate days shampooed her hair in the kitchen sink, the drain of which I’d have to unclog every couple of weeks, pulling out the thick black strands with a pair of chopsticks.

BROCCOLI by LARA VAPNYAR
Posted 2003-12-29
"Here’s another one, seduced and abandoned,” Nina’s husband often said, pulling a bunch of wilted, yellowed broccoli from the refrigerator shelf. He held it, pinched between two fingers, his handsome face contorted in disgust, as though it smelled.

DEBARKING by LORRIE MOORE
Posted 2003-12-15
Ira had been divorced for six months and still couldn’t get his wedding ring off. His finger had swelled doughily—a combination of frustrated desire, unmitigated remorse, and misdirected ambition was how he explained it. “I’m going to have to have my entire finger surgically removed,” he told his friends. The ring (supposedly gold, though now that everything he had ever received from Marilyn had been thrown into doubt, who knew?) cinched the blowsy fat of his finger, which had grown twistedly around it like a fucking happy challah. “Maybe I should cut the whole hand off and send it to her,” he said on the phone to his friend Mike, with whom he worked at the State Historical Society. “She’d understand the reference.” Ira had already ceremoniously set fire to his dove-gray wedding tux—hanging it on a tall stick in his back yard, scarecrow style, and igniting it with a Bic lighter. “That sucker went up really fast,” he gasped apologetically to the fire marshal, after the hedge caught, too—and before he was taken overnight to the local lockdown facility. “So fast. Maybe it was, I don’t know, like the residual dry-cleaning fluid.”

RECUPERATION by RODDY DOYLE
Posted 2003-12-08
He walks. Every day, he walks. That was what the doctor had said. All the doctors. Plenty of exercise, they’d told him. It was the one thing he’d really understood.
—Are you a golf man, Mr. Hanahoe?
—No.
—Hill walking.
—No.
—Do you walk the dog?
—No dog.
He’d buried the dog a few years ago, in the back garden.
—We’ll have to get you exercising.
—O.K.

SCREENWRITER by CHARLES D’AMBROSIO
Posted 2003-12-01
How was I supposed to know that any mention of suicide to the phalanx of doctors making Friday rounds would warrant the loss of not only weekend-pass privileges but also the liberty to take a leak in private? My first suicidal ideations occurred to me when I was ten, eleven, twelve, something like that, and by now I was habituated to them and dreams of hurting myself (in the parlance of those places) formed a kind of lullaby I often used to rock myself to bed at night. I got into trouble when I told my p-doc I couldn’t fall asleep until I’d made myself comfortable by drawing the blankets over my head and imagining I was closing the lid of my coffin. In confessing to him, I was only trying to be honest and accurate, a good patient, deserving. But no dice: the head p-doc put me on Maximum Observation and immediately I was being trailed around by a sober ex-athlete who, introducing himself, put a fatherly hand on my shoulder and squeezed and told me not to worry, he was a screenwriter, too—not as successful or rich as me, sure, but a screenwriter nonetheless. He said that his name was Bob and he let it be known that he’d only taken this position on the mental ward to gather material for his next script. Half the reason I was in the ward was to get away from the movies, but my whole time with Bob I kept wondering, Is this, or that, or this or that, or this, or this, or this going to be in a movie? Everywhere I went, he went, creeping along a few sedate paces back in soft-soled shoes, a shadow that gave off a disturbing susurrus like the maddening sibilance settling dust must make to the ears of ants.

SUNSTROKE by TESSA HADLEY
Posted 2003-11-24
The seafront really isn’t the sea but the Bristol Channel: Wales is a blue line of hills on the other side. The district council has brought sand from elsewhere and built a complicated ugly system of concrete breakwaters to keep it in and make the beach more beachlike, but the locals say it’ll be washed away at the first spring tide. Determined kids wade out a long way into soft brown silt to reach the tepid water, which barely has energy to gather itself into what you could call a wave. It’s hard to believe that the same boys and girls who have PlayStations and the Internet still care to go paddling with shrimping nets in the rock pools left behind when the tide recedes, but they do, absorbed in it for hours as children might have been decades and generations ago.

TRESPASS by JULIAN BARNES
Posted 2003-11-17
When he and Cath broke up, he thought about joining the Ramblers, but it seemed too obviously sad a thing to do. He could imagine the conversation:
“Hi, Geoff. Sorry to hear about you and Cath. How’re you doing?”
“Oh, fine, thanks. I’ve joined the Ramblers.”
“Good move.”

HUNTING KNIFE by HARUKI MURAKAMI
Posted 2003-11-10
Two rafts were anchored offshore like twin islands. They were the perfect distance to swim to from the beach—exactly fifty strokes out to one of them, then thirty strokes from one to the other. About fourteen feet square, each raft had a metal ladder, and a carpet of artificial grass covering its surface. The water, ten or twelve feet deep at this point, was so transparent you could follow the chains attached to the rafts all the way down to the concrete anchors at the bottom. The swimming area was enclosed by a coral reef, and there were hardly any waves, so the rafts barely bobbed in the water. They seemed resigned to being anchored in that spot with the intense sun beating down on them day after day.

TOOTH AND CLAW by T. CORAGHESSAN BOYLE
Posted 2003-11-03
The weather had absolutely nothing to do with it—though the rain had been falling off and on throughout the day and the way the gutters were dripping made me feel as if despair were the mildest term in the dictionary—because I would have gone down to Daggett’s that afternoon even if the sun were shining and all the fronds of the palm trees were gilded with light. The problem was work. Or, more specifically, the lack of it. The boss had called at 6:30 a.m. to tell me not to come in, because the guy I’d been replacing had recovered sufficiently from his wrenched back to feel up to working, and, no, he wasn’t firing me, because they’d be on to a new job next week and he could use all the hands he could get. “So take a couple days off and enjoy yourself,” he’d rumbled into the phone in his low, hoarse, uneven voice, which always seemed on the verge of morphing into something else altogether—squawks and bleats or maybe just static. “You’re young, right? Go out and get yourself some tail. Get drunk. Go to the library. Help old ladies across the street. You know what I mean?”

HAVE YOU SEEN THE STOLEN GIRL? by TONY EARLEY
Posted 2003-10-27
Jesse James, while hiding from the law in Nashville in 1875, lived for a time at the address where Mrs. Virgil Wilson’s house now stood. For years, Mrs. Wilson delighted in telling trick-or-treaters about the outlaw, but then one Halloween she noticed that the trick-or-treaters did not seem to know—or care—who Jesse James was. They also wore costumes that she didn’t recognize and that had to be explained to her—mass murderers, dead stock-car racers, characters from movies she’d never heard of, teen-age singers seemingly remarkable only for their sluttiness—and she realized that she had somehow become the crazy old lady whose tedious stories you had to endure in order to get the disappointing candy that such crazy old ladies invariably offered. For how many years, she asked herself, had she been boring children with her tales of Jesse James, and for how many years had they been laughing at her as they walked away? Every Halloween since then, Mrs. Wilson had sat in her kitchen in the dark, listening to the radio at low volume and pretending she wasn’t home.

LOVE SNARES by LOUISE ERDRICH
Posted 2003-10-20
A man finds happiness so fleetingly, like the petals melting off a prairie rose. Even as you touch the feeling, it dries up, leaving only the dust of the emotion, a powder of hope. That is how it happened with me. No sooner had Margaret and I found happiness together in our old age than our joy was disrupted. Our peace was shattered. Our love was challenged. My life’s enemy, Shesheeb, returned to the reservation and set up his house down the road.

POND, WITH MUD by DONALD ANTRIM
Posted 2003-10-13
"The yellow bird made from cloth and / vines sits better in the / window than / the red truck I built last / year of / bottles,” Patrick Rouse wrote, in the fifteenth volume of what he liked to refer to as his life’s work—in reality, a journal crammed with passages written in a metaphorized terminology that Patrick had borrowed, or so he told himself, from the Imagist poets, and which he used to describe his emotions and whatever objects aroused his emotions. The “yellow bird,” for instance, referred to a lingerie bikini set featuring yellow lace woven in a tropical-jungle motif, which he had purchased a few days before for his fiancée, Caroline, who, at that moment, was standing in the living room modelling it for Patrick and—though the boy could hardly appreciate the significance of his mother’s erotic poses in bare feet before the hearth . . . or could he?—for her son, the “three-eyed rabbit.” That being, of course, more of Patrick’s code, or poetry, in this case describing Gregory, Caroline’s five-year-old from her marriage to Roger, an unemployed chamber musician.

A STONE WOMAN by A. S. BYATT
Posted 2003-10-06
At first she did not think of stones. Grief made her insubstantial to herself; she felt as if she were flitting lightly from room to room like a moth. The apartment seemed constantly twilit, although it must, she knew, have gone through the usual sequences of sun and shadow over the days and weeks since her mother had died. Her mother—a strong, bright woman—had liked to live among shades of mole and dove. Her mother’s hair had shone silver and ivory. Her eyes had faded from cornflower to forget-me-not. Ines had found her dead one morning, her bloodless fingers resting on an open book, her parchment eyelids down, as though she dozed, a wry grimace on her fine lips, as though she had tasted something not quite nice. She quickly lost this lifelikeness, and became waxy and peaked. Ines, who had been the younger woman, became the old woman in an instant.

IN DEFIANCE OF CLUB RULES by TIM PARKS
Posted 2003-09-29
In defiance of club rules, Robert took to going out on the river alone. It had become difficult to fit in with other people’s plans. Arthur’s wife was about to give birth, and this hitherto loyal friend now had no time. To go on the group outings would mean hanging around for hours waiting for others to arrive and argue about what they were going to do and where. Instead, after work, Robert drove straight to the club, pulled his kayak down from the rack, and changed into his wetsuit.

VICIOUS CIRCLE by THOMAS McGUANE
Posted 2003-09-15
John Briggs sat on his porch on a dreary hot August day, a glass of ice water sweating in his hand, listening to opera on the radio. The white borders of the screen doors were incandescent with mountain summer. Through them he could see the high windswept ridge above his house, where the low bunchgrass could not get a hold, leaving only a seam of shale to overlook the irrigated valley. Earlier, at the farmers’ market, he’d strolled among the pleasant displays of food and crafts. A bearded youth offered handmade walking sticks; next to him, with a cage full of rabbits, a woman in Chiapas folk costume sold angora tooth-fairy pillows while tugging strands of angora from a rabbit asleep in her lap. An extraordinary assortment of concrete yard animals surrounded a display of bird feeders with folded expired Montana license plates for roofs. A hearty woman with her fists on her hips offered English delphiniums, which, she explained again and again, had never been crossed with Pacific Giants, “not ever.” The Hutterites, in suspenders and straw cowboy hats, had a vast array of vegetables, and their long table faced lines of people five deep, eyes fixed on the produce. A girl in jeans and a bustier played a harp, almost inaudible over the sound of the crowd, beside a table displaying geodes and specimens of quartz.

THE SURROGATE by TESSA HADLEY
Posted 2003-09-08
When I was twenty, I fell in love with one of the lecturers at my college. I know that this is a very ordinary thing to do. And I know now that lecturers, when they notice yet another smitten girl-child traipsing moonily around after them, simply sigh and feel anxious. They feel anxious and all the other things you would expect, too: flattered and confirmed and a little bit stimulated.

THE BRIEF HISTORY OF THE DEAD by KEVIN BROCKMEIER
Posted 2003-09-01
When the blind man arrived in the city, he claimed that he had travelled across a desert of living sand. First he had died, he said, and then—snap!—the desert. He told the story to everyone who would listen, bobbing his head to follow the sound of their footsteps. Showers of red grit fell from his beard. He said that the desert was bare and lonesome and that it had hissed at him like a snake. He had walked for days and days, until the dunes broke apart beneath his feet, surging up around him to lash at his face, then everything went still and began to beat like a heart. The sound was as clear as any he had ever heard. It was only at that moment, he said, with a million arrow-points of sand striking his skin, that he had truly realized he was dead.

AN APOLOGY

2007-01-14T18:24:00.000-08:00

Come the new year, people the world over make resolutions, intent on leaving the previous year behind. Their mistakes, their laziness, and their cowardice, all thrown in a heap in the backyard and lit on fire. Next year, they claim, they will run a marathon, be more honest with themselves, and finally divorce the dick they agreed to marry when they were 21 and didn't know any better. But rarely do you see the great grievances of the past year aired and catalogued for posterity's sake. So, in an effort to look behind and not forward, I've decided to write down some of the larger errors of judgments I've made this past year. Hopefully, when/if similar situations arise this year, I'll be able to recognize them as being problematic and, with some luck, to avoid them.

First of all, I just want to say that I'm sorry I convinced you to get a hysterectomy. In retrospect, it was a bad idea. Especially considering all the difficulty we've been having with the adoption agency. I'd also like to say - again - that it was really juvenile of me to say that the operation was "hysterecal", just because the doctor wasn't licensed and you had to stay in the hospital for two weeks. It was a truly awful pun, and a "hystoric" mistake on my part.

Last year, as you know, was not good for me, financially speaking. In hindsight, it was a mistake to bet my holiday bonus with that guy on the train. Considering the fact that he was a film historian, it seems obvious to me now that he would have known whether or not Gene Hackman starred in "Logan's Run". What can I say? LSD makes you say some crazy things, sometimes.

I'm sorry I stole your sister's car. Really, though, it seemed like she wanted me to take it.

According to my lawyer, getting involved in Big Brothers/Big Sisters was a big mistake, especially with the trial coming up this month. Still, I feel like my biggest lapse in judgment was buying those magazines over the internet, where, apparently, people can track that sort of thing.

Also, I'm aware that I should not have begun singing "The Final Countdown" at your mother's funeral. I had just listened to "Jock Jams" on the drive over, and it was totally in my head. In addition, I'd like to reiterate that I really did drop my lucky quarter in the casket and was trying to retrieve it, even though it looked like I was removing your mother's broach.

I should have told you about the polyps. That much is clear to me now.

Finally, I'd like to say that I'm sorry I told you I'd meet up with you in Bahrain, on April 25, at 9:00AM, at the steps of the Barbar Temple, right next to the newspaper stand. I was going to go, but then this thing came up, and then the game was on. I thought about giving you a call, but, well, you know how it goes.

I'M SORRY I DIDN'T VISIT YOU WHEN YOU WERE IN THE HOSPITAL - IT TRULY WAS "MY BAD"

2006-08-30T17:11:00.000-07:00

Though presumably no great shock to those who know me, I am hanging the hat of blogging upon the hat-rack of blogging. No reason is given; no justification offered. No more do I care to dally away my idle time making rhyme and reason and pithy, pathetic joke of my typical mid-twenties American life. Time presses me to do something relevant. Like widwifery.

Looking back at what I've written on this blog, I feel that an appropriate description of my efforts can be neatly summed by these prophetic words:

A work of art? It has no invention; it has no order, system, sequence,
or result; it has no lifelikeness, no thrill, no stir, no seeming of
reality; its characters are confusedly drawn, and by their acts and
words they prove that they are not the sort of people the author
claims that they are; its humor is pathetic; its pathos is funny; its
conversations are -- oh! indescribable; its love-scenes odious; its
English a crime against the language.

Counting these out, what is left is Art. I think we must all admit that.

--Mark Twain

By the by, for those wishing to know how and what I am doing, turn your ear this way. I currently reside in Ohio, near that great, muddy river on a fine plot of 72 rolling acres. I run a small apiary and petting zoo with my lovely Peruvian wife, Aytahmo, who hears not and speaks poorly, for she is deaf. In my free time, I write children's books and practice the art of blacksmithing. Thrice a year, I participate in Civil War reenactments (Confederate, 59th Carolina division), of which I have received numerous awards (mostly plaques). Last week I tailored a suit for the governor of New Mexico, Bill Richardson, whom I consider a personal friend. All of what I just wrote is fiction, save for the part about Ohio. That is true.

And the Civil War thing.

PARADIGM SHIFT

2006-05-01T17:52:00.000-07:00

From now until sometime, get your hot, fresh updates here.

In the meantime, check out this video.

NOT A STRONG SWIMMER

2006-04-28T10:06:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I got the necessary vaccinations for my trip. Hep A booster, Tetanus booster, Polio booster, then Yellow Fever, Typhoid, and malarial pills, oh my! I must have been allergic to one of the vaccines because four hours later I was sitting on my couch watching the Clippers game wondering if I needed to go to the emergency room. Instead I popped my leg with an expired EpiPen and tried not to worry that the constricting pain in my chest foreshadowed gloomy prospects for my time abroad. If I can't even handle the vaccines...

But I am strong of heart and spirit, and I will persevere. Three cheers for Simon Bolivar! Es caliente!!

RAMBLE ON

2006-04-27T10:33:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow's my last day of work. FOREVER. Well, probably not. But for a good amount of time, at least.

I'm putting on my dancing shoes and heading south of the border. South of the Ecuadorian border, that is. Hey-oh. Off to the land of the short, stocky, large-torsoed and short-limbed people of Peru. What I'll do once I'm there is anyone's guess.

When I come back, I doubt it will be to Los Angeles. Possibly Ohio.

Life is funny, life is strange. Here is a thorough Wikipedia entry on the latest hip-hop craze, Hyphy.

FYI

2006-04-26T09:00:00.000-07:00

I ate a roast beef sub from Quizno's last night and it made me sick. YMMV.

PEAK OIL

2006-04-19T10:11:00.000-07:00

Well, at least someone else gets it.

PHOTO GALLERY

2006-04-19T09:33:00.000-07:00

This gallery is great. I really like this picture.

Also, check out my friend Sarah's photos here.

TOMKITTEN

2006-04-18T16:32:00.000-07:00

Twenty bucks says that Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes's baby girl will turn out to be retarded.

THIS MORNING

2006-04-18T10:51:00.000-07:00

In the grocery store, I heard the song "If I were a carpenter," which reminded me of the poem I wrote yesterday. Did you know that that song was originally written by Johnny Cash? I didn't.

If I were a carpenter
and you were a lady,
Would you marry me anyway?
Would you have my baby?

If a tinker were my trade
would you still find me,
carrin' the pots I made,
followin' behind me.

Save my love through loneliness,
Save my love for sorrow,
I'm given you my onliness,
Come give your tomorrow.

If I worked my hands in wood,
Would you still love me?
Answer me babe, "Yes I would,
I'll put you above me."

If I were a miller
at a mill wheel grinding,
would you miss your color box,
and your soft shoe shining?

If I were a carpenter
and you were a lady,
Would you marry me anyway?
Would you have my baby?
Would you marry anyway?
Would you have my baby?

Ok, now watch this.

THIS

2006-04-17T11:39:00.000-07:00

Is really awesome.

ON MONDAY, AN APPRECIATION OF GOOD THINGS

2006-04-17T10:15:00.000-07:00

It is all too easy for a person with my certain disposition (being that I am a man inclined to melancholy and the vapors) to view the world through a darkened, hazy prizm. Black Gray Biv instead of Roy G. Biv. But when the world produces such songs as "Sullivan Street" by Counting Crows, then certainly not all is so bleak. Hope abounds, you just have to know where to find it. The goal in life is to be like the spelunker exploring the caves and caverns of his own soul, his headlamp like the beacon of a lighthouse, swiveling in the high tower and signaling danger to the passing ships of his fancy, warning them of the craggy rocks of hard-won experience, the travails of a ship's captain attempting to transport his cargo which is not unlike the burdens of a modern man in the crazy world, full of mixed metaphors and endlessly long, nonsensical, comma-filled sentences.

I had a good idea for a short story the other day, but I've forgotten. Now, literally nobody is going to be denied the story I wouldn't have ever finished in the first place.

A friend the other night accused me of having "carpenter envy" and I think that's funny. It's funny to me because it implies that my carpenter is small - an untrue claim.

I've not wanted to write lately, and that's why I haven't contributed much to this blog. Also, I've been working much harder at work. Though, if I were a carpenter, I would not have the ability to check the internet at all. Here's a poem:

If I were a carpenter
Tall buildings and cabinet doors
Sand the edges and hoist the beams
You are my sawhorse

DEAR JEWS

2006-04-14T09:18:00.000-07:00

Thanks again for killing our King and Savior.

NOT!

But seriously, I forgive you. Here is my offering of peace.

ILLEGALS

2006-04-13T14:10:00.000-07:00

Editor, Times-Union:

We in the Mastodon City area should be pleased to have a man by the name of Tim Pletcher back in the area. Hopefully, he can and will help us with this purge of crime and drug use and sales by Latino and confused whites in our area. We (meaning our government) need to send the illegals where they belong and not in our backyards!

Neil Sedaris, via e-mail
Mastodon City

BUSH'S RATING

2006-04-13T10:44:00.000-07:00

Editor, Times-Union:

Ref: To President Poll

Let's assume President Bush's rating is presently 46.

When asking someone how would you rate our President, the individual thinks of the war. I don't think that is a true rating.

I feel when asking someone, he or she should ask concerning two fronts: A - The home front and B - The war.

It is my opinion the rating on the home front would and should be 100. War front 46. Add the two and divide by two and you get the better rating, 73. I think 73 is a much more fairer and accurate rating.

What do you think?

Lilly E. Johnson
Mastodona Lake

HOW MUCH CHUNK IN THE TRUNK IS TOO MUCH CHUNK IN THE TRUNK IF TOO MUCH CHUNK IN THE TRUNK IS NOT CRUNK

2006-04-12T16:58:00.000-07:00

A scientist who clearly spends much more time thinking about women's bottoms than squeezing women's bottoms has devised a formula that purports to calculate the perfect rump; shake-a shake-a rump shake-a.

According to the article, the magical figures are (S+C) x (B+F)/T = V, where S is the overall shape or droopiness of the bottom, C represents how spherical the buttocks are, B measures muscular wobble or bounce, while F records the firmness. V is the hip to waist ratio, or symmetry of the bottom, and T measures the skin texture and presence of cellulite.

This study seems suspect and shabbily devised to me, and though I appreciate its creator's zeal, I must say that I'm not entirely impressed by his results. Butts are like boobs - they way they feel often betrays the way they look, and vice versa. The only true way to determine the quality of a fine steak of ass is to squeeze both cheeks with both hands. Until that study comes out, I remain unimpressed.

TIME

2006-04-05T17:42:00.000-07:00

Editor, Times-Union:

Changing the time on all my clocks is a real hassle.

If the governor hadn't assured us that commerce was going to pick up and implied we would all be so much better off financially, I would really be upset. I'm going to use my financial windfall to take trips to Hawaii and Arizona so I can make fun of all those poor unenlightened losers who don't realize how much better off they could be if they changed their time twice a year.

I feel so much better about being a Hoosier now, knowing that the rest of the country no longer thinks of us as country bumpkins. Thanks a lot, Governor Daniels.

Rick Lane, via e-mail
Mastodon City

AM I A GENIUS OR AM I BELOW AVERAGE ON THE SCALE WHICH MEASURES INTELLIGENCE OR IS THERE EVEN A SCALE

2006-04-04T11:51:00.000-07:00

The other night as I lay in bed reading, I had a wonderful idea for a piece of art. Later, as I worked it through my head, it become a series of artworks, ultimately germinating into a basic though somewhat revolutionary ethos.

The acorn idea planted in the soil of my imagination which gave rise to the forest of a new and better day was this: a hand-made typewriter, constructed completely of wooden parts. Simple enough. Gears and wedges and hammers, all made of wood, all pieces expertly crafted and assembled with care. It would be interesting, I think, in the same way that any painstaking reproduction of a regular object is interesting. The reason the idea of a wooden typewriter appeals to me is because of its purity, its separateness from the mass-produced world of trinkets and machines we find ourselves living in, an object with no equal or at the least no clone, whose value is derived not from its ability to lessen the burden of work from our shoulders but rather, inversely, from the incredible amount of human labor invested in its creation.

I continued to think and decided that it would be interesting to fashion a ream of handmade paper and a significant pool of ink and, using the wooden typewriter, write a story from purely handmade materials. The story would be unique, as all stories are, but would also have the added dinstinction of being expressed through the only wooden typewriter I have ever made, typed onto paper that I had made, with ink that I had culled.

But as with all things, the need for perfection does not lessen but rather intensifies as you near your quarry. It became clear to me that in order for the typewriter to be pure, the tools with which I used to create the typewriter would have to be of my own creation. And the hard hammer and rock used to fashion those tools would have to come from my hands as well. Likewise, the timber and bark used to created the typewriter and paper would have to come from my efforts; naturally, this would mean that I would need to construct an axe to fell a tree, that I would have to find some way to sand the wood down, that I would need to fashion instruments to gently carve and break apart the material necessary to construct a typewriter.

Where, though, would I fell a tree? If I purchased property simply for the purpose of cutting down a tree, then that land would be tainted - obviously I had purchased the land with money made by means not directly related to working with the land, i.e., I did not create the land myself. The only option would be to steal the tree from someone else's property. In turn, the entire production would have the element of theft and proprietorship - an interesting additional nuance that may, someday, be played out in our country's courts. Who owns the wooden typewriter that I so painstakingly labored over? Me or the man who's property formerly held the tree whose timber I stole?

Ultimately, the question posed is this: why do we work? The modern (wo)man specializes in a field and gains knowledge specific to that endeavor. The more precise the knowledge, oftentimes the more compensation he or she derives from their work. What has happened to the generalist, the handyman, the jack of all trades? The man who can not only create a wooden typewriter from a piece of lumber but who can also create those tools needed to create the typewriter, and the tools needed to create the tools. Let us draw it back to the beginning and ask what the value is of the man who understands the importance of an ethos of self-reliance in an age of societal safeguards. Is he a loon or is he a savior? Will the world forget that he once existed or will they find the necessity and value of his work?

That's all.

Interestingly, not two days after my epiphany, I read this quite good short story.

I LIKE

2006-04-03T12:12:00.000-07:00

This guy's work. Check out the whole gallery here.

AS I AM BUSY

2006-04-03T10:55:00.000-07:00

And unable to craft a hilarious or poignant or insightful or inspiring post, please read this, as it is humorous and may make you laugh.

SWIMMING AGAINST THE CURRENT

2006-03-30T09:47:00.000-08:00

Last night, whilst attending an indie rock and roll show in Silverlake, I found myself surveying the crowd and noting the differences between me and the others in attendance. Here's where I diverge from the masses:

1) At least I tuck in my snap shirt

In the past couple of decades, the great unwashed have decided that casual wear is befitting all manner of professionals, in all number of situations. Why wear a stuffy suit when you can wear jeans and a hoodie? It's the cornerstone of a more broadly held fuck-it logic that, by its nature, is difficult to find fault with. Just try. Oh yeah? Well, fuck it. See how easy that was? However, I'm here to say that there is such a thing as going too far. Let's not throw the baby out with the bath water, people. Style isn't about the absence of effort. It's about knowing your strengths and highlighting them. And one surefire way to accentuate the positive (if you're a tall, thin man) is to tuck in your shirt. Especially if your ass is as spectacular as mine.

2. My plastic pseudo-horn-rimmed glasses are green, not black

What fuddy-duddy declared that all glasses have to be black or brown? Whoever it was didn't know a damn thing about panache, or life, or that ineffable feeling of living like a bon vivant; what the French call "joie de vie" and what Iggy Pop refers to as "lust for life." The damn hipsters surrounding me wouldn't know fun if it offered them a bag of coke and a blowjob under the table in the corner booth at Denny's. You can just tell.

3. I'm not thinking about the music video I would make for the band onstage

There was a time when I could not make this claim. Thankfully, in my current state, I just enjoy listening to the music and am not imagining vacant barns and a dying basset hound and bug zappers flickering to the beat of the music and other such images that I was, at one time, quietly (I suppose too quietly) assembling in my mind as a potential music video.

4. When a band plays a song I like, I bop my head or shimmy my hips

Maybe you need to live in LA for awhile to understand why this makes me so unique.

5. I'm wearing hand-crafted Italian leather shoes, not Chuck Taylors

I come from a modest background. My heritage is comprised of laborers and teachers and layabouts. We never had much, except each other. And that's all we ever needed. Or so I thought. Turns out it doesn't hurt to have a pair of shoes that you really love. Shoes that fit perfectly and are comfortable and look fantastic. Life's too short to buckle down and count your pennies at the end of a long day. I feel like I've solved some equation by figuring this out, and I'm happy to share the news to everyone: buy a fucking sweet ass pair of shoes. I'm not advocating mindless Carrie Bradshaw consumerism or Imelda Marcos obsession; in fact, any more than one perfect pair of shoes would ruin the whole aesthetic. Just find a pair that shouts YOU! (or would it be ME!?) and wear them into the ground. Then get another pair. Or, if you want, just keep wearing your Chuck Taylors, cause that's really fucking original.

6. These assholes aren't worried a lick about Peak Oil

Unfortunately, this is not a positive. Yes, it separates me from the other hep cats around me, but it's not a distinction I would bestow upon anyone willingly. Ignorance is bliss, they say. Unfortunately for me, I'm thinking about $7 gallons of gas, wars in China, where to sock away my money before the global economy falters, and a feasible place and way to set up shop "off the grid." The clueless Joe Cools around me are listening intently to the band and, if there any thoughts at all coursing through their well-coiffed heads, it is a worry that their band doesn't sound as good as the band onstage, or that their screenplays and head shots aren't up to muster. I don't fault them these petty concerns and in fact envy them; ultimately, how are my worries concerning the coming collapse of our society going to in any conceivable way change the course of history? Of course they won't do a damn thing. I'd rather get blindsided by a drunk driver late at night on a country road then be tied to the tracks and watch for 20 minutes as an approaching train barrels down upon me. The fools win this battle. Will they win the war?

7. They probably have a Myspace page and are going to go home and write about the show

How pathetic is that? Writing about what you did last night on the internet with some sad hope that other people will read about your evening and find it compelling enough to add their own comments. Get a life.

I SAW THIS PICTURE ON A YAHOO! NEWS STORY TODAY AND JUST WANTED TO POST IT BECAUSE IT'S PERFECT IN EVERY WAY

2006-03-29T13:53:00.000-08:00

SUGGESTION BOX

2006-03-29T10:25:00.000-08:00

I'm now officially taking suggestions for what to do with my life. I know Krupke is a cop. Perhaps I could don the blue suit? Or maybe I should pursue my dream of taxidermy and glass sculpture. Peace Corps/adventure guide in some barren brown-skinned land seems fitting and inspiring as well. This is all I know: I can't keep going to this job. I must find a new way. A shining path.

Please. Tell me what that is.

THE SILVER TONGUED DEVIL

2006-03-27T15:58:00.000-08:00

Atta boy, Kris.

Just so long as it was back in the 70s, you know, and not, like, a week ago.

ROCKS THAT I GOT

2006-03-27T09:50:00.000-08:00

You may look at me, and my rocks, and become confused. It's happened before. In fact, it's entirely possible that you will look at me, and then my rocks, and then say to yourself, "Hey, I thought I knew this person, this person Jenny, and as I remembered it, she was just a girl from the block, but now she's got all these rocks." But here's the thing: I'm still the same person. I still break it down the same way. Regardless of my possession of rocks. Having rocks or not having rocks in no way precludes me from continuing to be from somewhere. How is that even possible? It's just a fact that I'm from the block. I could become an astronaut, fly to the moon, and live there with aliens, but I'd still be Jenny from the block. I couldn't, for instance, be Jenny from the farm, now could I? Or, say, Jenny from the subdivision. I can't go back in time. I don't have a time machine. Is that what you think these rocks are? Evidence of my ability to travel through time and space, and my application of said ability to conjure for myself an alternative history, one in which I'm no longer from the block, but am instead the daughter of a rich family, raised in a brownstone and educated at the finest schools, taking trips to Europe during the summer - all because I'm wearing a few rocks?

Listen. Don't be fooled by the rocks that I got. I'm still, I'm still Jenny from the block.

SMALL TOWN GOSSIP

2006-03-24T10:14:00.000-08:00

Imelda, dear, how ARE YOU? You sure do look fancy with that fancy hat sitting atop your head. I think it's BEAUTIFUL. I really do. Oh my, dear, did you hear THE NEWS this morning? Well it just so seems to be that that preacher down in Tennessee was SHOT IN THE BACK by his OWN WIFE. Now don't that just make you want to CRY? I swear on my heart I thought of you when I heard that, what with your brother being a preacher down in MONROE COUNTY and all. I thought to myself, "I hope JACK PARSON doesn't get SHOT IN THE BACK by some banshee wife," is what I said, because I know that he's a GOOD MAN. I met him once at a church social back in the 1950's, cross my heart I did. But tell me, what is it with PREACHERS' WIVES? It's like they're either robots or they're STARK-RAVING MAD, have you noticed that? Oh, I'm not saying anything about JACK'S WIFE specifically, dear, I'm just speaking in generalities. It really does seem to me that when a woman's got nothing better to do than sit around a house with a bunch of kids and make MEAL AFTER MEAL for old invalids at the church, SCREWS START LOOSENING faster than a squirrel skittering up an OAK TREE. I've thought that many times about REVEREND BICKINHAM'S WIFE, and even though I've never been in the parsonage myself I can just betcha it's filled with those little PRECIOUS MOMENTS dolls and some sort of old worn-out piano and all the carpets are shaggy and SMELL LIKE URINE. Oh, Imelda, really now, I'm not saying anything bad about her or anything, it's just that I worry about her, and of course I worry about the people she plans on SHOOTING IN THE BACK WITH A SHOTGUN because that's how that one's gonna end up, too, you can gosh darn MARK MY WORDS. People think that just because somebody get a little RELIGION they're a good person but half the time it just gives the crazy people a reason to TALK TO THE STRANGERS IN THEIR BRAIN and if they weren't spouting off about how JESUS TOLD THEM to butter their bread on both sides, we'd have locked them all away on the FUNNY FARM a long time ago. Now, Imelda, I'm not saying that EVERYBODY is like that or anything but I am saying that it doesn't surprise me ONE LICK that that poor little girl finally SNAPPED and offed her man like that. Everybody talking about how nice and charismatic he was. Can you imagine being married to that kind of man? Always making the LADIES BLUSH IN CHURCH and getting the kids to SING A HYMN before going to bed and praying about every gosh darn thing when all you want to do is watch a few minutes of WHEEL OF FORTUNE or some other sort of nonsense to get your brain off of what a SAD, SORRY LITTLE LIFE YOU LIVE. And the whole time you've got MISTER PERFECT sleeping next to you in the bed, loafing about and making half of a teacher's salary to TELL STORIES TO OLD PEOPLE once a week. It'd be enough to make me go cuckoo, I tell you that right now, Imelda, and I don't blame that girl ONE BIT for saying enough's enough - I'm just glad she didn't DROWN THOSE GIRLS OF HERS because that would have been a real tragedy. And goodness, Imelda, there's enough tragedy right here in MASON COUNTY, isn't that right. Why, just the other day they wouldn't accept my coupons in at the BURGER KING because they said they expiration date had passed. Since when do they make all the rules? Oh well, I don't want to get going about that LOUSY BURGER SHOP now, do I? Heavens no, I don't. Imelda, it was nice to see you again, as always, and BE SURE to say hello to your brother down in MONROE COUNTY and tell him to WATCH HIS BACK. Oh, you know I'm kidding, Imelda, but be well and I'll be PRAYING ABOUT YOUR HIP, dear. Okay, bye now, Jesus loves you, honey.

TRYING TO WASTE SOME TIME

2006-03-23T15:34:00.000-08:00

Here are my thoughts on the upcoming NCAA basketball games:

LSU vs. DUKE
This is a no-brainer in the "who should I root for" category. Always root against Duke. Rooting against Duke is like rooting against Communists, or Republicans. They represent all that is evil and boring and successful in this world. They are the man in the mirror, and I'm asking him to cha-ange his ways. Cha-ange his ways by getting beat on the basketball court, preferably embarrasingly so. LSU has that fat guy that they call "Big Baby." Can you imagine? I sure can. LSU over Duke, 95 to 32.

WEST VIRGINIA vs. TEXAS
Kevin Pittsnoggle, West Virginia's lead scorer, is the Bryan Cook of this year's senior class. They are both 6'11" guys who think they're 6'2" and shoot threes as if they weren't aware that you're allowed to shoot any closer. But whereas Bryan Cook is black, Kevin Pittsnoggle is hands-down the whitest white-trashed hillbilly player I've ever seen play college basketball. He gets away with this by being really good, in which case people tend to leave him be. Call it the Sprewell Syndrome. Ok, now I'm a little ahead of myself. Let's go back a bit. I should explain. Most white players fit one of two very general molds: the wigger (self-explanatory) and the coach's son. There are, of course, exceptions (Steve Nash, Adam Morrison, and Larry Bird sort of break the mold). Most white-trash hillbillies fit the coach's son archetype. That is: they have short hair, they listen to Toby Keith to pump themselves up, and they are great fucking passers/dribblers. Pittsnoggle, on the other hand, looks like he just rolled out of bed, got yet another tattoo of a 12-point white-tail on his shoulder, stopped by the greasy spoon down by the mechanic's shop where his two brothers and four uncles work, smoked a quick jay, hopped in his IH and rolled into the gym about five minutes before gametime. Doesn't hurt the aura that he already has a BABY with his WIFE with whom he lives in his TRAILER in fucking WEST VIRGINIA. On the strength of his almost unbelievably unprecedented come-to-life caricature of all that is wrong with America, I must give the Mountaineers a big edge here. WV over Texas, 108-47.

BRADLEY vs. MEMPHIS
I don't really know anything about either of these teams, though isn't Bradley a Christian school? I sure hope so. If they are, then surely God wants them to win more than the other teams. I do know that Memphis has that player on the team who last year missed two potentially game-winning free throws at the end of Memphis' last game. I hope he gets a chance to redeem himself this year. Then, just to show him that life isn't fair, I hope that Bradley heaves a full court shot with .4 seconds left and snatches the victory from the jaws of defeat and so on. Bradley wins, 13-11.

GONZAGA vs. UCLA
This is tough for me, because I hate Adam Morrison and I hate UCLA. But, if I'm being honest with myself, I hate Adam Morrison a lot less than I hate UCLA. The reason why I don't like Morrison that much is because he's an arrogant asshole. However, it's true that when you're the best player in the country, you have sort of won the right to be an asshole. I also like that he brings a little spice to the game. More than once this year I've watched extended portions of Gonzaga games because I wanted to catch Morrison play. I don't know, though, if it's because I want to watch him outperform the other players on the court or if, as in Nascar when waiting for an accident, I'm really watching because I know it's only a matter of time before he starts punching someone in the face, over and over again, screaming at the top of his lungs until a vessel in his temple explodes. It is my wish that this happens this evening, and that the young man on the receiving end of his blows is Jordan Farmar. Gonzaga over UCLA, 67-67.

And now you know . . . THE REST OF THE STORY!

THE GAY PEOPLE

2006-03-23T10:36:00.000-08:00

Maybe not as bad as everyone thought?

Gays: Not the ruin of our society? America thinks it over.

DRUGGED OUT NEGRO

2006-03-23T08:20:00.000-08:00

I'm about halfway through Barack Obama's book, "Dreams of My Father," and have been quite surprised to find that he admits to smoking pot, doing cocaine, and attending socialist rallies in New York.

So tell me - how is the Moral Majority gonna handle all that when he runs for President?

RAMBO SINGS "TOTAL ECLIPSE OF THE HEART" ON AMERICAN IDOL

2006-03-22T13:30:00.000-08:00

After which, the judges give their comments.

RANDY JACKSON: Yo, dawg, check it out. That was tight. See, this is what I love about you. When I knew you were singing this song, I was like, "wha?" you know, because it's hard to see a guy like you breaking it down like that. But you got pipes, man, you can blow. I love the range, man, totally impressive that you pulled that off. Right, dog pound? Hoo hoo hoo hoo.

RAMBO: Thanks, Randy. Thanks.

PAULA ABDUL: (clapping, then standing) You're a star. The way you just command the stage. And it's like, you're such a big guy, strong, but yet you were really vulnerable up there, and I think that's what America loves about you. They think they know you, but every week you come out here and reveal another part of yourself. And, of course, you can sing. You're a born performer. You're a star. I think we're going to be seeing a lot more of you.

RAMBO: Thank you. Thanks.

SIMON COWELL: (looking at Paula incredulously, then turning to RAMBO) Hated it. (Boos and hissing from the crowd) Pathetic. I mean, I'm sorry to rain on everyone's party here, but let's have a little reality check here.

RYAN SEACREST: Yeah, Simon Cowell, king of reality! (applause from the audience)

SIMOM COWELL: Good one, Ryan. (eyeroll)

RYAN SEACREST: How about a little constructive criticism for Rambo, so he can do better next week, instead of just putting him down.

SIMON COWELL: Ok, listen, Rambo, you're what? A huge, muscular Vietnam vet with a mullet and a tattered shirt? And you're - you're out here singing a Bonnie Tyler song. It's like oil and vinegar. America wants a performer who knows who they are. You're trying too hard to be something you're not. Pick a better song. Work toward your strengths, not against them. Maybe Mellencamp or something, I don't know. Bob Seger? And for godssakes, do something with that hair. Ugh.

RAMBO: Thanks, I'll use that. Thanks, everyone.

DEAR GUY WHO SIGNED UP FOR THE MILITARY TO SERVE AND PROTECT HIS COUNTRY AFTER 9/11

2006-03-21T16:13:00.000-08:00

On a scale of one to D'oh!, to what degree do you regret your decision?

AND THAT BOY BECAME A MAN

2006-03-21T10:41:00.000-08:00

Often I lament the fact that it is not entirely acceptable in our culture to go on walkabout. Recently, and increasingly, I have had to fight the urge to get up from my desk and walk out of my office, never to return. Perhaps even more distressing to my employers or my future therapist is that I don't simply wish to walk out the front door of the large steel and glass building in the heart of Corporate City in which I find myself gloomily trudging into most mornings, but rather that I wish to continue walking for a very, very long time. Think of Harry Dean Stanton in Paris, Texas. Dude just walked to Mexico and didn't come back for five years. I like that kind of moxie. Nevermind the moral repercussions of such an act; I don't have a small child or a wife I regularly beat, so the only people that would worry about me would be non-dependents, family and friends and so forth. Their fears would surely be assuaged by the eventual postcard, postmarked from Belize or some such place, "Craig here. Didn't die. See you when I get back."

Aboriginal cultures knew the importance of walkabout. A rite of passage, a crucible, a forging in the primeval fires of survival and solitude, it was the ultimate test, a test that asked, "do you deserve to be alive?" Today we have the SAT's which ask, slightly more sarcastically, "are you as smart as your parents hope you are?" Sure, you may know how to divine the arcsin of an unknown angle, but do you know how to filet a box turtle? Could you create a net made from twigs and branches and the pulpy bark of a birch tree to catch fish in a stream? More importantly, would you know how to find a stream? An underground current?

I guess what I'm trying to say is that it saddens and angers me to know that it is more important to have a solid resume with impressive references than it is to walk into a future employer, stand with stiff back, and exclaim, "I have sifted through the scat of muskrats and I can tell you that they do not prefer berries to minnows." It shouldn't matter that the position for which I am applying (and for which I have no applicable credentials) is Aerospace Engineer or Federal Food Safety Inspector - it should be impressive enough that I am the kind of person who has taken it upon himself to realize both the brutal harshness of the natural world and the impossible miracle of our existence. I may not know what constitutes "drag" or "lift", but I do know that I have watched swallows fly in swarms among the endless plains of the Peruvian lowlands and have killed a great many of them through the art of slingshot. This, I believe, would give me some legitamacy in talking about matters of flight. Of course, I highly doubt that NASA would see it that way, and that is exactly why this world is doomed for failure. We've screwed the pooch.

They say that Modernism is an endless march into the future. I say, "go back." It's not that hard. We'll start with walkabouts, and I'll be the first to go. If it works, and I come back alive, I will share my knowledge with you. I will also share the tanned hides of jackrabbits and water bladders I've constructed from the organs of South American antelopes. If I perish, then remember me not as the idealistic young fool that "the world" will attempt to paint me as, but as the first pioneer venturing into a new wilderness: the wilderness of our own souls.

GOLD DIGGER

2006-03-20T19:46:00.000-08:00

I'm not saying she's a gold digger.

I AM saying that I've never seen her with no broke ass nigger.

How you took that to mean that I think she is a gold digger, well, I'll leave that up to you to decide. Issues much?

I guess my point is that just because I've never seen her with no broke ass nigger, I am in no way implying that I think she is a gold digger. And, to be honest, I think it's kind of fucked up that you do.

Here's a little experiment, you ready? Ok, um, well, how about this - I've never seen your mom eat a sandwich. Does that mean I think she's anorexic? No, it just means that I've never seen your mom eat a sandwich. To be honest, I've never met your mother at all, but that's beside the point. The point is, you have a tendency to take something that I say and then extrapolate those words into something that you hope or are inclined to believe, regardless of whether or not that perspective is based in fact, in some pathetic attempt to make me look petty or judgmental. Well, it's not going to work.

So, to sum, I have personally never seen with no broke ass nigger.

However: I ain't saying she's a gold digger.

Stop putting words in my mouth.

LAST NIGHT I LAY AWAKE WITH STOMACH PAINS

2006-03-20T11:55:00.000-08:00

Unable to fall asleep, feverish, hot and then cold, clammy; all the while I was thinking to myself, "I have ruined my life, I have missed my calling, I will never find happiness - for I should have been a college basketball coach."

RAMBO

2006-03-16T07:12:00.000-08:00

Symbolized the discontent and fragmentation of America in the 1970's.

Who, in today's dystopian social climate, best exemplifies the American pysche?

The correct answer is House, MD.

Like Rambo, but not strong, not a war veteran, and not insane. But other than that, just like Rambo.

SON OF A BITCH!!

2006-03-15T09:32:00.000-08:00

I told my roommate that I was going to buy Chipotle when it got down below $42 or so. Well, two days ago it was around $41.

I blew my chance. Damn you, you quick and delicious Mexican food chain!

MAKE A STATEMENT

2006-03-14T11:21:00.000-08:00

This, I believe. By The American Mastodon.

I believe that one day, in the near future, a nuclear bomb or massive earthquake will destroy large parts of Los Angeles. I believe that when this happens, the greatest danger will not be radiation poisoning, broken infrastructure, or aftershocks; rather, it will be my fellow man. I believe that I have a sound plan for escaping the city, which I will outline below.

First of all, when the bomb goes off, or the ground shakes and the wooden houses built on hillsides buckle and slide into the hundreds of canyons north of the city, I won't panic. While the people around me scream, hurriedly pull out their cell phones (which will be inoperable) to call loved ones, and run for their cars, I'll be calm; relaxed. If one were able to witness me, moments after the disaster, they would see a man of resolute determination and utter calm, whispering softly to himself - It's go time.

The first thing I would do is grab a bag that would fit nicely on my back, or could be slung over a shoulder, and large enough to store a comfortable number of foodstuffs and necessities. I would head to the nearest grocer and loot the shit out of the place. That is, if it were closed. If it were still open, I would obviously pay for the various items needed after a large-scale disaster: water, granola bars, dried fruit, canned meat, ibuprofen: these sorts of things. If it weren't open, I would have little recourse but to throw a rock or some sort of large, heavy object through the storefront window and find for myself the necessary items, which I would place in my bag.

The next thing I would do is steal a bike. I would hope to find one in the various alleys in Santa Monica, where I live. If I could not, I would resort to finding a person on a bike, flagging them down, and jumping them; wrestling them or pushing them off of their bike and riding off quickly. Ultimately, there is a bike shop nearby and I would make my way there and steal a bike if I could not find one by other means. The search for a quality bike would be, at this early stage, my most important objective, for having a bike is the most assured way of exiting the city quickly. You may naturally ask, "why not just get a bike now?" but that is a really silly question, because what if the bomb goes off while I'm having lunch somewhere? Or if I'm playing basketball in a park? The fact of the matter is that I must be prepared to loot food and steal a bike in the event of a large scale disaster, and I am. This I believe.

Many people will be trying to leave the city by car, which is pure folly. First of all, good luck traveling east - that is either where the bomb has been detonated or where the most damage has been done by the earthquake. That leaves escape routes to the north and to the south. Going south is perilous, because the Long Beach harbor could easily be attacked (or was the source of the original nuclear attack), and various brown people live south of the city. Though I appreciate their hip-hop music and delicious Mexican dinners, they are not the kind of people that you want coming up to your parked car as it sits in the middle of miles of standing traffic on the 405. Going north is a safer bet, but the fact remains: every person in LA has a car and every person will be in one going north. This does not bode well for expedient travel time. Gas stations, one has to assume, will be inoperable, and cars that run out of gas will have to be pushed out of roadways in order for more mobile cars to pass. Do you see where I'm going with this? I will average 10 mph on my bike, while the people in cars will sit in their minivans and Acuras, freaking out because 2 million people are trying to get to Simi Valley by way of Sherman Oaks.

And as they sit in their cars, frightened for their futures and the future of America, I will be on (someone's) bike making my way up the PCH toward Malibu and beyond. If I notice something particulary nefarious (say, an invading Chinese Navy), then I will work my way inland through the canyons of Topanga. Once I get north of Pacific Palisades, I won't be overly worried. Sure, the PCH will be a parking lot, but I'll be flying by them on my bike. I may even use the beach bike path. I'll just play it by ear, you know? It is also possible that frustrated motorists will attempt to jump me on my newly acquired bike. I'm not sure what to do about this fact, but I may have to take back roads, or I may have to purchase a gun. I'm leaning toward the gun idea.

Ultimately, once I'm out of immediate harm, the objective is to make it to Oxnard. Once there, refugee camps should be set up and I'll be able to contemplate how best to return to the city, if ever.

I could go into greater detail and outline a specific route that will get me to the PCH (Sunset seems the safest bet at this point), but suffice it say that revealing any more will only show you my hand, and when the time comes, assholes, it's not about us against them. It's about you against me.

This I believe.

WARSAW, INDIANA

2006-03-13T14:28:00.000-08:00

Like Mayberry, only in the Midwest, and labotomized.

Video.

OH, CRUEL WORLD

2006-03-10T17:00:00.000-08:00

Have you at least remembered how to laugh?

I said laugh, damn you!

ALBERT QAEDA HAS 1,937 FRIENDS

2006-03-10T10:38:00.000-08:00

I always knew that that damn site was un-American, insiduous, and the eventual ruin of modern civilization.

Remember when kids used to play around in the out-of-doors, catching insects and turtles in the pale sunset of a summer evening, returning home to a freshly made meal and a tall glass of lemonade? I do, goddamnit. Now we got the internet - halle-freaking-lujah - and with it, pornography, terrorism, and pederasts. If you listen closely, you can hear the dying sound of the American spirit. Thanks-a-fricking-lot, Al Gore.

After relying heavily on fixed — and thus vulnerable — Web sites until early 2002, al Qaeda quickly switched to hiding its online operations within more legitimate bulletin boards and Internet sites offering free upload services or connecting through such popular social network sites as Orkut and MySpace.

THE REVOLUTION WILL BE TELEVISED; SADLY, WE DO NOT HAVE A TV

2006-03-09T11:06:00.000-08:00

I know you call yourself anarchists, but really, aren't you just lazy?

LOCAL MAN LOVES BABIES; CLASSIC 6-4-3 DOUBLE PLAYS

2006-03-08T18:30:00.000-08:00

We want a pitcher, not a baby killer! Go Cards!

NOT TO SOUND TOO SENTIMENTAL

2006-03-08T12:51:00.000-08:00

Or anything, but I remember a time when queers were laughed at, blacks were enslaved, and goddamned lobsters looked like goddamned lobsters.

Sometimes it's hard for me to get up in the morning, knowing how much the world has changed.

God's idea of a damned joke or something.

CRASH IS TRASH

2006-03-07T11:10:00.000-08:00

So true, so true.

EVERY TIME

2006-03-06T17:29:00.000-08:00

I go on Friendster and start looking around, I get unfathomably depressed.

Does that happen with anyone else?

THE OSCARS

2006-03-06T12:26:00.000-08:00

I was on a plane yesterday night playing chess with Phil Keoghan's daughter, so I didn't get to see the Oscars.

The question now becomes which is a less reputable-sounding title: Oscar-winner or Grammy-winner?

THE FUTURE IS THE PAST AGAIN

2006-03-03T10:46:00.000-08:00

The new Domino's Pizza Jesus Town in Florida reminds me a lot of turn of the century Winona Lake.

I wonder if Billy Sumday will be invited to set up a Tabernacle?

I'VE LATELY FOUND GREAT SATISFACTION

2006-03-03T10:12:00.000-08:00

In flossing my teeth.

AEROSMITH

2006-03-02T10:04:00.000-08:00

Is the most overrated band of all time. I provide as evidence their last three albums.

Rod Stewart is grossly underrated. I provide as evidence "Maggie May."

REM is almost perfectly accurately regarded, and are neither underrated or overrated. I provide as evidence "You are the Everything," from their completely reasonably well-received album, "Green."

IS THERE ANYTHING HE CAN'T DO?

2006-03-01T14:19:00.000-08:00

Jordan Arrests 3 Said to be Plotting Terrorist Attack.

LOCKING PEOPLE IN CAGES

2006-03-01T10:38:00.000-08:00

Just as popular today as it was in 1906!

CONFUSED

2006-02-28T13:36:00.000-08:00

If this

now has this,

then why is it still called bird flu?

If, heaven forbid, this

catches this,

then I suggest we change the name to something a little less species-specific. Something catchy like "Holy Shit Flu."

Finally, it would have been truly tragic, and quite ironic, had she

died from this,

which, for those of you following along, is now found in both these

and these.

IN A WORLD WHERE EVERYTHING IS FUNNY, NOTHING IS

2006-02-28T10:58:00.000-08:00

Satirists the world over are dealt yet another blow at the hands of earnestness and idiocy.

FIRST, YOU LAUGH

2006-02-28T09:23:00.000-08:00

Then, you feel bad for laughing.

Then, you laugh again.

HOW I SPENT LAST NIGHT

2006-02-28T07:05:00.000-08:00

Because Valentine's Day was so fun.

DEAR DOUCHEBAG

2006-02-27T12:00:00.000-08:00

You've got a lot of growing up to do. And, for what it's worth, I agree with your father, who, in his wisdom, claimed that there will be "a dark and difficult future, if there is a future at all." He also correctly proclaimed that, "there will be a pandemic that kills millions; a devastating energy crisis; a horrible, worldwide depression; and a nuclear explosion set off in anger." Unfortunately for you, you are too young and full of your own esteem to believe him. The words of the prophets, though often written on the subway walls, and tenement halls, are rarely heeded in their own age.

Thankfully for me, I realize the prescience in his concerns; after the bomb(s?) go off, China has successfully claimed the oil fields of Russia and Pakistan, gas climbs above $6/gallon, houses in the suburbs sit abandoned, unemployment rises past 30%, and wolves prowl city streets, you'll be sitting dumbfounded with your thumb in your mouth, staring at the static on the television screen, hoping and silently waiting for some great miracle to arrive - through your pollyanic vision of a country bound together, we patriots rise above our differences and help each other through a series of great crises for which we are grossly ill-equipped. Through my more realistically-based perception of the world as it is today and soon will be, I loot your goddamn house, stab your elderly but wise father and steal the precious jewels he desperately clutches, siphon the gas from your family's SUVs, and steal your sister to be the mother of my clan as we start a new life in the hills of Idaho.

The imbecilic hopefulness of the Josh Rittenbergs of the world, though charming, is not a trait that will likely survive the coming global population contraction. This I believe.

DEAR MR. CHICKEN

2006-02-25T18:45:00.000-08:00

Whoever told you that your strength was "bumbling" gave you great career advice.

TEARJERKER

2006-02-24T11:41:00.000-08:00

I hate those damn give-the-retard-the-football-on-the-last-play-of-the-season type television segments, because they always make me cry. Always. You could shoot my dog and choke my horse and I wouldn't dampen a hankie, but show me a retard in a baseball helmet striking out during the state finals and I fucking lose it.

Because of all that, this was remarkably dangerous to watch at work.

FUNNY ALERT

2006-02-23T15:32:00.000-08:00

BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!

A DIFFICULT SITUATION IN WHICH TO FIND YOURSELF AT 9:30 ON A WEDNESDAY NIGHT

2006-02-23T10:16:00.000-08:00

My brother likes to say, "you should just get a girlfriend, I think it would make you happier," as though the option is just sitting there ripe for the taking - as though I've been actively turning down the opportunity to date a bevy of sexy, sweet, and simple women. Now, it would be easy, at this point, for me to start writing about all of the reasons why the presence of a girlfriend hasn't been a part of my life since college. But again, like blogging about my job, discussing the reasons behind my proper assimilation and acceptance of modern dating procedures on my blog is just not within my realm of ability or comfort at this point, nor do I hope it ever is. No, this little post is about something slightly different. It's about why, when you reach a certain age, when it comes to women, you stop competing with only your peers and start competing with them and with all those who came before you.

My roommate and I live in a small apartment complex comprised of four two-bedroom apartments. Recently, probably a week ago, we got new neighbors - two girls from Chicago, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed to be in the warm and sunny climes of America's hitmaker of a city, Los Angeles. Pulling up in their Penske truck late on a Wednesday night, the roomie and I decided to help our fellow neighbors, as is our Godly duty, and broke quite the sweat schlepping their seemingly endless parade of stuff up the stairs and into the new apartment. What can I say? We're stand-up guys. It should be noted, for purely scientific and empirical reasons, that the girls are not significantly cute, though one is a bit cuter than the other. They are of that healthy breed of gals that come from the chilly climate of the hog-butcher to the world - Chicago requires a thicker winter coat than southern California is all I'm saying, and I'd appreciate it if you'd not judge me harshly for my clinical observations. I can enjoy the friendship of women without having to think of them as sexual objects, you damn prevert.

During the past week, they've come down the stairs for a beer or two, and I've made my way up the steps to share some music and chat about their respective job searches. It's almost painful to talk to them at times - the same spot in my heart hurts every time I speak to anyone new to LA, full of faux-hope and not completely buying their own bullshit, as if the louder they proclaim their unwavering desire and determination to "make it", the greater their chances. It is the fumes from these gaseous delusions that run this city, the hundreds of thousands of technicians and interns and PAs that don't mind being abused and degraded and underpaid, so long as they someday have their shot (their shot at what, exactly, is universally vague, but the chance to rub shoulders with someone like Kanye West would surely suffice) - and sadly, how few of them are able to see the little compromises they make along the way, the slow slide into cynicism and the casual drift of personal tastes, until ten years go by and they've become the person they first worked for and whom they always said they'd never become, still renting a one-bedroom apartment in Hollywood and holding out hope that someday their script will be read by a famous actor too overcome with emotion not to produce and star in the film themselves, a stroke of luck that will buy them a little respect and a one-way ticket on the fast train to celebrity luches at Spago and a house in Malibu. Onward fame-obsessed soldiers!

Last night, I returned a few CDs to the ladies from the Windy City, lingering in their apartment as they recounted their day for me - an eventful but slow drive up the coast to Malibu, full of stops on the side of the road and snapshots taken. Oh, the innocence of youth. We talked about how much I hated my job, and how much they were looking forward to their new, still imaginary jobs, and the conversation drifted into one of the girl's bedrooms, where she was working on her computer. The three of us joked a bit more and, after being prompted, I again did my impression of Gob from Arrested Development, one of the easier guaranteed laughs in my repetoire, a high face card always held for an easy hand. After the girly giggles subsided, the girl at the computer whispered, almost inaudibly, "You remind me so much of J." I asked who J. was. She pointed to the large, framed picture of a young man playing a heavily stickered guitar on the dresser and said, "Just . . . a guy." As is my nature, I mocked her. "Oooh, just some guy, huh?"

"Actually," she said, "he's passed away."

What do you say then? I apologized and asked what happened, but she said that she'd rather not talk about it. Of course she wouldn't want to talk about it! I mean, all she did was bring it up herself! Who in their right mind would take that as an invitation to discuss the circumstances of the young man's death? A presumptuous asshole was the implication and, being a presumptuous asshole, I pressed further. "Oh, well, I'm really sorry. You don't have to talk about it . . . I mean, if it's really personal or something . . ."

She claimed that it was really difficult to talk about it because J. was "her guy" and that maybe her roommate should explain what happened. After a confused look and some hemming and hawing, the roommate proceeded to vaguely describe how "some sort of freak accident" took J.'s life, that somehow he was electrocuted on the El. It was hard to understand everything the roommate was saying, though, because of her unfortunate mumbling and the faint high hum of a chorus of violins playing the theme from the Twilight Zone somewhere on Santa Monica Boulevard. I quietly excused myself and retired to my apartment, where the lock was quickly but quietly engaged, the blinds closed, the lights dimmed, and the television turned down.

You see, this is what you get for reaching out into the world. You try to help someone. You try to make a connection with people, to develop an understanding, to find common ground. And at the end of the day, all you get in return is the creepy feeling that the world is full of unstable women waiting to compare you to their dead boyfriends.

PERPETUAL ANGER MACHINE

2006-02-22T11:35:00.000-08:00

I should have saved my outlandish vitriol for the truly disturbing and soul-crushing, instead of wiling it away this morning on some lady who doesn't really know any better. I should have saved it for this.

My anger is like a grain of sand, hurled through space, quickly freezing, growing in size, full of ice and stone and dark nooks and growing, growing, growing, colliding and combining with other comets, pulled toward an unyielding source, compacting as it races towards a black hole, then quickly imploding in a soundless vaccuum; the inhuman spectacle that is the physical realm flows forever on.

STATE OF THE UNION

2006-02-22T09:31:00.000-08:00

I've lately experienced some changes here at my job that have left me sad and angry and frustrated. I won't get into them because, ultimately, none of it is important in any significant way, and I choose to only ever write about things which provoke in me a great and unwavering passion. Also, even though I have a job I don't like and I have a blog, two key ingredients to great blog-cess, I feel like writing about my job on my blog would force me to confront things about myself that I'm unwilling to do at this time. Regardless, as infuriating as this job and this work environment is, I have to admit that reading this article provoked the most antipathetic reaction to a personal point of view since those Danish guys offended my Lord, Allah.

Is it just me or is the world growing Jessica Francis Kanes like a bad case of athlete's foot? Stupid, rich, undeserving, lazy, arrogant and selfish. Ain't that America.

THE INTERNET MAKES US THINK ABOUT THINGS IN NEW WAYS

2006-02-20T09:37:00.000-08:00

You know, I've never had a friend with the same first name as me. I've never had to say, "Hey, Craig!" I think it would be weird. I don't know how the Robs and Daves and Johns of the world do it.

Happy Presidents' Day, everyone.

CHENEY

2006-02-16T15:42:00.000-08:00

Editor, Times-Union:

OK, OK, So the vice president of the United States shot someone in the face with a shotgun. What I would like to know is, did he get the quail?

Harold Kitson
Mastodon City

LYNX

2006-02-16T14:18:00.000-08:00

Catch em by the tail.

James Cruise talks about his fabricated gay memoir on Oprah.

Werner Herzog does not like chaos.

The dodo bird sho' is funny lookin'!

"FREEDOM FRIES" WAS THE BETA VERSION OF THIS JOKE

2006-02-15T13:46:00.000-08:00

TEHRAN (Reuters) - Not content with pelting European embassies with petrol bombs to protest against cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad, Iranians have decided to rename the "Danish pastries" relished by this nation of cake lovers.

From now on, the sweet, flaky pastries which dominate the shelves in Iran's cake shops will be known as "Roses of the Prophet Mohammad," the official IRNA news agency reported as pressure on Denmark over the cartoons took on a new dimension.

HOW I SPENT MY VALENTINE'S DAY . . . AGAIN

2006-02-14T21:22:00.000-08:00

WHO IS CURTIS SITTENFELD

2006-02-14T14:01:00.000-08:00

I could cut and paste a hundred lines from this story, but that wouldn't be very efficient for you or me. Just print it out and read it if you've got the time. Never have I felt more pegged, or exposed, after reading a story than this one.

BEST HEADLINE OF THE DAY AWARD

2006-02-13T19:11:00.000-08:00

Goes to...

Cheney Apparently Breaks Key Hunting Rule by the Associated Press

I don't want to give anything away here for those of you not yet aware of the story, but the "Key Hunting Rule" they're speaking of rhymes with "Pdon't Pshoot Psomeone Pelse in the Pface."

CONVERSATION ABOUT RAMBO

2006-02-13T13:17:00.000-08:00

AM: when was the last time you watched rambo?
Farmhand: little rocks of ice are falling from the sky
i guess they call it hail
rambo would cry if he lived in seattle
AM: rambo would wage war on the weather
he wouldn't be a pussy about it
Farmhand: rambo would stab the weather to death
and in the battle he would receive a laceration from a bolt of lightening
and he would sew it up with a thread of bark he made soft by chewing on it
AM: and he'd be all like "you made me fight you, weather! i never did nuthin to you! i just wanted to enjoy the sunshine. it's in my nature!"
which is ironic, right?
like, two forces of nature
Farmhand: and his body would reject the bark because all of nature is against rambo
rambo is at war against the gods
he is the atlas of the modern age
he must hold the world upon his shoulders in punishment
AM: rambo vs. nature. who would win?
it would be ugly, that's for sure
Farmhand: rambo would lose, but he would become a legend in the process. and he would plot his revenge.
rambo would shoot dynamite arrows into the heart of mt. st. helens and blow up nature from the inside.
AM: it's like the dragon's neck
there's only one place he can pierce
Farmhand: but nature would make an earthquake and he would fall down inside the earth
AM: he sets off a chain reaction and all of the earth's plates completely shift
no, see, rambo thought ahead
he shot it from a hot air baloon
Farmhand: well, that's an idea.
he could make the ballon from animal hides
that he killed with his bare hands
AM: and blow it up in the air with his own breath
Farmhand: right.
but nature would probably send an army of eagles to rip it up
AM: well, come on
eagles? need i remind you we're talking about RAMBO
he would just slice em up
it would be like practice for him
Farmhand: rambo is tricky.
he would probably tie a dead rabbit onto the tip of dynamite arrow, then launch it high above the balloon.
the eagles would flock to the sweet meat, and then all explode.
and then they would all fall into the basket and he would eat them all to get their bravery
AM: you know, the more you think about, the more you realize that rambo IS nature
i mean, where does one start and another stop?
Farmhand: that's the tragedy. once rambo and nature lived in harmony.
then rambo went to war to defend the human race
and nature betrayed him
now rambo is all alone, battling for survival and for his honor.
AM: but wasn't it nature who exiled humans in the first place?
or were the humans the ones who betrayed first?
the rambo story alludes to this chicken/egg dilemma that faces all of us
Farmhand: well if those questions were answered once and for all, we wouldn't need rambo out there battling nature
let's just say, if rambo would ever win, things would be very different around here.
nature wouldn't boss around humans anymore, for starters.
AM: rambo represents the grotesque beauty of our souls. of our potential, and of our vulnerability. rambo also represents how awesome it is to shoot a machine gun.
Farmhand: rambo doesn't believe in pain.
rambo doesn't believe in eating vegetables, either.
except rice is okay.
but wild pigs are probably the best food for nourishment when you are battling nature or large armies of humans.
AM: rambo eats what he can find. that includes fear.
Farmhand: yes, it's true. rambo will eat fear if there aren't any wild boars around to stab to death. he will also savor the sweet scent of burnt forests.
this is good stuff, i'm cuttting and pasting this into my novel.
AM: shouldn't this actually just be the novel?
Farmhand: like the best parts of all novels, it will be the vision the protoganist will have on his deathbed.

QUOTES FROM "RAMBO"

2006-02-13T10:16:00.000-08:00

I didn't come to rescue Rambo from you. I came here to rescue you from him.

You don't seem to want to accept the fact you're dealing with an expert in guerrilla warfare, with a man who's the best, with guns, with knives, with his bare hands. A man who's been trained to ignore pain, ignore weather, to live off the land, to eat things that would make a billy goat puke. In Vietnam his job was to dispose of enemy personnel. To kill! Period! Win by atrition. Well Rambo was the best.

I could have killed 'em all, I could kill you. In town you're the law, out here it's me. Don't push it. Don't push it or I'll give you a war you won't believe. Let it go. Let it go.

Vagrancy wasn't it? That's gonna look real good on his grave stone in Arlington: Here lies John Rambo, winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor, survivor of countless incursions behind enemy lines. Killed for vagrancy in Jerkwater, USA.

But I'm your friend Johnny! I was there with you knee-deep in all that blood and guts. I covered your ass more than once. Seems like baling you out of trouble's got to be a life-time achievement for me.

That boy's a heart attack! He may be the best the Special Forces ever produced. Whatever you're planning to throw at him here, he's been through a whole lot worse, in lot worse places than this. I'm just amazed he allowed any of your posse to live.

God didn't make Rambo. I made him!

Nothing is over! Nothing! You just don't turn it off! It wasn't my war! You asked me, I didn't ask you! And I did what I had to do to win! But somebody wouldn't let us win! And I come back to the world and I see all those maggots at the airport, protesting me, spitting. Calling me baby killer and all kinds of vile crap! Who are they to protest me? Who are they? Unless they've been me and been there and know what the hell they're yelling about!

We were in this bar in Saigon and this kid comes up, this kid carrying a shoe-shine box. And he says "Shine, please, shine!" I said no. He kept askin', yeah, and Joey said "Yeah." And I went to get a couple of beers, and the box was wired, and he opened up the box, fucking blew his body all over the place. And he's laying there, he's fucking screaming. There's pieces of him all over me, just... (Takes off his bandolier) like this, and I'm tryin' to pull him off, you know, my friend that's all over me! I've got blood and everything and I'm tryin' to hold him together! I'm puttin'... the guy's fuckin' insides keep coming out! And nobody would help! Nobody would help! He's saying, sayin' "I wanna go home! I wanna go home!" He keeps calling my name! "I wanna go home, Johnny! I wanna drive my Chevy!" I said "Why? I can't find your fuckin' legs! I can't find your legs!"

Hunting? We ain't huntin' him, he's huntin' us!

SHAKE THAT

2006-02-10T18:44:00.000-08:00

King Crab.

Shake that ass
Shake that pussy
Looking so good
I like your boobs

I JUST REALIZED SOMETHING

2006-02-09T15:15:00.000-08:00

And it makes so much sense, it's scary.

Some day, Jack White is going to grow up and be Prince. Say what you will; cast stones all you like - this is a true statement and one I stand behind unequivocally.

If you have the balls, watch this.

I'LL TAKE "DOUCHEBAGS" FOR $600, ALEX

2006-02-08T18:31:00.000-08:00

In what has become a common occurrence among the many idiots of the blogosphere, this morning we will undoubtedly find at our monitors the fruits of labors so greatly unimportant that not even Muslims will find reason to riot. I'm talking, of course, of live-blogging. Because who, in this slow and simple world we live in, has the extravagant luxury of owning a television, a radio, or a subscription to a newspaper? The answer, unfortunately, is none of us. That's why we come crawling to the Interweb every morning, seeking information and, if the time allows, a bit of entertainment to brighten our day. And this morning, with a collective gasp, we stand before our monitors with mouth agape in the realization that - omigod - the GRAMMYS were on last night!

You are all pathetic wastes of skin. If you are searching for salvation in $500 handbags and another pair of shoes, I hope you find it. Redemption and peace, our ancestors wisely told us, can be discovered within the pages of US Weekly magazine. Sure, half the world may be burning and the other half may be sliding ever quicker into fascism, but thinking about all that just makes you so depressed, and who needs more doom and gloom in their life? Clutch tighter to your breasts your iPods and your designer sunglasses and forget the fact that you hate who you are. Slip slide away into the trivialities of celebrity and song; construct for yourself a cooperative world that plays by your rules - then, when you're bored by it, dismantle it with snark and cynicism. Speak only of the frivolity of the world, without cessation, and then speak of how much the people in that world irk you. And, of course, no matter what you do, don't admit to yourself that you just may have an extra minute somewhere in your day to slow down, take a breath, and contemplate the spoiled, senseless existence you slumber through - because, hey, that text message to your fuck-buddy isn't going to clumsily type itself! You don't deserve the wealth that the blood and toil and pain of generations of forebears and slaves has wrought you. You are not aware of, let alone ashamed of the perverted fact that what you make in a week, sitting at a desk answering phones and typing on a keyboard and listening to music and god knows what else that doesn't involve breaking a sweat, is more than what a 60 year old man in Guyana who works 70 hour weeks schlepping dirt out of a polluted gold mine makes in a year.

And what really hurts - what really twists the knife in your chest - is the fact that he is happier than you are, because he doesn't have an STD and because he doesn't secretly hope to be an editor for some shitty magazine; whatever salvation you hope your little fantansies of fame or wealth will bring you pales in comparison to the sacrifices you will inevitably make in giving up that which formerly passed as your personality. The man in the gold mine says, "This is the day that the Lord hath made, let us rejoice and be glad in it." You say, "Jesus Christ, how long does it take to make an iced mocha? God!"

Of course it's entirely possible that you are now thinking to yourself, "Well, what makes you any better?" Nothing does. That's the whole point right there. I'm in the same boat and I'm not going to make excuses for myself. I'm just going to tell it like it is, speak truth to power, let the chips fall where they may, and other platitudes. There are, however, two things that differentiate me from you - one, I understand what a petty and awful little wretch I am, and two, I don't live-blog shit like the Grammys.

I live-blog shit like Jeopardy.

*********

7:02 PM
We are introduced to the contestants. This week is Teen Jeopardy, which is great because on a given night, I can get probably 80-90% of questions correct. Alex comes out and introduces the contestants, who all appear extremely young. On the far right, we have a mulatto girl named Iddoshe from Louisville, cute enough but boy howdy Jesus, those are some ridiculous braces. Next we have a nice, gay little Catholic boy named Joseph from New Jersey. Finally, in the pole position, a horsey looking farmgirl Camille from Oklahoma, I presume, wearing some pinkish sweater. Didn't hear where she's from.

7:04
We get started, and the kids jump into the World Geography category. These are quite possibly the easiest questions I've ever seen on a Jeopardy show. First there is a map of the North Atlantic, with two countries highlighted. Could they be...Greenland and Iceland? By jove they are! The next answer is, "This country was divided into two halves before the US entered in so and so date in the late sixties." Couldn't be Vietnam, could it? Next is another map question with India highlighted. Another toughie. The last question is the only tough one - Hobart is the capital of what Australian island-state. Gee, how many Australian island-states are there?

7:05
Now the kids decide to move on to the category of "All in the celebrity family." I'm getting really tired of this live-blogging thing. A couple of answers in this category are the Afflecks and the Olsons.

7:05
Some math questions. Joseph is just sitting at his podium looking stupid. He's not answering anything.

7:09
Back from commercial break, the kids tell their "getting to know you" stories. Iddoshe is a bitch. Alex asks her, "So it says here that you went on an African safari. Where exactly did you go?" Her response is, "uh...Africa?" in that "Jesus you are a dumbass," valley-girl kind of way. Then she laughs at her own joke. One word: uppity.

Joseph seems like a nice young man, but he's a fucking tool. I'm doubting the mom-picked-out-this-sweater at Penny's look is reeling in the ladies. I could be wrong, though. Douche.

Camille quickly reveals herself to be the most loathsome. Alex asks her about her extra-curricular activities, to which she replies that she reads for the blind - over the radio. Alex says - and this is why The Trebek is The King - "aren't all radio stations for the blind?" SNAP. Camille I hope you go blind and have to listen to do-gooder 17 year olds read you the newspaper over the radio. I'm also really hoping that the station you work at is not publicly supported. My tax dollars should be used to make nuclear bombs, not make blind people happy.

7:11
Back to the trivia. Another celebrity family question - the Culkins is the answer. Obviously that was going to come up at some point.

Camille is kicking serious ass. I haven't even really been keeping track.

Joseph finally answers something correctly. I didn't hear the question(answer), but the answer(question) is "What is a Dandelion?" I bet mom is so proud! Queer.

Ooh, Camille gets the first Daily Double in Word Origins and wagers $1800 (note: not a true daily double). The answer is "coroner" and she got it right.

7:12
Joseph looks like he's going to cry.

Another question, this time in the Stock Symbols category - clue is that the symbol is SIRI and they use satellites to bring you your tunes! And this is the hardest question in the category. Man, I love Teen Jeopardy. How easy was that?

7:15 - DOUBLE JEOPARD
This live-blogging thing is hard and boring. There are too many questions in Jeopardy. From now I'm just going to mention weird things I notice.

7:16
The answer(question) was "What is the special olympics," and Joseph answered (incorrectly, of course), "What is Buddy Ball?" That is gold.

7:18
The tides have turned. The young mulatto is running away with it.

7:19
Not too fast - Camille is trying to make those blind radio listening people proud. Do you think they're watching, or listening on their radio?

7:20
Joseph is kicking ass in the Revolutionary War category. Shocker! I'm guessing that homeschooling provides a lot of time for the study of the Revolutionary War.

7:20
Camille gets another Daily Double, wagers $3600 (note: not true daily double) and gets it right.

7:20
Joseph gets a Daily Double in the revolutionary war category, wagers $4000 (note: not a true daily double) and gets it right. Good on ya, Joe. Mom is surely beaming.

7:22
Commercial break. I'm worn out. Final jeopardy category is "MILESTONES".

7:24
Made myself another whiskey and squirt. Mmm...whiskey and Jeopardy. I could live in a fucking gulag for the rest of my life so long as I was plied with whiskey and could watch Jeopardy twice a day. Ha! Obviously i'm joking. I'd only need Jeopardy once a day.

7:25
Oprah promo - tomorrow's show is all about OJ! I kind of want to watch it.

7:26 FINAL JEOPARDY
Here's the question(answer): "In 1994, 25 years after this event, one participant said, 'For one crowing moment, we were creatures of the cosmic ocean.'"

This is quite possibly the easiest Final Jeopardy clue of all time. Obviously the event was the opening of the first GAP store.

The real question is whether or not any of these kids will get it wrong.

Joseph got it right, though he said "Apollo 11," which in my opinion means he should get bonus points.

Camille got it right.

Iddoshe got it right and won the game with $26,600, which is a lot. Unfortunately, because she's a minority, she'll probably get a scholarship for college anyway. You know where i'm going with this - ESCALADE TIME!

*****

Ok, this concludes my first foray into live-blogging. This moment is hands-down the lowest point of my life.

GREAT PAINTER

2006-02-08T11:41:00.000-08:00

Walton Ford. Be sure to read the caption of the picture in the article.

Check out some of his paintings here.

La forga de un rebelde

Reminds me of the work of John Steuart Curry, specifically Hogs Killing a Rattlesnake.

Also reminds me quite a bit of Steven Kenny.

The Cooper's Wife

SHAKE IT, SHAKE IT, SHAKE IT, YOU KNOW WHAT TO DEEEEEEEW-OOH

2006-02-08T11:11:00.000-08:00

I hate to be such a syncophantic New Yorker cheerleader, but really. They just have fantastic articles. Here's one about the Shakers. I had no idea that the woman who founded the Shakers was also considered the second coming of Christ. Funny.

Here's a picture of a Shaker desk-thingy:

DEAR RADICAL ISLAMISTS

2006-02-08T08:54:00.000-08:00

and Mormons and crazy fundamentalist Christians and right-wing militias and Katie Couric and Baathists and all you commies and the ACLU and Jimmy Carter:

You will never destroy the essence of America, because America is filled with people like this.

2284 [17] Ensign Oak in field mission.

During a special scientific research where part of the crew were assigned to aid the Cantaris One new scientific team.

Marshall Oak was among the crew assigned to follow the Special Aid Team to help operational scientific crew of the lab. They were on the need to catalog the indigenous life forms of the habitable Cantaris system planets and the training crew of the Enterprise was eager to a chance to go into field.

The mission went through some weeks and after that the Special Team would be sent back to the Academy for some R&R and new studies.

VALENTINE'S DAY

2006-02-08T07:36:00.000-08:00

If there's one thing I've learned in life, it's this.

MARRY ME MANOHLA

2006-02-07T16:57:00.000-08:00

I don't even know if Manohla is a man or a woman. Or Indian or Spanish. Or twenty or sixty. Or tall or short. Or black or white. Or hot or not.

*****

Q. I know you loved “The New World” and so did I. I've seen it twice in the past two weeks, with the second viewing even better than the first. I think it's an unqualified masterpiece. Why do you think it's being left out of the field of Oscar nominations? — Kay Flaminio Durham, N.C.

A. The film’s brilliant cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki was nominated, so it wasn’t completely ignored. Mr. Lubezki was previously nominated for “The Little Princess” (he lost to John Toll for, bleech, “Braveheart”) and “Sleepy Hollow” (that time he lost to Conrad L. Hall for "American Beauty"). Here’s hoping that this time around talent outweighs popularity. In any event, there is only one possible explanation for why Terrence Malick’s glorious film, one of the most aesthetically and intellectually ambitious, emotionally devastating and politically resonant works of American art in recent memory, was overlooked by the Academy: with the exception of my few dear friends in that august body, they are idiots.

RPI

2006-02-07T14:21:00.000-08:00

This may come as a shock to as many as one of you, but the 260th best college basketball team in the country, Alabama A&M, also has the toughest schedule. Now that's a tough break.

Also, Connecticut and Pittsburgh, ranked number 1 and 9 in the country, respectively, and members of what is inarguably the best conference in the country, have strength of schedule ratings of 192 and 210.

Do I smell shenanigans? Governor, I believe I do.

Also, while we're on the topic of college basketball, let me just say that I like the idea of Adam Morrison, but, after watching the man play, I must admit I don't actually like Adam Morrison.

Beware, all you NBA scouts who are reading this blog - DO NOT GIVE AWAY YOUR NUMBER ONE PICK FOR THE NEXT TOM GUGLIOTTA. Thank you.

Adam Morrison, above, attempts a behind-the-head pass to the cute little asian girl in the front row. WOOK OUT, WADY!

MARY OF MAGDALA

2006-02-06T14:18:00.000-08:00

"As time passed, five whole bodies of the Magdalene, together with spare parts, were discovered in various locales."

Fantastic article about Mary Magdalene.

THE PROPHET MUHAMMAD

2006-02-06T12:32:00.000-08:00

Since no one really knows what the Prophet Muhammad looked like, any modern attempts to represent him are either incorrect or hypothetical. So, in an expression of my rights as an American, and as a member of a modern and secular society, I have chosen to publish what I believe is an image of Muhammad. However, because I don't want to offend anyone, I have actually posted four pictures, only ONE of which is an accurate depiction of Muhammad. If you are a Muslim and you wish not to be offended, please imagine that none of the pictures below are actual representations of what Muhammad may have looked like. To the rest of you, I repeat the words of The Prophet, who in his wisdom promoted peace, justice, and happiness: "We don't make mistakes here, we just have happy accidents. We want happy, happy things. If you want sad things, watch the news. Everything is possible here. This is your little universe."

ATTACK THE VOYAGE

2006-02-03T08:41:00.000-08:00

You'd think that the Packers - surely a company with annual revenues in the millions - could at the least hire a recent college grad to proofread the new coach's Mission Statement.

I'm sorry, I meant MISSION STATEMENT.

My favorite parts of the statement are the term ATTACKING THE VOYAGE; when he puts quotation marks around "LEADERSHIP"; and the entire first, nonsensical sentence, THE FOUNDATION FOR THE NEW DIRECTION OF THE GREEN BAY PACKERS WILL BE CONSTRUCTED WITH THREE KEY COMPONENTS OF OBTAINING "PACKER PEOPLE," CREATING "STABLE STRUCTURE" AND CONCENTRATING ON "CHARACTER AND CHEMISTRY."

I love sports. But I hate sports people.

Sadly, there once was a time when a couple of the smartest people in America used to write eloquently about sports.

Sorry, Bill Simmons - you don't quite cut the mustard.

ROOT BEER AND WHISKEY

2006-02-02T20:18:00.000-08:00

Is not really as bad as you might imagine.

YOU REMEMBER?

2006-02-02T10:52:00.000-08:00

10 YEARS AGO
February 2, 1996

Floyd Voight, proprietor of Voight's Automotive Service and Repair, purchased a winning lottery ticket at Big Jack's Shell Station. After cashing in his $20,000 prize, Floyd was arrested on charges of child support deliquency.

25 YEARS AGO
February 2, 1981

The annual "Kiss A Pig" contest at Lincoln Elementary school, where students vote for the teacher they most want to kiss a pig by putting pennies in a can, proved not to be a success. Money was raised for the purpose of going on a ski trip, but the grand total amounted to no more than $96. Sixth-grade students won the contest and chose Bill Studebaker to kiss the pig, which was furnished by Rudy Glingle. The money was given to the local Salvation Army.

50 YEARS AGO
February 2, 1956

Pfc. Robert L. Graham, son of Charles N. Graham, North Mastodon City, recently participated in "Polo Ball," a Seventh Army command post exercise in Germany. The exercise tested communications, clothing, equipment and supply operations in snow, rain, mud, cold and wind. It was agreed that most of the supplies tested proved to be in quite poor condition.

75 YEARS AGO
February 2, 1931

Peggy Dickinson was finally caught with her hand in the cookie jar. The eight year old daughter of Reverend Jim Dickinson, First Methodist Church, was caught pilfering a snickerdoodle from Johnson's Bakery on Market Street, the site of many recent missing desserts. Her father, who was alerted to the crime by the bakery's proprietor, whipped his daughter in broad daylight with his leather belt and was promptly placed in jail for three weeks.

100 YEARS AGO
February 2, 1906

Bill Jenkins, a traveling miracle-cure salesman from St. Louis by the Mississippi River, peddled his wares in the newly-built Central Lake Park Pavilion. Many bottles of his special elixir were purchased and most of the customers left satisfied. Maybelle Taylor claimed the potion cured her sore back and even Janco Roberts, who first spoke up against Mr. Jenkins by calling him a charlatan, admitted that the magic medicine cleared up a pressing headache.

AND NOBODY WAS FIGHTING BACK

2006-02-01T18:15:00.000-08:00

There are three reasons why you should read this short story:

1) It's perfect.
2) It's by Tobias Wolff.
3) It's short.

The whole country was being hollowed out like this, devoured from the inside, and nobody was fighting back. It was embarrassing, vaguely shameful, to watch people get pushed around without a fight. That’s why he’d taken on his little pop-eyed pug of a client with her fucked-up hand—she was a battler. Stonewalled every step of the way, bombarded with demands for documents, secretly videotaped, insulted with dinky settlement offers, even threatened with a countersuit, she just lowered her head and kept coming. She’d spent all her savings going after the surgeon who’d messed her up, to the point where she’d had to move to San Francisco to live with her son, a paralegal in Burke’s firm. Her lawyer back here in New Delft had suffered a stroke and bowed out. The case was a long shot but Burke had taken it on contingency, because he saw that she wouldn’t back off, she’d keep pushing to the end.

SCANDAL

2006-02-01T14:48:00.000-08:00

Recent news coming out of Washington indicates that "[CIA Special Prosecutor Patrick] Fitzgerald admits that he has been told some emails from the President and Vice President's offices have been deleted, though he cautions that 'no pertinent evidence has been destroyed.'"

I, my friends, have acquired those emails, and have reprinted them below. EXCLUSIVE!

From: Scooter Libby
To: Dick Cheney
3:14PM
sup bro. thinking about checking out 'two for the money' tonight. mccaunaghey(sp?) is smokin hot. whatya think?

From: Dick Cheney
To: Scooter Libby
3:31PM
furreals. i was thinking about maybe takin lynne with me. she loves sports movies (weird, right?) plus, pacino, need i say more? nuff said. also, you have any idea what happened to all the mr. pibb? fridge seems to be empty...

From: Scooter Libby
To: Dick Cheney
3:54PM
sorry duder. i was here late last night working on my novel and polished off the batch. maybe we could get an intern to restock. you seen the new honey from g'town? that broad is suh-mokan, am i right.

From: Dick Cheney
To: Scooter Libby
4:12
chick definitely be bangin. i know her dad from way back in wyoming, so it's like kind of off-limits for me but you should def try to tap that. so yur workin on another novel, huh? good luck with that [eye roll] just dont quit yur dayjob!

From: Dick Cheney
To: Scooter Libby
4:19PM
just bustin yur balls, broham. you know i think yur an awesome writer. hey, maybe you and lynne should work on something together sometime. just dont be hittin that shit when i'm not around, dude, know what i'm saying? fuck, did that chick get the pibb yet?

From: Scooter Libby
To: Dick Cheney
4:32PM
ha ha very funny. i'd like to see you try to write a book, dick(head!). it's not that easy. anyway, i wouldn't want to get with lynne, so you don't have to worry about that. she likes sports movies, huh? yeah, that's pretty weird. does she like softball and wife beater shirts, too? does she watch a lot of ellen? LOL, dude, i'm just razzin ya.

From: Dick Cheney
To: Scooter Libby
4:46PM
just because mary's munching on mittens don't mean momma's a muff diver, too. you need to grow up.

From: Scooter Libby
To: Dick Cheney
5:01PM
hey, big chief, it was a joke. anyway, brittany (the intern) just got back with the pibb. but guess what? it was all DIET. what an idiot. i just might have to 'reprimand' her if you know what i'm saying.

From: Dick Cheney
To: Scooter Libby
5:08PM
diet pibb? who drinks that kind of shit. i'd rather piss in a cup and drink it. i did that once, actually. you know what it tastes like? shit. hey, where you gonna see 'two for the money'? amc in georgetown?

From: Scooter Libby
To: Dick Cheney
5:16PM
yeah, probs. wanna catch a bite beforehand? i know a good french place down by the water. it's pretty sweet. the waitresses there are ridonculously hot. ridonculous. anyway, let me know. whatever's clever with me, homeslice.

From: Dick Cheney
To: Scooter Libby
5:23PM
sweet. never been before. i'll have to get lynne first - she's at the gym right now doing yoga or some shit. before you know it she'll be reading my horoscope and, like, you know, reading my palm or something, right! maybe when this vp shit is all over she'll wanna move to beverly hills or sumthin and do yoga all the time. wutevah!

From: Scooter Libby
To: Dick Cheney
5:26PM
dude, way hilarious. yur married to a hippie chick! does she light incense and drink tea and stuff like that? hilarious. i'm gonna tell norquist. he's gonna shit a brick. yoga! anyway, pick you up at 7?

From: Dick Cheney
To: Scooter Libby
5:27PM
you tell norquist you die. i'm serious about that.

From: Dick Cheney
To: Scooter Libby
5:39PM
dude, i'm fucking with you!! jesus, you are wound up today or something. you know i wouldn't call a hit on you. not yet at least.... dum da dum dum dum...

From: Scooter Libby
To: Dick Cheney
5:45PM
oh, really scary, i was shaking in my boots. and i'm the one who needs to grow up? i was just taking a shit, bro, it's not like i thought you were furreal. oh, and norquist wants to know what kind of sushi lynne likes!! LOL!

From: Dick Cheney
To: Scooter Libby
5:53PM
you fucker! i told you not to tell norquist. now he'll tell reed and mehlman - those guys can't keep a secret to save their lives. next thing you know there'll be an article in the jew york times about how lynne doesn't shave her armpits and smokes pot all day! LOL! they'll be all like, 'no wonder their daughter's a total muff diver!' dude, my life is over! you suck! i'll see you at seven.

From: Scooter Libby
To: Dick Cheney
5:58PM
seven it is, asswipe. see ya then.

EVEN EBAY HATES JAMES FREY

2006-02-01T10:41:00.000-08:00

You are bidding on an emotionally-authentic Denison University beer mug that I seem to recollect receiving from "A Million Little Pieces" author James Frey. This very mug may have been involved in a number of the authors drinking escapades while attending Camp Denny-do. It's in perfect condition considering all the tough times it may have been through. I remember that it was signed on the bottom by the author, but the autograph has inexplicably disappeared.

via the Young Professor