So my town was the center landing point for hurricanes Frances and Jeanne. We've been without power and phone more or less since September 5th, and they say we'll likely stay that way until October 13th. It hasn't been necessary to boil water however, and the Army hands out ice, so we're making do. We lost most of our trees and our aluminum pool ( Read more... )

The idea of celebrity has become pretty cheap here, but the job requirements are a lot steeper in other parts of the world. Leslie Cheung was a great actor, comedian, sex symbol, kung-fu fighter, platinum-selling pop singer and an openly gay, headline-grabbing personality that stayed a huge star in Hong Kong for over 20 years. You're probably not ( Read more... )

( Read more... )

Booth & Trudy went into a drawer for a couple months. My neuroses have been beating my brains out since I finished writing the script, but it's too boring/self-indulgent to go into. They're not done with me yet, and I'm totally unprepared to embark on a major endeavor - I can't even complete a simple journal entry lately - but it's gotta get done, ( Read more... )

I've been in the mood to talk about politics, and since it's the subject I know the least well, it's the one about which I hold the most opinions. There's too much to cover, though, and I haven't had much time, so I thought I would just think out loud, start and stop when I feel like it, and edit it all later, otherwise I would never get to it. ( Read more... )

Could the West Nile virus be God's wrath for people who wear short-sleeved shirts?

It's crummy to realize that shyness can manifest itself in text as easily as in blood and breath. My life-long bouts of silence have been interpreted variously as arrogance, wisdom, strength, boredom, apathy, superiority, guile - anything more interesting than doubt, looping exponentially. No one is much falling for it anymore, though ( Read more... )

What do you call a thousand children at the bottom of the ocean?

A good start.This joke is one of my favorite man-made things. It begins by promising to delight the listener and ends with genocide, still delivering its promise. It has production value. 'The bottom of the ocean' is mythic territory, and a thousand of anything piled there makes for ( Read more... )

When I first slid in the new Breeders album in the parking lot of the record store, I wasn't sure what I thought. It's less heavy than I was expecting, and though it has lots of melodies, they're all broken or abandoned as soon as the hum-along impulse kicks in. Many of the songs were recorded at various times over the last few years, with one of ( Read more... )

Would I be all alone in admitting still finding myself periodically haunted by recollections of chunks of caked deodorant dangling from the armpit hairs of LL Cool J from his MTV Unplugged concert in 1991?