I got back a set of poems in the mail today. Rejection happens and all... but wow. Not even a form rejection. The poems were just stuffed in the self-addressed stamped envelope and sent back. It would at least have been nice to get a little pink slip saying "Sucka!"

I am sick and tired of living where I live. Right now a guy is shooting up in the alley. Our next-door neighbor is crazy. People are constantly rooting through the trash, sometimes for identity-theft purposes (no, not joking or paranoid here). I'm ready to move and don't want to live in student housing-y areas next to a place as scabby as the ( Read more... )

Read this essay when you get a chance. Wodehouse is a bestseller in India, moreso than in the Mother Country.

Today I finished reading Already Dead, by Charlie Huston. This novel is good for many reasons but the first and most important is that it succeeds in making Stale Old Genre Wheezes into new things, and with panache. Here you've got your vampires, vampire detective, zombies, White Wolf-style vampire clans and appurtenances, HIV, jokes about Anne ( Read more... )

Wednesday was the first day I've felt healthy in weeks, and it was wonderful. You know how it is -- you never really notice or value your health until you don't have it. Very nice ( Read more... )

Pedaling on the exercycle while reading How to Be Idle.

On related lines, check out Modern Drunkard if you've never seen it. Long time fave, though I've never subscribed...

And I'm not even talking about Bush. I won't even mention Bush's gross lies about the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, except for the sake of assembling the conclusive evidence. I know, of course, that you denounce him--but mechanically, I am almost tempted to say ritualistically. And yet the United States nearly impeached Nixon because he had ( Read more... )

The acute mono symptoms, as mentioned a few posts back, have faded, but the fatigue remains. Today I took off from work as a sick day, I was so tired. Napped during the day and now I can't sleep. Bleah ( Read more... )

I used to hate watching sports, but now I realize it is the civic glue that soothes and unifies the masses in semi-bovine oblivion. As such, I feel it my civic duty -- once a year -- to scream and holler and get worked up over overly muscled men in tight plants rough housing and combatting over... balls. Generally for the week following said game ( Read more... )

Here's an opinion piece I quite enjoyed about the current flap over the Islam cartoons published last week in Denmark. Its chest-beatingly pro-Western values and provided a quite welcome counter to much of the debate in the press and on opinion pages. I can see various sides to this argument, and why these various arguments exist, but ( Read more... )