THEY KNOW THEIR AUDIENCE

Consider the ad at the top of a weekly e-mail for journalists that just came over the transom: "You have adult acne.... Will anyone ever find you attractive?"

Yes... and no.

METRO FOR RED-STATERS

One of the gazillion associations in the DC area has written a painfully retentive guide to the metro. "After one trip, you'll be a pro!" the breathless copy reads. Especially helpful -- the detailed instructions for purchasing a farecard, and I quote: "1. Put your money in the slot."

The only thing they forgot to add was not to get scared when the train goes under the Potomac, since it doesn't get wet. (I once worked at a newspaper where the publisher didn't quite grasp the concept of a subway, but that's another story for another day.) All I know, if I was thinking about coming to DC from the distant hinterlands, the level of complexity this suggests would have me out on the shoulder of 395, hitchhiking.

(Shout-out to DCSOB for pointing this one out.)

THE SMOKING GUN

I spent a few years living in Germany during my teenage years -- a few years which just happened to fall during the mid-1980s, so I missed quite a few cultural milestones. MTV? We'd occasionally get a videotape someone would bring back from the states, which would make the rounds of my friends until we had the 2 hours of music memorized*. Cabbage Patch Kids? Luckily, I missed that one until recently, when one of my daughters was given a vintage one by a great-grandmother. Smurfs? Well... actually, they came from Germany, though they were called something like "Schlumphs," which is precariously close to an unflattering German term for a young woman of questionable virtue.

But I digress. When I returned to the states, I had a lot of catching up to do, culturally. And one of the things I never quite got was the TV show Alf, which came and went while I was overseas. Allegedly. I summarily refused to believe that a sitcom starring a stuffed furry alien could possibly have become a prime-time hit, even in the 1980s. And yes, I had seen Knight Rider. It was huge in Germany. In fact, I accused many stateside friends of being part of a conspiracy to convince me that Alf was real, then chuckling at my gullible self behind my back. Even years later, I was never quite convinced.

Flash forward two decades. While visiting the in-laws last weekend, we stumbled upon this.



I'm through the looking glass, sadder and a bit wiser. Sadder, mainly, as had my kids not gleefully colored all over the sucker, I could have made a fortune on eBay.

(*) Back in the day, MTV aired short-form movies that were intentionally synchronized with popular songs of the time, called (I believe) "music videos."

THIS COULD BE ME...

Apparently this is where some journalists wind up during these trying economic times.

It certainly has a lot more panache than the Maytag box I've been eyeing of late...

THIS JUST IN...

... I have no life. I scored a 109.5 on this test. Pity me.

The most embarassing part, aside from the fact that I precisely remember the lyrics to a freakin' Toto song from two decades ago but can't recall what I had for breakfast this morning? I identified lots of songs generated by hair bands. Bad hair bands...

BOO!

OF PUMPKINS AND PAINTBALLS

It's fall, which means it's time for our family's annual trip to the pumpkin patch out in the country. Well, not so much in the country anymore--it's now surrounded by a gaggle of vinyl-clad Northern Virginia McMansions, all with extensive decking so their owners can enjoy an uninterupted view of the moon bounces, the plentiful parking, and all the cheerful examples of copyright infringement the proprietors have plastered on everything that isn't orange and/or organic.

Still, it's fun. Pumpkins, moon bounces, slides, hayrides, and, this year, shooting at targets with a high-powered rifle equiped with a sniper-style scope.

No, really. Okay, so it's paintball, but it still seems like an odd choice for the under-6 crowd.

Now don't get me wrong -- I'm not one of those freedom-hating, Dear Leader-mocking types you see all over the blogosphere. I learned to fire a rifle in high school ROTC (don't ask), and have, in the course of undertaking journalistic research, participated in a paintball battle pitting our hardened newsroom of seasoned reporters against a bunch of Shenandoah Valley locals, who brought their bulletproof vests, automatic paintball rifles, and boundless enthusiasm to the match. I still have the welts to prove it.

At the same time, though, at a pumpkin patch? It's a bit embarrassing. Especially when I caught myself shouting at my daughter, "NO! AIM FOR THE HEAD! NOT THE CHEST--THE HEAD!"

Or not.

MY NEW CAREER...

...as a film reviewer. Scroll down to the review entitled "A stunningly prescient rumination on Euro-American relations," and enjoy.

The balcony is closed.

YEAH, BUT OTHER THAN THAT, DID WE GET ANYTHING WRONG?

A classic correction from The Washington Post:

A Sept. 21 item in the Metro in Brief column about a woman fatally shot in Prince George's County and a child who was wounded incorrectly reported the woman's age, the child's sex, the child's location at the time of the shooting, and the street on which the shooting occurred. A correct account of the incident appears in today's Metro in Brief column.

Guess the editors were busy fact-checking the Page One story about the all-you-can-eat steak.

THIS JUST IN: CULTURE IS DEAD

I wouldn't believe this if I hadn't read it myself: Evidently piqued at the thought of his wife being groped by a treacherous Frenchman, our august president wrote her this lovely, nuanced poem:

Roses are red
Violets are blue
Oh my, lump in the bed
How I've missed you.
Roses are redder
Bluer am I
Seeing you kissed by that charming French guy.
The dogs and the cat, they missed you too
Barney's still mad you dropped him, he ate your shoe
The distance, my dear, has been such a barrier
Next time you want an adventure, just land on a carrier.

Awww... They're just like two schoolkids, aren't they? I'm going to try calling my wife a "lump in the bed." Then I'm going to try getting used to sleeping on the sofa downstairs.

THE MOVIE OF THE YEAR

When critics use that phrase, it's usually hyperbole. For us, it's literal.

Ever since we had our first child, we've seen exactly one movie -- no more, and no less -- in the theater each calendar year. Between the relative scarcity of babysitters, and the desire to do something other than sit in a dark room when we're lucky enough to find one, we just don't go to the movies much any more. In fact, we haven't been the movies yet in 2003.

Good thing, too. Had we already squandered our movie for the year, we would have had to wait for this to go to video.

WHO NEEDS THE NYT SUNDAY BOOKS SECTION?

My well-documented love for this comic meets my penchant for fair and balanced book reviews.

Maybe we should pass this title along to Mssr. Limbaugh.

IT DOESN'T GET ANY META THAN THIS

Here's the first longish thing I've written for Teacher -- an article on blogging. And now here I am, blogging about an article about other people blogging. It's enough to make your head spin.

It doesn't end there. One of the great things about the Internet is that when you write about people who write on the Internet, they write back about being written about. Journalists have a tendency to "file and forget," so it's kind of refreshing to get feedback, both good and bad, without having to fish for it. Here's one of my interviewees using the title of this entry to poke fun at my short description of him in the story. Hey -- I never claimed to write for the New Yorker.

Another person I interviewed tried to read the article at work, but -- and this is a first in my storied writing career -- her school's Internet filter blocked it, presumably because the article quotes a blog that uses the f-word the way most people use commas. More specifically, the Internet filter had this to say:

This page will not be displayed because... it has exceeded its tolerance of questionable words.

Exceeded its tolerance of questionable words? Funny, I get that from my editors all the time.

GOOD GRIEF

More fair and balanced commentary from the hinterlands.

I'm glad I'm not the person who had to edit this one down into (semi) coherent sentences..

THOUGHTCRIME!

So, you'd think a good way to blow off some steam would be to go hear some live music, right?

Think again.


This is us at a recent concert in oh-so-hip Arlington, where we lived before we became boring suburbanites obsessed with shiny wallpaper and homeowner association-mandated paint colors like "Beachwood." Looks like we're having some good, clean, Right-Thinking fun, right?

Think again. Examine the circled part of the picture carefully. Here it is again, enlarged for your convenience.



Uh-oh. Something tells us our names are on a list now.

ARE YOU READY FOR SOME... HAIRBALLS

So, the Redskins won their first game of the season the other night, though based on what I've read about the NFL's "celebration" on the Pepsi Vanilla(tm)/Fritos(tm) National Mall(tm), good taste was the real loser of the night.

I'm a long-time Redskins fan, having endured a decade-plus of medicore teams, embarassing owner gaffes, and revolving-door coaching. I've even had the, um, luck of attending some historic games, like the one where Gus Frerotte (remember him?) gave himself a concussion by high-fiving a concrete wall with his head, and the bitterly cold, windy December game that led to the sacking of Norv Turner (remember him?), and... well, that's about it. Come to think of it, most of the rest of the past decade's been a blur. A mediocre, turnover-prone blur.

But you read it here first, folks: They're going to the Super Bowl this year. No ifs, ands or buts.

How do I know? Because, after nearly a decade, I found out this summer that my name had finally come up on the season ticket waiting list. Of course, I found this out days after one of our cats wound up having to spend a week at an animal hospital, and the bill came to virtually the exact cost of the season tickets--almost to the penny.

I'm trying to maintain some perspective. After all, as I've been saying, our cat probably won't lose nine games this season. Though come January, if the Redskins are still in the hunt, Sushi had better stay down in the basement on Sunday afternoons.

UPDATE: I just got another e-mail from the Redskins notifying me that good season ticket seats are still available, which is pretty much unheard of in these parts. Either people aren't buying that first win of the season, or a lot of people had sick pets this summer...

I ALWAYS KNEW THAT WHOLE POLITENESS THING WAS A FACADE

Yet another reason not to trust the Canadians.

A TRAITOR IN OUR MIDST

Where I work, in buttoned-down Bethesda, you wouldn't expect drama, rebellion and outright treason to play themselves out in the streets.

You'd be wrong.

First, someone quite unreasonably, I think, spraypainted the newspaper boxes for The Washington Times with one simple word: LIES. That was followed by the word SWILL on the USA Today boxes. Then, the same person hit the parking garage where I stow my Xtreme vehicle with an axiomatic motto, intended to demoralize those of us still contributing to the nation's GDP: COMMUTE WORK COMMUTE SLEEP. And now, the construction site for the Rio Grande, your typical chainy Mexican restaurant being built down the street, has been hit. The same objectively pro-Saddamite spraypainted an arrow pointing to a picture of Uncle Julio, the chain's grinning, sombrero-wearing mascot, and added the question: STEREOTYPE? Clearly this person is a divider, not a uniter, and clearly he hates freedom. Or at least chilie con queso.

Of course, you're no safer in the hinterlands. Check out this fifth columnist in my former place of residence. Fortunately, the Patriots at the paper were quick to run photos of the offending susbstances, let someone accidentally ingest some tabouleh.

THE HOLIDAYS ARE JUST FOUR SHORT MONTHS AWAY...



...not that I'm dropping hints or anything. Who knows, maybe I was just inspired by this heartwarming example of compassionate conservatism (scroll down to the comments for the full effect).

Or, if this all seems so three months ago, there's always this. A timeless classic which plays... a timeless classic.

HOW I SPENT MY SUMMER VACATION, PT. 2

Kids at the beach... This is exactly what summer vacation is all about. Nine hours in the car each way, listening to kids tunes involving SpongeBob, Dragontales and the confounded freaking religious vegetables thanks to an iPod whose battery refused to die... not so much.

SOMEONE NOTIFY OPRAH IMMEDIATELY

The scary joke novel I'm writing with two friends has been updated once more, thanks to Jeremy. Taking an already weird literary experiment to new heights, his new entry includes Saladin, Jimi Hendrix, Einstein and a plot line from the cinematic masterpiece Back to the Future II. (As always, the most recent chapter is at the top of the page, though it's no more coherent when it's read chronologically from the bottom up).

Now it's my turn to update the sucker, hopefully without any flying Deloreans or breakdancing robots. Okay, well, maybe just one breakdancing robot. Or two.

If all this makes your brain hurt -- and God knows that's what it does to mine -- you could just read this instead, for a far more coherent and reassuring worldview.

IT STILL MAKES MORE SENSE THAN J-SCHOOL

As if Jayson Blair, massive media consolidation and this wacky unrecession haven't been ill enough portents for those of us in the journalism biz, now there's this fun new option for the upwardly mobile reporter. Instead of putting in your time in the trenches, building a decent clip file, and uncovering that one big scandal that can define a career, you can simply bid for a major-network writing gig on eBay.

Okay, okay, so maybe it's on Fox. But at the moment, the bidding for this Nascar column-writing gig is well north of $200, which vastly exceeds your typical rookie reporter's annual budget for Ramen noodles. A pity, too -- I've always wanted to build on my well-documented ability to cover sophisticated, upscale sporting events.

A SHAMELESS PLUG FOR A SOCK PUPPET

My college friend Cece has a book coming out in September. After years of seeing sock monkey-related imagery from her and her husband, Tom, and not getting the joke, I can't wait.

Thanks to a master's level class my wife took on this Internet thingy, I know you can pre-order the book on Amazon, and help Sock Monkey break the 1,646,444 mark in their sales rankings.

As if that isn't enough of an enticement, Amazon has the book categorized not only in its "monkeys" category, but also under "cleanliness" (where you can also find this Right-Thinking tome). Really, what more could you possibly want?

NO PROBLEMS FINDING A PARKING SPOT WITH THIS

As regular readers of this space know, I drive an SUV (but don't worry -- it's electric). And now, as a way to offer a glimpse of my reclusive, Howard Hughes-like existence (only without the millions of dollars or the Kleenex boxes for my feet), here's a picture of my bitchin' set of wheels.

Sure, it only gets 8 MPG, but that's not what keeps me up at night. My biggest worry is finding a skilled artist with a flair for the medium of airbrush-on-steel during these busy summer months to replace the map of Iraq with one of Iran. Or maybe Liberia. Or France.

SO IT'S NOT THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

Another fair and balanced letter to the editor from my former employer in the hinterlands:

Enough whining about entitlement

I would like to respond to Nelson Graves' column regarding affirmative action. Isn't it time the African American race quit crying about how unfair they have it? Let's start out first by stating this: The Civil War was not over slavery as has been taught to our kids: It was over states' rights, NOT SLAVERY. Haven't there been other (enslaved) races? Some could point (out) that the Jews were slaves to Hitler. Why should a black man get a job over a white man who is more qualified? Do we have a White American Pageant or a "WET" -- White Entertainment Television -- channel? No, we don't. So why should a black man get a job over another because of his skin tone or vice versa?

(Graves made) reference to Michael Jordan; he is one of the few who is doing something with his money in the black community. We all know of the millions of dollars black athletes and also entertainers make, but what do they do with their money? We hear not, "How can I help the African American race" but how nice a "crib" or "ride" he has, so enough of the whining -- it's time!

The whites call your bluff on how bad your race has it and say what needs to be said -- that the only way to have something is to work for it, not rely on someone feeling sorry for you -- and that goes for every color.

But we do have a White Entertainment Television channel -- it's called Fox News.

Bear in mind that this ran in the same august publication that -- and I swear I'm not making this up -- used whiteout to remove a snake from a Far Side cartoon on deadline because a woman called the publisher to complain that snakes were servants of the devil. Unfortunately, the snake was the punchline of the panel, so the next morning readers awoke to a cartoon that made no sense whatsoever. Usually, they had to get to something I wrote before that happened.

HOW I SPENT MY SUMMER VACATION



This is the view from our friends' backyard in Tucson, Arizona, where we spent a few days watching a massive forest fire snake up the far side of the mountain you see here.

It's not like we look at the newspaper and ask aloud, "Hmm. It's vacation time. Where can we go where there's 115-degree weather, an airport named after American Hero Barry Goldwater, and a massive natural disaster?" It just sort of works out that way.

The amazing thing? Somehow, we still managed to have fun. And I'll take 115-degree weather and Barry Goldwater over eternal drizzle and the guy who can't even ride a Segway.

TAKE THAT, SADDAM!

Who says our nation's color-coded rainbow of terror doesn't mean anything? As a result of the previously mentioned return to Mellow Yellow(tm), they've unlocked one door at my office building. Hell, if we go back to blue, they might even let us crack a window!

SLOWEST NEWS DAY. EVER.

I look forward to reading the newspaper on weekends. So as I skimmed the front page of The Washington Post this morning, what do I see? In the paper that brought down Nixon, a front-page article about a woman who tried to eat a 50-ounce steak (and failed, to save you the time of reading about 2,500 words of bland "local color"). You see, she's from Texas! It's a wacky, non-D.C.-like, place!

Okay, let's be fair. Maybe not much else is going on in the world. So let's flip to the Metro section. Surely in a city that Donald Rumsfeld just called statistically more dangerous than Baghdad, something interesting happened. Sure enough -- at the top of a page, a story about earthworms, and how the nonstop rain we've endured over the past few months is a Bad Thing for them. Maybe they could move to Iraq.

Remember, this is the paper of record in the nation's capital, the self-appointed watchdog of our public servants. They should be focusing on the big issues, the barnburners, the exposes -- oh, wait, I forgot to turn to the Style section. I stand corrected!

THE WORLD'S UPSIDE DOWN...

...when in the D.C. area, Newt Gingrich hawks his new novel about the (surprise!) Civil War at Barnes & Noble, while Hillary Clinton hawks her own book at Wal-Mart. No word, though, on whether they were handing out free tackle boxes.

MAYBE HE SHOULD HAVE WORN HIS FLIGHT SUIT

By now, everyone's seen these traitorous, objectively pro-Saddam pictures of Dear Leader:

I've had the dorky priviledge of riding a Segway. And from my limited experience, it's virtually impossible to fall off of one. Of course, W.'s father was the one who thought a grocery store scanner was going to steal his soul, and there was all that unpleasantness with voting machines in his brother's state. So maybe the family just has some issues with technology.

UPDATE: Now there's this. Genius.

YOU CAN'T GO HOME, PT. 34

In the nearly 10 years we've been married, I've joked that we keep moving into increasingly depressing places. First, we lived in a cool, surprisingly hip loft-style apartment in a renovated 110-year-old warehouse. Then we moved to one of the few high-rise apartments in Arlington that overlooked something other than another high rise. Then came the nice but generic townhouse adjoining the world's scariest grocery store, followed by the swank 70s monument to stucco and earth tones we currently call home.

Well, this is what's apparently happened to place # 2. We hear the rats have reclaimed the backyard of place #3, and the owner of place #1 apparently went bankrupt years ago. Still, though, this takes the cake.

It's fun being downwardly mobile.

THINGS I DID IN THE HINTERLAND THIS WEEKEND

• Discovered that the Mark Toner Chop Steak now comes with Freedom Fries.
  
  
• Read this fair and balanced letter to the editor.
  
  
• Learned they give kids free tackle boxes filled with sunflower seeds at Wal-Mart.
  
  
• Saw this license plate: HUNT ELK (I'm assuming they mean the animal, and not members of the civic association).
  

The scary thing? In spite of it all, I love the place.

GOOD GRIEF

Here we go again. Now all my past posts have returned from the Great Beyond, but they can't be reposted. In fact, I don't think anything can be posted at this point. My blog appears to be in a state of suspended animation, much like usual except that I'm actually trying to post.

Anyway. Consider this my attempt to give this stupid blog a Megtron(tm)-worthy kick back into the real world.

Megtron(tm) and Blogger -- two great tastes that taste great together.

UPDATE: Everything seems to be working. Now back to the usual, regularly scheduled lack of updates.

WELL, WELL, WELL...

It seems the picture below was so ugly, it actually broke the Internet. Or at least Blogger. Either way, about three months' worth of postings seem to have disappeared into the ether. One or two of them were even vaguely coherent.

Luckily, I keep a non-Blogger archive, so simply follow the link and you won't miss a darned thing. Western civilization can breathe a collective sigh of relief....

Stupid Blogger.

UPDATE: Well, now the old entries reappeared, but today's disappeared until I manually reentered them. Bad, bad Blogger.

ROCK AND ROLL WILL NEVER DIE...

... but maybe, just maybe, someone should have pulled the plug on its ventilator in the '70s. All of the sudden, the sexual ambiguity that pervaded 80s music is put into some sort of twisted perspective.

But wait -- there's more.

THIS MAKES ME FEEL SOMEWHAT LESS XTREME

The rich, as the author of the upcoming Lance Bass/Paris Hilton blockbuster famously said, are different than you and I. For one thing, they go to Hummer camp, apparently for the priviledge of driving their $50,000 SUVs in the mud, which costs money, as opposed to the mall, which is free.

Speaking of shopping, here's what one of the participants said about her Canyonero-sized car:

"You know when you go shopping and nothing moves you?" she asked. "Then there's the time you see something, and right away know it's perfect. It's like falling in love. When I'm driving it, I feel empowered. It's the car that opens the sea for me. Now I know how Moses felt."

Yeah, Moses was pretty bummed out, what with the imprisonment of his people and ancient Egypt's generally unfulfilling retail options.

In the interest of full disclosure, I drive an extraneous, XTreme-styled SUV myself (but don't worry -- it's electric), and I'm sure I cut quite the Biblical figure when I drive it to the Giant down the street, the Nissan-supplied XTreme bandana draped around my shoulders. At the same time, though, it seems like the newly idle rich now have this tendency not just to flaunt their money -- a time-honored American tradition -- but flaunt it in ways calculated to infuriate as many other people as humanly possible. We've gone from ostentation to irritation.

So when I get my $400 child tax credit check in the mail this summer, I'll have to find some equally obnoxious way of spending it (while doing my share to create those 1 million new jobs we've been promised). Maybe I'll pick up some remaindered NO SLACK FOR IRAQ mud flaps at the local Wal-Mart.

ASK FOR IT BY NAME

You know you're in for a fun afternoon at work when you walk into the office and smell the smoke from your burning computer wafting all the way down the hallway.

Hard to believe as it may seem, a four-year-old computer from one of the world's best-known and most-trusted brands -- MEGTRON (tm)(R) -- isn't the most reliable piece of mission-critical eqiupment in the world. Even before the unfortunate explosion, it would make noises alternating between the death rattle of a Soviet-era iron lung and a high school nerd's rock tumbler whenever you tried to do something inadvisable, like turn it on. I realize the folks in the MEGTRON (tm)(R) head office are probably pretty busy, what with having to fight Godzilla, but I can't help but think there's an air traffic controller out there somewhere trying to guide a 747 into a fogged-in airport using one of these suckers.

The saddest, nay, tragic part of this whole sad story? Even after the explosion, it was easily repairable, and even as I speak (or type), it's growling menacingly under my desk. Maybe it senses that Mothra is nearby...

MOOSE AND SQUIRREL

I'm way, way late to the party in bringing up Jayson Blair, the disgraced New York Times reporter who decided that the best way to avoid a work-related trip to West Virginia is to assume that everyone's house there overlooks tobacco fields. If you've been living on a desert island for the past month, or simply don't share the average journalist's narcissistic belief that everyone in the world is as interested in media gossip as the average journalist, here's an overview.

The part of this whole sorry mess that rings the most true to me as an, ahem, journalist isn't the sense of outrage at the desecration of my noble craft (picture a rendering plant on an August afternoon), or the sad realization that most people affected by Mssr. Blair's fabrications simply assumed that's the way the media goes about its business (a reasonable assumption, incidentally). No, what really bugs me is the moose.

Other writers have explained the moose in detail, but the upshot is this: At some point, Times management handed out little Beanie Baby-style meese to employees, as a reminder that they should feel free to talk about important, but often unspoken, issues. Apparently, some people actually bring them to meetings. Important meetings.

Beyond some college freelancing, I've never worked at the Times (a fact that should be glaringly obvious to anyone who's read anything I've ever done). But I've seen similar animal-related travesties at several of my jobs. At one, the editors decided to counter the complaint that there was too much "bad news" in the paper by running a graphic of a smiling cartoon dog holding a paper bearing the words "GOOD NEWS!" with any story that didn't involve blunt force trauma. At another, they handed out not meese, but little plastic fish, supposedly to symbolize the sense of fun that a fishmonger might have on the job. Some middle-management guru made a small fortune extrapolating this concept of forced workplace frivolity into a very thin book featuring very large type, ignoring the fact that, as Dilbert once pointed out, the "title characters get tossed around and eaten."

But I digress. We all got fun plastic fish. We had a naming contest, which resulted in our workplace mascot being given the name "James Pond." A good time was had by all.

Weeks later, the layoffs began.

Meanwhile, you can hear from the man himself, Mssr. Jayson Blair, minus his company-appointed moose. Oh, those wacky Inter web pranksters!

SIGN OF THE APOCALYPSE #47

I really, really hope this is a joke:

Lance Bass To Star In 'Gatsby' Film With Paris Hilton

So what does Lance Bass have in common with hotel heiress Paris Hilton?

Well, besides being blonde and getting invited to socialite-stuffed shindigs, the 'NSYNC vocalist and the older half of the model/actress Hilton sisters are teaming up for the latest Hollywood take on an F. Scott Fitzgerald classic.

"[It's] a remake along the lines of 'The Great Gatsby,' but younger," Bass explained at Wednesday's "Matrix Reloaded" premiere in Los Angeles. Bass will star in the currently-in-development flick, one of many he has on his plate.

Does anyone have any sense of karma anymore? Speaking of which, there's this:

"I'm writing my first horror film right now, called 'Imaginary Friend,' " he added. "It should be along the lines of that old fun Freddy Krueger-type stuff. ... We've got a nice imaginary friend-type [slasher character] that will scare the bejesus out of ya'."

That would be F. Scott himself, back from the grave. And he's gonna be pissed.

BEST. NOVEL. EVER.

Thanks to the Internet web screen machine thingy, I've finally managed to find the book The Washington Post called "the worst novel in the world" (at least until my own masterpiece of contemporary fiction comes out). The sad thing? I actually read quite a bit of it.

The Great American Parade is apparently a satirical novel of ideas that, so far as I can tell, involves lengthy discussions of progressive income taxation, complete with every novelist's favorite plot device, the numerical chart.

Of course, any novelist worth his or her salt knows not to rely on such flashy, Harlequin romance-like gimmicks as -- and this isn't a joke -- a fictional conversation with Barbara Streisand in which the protagonists complement her on an article she wrote on social issues. No, you also have to be able to write credible dialogue. Like this:

"What can be done?" Rumsfeld anxiously asked Cheney, as they both saw the color rising in Bush's face.

"Not a damned thing! Not a damned thing!" Cheney replied, teeth clenched, face reddened in outrage. "This whole damned affair has gotten out of hand-but what can we do? It's all on camera. It's in every living room in the country. Right now! And, God damn it, it's being watched everywhere else in the world!

"And we're here to celebrate America's achievements-and its most notable achievers! What a mockery these damned college students are making of our parade!" he continued, seething with anger.

"And of us-of all of us!" lamented Colin Powell at his side.

And they would have gotten away with it, too, if it wasn't for those meddling kids!

So maybe the folks at The Washington Post have a point. Of course, the same august publication once singled out this Web site for generally favorable attention, so there's no accounting for taste.

HATS OFF

At the end of last year, I switched jobs. Sadly, the magazine I used to edit is now no more.

I was actually quite proud of TechNews, mainly because of the way we attempted to cover abstruse technologies in an entertaining, engaging way -- and you haven't gotten abstruse until you start talking about folder pin-post bushings on printing presses. Nor have you gotten truly retentive as an editor until you determine that the hyphen in the above sentence goes between "pin" and "post." We tried to make this stuff fun, and had fun in the process.

A moment of silence, please, for the only publication that allowed its editor to reminisce at length about his fading glory days of watching ink trucks and making fun of local TV newscasts.

Come to think of it, maybe there's a reason it went under.

EH-OH...

It's no longer topical, or even particularly relevant, but this has been updated for the first time in what seems like years.

But don't thank me. Thank this Right-Thinking American.

OPERATION ENDURING NAUSEA

Some liberty-hating ne'r-do-wells say Paris--er, Freedom City, is the most romantic setting in the world. According to the folks at my favorite forum for nuanced political discussion, it's not. Instead, try the flight deck of a Floating Fortress(tm):

Us ladies here already supported President Bush... it's just been a loooooooong time since we've seen a REAL man leading the way.....and it's his manilness and values that make him so sexy.

Yesterday when GW got off the plane, all I could think was "He's so good-looking. What a cutie!" (Then I'd bounce back to "That's your president, woman. Knock it off.")

i am totally with you, that was exactly my thought. he is hot. i sent my sisterinlaw one of those photos of him and said the same thing to her, and all she said in return was "mmmmmmmm".... LOL. i admit to being pathetic, and i critcized the pathetic soccer moms for finding the bubbaloon attractive. i mean GOOD GRIEF, how can you even compare???

I guess some women just like sissy-men (evidence the popularity of Keanu Reeves and Leo DiCaprio). I want a man that looks and acts like a man. Give me Sean Connery (yes, even old and bald) or Tom Selleck any day. I like a man that makes me feel like a woman. Bush just has that manly vibe going on.

I think two of the most attractive things about President Bush is that he loves and respects his wife and family and that he looks to God for guidance. (He didn't look too bad in that suit, either.)

Then there was my favorite comment:

Manly man bump! Woo-hoo.

Justice O'Connor, get off the computer! Court is in session.

I need a cold shower. With bleach.

HAD I KNOWN, I WOULD HAVE PICKED UP A CARD

Today, freedom-hating countries like France--er, Freedom, are celebrating May Day, typically as a celebration of the working class, endless dole lines, clove cigarettes, lukewarm mystery meats, etc. Thank goodness our Right-Thinking president has found a way to rechannel all that worthless energy:

NOW, THEREFORE, I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, do hereby proclaim May 1, 2003, as Loyalty Day. I call upon all the people of the United States to join in support of this national observance. I also call upon government officials to display the flag of the United States on all government buildings on Loyalty Day.

How can you not love all these cute little slogans and names? Hope I can get enough rest before we have to start preparing for Hate Week!