I'm sitting in the coffee shop, working on some piece or another, when Johnny Cash's cover of "Solitary Man" (penned by Neil Diamond) pipes through the speakers, warm and gravelly, sounding almost as if he's in the room. This was always his strength, I think—the intimacy of his voice, and how it seems private and personal, even from a crowd of thousands, even from the grooves of a vinyl disc. This coincides with my reading of his biography which, although written with a professional author, sounds like it came right from the horse's mouth. And I think, nobody has ever had a voice like that. No one will ever have a voice like that again.

The latest death toll from the Asian tsunami is around 71,000. Can we even fathom numbers like this when it comes to human loss?

Here are some aid organizations, if you're interested in helping out your neighbors across the globe:

—three sticks of doom

This holiday, I took time out from the compulsory gluttony and merriment to enjoy Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events. My friends and I had to sit a little too close to the screen, and at a slightly obtuse angle (no jokes, please), but although we considered extracting several kids from their primo seats, we chose the way of peace instead. I don't mind telling you that we would have kicked their little fifth-grade buttocks. It would have been appropriate, too, because in the world of Lemony Snicket (much like in real life), this is exactly the sort of thing grown-ups do, without reason or provocation.

Can't you just see Elrond at family gatherings? He's old, crotchety, and hard of hearing—one of those veterans who loves recounting his wartime exploits. "Did I ever tell you about the war with Sauron?" he asks, and the grandchildren roll their eyes, because they know very well what's coming. This story has been told at every holiday meal for a thousand years, and the tradition is likely to continue for another thousand.

Dear Reader:

Nick and I have been busy this year. We hooked up a new DVD player, and then climbed both slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro (the first task was the more difficult). We also adopted a small goblin who claims to be from Milwaukee. Milwaukee—Algonquin for "the good land." Mostly, he lives under the sink and tampers with the hot water heater.

Well, it's the holiday season in Lawrence, Kansas, and this means one thing in particular to those of us who are natives—there is a massive influx of traffic from Johnson County. Here we are, a town full of artisans and students, hippies and thinking people, and assorted others who make their living pretending to be all of the above. We are the Berkeley of the Midwest. We are the Village people (heh heh). And we have the kind of cultured ambience that summons affluent characters from the suburbs of Kansas City.

The art in my office is terrible. I'm looking at a piece right now, and it's like a festival of mediocrity. It's all geometric shapes and muted colors, with bold stripes and wavy lines on the side to give it a sense of texture. It's the kind of design you might have seen on the $5 sweatshirt rack in the 80s. The one behind me is no better. More reds, maybe, and a hint of gold, with lots of intersecting half-circles. It reminds me just enough of a Chagall to piss me off.

Have you heard the one about the woman who went into a coma and didn't wake up until after German reunification? This is the clever premise for Good Bye Lenin, a film by Wolfgang Becker that is both tender and humorous, heartbreaking and romantic.

It's early 1990. Alex (Daniel Brühl), who narrates the film, explains that his mother (Katrin Saß) is a loyal member of the socialist party in East Germany. She adores Lenin, and has pretty much dedicated her life to furthering the ideals of socialism. When she sees her son being arrested at an anti-socialist protest, however, the woman has a heart attack and slips into a coma. Eight months later, she wakes up to a changed world. The doctor assures Alex and his sister that if their mother encounters anything upsetting or shocking, she will almost certainly have another heart attack and die, so Alex decides that they simply won't tell her the whole business about Erich Honecker's resignation and the Wall coming down. They will pretend that nothing has changed.

Dear Santa

How are things at the North Pole? How is Mrs. Claus? I have been very good this year. There are a few things I want to ask you for.

This is what I imagine the movie Saw is about. Keep in mind, I have no real basis for these speculations, other than what little I've gleaned from the ads.

The Dread Pirate Westley gets kidnapped and locked in a dingy, poorly lit room. Upon regaining consciousness, he discovers that his wrists and ankles are manacled. A note has been left at his feet, and it goes something like this:

"Hi there! You have been selected for an experiment in psychological torture! I've left you a saw so you can cut off one of your limbs and leave. Don't worry about a thing, though. There's an incredibly obvious flaw in my sinister plan that will allow you to escape."

I just realized that Six Months of Solitude has been online for nearly a year—suckers!—so I thought it'd be fun to look back on all the different ways people have found my site. By and large, the hits are from people who make direct requests or come from links, but each month I get a goodly number of hits from inquisitive folks who are looking for something in a search engine. With this in mind, I reviewed my usage data for the past eleven months and compiled a list of my favorite search strings. Keep in mind that someone typed each and every one of these gems into a search engine, and then—through the sublime magic of the internet—ended up at my very own SMoS. Some of these I can figure out, some are pretty random, and some I'd prefer not to even think about. Enjoy.

1/2—one and a half sticks of doom

Sideways fancies itself a grown-up film of the most sophisticated sort. We have middle-aged adults in romantic situations, and we have a whole lot of wine drinking, sniffing bouquets, etc. But do not be fooled into thinking this film is a late heir to The Big Chill. When you look beneath the surface, there is nothing sophisticated about Sideways. It's the cinematic equivalent of boxed wine.

This link is a trap!

Last Friday I heard a report on NPR about electronics chain Best Buy and their new customer profiling practices. I understand this has been reported on Slashdot, too. For those who haven't heard the story, the deal is this: Best Buy has just implemented a sort of triage system that determines which customers are worth the employees' time and which are not. They staff is trained to recognize certain types of customers and allot their attentions accordingly.

When I was in second grade, my parents were counselors for a horse-riding camp. The camp was for area youth groups (grade 9-12) so I was way too young to attend, but they brought me along and let me stay in the lodge with them anyway. I had a great time. I got to ride horses, and the older kids were really nice to me. It was all the fun of camp, without any of the ugly parts, like homesickness or barely cooked biscuits.

The summer after Kivawood, I ended up at Circle-C Ranch. Circle-C was a Bible camp, and the emphasis was on developing "soldiers of the Lord." Partly, this emphasis was evidenced by the military-type room inspections, and the fact that we had to stand in formation by the flagpole at 6 every morning.

1. If you are a vampire who is craving blood badly, keep a flask of it in your suit pocket and discreetly take a sip or two when no one else is looking. It's extremely bad form to latch onto your mother-in-law and drink a couple pints before the pumpkin pie is served.

Camp is a way to get kids out of the house. They are packed up—their names lovingly Magic Marker-ed onto their clothing tags—and then are shuttled off to some tick-infested wilderness, where a single ill-timed heart attack would leave them entirely to their own Machiavellian devices. At camp, you can learn new skills, like canoeing or making lanyards. You have allies, and you have enemies. You can get lucky and be praised for your successes, or unlucky and be put under house arrest because some other kid TP'd the counselor's cabin and blamed it on you. At camp, you will find nice people and mean people, joy and heartbreak. In other words, camp is life.

Take your Christmas lights down. Sweet crackers, madam! Do you realize it is still a week before Thanksgiving? The holiday season goes on for long enough as it is without the likes of you prolonging it even further. Are you so desperate for the approval of your neighbors that you must engage in this shallow display of merriment before anyone else? Are you worried you won't be the first, because somehow your self-esteem is tied into your placement in the holiday lights one-upsmanship contest?

—three sticks of doom

It takes a lot of guts to use a Johnny Cash song in a zombie movie, but Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead does it, and does it well. Imagine scenes of rampant carnage, wanton destruction, and the occasional close-up zombie glamour shot, all set against the folksy backdrop of "The Man Comes Around," Cash's famed song about the End Times. Brilliant, in my opinion. And this is just one example of the kind of detailed craftsmanship that makes this film so fun, gruesome and, ultimately, watchable.

Farewell, John Ashcroft. You'll be sorely missed
By neocon reformers, bums, and hacks.
While thousands daily make your "terror list,"
The real al Qaeda's slipping through the cracks.

Way back in January, when my site had only been up for a few days, I noticed something odd in my daily usage logs. Something called a "Googlebot" had crawled my site. Somehow, through all the chaos and pablum of the internet, it had found my infant site—barely cleansed of its amniotic fluid, in fact—and indexed it. This was kind of cool because it meant that my site would show up in Google searches when you typed in "Karen Vaughn solitude" or "Nudist Colony of the Dead" or just "Terrible Movies." Huzzah for that, right? But the image that kept insinuating itself on my brain was that of a tiny, heinously creepy insect creature, brushing its sticky little legs and feelers on every page of my site. I couldn't help it. The Googlebots creeped me out.

Man, I'm irritated right now.

You there, in all of those gay-marriage amendment states (those of you who voted "NO" are exempt), you are no longer allowed to watch Will & Grace, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, The L Word, or Queer as Folk, and you are also not allowed to talk about how much fun your gay hairdresser is.

#10. Convert to Shinto.

#9. Be caught with a little boy.

#8. Publicly acknowledge his blood bargain with Lucifer.

#7. Sell the Statue of Liberty to Colombia for a couple kilos of Bogota's finest.

#6. Host a pharmaceutical company shopping spree at the Federal Reserve building.

#5. Die.

#4. Use the Force to strangle his top admiral on national television.

#3. Accidentally nuke a third-world nation out of existence, then blame the mistake on intelligence failures, then shrug the whole thing off with a good-old Texas guffaw.

#2. Kill the firstborn son of every family in America.

#1. Trick question. Apparently, Bush could do any of these things and be re-elected. Way to go, America. You make me real proud.

Okay, America, I'm begging you. Please vote for Kerry this Tuesday. We can't afford another four years under Bush. All that has been accomplished with Bush's preemptive war is that the terrorists have been energized to greater hatred and violence than before. We're less safe now than we were four years ago.

Four-way stops.

This morning as I was crossing town, I happened to stop at a four-way stop. A pick-up was on my right, and he had reached the intersection first (by several seconds), so I sat back and waited for him to go. Then I waited some more, but he just sat there. Finally, he made one of those exaggerated "well, go ahead" arm gestures, followed by a rather obscene one. I drove through, made some gestures of my own, and considered following the guy to his destination so I could politely explain to him about the rules of the road. Okay, so first thing. What's the rule when you are at a four-way stop? The person who reaches the intersection first goes through before everyone else. Second, if there is a stalemate, the driver on the right has the right of way. So there are two reasons, right there, why he should have driven through ahead of me. Karen: 2; Idiot: 0.

It all started because I'm planning to dress as Leela from Futurama for Halloween this year. I have been scouring Google Images for pictures, looking for examples of Leela's wardrobe. So far, I've pulled together the basic outfit—white tank top, black pants—and I've even made my own arm band thing out of gray/blue felt and Velcro. The hardest part will be figuring out how to fashion Leela's trademark single eyeball into something that will fit on my head and look right, but that will also be transparent enough for me to see through. But don't worry about it. I'm a smart girl, and I'm sure I'll figure it out.

In the process of doing this research, however, I uncovered more naughty pictures of our dear Leela than I could ever have imagined. These are mostly amateur drawings of Leela in sexy lingerie, in a variety of Barbarella-style outfits, or just plain-old buck naked. There is also a startling amount of fan fiction, detailing exactly what it is that Leela and Fry do behind closed spaceship doors (hint: it's not spot-cleaning the computer panels). I guess this shouldn't surprise me, but it does. The sheer volume of it, anyway.

I walked into the store today and saw a zombie there
With green detritus in her teeth and flowers in her hair.
Inquiring first about her health, I asked her one thing more,
Then tipped my hat to Zombie Girl and went on with my chores.

1/2—two and a half sticks of doom

It's impossible to talk about Mean Girls without talking about Heathers. The themes are mostly the same. Teenagers live in a world of social stratification, in which the lunch table you sit at determines your status; intermingling of groups is discouraged; and there is always a clique of mean girls ruling over it all. In Heathers, they go by the eponymous moniker, "the Heathers"; in Mean Girls, it's "the Plastics." Both films feature a single outsider who infiltrates the ranks of the privileged clique, and causes havoc from within. But compared with the comically violent Heathers, Mean Girls is one big genteel catfight.

1. If a man at a haunted house runs at you with a chain saw, it's best to assume that he is an escaped mental patient who has chosen the perfect setting for his murder and mayhem. Push someone else in front of him.
2. You may say "Bloody Mary" twice in front of a mirror, but not three times. (Same with Betelgeuse, Candyman, etc.)
Posted by Karen Updated on Tuesday, 19 January 2010 22:11 CST
Tags: safety

My first through fifth favorite people are Nick, my friends Thomas and Erin, and my parents. Below that, things get reshuffled quite a bit. But as of three days ago, number six on the list is Jon Stewart (this is an impressively high ranking for someone I've never met). I'm a big fan of The Daily Show. Always have been—even in the primitive days of Craig Kilborn. But the thing that has propelled the show to unprecedented success in recent years is the dry, self-deprecating wit of Jon Stewart. He has turned the show into a satirical tour-de-force that boldly goes where no fake news organization has gone before.

Dream #1: I was dancing with Johnny Ramone in the desert. Don't know why, but I was. Then I saw this Japanese skateboarder doing Old School kickflips and grinds on a nearby railing. For some reason, he was wearing a t-shirt from the musical, CATS. He was really good, so I stopped dancing and went over to get his autograph. As he turned toward me, his eyes turned yellow and lasers shot out of them. It was kind of scary, so I left without getting an autograph.

When I heard the candidates were going to be speaking about domestic issues tonight, I was hoping they would be debating about who had the privilege of doing my dishes and my laundry. Alas, twas not to be. All they did was talk about the economy and taxes and stuff.

Nevertheless, here's the third installment of my in-depth series on Bush and Kerry in Debate Land. (This is sort of like Disneyland, without the ten-dollar sodas.) Once again, this is all my approximation of what the candidates said unless denoted by quotes. And even then, don't hold me to it.

Friday night, I watched The Ladykillers, the Coen brothers' loose remake of an earlier movie with the same name. In the film, Tom Hanks portrays a refined Greek classicist who leads a band of eccentric criminals through a woefully mismanaged casino robbery. Dressed the part of a southern gentleman, he sports a white suit and a Colonel Sanders beard throughout most of the film. He has a florid, arcane way of speaking and a brand of eccentric laughter that makes him sound like he is hyperventilating. (These quirks are explained somewhat by the fact that his father was a librarian in a mental institution—an inmate, if you must know.) The movie is quite sly, keeping you on your toes from start to finish, and it's full of the kind of dark humor that can only come from delving into human iniquity. Plus, there's a lot of great gospel music to keep your spirits up between misadventures.

I'm not sure why The Ladykillers didn't catch on, even with the art theater crowd. People may have been mystified by the violence and the rather high body count, but could they have already forgotten the wood chipper of yesteryear? Surely that was much worse. Do I need to remind everyone of the stockinged foot sticking out of the top? Now that's comedy.

Start with 1 lb. of technology gone awry. Add 3/4 c. human enslavement, 1/2 c. marauding gangs, 1/4 c. people converted into food or power, 1 can of Carousel, and 1 Tablespoon constant government surveillance. Fold in two Sly Stallones. Heat mixture at 451 degrees Fahrenheit for 19.84 minutes. Sprinkle with a pinch of deadly road race, and you have Easy Baked Dystopia. For best results, use Terry Gilliam's oven.

For you hardcore politics junkies who didn't happen to catch the second debate tonight, I have prepared a by-the-minute account of the event. I have illuminated the major points and commented when I was puzzled or irritated by what I heard. No edits have been made except for clarification and where I stupidly left words out or something. Comments in quotes are direct quotations. All others are approximations.

October 2004

Dear Mr. Sean O'Keefe, c/o NASA;

It was early winter, and I had just gotten a new tank top set. It was white, with blue, green, and red palm trees on it, and the brand was Jet Set. I remember the brand name because I thought it sounded so grown-up and sophisticated. Made me sound like I should be on Falcon Crest or something.

So did y'all watch the debates last night? What did you think? It seemed to me that one of these men is a good public speaker and one is not. I don't know. Maybe it was just me. Bush said some mighty strange things, and for awhile it seemed his brain was stuck on some kind of loop:

It's official. They'll make a Broadway musical about anything. I have recently learned that The Last Starfighter—that campy, outrageously bad 1984 film—has been converted to a musical and will debut on Broadway within the next few months. It's a shame Robert Preston is dead, because he's the only one of the original cast who actually could have reprised his role from the original.

This was officially Quentin Tarantino weekend in our household. Bravo was showing Jackie Brown, followed by Pulp Fiction, and we rented Kill Bill Volumes 1 and 2. Watching Bravo's version of Jackie Brown, however, I was mystified by the repeated references to melon farmers. Every five minutes, Samuel L. Jackson was calling someone this epithet, and I inferred from his inflection that it was not a term of endearment. For instance, there's a scene in which the characters watch a video about assault weapons. Jackson's character narrates the video, and when it gets to the part about the AK-47, he says this about it: "When you absolutely, positively, gotta kill every melon farmer in the room—accept no substitutes."

My friends and I went to see David Byrne—formerly of the Talking Heads—at the Uptown Theatre last Wednesday. The evening started off as a challenge. One thing I hate about Westport is that parking is a disaster. Everything is either privately owned (with tow trucks idling nearby, just waiting to haul away offenders), or charging exorbitant sums for a spot that is barely wide enough to squeeze in a Mini Cooper. Plus, whenever you manage to find a place, you will inevitably have to walk the gauntlet of panhandlers to get to your destination. (One told me he was trying to raise a down payment for a cheeseburger.) We finally arrived at the designated pub, ate a mediocre pre-show dinner, and then made our way to the theatre.

There was a buzz of excitement—and other evidence of onomatopoeia—as we located our seats. We were restless. We asked each other over and over again what we thought he would play. But no bets were placed. If there's one consistent thing about David Byrne, it's that you never know what he's going to do.

As I've mentioned before, Nick and I recently went to Colorado. What I didn't mention was that we stayed in a hotel with one of those Nintendo things in the room. We scanned the menu listing the available games, and when we made it through the list, the menu continued into the adult films. For a lark, we checked out the titles and laughed at their ridiculous pictures. But after the catalog of 50 or so films had gone by and we went back to the games, a gnawing realization began to insinuate itself on my brain. Every single one of these films—whether about chesty cheerleaders, naughty nurses, or buxom beekeepers—was targeted toward white heterosexual men. What's up with that? Notice to hotel chains everywhere, not everyone in this country is a white heterosexual man. Perhaps you've never realized this? Once in a great while someone who is of another gender, race, or orientation may happen to wander into your hotel. They may be feeling lonely and seeking out a few creature comforts. But instead of solace, they will be faced with adult media that in no way represents their culture or interests. It's a travesty, is what it is.

This weekend, a car caught on fire outside the Yello Sub shop in town. This struck me as a strange bit of coincidence, because the very same thing happened to me about eight years ago. At the time, I had a K-car (you know, that scrappy species of car that includes the Dodge Aries and the Plymouth Reliant). I'd been having problems with it, naturally, and it had just gotten out of the shop that morning. As I started the car up to drive it home, a thin trickle of smoke crept out from beneath the hood. The mechanic swore this was normal. "That's cause we just worked on it," he said. "It'll taper off here pretty soon."

"Oh, okay," I said, and happily drove away—the most naive girl in the world.

Have you ever had a dream that you were so sure was real? Was Elvis there, but old, grizzled, and with a walker? Was there also an old black man calling himself JFK? And was there some redneck mummy starting trouble in a small Texas nursing facility? If so, then you likely weren't dreaming at all, but watching Bubba Ho-Tep, the Second Greatest Story Ever Told. (We'll let JC keep his props for the first.)

That's right, folks. Bubba Ho-Tep is my new favorite movie.

(This piece aired on Kansas Public Radio in early August.)

This year marks the 65th anniversary of film version of The Wizard of Oz, and I'd like to say once and for all—I hate this film. I'm done with it, and not just because of the saccharine sweet songs or the nightmarish set designs, which are like German Expressionism gone horribly wrong. No, I hate The Wizard of Oz because of what it has done to this state. The thing is, you can't go to the movies or turn on the television without hearing "we're not in Kansas anymore," or "there's no place like home." These catchphrases are everywhere, and hearing them always makes me cringe. When this whimsical little movie came out in 1939, who would have guessed that it would saturate our culture so thoroughly? Who would have guessed it would become so representative of our identity as Kansans?

Ladies, are you tired of going home night after night to an empty house? Are you tired of family members haranguing you on holidays, asking if you're "seeing anyone special"? Dating is difficult. We've all had those embarrassing conversations at the bar, and experienced the anxiety of memorizing a three-minute speech for speed-dating events. Who needs the headaches? Try my new program, called Find Love at the Voting Booth.

Within the universe, there are two known singularities that cause time to slow down and come to a grinding halt: black holes, and presidential elections.

I've been thinking a lot about black holes, ever since Stephen Hawking lost his famous bet. You see, Hawking had always claimed that it's not possible to recover information once it's been sucked into a black hole. But in July of this year, he changed his mind. Black holes do release some kinds of information, he said. And because he changed his mind on this, he owes John Preskill from Caltech a big, fat set of encyclopedias.

½—one and a half sticks of doom

Imagine the movie Red Dragon. Pretty good, huh? Then imagine someone integrating a convoluted plot in which Gandhi kills the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, Aaron Eckhart gobbles up aspirin with narcotic fervor, and a stony-faced Trinity is the patron saint of FBI agents. Then throw in a little Darren Aronofsky, and you've got Suspect Zero, a muddled re-telling of every serial killer movie you've ever seen.

Something changed partway through third grade. It became acceptable, even desirable, to hang around with boys. Not that I hadn't always had crushes. In first grade I tried to kiss a boy named Robbie, who cruelly rebuffed my advances (he ran away). In second grade, I was inexplicably fascinated by a boy named Tom, who talked in a raspy voice and beat all the other kids at kickball. But in third grade there was Zach. Little, sarcastic Zach, with his freckles and his sandy-blond hair. I had never seen his kind of attitude before, and was fascinated by it. Needless to say, this would not be the last time I dated a smart-ass.

1. Bottled water at Lollapalooza
2. Frogs
3. Health care
4. Gravity
5. Siamese fighting fish
6. College
7. College textbooks
8. Hair pieces
9. Slinkys
10. Youth
11. Beauty
12. The Brothers Karamazov
13. String theory
14. String cheese
15. Buns of steel
16. Our sense of dignity
17. Language
18. Profanity
19. Conspiracy theories
20. Jungian archetypes
21. Hot Wheels
22. The iconic cult status of Kerouac
23. Transmogrification
24. Transsubstantiation
25. Tintinnabulation
26. Advice at the Oracle of Delphi
27. Portraits of the Queen
28. Radiohead
29. Igneous rocks
30. Schlemiel, schlimazel, Hassenpfeffer Incorporated
31. Kinetic energy
32. Our souls

Kevin was one of the meaner kids in class. He had a wicked smile, and a passion for disrupting class with simulated fart sounds. Usually, Kevin picked on the smaller kids, but one time he embarrassed me terribly by holding an anatomy book in front of my face and pointing to a diagram of the breasts. I was mortified, but I do remember looking at the strange way the tissues seemed to be folded around inside the breast, and thinking how odd that was, and how I wasn't sure I wanted any of that stuff anyway.

It all started when I had to stay the night at Greg G's house.

Greg's mom and my mom were best friends, so Greg and I were forced to spend a lot of time together. Every Sunday after church, our families would go to the restaurant at the Ramada Inn to eat lunch together. Greg and I were always bored during the meal. We'd sit squishing green jell-o through our teeth until our parents dismissed us, at which point we'd go out to the lobby and monopolize the sit-down Centipede game. Sometimes we'd fight over the controls.

Greg and I had a conditional friendship, the condition being that no one in school could ever know about it. The problem? He was a boy, and I was a girl. Neither of us really believed that the other had cooties, but we had to stand behind the party platform anyway. It was just one of those things.

The new Exorcist movie is going to suck. I'm sure of it, and I'll tell you why. William Friedkin will not be directing it, and William Peter Blatty will not be writing it. Renny Harlin is the director of Exorcist: The Beginning, and if his previous films are any indication (Cliffhanger, Deep Blue Sea), there will be lots of sinewy, muscled men and women who must take their clothes off for reasons of safety. In other words, this newest foray into demon possession may be a deliciously bad flick, but it definitely, absolutely, positively will not be a good one.

Every year, tornadoes ravage the Midwest. Although these meteorological temper tantrums cannot be prevented, there are a few things you can do to protect yourself from them. Here are a few tips gleaned from a lifetime spent in lovely Tornado Alley.

The best thing you can do to protect yourself during a tornado is to go to the basement or cellar. Go to the basement if: a) you hear the tornado sirens; b) you hear your local weatherman shrieking at you to take shelter; c) you hear the sound of four seals being broken, followed by eight pairs of hooves; or d) you need one of your power drills. If your home does not have a basement, flee to a neighbor's basement and introduce yourself at once. Be sure to bring your host a small gift, such as a bottle of wine or a generator. Engage in some pleasant conversation, then duck and cover.

Our friends Ron and Brandi were great hosts. They showed us the sights and walked us around downtown Denver. And we spent a lot of time just hanging out with them and their two kids: Mikey, 6, and Maddi, 5 months. This was our first time seeing Maddi, and she was appropriately adorable. She has very blue eyes.

Confession Time: I've always been tentative about holding babies. I suspect that long ago, when the earth was much younger, somebody asked me to hold their colicky baby. I further suspect that the baby instantly began to scream bloody murder upon being placed in my arms, and that I was impressionable enough to take this personally. This would explain why I'm mortified that somehow I will break babies, just by holding them. Sort of like Lennie in Of Mice and Men. ("Tell me about the rabbits, George.") Little Maddi, however, seemed perfectly satisfied with me holding her, and there were no screams or secretions issuing forth, so the event was a brilliant success.

Bob Costas is like the funny guy who hangs around your living room getting barbecue potato chip crumbs in all the little crevices of your sofa, and he never leaves because his wife is divorcing him and he doesn't want to go home, but it's okay because he makes you laugh and he points out all the absurd things that are occurring around him and on the television, and you have to love the way he narrates the Olympics because he's always got a slight smirk around the edges of his mouth, and it's almost like someone doing a comical impression of a sports commentator rather than an actual commentator, and he's so sweetly dorky that you think if you were set up on a blind date with him you'd have a great time eating eggs at the diner and laughing, but at the end of the night he'd try to kiss you and you'd kind of duck to avoid it and there'd be an awkward silence, after which you'd tell him that you really like him as a friend, even like a brother, but that you just don't think you're ready for a relationship so soon after your last break-up, so then you'd let him hang out in your living room as long as he wanted, getting potato chip crumbs in everything, because when it comes down to it he's just a little boy with too much pomade who just happens to be smart and preternaturally knowledgeable about sports, and after three or four months of this, you'd probably fall in love with him anyway, because if love is about anything, it's about laughter, and no one does laughter like Bob Costas.

I was watching the women's gymnastics portion of the Olympics a few nights ago, and it occurred to me that something hinky was going on. One of the commentators was being more than a little condescending toward the athletes—he kept saying things like "the cute-meter is broken now" and "aw . . . did you see that little grin?"

Yes, Mr. Olympic Commentator with your waxy pompadour, these girls are young. But have you noticed that they're also world-class athletes? Gymnastics at the Olympic level is a bit more competitive than at the annual "Tap and Tumbling" recital in Goatwater Falls, U.S.A. Even more troubling is the fact that most of your comments were made about the physically diminutive Chinese team. With the Australian team, there was talk of poise, flexibility, and execution. Then the Chinese step into the ring and suddenly it's all about how the girls should get 10 points for their smiles alone. Aren't they adorable? This little girl's goal is to win two gold medals. Isn't that cute?

Nick and I drove to Colorado last Thursday. Lawrence is about nine hours away from Denver, and a large portion of the drive is comprised of the brown, flat stretches of Western Kansas. The eastern half of Kansas is actually fairly hilly, but by the time you get to Abilene, it's as if an overindustrious giantess has taken a rolling pin to the countryside. There are a few Points of Interest along I-70, such as the enormous replica of Van Gogh's "Sunflowers" that can be seen from the highway in Goodland. The painting is on a huge easel that is taller than the surrounding buildings, and its presence completely throws off the scale of things, much as if you were to look into an ant farm and see a fingernail-sized Margaret Thatcher. There is also the World's Largest Prairie Dog, which is actually an enormous cement statue in a barn. As if that were not enough, this roadside attraction also boasts a living six-legged steer and a shop selling homemade rattlesnake jewelry.

Me zombie. Name Orwell. Me born long time ago, die, then go into ground. One morning, terrible noise wake me. Like God fingernails on big chalkboard. (Me literary—want write poem book one day.) Me stand up in graveyard, see other zombies standing, too. Moon out, and air full of green fog. Music play like at carnival. Weird.

"What do now?" me ask.

Other zombies shrug. "Guess eat brains."

Last Friday, at 11:15 in the evening, Nick and I went out to the Amtrak station in town. Kerry and Edwards had just finished a rally at Union Station in Kansas City, and their whistle-stop train was due to come through Lawrence about 11:30. No one was exactly sure what would happen then, but the rumor was that if there was a crowd, the train would stop and the Brothers John would say a few words to the party faithful of Lawrence, Kansas.

There was a crowd, alright. By 11:30, there were about seven or eight hundred people gathered on or near the tiny train platform. Most were Kerry supporters, armed with balloons, signs, etc., but there were a few Bushies and anarchists. A group of tough-looking middle-aged men held signs reading "Laborers for Kerry," and they were standing immediately in front of some College Republicans with Bush/Cheney signs. If there was going to be a riot, I figured, that was where it was going to occur. There, or where the anarchists were perched.

—four sticks of doom

Several people have mentioned to me that they don't want to see Napoleon Dynamite. "High school was hard enough the first time," they say, "and I don't want to relive it." To them I say: you must watch this film, because it's the only way to achieve any sort of catharsis. But really, this isn't a film for ex-geeks or ex-jocks or ex-anything in particular. It's no glossy, bittersweet John Hughes flick, either—the geeks at this high school don't look like John Cusack or Anthony Michael Hall (who only seemed dorky because they were so young). Nope, Director Jared Hess has Fellini's eye for weird yet engaging faces, and he has used this talent to assemble a completely believable ensemble of misfits. Napoleon himself (played by Jon Heder) has an angular face, buck teeth, and an unsettling way of speaking through his mouth and his nose at the same time. We're talking Grade A prime geek, here.

A year after the fact, I finally feel I am brave enough to tell the story of Lollapalooza 2003, Bonner Springs stop. The show was held at the amphitheater formerly known as Sandstone, and the musical line-up included the Donnas, Incubus, Jurassic Five, Audioslave, and Jane's Addiction. I was excited about the Donnas, but my raison d'etre that day was to hear Audioslave (I loved their musical ancestors, Soundgarden and Rage Against the Machine) and Jane's Addiction (I've been crazy about them for more than half my life).

There is no shade at the amphitheater formerly known as Sandstone. No shade at all. The structure is built at the bottom of a hill, so there is no breeze either. What there is—and in great abundance—is profiteering. Cheap t-shirts were selling for $50. Hats were going for even more. Most spectacularly, bottles of water were $4, and if you wanted a cup of ice, you had to pay an additional $4 (the price of a soda). Keep in mind that this was all occurring on a hundred-degree day in July, and that the bands started playing at noon.

Well, it's finally happened. The National Geographic channel has started pandering to the lowest common denominator. Lately, if you watch any program on NGC, the tone of the narration resembles the crazed rhetoric of late-night police chase shows. The libretto for National Geographic's "World's Most Dangerous Jobs" goes something like this: "But little did these firefighters know that they were in the gravest danger, for death was just over the ridge, waiting to envelop them. The fire blazed savagely up the south side of the mountain, engulfing with raging fury everything in its path. Who could escape its murderous rampage? When we return, find out who will survive the inferno."

I was downtown a few nights ago, just browsing the shops and what-not, when a disheveled young man came up and asked for twelve cents.

"Twelve cents?" I asked, incredulous.

"Yeah, twelve cents would be great."

I just stared at him for a moment, then reached for my wallet.

This past weekend we journeyed to Ute, Iowa (population: 500) to visit Nick's extended family. Several amusing things occurred.

ONE. The outfit I had picked out for Saturday was a white, sleeveless blouse and a peach silk skirt. It was a pretty outfit, and I felt good in it. The problem was, I somehow forgot to pack ANY undergarments whatsoever, a fact that occurred to me in the car about halfway to our destination.

Check out my brand-spanking new 404 page! Now, in glorious Technicolor! With croutons!

1. The Fifth Element—Bruce Willis' orange tank top with the cut-out back (P.S. This movie shares one actor in common with Blade Runner. Can you name him?)
2. Cliffhanger—John Lithgow and his hilarious British accent
Posted by Karen Updated on Thursday, 14 January 2010 21:37 CST
Tags: movies

—three sticks of doom

Jim Jarmusch likes the mundane. He likes those quotidian moments that happen between dramatic episodes, because that's where some of the greatest truths of human interaction are revealed. To make a film about such moments requires tremendous skill and subtlety, and lucky for us, Jarmusch has both of these attributes in spades. The problem is—to paraphrase Sigmund Freud—sometimes a mundane moment is just a mundane moment.

Coffee and Cigarettes, which Jarmusch wrote and directed, is comprised of 11 black-and-white vignettes. These vignettes are not related or necessarily sequential, but there are common themes and phrases that repeat throughout. Almost every vignette features someone who says, "Coffee and cigarettes—that's not a very healthy lunch." Another repetition occurs when RZA and GZA from the Wu-Tang Clan discuss the inherent connections between music and the practice of medicine. This comes after a bar scene in which Tom Waits informs Iggy Pop that he was late because he had to perform a tracheotomy with a ball point pen.

Neutral Milk Hotel is a now-defunct psychedelic folk band composed of Jeff Mangum, Julian Koster, Jeremy Barnes, and Scott Spillane. I've been immersing myself in their In the Aeroplane over the Sea CD, and it's too good not to share. Here's a mnemonic acronym to help you remember much they rock.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Integer ac lacus nec wisi mollis suscipit. Praesent turpis diam, mattis vitae, suscipit at, ultrices in, nibh. Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae; Vivamus dictum diam. Cras auctor, est vel laoreet fermentum, nisl arcu feugiat leo, ac fermentum risus nibh sit amet enim. In hac habitasse platea dictumst. Aenean tincidunt orci. Donec urna sem, consequat sed, mollis sit amet, porta at, metus. Sed egestas massa at wisi. Fusce ultrices urna eu lacus. Etiam molestie. Proin eleifend, ante et fermentum mattis, erat eros porttitor mauris, quis rhoncus lorem nulla nec libero. Nullam a mauris in lacus commodo consequat. Pellentesque magna. Nullam ante lacus, iaculis non, convallis sed, malesuada eu, leo. Nullam nec augue a lorem vehicula viverra.

I just found something incredibly neat. If you visit reasonablyclever.com, you'll find a neat little interface where you can build a Lego person that looks like you. Different hair, different skin tones, different "clothing" and backgrounds—it's the coolest thing I've seen all week. Below is me, as rendered in Legovision. Please note the dazzling Wonder Woman tiara.

I was at a department store a few days ago, when a prominent display of handbags caught my eye. They were little vinyl purses and wallets in a variety of bubble gum colors, but the thing that was most inexplicable was the large patch that was sewn onto each one. The one I saw first said simply: "Mrs. Bloom." I was perplexed. The words were in a strange, loopy, curlicued writing, and I was reminded of the penmanship exhibited by the sort of little girls who dot their i's and j's with little hearts. My first thought was, "oh, they must be referring to that character from Ulysses." That's how far removed I am from the real world. In fact, Leopold Bloom was probably the furthest thing from the true explanation that I could have ever come up with. The famous Bloom whose name was emblazoned across the handbag was, of course, the lovely (and oddly feminine) Orlando Bloom. I deduced this by scanning the names on the other bags—Mrs. Depp; Mrs. Timberlake; Mrs. Pitt; and Mrs. Kutcher. I noticed there was no Ms. anything.

This really is too depressing to speculate about, but I'm going to do it anyway.

Sweet, sweet nectar! Six Months of Solitude now has the potential for interaction and dialogue such as the gods themselves will be envious of! Yes, I'm talking about a comments feature, written up by my very own Dr. Nick, the King of All That is Technical. All who breathe, stand in awe of his creation!

The time has come for me to put my foot down. I was not raised to be a doormat, and I will no longer tolerate the duality of your affections. It is time for you to make a decision. Will it be me, a living-breathing woman with love in her heart, or will it be the King, who has been dead for nigh upon 30 years? You will notice I have nailed this to our door, as Martin Luther did with his 95 theses, and I will not be darkening the doorway again until I have heard your answer. You will be lonesome tonight, for I am staying at the Heartbreak Hotel.

—three sticks of doom

A crowd is gathering around the cafe. Doc Ock's mechanical tentacles are coiling sinuously, and he tells you you'd better bring him Spider-Man, or he'll turn your lady friend into tasty mincemeat pie. What do you do?

I'm currently writing a story about a female gunslinger, so I figured it'd be fun (and useful!) to absorb myself in the Wild West persona. Step one: cowboy boots. I've lived in Kansas all my life, but I've never owned a pair of cowboy boots. I figured they'd be incredibly uncomfortable—the authentic ones have those pointy, cuneiform-shaped toes, and they look like they might do more damage to your tootsies than the slickest pair of Jimmy Choos. I was wrong. Nick and I went to Nigro's this weekend, a cowboy wonderland in Kansas City, and I bought this fabulous and comfortable pair of distressed-leather boots. Why are they so distressed, you may ask? Because they can't stand being so sexy!

Last night I dreamed I walked awhile to find
You, of the darkest hair and brooding eyes.
I bought you whiskey, seeing there behind
That side-slung jaw, a lover in disguise.

It's the Fourth of July today, and you know what that means—illegal fireworks for every man, woman, and child! Lawrence banned the use of fireworks several years ago, but there has been no appreciable decrease in their usage since that time. Driving down the street at night means you'll have to pass through the gauntlet of bottle rockets and Roman candles that shoot past your car like debris in an asteroid field. With this in mind, I've compiled a short list of reminders for those hoping to enjoy this important holiday in the safest fashion possible.

So I was listening to the radio the other day, having a moderately pleasant drive home from work and thinking of buying my first pair of cowboy boots, when I heard the commercial. "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by hunger . . ." it began. I was struck dumb. This can't be, I thought. I'm hearing things. And then it went on, but instead of stanzas about draft lines and the madness of war, I heard paeans to the fine foods offered by Wendy's restaurants. That's right, apparently a Frosty is the way to cure all your existential ills. Road rage overtook me, and I practically swerved into a four-wheeler. Steam poured from my ears just like in the cartoons. Someone had taken the poem "Howl," Allen Ginsberg's radical protest piece, and turned it into a commercial for a single hamburger with cheese.

(growl)

—three sticks of doom

In Super Size Me, Maverick filmmaker Morgan Spurlock embarked on what he described as "every 8-year-old's dream": to eat McDonald's food every day for a month. Morning, noon, and night, the only stuff he ate was food that had been lovingly fried and processed beneath the golden arches. The rules were these:

1. He had to have every item on the menu.
2. He had to super-size every time he was asked.
3. He could only walk as much as the average person with an office job and a sedentary lifestyle (5,000 steps a day).

His girlfriend, who is a vegan chef, was appropriately horrified. Spurlock enlisted the help of three physicians, and checked in periodically to see how much damage had been done. By the end of week one, he had put on 8 pounds. Keep in mind that's more than a pound a day. But that's nothing, because by the end of the month—prepare yourself, please—he had put on a total of 25 pounds. He had also gotten to the point where his family physician became livid and told him "Stop the experiment. Stop it or your liver's going to shut down."

I was looking around my office today, and I happened to meditate on the overwhelming abundance of plants. We actually have people on staff whose only job is to keep our captive flora hydrated. Plants are virtually everywhere in this building—on the file cabinets, forming little oases between cubie clusters, and in the hallway by the elevator. You see them just inside the glass entrance doors on the bottom floor, and in the room where job hunters fill out their copious applications. Most of these plants will never see genuine sunlight, and that makes me sad. Day after day these poor plants subsist beneath the cruel glare of fluorescent lights, never getting the opportunity to engage in authentic photosynthesis. They enrich our lives with their beauty, produce oxygen for us to breathe, and remove noxious gases from the air. What do we give them in return? A stick of stale plant food and a pat on the leaves.

It's shameful.

And I want to set them free.

Whether lazing about beside a glistening lagoon full of mermaids, or just working the burger joint as always, you'll need reading materials to keep the summer ennui from lulling you into a coma. Fight back with these picks from the bottom of my heart and the middle portion of my backpack. (A caveat to those who read while tanning: The suggested readings are so engrossing, you may lose all sense of time. Just remember that when you hear your internal organs begin to sizzle, you should probably turn over.)

Well, here I am, and I've finally seen the new Harry Potter movie. My ticket stub says "Harry—Prison," which is funny right off the bat. But let's get some embarrassing business out of the way first. As you may have noticed, I've begun cranking my way through the HP books. I admit, I was an extremely reluctant reader. I distrust anything that the whole world is raving about, and I resisted for a long time. In the end I succumbed because I love literature of all sorts, and I can't resist the promise of a great read. It was also so I wouldn't feel so freakin' left out in family conversations. Just imagine if, for some unimaginable reason, you hadn't seen Star Wars, and everyone around you was chattering about it endlessly, day in and day out, from July 4th to Turkey Day. "Oh, I keep forgetting you haven't seen it," they'd say, looking as if they felt quite sorry for you. "But like I was saying, Han Solo is really the embodiment of the mythic trickster figure in ancient cultures"—and so on.

Alfonse Cuaron directed, and I was a little curious how that would turn out. The last film of his, Y Tu Mama Tambien, was thematically fun but WAY racier than anything J.K. Rowling has written (at least in Books 1 through 3—I can't speak for 4 and 5). What Cuaron did, though, was bring the vitality and energy of his other movies to an enterprise in dire need of a makeover. If he hadn't stepped in, the HP movies may have gotten stranded Friday the 13th-style (remember: there were supposed to be 13 of those puppies) and just petered out after the fourth movie. But thanks to Cuaron's infusion of life, HP is no longer slogging along in quiet desperation, sagging under the weight of its own glossy charms. No longer is the audience lying still and thinking of England. Prisoner of Azkaban has such an exuberance to it that viewers should be more than happy to forgive its minor flaws and missteps. And if the viewers are not so inclined, then they're a bunch of ungrateful gits.

I recently discovered that the gym equipment I exhaust myself on daily is much older than I could have imagined. In 1815, a group called the Prison Discipline Society began to meet in England. Their mission was to develop the sort of devices and punishments that would inspire dread in the populace at-large, and thus deter potential criminals from committing dastardly deeds.

There once was a derelict bus;
The ghosts drove it each night at dusk.
It roared and it reeled,
Then came back to the field,
As if it had always been thus.

Act III.

MAL, ADJUS, and TED are still sitting in the yard, but MAL and ADJUS are sitting back to back. TED has not moved from his original spot. The sun is going down, it's fairly dark, and the mood is tense.

MAL: I mean, what if he was wrong? I saw Father Miller at the store the other day and he was counting out his change, and he had to do it three or four times to get it right, and I thought to myself, "this guy doesn't seem to be very good at math. . ."

TED: How dare you!

MAL: No, no, all I'm saying is that this is a pretty tricky proposition here. If he claims to have calculated the precise day of the Second Coming, how do we know he didn't switch the numbers around? How do we know it wasn't the year 3481? That would make us about fifteen hundred years early.

Act II.

MAL, ADJUS, and TED have not moved from their respective spots in the yard. It should be clear from the light that it is no longer morning, but mid-day. A faint rumbling sound can be heard in the distance.

ADJUS: (perking up) Is that the distant thunder? The golden chariots swooping down to earth to whisk us away? A storm cloud lowering from the sky, about to engulf us in the fog of heavenly bliss?

MAL: It's the man with the ice cart.

On June 7, 1843, thousands of disciples of the New York Second Advent Association, led by William Miller, donned white muslin "ascension" robes and prepared to be transported to heaven. "Father" Miller claimed to have calculated the precise date of the second coming, and followers all over the country believed him.

MAL: Man in his 40s. Full, graying beard and a stern expression. Skeptical.
ADJUS: 16-year-old boy. Overzealous.
TED: 20ish, with preternaturally white teeth and superior eyes. Sanctimonious.

Act I

MAL, ADJUS, and TED, clad in white robes, are sitting in a small yard. Behind them is a row of tightly packed, two-story houses. The occasional bird can be heard chirping in the distance.

ADJUS: When's it going to happen? Father Miller told us it was today. What if it's not today?

TED: It's today.

ADJUS: But how can you be sure?

TED: Because Father Miller is a prophet, and the Lord gave him the power to calculate the precise time of his coming.

MAL: It's special math, Adjus. Special math from heaven.

Here is a brief guide for those who wish to become hip in a hurry. Follow these guidelines, and you will attain a degree of hipness you never thought possible. Your friends will beg you to reveal your secrets, but keep in mind that a truly hip person never acknowledges having put forth any effort toward anything.

Rule # 1. Drop the names of philosophers into your daily conversations to show how smart you are. Nietzsche should be pronounced "Nitch" whenever possible. Avoid mentioning philosophers with more difficult names like Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer, who never said anything worthwhile anyway. The premise of existentialism is that there is no such thing as human nature or essence, so make sure to turn this into a fervent argument for moral relativism. You will garner the respect of everyone who hears you, even in passing.

—Four sticks of doom

"Youth is wasted on the young" is one of those tedious bromides with which we're all familiar. But in Andrew Sean Greer's brilliant book, The Confessions of Max Tivoli, the truth of this phrase is put on trial. A self-described monster, Max is a creature born into the world wrong. At his birth, he is as shriveled and wrinkled as an old man, and as his mind grows older, his body inexplicably grows younger. At 35, his looks and his mind finally converge, and Max gets to stop pretending to be something other than what he is. But then his body keeps going, and he can't stop its progress any more than the rest of us can halt the onset of wrinkles and sags. He dies his hair gray and walks with a cane, hoping his wife will not notice his body growing younger and firmer, knowing that when she does, the dream that is his happiness will dissolve into whispers. Time is an enemy to Max, too.

I think I've mentioned that I'd love to move to New York. Manhattan's a little more expensive than I expected, but I think I've worked out a feasible plan for survival. Here's the breakdown of expenditures (assuming a salary of $2000 a month) for a one-bedroom apartment in the East Village:

My favorite show finally gets its props!

As you will recall, faithful reader, I've been lifting weights. The muscles are not huge yet, but they are rock-solid and well on their way to looking like Linda Hamilton's. Since the initiation of this weight regimen, there has been a distinct improvement in my strength. I can now wrestle full-sized alligators to the ground.

This morning we got up early. We ambled outside with our bulky bags and waited for our shared-ride bus thingie. It was raining, naturally, so we stood under the hotel awning. A friendly old man (who may have been tipsy) teased me: "If your mother knew you were outside in a sleeveless blouse on a day like this, she'd give it to you good! Am I right? Am I right? Ha ha!" He was great, but then he and another old fellow took off in pursuit of two older ladies at the end of the block, tapping their canes and laughing about the conquest. The bus was half an hour late—we were in the process of hailing a cab when its smiling grill came around the corner. It was a quick, harrowing ride to LaGuardia as the bus clattered down brick streets and sailed across the bridge, barely missing a thousand obstructions. Didn't take nearly as long as the ride to the hotel.

We went walking this morning and ended up at the U.N. building. The whole set-up is pretty impressive, what with the long row of national flags outside and the building itself rising like a monolith against the sky. Name-tagged delegates were filing in and out. A man came up to Nick and started chattering in Russian. There were some great sculptures outside, including this one:

This morning we took the subway down to the site of the Trade Centers. I didn't take pictures, and I don't feel like writing about it, except to say that I felt like I shouldn't be there. Afterward, we walked around Wall Street and saw the New York Stock Exchange. The original area is much smaller than I expected. I kept looking for Michael Douglas carrying that gigantic mobile phone he had in that movie, but all we saw was a boatload of fancy suits and some group that was protesting the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

Morning: Central Park. It's much, much bigger than I was expecting, with an atmosphere that is part play and part pure relaxation. Putting this lush park in the middle of New York is the best bit of feng shui imaginable. Lots of families and sunbathers and business people, just enjoying a few moments away from the bustling crowds. We walked for several hours, and ended up at the John Lennon "Imagine" mosaic, which was a re-creation of a mosaic found at the ruins of Pompeii. It was covered in flowers and surrounded by tourists.

We did better on the subway today. A few wrong guesses, but mostly everything was right on track. One thing I do not get is how so many women wear tiny spindly high-heeled shoes when they have to trek up and down the gajillion steps in the cavernous metro system. One time, we found ourselves stepping off a subway car only to go up four extremely long sets of stairs to get to the surface. We must have been close to the center of the earth. Subterranean homesick blues indeed.

People in New York are much nicer than they are reputed to be. They don't ordinarily make eye contact, but I've found that if you approach them with big, helpless tears streaming down your face and beg them for directions, they are more than happy to accommodate you.

Brian Greene is my favorite living scientist.

My first exposure to him was on a NOVA mini-series that aired not long ago, entitled "The Elegant Universe." He was the host, and at first I figured he was just an actor hired to guide us through the brave new world of string theory. He probably didn't even know what he was saying, I thought. He was just too charming, too well spoken, and too entertaining to be a scientist. Then it listed his creds: he's a professor and researcher at Columbia who specializes in string theory and quantum gravity. "Okay," I thought. "So he's a scientist. It's not like he wrote the thing." Turns out, of course, he did. And not only did he write the program, which was adapted from one of his books (of the same name), he's written a bejillion journal articles with names like "Duality in Calabi-Yau Moduli Space" and "Orbifold Resolution by D-Branes." This guy is seriously smart.

Hooray! Nick and I will be going to New York this Saturday for a week-long, belated honeymoon. I am terribly excited. I just know that from the moment I step off the plane, I'll have to fight to keep from belting out "New York, New York, it's a wonderful town" like some barrel-chested, tap-dancing sailor on shore leave. Indeed, I'll be looking for the ghost of Gene Kelly, and for Lauren Bacall in a fabulous dress. If anything remains of Dylan's New York, or that of Woody Allen and Diane Keaton, I want to find that, too. I wonder how much of my knowledge of New York is fiction and how much is fact? Will we see Snake Plissken or Akim or the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man? Will we see De Niro drive by in a taxi?

Did you know that a Dracula amusement park has recently opened in Vlad the Impaler's homeland? It's located in Snagov, Romania, near Bucharest, and it's where the remains of Vlad Tepes are said to be buried. I know nothing else about it, except that I want to go there very, very badly. It's only a zillion times cooler than that brain-dead Oz amusement park they keep trying to build in my beloved eastern Kansas (may Dorothy rot in hell). My guess is that the Dracula park will be a Universal Studios sort of gig, complete with goofy rides through haunted castles and lots of irritable teenaged staff persons standing around in capes and plastic fangs.

First there is an entity, a single cell, which comes into being within an idyllic pool of ground water. There it is, the first living thing on the planet. It is quite solitary, but it decides to make the best of its situation by creating copies of itself. Over millions of years, these copies bind together and eventually diversify, creating primitive plants and sea creatures. Here we have mollusks, echinoderms, coelenterates, and worms, which feed on the water plants and collectively prefigure every form of modern life. Before long, the most precocious of these sea creatures becomes larger and develops a skeleton.

What is going on with Bob Dylan these days? First, he was in that freaky Victoria's Secret commercial (he's NEVER done commercials before), and now I hear that he's going to be a guest judge for American Idol. What happened to Mr. Antiestablishment? I confess, I feel hurt and betrayed. I feel like shouting "Judas!" just like at that Manchester concert where Dylan switched to electric guitar, and his gentle folk fans were driven into a foaming, self-righteous rage.

Guess what? I've received a late entry for the slash fiction contest, and I hope you're all proud of your lazy selves, because it's crappy. But it's the only one, so I'm posting it. Maybe next time you'll consider participating in one of my contests so that I'm not forced to post this kind of trash. (Full disclosure: I'm not actually this mean. A friend of mine wrote the following piece because I coerced him into it. He's been a very good sport about all of this, and I thank him.)

Did you notice that the winner's box was empty? That's because you people are incorrigible slackers. I have monitored my inbox for a week, and slash fiction is nowhere to be found. Nothing, zip, nada, the big goose egg. There is only a vacuum where the entries should be, and boy does it suck. I give and I give, and all I get in return is two viruses and a spam offer for cheap Valium (which I am about to make use of, thank you very much).

Mrs. O'Malley

Mrs. O'Malley is giggling with glee;
Her troubles are over, she thinks.
She's butchered the vegetables in the ice tray;
There are gruesome remains in the sink.

A man sits holding a violin against his heart, the bow resting on his lap. His hair is a little wild—just as you might expect from a musician—but his expression is all seriousness. It could be anyone's great-grandfather. The photograph was probably taken around 1900, and it's a classic example of the style of portraits done at the time. In fact, there is only one thing unusual about it—the ghost. Above the man's head and off to the left is a blurred oval of light. If you turn your head slightly to the side, you can see that the dark markings in the oval form a human face.

(Yesterday was my birthday. Happy birthday to me!)

Westworld is an old, bad favorite of mine. Directed and written by Michael Crichton, it stars Yul Brynner as an evil cowboy robot, which really should be enough to sell the movie all by itself. (Brynner is not exactly reprising his role from The Magnificent Seven, but you can see why the casting director thought of him.) A smirking James Brolin costars, along with a dark-haired, mustachioed man whose name I have not bothered to look up. Dick Van Patten also makes an appearance, camouflaged behind a pair of thick glasses that practically scream Lambda Lambda Lambda.

Rating: R
Pairings: Sydney Carton/Charles Darnay
Category: First-time, Romance, Drama, Dominance
Summary: It is a far, far better thing Sydney does than he has ever done before.

For those who don't know what slash fiction is, imagine this:

Captain Kirk looks deep into Mr. Spock's eyes, as if seeing him for the first time. With a shudder, he realizes that all those alien women he had been with were, and could only ever be, a distraction from his true passion, from the forbidden love he had not allowed himself to believe in. Now that he has acknowledged them, though, Kirk is frightened by the intensity of his feelings. He finds himself trembling, his confidence shaken. "What do you think, Mr. Spock?" he whispers. "Should we recall the away team? Is that the logical thing to do?" As if guessing his thoughts, Spock raises a delicate eyebrow at him. "Not just yet, Captain." Kirk begins to breathe more heavily—he is racked with longing, delirious with the thought of what would happen if he succumbed to the spell of those steely, Vulcan eyes. He swoons. As he feels Spock's sinewy arms lifting him off the floor of the bridge, he wonders: can a Vulcan truly love?

Okay, so you got that?

Put simply, slash fiction is Web erotica based around characters and events from books, films, and television shows. The primary characters are almost always men, and each story is preceded by a list of character pairings, such as Kirk/Spock or Scotty/Sulu (hence the "slash"). Slash fiction stories serve as an homage to the original work, as well as a chanelling point for silliness and fantasy.

They are fabulously entertaining.

About five years back, I made a trip to San Diego for a job interview. I did my best online search and located what I thought was a decent hotel in the middle of the trendy Lamplight District. Believing that this was a nice area, with funky shops, I didn't think twice about plunking down 60 bucks a night for this hotel, even though it was not a chain and I couldn't find any customer reviews of it.

Let's pause for just a moment. I realize now that the red flags should have been flying like at a military parade in Communist China. But at the time, I didn't have much firsthand experience with cost-of-living disparities across the country. Turns out, of course, 60 bucks in California is barely enough to buy an all-soy hot dog, and what it gets you in terms of living space is even less appealing.

The Tattoo

The Man sat morosely behind his desk,
Victim of the seething yellow envelope.
Less threatening blue counterparts hovered nearby.
Feeling suffocated, he suddenly stood,
Discarding the petrified remnants of his egg and toast,
And defiantly strode out.

The man felt plucky walking into the boxy little store,
But was startled to see the shopkeeper
Like an aged Viking, noble and haggard,
His bald head dotted with patches of hair,
Like scattered grasses on a plain,
(His teeth of the same green sanctuary.)
The Man hesitated.
He recalled Geraldo's warning about psycho tattoo artists from hell who actually buy the oh-so-sharp knives advertised on television that no one could ever use but that could cut through a medium-sized building if such a situation arose,
Then resumed his calling.

½—two and one half sticks of doom

½—one and a half sticks of doom

If you love circuitous stories that do not really begin or end, if you love narcissism and solipsism and sexism—you'll love Jim Morrison's Adventures in the Afterlife, a novel by Mick Farren. Jim Morrison kicks it with Doc Holliday, Jesus hangs out inside a tumor in Godzilla's brain, and people randomly turn into cartoons. It all sounds so promising, doesn't it? Ordinarily, I'm a huge fan of this sort of absurdity. I'm always the one who goes straight for the cult section in our local video store. But, there has to be something to grab onto in the story—whether it be a particular theme or just a vividly portrayed character—something that justifies the time you spent reading or watching it. I was ticked off while reading JMA, and even more ticked off when I had finished it.

A few weeks ago, I lost my handheld Tetris game. This was one of those cheap little jobbies you can purchase for 20 bucks at Wal-Mart, but it was as dear to me as if I had mortgaged my house to pay for it. Alas, how swiftly things can change. No sooner had I become intoxicated with its digital ambrosia, than the cup was dashed from my lips.

I left the device at the gym by mistake. When I came back it had disappeared—gone from my life like a fickle lover. I couldn't catch my breath. I felt helpless. My fingers were twitching, aching for the tactility of those smooth gray buttons.

A tenuous thread is all that separates possession from loss.

—Two sticks of doom

The world as seen in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is very much an alternate universe kind of place, full of anachronistic technology and characters drawn from turn-of-the-last-century literature. We are told at the outset that all hell is breaking loose, as hell is bound to do, and the League is the only thing capable of preventing...something really heinous from happening. Actually, I suspect the best way to describe this movie is by describing the members of the League itself, since their interactions are the most interesting thing about the movie (and since there is no plot to speak of). Here we go.

When I go to the gym, all I want is some old-fashioned solitude. This is one of the few times I get to be by myself, and it's every bit as crucial to my well-being as food and oxygen. (I'm an only child, after all.) When I'm working out, I want to be inwardly focused, to concentrate on the kinetics of bones and muscles. I do not wish to be spoken to. This is especially true if I am on the treadmill, where my heart rate is accelerated and I'm already in a heightened state of primitive energy. If you talk to me then, I am liable to become enraged, and then I cannot be held responsible for my actions.

See Kyle, a 45-year-old construction worker from Duluth, face off with an El Monterey beef and bean red chili frozen burrito. Who will be triumphant in this unsavory smackdown?!?

The first phase is no contest: The burrito will be placed in the microwave oven for 1 minute, 15 seconds, and then will be allowed to cool for another two minutes. If Kyle is able to suspend all sense of taste, possibly by holding his nose, he will almost certainly succeed in masticating and ingesting the entire frozen burrito. This is like climbing to base camp on Everest—it requires no exceptional skill. But once the last bite of the beef and bean red chili frozen burrito has been swallowed, the true battle begins.

To a large extent, the success of any given band can be deduced from the reaction of the crowd. For some reason, most concerts in Lawrence are painfully low-key—people just stand around with their arms crossed, as if they're too cool to move, as if they didn't actually come to hear the band at all but were merely on their way to the kitchen to fix a broken dishwasher or something. Very little dancing occurs, and when it does, it's usually a lone hippie, undulating in a rotary fashion so that her dreadlocks swirl into the air like little Medusa serpents. (Then again, this could be DTs.) But either way, it's nothing like the crowd response I witnessed at the good Reverend's revival last Saturday night at the Bottleneck. People were jumping up and down, throwing their bodies around, and crowd surfing. There was a genuine mosh pit. Remember: this is a rockabilly band we're talking about, but there was just so much drive to the music, so much punk energy, that it was physically impossible to keep still.

A little old man with white hair was doing the twist.

How happy is the blameless vestal's lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each pray'r accepted, and each wish resign'd.
—Alexander Pope (not Pope Alexander)

½

My favorite part of a movie is always the beginning—the opening credits, where anything can happen and the realm of possibility stretches ahead like a vast, undiscovered universe. You're like an infant at this point—utterly without knowledge, virginal, a larva without wings. You have no idea yet if you'll like the movie or hate it. You are tabula rasa. The opening credits often provide the first suggestion of the film's themes, showing images or scenes that will prove relevant later on. Some are straightforward cityscapes; some are the equivalent of abstract paintings. You might see the silhouettes of undulating Bond girls, or a hapless Woody Allen ambling down a New York street. And who could forget the visual gourmet dished up in the credits of American Psycho? Even credit sequences that don't feature a garden of ocular delights can effectively set the mood—with music. What all of these approaches have in common, though, is the ability to transport you (the viewer) to a place of eager expectation. And it's that anticipation, that childlike longing to be entertained, that makes movie-watching a soulful and spectacular experience.

With Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, I had that feeling the entire way through.

Dear Diary,

Don't tell anyone, but I'm in love with Donald Rumsfeld. Donald H. Rumsfeld is the paragon of manhood. He is a warrior for our times, a military strategist with the genius of Napoleon, a Machiavellian prince who is both feared and loved. That lantern jaw, those adorable specs, and that broad forehead cradling the biggest, most remarkable brain in existence. That brain, that luscious brain—I'd love to obtain just a little sample of his brain tissue to fry up and eat, like the Celts, so maybe the tiniest bit of his formidable wisdom would be imparted to me. Am I freaking you out?

Hear ye, hear ye! As of this moment, I am implementing a system for ranking all the things that exist in the world. In the context of this site, I'll be applying this taxonomy to books, movies, music, and anything else that I can assign a totally subjective and artificial value to. I will not be using stars. All value shall be denoted with the Stick of Doom measurement.

The Stick of Doom is a pseudo-ceremonial wooden staff (topped with a coyote skull) that I purchased last Christmas from a regional woodworking artist. I saw his adorable, skeletal head peeking out from inside a tall barrel, and I fell in love with him at once.

Let us go then, you and I,
When the sale signs are spread out against the sky

If hell is upper-middle class suburbia, then I have ventured into the den of the beast and lived to tell the tale. The event in question is a glammed-up open house being held at a J. Jill store in Leawood. (For those not native to Kansas City, Leawood is that portion of the city where sprawling McMansions gleam with palatial splendor, and even Adam Smith's invisible hand has a manicure. You know the sort of place I mean—where lush sylvan landscapes, under scrutiny, reveal themselves to be no more than a thin curtain between Pottery Barns.)

There was a time when I gave blood every few months. I've never really had an aversion to needles, so it was an easy way for me to feel I was helping out the community. In fact, the only problem I ever had giving blood was when a delusional Nurse Ratched-type, convinced I was on heroin, kept checking my arm for needle tracks.

That was until a bright, sun-shiney day last May, when everything changed.

Where I work, we often see press releases from companies interested in getting our medical journal to publish information about them. Most of these are ads featuring a new type of designer oxygen machine or an anti-gravity defibrillator, but once in a while, we know we're in for something really special. The title of the most recent press release was, "Lips: The New Must-Have Accessory for Every Season."

I've had a couple of freaky dreams about John Turturro recently, so I figured it was about time I went to see him in Secret Window. I knew this movie had the potential to scare the crap out of me, but I went anyway because: a) I like to be scared; and b) I didn't really believe it would be that scary. Hollywood has rarely done right by Stephen King, after all. The only truly great Stephen King adaptation was The Shining, and that was because Kubrick was a genius. The first time I watched it (age 12, I think), I was practically peeing my pants from the opening credits, when the car was driving through that incongruously sunny mountain pass and you hear the Dies Irae thundering in the background. That's the thing about The Shining—it scares you even when nothing is going on. You could be watching a fat man eat a hero sandwich and you'd be scared. And let me tell you, by the time the blood came gushing out of the elevator, I was huddled up in a little ball like a hedgehog, perfectly paralyzed with fright but unable to change the station for fear of missing what happened next. That legacy is a lot to live up to. But then, Secret Window did star the two John-Johns, both of whom typically have a knack for sniffing out great scripts, so there still was plenty of reason for optimism. I was less optimistic about the audience, which was mostly comprised of slovenly high school kids who split their time between heckling the onscreen real estate ads (to be fair, I do this, too) and spouting peculiar non sequiturs: ("Dude, if I was the first guy to get pregnant, I'd be a billionaire").

Yeah, dude. If only.

Thine father, oh he must have been a thief,
He stole the stars and put them in thine eyes.
The time I hath to live, my dear, is brief.
Hast thou not seen my missing Nobel prize?

When asked that question about the five people I'd have to dinner, if I could choose from anyone in the entire scope of human history, the first two who always come to mind are Lincoln and Douglas. This is so I could hear them argue the merits of popular sovereignty between bites of Hamburger Helper. I'd egg them on, too. "Oooh. Good one Abraham," I'd say. "What do you say, Stephen? You gonna take that from him?"

Ah, the sweet diversion of an Ed Wood, Jr film, like a comfortable pair of kinky stiletto shoes. And so we witness Orgy of the Dead. Of course, given the time this was made, there's nothing that even remotely resembles the type of orgy teenage boys were imagining when they sneaked into the local drive-through to see this. It's more an orgy in the sense of "a secret rite in the cults of ancient Greek or Roman deities, typically involving frenzied singing, dancing, and drinking." And not even that, unless your definition of dancing includes a woman awkwardly tossing her breasts around like twin propellers. So yes, there is nudity, but it's way more perplexing than it is erotic. I promise.

Boba is a mysterious bounty hunter with his own dress code. He has been an intern at The New York Times for six months, and he says the best part of the job is the people. Normally good-natured and agreeable, he can become petulant if asked to write headlines.

Physicians are always trying to be a cut above the rest. But according to a new book by Kenneth Iserson, physicians are interested in other kinds of cutting as well. The book, entitled Demon Doctors: Physicians as Serial Killers, provides a background for this growing trend, as well as a discussion of a new degree, offered for the first time at medical schools across the nation, which combines a focus in medicine with that of serial killing. In the text, Iserson cites a surprising statistic. Of the students graduating from U.S. medical schools last year, 30% went into family practice, 60% chose traditional specialities, and 10% elected to pursue the new hybrid degree as a demon doctor/family physician (abbreviated MDD).

My arms are skinny, and I want them to be muscular, so I've embarked on a mission to beef them up a bit. I won't be using steroids or anything as gauche as that (after all, W made a pretty persuasive case against steroids in his last SOTU address, didn't he?). My inspiration in this endeavor will be Linda Hamilton, as seen in Terminator 2. She is my muse of all things muscular.

Well, here's the requisite Oscars blog, a bit late. This is the first time I have ever sat down and watched all four hours of this interminable ego-fest. I have to say, first, that the story of the Oscars is partly the story of the programming chosen by other stations to compete with it. Like Tom Jones, they try to seduce you away from the main attraction. USA is showing Braveheart. SciFi is showing Stargate (the movie, not the series). And the WB is showing that holy of holies, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I mean, how can you compete with the happiest, funniest, most charming movie ever made? One station is showing Star Wars: Episode 1, although I think this naked attempt to lure viewers may backfire once Jar Jar Binks appears (he's Bantha fodder).

I have a long history of dreaming about celebrities, beginning with the dream in which Marlon Brando, dressed as Sky Ma

I have a long history of dreaming about celebrities, beginning with the dream in which Marlon Brando, dressed as Sky Masterson from the movie Guys and Dolls, asked if he could hang out with my family. (He didn't have one of his own, you see.) My family in the dream turned out to be David Tomlinson and Angela Lansbury, who appeared together in Bednobs and Broomsticks, one of my favorite childhood films.

I just watched Jeffrey Blitz's documentary, Spellbound, about the 1999 National Spelling Bee, and was completely sucked in by it. I used to be in spelling bees myself, back in the day, so I identified with the kids in the film. The overconfidence, the nerves, the attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, the private tics and mannerisms that suddenly become obvious to the world, the sweet dorkiness of the other contestants (I certainly wasn't dorky), the backstabbing, the stalling for time, the glorious and infernal bell that signals your fall from greatness, and the nauseating re-entry into the dreary world of the proles once the whole thing is over—it's all part of what makes spelling bees so great.

I've been amazed by so many things as of late. I was amazed when the Supreme Court struck down a Texas anti-sodomy law last year. I was amazed by the recent Massachusetts court decision saying that gay marriage could not be prohibited under the state constitution. And I was amazed when San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom began marrying same-sex couples a few weeks back. Maybe, I thought, this country is not totally, mind-numbingly hopeless after all.

For our first wedded Valentine's Day, Nick bought me my very own copy of Harold and Maude, the 1971 Hal Ashby film in which a young man falls in love with an octogenarian. I maintain that this is the most romantic movie ever made (although Steven Shainberg's quirky Secretary comes in a close second). Forget the sappy, weirdly jingoistic Casablanca. Forget Gone with the Wind, which is racist, sexist, and way too long. H & M is the real deal.

Why do automakers keep branding their vehicles with these ludicrous names? Some of them sound grandiose, but when reduced to their basic etymological form, mean nothing. Some of them clearly mean nothing to begin with. The most ambitious names are the ones that bug me most—they seem to have been haphazardly lifted from the pages of a seventh-grade social studies book. For starters, there's the Aztek, which seems to be strategically misspelled so as to prevent the descendants of this once-great empire from coalescing into a mighty guerrilla force and burning down the manufacturing plant. I bet this gas-guzzling monstrosity isn't quite what they had in mind back in Tenochtitlan. As a bonus, the Aztek looks like a Honda CRV that has been hooked up to a helium pump for too long. Then there's the fearsome Rubicon, which is a new and alarming flavor of SUV. The name is promising—it's both a historical and mythological allusion—but the problem is that the Rubicon was actually a river (dividing Gaul from Italy). The idiom being referenced is "crossing the Rubicon," which is what Julius Caesar did when he decided to invade Italy. See the conflict? The actual Rubicon is something that needs to be crossed, rather than something that does the actual crossing. It's confusing, but the manufacturers don't care about that. They're already working on their next fuel-inefficient masterpiece.

There's no point in denying it anymore. ER is a soap opera. I've been watching it on and off for the past few years, and I've always liked the rare combination of intelligence, human interest, and cool medical procedures (back in the day, I used to watch the Surgery Channel). Recently, though, the ER overlords have been raising the stakes. The melodrama keeps escalating, getting more and more out of control, so that pretty soon they'll have nowhere left to go. From that great moment when Dr. Romano got his arm amputated by a helicopter blade (I was watching this at the gym, and an entire row of runners tripped on their respective treadmills when it happened—beautiful), ER seems to have become less a serious medical drama and more a theater of the absurd. Ionesco himself couldn't have been prouder of the way the show is turning out, although he might have suggested turning Dr. Dave into a rhinoceros.

How many more times must I endure this nonsense? As if the music box debacle wasn't enough, I now have another instrument ascended from the fiery pits of hell to torment me. What's at work here is a conspiracy of Dantean proportions.

My alumni magazine arrived today, and it got me thinking about old times. Or, as Shakespeare put it, for "my salad days, when I was green in judgment." For the love of all that is holy, people, don't choose English as your major unless you are prepared to suffer. There's a reason there are more English majors at your local fast food joint than any other type of college graduate. There's a reason Garrison Keillor makes jokes about English majors working menial jobs and diagramming sentences just to freshen up their skill set. It's because English departments attract the kind of people who are dreamers, who are so right brained they can't manage to coordinate their socks, and who are too absorbed in their Victorian novel to pay the heating bill. I know this, of course, because I was one.

Paris, 1900. From the moment the show began—all sepia and grainy like an old silent film—I was charmed but wary. Would the much-touted Moulin Rouge be too self-consciously vintage? Would its preciousness disgust me? What would the sets look like? Why have I never noticed how much Ewan McGregor resembles Kenneth Branagh? (It must be the beard.) Should I go to the bathroom now, or wait until the halfway point?

My wife loves Capone. Thinks he's the sexiest man alive. I see him on Clark Street today when I'm out with my cart selling fresh flowers. Daisies, gardenias, hollyhocks, I've got 'em all. And I'm seeing lots of business, seeing how every poor schmuck wants his girl to think he's a romantic on the Big Day. It's cold like February always is, and I'm shivering in my big overcoat that almost reaches down to my brogans.

Apparently, some exhibitors have been accused of putting hairpieces on their show cattle at the Ohio State Fair last year. What this means is that they took excess hair from the cow's body—from other cows, even—and strategically glued it to other spots in order to give the animal a more healthy and proportional appearance.

I just finished re-reading a children's book called The Girl with the Silver Eyes, by Willo Davis Roberts, and it brought back a deluge of memories. The heroine in this book is a 10-year-old girl with telekinesis, and when I first read it, I thought this ability would be about the coolest thing ever (second only to meeting that dreamy boy from Flight of the Navigator). So I tried to do it. I tried to move stuff with my mind. But the results were disappointing, to say the least. It just wasn't fair, I thought. Why couldn't my mom have taken a dangerous, experimental drug when I was gestating, so that I would end up with bizarre abilities that would make my classmates fear me? (Children have a natural Machiavellian sensibility, which is why they go all "Lord of the Flies" every time a bunch of them get stranded on an island together.)

Man, do I love Independence Day. Alien attack movies are always fun, but this one is the best because it has more destruction scenes than all the others put together. Will Smith is mouthy as always, Randy Quaid is in rare, redneck form, and there's enough Jeff Goldblum to muck up a lifetime of fly paper ("help me, please help me"). Data McStar-Trek is funny as that freaky Deadhead scientist, and Bill Pullman is the goofy, incorruptible president we all wish we had. And in a film like this, there is no such thing as nuanced portraits of good and evil, so when That One Guy first appears as the Secretary of Defense, he might as well be wearing an eye patch and chortling "bwoo-ha-ha-ha!"

Recently, I have begun to suspect that I have a mild form of hypergraphia, that insidious neurologic disorder that dampens a person's impulse control, causing him or her to write obsessively. It can be rated on a scale of 1 (nagging preoccupation, can't go more than a few days without writing) to 10 (Stephen King). I have to admit, if this is true, it's kind of a cool affliction to have. I always wanted some sort of debilitation or tragic moral failing to give me credibility as a writer—something like gambling or womanizing or the compulsion to collect excess fertilizer on weekends and shape it into tall, grooved mounds like Devil's Tower.

Recently, I had to let go of a beloved pair of brown Doc Marten hiking boots. These boots were a full eight years old, and they had been worn so many times that the once-stiff side panels were all slouchy. When you looked at them sitting together on the floor, they seemed to be scrunching up their little noses, as if repelled by their own increasingly pungent stench. This was all part of their working class charm.

Remember in Logan's Run, when the computer tells the 25-year-old Sandman that he has to go undercover to capture the 29-year-old runners (who are fleeing Carousel, the laser-light show that kills), and all of a sudden the red light on his own hand starts blinking and he realizes he's just lost four years? That's kind of what I imagine happening the moment a President steps into the White House. They all go into the presidency as vital, robust young men, and emerge as weird zombie versions of themselves.

In America, Jim Sheridan's new film, tells the story of an Irish family that moves to New York in the 80s. Just as you would imagine, they are in search of that elusive phenomenon that involves both America and the rapid-eye-movement stage of sleep (notice how I circumnavigate a certain overused phrase?). But this film goes way beyond that. It's not even really about the experience of immigration—it's about four people who just happen to be immigrants.

Spirit: Look, NASA, I love you and everything. I just don't think this long-distance thing is going to work.

NASA: But I'm the one who sent you there! I sacrificed for you, so that you could have everything you wanted, so that you could see the stars.

Spirit: Yeah, but now that I'm here . . . I just feel so restless. I feel like I need to . . . well . . . rove for awhile.

Come on, everybody. Ease up on my boy Howard Dean.

I've heard the primal scream. I've even heard it set to music. But I fail to see why the media considers it to be such a monumental screw-up. Sure, it was a little raucous for a concession speech. Okay, more than a little, but did anybody really expect him to lay down and die after the disappointment of Iowa? This is Howard we're talking about. Good old grass-roots Howard. He was trying to re-energize his supporters, and how was he supposed to do that without getting excited himself? Yeah, it was kind of cheesy, but it was genuine, which is more than I can say for anything that was said in the State of the Union. Doesn't anyone remember when Mr. Keating explained the cathartic value of Walt Whitman's "barbaric yawp"?

Alright, I give up. What exactly is this? I've encountered it on more than one occasion while facing down the business end of a soup can, and I can't help but wonder: if this is the pretty, corporate name for this particular facet of the chicken market, then what in the world did it start out as? I mean, there are PR people in billion-dollar suits making up digestible euphemisms for all the unsavory products and processes that end up on labels in your neighborhood ALDI (What? Your neighborhood doesn't have an ALDI? Ok, Richie Rich, just substitute "personal shopper" and keep reading.) If THIS is the best name their slick spin doctors could come up with, what in God's name is really going on at the chicken factories? Is there some sort of Pink Floyd nightmare machine that turns the Little Red Hen into sausage? Has the torture rack used in the days of Savonarola been revived for use in the poultry industry?

It's not often you run across a film that is expertly acted but entirely devoid of all meaning and substance. 21 Grams has that rare distinction. Here is the plot in a nutshell. Three people are devastated. They are devastated from the very beginning, they arc through a period of lesser devastation, and then this lesser devastation gradually resolves into—unholy, unthinkable devastation. It's like being at a funeral for two and a half hours—but not the normal kind of funeral, where the family holds it together for the sake of appearances—this is more like the kind where people scream and tear their hair out and leap into the casket. Possibly even a Viking funeral, where horses and servants are sacrificed, too, and all the carcasses go onto an enormous flaming pyre that crackles and sizzles like a smoldering volcano, and pretty soon the pyre erupts, filling the sky with clouds of ash and fire and smoke. The explosion is so massive it's visible from space.

During a lengthy bout with the flu this winter, I found myself watching a lot of television. This led me to the unsettling discovery that there are entirely too many psychics cashing in on their alleged abilities. I don't have a problem with the idea of psychics in general—after all, most of us use an embarrassingly small portion of our brains, and it just makes sense that there's some extrasensory stuff left over from the era when we had to fend off three saber tooth tigers before breakfast every day. But these people on my television—these John Edwardses and James Van Praaghs—are just so pompous and silly. "I'm sensing that someone here recently lost a relative whose name began with a J. And I'm also sensing that this person liked cheese enchiladas? Is that right? Does this sound familiar to anyone?" Yeah, maybe you're sensing the cooking show on the set next door, John.

It's been brought to my attention (by one of those treasured friends who you can count on to tell you gently but firmly that for the sake of civility you just MUST wipe that mucus from your nose) that there has been a glaring omission from my list of Greatest Terrible Films of All time, in All Possible Universes. For the sake of artistic purity, I will not be altering that list. I suspect that if I did, I would not be able to stop--I would just keep changing it and changing it, to the exclusion of every other activity in my life, until I finally collapsed from exhaustion while scratching out yet another apologia about why I've decided that Sorority Slaughter or Alien Anarchists really deserves a place on my list. But I do feel a little bad about excluding this film, so here goes. Consider it an amendment to the list, but it will be the only one, or else I would just keep adding and adding ... (see earlier discussion of compulsive descent into madness).

1. Death Race 2000, starring Sly Stallone, some other people, and yes, Grasshopper, David Carradine! I think we've all fantasized about this (driving over pedestrians for points, not David Carradine, although there's something mighty fetching about that bizarro rubber suit he's wearing...). And in case you thought the eponymous death race was just for men, there are some great women racers, too. Vive le difference!