You can be inscrutable, but can you scrut anything? You can be ineffable, but can you actually be effed? (“I think you can in Europe.“)
Page 169 of 181
Today’s Doonesbury, even though it’s the “Summer Daydream,” implies that Mike is interested in someone other than Kim. The original (1998?) Mike-and-Kim story, including both major arcs, is collectively my favorite Doonesburies ever. If Mike is tired of Kim, Mike needs to die.
Speaking of great comic storylines, Checkerboard Nightmare just wrapped up (I presume) probably my favorite continuous run of strips in its history; Wednesday’s edition packs more great lines into four panels than the fire marshal really allows. I talk about Checkerboard Nightmare a lot, and I still don’t talk about it enough. I was going through the archives a while back and noticed that Mr. Straub produced these three strips all within one week. Those are some of the most perfect one-shots ever committed to pixel. I can’t stand it!
About half the books I requested from the library arrived yesterday (and the magic Library Computer telephoned to tell me so!), so after I got off work I biked on down to get them. About a block away, I got a flat tire.
I really should have had them replace the tires when I got it tuned, but I thought I’d save a little money and just get new tubes. Smart me. I’ll take it in this afternoon and get two new ones–the back tire is the one that popped, but I’m sure the front isn’t far behind.
Anyway, I walked the rest of the way to the library and picked up another packful of pages (Lovecraft and Lem, both of whom I’m trying for the first time, and more) and started the trek back. A few blocks on, I noticed that this store called Twice Told Books was actually open–it had always been closed when I passed before. So I decided to check it out, locked my bike to a parking meter, walked in and was eaten.
The books were so dense there. The shelves weren’t nearly enough to hold them all, so they were stacked on top, piled at the bottom, stacked on top of the piles at the bottom, everything. It smelled like dry paper and glue, exactly like the stacks at the old EKU library, before they tore it up and made it big and glassy. I spent a lot of evenings there in middle school, while Mom was earning her Rank I (again), and read a lot of books. The shelves and the overstocking and the smell were all the same, and it was a pretty memory-intensive experience.
They apparently live to buy old sci-fi and fantasy paperbacks, too, and I picked up a lot of them–Le Guin, de Camp, all books about which I’ve thought “I should own that” but never got around to buying. I even got a book I’d been thinking about lately but never thought I’d find again, because I had no memory of the author or title, only the cover illustration. It’s called The Sword and The Satchel, as it turns out, which I learned when I found its cover staring up at me from one of the aforementioned piles.
They had to kick me out when they closed. I was enthralled, and for the first time I honestly wish I wasn’t leaving Bardstown Road. The music stores and comic shop and ice cream I could do without, but I’m going to sneak back to that bookstore whenever I can.
Think they’d give me a job?
Just GUESS who’s on the first page of Google image search results for “MULLET PHOTO BEST.”
Go ahead, I’ll wait.
MSN:
… The mastermind behind “Gothika” and Halle [Berry]’s glammed-down and physically demanding role is producer Joel Silver.
“She broke her arm in a very violent scene where she’s being restrained with restraints in a cell and she was fighting the restraints,” explained Silver.
That’s such a brilliant line. I couldn’t have come up with it myself, so I’m stealing it.
I should explain that the reason all these MSN headlines are popping up in here is because, after a year of getting my Hotmail via Outlook Express, I’m now suddenly being deluged with teaser headlines whenever I check it on the interweb here at work. The sheer dumbness of them is still a novelty. Trying to get people to read your insipid articles by putting teaser headline boxes under every sent mail confirmation is dumb too, but, well, obviously it works.
Did I say six of seven? Because officially, it turns out to be twelve of twelve. I generated an entire point release myself! I am Bug Barbecue!
Abruptly and without transition, check out Ken’s two–part account of his trip to Lollapalooza. It’s extreme!
“I, Ken Moore, the person you all know as a calm and not easily excited person, was jumping around and loving every second of it. These guy are the saviors of rock and roll.”
It’s great stuff, and I wish I could have been there, and I’m very glad Ken’s writing regularly.
MSN:
50 Cent touts new duds
Who the hell says “touts” or “duds?” Headlinese is so far removed from English now. You should get a foreign language credit if you take journalism in high school.
I read for at least one solid hour every day at lunch, and I’ve managed to get through all the new books I had with me already. I brought Cold Mountain with me today, because I had it and I hadn’t read it and everybody read it a few years ago, so why not. Twenty pages in, I was like “forget it.”
So tonight I went out and got my card. Finally, after twenty-two years, I have unfettered access to a metropolitan library system! This is glorious. I checked out nine hardcovers today (Flannery O’Connor, Terry Pratchett, lots of Margaret Atwood) and requested probably a dozen more, then biked back happy in the rain, my backpack taut and heavy with words.
It occurs to me that “exCentric” would have been a much better word to use than “exCentriate” in my dinner party entry the other day, but I’m not going to change it, because then this entry would have no purpose and you’d probably never know.