Do the Yak

My daily commute consists of a 15-minute drive, during which I listen to WERS (highly recommended -- listen online if you're not in Boston); a 10-minute walk, during which I listen to my iPod on shuffle; and a 10-minute subway ride, during which I read a book. Today I was in one kind of mood when I got onto the train and a different kind when I got off; I'm not sure how to describe them, but the cause was the book I'm now reading, "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" by Jonathan Safran Foer , who is my favorite living writer along with Michael Chabon. (If Kurt Vonnegut were still alive, that would make three, but now he has to compete with hundreds of great dead authors instead of a few living ones.) The book is difficult at times, even frustrating, but absolutely brilliant -- one of the few that makes we want to shove a copy into the hands of everyone I know. When I got to work, I immediately Googled "Dirty Laundry," which was a sort of underground c...

Along with the rapidly approaching obsolescence of newspapers and CDs, now I hear of the demise of music radio as the place to go for hearing the latest tunes. The Boston Globe did an article spurred by the closure of WBCN, which in the 60s and 70s was the epicenter of the rock scene around here. Now we have the online streaming-music struggle between Last.FM and Pandora . I had heard of Pandora but not LastFM so I quickly checked out both their websites. I quickly decided I preferred the look and feel of Pandora and proceeded to create my own "station." Great! Of course you have to be at a computer, but then I found you can get an iPhone app to listen to your station on the go. Even greater! So now the only remaining issues I have are (1) the car (since my 2004 model does not have an MP3 jack and iTrip sucks), and (2) what about lousy cell reception and the radio equivalent of dropped calls? Then again, radio reception isn't always perfect either; you sometimes have st...

I cracked up reading Amalah's review of kiddie books and had to leave her a comment listing my own faves: " Go Dog Go " -- love the utopian party-in-a-tree ending and the iconoclastic fuck-your-hats attitude interwoven throughout. " One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish " -- the best Seuss. I always hated "Cat in the Asshat" -- he's an egotistical jerk and I would NOT like to have a beer with him, which is a requirement for protagonists of books I read aloud to my preshus offspring. " Polka Bats and Octopus Slacks " -- works on so many levels, including mine. Drugs were probably involved in the creation of this book. " Kat Kong ," " Dogzilla " and anything else by Dav Pilkey (including the Captain Underpants series for the more sophisticated reader) " The Velveteen Rabbit " -- Never had it as a kid myself; I read it for the first time when I was in my 30s. SOB SOB SOB SOB OMFG SOB!! More powerful a...

As I wrote a while back, we switched to four-day-a-week home delivery of the Globe, which has worked out quite well -- it's really a treat now when I get to fondle an actual paper over coffee -- but the one thing for which I couldn't get my daily fix was the comics. The Globe happens to have the best and largest selection of comics I've ever seen. As of a year or two ago, they're nicely packaged (in print) in the "g" tabloid color magazine insert, which also has the arts and living sections. But on Monday through Wednesday, what's a girl to do? All the strips are on one website or another, but who wants to do that much clicking? The Globe's website, boston.com, has a link to a so-called comics page but it's obviously been completely neglected -- it has a few lame comics that don't even run in the paper. What I did was pony up $11 a year to gocomics.com to get a daily email with many of my favorite strips embedded -- just a gentle turn of th...

Am I missing something here? I just rediscovered the Globe Reader after they stuck an ad for it on today's paper. It's not new -- I remember checking it out a year or two ago -- but had forgotten about it until all this mess about the newspaper industry tanking. Here's the multimedia demo if you're curious. But here's the stupid: you can't download the Globe Reader unless you already subscribe to the print paper! WTF?! So... you're supposed to pay to have the paper delivered so you can kill trees and drop it unread into the recycling bucket just so you can get a decent online version? I'm very confused. The Globe is not saving any money on printing and delivery by doing this. The only thing I can think of it that the Globe Reader apparently serves up the content with no ads, which is great, but that freaks out the execs who can't get their head around making money from something other than advertising. Do they have some sort of senile fantasy that ...

We returned Monday from four days in Nantucket, and it was one of my top 5 vacations ever. I have to write it down so I'll remember it, but if it's too boring to read, just go to Mimi Smartypants' latest , which is even excellenter than usual. We left Friday morning for Hyannis and barely made the 11:00 ferry (who knew you STILL had to stand in line to get printed tickets when you had purchased them beforehand online?). The house that D1 and . rented in Sconset was absolutely beautiful -- a spacious living room with a strip of backyard and then the bluff dropping to the wide-open sea. We were in an adjacent guest cabin, while K, her 9-year-old daughter J, and D2 were in the main house as well (K, D, D2 and I all worked at the same place at various times). The kids loved battling the waves and then eating ice cream at Sconset Beach even though the water was pretty cold thanks to the worst June weather ever. Then we had a barbecue and cocktails in the front yard that evenin...

Funny coincidence the other night... out of the blue, Sarah asked me what tampons were (she had seen a tampon machine in a public restroom and it registered for the first tine, I guess). I'd talked about menstruation before, but we hadn't discussed a Lady's Way of Dealing With Aunt Flo. I described the reason for needing tampons and, warming up, began discussing the tampon's structure and function. I went into our bathroom to get one to dissect for her edification. Then just as I was reaching the high point of the story (pantomiming insertion fully clothed), there was a perfectly timed howl from elsewhere. Rolling my eyes I waited to see what Drama Queen was overreacting to now, when into the bathroom she rushed... dripping blood from her face, arms and hands. Yes, with her impeccable talent Becky had managed to give herself a whopping nosebleed by somehow bumping her nose with her own knee, and then dashing in, deus ex machina -like, to inadvertently illustrate my...

Another entertaining political career implosion for a politician who answered the siren call to Think With His Dink: Mark Sanford. Did I say Appalachian Trail? I meant Argentinian Trail! In the Andes! Of course for sheer hilarity plus chutzpah, nothing can beat Mr. Wide-Stance himself, Larry Craig. But even without the sex angle (that we know of at the moment), we can be entertained by career nosedives like Sarah Palin's inexplicable resignation. The best lines I've seen: " I-Quit-a-Rod " and this line from Maureen Dowd : "Caribou Barbie is one nutty puppy." **** What day would be complete without the latest chunk of masonry falling from the edifice of journalism? The Washington post ombudsman acknowledged in his own paper that more errors are getting through because the paper has slashed their copy desk to the bone. And let's face it, it's only going to get worse. The only thing that the established news business (as opposed to amateur bloggers) ha...

I never heard of Clerihews until I came across the term in the Miss Conduct blog vv. The basic idea is that the first line is the name of a celebrity and the other three lines poke fun at that celebrity in some way. The rhyme scheme is A-A-B-B but there's no meter, so any number of syllables in any line is fine. Like every other red-blooded American, I have Michael Jackson on the brain, so this is what I came up with in about 10 minutes: Michael Jackson Died with his slacks on, Which is more than you can say for David Carradine, Who was hanging out with a dirty magazine. I entered it in Miss Conduct's contest (#24 if you click on the comments in the link above). It's gotta have a shot, right? Along the same lines, there was an NPR story yesterday about the annual Bulwer-Lytton bad writing contest . So I was inspired in the car to jot down my own entry, which came to me unbidden on a flaming pie : He knelt and laid a trembling hand on her shapely head, acutely aware of her ...

The Gannett Co., the country's largest newspaper chain (84 dailies including USA Today, plus 850 nondaily papers and 23 TV stations), is laying off 1,400 employees . The ongoing layoff count company-wide can be found on Gannettoid.com , which shows that most papers in the chain have had several round of layoffs in recent months. I have a friend who works at the Indianapolis Star (for the moment, anyway) and has hung on to her job so far, but her paper's union just voted down a 12 percent pay cut request from management by a vote of 97-9, because they knew perfectly well that such a concession would not avoid further big layoffs . Robert Phelps , an old New York Times hand, thinks the industry has some kind of future, once people realize the blogosphere has no quality control or original sourcing: What you have there now is almost an unedited cacophony, a Tower of Babel, with everybody saying what they want. They get they’re reporting from where? Because they read the newspaper...

Okay, WTF with this weather?? I was woken up on several occasions last night by the loudness of the rain pounding outside. And thunder, of course. I could hear because the windows were open a crack, but only a crack, because it's TOO COLD to open them all the way. In fucking July.This morning it was dark as twilight -- headlights were mandatory -- and it was pissing rain and thundering during my drive and walk. Good thing I wore Teva sandals because I was soaked below mid-calf even with a raincoat and umbrella. It's going to do this all day. Just like all day yesterday. And tomorrow. If these clouds don't get the hell gone by next Friday when we go to Nantucket, somebody's gonna pay. Meanwhile, the Globe is handling the meteorological crisis with a helpful explanation of how to build an ark . Despite everything, I dragged the kids to see The Nays last night (note the free downloads). I went to grade school with all those guys, but that's not why I like them -- th...

As I'm sure you know, diadromous fish travel between salt and fresh water. Among that diadromous group, anadromous fish live in the ocean mostly, and breed in fresh water, while catadromous fish live in fresh water, and breed in the ocean. Why is this relevant to anything at all, you may well ask. Because it applies to some fish we happen to own. They're not exactly diadromous in the strictest sense of alternating between salt water and fresh water -- more like alternating between brick and wallboard environments. Also they're not exactly alive. They actually comprise a sculpture made by John Buckley for my mother, who installed them on an exterior wall of her house in Oxford, England. Buckley is best known for the Headington Shark -- Headington is actually part of Oxford, and I could see the shark if I peered down a side street at the right moment on the coach from Heathrow Airport. When my stepfather sold the house a couple of years ago, my brother and I shipped a lot of...