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...