What's new pussycat?

I don't know if Bill Manhoff's play THE OWL AND THE PUSSYCAT has been done in New York since the movie starring Barbra Streisand was made in 1970 - it has a great pedigree - the original was performed in NY with Alan Alda in the lead and the screenplay was written by Buck Henry. It's very entertaining and would work great with a minimal set - but the finks want $75 a pop for each performance.

The entire movie is available for free on youtube.com (see above)

I guess I'll have to write my own two-person romance. But if I had the money I'd do a revival of this.

2nd opinion

why i love the sonnets

Today's special

More at engrish.com

And now for something completely different, an educational web site sex.healthguru.com

Dreamland sonnet

We were last night in Dreamland...

The truth about Memorial Day

Memorial Day got its start after the Civil War, when freed slaves and abolitionists gathered in Charleston, S.C., to honor Union soldiers who gave their lives to battle slavery. The holiday was so closely associated with the Union side, and with the fight for emancipation, that Southern states quickly established their own rival Confederate Memorial Day.

Over the next 50 years, though, Memorial Day changed. It became a tribute to the dead on both sides, and to the reunion of the North and the South after the war. This new holiday was more inclusive, and more useful to a forward-looking nation eager to put its differences behind it. But something important was lost: the recognition that the Civil War had been a moral battle to free black Americans from slavery.

More at the NYTimes

Seven Samurai Online

This can't be legal, but someone has posted the entire film "The Seven Samurai" on Youtube. In my opinion this is the greatest film ever made. In this segment we meet three of the seven.

Desperate farmers, who are being oppressed by bandits, have come into a village to try to hire samurai who will work for food, and they get lucky when they witness Kambei Shimada's stealth attack on a thief who has been holding a child hostage - the scene opens with the death of the thief. The next scene is great because it shows the farmers, the young samurai Katsushirō Okamoto, and the samurai wanna-be, Kikuchiyo, played by Toshiru Mifine, vying for Kambei's attention - it's a great way to display the individuality of their characters.

PART 1 - To Bee or not to Bee - the bee poems of Emily Dickinson

"Nature" is what we see—
The Hill—the Afternoon—
Squirrel—Eclipse—the Bumble bee—
Nay—Nature is Heaven—
Nature is what we hear—
The Bobolink—the Sea—
Thunder—the Cricket—
Nay—Nature is Harmony—
Nature is what we know—
Yet have no art to say—
So impotent Our Wisdom is
To her Simplicity.

******

A little road not made of man,
Enabled of the eye,
Accessible to thill of bee,
Or cart of butterfly.

If town it have, beyond itself,
'T is that I cannot say;
I only sigh,--no vehicle
Bears me along that way.

******

Bee! I'm expecting you!
Was saying Yesterday
To Somebody you know
That you were due --

The Frogs got Home last Week --
Are settled, and at work --
Birds, mostly back --
The Clover warm and thick --

You'll get my Letter by
The seventeenth; Reply
Or better, be with me --
Yours, Fly.

Oh heart, why wilt thou suffer evermore?

Oh heart, why wilt thou suffer evermore?
What is thy limit of endurance? Spray
Rends rocks, and rust eats iron bars away;
the rest...

Jane! Jane! Jane!

cats!

It's Mr. Fuzz and Miss Willow!

Miss Willow is camera shy but you can see her in the upper-left-hand corner of this picture.

pretty good marks

Well it looks like some people like my poetry... I don't know if it's enough to make up for the emotional anguish that was the source of the poetry... but it's something...

A day in the life of the ESB

When I lived in Hoboken I had a web cam pointed at the Empire State Building... I put a bunch of the shots together from a single day and turned it into an animated gif.

JANE EYRE 2009 on sale now

JANE EYRE tickets on sale now

a bee or reverie

A sonnet in proximity.

poesy

Got Poetry?

another good article from the New Yorker

But once again, registration is required - very annoying!

These numbers do not lie or flatter. Up and down the line, obligations loom and prospects dim. Wall Street's tribulations have brought drastically straitened circumstances to nearly every profession. Whether you work for a contractor, a vender, a hospital, a restaurant, a transit system, a high school, a newspaper, a charity, or yourself, the Conversation likely involves a new and irreconcilable calculation of commitments: perhaps even an abandonment of a college education or the loss of a health-care plan.

Pretty damn depressing.

How not to write a (screen)play

One of the most annoying things that not-so-good playwrights and screenwriters do is create characters/scenarios that utterly lack integrity.

A producer/director in the local independent movie scene recently made a movie set in "space" somewhere, and although I think the plot is lame and the recycling of Star Wars technology even lamer (the sexy ladybot has to use a light saber to fight people wielding gigantic space blasters) the worst aspect is the script going for whatever is narratively convenient, rather than letting the characters and situations play out organically.

Most egregiously handled is the dumb-guy character, who is dressed like a cowboy and speaks with a Southwestern accent. Right in the middle of the movie, he takes time off from drooling and bumbling around to solve the movie's big mystery - he figures out that the hero of the story has returned incognito to seek vengeance. He lays it all down like a perfect logician: "so whether or not he is Mr. X, he's out to fry everybody connected with Mr. X's death."

You know the screenplay is bad when the dumb guy is given the job of solving the mystery.

The best part of this mystery-solving is that right before the dumb guy solves the mystery he is called "nitwit" and "idiot" - but that's not unusual - in fact, virtually every character in the movie insults the dumb guy's intelligence, except for directly after he solves the mystery, when his boss (a pointlessly long-winded and affected douchebag) calls him a king among men. To which the dumb guy responds something to the effect of - and I am freely translating here - "duhhh.... I'm back to being dumb again now that the mystery is solved."

They actually wrote a character whose job it is to be insulted the entire movie, except when he's solving the mystery.

But you know what - who cares? It's a "genre" movie right? As long as there's lasers and mutants and ladybots in tight-fitting outfits and actresses who get nekkid for free for the director, it doesn't matter how stupid the screenplay is. They'll just keep cranking them out, and there are people in Japan, apparently, who will watch them.

As George Lucas, with his post Harrison Ford Star Wars films, and Steven Spielberg with his last Indiana Jones film (proving that Harrison Ford can't save every movie) demonstrated - it doesn't matter how good the director is, or how big the budget is, if the screenplay is bad, the movie is bad. Period.

So of course screenwriters are the lowest of the low in the movie world's pecking order and screenplays are cobbled together as an afterthought. I guess space-western director guy figures if the big boys make movies with shit scripts, why can't he?

Thank you Adam Gopnik

...for saying what I had been thinking...

...the three-blade razor may be the first known instance in the history of capitalism of a product mocked long in advance of its invention. "Saturday Night Live," on its very first program, thirty-odd years ago, not long after the two-blade razor appeared, actually did a parody commercial mocking the imagined advantages of the still imaginary three-blade razor: "Because you'll believe anything," the slogan went. And we did. We believed. Pity the capitalist, who, having made belief, must now unmake it, for fear of not being believed again.

More (need subscription though...)

Live Paul Krugman song!!!

Thank you Rachel Maddow!

great news for breastfeeders

It appears that breastfeeding is great for the mother's health:

The longer women breastfeed, the lower their risk of heart attacks, strokes and cardiovascular disease, University of Pittsburgh researchers said.

"We have known for years that breastfeeding is important for babies' health; we now know that it is important for mothers' health as well," Dr. Eleanor Bimla Schwarz said in a statement.

The study, published in the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology, found postmenopausal women who breastfed for at least one month had lower rates of diabetes, high blood pressure and high cholesterol -- all known to cause heart disease.

Women who had breastfed their babies for more than a year were 10 percent less likely to have had a heart attack, stroke, or developed heart disease than women who had never breastfed.

more here

Whoo-hoo! That's good news for me! And it makes up for the sore nipples and leaking through my shirt.

Youtube now has quite a few educational video clips about breast feeding and what appears to be a documentary about a woman who breastfeeds her 8-year-old. I'm pro breastfeeding and all, but that's a bit much. I actually couldn't watch it.

Really great article in this week's New Yorker

These were the daughters of computer programmers and people with graduate degrees. They worked on science projects, and read books, and went on ski vacations with their parents, and dreamed about growing up to be marine biologists. Ranadivé knew that if they played the conventional way—if they let their opponents dribble the ball up the court without opposition—they would almost certainly lose to the girls for whom basketball was a passion. Ranadivé came to America as a seventeen-year-old, with fifty dollars in his pocket. He was not one to accept losing easily. His second principle, then, was that his team would play a real full-court press, every game, all the time. The team ended up at the national championships. "It was really random," Anjali Ranadivé said. "I mean, my father had never played basketball before."

David's victory over Goliath, in the Biblical account, is held to be an anomaly. It was not. Davids win all the time. The political scientist Ivan Arreguín-Toft recently looked at every war fought in the past two hundred years between strong and weak combatants. The Goliaths, he found, won in 71.5 per cent of the cases. That is a remarkable fact. Arreguín-Toft was analyzing conflicts in which one side was at least ten times as powerful - in terms of armed might and population—as its opponent, and even in those lopsided contests the underdog won almost a third of the time.

In the Biblical story of David and Goliath, David initially put on a coat of mail and a brass helmet and girded himself with a sword: he prepared to wage a conventional battle of swords against Goliath. But then he stopped. "I cannot walk in these, for I am unused to it," he said (in Robert Alter's translation), and picked up those five smooth stones. What happened, Arreguín - Toft wondered, when the underdogs likewise acknowledged their weakness and chose an unconventional strategy? He went back and re-analyzed his data. In those cases, David’s winning percentage went from 28.5 to 63.6. When underdogs choose not to play by Goliath's rules, they win, Arreguín - Toft concluded, "even when everything we think we know about power says they shouldn't."

more here

Huck Finn, MD

Move over Dougie Howser - NYCPlaywrights actor member Nick Fondulis is now a doctor on the NBC series Mercy.

Watch him get yelled at by the head nurse here. And this was after he gave her donuts!

At least he doesn't get punched in the head, like he did in Kings.

I revised the script for them:

Dr. Nick: "Veronica, I feel terrible - what do you want?"

Nurse Veronica: "I wanna pinch your nose! Like this! I learned how to do it in IRAQ!"

Dr. Nick: "oh oh oh oh oh - I'll never screw up again!!!"

New Rules

My 10-minute play NEW RULES was part of this weekend's NYCPlaywrights Spring 2009 Fundraiser

8 year old divorces

8-year-old girl gets to divorce her 50-year-old husband.

An 8-year-old Saudi girl has divorced her middle-aged husband after her father forced her to marry him last year in exchange for about $13,000, her lawyer said. Saudi Arabia has come under increasing criticism at home and abroad for permitting child marriages. The United States, an ally of the kingdom, has called child marriage a “clear and unacceptable” violation of human rights. The girl was allowed to divorce the 50-year-old man after an out-of-court settlement was reached, said her lawyer, Abdulla al-Jeteli.

Heart of Conrad

Interesting article about Joseph Conrad

Conrad never claimed that his writings would change the nature of humankind or society. He wasn't interested either in spinning adventure stories set on the high seas, in the manner of Captain Marryat, R.M. Ballantyne, or John Masefield. Nor did he believe in the type described by Herman Melville as the "Handsome Sailor," that nautical beau ideal whom his messmates loved and admired, the ancestor of Captain Horatio Hornblower or Patrick O'Brian's Jack Aubrey. Conrad had scant faith in the idealized man and the abstract idea, in the generalized theory. Rather, he believed in the form and substance of things; in the visible, the measurable, the job to be performed, all of it limned by that ethical cipher which flickers like a spectre in and out of the stories, the novels, the sketches.

acer palmatum dissectum

The Japanese Threadleaf Maple (acer palmatum dissectum) is one of the most beautiful plants ever developed by humans. I never noticed these trees until I was in my early 30s - and then I noticed that they are everywhere, and rightly so.

You can see samples of the leaves above, but from a distance the tree looks like it consists of a beautifully gnarled trunk supporting puffy green or purple or red clouds. Like this:



The Brooklyn Botanical Garden, which I hope to visit soon, has a Japanese Hill-and-Pond Garden with fantastic examples.

The Japanese really know how to do gardens - the Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, which I visited ten years ago, is so beautiful it blew my mind.

Sonnet 151-palooza

Youtube is a treasure trove... or a thrift store... or an antiques shop... or a 99c store... it contains multitudes.

There are all kinds of video recordings of people doing Shakespeare, INCLUDING 151...

An "enactment" of sorts that is bizarre and rather unsavory...



Since this year marks the 400th anniversary of the publication of Shakespeare's sonnets, I think there needs to be a recording of all of them - by talented, attractive actors... hmmm... I'll have to think about taking on that project...

Spring fever

I think NYC has spring fever - I saw all kinds of weirdness on my commute today. Maybe the weirdest was the street guy that got on the subway and sat across from me, called me "Cinderella" and proceeded to go on about karma etc., and assured me that he was "worshipping (my) beauty" by talking to me. I thanked him and then got off at the next stop - which wasn't actually mine, but who knows what other crazy things he was gonna start saying? Crazy guys are not all that uncommon in the MTA system, of course, but usually they just tell you about Jesus, or the Illuminati, or ask for money.

Sonnets are sexy

Sonnets are sexy - says so right here.

Shakespeare = "Big Willie" hee hee!

#131

Thou art as tyrannous, so as thou art,
As those whose beauties proudly make them cruel;
For well thou know'st to my dear doting heart
Thou art the fairest and most precious jewel.

The rest of 131

Yesterday is the date on which Shakespeare's birthday is traditionally observed...

Ooh, Sonnet Sleuth!

How to write for the American theater - a chart

See the larger version here.

Favorite part: "Do you like zombies?"

Interesting article about EA Poe

This year marks the two-hundredth anniversary of Poe’s birth and the publication of two collections of gothic tales produced by the Mystery Writers of America. “On a Raven’s Wing: New Tales in Honor of Edgar Allan Poe” (Harper; $14.99) contains stories by twenty mystery writers, including Mary Higgins Clark. “In the Shadow of the Master: Classic Tales by Edgar Allan Poe” (William Morrow; $25.99) pairs Poe’s best-known stories with modern commentaries; Stephen King muses on “The Genius of ‘The Tell-Tale Heart.’ ” There’s also a sensitive and haunting brief biography, Peter Ackroyd’s “Poe: A Life Cut Short” (Doubleday; $21.95), that offers a fitting tribute to Poe’s begin-at-the-end philosophy by opening with his horrible and mysterious death, in October of 1849. Poe, drunk and delirious, seems to have been dragged around Baltimore to cast votes, precinct after precinct, in one of that city’s infamously corrupt congressional elections, until he finally collapsed. From Ryan’s tavern, a polling place in the Fourth Ward, Poe was carried, like a corpse, to a hospital. He died four days later. He was forty years old.

More in the New Yorker

150

O, from what power hast thou this powerful might
With insufficiency my heart to sway?
To make me give the lie to my true sight,
And swear that brightness doth not grace the day?

Sonnet 150

People ain't no good

It's the Paul Krugman song!

"Timothy Geitner uses TurboTax"!

Speaking of being a cougar...

The jailbait in my MySpace mailbox...



...who sent me this message: "im 17 but i was lookin at ur pics i think u r so beautiful i hope it was ok that i wrote to u :)"

Do young men just troll MySpace and email every woman they see???

The curse of love

Well I was told today by a 24-year-old that I certainly am a "cougar."

I hate that term of course - it means a woman in her 30s-40s who likes 20-something guys. I hate it because a 30-40-something guy who is into 20-something women is called... "a guy."

But more, I hate the fact that I am so hung up on love & affection. It's so much easier if you are just about the physical.

It's a curse.


*sigh*

Financial chicken soup for Jon Stewart

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
Elizabeth Warren Pt. 2
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Economic Crisis Political Humor

Becoming Jane

Well I am swamped with Janes! I put out a casting call for my 2009 production of JANE EYRE and have gotten over 300 submissions so far. Mostly young women wanting to be Jane or Blanche/crazy wife/etc. Which only makes me kick myself once again for my casting choices in the past, made on the basis of convenience and familiarity. Why do I always have to learn everything the hard way?

The Room is in the house

Wow, somebody made a rap song tribute to The Room. It is so funny!

Watch them rehearsing! Tommy Wiseau actually rehearsed this!




Oh no - midnight showing at the Village East on April 24! - this is the new Rocky Horror.

The Room

">

This weekend my daughter turned me onto the. worst. movie. ever, "The Room."

Just a tiny little clip demonstrates how amazingly bad it is.

More about the film on Wikipedia

The MIghty Krug-Man strikes again

Beyond that, Republicans have become embarrassing to watch. And it doesn’t feel right to make fun of crazy people. Better, perhaps, to focus on the real policy debates, which are all among Democrats.

more here

sonnet stats

Sonnet statistics:

Sonnet cycles: 6

* Sonnets in G
* Bitterest Bliss & Gregorian Chants
* Secret Sonnets
* NY Sonnets
* Goddam Sonnets
* Poetry Month Sonnets

Total Sonnets: 50

* Sonnets in G - 10
* Bitterest Bliss & Gregorian Chants - 6
* Secret Sonnets - 14
* NY Sonnets - 5
* Goddam Sonnets - 10
* Poetry Month Sonnets - 5 (so far)


more sonnet stuff soon...

I gotta get me a new ISP!

Damn that was painful - 11 hours with Heavens to Mergatroyd and NYCPlaywrights offline thanks to those bungling idiots at readyhosting.com

And I hope they read this!

The dread Daphne Merkin strikes again!

She's even a bigger jerk than I realized!

Late last month, the New York Times published an op-ed by Daphne Merkin, a contributing writer to the Times Magazine, on the Bernie Madoff mess. The curious premise of the piece seemed to be that Madoff's "victims" (the quote marks are Merkin's) aren't really blameless, since "no one was holding a gun to anyone's head, saying sign up with Mr. Madoff or else."

The argument seemed tendentious at best -- but there was a bigger problem. As numerous bloggers quickly pointed out, Merkin's parenthetical disclosure -- "I did not know Mr. Madoff nor did I invest with his firm, but have a sibling who did business with him" -- didn't come anywhere close to fully informing readers about her personal tie to the case.

That sibling is Ezra Merkin, the financier and former chairman of GMAC, who was the second-largest institutional investor in Madoff's funds, losing billions of other people's money. In a civil suit filed this week by New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, Ezra Merkin, who collected over $40 million from Madoff's funds, was charged with "betraying hundreds of investors" by lying to them about how much of their money he had invested with Madoff, and by failing to disclose conflicts of interest.

more...

African Queen

Even though it stars "old people" - Bogart was 51 and Hepburn was 44 when it was made - The African Queen is one of the most romantic movies of all time.

Resonance

I've lately become interested in this Sondheim musical

Loving you is not a choice... it's who I am...

Historic Pear Watercolors

You say you've looked high and low and you just cannot find a web site that displays watercolor paintings of a multitude of pear varieties painted between the 1890s and the 1930s?

Despair no more!

The Trouble with Jesus: Dramaturgy & the Prince of Peace

I have nothing against writing plays about Jesus, I'm just saying they won't work, unless the play is all about Jesus. It can't be about human stuff. Unless your Jesus is the non-god version. But that leads to other problems.

If you have a play with a god in it, it changes things. Just ask the Greeks - they used to have their plays end with the deus ex machina (God in a machine) - they actually had an actor in a contraption to make them look god-like. The god would make everything come out alright in the end. Nowadays deus ex machina is not considered a satisfying method of ending a play. Although even Shakespeare pulled that one, in As You Like It. But Shakespeare always gets some slack of which contemporary writers are not cut.

Lately my writers group has been plagued by plays about prostitutes and plays containing Jesus. I have problems with the prostitute plays too but that's another essay.

The authors of the Jesus plays insist on writing what they consider realistic stories about humans that just happen to have Jesus in it. This flat out does not work, because even though many of the writers are not devout Christians, their view of Jesus comes directly from the Bible. And the Bible considers Jesus a god. That throws everything off. That's like writing a kitchen-sink drama and one of the characters reveals that the wise teacher in her school is in fact Superman. There is no way that the play cannot become about Superman. Ain't nobody care about yo kitchen sink when Kal-El from Krypton is in town. (Kal and Jesus were both sent to Earth by their fathers - did you ever notice that? For an even better connection between God and superheroes, see Tom the Dancing Bug's God-Man series.

The Trouble with Jesus essay continued here

April is National Poetry Month

So I'm a little ahead of the curve...

GDS 10

Emily Dickinson 50

NOT with a club the heart is broken,
Nor with a stone;

the rest

The mighty Krug-Man

Making the cover of Newsweek!

The Newsweek story here.

Media Matters for America has an interesting take on it:

Looking back on the Bush years, Krugman's track record was rather impeccable. But you'll note he didn't appear on the cover of Newsweek back then. (No "Bush is Wrong" cover lines.) And for years Krugman only occasionally appeared on the pundit talk shows. He wasn't referenced much inside The Village, either. Meaning, the Beltway press pros didn't seem to care what Krugman wrote about Bush and didn't think his writing--his opposition--needed to be examined closer. He was just a liberal critic, so who cared what he wrote about Bush.

My theory on directing

So I finally developed my own theory on directing, which is pretty primitive, but even so:

- Cast carefully - get really good actors.
- Give them some guidelines.
- Make them feel safe.
- Get out of their way.

Maybe I'll elaborate and get fancy with it. But I think this works pretty well... my STRESS AND THE CITY production was a breeze to direct mainly because I followed this theory. Also, none of the actors were evil. That helps.

oh that droll Schopenhauer

In Arthur Schopenhauer's preface to the first edition of his "The World as Will and Idea" (AKA "The World as Will and Representation") he advises the reader to do the following things:

1. Read the works of Immanual Kant first


2. Read Schopenhauer's own "On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason" first


3. Read his own "On Vision and Colors" first


4. Read the Upanishads first


5. Read the appendix of "The world as will..." first.


6. Read both the appendix and "The world as will...", twice.

If you can't be bothered to follow his advice, Schopenhauer has a few thoughts for you:

...Therefore my advice is simply to lay down the book. But I fear I shall not escape even thus.The reader who has got as far as the preface and been stopped by it, has bought the book for cash, and asks how he is to be indemnified. My last refuge is now to remind him that he knows how to make use of a book in several ways, without exactly reading it. It may fill a gap in his library as well as many another, where, neatly bound, it will certainly look well. Or he can lay it on the toilet-table or the tea-table of some learned lady friend. Or, finally, what certainly is best of all, and I specially advise it, he can review it.

Mark Twain was never more droll.

I love this article about Jon Stewart

While it isn't The New Yorker I really like New York Magazine's short pieces - they get some very good writers.

This piece by Emily Nussbaum on Jon Stewart is very nice:

Three weeks ago, when he launched an attack on CNBC and Jim Cramer, it was an astonishingly polarizing moment, and for all the praise he got from his fans, I was startled to hear several colleagues of mine hit full-out backlash mode: Stewart had become a bully, they told me, sanctimonious and overreaching. Who did he think he was?

For me, it was a conversion moment. I’d always admired Stewart, but I was bugged by that “little me” deniability, the “just a comedian” escape hatch he’d adopted early on. Now, at last, he had claimed his own authority, without becoming any less funny. When Cramer appeared before him, trying to bond as if the two were buddies from the greenroom, Stewart didn’t knuckle: “Roll 212!,” he cried, elevating video fact-checking into a thrilling moral vaudeville.

Love it.

And Comedy Central Insider likes it too.

When we two parted by George Gordon, Lord Byron

WHEN we two parted
In silence and tears,
Half broken-hearted,
To sever for years,

more...

Why David Sedaris earns a living as a writer...

an excerpt from his piece in this week's New Yorker...

He's at a Costco's with his brother-in-law...

This store didn't have the light bulbs Bob wanted, so we trudged on to the drug section, which proved equally disappointing. Pain relievers were in ten-gallon jars rather than packets, and so I looked around for another gift that a teen-ager might appreciate. I wanted something light and individually wrapped, and settled, finally upon a mess of condoms, which came in a box the size of a cinder block. It was a lot of protection, but not a lot of weight, and I liked that. "All right," I said to Bob. "I think these should do the trick."

Putting them in the cart, I thought nothing of it, but a moment later, walking down the aisle with my fifty-nine-year-old brother-in-law, I started feeling patently, almost titanically gay. Maybe I was imagining things, but it seemed as if people were staring at us - people in families, mostly, led by thrifty and disapproving parents who looked at what we were buying and narrowed their eyes in judgment. You homosexuals their faces seemed to say. Is that all you ever think about?

My brother-in-law is around my height, with thick graying hair, a matching mustache, and squarish wire-rimmed glasses. I'd never imagined him as gay, much less as my boyfriend, but now I couldn't stop. "We've got to get something else in this cart," I told him.

Bob disappeared into the acreage reserved for produce and returned a minute later with a four-pound box of strawberries. This somehow made us look even gayer. "After anal sex, we like shortcake!" read the cartoon bubble now floating over our heads.

"Something else," I said. "We've got to get something else."

Bob, oblivious, looked up at the rafters and thought for a moment. "I guess I could use some olive oil."

"Forget it," I told him, my voice a bark. "Let's just pay up and go. Can we do that, please?"

119

What potions have I drunk of Siren tears

Fail blog

Failblog, along the same lines as engrish.com

spring to summertime

Joplin recording "Summertime." I never knew how cute her lead guitarist was.