Wednesday, July 23, 2008

From the Daily News:

[Christian] Bale’s mother, Jenny, 61, a former circus clown…

That concludes the latest installment of “Things I Wasn’t Expecting to Read Today.”

Posted by Kevin K. on 07/23/08 at 10:03 AM
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Monday, July 21, 2008

I really wish the anti-Obama forces would make up their minds as to whether Obama is the Messiah or Hitler. We can’t combine the two because Jesus would look downright silly with a Hitler mustache and Adolph is too angular and harsh-looking to pull off a long, flowing robe. It’s one or the other, people.  I’d like an answer by the end of the day.

Posted by Kevin K. on 07/21/08 at 01:55 PM
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Saturday, July 19, 2008

This interesting article in The Atlantic got me thinking ...

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
[...]
I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”

But it was a really long article and I couldn’t finish. Later on I’ll surf around a bit and see if I can find some quick answers.

Posted by poputonian on 07/19/08 at 09:51 AM
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Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Today’s edition:

Over the shoulder boulder holder

That concludes this morning’s “Things I’m Glad No One Says Anymore.” As usual, thanks for your patronage.

Posted by Kevin K. on 07/15/08 at 09:09 AM
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Monday, July 14, 2008

1) Cleaned my apartment, including dusting my Marty Markowitz bobblehead and my skull mug that holds approximately seventeen writing implements I will never ever use.

2) Bicycled with my lovely wife Chris out to the last day of the Murakami show at Brooklyn Museum. It was crowded and lots of people were posing for pictures with his art like his paintings were long-lost relatives.  That annoyed me.  I also had no idea what was going on with this “sculpture” (below). It had a vagina and nice boobs, but in the wrong places. That made me uncomfortable.

3) We came back home and drank a couple of Tito’s vodka & tonics in our garden while Chris kicked my ass in spite & malice (these rules are all wrong!) and backgammon. We listened to the Kinks’ Arthur and Men & Volts’ Cheer Up. We talked about how much we liked our garden, what a great day it was and how much we wish Murakami knew where vaginas belonged.

4) I cooked marinated shark on the grill while Chris prepared fresh green beans I got at the farmers market on Saturday. There’s a vendor who sells bread at the farmers market who really creeps me out because he wears teeny tiny 70’s shorts and little icky tanktops and he looks like he stores yeast in his basement next to cribs with handcuffs attached to them. Aside from that, I really like the farmers market. Oh, yeah, the dinner fucking rocked.

5) We watched The McLaughlin Group and The Next Food Network Star. Susie Fogelson‘s hair looked extra billowy! McLaughlin’s, not so much.

Posted by Kevin K. on 07/14/08 at 06:12 AM
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Thursday, June 26, 2008

My wife and I have a new funny we recently came up with that I figured I’d share with you folks.  Whenever one of us says something the other person doesn’t agree with or want to hear, we respond: “Please take me off your mailing list.” Here’s a sample exchange:

Me: I put the new phone next to the cactus because I didn’t like where the old one was next to the window.
Her: Really?
Me: Yeah, you had to lean over the rocking chair to get to the answering machine and I don’t like that people can hear our messages coming in if we have the window open.
Her: But doesn’t it look crowded next to the lamp?
Me: I moved the jar with the painted eggs.
Her: (silence)
Me: It looks good.  Trust me.
Her: But—
Me: Please take me off your mailing list.

Feel free to use it at home.  If it saves your marriage, we expect some nice flowers or a gift certificate or something.

Posted by Kevin K. on 06/26/08 at 07:59 AM
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Thursday, January 03, 2008

My great pal Mark’s resolutions were a day late arriving, but I’m a few days late calling your attention to them.  Go check ‘em out.  They’re wonderful. Mark’s one of the best new writers in the blogosphere and worthy of your attention.  He’s thoughtful and funny. A seemingly impossible combination but he pulls it off with ease.  Bravo.

Posted by Kevin K. on 01/03/08 at 09:06 AM
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Sunday, December 23, 2007

“Frosty the Snowman”—Leon Redbone & Dr. John (from my favorite Christmas album of all-time, Christmas Island)

• THE MOM AND POP CULTURE SHOP: My old pal Anna, who I haven’t seen in ages, is running a great lil’ blog that spotlights her thrift store finds (outsider art, weird vinyl, etc.).  It’s a fun place to visit, her blurbs are a hoot, and it shoehorns nicely into the holidays.
  
• MATT BURLINGAME: Burlingame’s oddball sculptures and dioramas don’t shoehorn quite as nicely into the holidays (unless Christmas makes you think about zombies and robots), but if any of you would like to buy me some of his artwork I’d consider it to be THE.BEST.XMAS.PRESENT.EVER.
  
• BUZZWORDS OF 2007:  The New York Times says, “You didn’t hear them here first. But chances are that in 2007 you caught these phrases somewhere.”  Ummm, actually, no, I hadn’t heard about a lot of these.  I would have thought “Nose bidet” was a really bad band name.
  
• IT’S THE MANDATE, STUPID: The New Republic‘s Noam Scheiber posted a good analysis of why Barack’s been creeping up on Hillary
  

Posted by Kevin K. on 12/23/07 at 01:57 PM
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Monday, December 17, 2007

...and line of the day, too, over at And I Am Not Lying:

...his prose clinks like bullet casings on wet concrete.

Posted by Kevin K. on 12/17/07 at 10:23 AM
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Tuesday, December 04, 2007

Recently I was cleaning off some of the detritus that we have magnetized (magneted?) to the fridge when I got a chance to reread something my wife and I had torn off a bag of Newman’s Own popcorn.  This is really what it said (image below the fold):

LEGEND: I’ll tell you how bad it is.  Nobody gets trusted with popcorn - except me. That includes the FBI, the IRS, Tiffany’s and concessionaires of any ilk.  A good flick arrives on the local screen, you see ol’ Newman scuttling across the lobby with a greasy brown paper bag of this homemade popcorn in one hand and—you guessed it—a machete in the other.  Who’s who lists a lot of one-armed people in my hometown.  They got caught trying to muscle their way into my greasy brown paper bag.  The way I feel—they got off easy. They should have been strung up.

Col. P.L. “Pops” Newman

“[Y]ou guessed it—a machete”? Are you fucking kidding me?  Who would guess that Paul Newman would be “scuttling across the lobby” with “a greasy brown paper bag” and a fucking machete? And since when did “who’s who” start keeping tabs of amputees in any town, let alone the town where a deranged Paul Newman is running around wildly hacking people’s arms off? And why isn’t he under arrest for this crime or locked up in a mental ward?  He owns the company that makes the popcorn and, instead of offering people free samples, HE LOBS OF THEIR LIMBS WITH A MACHETE if they try to eat any! And then, in case you don’t think his out-of-control sharing issues were batshit crazy enough, he has to add that all of these poor, sans-arms bastards are lucky because HE SHOULD HAVE KILLED THEM.

What does it say on the side of his salsa jars?  That if you take any from him he’ll slowly peel off your skin and wear it like a suit? That he’ll jam your open mouth over a curb and ram his boot into the back of your head? If you sneak a sip of his lemonade will he tear the legs off of your children and make coffee tables using their tiny appendages?

I don’t even want to think about what he’ll do if you try to use any of his steak sauce because it probably involves guillotines, mass genocide and skull fucking.

read the whole post »

Posted by Kevin K. on 12/04/07 at 01:31 PM
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Tuesday, November 27, 2007

There’s a coffee shop for sale in Maspeth, NY:

Listing Description

Low Rent $2000 5 year lease - Landlord willing to extend Basement No other restaurant nearby. Busy commercial area. Schools, offices, retail, lodging and industrial all nearby. Large Irish, Italian and Hispanic base. High breakfast/lunch traffic. Full inventory included. Ready to go! Smooth transition. Currently open at 8am, close at 7pm six days. Increase earning potential by adding pork products such as ham. Also beers. Motivated seller. Please call to schedule appointment. SERIOUS INQUIRES ONLY.

(Thanks for the tip, Colin!)

UPDATE: I guess we were driving a little too much traffic to the listing because Restaurants For Sale Online has pulled it.  Or, I guess, someone with an excess of pork pouring out of their pockets might have bought it. You can view the Google cache here or check out our screencap.

Posted by Kevin K. on 11/27/07 at 07:20 AM
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Monday, November 26, 2007

This morning, while watching an Ocean Spray commercial, I realized that I know next to nothing about the harvesting of cranberries.

This concludes this morning’s edition of Things I Know Nothing About.

Posted by Kevin K. on 11/26/07 at 09:14 AM
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Tuesday, November 20, 2007

There’s a special part of me that knows liking something as insipid as “Cute With Chris” is bad for my “cool” ranking, but that special part of me is too cool to care.  (Warning to my sensitive readers: This video features a dog with eye cancer, but his name is “Happy” and, by all accounts, he seems to be.)

Posted by Kevin K. on 11/20/07 at 10:51 AM
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Monday, November 19, 2007

Screw politics and blog wars (even ones we clearly win), let’s have us a hoot:

Bossy had so much fun in NYC last year that she had to return.  I love this gal.

Posted by Kevin K. on 11/19/07 at 03:20 PM
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Friday, November 16, 2007

In this case, “WTF?” = “What the fortune?”  This is what was inside of the fortune cookie that my wife got with her Chinese food last night:

The greatest medicine is the emptiness of everything.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go drown myself in a huge vat of lo mein.

Posted by Kevin K. on 11/16/07 at 11:33 AM
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