Jerry Remy, announcer for NESN and the Boston Red Sox, has a local chain of Tcotchkes-style restaurants. This bit of trivia - the existence of the chain and the importance of its owner - lives in a weird limbo between "apropos" and "boring," depending on the audience. People who live in Boston need hear nothing further than the restaurant's name before instantly knowing every item on the menu and the decor. People who don't live in the New England area will nod politely - oh, a sportscaster owns a restaurant; how unlikely - and forget the man's name once the story ends.

Anyhow, there's one in Logan Airport right next to the Airtran terminal. It used to be a Legal Seafood and it's about six months from becoming a Johnny Rocket's. Every space in an airport that's zoned commercial oscillates between just having been or just about to be a Johnny Rocket's, depending on the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the airport's proximity to Chicago. I ordered a hot dog with a Caesar salad (because that makes it okay); I got a 3/4-pound beef log drizzled with cheese, relish, and onions. And the side salad. "That's a big dick," said the 50-something man behind me, "I mean, a big dog." If his stories were to be believed, he was on his way to his third wedding, this time to a 70-year-old woman for money; if not, he was really bad at delivering a joke.



The Departures screen had said my flight was pushed back 30 minutes when I entered Jerry Remy's Sports Bar and Grille; when I exited, it had changed its mind. I have never seen this happen. I have never seen a plane arrive earlier than announced, especially when it had already been posted late. The takeoff window shrank from 60 minutes to 25 minutes, and I had yet to pass through security, and my pre-printed boarding pass reminded me, in its smug little Helvetica, that the plane shut its doors 10 minutes before departure. Trying not to fume, I slipped into the security line, emptying my pockets of metal and slipping off my shoes.

"Put your shoes flat on the belt!", a guard would announce from time to time. "Only things that go in the bins are laptops and loose items. Jackets, bags, shoes - flat on the belt."

Ten minutes before departure, I stepped up to the X-ray machine. I walked through. It beeped. "Do you have anyth--", the guard asked. "My belt," I said, backing up and whipping it off like Jet Li vs. Billy Chow (watch all the way to the end).



Passing security, I scooped up my wallet, cell phone, ring, loose change, belt, boarding pass, messenger bag, jacket and backpack and began padding down the halls of the Airtran terminal at a decent clip. I made it about one hundred feet before I realized how comfortable the ground felt. Turning, I made it as far as a 65-year-old TSA screener, his Orville Redenbacher hair fringing his face like a halo. Had I been charging the security gate at a full sprint, screaming "Surely the Party of God will be triumphant!", he might have tripped me. Maybe. "Are you trying to get out?", he asked.

"I left my shoes there."

"Just go get the man in the blue shirt," he said, blue being the TSA uniform. "He's the supervisor."

I flagged the man in the blue shirt down. "I left my shoes on the belt! Brown? Size 13?"

Fortunately, I was the only person to have made that mistake (that hour), so security quickly reunited me with my shoes. I made it to my gate, discovering that my flight had been pushed 30 minutes back.



The next morning, waking up in the family homestead in Maryland, my father suggested we take the dog for a walk. As I put my shoes on - Merona, Target's in-house brand; brown, leather, worn but sturdy - I noticed an unfamiliar notch in one of the soles. Curious, I turned the shoe over. A ragged slit had been torn in the entire sole from left to right, cutting all the way through the rubber to the very base of the shoe. This wasn't just a hole in the bottom. This was a rough horizontal line that had cut clean through the sole of the shoe and stopped at the leather. The right shoe had been thinking about snitching; the left shoe had made an example of it.

Am I saying that the TSA, in the twenty seconds that I left my shoes unattended, shredded one of them with a government-issue razor blade? No, but I'll imply it with all my might.

I don't spend a lot of time staring at the bottom of my feet, but I would have noticed a tear that size when I put them on in the morning. The only time they were out of my control the entire day was when I put them on a conveyor belt ("flat on the belt! the only things that go in bins are laptops ...") and forgot them. And if I hadn't thrown these shoes in a closet in Maryland, I'd post a picture to show you. This isn't a puncture; this isn't a hole that worried itself wide. This is an even cut that runs between the tarsus and the metatarsals, deep and ragged. My shoes bear the scars of malice aforethought.

By an odd coincidence, these are the second pair of Target shoes to disintegrate catastrophically in 15 months. Am I wrong in suspecting a conspiracy? No. I'm never wrong. Especially not about conspiracies.

Original post

did you warn me my overdraft limit was slammin back to ZERO today? even though my next work cheque won't be in for two weeks?

why yes i believe you did! but i forgot! *FACEPALM*DESK*FLOOR*

• 10:49 Having email/phone woes, if you've had trouble getting in touch, try try again! :) #
• 11:46 Top conservative blogger quits the Right; here's his 10 reasons why bit.ly/832Unp #
• 18:11 Looks like no COBRA after all. Sure could use a little of that ole' devil Socialism hereabouts... #
• 00:18 These cows are very small, but THESE cows are FAR AWAY bit.ly/5B0t8B #

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Somebody has been flying an incredibly noisy helicopter over my neighborhood almost every day recently. Sometimes it comes by in the morning and wakes me up, sometimes it arrives in the afternoon. This afternoon I was outside when I heard it approaching, and it was louder than I've ever heard it. The racket is actually painful when the machine gets close. I looked around trying to see the infernal device, but the noise was everywhere so I didn't know where to look. In the end I missed it. I think it passed very near and to the north, and not very high. I heard the kids up the block whooping after it had passed, so they must have seen it.

But two of the feral cats were in the yard and went into a complete panic. One dove under the jasmine hedge, and the other ran into the shed. They were wild with terror.

I wish there was a helicopter spray like bug spray.

So, anyone out there have any brilliant suggestions for places to stay while in New York City this weekend? Last time Cass and I went, we stayed in a little family-run inn in Morningside Heights, which was great — the shared bathrooms were skeevy, but the rooms were clean and the staff was friendly and there was a great corner grocery store around the corner, with stacks of fresh fruit outside and homemade baked goods and salads on the inside. And it was $60 or so a night.

And I can't find it again, mostly since I don't remember its name. After hours of frustrating Internet searches, I finally just used Google Street View to take a virtual walk around Morningside Heights and find the address where the place had been, but there's no signage, and Google doesn't acknowledge that there's a hotel in that area.

The last time we stayed in New York, a casual Internet search turned up a dozen or so places like that — semi-sketchy family-run inns with shared bathrooms and cheap rooms. But that was years ago. Now Google is only giving me hostels (as low as $19 a night!) and places in Newark and downtown luxury hotels with rooms up to $995 a night. Was there an entire industry of fly-by-night hotels that got shut down over the last four or five years?

At any rate, I'm flying into town late Friday night, spending the weekend wandering around on my own, probably working in The Onion's NYC office on Monday, and then Monday night, appearing with Keith, Josh, Nathan, and others at Union Hall in Brooklyn to do a reading / presentation on behalf of our new book Inventory. (30% off on Amazon, though for a while it was 75% off, which propelled it into the top 100 bestselling books on the site.)

So if you find yourself in the area on Monday night, you should absolutely come out and say hi.

And in the meantime, I'm actually considering a hostel, since I've never stayed in one, and I'm curious. It'd be an adventure. Besides, when traveling, I pretty much just view a hotel room as a place to be unconscious for a while when exhausted, so I don't really want to pay $250 for a bed I'll use exactly the same way whether it's in a nice private room or a hostel. Though I am also considering staying at the Chelsea, just to stay at the Chelsea. Unfortunately, they have rooms available Sunday and Monday night, but not Friday or Saturday. So… I dunno. I'm perilously close to pulling a catechism and sleeping on a park bench. That also would be an adventure.

Today A. died. I didn't know him very well at all, but what few times I met him, he was 100% awesome. It was like hanging out with Miles Vorkosigan. Not too many people you can say that about.

Yesterday two friends of mine welcomed a brand new baby into the world.

Everybody's crying tonight, but for different reasons. I think I'm going to go hug my guy. 'Night, all.

The Seven Wonders of the World

Junior high school students in Chicago were studying the Seven Wonders of the World. At the end of the lesson, the students were asked to list what they considered to be the Seven Wonders of the World. Though there was some disagreement, the following received the most votes:

1. Egypt’s Great Pyramids
2. The Taj Mahal in India
3. The Grand Canyon in Arizona
4. The Panama Canal
5. The Empire State Building
6. St. Peter’s Basilica
7. China’s Great Wall

While gathering the votes, the teacher noted that one student, a quiet girl, hadn’t turned in her paper yet. So she asked the girl if she was having trouble with her list. The quiet girl replied, “Yes, a little. I couldn’t quite make up my mind because there were so many.” The teacher said, “Well, tell us what you have, and maybe we can help.”

The girl hesitated, then read, “I think the Seven Wonders of the World are:

1. to touch…
2. to taste…
3. to see…
4. to hear… (She hesitated a little, and then added…)
5. to feel…
6. to laugh…
7. and to love.

The room was so quiet, you could have heard a pin drop.

Then all at once, the students began gagging and vomiting, flooding the floor with a tsunami of lunch meat.

After the regurgitation subsided, the teacher told her, "No, that's wrong. You've entirely omitted the sense of smell" and awarded her an F for the quarter.

And she never spoke up and bothered anyone again.

So this week in the comics I read an evil entity creatively named "Nekron" has turned Superman and Wonder Woman and other superheroes into a zombie horde, while in my soaps (you heard me) the show's "supervillain" makes a surprise appearance by popping out of the coffin (with a cheery grin on his face, of course) meant for a guy he murdered in the middle of said guy's funeral.

See, this is why I watch and read this stuff: crazy-ass plot twists. Let's see you get that kind of over-the-top insanity out of "Mad Men" or Thomas Pynchon, dammit.

The History of Birth Control

I did a report on Margaret Sanger at some point but I honestly can't remember whether it was college or high school o_o

She started doing this at about three weeks old



So adorable. Sometimes she giggles too, and other times she dozes off while feeding and smiles with my nipple in her mouth. Ha.

I really want to make a post and tell you about my trip to California and the other stuff that's happening but I'm so busy with school stuff and work stuff that I don't feel I can properly take the time to do that. I'm still finding time here and there to take breaks to dip into the Sookie Stackhouse books, but that can be done for just a few minutes at a time.

(Henry Cavill, via Erin)

The customer hasn't renewed my contract for next year, so I'm a free agent again.

I'm looking for system administrator and application support work in the greater Los Angeles area.

If I had been offered a $20-off code for a website that sells Ugg-style boots, would any of you be inclined to take advantage of it?

Hypothetically, I mean. Totally. I do not have this code as such yet: the site in question is asking me to basically do a post saying "HEY GUYZ BOOTZ" and post the existence of the code, and they'll pay me for the privilege. I am not sure how comfortable I am with that.

Lady Gaga is playing Boston tonight, and I don't have a ticket. I nearly got tickets when the tour started, but the Semiprecious Weapons, which were openers elsewhere, weren't on the bill, so it wasn't enough to get me to commit. I was a lot less into her then than I am now.

We've been playing her music at home pretty much all the time, and then I am leaving the building, and guess who's playing on the radio? Yes, it's Radio Gaga.

Anyhow, her flaws are evident to me, mostly made up of the fact that she's just a kid, but her appeal more than outweighs them. Evidently, many people disagree. MANY MANY PEOPLE. It's strange how she divides people. But I guess that's just how it is if you're a big weirdo, and a take-no-prisoners woman, or both.

• 23:17 Girlfriend's out playing Guitar Hero; I'm at home playing DJ Hero. #modernmetaphors #

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Dear Log,

Tired of the blocky Aramaic Hebrew script on dreydels?  So upgrade/rollback to good timey Phoenecian/Unishem letterforms!

Extra credit: origami dreydel.

If there's one thing I regret about withdrawing from the social scene over the past two years, it's that it's made me more of a mystery, more of a formless, almost corporate entity.

I have a friend who is routinely super-secretive about everything to do with his life - whom he's dating, what he does with his time, everything - to the point that even some close friends don't know a lot about what's going on with him. It creates an atmosphere of intrigue; if it's a secret, everyone wants to know so much more - and everyone wants to know first. It means people gossip more, people pry. He retreats more. It's never-ending.

I operate under the assumption that everyone is going to find out everything eventually anyway. I can control how I present myself, but I can't control how that's perceived or what else is told beyond the narrative I present. I only keep secrets that involve more interests than just my own, and I have things that are more public or less - things you'd have to directly ask me about. Since most people don't ask direct questions about anything sensitive or emotional, some issues just don't come up.

I am louder about the issue around my high school relationship and the emotional and physical abuse that went on there, because I believe that my silence makes me complicit in it happening to other people. If his name comes up, I bring it up, which isn't all that often. The reactions I get range mostly from anger to uncomfortable shrugging and quick dismissal. I know it makes people who are friends with him, who are in bands with him, uncomfortable, and it should. I generally don't like making people uncomfortable, but in this case it's warranted.

His presence and my absence in the local music scene created a lot of drama this summer, though most people wouldn't probably know that's the root. I won't book the band he's in, and that became an issue. I know everyone thinks it's about someone else, and I probably should have been more clear in my communications. I mean, a lot of people in the band have done douchey things, and really, which douche am I objecting to?
Anyway, I get that being more physically present this summer, in particular, would have put a lid on some of the bitchy hissy-fittyness just by reminding people that I'm a real human, with a real human face and all that. It wasn't possible, because of work, but I doubt I would've done it anyway. I withdrew to get better; better at the things I do, and better in my personal, professional and artistic life, spending less time around a scene that sets all its bars so low. And I have. It's been lovely, not to be constantly managing my responses, trying to temper my critical eye, playing nice with people I think of as hacks and charlatans while trying not to belie my true opinions - talking about the costumes to avoid talking about the acting. There are people I miss, too; people who are too embedded to be dealt with separate from their scene, but who are great people. Or who would be great people, if they could just get away.

I generally don't want to be a mystery; besides finding out everything, people also have a tendency to colour in whatever they don't know. They create facts that fit. They mould me into the enemy, or the aggressor, because I'm absent and no one is contradicting them and it's always very energizing to have a fight on your hands. It's why people have sometimes imagined that witches had cursed them; it takes a lot of the responsibility off of your choices, your actions, if someone else is sabotaging you. It means it's not your fault, and you can just wallow in the misery of being downtrodden.

Someone was telling me the other day about a mutual acquaintance who has a serious hate on for a celebrity because they were on the same playing field once, and the celebrity has gone on to get famous and wealthy in their field while the acquaintance has left it altogether. The acquaintance feels that the celebrity took the fame that should have been theirs. Obviously, the choices they made had nothing to do with it, right? And there's a finite amount of success or good fortune to go 'round, too, which the celebrity sucked up.

Peterborough's a town where there's a distinct sense of being owed something. Of being held back only by forces beyond yourself. And a pretty sizable amount of bitter sniping goes on about anyone who doesn't sit and subscribe to the misery with all of the others, even more so about anyone who raises a bar or makes money or manages to make a go of it. If half that energy were directed towards artistic practice, there'd be a 21st century renaissance in our little town.

Being absent from that is the best thing I can do for myself, for the people who love me, and for the success of my career and artistic practice. It means I lose a very small number of people I genuinely love and care for. It means my intentions occasionally get misconstrued, and that I occasionally get flamed by people I've done favours for in the past. It means I make myself a mystery, a faceless oppressor, which helps to sever more connections as I see people's true colours and bad behaviour.

Junkies can't just give up junk; they have to remove themselves from the lifestyles. This bullshit was a needle in my vein for too long.

Saturday was the one-year anniversary of my 10,000 3x5 project. To my amazement, I created over 1300 drawings on 3x5 cards in the first year, which puts me on pace to finish the project in just under eight years. So I'm really just now getting started.

Here are a few of the latest drawings, from the past few days:











You can check out all 1300+ drawings on Flickr. Most drawings are available for sale: $25 for one, $40 for two. I put all drawings in a nice dollar store frame for your convenience. Just follow the instructions on each drawing's Flickr page.

(...and also I'm embarrassed that I just now noticed that my first three entries all start with the same letter. NOT INTENTIONAL, SORRY FOLKS, SORRY)

American Virgin
DC Comics/Vertigo (Steven T.Seagle, Becky Cloonan) 2006-2008
Wikipedia Article

Unrelated to the Rob Schneider comedy released earlier this year and unfortunately saddled with the archly tacky tagline “From the Bible Belt to the Chastity Belt” (what?), Seagle’s American Virgin is far from perfect; a writer who occasionally crawls up his own head (you may care to reference his earliest works, Kafka and Amazon, as examples from which he has strayed but slightly), Seagle indulges himself in some very stage-y scenes which defy readability, and some characters (such as Mel, a sort of gender-queer John Constantine by way of a Quentin Tarantino film) which seem cast from Vertigo’s “weird for weird’s sake” mold.

Still, the story of sex symbol, evangelist and abstinence advocate Adam Chamberlain’s vision-soaked journey to confront the murder of his fiancée and come to … er, grips … with his own overpowering sexual urges makes for an action/drama as compelling as anything you might see on HBO.

American Virgin also manages to perform one of the most convincing acts of alchemy in contemporary comic book fiction, slowly transforming the very real and practically shamanic presence of God (or, at the very least, of Godliness) which permeates the early half of the story into a very real and practically shamanic omnipresence of potent sexuality. That the sacred and the profane are as much essentially united as they are at violent odds with one another is one of the key themes to the book, and the friction thereby generated keeps this often violent and generally morally oblique story moving at breakneck pace.

Also, it cannot be stated enough that artist Becky Cloonan really stitches this book together, providing artwork at once both saintly and sexy...

American Virgin Vol 1
American Virgin Vol 2
American Virgin Vol 3
American Virgin Vol 4

Asterios Polyp
Pantheon Books (David Mazzuchelli) 2009
Wikipedia article

It’s always surprised me that Mazzuchelli’s name is so rarely mentioned - if ever - in the same breath as Chris Ware or Dan Clowes, although that arguably has as much to do with properties as anything; Clowes has Eightball and its wealth of movie material, Ware has Acme Novelty Library and its recurring characters, while – an excellent body of work aside, Mazzuchelli had the experimental and generally under-the-radar Rubber Blanket.

Asterios Polyp – adeptly laid out, vibrant, complex, and (much like James Joyce’s Ulysses) one of those books which teaches the reader how to read it as they go - is very likely the book which will change Mazzuchelli’s fortunes. Very far removed in style from the journeyman work of his younger days and distinctly his own voice (unlike the excellent 1994 adaptation of Paul Auster’s book City of Glass, probably Mazzuchelli’s best known work since Batman:Year One or Daredevil: Born Again but, while a clever adaptation, an adaptation under another writer), it’s distinctly a series of visual and structural signatures which are among the most stirring in modern comics.

Asterios Polyp

The Onion's AV Club recently put together a list of the best comic books and graphic novels of the last decade, and it got me thinking about my own picks for the same period – many of which, admittedly, overlap with theirs.

Still, the 21st century has, so far, been a real renaissance for the comic art form and - speaking as a fellow who has read volumes upon volumes of books dating from every decade of the last eight which even had comic books - I can honestly say with conviction that we have never had a better ten year spread. The variety, the quality, the expanse and the experimental atmosphere of the last ten years are, when taken together, unparalleled.

So, what follows over the next few posts will be my personal picks for the Twenty-One Greatest Comics of the Twenty-First century (so far). And with that being said, some caveats:

• First off, I realize that the year – and therefore the “Naughts” aren’t quite yet over, but we’re close enough to the finish line that I think we can call the race (although, admittedly, one of my picks is only a month or so old, and I would’ve missed it if I’d started this list at the beginning of November). Also, a lot of these comics would make great gifts for the holidays, so, you know, I thought I’d get it in early... Please notice my Amazon Associate-powered links ...


• Along those lines, I also realize that the first decade of the 21st century isn’t actually over until the end of next year. I also don’t care – as far as goes popular culture, decades run from zero to nine. Plus, I’m just following what the AV Club suggested, so go yell at them if you feel you gotta.


• I’m numbering these just because I want to keep track of the “Twenty One Comics” gimmick. These aren’t ranks. I got no interest in ranks, I got no interest in deciding if Marvel Two-In-One #26 is better than Devil Dinosaur #3, metaphorically speaking.


• My aim is to cover as many genres and creators as possible, my guiding concept is that the books I end up selecting should compose a great library of which anyone could be proud, whether they’re superhero, general fiction, non-fiction, memoir or whatever collectors. Even the books with the superheroes in it, I’d be proud to show off in my library.


• More than one of my picks was originally published prior to 2000 and is being included because either a definitive collection or an American edition was first released some time after 1999.


• If you disagree with these picks, try not to take it personally - a lot of people are, strangely enough (check out the comments in the above-linked AV Club article for an example). Might I suggest, in fact, that if you feel strongly about some book's inclusion or exclusion, you oughtta make your own list?

Okay, so, on to the first!

All-Star Superman
DC Comics (Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely, Jamie Grant) 2005-2008
Wikipedia article

It’s damn near impossible to keep Grant Morrison off of this list, and it’s only because of a self-imposed rule that I limit each author to a single selection which keeps me from listing at least five of his other works (see below), including three with his frequent collaborator, graphic designer and fellow Scot Frank Quitely.

The charm of Morrison’s self-contained Superman epic is that it’s imbued with science fiction and metaphysical wonder, but more than that, truly believable and tender emotion. Arguably, Morrison has written several series which may be construed as love letters; to comic books in Flex Mentallo, to superheroes in Seaguy, and here, to the original superhero Superman. Beyond anything else, Morrison may be the first writer since the lovelorn and longing Jerry Siegel to imbue the Superman and Lois relationship with a resonance so compelling that it’s enviable.

Other great titles Morrison has produced in the last ten years: The icon establishing JLA Earth 2, the apple-cart upsetting New X-Men, the phenomenal WE3, the engrossing Seaguy and its sequel Seaguy: Slaves of Micky Eye, the very sweet and funny Vimanarama, mindbending The Filth, ambitious collaborative effort 52, ambitious and hindered series Final Crisis, and a personal favorite, the exceptionally ambitious and awe-inspiring Seven Soldiers. And that's just a few of them ...

All-Star Superman Vol 1
All-Star Superman Vol 2