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The warm weather caught me off guard, and I still wore my thick winter coat yesterday and today. I felt like a tank wheeling down Hudson St. with all these lighthearted people strutting by in their short sleeve shirts holding skateboards.

I’m also carrying around two bent up and dented license plates from the car I gave away a month ago. It’s such a hassle to get down to the Brooklyn DMV, located in (begin sarcasm)convenient(end sarcasm) Coney Island, that I’ve had them with me this whole time. But I’m determined to get them in the mail today. At any rate, while ambling down the street in my enormous coat, I pulled them out of my bag to inspect them. [...]

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It goes something like “Just to get BY, just to get BY, just to get BY” or maybe it’s “just to get HIGH, just to get HIGH, just to get HIGH.” It rocks. It’s not some slower mid-tempo thing. I’ve heard it on Sirius here at work but have never done the necessary leg work (i.e. walking across the room) to get a song title and artist info. I would sing it for you, but this is just a writing blog and I have the vocal range of a rock.

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Part of Eliza’s and my trip upstate last weekend was me discovering the October 17, 2005 issue of The New Yorker. I subscribe to that magazine but never read it because I’m inefficient that way. So this was my first viewing of it. To my DISMAY, it had an article on the state of comics books called “Words and Pictures”, subtitled “Graphic Novels Come Of Age.”

Ugh! Journalists of the world, know this: there is NO reason to tell people that “comics aren’t for kids anymore” or that “comics are serious literature” or as this article said “Graphic novels — pumped up comics — are to many in their teens and twenties what poetry once was.”

I’ve read this same story in [...]

8 Comments | Tags: comics

My standards for when it is proper to recycle are completely arbitrary. I resent bundling up cans and bottles at home because NYC recycling procedures are so Byzantine that I feel like I’m figuring out my taxes once a week. So a lot of times I’ll throw a few bottles in the regular trash if it means putting off dealing with the mandatory light blue bags.

However, I stubbornly refuse to get new paper cups at work. I reuse the same one for weeks. It makes my desk look about 30% more disgusting and contributes exactly .00000000001% to the further preservation of our planet. It’s filled with water but flakes of leftover coffee stain it brown, as if I scraped my [...]

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It seems over the last 3 or 4 months that when walking around New York City I am perpetually trapped immediately behind a slow person of the fat variety. He or she will step in front of me as I depart the subway and bob in front of me like sagging inner tube blocking my path out of the pool. And I’ll race up out of my seat, already late to my next appointment, only to be stuck behind them as they widen their bodies by sheer force of will — looking up and around like a mentally retarded duck, forcing me to BE SLOW. They have strollers, they are eating sandwiches, they are eighty-five years old and don’t trust [...]

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Saw V for Vendetta Thursday night with Eliza, Kevin and Cat. My proclomation: it was….. okay! A bit better than Batman Begins, and I wasn’t overwhelmed with that. But Brian loved Batman Begins and Kevin loved V — as did Eliza and Cat — so I feel like I must be suffering from pre-conceived notions from having loved the comic first.

Qualifiers of my own credibility aside, I thought it was gutsy in a lot of ways, but ultimately felt like someone trying to simply do a good job of being faithful to some list of requirements rather than telling a story. It felt like a list of ideas being stated, rather than a story being told. “What I believe [...]

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Doing an improv show tomorrow night with Primal Bias, 5 Dudes and special guest Chantico Warfare. Silly names, all! Basically three good improv groups, $8 — and, no shit — 40 oz. beers handed to the first buncha people there. Maybe everyone, depending on how many we buy before the show. Probably everyone. Come and be late 90s gangstaz Saturday night.

10:30, $8
UNDER St. Marks
94 St. Marks Place, between 1st Ave. & Avenue A
Basement space, no wheelchair access
(st. marks place = 8th street)

PRIMAL BIAS: kevin cragg, kevin hines, will hines, dave lombard, silvija ozols, gavin speiller, erik tanouye
FIVE DUDES: eugene cordero, chris gethard, bobby moynihan, charlie sanders, zach woods,
CHANTICO WARFARE: cory cavin, emily felt, [...]

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Catching up. Might expand on some topics later.

• Eliza and I spent last weekend in the Catskills. That makes us sound like Henny Youngman. Or 80. Even moreso if you count Eliza’s time knitting in a for-real rocking chair, and my desire to hide inside and read. It’s off-season, which meant cheaper room rates for us and a hilariously high percentage of businesses closed. Our cabin was great: I cringe at the thought B&B’s — but Eliza found one that was low on fluffiness and high on spaciousness and having-its-own-kitchen. Very nice. And wi-fi!
• Top 50 Comics Publications of 2005, according to Tom Spurgeon:
  http://www.comicsreporter.com/index.php/briefings/commentary/4505/

  Seeing the entries on Batman: Year One and Watchmen warmed my increasingly robotic heart.

• I made this [...]

6 Comments | Tags: batman, eliza

My sideburns have never been thicker. I look like a lost son of Martin Van Buren, cast 150 years into the future. I’d put a picture up, but that’s for unemployed punks who have time for such shennanigans.

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I’m currently creating a web site (in what is apparently a popular trend out there) to let women upload pictures of their ass in an attempt to be voted a “booty of the week.”

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