Peace and Latkes

Cheery New Year's Resolution - having given up tobacco, red meat, daily alcohol consumption and other free radicals in the past few months, I'm adding blog commenting to my list of dietary restrictions. It's just too Meta, too Kid-A, and this is, after all, the late Naughties.*

Good Yontif, Twatwaffles

*Josh and the legendary (or mythical) Raven Power "secret blog" excepted.

With Baited Breath

Like, we're both into publishing, the internet, youth culture, pink, tearjerker movies and while I never actually read her favorite chick-lit beach book, I Am Charlotte Simmons, but I totally loved Wolfe's other book Diary of a Mad Bride, so like, same thing.

Oh, I can so see it now. We're gonna like full-on relate about being hot and semitic in the magazine world and how people should just grow up and get over their problems with our armhair. We don't complain about you being all fat and ugly do we?

I mean, at least not to your face.

Whateva - me and 'Toos are tots gonna be BFFs! This is gonna be AWSOME!!

FALLOUTBOY!!!

* huh, mmm, meh and wow.

The Squeaky Wheel Gets the Social Lubricant

Look, don't get me wrong, I love booze (beer in particular) and I love my friends (thems what buys me beer in particular), but I'm actually getting tired of the central activity of meeting up with them being booze (or frooze for that matter.)

Let me re-phrase - I'm tired of being a drinker around people I like.

Isn't there something, I dunno, icky about saying, "let's go get a drink sometime" in the same way that you used to say, "wanna come over to my place and play G.I. Joe"? I don't know about you, but I think I in particular need a little air between me and that.

Now, again, don't get me wrong. I'm no problem drinker. Time was, I was a pro-drinker (witness me in the twilight years of a storied career.) But there has been sharp decline of local chums as of late. Sigh... if only my friends were bad Doctors of Philosophy or never married their nice, rich doctor husbands, then they'd all still be licking Red Hook off the floor of The Twizzie instead of living hither and yon.

Losing my neighborhood beer league means I'm woefully out of practice when it comes to downing pints. I mean, at this rate I'm only drunk like twice a week - I mean can you imagine?

When I do get my drink on, its generally with the wonderful folks I like to call the Downtown Contingent. You know damn well who you are and you know dawn well that you all live on the wrong side of the river. Love y'all as I do and greatful for your love, this old man can't truck himself through Peter Kalikow's Maze of Death a couple of hours each way without some ill effects.

This is all a long way of saying that since I came back from a certain Brooklyn boy's birthday (happy two-one big fellah!) I've felt like whatever they make these out of.

So we're trying this as an experiment - because the social lubricants aren't helping me slip and slide around as much as they used to and between friends and beer, I'll take friends, I'm gonna try "getting a drink" without actually drinking.

Yes, that asshole sipping water - yeah, that's gonna be me from now until New Year's - call it an Old Year's Resolution if it makes you happy.

So, be nice. Understand if I'm a little less moody and more restrained than normal and don't give me no funny looks when I light up a joint at Boat, okay?

No, you can't fucking have any.

Africa Rules!

Diamond wars! Sex death-plagues. Madonna babynaps. Genocide. Gold mine pirates fighting an underground battle against the police!

When the 6:30 news reads like G.I. Joe, who wouldn't Want to Be African?


Seriously, though - donate.

What Generation Gap?

My father is 59, a graduate of Yale (where he hung with G.B. Trudeau and various presidential candidates from both sides of the aisle) and Harvard Law, got 1600 on his SATs, taught underprivilaged kids in Boston to avoid the draft, has been a partner at three prestigous law firms, helped draft the first versions of the "Living Will" while doing pro bono work for the GMHC, is a longtime supporter and periodic boardmember of the City Ballet, wears custom-built shoes handcrafted in small, Northern Italian villages, assists in many charitable causes and has summered in the Hamptons since they invented sand.

Here's what he emailed me today:

I have to take this home and read tonite--glazing over now. Call u in the am.

Lovely what the Information Age has done to discourse, no?

Strangled by the Tiffany Network

I had a dream last night - I was a contestant on Big Brother. Naturally, I was the resident Puck and managed to make the resident Julie (Katie Couric) cry repeatedly. When the cameras were off, however, she chased me up the house's central staircase, pinned me against a wall and choked me with her lovely, lithe fingers. "What do you think this is," she asked somewhat rhetorically, "a game?"

Don't worry, when the cameras came back on moments later, the whole nation saw her true face.

Behnaz Sarafpour - Totally Working for The Koreans

Proving my bread and butter tain't necessarily three-dollar bill, watch as this news wire comfortably lands between The Military Channel and FTV:
POSTED: 8:47 p.m. EDT, September 3, 2006
LONDON, England (Reuters) -- German spies hid secret messages in drawings of models wearing the latest fashions in an attempt to outwit Allied censors during World War Two, according to British security service files released on Monday. Nazi agents relayed sensitive military information using the dots and dashes of Morse code incorporated in the drawings. They posted the letters to their handlers, hoping that counterespionage experts would be fooled by the seemingly innocent pictures. But British secret service officials were aware of the ruse and issued censors with a code-breaking guide to intercept them. The book -- part of a batch of British secret service files made public for the first time -- included an example of a code hidden in a drawing of three young models. "Heavy reinforcements for the enemy expected hourly," reads a message disguised as a decorative pattern in the stitching of their gowns, hats and blouses.

"Along the way pointed out by the Great leader,
we will march not sparing our lives... also, fairytale
romance is back with a sexy bang this fall."