Tat for Tarts

Excerpted from Yahoo News.

Faced with declining demand for their intricate doilies, the lacemakers of this Polish mountain community [Korniakow] came up with a solution: sexy underwear.

The business-boosting idea has given a new lease of life to Koniakow's 200-year-old cottage industry, but opponents say it is immoral and an insult to past customers...."Traditional lacecraft was too expensive, so it wasn't selling anymore. We weren't making a living. A friend jokingly said: 'Why don't you start making g-strings!'

"I took his word for it, and made one for myself and then for my friends. They were a hit," said Malgorzata Sanaszek.

Whether black, red or decked with flower motifs, and however little they leave to the imagination, the g-strings are made using handicraft techniques stretching back some two centuries in southern Poland.

But they have some advantages over traditional table ware.

"Making a g-string is even easier than making a tablecloth," said Krystyna Kaisar, an experienced lacemaker in her 50s.

A tablecloth can take between a week and six months to produce, depending on its size and detail. A g-string -- which sells for about 25 to 30 euros (32 to 38 dollars) -- takes about a day.

"It also brings in more money," said Kaisar.

Frankly...I think sexy is lost in translation. I don't know of any women who'd want a crotch doily.

Upon further examination--does the crotch look funny to you? and the placement of the heart? I think that could cause some unfortunate abrasion and chafing.

I've Got to Have This

Usually, I just end up sending the little automatic emails from Amazon in the trash. Rarely do I get info about something I'd actually really buy. But today, today was a good day.

I've known about this for a couple months now, thanks to Eric. He hooked me up with the stellar A John Waters Christmas and I cannot wait to get my grubby little paws on this. I love the cover art: the flipped collar, the red work pastoral backdrop, that disco-era pink marquee lettering.

According to the Amazon.com promo blurb, the selections on A Date are "all romantic seduction music I would play if I had you over."

There are no media player snippets available for preview yet, but the track list looks fantastic.

1. Tonight You Belong to Me - Patience and Prudence

2. Jet Boy Jet Girl - Elton Motello

3. Ain't Got No Home - Clarence "Frogman" Henry

4. I'd Love to Take Orders from You - Mildred Bailey,

5. In Spite of Ourselves - Iris DeMent, John Prine

6. All I Can Do Is Cry - Ike Turner, Tina Turner

7. Big Girls Don't Cry - Edith Massey

8. Imitation of Life - Earl Grant

9. Sometimes I Wish I Had a Gun - Mink Stole

10. Johnny Are You Queer? - Josie Cotton

11. Night Time is the Right Time

12. Hit the Road to Dreamland - Dean Martin

13. If I Knew You Were Comin' I'd've Baked a Cake - Eileen Barton,

14. Bewildered - Shirley & Lee

I've heard the Edith Massey cover of "Big Girls Don't Cry," it defies description; I'm hoping Mink Stole's "Sometimes I Wish I Had a Gun" delivers as well.

In related news, CourTV (those bastids) have not aired the "'Til Death Do Us Part" series yet; there's no upcoming airdate listed or any info regarding the series' status. Despite the fact that they've posted a press release about the show.

It's Come to This

from the Mutts Comics Website

A couple of years ago I managed to lose about 30 pounds of post-Prozac weight. I've gained back about 5 lbs of that since then, but overall the weight's stayed off. The time's come to lose the last 15-20. Back to the mini-meals and healthy snacks, high fiber and lean proteins, the sensible portion sizes and daily trips to the gym. Maaaaaaybe if I lose that weight and keep it off, I'll consider stopping smoking.

NJ sez: Don't Eat Our Squirrel

Or if you just have to have it--limit yourself to servings of the little critters no more than twice a week (less if you're a child or pregnant.) According to an AOL news story, there's a possibility that squirrels bagged near dumps are rich with lead.

The "L" Word

I'm no fan of Wolf Blitzer. There's something about him that looks like he's got a fine layer of frost on him and strikes me as profoundly creepy. I do, however, admire his way of twisting members of the Cheney clan's panties. The VP's recent "I'm gonna take my ball and go home" performance was truly enlightening.

Q We're out of time, but a couple of issues I want to raise with you. Your daughter Mary, she's pregnant. All of us are happy. She's going to have a baby. You're going to have another grandchild. Some of the -- some critics, though, are suggesting, for example, a statement from someone representing Focus on the Family:

"Mary Cheney's pregnancy raises the question of what's best for children. Just because it's possible to conceive a child outside of the relationship of a married mother and father, doesn't mean it's best for the child."

Do you want to respond to that?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: No, I don't.

Q She's obviously a good daughter --

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I'm delighted -- I'm delighted I'm about to have a sixth grandchild, Wolf, and obviously think the world of both of my daughters and all of my grandchildren. And I think, frankly, you're out of line with that question.

Q I think all of us appreciate --

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I think you're out of -- I think you're out of line with that question.

Q -- your daughter. We like your daughters. Believe me, I'm very, very sympathetic to Liz and to Mary. I like them both. That was just a question that's come up and it's a responsible, fair question.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I just fundamentally disagree with your perspective.

This is systemic behavior from them when their daughter Mary is mentioned. More pointedly, when Mary's lesbianism is mentioned. They take offense at anyone who references the fact. Well, they take offense at anyone who's not a Republican who references it. Can they not make some sort of statement (no matter how lukewarm and boilerplate it might be) that shows just how integral a part of their family and political lives she is? Before last year's mid-term elections, there was a lot made in the blogs about Bush and Cheney's private non-official tolerance toward gays and lesbians. It seems to me that they're unwilling, or perhaps unable, to address the contradictory natures of their own lives.

They've fronted a political machine that's demonized gays and lesbians, courting the evangelicals and conservatives while never making any sort of principled stand. What I'm curious about is why Cheney thinks this question is out of line? Their party has made this a question worth pursuing, a debate worth having. Would they be so quick to dismiss it if it was a prominent Democratic lesbian opting to have a child with her partner?

Consider the call by Rev. Don Wildmon to purge DC of gay staffers, a demand that went unaddressed.

Or maybe this little gem from James Dobson, in Time magazine (a bile-raising little screed called "Two Mommies is One Too Many")

We should not enter into yet another untested and far-reaching social experiment, this one driven by the desires of same-sex couples to bear and raise children. The traditional family, supported by more than 5,000 years of human experience, is still the foundation on which the well-being of future generations depends.

Their silence, their petulance, their pandering is nothing short of despicable.

??????

Text on the Digital World Tokyo site's Shop page declares: Get your hump on with the one and only USB Humping Dog!

Thanks...but...no. It's the high tech version of those wind-up hopping peckers.
There's also a YouTube clip of the thing in action, if you just HAVE to see.

A Murk An' Pall I See

Unbelievably, he said something during the State of the Union Adress I agree with; at least phonetically.

What Immor(t)al Hand or Eye II

Because of his omnipresence on the cable news outlets pimpin' the Deciderer's State of the Union address, I give you:

Yertle the Turtle


PLUS

Charlie McCarthy


EQUALS

Sen. Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell

The Vacation That Wasn't

Disregard prior transmission about Capital City.

I never made it. I did end up in the median of I-79 South at approximately the 87 mile marker. The car was at such an angle that we were afraid it would tip so we stood in the median for about an hour and twenty minutes, waiting for the tow truck. No one was hurt. The car was fine--I somehow managed to miss both the guardrail and a passing GMC SUV. Several people slowed to offer cell phones or just to gawk--some bitch took a picture with her cell phone. These same people almost caused accidents in our vicinity. Thank god nothing happened, but there were more than a few "crap your pants" moments.

I'd thought I might try to write this up and be funny and flip about it, but that has failed. I realized I don't wanna talk about this, or think about this.

I need to make note of one person who DID stop--a freaky aging hippie type with Howard Hughes' fingernails, swiggin' from a can of Faygo Root Beer. A State Trooper had stopped at about the same time and he gave him the fish eye treatment and made a point of being on his CB, calling in our location, checking on a wrecker. I think Freaky Hippie Man wanted to use my travelling companions as the seeds for his hillbilly harem.

I am not driving in snow for a very, very, very long time.

Busman's Holiday

I'm going out of town for a couple of days, off to Charleston, WV--or as I've taken to calling it lately...Capital City.

There's a swingin' town I know called... Capital City.
People stop and scream hello in... Capital City.
It's the kind of place that makes a bum feel like a king.
And it makes a king feel like some nutty, cuckoo,super-king.

It's against the law to frown in... Capital City.
You'll caper like a stupid clown when you chance to see...
Fourth Street and 'D'!  Yeah!

Once you get a whiff of it, you'll never want to roam,
From Capital City, my home sweet, swingin' home!

It should be interesting because I'm going with a friend for a work conference. I'm sort of interested to see what it'll be like. She's told me stories about coworkers--and now I feel like Jane Goodall off to observe them in their habitat.

Since she has seminars and other thrilling stuff during the day I'll spend a lot of time just in the hotel room working on poems, mss, etc. By some twist of fate, Brent Goodman at Wrong Horoscope has an excellent post here about issues to consider when submitting work. Hoepfully I can get in some bookshopping and maybe a trip to the dog track while I'm there.

Poem for the Day

As Aaron noted yesterday, and as I vaguely alluded, we've known one another since undergrad. He and our former teacher, Irene McKinney, are my longest-running poetry friendships. They're people whose advice and editorial suggestions I always listen to, because they're usually right, dammit.

Aaron posted a poem from Six O'Clock Mine Report and I thought I'd post a poem from her most recent book, Vivid Companion. It is, of all her books, my favorite. It's the consciousness, voice and range of interests I've known (and enjoyed) all these years--unbounded, passionate, unvarnished.

Ironweed

Everything resists; there is iron in the roots
and the squared-off stem, silted into its deepest chambers,

and this weed stands on the slope above the dry creekbed
and refuses nearly everything. It refuses a large and showy

flower; it tried that in another life, when it was an orchid.
It refuses to be pulled out of the ground without shrieking

like a mandrake, and it refuses to let those drops
of Mary's blood ooze from its stem. In the locust tree

above it, an army of cicadas is drilling holes
in the afternoon. Each of them hoists up a pneumatic drill

between its knees. The females have an ovipositor
like a curved iron thorn; they jackhammer their eggs

into the hide of the tree. Later the damaged branches
will fall off; but they don't care. Whatever lasts

resists until it can't. Do you know what I mean?
To someone trying to grow a life, our world casts

itself in a thick iron bark. She hones herself
almost beyond belief. Exhaustion is her flower.

My Fortune Cookie told me: Do not take a corkscrew inside a bouncy castle. Get a cookie from Miss Fortune

Mon Armor

What is it with conservative christians and armor? Bad enough that they cherry pick from rabbinical law; if nothing else proves they can't be trusted to interpret metaphor or allegory it's The Armor of God Pajamas.



I know I can't wait to sleep in silver lame with a helmet. And at 50.00 a pop what kid (or budding clubber) wouldn't?

But wait--RJ, you're being unfair! Look at what they get for their 50.00

• Pajama Top with breastplate of righteousness and hem of truth.
• Pajama Pant with wings of peace to cover feet.
• Helmet of Salvation.
• Shield of Faith pillow.
• Sword of the Spirit (New Testament).
• Activity coloring book.

Perhaps I am being harsh. They are, after all, getting both pajama tops and bottoms. Why would I think that this was some crass attempt to market crap to a specialized audience.

Poem for the Day

"A Step Away from Them" is not my favorite Frank O'Hara poem. It is proof (along with his James Dean poems and "The Day Lady Died") that the concerns of the elegy are not the dead but the living. It does, however, work its way to one of my favorite endings.

And that's what's been consuming my thoughts lately...ending the poem. I have little difficulty getting into the poem, starting it, helping it move along wherever it wants to go, but finishing it? Ooh, dear! I feel lost most times. I'm so often startled by others' ability to end a poem in "just the right way," so that when it's finished I feel simultaneously surprised and absolutely certain that it could end in no other way.

So I'll throw this out there: What's your favorite ending of a poem? What are your thoughts on endings in your own work?

A Step Away From Them

It's my lunch hour, so I go
for a walk among the hum-colored
cabs. First, down the sidewalk
where laborers feed their dirty
glistening torsos sandwiches
and Coca-Cola, with yellow helmets
on. They protect them from falling
bricks, I guess. The onto the
avenue where skirts are flipping
above heels and blow up over
grates. The sun is hot, but the
cabs stir up the air. I look
at bargains in wristwatches. There
are cats playing in sawdust

On
to Times Square, where the sign
blows smoke over my head, and higher
the waterfall pours lightly. A
Negro stands in a doorway with a
toothpick, languorously agitating
A blonde chorus girl clicks: he
smiles and rubs his chin. Everything
suddenly honks: it is 12:40 of
a Thursday.

Neon in daylight is a
great pleasure, as Edwin Denby would
write, as are light bulbs in daylight.
I stop for a cheeseburger at JULIET'S
CORNER. Giulietta Maina, wife of
Federico Fellini, e bell'attrice.
And chocolate malted. A lady in
foxes on such a day puts her poodle
in a cab.

There are several Puerto
Ricans on the avenue today, which
makes it beautiful and warm. First
Bunny died, then John LaTouche,
then Jackson Pollock. But is the
earth as full of life was full, of them?
And one has eaten and one walks,
past the magazines with nudes
and the posters for BULLFIGHT and
the Manhatten Storage Warehouse
which they'll soon tear down. I
used to think they had the Armory
Show there.

A glass of papaya juice
and back to work. My heart is in my
pocket, it is Poems by Pierre Reverdy.

The Orgasmatron 3000

Ordering details can be found here.

Another Poem of the Day

In my first real college poetry workshop we read a lot of books and handouts that have (in one way or another) stuck with me. Some of the people I still enjoy reading (Louise Gluck, CK Williams, Larry Levis, Gerry Stern) others I've developed an appreciation of that I would definitely consider qualified (Sharon Olds, Galway Kinnell) and some have lost their lustre (Jori Graham.) But among all those poems were the two most responsible for my latching onto and loving poetry. It also generated my two longest-lasting poetry friendships. Scary to think it was 15 years ago. The poem in question is Jori Graham's "Reading Plato."

My relationship to it has changed with time, just as my relationship to Graham's body of work has. I can see now the seeds of what her poems were to become--there's a reaching out to draw in other things, what became her tactic of an opening to an opening to an opening. But there's a restraint here--maybe hesitance is the better word; the desire to draw in things, to look and look and look, to extend and evade the finality of meaning by stretching out gestures and descriptions is evident, but not baroque or mannered yet. There's a more obvious connection to everything she includes. And it satisfies me. There's no amaryllis humming here. What I find in this poem that I see missing in so much of her other work is tenderness. Enough explication du text, here's the poem.

Reading Plato

This is the story
***of a beautiful
lie, what slips
***through my fingers,
your fingers. It’s winter,
*** it’s far

in the lifespan
*** of man.
Bareheaded, in a soiled
***shirt,
speechless, my friend
***is making

lures, his hobby. Flies
*** so small
he works with tweezers and
*** a magnifying glass.
They must be
***so believable

they’re true—feelers,
*** antennae,
quick and frantic
*** as something
drowning. His heart
*** beats wildly

in his hands. It is
*** blinding
and who will forgive him
*** in his tiny
garden? He makes them
*** out of hair,

deer hair, because it’s hollow
*** and floats.
Past death, past sight,
*** this is
his good idea, what drives
*** the silly days

together. Better than memory. Better
*** than love.
Then they are done, a hook
*** under each pair
of wings, and it’s Spring,
*** and the men

wade out into the riverbed
*** at dawn. Above
the stars still connect-up
*** their hungry animals.
Soon they’ll be satisfied
*** and go. Meanwhile

upriver, downriver, imagine, quick
*** in the air,
in flesh, in a blue
*** swarm of
flies, our knowledge of
*** the graceful

deer skips easily across
*** the surface.
Dismembered, remembered,
*** it’s finally
alive. Imagine
*** the body

they were all once
*** a part of,
these men along the lush
*** green banks
trying to slip in
*** and pass

for the natural world.

*For some reason--the formatting and lineation of this is being all set left, despite it showing as indented in my posting window. I will play with my settings and see what I can come up with. Damned technology!

Bad Sleeper and the Hodgepodge Post

I'm a bad sleeper--always have been and fear I always will be. I envy those who just go to sleep easily, who don't wake up a couple of times a night, who actually feel rested. On an average night I wake up 2 or 3 times for about 10 minutes per episode. Strangely, I'm less likely to do this if I'm not sleeping alone. I wake up, but usually I just flail blindly in the dark, shlump myself over to Brian and throw my arm over him.

Monday I woke up before 5 and stayed awake...bleh. Tuesday night I stayed at my friend Michael's because we drank and watched the American Idol auditions. I woke up a couple of times and then woke up at about 5. I watched some Nova doco. on PBS until I felt sleepy. Last night, I woke up about 3 am and it wasn't the usual stuff--I wasn't hungry (I'm practically a sleep eater some nights), didn't need to run to the can, wasn't sitting up trying to scream from that damned "falling from great heights" dream. No--I started a couple of new poems.

This to me seems worth it. I got the words down and I don't know what they're going to do yet; what they're going to be, which is exciting. The lineation and rhythms feel different than what I was doing before, so we'll see where they go. As much as I love my sleep, I'm willing to sacrifice it for new work.

I've spent precious little time the last 9 months generating new poems. Maybe three that were actually worth pursuing? Hard to say. Mainly I've revised; rethought what I was doing, what I wanted my poems to do; read. I've found out this is how I work--sustained bursts of new writing, maybe seven or eight months worth of new poems, then about the same amount of time not generating new material.

It took me a while to accept this--I had a long period of writer's block, about three years--and once I was writing again I didn't want to stop. I was afraid to stop; that any lag was the start of a new drought. It took a lot of patience to train myself. The seven or eight months is dedicated mainly to new poems with minor attention to revision, unless there's just something so nagging I can't ignore it. The downtime is dedicated to revision and edits and playing with exercises.

Poem for the Day

This is a golden oldy. I actually got the book this poem was in by accident. I was a sophomore in college and had joined a book club (QPB) because they were doing reissues of old gay and lesbian novels at the time. Through them I got James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, Rita Mae Brown's Rubyfruit Jungle, Andrew Holleran's Dancer from the Dance, and John Rechy's City of Night. I'm sure there were others--but these are the ones I really read and re-read...oh, I did also get an omnibus of Edmund White's novels. They didn't do much for me, though I do love his essays. They were reasonably priced and actually not badly produced.

Anyways, I ended up getting a copy of Audre Lorde's The Marvellous Arithmetics of Distance because while I was trying to get the code number of a book in an adjacent column I wrote down her book's code by mistake. Serendipitous mistake, because I loved the poems in this book. I've since lost my copy somewhere along the way. I got the text for this from Aaron. This poem stands out as an oddity for me, in terms of favorite poems, because it's so reliant on metaphor.

Smelling the Wind

Rushing headlong
into new silence
your face
dips on my horizon
the name
of a cherished dream
riding my anchor
one sweet season
to cast off
on another voyage

No reckoning allowed
save the marvelous arithmetics
of distance

Gird Up Your Loins, O Israel

Harper's has a great article about the christian right's attempts to recontextualize American history as divinely inspired.

A brief mention in the article of the Family Vision Forum catalog led me to these educational gems. They have product lines for boys (The All American Boy's Adventure)and girls (The Beautiful Girlhood Collection.)

According to their website the Boy's product line meets a need not being met by the culture at large. The time has come to rebuild a culture of courageous boyhood. The All-American Boy’s Adventure Catalog is one step on that journey. Within this section of our site, you will find inspirational gifts and concepts to build the character of a boy. Every toy, tool, and book has been carefully selected to fit the overall concept designed to inspire and motivate boys to dream big dreams for the glory of God.

And how else to inspire those big dreams than to buy Junior his very own set of armor, complete with sword, all for $177.00 (before shipping.) A steal since it's all metal.



The little explorer can have his own Sacagawea facsimile!


It is 1805, and you are Sacagawea, guiding Lewis and Clark through the wilds of the Pacific Northwest, or Pocahontas in 1606, gathering food in the forest and meeting the colonists at Jamestown for the first time. This year, as we celebrate Jamestown’s four-hundredth anniversary, re-enact Pocahontas’s historic role with this stately tunic.

Smallpox blankets and cholera samples are apparently not available at this time.

Tchotchke Jesus

Hat tip to my friend Bill for posting about these statues; I'd seen these mentioned in Spin about 10 years ago and had forgotten them--silly, silly me.

How better to indoctrinate your young'uns than to have them think Jesus cares about their extracurricular activities? What's with these kids faces? They all look a little...well, special (and not in the way that Mommy and Daddy tell them they are.) Check out the kid in cross country Jesus. He looks like Eric Stoltz in Mask.




Jesus tells her that if she just throws up after eating she can finally stick her dismounts.


Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting, their Savior, fast as lightning.


See Zidane? Jesus ain't down with headbutts.


This one just defies comment. What the hell is wrong with her face?

For No Good Reason

I give you: Jake Shears from Scissor Sisters, in a diaper.















All Photos by Kevin Tachman.

Niche Marketing Week

The leather bears post got me to thinking about the fact that there are just some strange "what were they thinking" products out there. So this week, I'll try and have a daily post of my favorite what the fuck products. Feel free to share suggestions.

If You Go Out in the Woods Today, You're Sure of a Big Surprise

Brian sent me a link to this website, Kinkystore.com. Now, I don't know WHY he found this website, nor do I know HOW he got there--these are issues for a later time. What I do know is that under the banner ads for dungeon gear, ball spreaders, nipple clamps, electrified paddles and all the accoutrement your BD/SM enthusiast could desire they have--teddy bears. Leather bear teddy bears. There's some strange comingling of the sleazy and the cuddly goin' on here.



An almost Village People-esque assortment. Now your 4 year old dom-in-training can play with the bears as he sings "Macho Man." And not only are they soft and furry, he can learn to appreciate the fine craftmanship.

Painstakingly hand crafted attire in Genuine Leather and hardware with no attention to detail spared.

Real rivets, d-rings, snaps, chain, and buckles. Chaps really snap, restraints and garrison belt really buckle.

Cop Bear holds a baton and metal chest and hat badges read "Special Police". Master Bear's hat features chain detail over the top and across the front. Deluxe leather hats look just like the real thing, leather lined, completely removable and held in place with chin band.

All attire is genuine leather and completely removable.

Bears have fully movable jointed arms, legs, and neck so that they may assume any kinky position desired!

That's right--REAL RIVETS! Batons!

Or maybe your little girl can learn a new appreciation of Stevie Nicks as she plays with "Slave Girl" Bear and sings "Give to me your leather, Take from me my lace" with a new trenchant delivery.



But I worry about "Daddy Bear;" he looks like he could be permanently damaged because of his harness. Something just doesn't look...right. It's like the gopher from Caddyshack got kidnapped and taken to the Russian River for reindoctrination.



If they weren't so cost prohibitive I might be tempted to get a set and make my own all teddy-bear recreation of Madonna's "Justify My Love" video.

Nothing says dungeon to me like a leather quilt and some bondage bears in the corner.
I suppose though, they are more cuddly than the alternative.



(and yea I'm totally gunning to mess with people who're googling electric paddle, ball spreaders and nipple clamps.)

One of THOSE Days.

Poem for the Day

I'm in a Linda Gregg mood. So I'm posting something from Things and Flesh instead of Chosen by the Lion.

At Risk

This body does not smell human,
it smells of oregano in heat.
This is not your world
where people work and live in a house.
It is a place before or after.
After and before that.
Things in parts and pieces.
The wind turning silver
in the olive trees.
A red pomegranate on the table.
Silence with a ringing in it.
This is a beginning
or long afterwards.
Exactly that.

Marcel, Marcel, Marcel

I adore Marcel from Bravo's Top Chef. He's smug, he's abrasive, he's got that crazy hair. How could I NOT love him? He's also like that one little chimp that all the other little chimps throw their rotten fruit and poo at. In this week's epi, he was found all alone atop their building, while everyone else was downstairs essentially hating on the pale little fella. During his little intro segment he broke out some lines. Now I don't know if this was a poem, an attempt to rap and boast, or was some sort of slam thing. I do know this--it sucked balls. Hard. With teeth. Marcel--do this sort of lame-assed shit again and I'll join Ilan and Sam in mocking your candy ass.

Lookin' For Love in All the Wrong Places

Courtesy of the February 2007 Harper's Index

Chance that a hip-hop fan has had five or more sexual partners in the last five years, according to a UK study: 2 in 5

Chance that a country music fan has: 1 in 67

Blargh...

I am not a neat person. I'm a stacker, a piler, I make three-foot Jenga towers out of books and magazines. I am currently rethinking this as a life-strategy. I wanted to post a poem from Linda Gregg's Chosen by the Lion yesterday but couldn't find my copy. Anywhere. Now there's a few possible reasons for this--a) it could be in the mess somewhere, b) it could be in storage in a box (but I doubt this, as I remember having it in hand within the last year), or c) I could've loaned it to someone and then forgotten it. Right now, a and c are the front-runners. I'm always amazed when I go to people's homes and they're neat. It astounds me. Truly, this is a sense of discipline or a virtue I missed out on. Thankfully, the mess pictured above is not mine. I'm not quite that bad.

For Minda

She's in Texas. And bored. And she's like my little sister--just much much hotter.

Okay, Okay, Enough Negative Energy.

I think we need a palate cleanser after my RR bashing. So howsabout some pictures of kittens?











that look like Hitler