Useful, little known facts about the world, though perhaps fictional:

"Dogs see ghosts. They see disease floating down the street like fog. They hear and smell the unimaginable. Yet dogs are indifferent to such things because they are simply part of their perceived world. . . .

Life and death do not mix. They could never dance together because both of them would insist on leading."

from "the Ghost In Love," which later explains why, for the dog in question, the absolute worst thing he can encounter is to hear harmonica playing, particularly if it is the recording of the harmonica part of Neil Young's "Heart of Gold."

By the way, he likes the version

Greil Marcus, on Neco Case singing Hank Williams' "Alone and Forsaken:"

"None of [her work on previous albums] suggested that she could look a song like "Alone and Forsaken" in the face. She isn't up to Williams; unlike him, she doesn't sing as if she's already dead."

from Oxford American, Issue 63.

Whoa Wild Will Wire WIth Wrap You Young Your

How do you recapture afresh the impact of an overly-familiar work of art?

Here are the lyrics of a great, overly-familiar song, arranged in alphabetical order, with each word in the song only listed once:

9 a all american amusement an and are at baby back be beach beyond bold
bones born boulevard boys break broken but cages can ’cause chrome-wheeled comb come could ’cross day death die don’t down dream dreams drive drones drop
engines everlasting everybody’s feels four friend from fuel-injected get girl
girls glory go gonna gotta guard hair hands hard hemi-powered heroes hide
highway highway’s how huddled i i’ll i’m if in is it it’s jammed just kids kiss
know last-chance left legs let like line live lonely look love machines madness
mansions me mirrors mist my n never night no of oh on one ooh out over palace
park place power rap real really rearview ride rider rims rips rises road ’round
run runaway sadness scared scream so someday soul sprung stark steppin’ strap
streets suicide sun sweat that the their then there’s these this three through
till to together tonight town tramps trap try two us velvet visions walk wanna
we we’ll we’re wendy were when where while whoa wild will wire with wrap you
young your

From a very nice quiz, asking you to identify songs which have undergone the same treatment: http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/diversions/and_great_lyrics_quiz_rock_roll_the.php

John Updike, R.I.P.

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/01/27/books/AP-Obit-Updike.html?hp

Sorry to see the news of Updike's death. I was a great fan. I liked him best the smaller the unit of consideration. He wrote some very good novels, but better short stories, and unsurpassed sentences. Unlike many great writers of sentences, his were grounded in the circumstances of the greater writing, and the greater world, whether natural or social, internal or external.

Epigraph from 2666

""In those days all I cared about was baseball and ethics, " said Campbell."

from 2666

"On her fifth morning with them, when the medicine she had brought with her from France was about to run out, Lola told them she had to leave. Benoit is little and he needs me, she said. Actually, he doesn't need me, but that doesn't mean he isn't little, she said. I don't know who needs who, she said at last, but the fact is I have to go see how he is. ... "

Sales pitch

Latest undoubtedly false but linguistically intriguing promise from my spam:

Beyond question, any woman will be 100 shocked with your mega.

Baseball Parks In Winter

http://homerderby.com/archives/3176

Coffee House Brawl

My latest dream:

Having drinks at what seems to be a coffee house with a friend from out of town, and someone else. Though a coffee house, whatever I'm drinking is getting me drunk. After two drinks we go downstairs and out to the street. My friend suggests that he and I head to The Dragon, a nearby bar.

Next thing I know, I am back in the coffee house by myself, drinking again. I wonder where my friend is and figure he must be at The Dragon. But then a guy from a group at the next table, slaps and scratches at my face, saying things I don't understand. I bite his finger, though not too hard. I come to realize that he and his friends are acting, and in the midst of putting on a play for the coffee house audience. But the manner in which the actor keeps involving me -- attacking my face -- makes me wish they'd respect the fourth wall a bit more.

My nose hurts from the attack, and I go downstairs to a mammoth bathroom. Mammoth, deserted, like an old basement. Furnished with brown leather couches. I look in the mirror, and learn that the actor had been smearing red paint on me, and my hair and neck are covered in red paint. I wash it off, but it is a difficult task. The paint smears, and I am thoroughly scrubbed and drenched, like a soaking dog, before the paint comes off. I also realize that under the paint I had been given a slight bloody nose.

I leave the restroom and learn from someone entering it that I had been in the women's room. I tell the woman entering that it didn't matter, as I was just washing my face.

Walking up the stairs away from the bathroom, a man recognizes me, and accuses me of treating the actors badly. For one thing, I bit that guy's finger. He starts pushing me and we get into a coffee house brawl.

If I had to wrestle with myself I'd win

pretty amusing:

Ken Blackwell [probable incoming chair of the Republican party]: No. What I said is that, in that regard, you can choose, people choose to be who they are, as they choose to break civil law and God's law...I think you can choose not to be homosexual...

Michaelangelo Signorile [interviewer]: Did you choose to be heterosexual? Did you wake up one day and say I want to be heterosexual?

KB: The answer is that I've never had to make the choice because I've never had the urge to be other than a heterosexual, but if in fact I had the urge to be something else I could have in fact suppressed that urge.


from: http://www.signorile.com/2009/01/rnc-chair-candidate-homosexuality-is.html

Breaking My Rules

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/musical/2009/01/12/090112crmu_music_frerejones

Nice to see the appreciation by Sasha Frere-Jones of the sometimes underappreciated Bon Iver.

Dream Fragment

Last night, in my dream, talking to others I pointed to a mountain in the distance and said, "My dream is to someday reach that mountain top."

It was a joke, the point of which, on awakening, I no longer know.

Dream

Last night's dream:

I was at the Academy Awards, or the rehearsal. They were held at a large house, which was a funeral home, and the spacious grounds, which no doubt were a cemetary. I saw Simon Cowell, judge from American Idol, in what appeared to be blackface. I went up to him to chat, and suggest it wasn't in the best American taste, but when I got there I saw he was wearing make-up in a sort of stripe to suggest the mask of the Phantom of the Opera. I told him what I had thought, adding that I figured it was chocolate frosting spread over his face to make an Othello costume.

Later in the dream I was trying to make my way through the house as the show was starting, alternately in empty rooms and then rooms full of performers (as in chorus line performers) trying to get to their spots. I was just trying to find where I could get a drink.

Happy Birthday Sherlock Holmes

http://www.madison.com/communities/canary/pages/jan6.php?php_page_set=0

Is this his birthday? The article is convincing.

Wisdom from Spongebob and Patrick

Spongebob has filled his house with night lights, because he has become terrified of the dark and the "creepy crawlers of the dark."

Spongebob: What if Squidward is right? What if the monsters are just
figments of our imagination?

Patrick: Then we need more lights!

Songs Bruce Springsteen Might Play At The Super Bowl Halftime Show

Born To Run
Born To Run Play Action
Born To Play Free Safety
Born To Blitz
Born To Get Rid Of The Ball Before Taking A Sack
Rosalita

2008 Jambalaya Award Winners

most interesting books read and finished for the first time in 2008:

The Deadly Percheron -- John Franklin Bardin

Cutter and Bone -- Newton Thornberg

Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong: Reopening the Case of The Hound Of The Baskervilles -- Pierre Bayard

The Lost Dog -- Michelle de Kretser

Names on the Land: A Historical Account of Place-Naming in the United States -- George R. Stewart

Elective Affinities -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The Man In The High Castle -- Philip Dick

Out Stealing Horses -- Per Petterson

Cakes and Ale -- W. Somerset Maugham

The Bloody Shirt: Terror After Appomattox -- Stephen Budiansky

The Curse of The Spellmans -- Lisa Lutz

All About H. Hatterr -- G.V. Desani

The Savage Detectives -- Roberto Bolano

Diary of A Bad Year -- J.M. Coetzee

in reverse order of reading

Final largely complete 2008 Reading List

The Deadly Percheron -- John Franklin Bardin
The Big Lebowski (BFI Film Classics) -- J.M. Tyree & Ben Walters
Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America -- Brian Francis Slattery
Always A Body To Trade -- K.C. Constantine
Cutter and Bone -- Newton Thornberg
Best American Comics 2008
Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong: Reopening the Case of The Hound Of The Baskervilles -- Pierre Bayard
Agnes's Final Afternoon: An Essay on the Work of Milan Kundera -- Francois Ricard
52 McGs -- Robert McG. Thomas, Jr
Batman: Year 100 -- Paul Pope
The Big Sleep -- Raymond Chandler
In The Woods -- Tana French
Memoir of the Hawk: Poems -- James Tate
The Lost Dog -- Michelle de Kretser
Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph -- Edgar Johnson
Rhubarb - H. Allen Smith
How Fiction Works -- James Wood
Let Me Finish -- Roger Angell
Blonde Faith -- Walter Mosley
The Heckler -- Ed McBain
Names on the Land: A Historical Account of Place-Naming in the United States -- George R. Stewart
Netherland: A Novel -- Joseph O'Neill
Stop Me If You've Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes -- Jim Holt
The Summer Book -- Tove Jansson
Elective Affinities -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Cop Hater -- Ed McBain
Dirty Words: A Literary Encyclopedia of Sex -- Ellen Sussman (ed.)
The Commodore -- Patrick O'Brian
Almayer's Folly -- Joseph Conrad
Nazi Literature in the Americas -- Roberto Bolano
The Widow -- Georges Simenon
Blood And Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West -- Hampton Sides
Darker Than Amber -- John D. MacDonald
The Man In The High Castle -- Philip Dick
Girl Factory -- Jim Krusoe
Bonk -- Mary Roach
Updike in Cincinnati -- James Schiff (ed.)
Out Stealing Horses -- Per Petterson
The Poetry of War -- James Anderson Winn
Cakes and Ale -- W. Somerset Maugham
Into The Canyon: Seven Years In Navaho Country -- Lucy Moore
The Invention of Morel -- Adolfo Bioy Casares
What The Dead Know -- Laura Lippman
The Bloody Shirt: Terror After Appomattox -- Stephen Budiansky
The Curse of The Spellmans -- Lisa Lutz
The Big Clock -- Kenneth Fearing
Clark Gifford's Body -- Kenneth Fearing
The Counterlife -- Philip Roth
The Man Who Smiled -- Henning Mankell
All About H. Hatterr -- G.V. Desani
I Shouldn't Even Be Doing This -- Bob Newhart
Christine Falls -- Benjamin Black
Born Standing Up -- Steve Martin
The Savage Detectives -- Roberto Bolano
The Barbarous Coast -- Ross Macdonald
Diary of A Bad Year -- J.M.Coetzee
The Long Suit - Philip Davison
Revolutionary Road - Richard Yates
Best American Comics 2007

Amusing answer by a pair of 13 year old girls to the question How Does Gran Torino Compare To Other Clint Eastwood Movies?

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=ApFofJgf8P9QepfuEr081_sjzKIX;_ylv=3?qid=20090101020246AA9NZGw