longshot

Remember in Back to the Future II when Biff stole the DeLorean and gave a sports almanac to his earlier self so that he could gamble and win at various sporting events?
Well, what if Earlier Self Biff instead just got a job writing secretly ironic headlines for MSNBC?

That might be a good movie too.

Unrelated:
Kentucky Derby Hopefuls Take Their Final Shot


oh man; poor dead horse. Although this probably bodes well for sales of Chicken Soup for the Horse Lover's Soul II: Tales of Passion, Achievement and Devotion. Totally the best book title ever!

ImprovEverywhere People: you should all buy this book and do something wacky related to it!

Madeleine L'Engle Dies: ))<>((

According to the obit, she leaves behind a "philandering husband".




Note that although Madeleine L'Engle did die, the character who bears her name in this post is a complete fiction, as is the character of her husband.

Yellow Dog Day Afternoon

I was going to get one of these* for lunch, and I walked by the NBC News LED ticker, and due to the spacing of the vertical bars and the fact that I was walking against the light, plus I was thinking of something else**, I thought at first it said "MOLLY IVINS, AUTHOR AND COMMUNIST, DEAD AT 62".***

As with most things, time and the whole quiet desperation thing have muted and blurred the irritating things about what it was like to live in Texas**** and enhanced the things that were really kind of great. This is a pretty big blow against the kind of great things list.

The Texas Observer has a page with a few tributes on it (including one from former governer and failed businessman GWB); reading it reminds you both that things continue to be stupid and suck, but also that there are people trying hard. We should all probably be trying harder.


* Oh my God, so much best. Midtown Lunch is doing the most important work in America right now. You know, other than the ACLU.

** I was amusing myself by imagining George Saunders characters singing Hole songs: "I want to be the girl with the most cake, due to I like cake?" (That's about as far as I got with that thought. Probably not much more I could do with it than that, I imagine.)

***For reals, it said "columnist" but for a second, it seemed totally plausible, both that that would be what the ticker was saying and that she had actually been an actual Communist, like one of my other muckraking iconoclast brain-crushes, Jessica Mitford: didn't I read that being a Populist is a gateway drug to Communism? Or is "Populist" just "Communist" without the beans?

**** Off the top of my head: there is a dearth of: (1) chicken tikka paratha; (2) tolerance (like I couldn't tell if this was real or not for a very long time; the line between hostile hypocritical religious nonsense and parody of same is a 250-pixel Gaussian blur of a photo of Occam's Razor, Photoshop stizz).

Yvonne De Carlo Dead at 84

Not as sad as when Carolyn Jones died in 1983, but pretty sad, I guess.
I'll update the phone book.


[AP obit here]

Also: the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital: Sad Place to Die or Awesome Place to Die? I totally can't decide.