Another New York Times Junkie

This morning I shoveled a foot of snow off my car and hit the road. After checking on my parents, I went in search of The Sunday New York Times. (Yes, I know you can read it online. It's not the same!)

I didn't see anyone out except for snowplow drivers, grumpy store clerks, and a meth addict trying to score. I think the meth-head had more business being outside than I did.

My New Fragrance

I've decided on the composition of my new fragrance:

part old books,
part dead silverfish,
and a tang of ozone from a sputtering fan trying to cool off an aging MacBook.

It's called "Bookworm."

If Amiri Baraka Can Do It...

At a party, we challenged each other to come up with the most outre name for a rock band. I won with "Kafkaesque Vaginas." But I think I just ruined any chance I had to become poet laureate.

Christmas Card to a Billionaire

Right about now, Steve Jobs is writing this Christmas card to Bill Gates:

Bill, thanks for once again marketing such a shoddy product! Thanks to you, Apple's products don't have to be good. They just have to be better than yours!

Snow on the Wasteland

I spent most of yesterday working in a suburban library. (It's not the closest one or the largest one - I go there because it's under-utilized, and I can always find a table to myself.)

This library is in a new housing development. Hundreds of townhouses, the proverbial "little boxes made of ticky tacky." I worked until closing, long after sunset. As I left, I saw the Christmas lights that the townhouse builder had put up in the tiny park in a futile attempt to make the place look festive.

Across the street are a few acres of land not yet bulldozed for housing. The trees on that land - now bare of leaves - had snow plastered to their trunks and branches on the windward side.

Those snow-covered trees on wasteland are far more beautiful than anything that builder had managed to achieve. Or ever will.