I am in the midst of attempting to read a book (Marilyn Stablein's Sleeping in Caves) in which, for some inexplicable reason, all of the "2-em" (i.e., "—") dashes and apostrophes have been replaced by double/single spaces.

This is truly driving me nuts. Only endless repetitions of "Big Sky" on Kate Bush's Hounds of Love—my fave of hers; if it had "Wuthering Heights" on it, it'd be perfect—are keeping me in check at all.

How, O how could a book possibly get typeset and proofread with no one noticing this??!

Kate on the cover of Lionheart is still the best, though.

Wanna do it "lion style"?

So I've been listening to nothing but Jackson Browne's "Running On Empty" song for two straight days now.

What happened was....

I took a "Best Of Jackson Browne" CD out of the library. But it turns out that he only ever recorded one song worth listening to—you know which one. And even it had, for no good reason, 30 full seconds of pointless club crowd noise recorded as an "intro" to it.

So I had to find/download a program to convert from cda (CD Audio) files to wav, then import the converted file into SONAR and edit out the stupid intro, then save it as a new wav. Someday I'll burn it to the start of a CD, with some other artist filling up the rest of the disk, but right now I've just got that one song playing in Windows Media Player. Over and over. (Remind me to take out a Joe Walsh best-of some day.)

I was reading a songwriting book a couple of months ago, which had interviews with both Browne and Elvis Costello. The latter was bitching about Jackson's "fuck me, I'm sensitive" schtick, which I thought was a pretty low blow. I actually lost a lot of respect for Costello when I first read that. But now, having listened (only once) to the rest of the best-of, it's harder to argue.

...but I know Paul.

So the Simon & Garfunkel show at the ACC on November 30th sold out before I even knew it had been scheduled. That's just as well, though, as I really didn't need the temptation of spending $50 to $250 on a ticket.

Plus, experience (Boston, Elvis Costello, Peter Gabriel, Betty & the Bobs) has taught me that I would have been the youngest person there anyway.

Coo-Coo-Cachoo.

"When you have a high-profile girlfriend, people forget that really she's like, well, like everyone, Jack Nicholson or the Pope...."

—Coldplay singer Chris Martin, on girlfriend Gwyneth Paltrow

Free-association test: "My girlfriend is like ________."

Filling in that blank with (a) "Jack Nicholson," or (b) "the Pope" does not bode well for a relationship.

"My girlfriend is like Yellow."

What is "coldplay" anyway? Foreplay with cold hands?

I suppose Gwyneth would know.

And what does Chris Martin got that I ain't got? Other than fame, fortune and a beautiful, high-profile girlfriend, I mean. (And probably a nice flat out in London West 9 or wherever.)

Does he have this (holds up camera-ready copy for The Science of the Soul)?

Update (12/04/2003): Gwyneth is pregnant! No word on whom the baby will resemble more: the father or ... Jack Nicholson.

Ever launched a cheerleader into outer space? NASA tried—once—but the astronauts kept getting distracted and forgetting to catch her.

“If people knew how KFC treats chickens, they’d never eat another drumstick,” Pamela Anderson wrote in an open letter circulated by the group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). I think she meant to say they'd "never touch another breast...." Geez, now I'm hungry for cole slaw.... (Note to Pammy: Lara Croft called, she wants her upper body back.)

He broke off a piece of veggie pizza with his good hand. The hand that hadn't been burned on the stove.

He wished the boy were here.

The ice cubes in the gin and pineapple juice would melt by morning. He knew he had to drink it soon.

The sun was already down. All of the beautiful city girls had gone home along Eglinton and Duplex from their nine-to-five jobs, to do whatever it is that beautiful city girls do after work.

There was nothing to do but wait for the Red Sox game to start, and listen to Joe Jackson (best of) and Chris De Burgh (Spanish Train).

He wished the boy were here. The boy could put away half the pizza for tomorrow, and take the ice cubes out of the gin and pineapple juice.

"Are the young girls in the city still as pretty in the fall?" the old man asked himself.

"Yes, they are," he replied. To himself.

He wished the boy were here. Or, even better, he wished the boy's sister were here.

Yeah, that'd be fun.

(Explanation: When Paul Clemens at Blue Dolphin and I were discussing my long-ish sentences in The Science of the Soul a month and a half ago, he mentioned the possibility of me one day doing a digestible popularization of SOS, "like Hemingway"—which is indeed now on my eventual list of "things to do." So I had to go and read The Old Man and the Sea, to try and figure out WTF was the deal with Hemingway. Turns out that Ernest wrote for the Toronto Star for four years, mostly as a foreign correspondent in Paris and Spain. He hated T.O., by the way—found it, in the 1920s, to be much too "Protestant" for his tastes.)

... but I know what I like.

"Man Caught Looking"
Oliver Clothesoff-Fast

Massage oil on canvas
36" x 24" x 36"
H. Hefner Gallery