Embrace the Dull

ETD personality quiz

I devised the following question that I believe can be quite revelatory in determining someone's musical likes and dislikes; I also think it can be helpful in divining their dreams, personality traits, defining characteristics and spiritual wellness.

The scenario:

All that we know about music has been erased from existence. Every note, every chord, every tick on every metronome, every flutter of every violin string.

Everything is deleted.

You can choose one of the following pieces of music to attribute to yourself. You alone will be considered its composer. You alone will achieve the fame that is otherwise associated with its writer.

Your choices:

a) The bass groove to Billie Jean by Michael Jackson.

b) None of the above. I hate music. I have small, thorny respirator where my heart should be; instead of blood it pumps sticky, black pitch through my body. I am joyless.

What say you?

Ron Jaworski

I wonder how many more times I'm going to hear Ron Jaworski tell me

"you know, it's ironic that the New England Patriots might go undefeated in the same season that the Miami Dolphins don't win a single game!"

before I kill my entire family.

Alec Baldwin

When Alec Baldwin begins to receive his lifetime achievement awards (he's only 49, so probably another 10-20 years) we will surely see scenes from Glengarry Glenross, Hunt for Red October, Beetlejuice, etc; assorted scenes from SNL (Shweaty Balls, The Tony Bennett Show, etc) will also be featured.

Last night on 30 Rock another performance made it into the canon; his portrayal of Tracy Morgan's dad, Tracy Morgan's mother, Tracy himself and Tracy's Latina neighbor all in the span of about 10 seconds will rank as one of his (Baldwin's) funniest performances ever.

He is, without a doubt, one of the finest comic actors of our time.

Hand of God credited with saving the life of boy who nearly died at the Hand of God

MICHIGAN A mattress and a miracle are being credited for sparing the life of a 14-month-old boy sucked out of his home — crib and all — and thrown 40 or 50 feet by a powerful tornado that struck a sleeping Michigan family on Friday.

By the time Joe Soyring and a neighbor found little Blake whimpering beneath his mattress, Soyring already had come across the mangled remnants of his son's crib and knew that his Millington, Mich., home was destroyed.

“Luckily the mattress was still over him. That's probably what saved him,” Soyring said during an appearance Monday on TODAY.

So a miracle (file under: Act of God, Good) saved the life of a boy who was nearly killed after a tornado (file under: Act of God, Bad) pulled him from his bed and flung him forty-five feet out of the house.

Now God obviously reconsidered killing the boy after He had decided to smite him with a tornado, and for that He should be commended. But can we really get all gaga over this miracle that was really nothing more than damage control to begin with?

If anything should get "miracle" credit it should be a Sealy Posturepedic that broke the kid's fall, no?

Jesus Fucking Christ

No wonder, really, MSG only a handful of blocks north of Chelsea

CAA have (has?) nice offices

Liz and I rolled into CAA last night to sign a couple of contracts for Quiet Library. After having our car valet parked (seriously) we entered what could be best described as a library-as-disco-by-way-of-the-Death-Star.

The aesthetic was sleek and white and full of sexy people, like a discotheque; hushed and suffocating, like a library; and possessed of a raw power sufficient to crush you like the tiny planet of Tattoonie, like the Death Star.

All in all it was quite impressive -  made all the less so by the fact that the dollar amount of the contracts I signed was inferior to the cost of our agent's assistant's bolo tie.

If he's good enough for Chuck Norris he's good enough for me

Chuck Norris Endorses Mike Huckabee for President

I [Chuck Norris] won't leave you in suspense. Though Giuliani might be savvy enough to lead people, Fred Thompson wise enough to wade through the tides of politics, McCain tough enough to fight terrorism and Romney business-minded enough to grow our economy, I believe the only one who has all of the characteristics to lead America forward into the future is ex-Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee.

Who knew Chuck was on the God Squad?

A hard rain is gonna fall

On the Catholic Church...

ROME -- A high profile Vatican cleric suspended after he was shown on television making advances to a young man allegedly had a list of homosexual priests and bishops in the Roman Catholic Church's governing body, Italy's Panorama weekly reported Friday.

yikes...

This made me homesick for New York...

Some Norwegian program tried some third-rate Borat jive on Congressmen Oddo from Staten Island. He um, well, he's not a congressman of the genteel variety.

All our politicians should be so honest.

Motherfucking writer's strike shit

I hate when people say "man, this is just my luck" when bad things happen to them. I'm a believer in good-luck being the due reward of the skilled; bad luck, meanwhile, tending to be misfortune exacerbated by a lack of preparation.

For example, I lost most of my hair by 25 (kind of bad) but that was exacerbated by the fact that I was dating a small, unpleasant person.

Were I sagacious I would have foreseen as inevitable my hair-loss and rapidly diminishing sex-appeal and begun dating someone hot while I still enjoyed a modicum of leverage.

Alas, I did not. And I was therefore stuck in Washington Heights, balding and sad. But...!

... life ebbs and life flows, doesn't it? Caught as I was in an ebb (in the form of the small unpleasant person) I flowed in the form of meeting Liz, being funny, getting her drunk and asking her out. Then I took advantage of the fact that she didn't like where she was living and convinced her to live with me. Then I cemented our relationship via the acquisition of cats. Before she knew it we were engaged and, voila, now this balding, out-of-shape, middling-writer is married to a total babe.

See how that works?

All that being said, the impending writers strike is some bad fucking luck. Quiet Library has 3 contracts with 2 media companies, representation by CAA and we anticipate a new round of meetings with additional media companies in the coming months. Pretty sweet except that if we accept one thin dime for any of our work we'll be permanently blackballed from ever working in Hollywood.

But Quiet Library isn't in the union yet, right?

From the link: "[The Writer's Guild is] also asserting that nonmembers who perform banned work during a strike will be barred from joining the guild in the future."

Motherfucker. Maybe Reagan will come back from the dead and fire all of them.