Your Baby's Daddy Is...

Maury Povich charged with sexual harassment

Thunder Without Rain is Like Tonic Without Vodka

This morning at 8:43 a.m. I heard my first thunder in New York City. It was wonderful. The first sound of nature trumping urban life. And no rain followed.

The Cringe-O-Meter

Yes, as technology brings us closer together it also sadly tears us apart. The impact of being constantly connected and ever alone has left many a keypusher heartbroken and despondent, curled up in pj's watching "Contact" or drinking beer and prank calling public access television (now that's the ticket). Though there are so many people in the box they're looking at, there are none outside their door.

When in doubt, rely on magazine editors. The masters-of-lists are also the wrangler of hormones.

You'll always have the sage advice of how-to articles on issues as complex and hit-or-miss as love. In this example, the writer's use of the "Dave-O-Meter" as a measurement of date ideas is cringeworthy but oh so quirky. Me so lonely. Me so wone-ly, wone-ly, wone-ly.

Great Dating Ideas or How to Recycle the Same Article Countless Times a Year (Yahoo!)

Alfred Hitchcock and Steam

Gyms at 9:00 a.m. are interesting because every other schlub on a treadmill wonders if the other has a job. The equipment is available for use, the bass thump pumping throughout is not as overbearing, and the men's locker room is a few penises less populated. Mine in particular is filled with these gallavanting jaybirds, the guys who shoot you a quick glance when you're lathering up in the shower and who like to chat in the buff. Somewhere you find the strengh to push on.

The sauna this morning was still warming up so I opted for the tiled rival.

I entered the steam room and was greeted by hiss and mist and the figure of another person faintly visible through the fog. Gold-chain Italians in movies and business tycoons might talk in steam rooms and saunas, but I refrain, and not because it's considered strange or untoward, no far from that. I'm sitting in 140 degrees, my elbows on my knees, and I'm dripping with sweat and inhaling menthol-tinged damp air. It's just not conducive to discussion for me. I sit on the tile and the hiss begins anew.

I lean against the wall and close my eyes as heat envelopes me and think of my life and of words and of how I need to get better sleep, eat a bit better, renew my credit cards, mail resumes, upload my photos, and visit my grandmother in Jersey. She lives a bus ride away and is sleeping on the first floor now, can't make it up the stairs, we'll go get lunch, I say, and she says no, We'll eat cold cuts and talk about how she just doesn't get it anymore, these Koreans with the nail salon and the Russian lady she's paying to drive her to Shop-Rite. I asked her once why she has never told me she loved me and she said they didn't do that in Germany. We have the same face.

The heat becomes too much. I lift my head up off the wall and open my eyes. There before me stands a squatty silhouette, like Alfred Hitchcock's, except he's butt naked and locked like a guard with a fuzzy hat. Just standing there, in a state of naked Zen, his chest expanding wide. Al doesn't stay for the mist to clear and leaves as a shadow figure. I tell the guy sitting next to me that it was an awkward thing to see after snapping out of a daydream.

"Yep," he said. "That kind of shit can be pretty shocking."

And to think that my birth was protected by a drunken security guard named Merle...

Lions to protect pregnant [Angelina] Jolie's privacy: paper (Reuters)

Cold Hard Rain in a Big Big City

Today all of Manhattan, and the entire northeast United States I think (no time for forecasts, must do chin ups), was blanketed by clouds and pelted by rain, and it was a day of umbrellas bending backwards from the wind cutting through the skyscrapers. Every block or so you see a brolly's carcass mangled on the sidewalk, and the rain comes down too hard that even if you're unlucky enough to possess one (or just too poor to buy one) and are walking 15 blocks to mail headshots and resumes, you will not pick it up. You won't try to fix it by bending the frame back in shape and rehooking the fabric while the smattering of people hustle by. You'll step over the umbrella and with your hands in your pockets, tuck your head in your coat like a turtle in a war trench, and continue to walk south to a tiny restuarant. And it will be the cheapest and best Mexican food you've had since arriving in this city.

Merry Christmas, My Fellow Countrymen!


May this find you happy and in one piece.

No I swear I'm not...and I promise I don't

When blood starts trickling out your nose at a party filled with wizened twentysomethings, how do you explain it without sounding like an ass: too much coke or too much booger scraping?

Answer: just simply walk away.

Thank God for CraigsList...

nude model to pose with fish for tomorrow evening (tuesday)
Reply to: gigs-114378334@craigslist.org
Date: 2005-11-28, 10:07PM EST

model needed to pose with three foot fish for ongoing project for a published book. Established artist and assistant (female) are shooting tomorrow, should only take 1/2 hour. (Fish is fresh from market in the morning.) Looking for all sorts of women. Please email for more info.

* this is in or around chelsea
* no -- it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests
* Compensation: $30

114378334

Copyright © 2005 craigslist, inc. terms of use privacy policy feedback foru

Zee Fake Tree

Duty follows gluttony, and for the first time in the Wheatley family household, the eight-foot tall artificial arboreal delight was erected the day after Thanksgiving. I hauled it up from its cardboard casket in the basement, each piece at a time, snipped the rope wrapping it like a giant green joint, stacked them, and fluffed the "branches." That all this happened while I was in my boxers, my brother typed away on a keyboard, my mother washed dishes and my father watched Jerry Springer reminded me even more that Christmas is to arrive soon.

The Elevator Ate My Wife

Daniel Gelding made a concerted effort to stop, pouring out bottles of bleach and Windex and reducing his arsenal of paper towels, disinfectant wipes, air fresheners and wood polish twofold. He did the dishes only once every three days and used the Sears-bought washer instead of the scrub method. Daniel's fingers became less coarse and dry and returned to the more suitable form of the hands he had before things got all mucked up, back when he was a respected tailor and a decent husband, a lover of museums and unscented candles. Then an elevator cable snaps and your wife drops with it, and in what can be explained as a horrible turn of events you develop tremors and the skill with which you once were a master now you were a convulsing pin-poking threat. He retreated and started cleaning. And Daniel was going to stop.

Why does fossilized dung always have to tell the story?

Dinosaurs may have eaten grass (AP)

Scene outside my window, 3:39 p.m.

The boyfriend was obviously fresh from school, still wearing his backpack, and raging at Olive, the girl who looked like a boy. She had a military buzz-cut that should have been covered by the pink toboggan the boyfriend flailed about. The customers in the pizza parlor were aware of this scene.

"How could you do this to me?" he screamed at her, in her face, as she sobbed and wobbled. He's Italian. He has the accent. "All I wanted to do was get a bite to eat! You can't even go inside this restaurant and get a soda. No, you need alcohol. The girl I was on the phone with last night would have gone. But look at her."

She continued to cry and stagger and was unable to respond. Making her way to a nearby stoop, she aimed her ass for the steps but missed and crumbled to the ground. A passerby offered her help which she refused.

"Nineteen years old," the boyfriend said and gave her the pink toboggan. "And your life is done. How could you do this in two hours? Look at you. Your life is done."

Olive got up and followed him like a sheepish gimp, a puttering jalopy. He told her she loved drama, she loved problems. Olive was happy only when she was sad. Two blocks away I still hear them and she's sitting down again, her pink head resting between her two knobby knees.

David Carr makes an excellent argument for practicing restraint and establishing some sort of poise in blogging. For too many, condescension and finger-pointing is the only way to make a mark. He questions the ethics and architecture of it all.

Find it here.

You ain't takin' my 40 cents!!!

Bear with me, people. Because I'm a cheap bastard who refuses to be taxed by eBay just to show off my valuables...I choose to post this photo here. The online auction house wants my quarter, dime and nickel to host what you see above. I say hells no.

It's got the story behind "November Rain" and "Don't Cry," as well as "Estranged." Remember the scribbling at the end of those? It was this guy's name.

If you want it, go here.

UPDATE: The damn thing didn't sell. And Cheney says people are using eBay to make a living.