It's always fun when Alabama pops up in strange places, and it has a couple of times today.

First, I'm reading John Waters' new book, Role Models, and in the very first chapter he goes off on a tangent about an actress in the film The Bad Seed, which is based on a book written by a guy who is somehow connected to The University of Alabama, or at ( Read more... )

Still got around $10 on a gift card to Books-a-million, whose ebooks are Nook-compatible. (Mostly, anyway. Anything that doesn't come from the B&N store is a second-class citizen. No representation on the home page. No pretty cover art.) So I'm looking for an ebook ( Read more... )

I finished Infinite Jest tonight, and it was kind of a anticlimactic.

( Here there be spoilers? Sort of? I guess. )

I'm so unused to having things I need to do on my day off that this list of menial tasks seems worthy of commemorating:

• Bank deposit
  
• Farmer's Market
  
• Go to Verizon store
  
• Pizza Party (retirement party for former co-worker)
  
• Get to page 1,000 in Infinite Jest
  
• Pay Credit Card bills

And there you go.

Be amazed.

I posted this reply to a comment on Facebook after I'd quoted a passage of Infinite Jest.

The quote:

"Avril said she’d watch him just kind of drift from cluster to cluster and lurk around creepily on the fringe, listening, but that he’d always say, loudly, in some lull in the group’s conversation, something like ‘I’m afraid I’m far too self- ( Read more... )

Spent my birthday playing Assassins Creed II, which feels distinctly creepy to admit after there's been a well-publicized assassination attempt in the news ( Read more... )

I had really good intentions. I was going to read something, maybe Infinite Jest, so I could get back on that wagon. And I was going to go to bed at a reasonable hour ( Read more... )

I got refunded the money that person (those people?) stole on Christmas eve!

I can pay my bills!

My car won't get repossessed!

It's a 2-days-after-New-Years miracle!

A poem from The Awl.

I saw this story about thousands of birds falling from the skies in Arkansas.

Sounds creepy.

Watch the video:

Click to view

I love how at the very end the reporter seems to be saying "Kids sure do pick stupid names for birds."

All of this reminds me, however, of the song "Rooks" by Shearwater. Listen at it.And that means that this might be the end of the ( Read more... )