Everything I Really Need to Know I Learned by Being Kicked in the Teeth By It

I'm reading a book for a real, paying review now, so I can't write about it yet. I'll get you caught up later.

*** Instead, this will be an items column, of the type employed by certain prima donna columnists when they think they have something to say but are too lazy to actually stick with a topic, research it, consider different points of view about it and then write about it at length and reach some kind of conclusion about it. You know who you are.

*** Bad literature can be fascinating. There are many forms of bad literature, but one of the most fascinatingly awful is the rock press release. I mean, rock 'n' roll is fun, right? A press release about a great rock 'n' roll band should be as fun to read as a review of the band, or an interview with the band, right? Wrong.

***Here's a link to a well-done article about a very scary topic: a conference of right-wingers who think that our culture is engaged in a war on Christians. Their keynote speaker: Tom DeLay.

*** I'm trying not to turn this blog into yet another political blog, but it's hard to avoid the subject.

*** If you read Calvin Trillin's recent New Yorker article about his late wife, Alice, and didn't get choked up by the end, I worry about you. And I don't mean choked up in a Spielbergian way, I mean genuinely moved.

*** Items columns are lame.