Fractionals

I mean, I have very good reasons for not being able to update here, the death of an old friend (and going home for the funeral and to reconnect with other old friends) being chief among them. Rest assured, if I'm still clutching these names after toting them around in my email after a week or too, there's good stuff inside:

- I'm an Asker, and column explains a hell of a lot. I, too, am skeptical of anything that goes "there are two kinds of people..." but this one seems very on point.

- I desperately need to find the time to write up two shows I saw recently, but PopMatters has my report on the excellent Horse Feathers show I caught a few weeks ago.

- I fucking love Grant Morrison and will continue to link any and all good interviews with him.

- Adam Gopnik's "What Did Jesus Do?" starts off like it's going to be another tedious "see, religious people are gullible!" exercise (I'm not religious, and I still can't stand that stuff), but it's a hell of a lot more balanced and interesting than that. The subtitle puts it fairly well: "Reading and unreading the Gospels."

- Pronouns; they're kind of weird, if you think about it. I read this for work and loved it.

- My buddy Mark got interviewed by the friggin' New York Times for their story on growing tomatoes and other plants upside-down. Pretty cool; my housemate is trying it and swears she already sees results.

- Like the anti-Grant Morrison, I will happily post whenever someone takes a good solid shot at the odious Ayn Rand, and this is a prime example. A very good overview, although it never gets quite as justly scathing as the opening: "St. Petersburg in revolt gave us Vladimir Nabokov, Isaiah Berlin and Ayn Rand. The first was a novelist, the second a philosopher. The third was neither but thought she was both."

- The ever-brilliant Andrew Unterberger has been taking requests, and he took mine. Insightful, throught provoking and funny in equal measure, as always.

- Next time you're bored, take a beer mug with walls kind of like this (but no middle lamp thingy), a darkened room, and a tea light. Put the tealight in the beer mug, make sure it's flickering, and stare at the wall for a while.