Get to know: Tsar Bomba

What? You know nothing about Tsar Bomba, the biggest nuclear device ever set off?





EPIC!



www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba

www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxD44HO8dNQ&feature=related

A luddite recommends:

You know all these gizmos like Blackberries and iPhones? Forget them, because what's totes hot is the PENCIL!

I make lists compulsively, so am constantly scratching out stuff to do that's been done/adding new stuff to do, or making a change in my mega-strict self-budgeting and my sheets of 8.5x11 end up looking like the chicken-scratchy ramblings of a madman. The other day there were three nicely sharpened #2 pencils on the dining room table that the Bride had for some reason, so I made off with one and there is no going back! When you make a mistake or wish to change something you've written, you can erase it. It's NUTS!

I wonder - do "they" still make those erasable ballpoints? I remember when those were the shit-hot new thing, and I remember the ink's ginger ale-like smell. But they may be gone?

Anyway, PENCILS! Whether you get them at the store or order some $15-for-three set from Jack Spade (with "witty" engraving on the side such as 'INFALLABLE', probs), they are HOT!

Overheard

"You wanna eat, you gotta kill."

Social Climbers

No, not Janice Springer et famille, this is about some band from Indiana in the early 80's, maybe?

Obstuse!

Anyway, came across this weird record on some blog or other, and it's a very strange, sorta-punk/sorta-Sparks mishmash, but very smart. Also, sort of Gang of Four scratchy guitars all over the place.

But what I really love is the cover (of course):

How many times do I have to say this?

<Get that Girl in a Coma record called Trio BC. And the Noisettes. And the new Postmarks.

Do it!

UB

My college cronies and I rented Uncle Buck and kept it so long the police had to come get it back (I think that's what happened - small town!). Herewith, the top five things I still say all the time from the movie, if only in my head during the "quiet times" [?]:

5. "Mmkay, buh-bye, hon." [hanging up phone]



4. "Let go of my arm, goddammit!"



3. "Been eating a lot of cheese lately..."



2. "If that's true, we're really going to have to start brushing our
teeth..."



1. "Least I'm learning a trade!"/"Will do, chickie." [tie]

Joan Didion kicks ass, I fear

It's painful for me to admit (again - I think I posted on this same topic in January or so) with all the constant deification from all quarters, but Joan Didion's essays really are fantastic and tough as nails.

It was a spotty case, and to make it work at all the State was going to have to
find a motive. There was talk of unhappines, talk of another man.
That kind of motive, during the next few weeks, was what they set out to
establish. They set out to find it in accountants' ledgers and
double-indemnity clauses and motel registers, set out to determine what might
move a woman who believed in all the promises of the middle class - a woman who
had been chairman of the Heart Fund and who always knew a reasonable little
dressmaker - and who had come out of the bleak wild of prairie fundamentalism to
find out what she imagined to be the good life - what would drive such a woman
to sit on a street called Belle Vista and look out her new picture window in to
the empty California sun and burn her husband alive in a Volkswagen.

Shit like that!

Plus, I totally caught Bret Easton Ellis out at exact lines swiped and stuck in Less Than Zero. Dumb! Hence his saying in the August 1994 Vanity Fair "I have Thanksgiving now with Joan Didion and her husband and it's, y'know, alright." [paraphrase].

Also, BEE says that his sequel to Less Than Zero is done and that Julian is "fragile, but sober."

But who isn't, Bret?

Who?