Happiness is...K-Y and anal beads

Occasionally, when I'm bored enough to actually peruse online personal ads, I'm rewarded with a profile that's so bizarre that it makes me reconsider whether I should put myself into the dating pool at all. To wit:

• Profile name: 12incher
• Picture: [looks like it came out of a picture cube on a desk at K-Mart]
• The five items I can't live without: K-Y, anal beads,
• In my bedroom, you'll find: K-Y, anal beads, and a towel
• Why you should get to know me: K-Y, anal beads

It's patently unfair that Terri Schiavo is dead, but this man is allowed to live on.

MIT Weblog Survey

Take the survey--it's the electronic, feel-good version of donating blood. (Except that the homos can still do it without lying.)

Centennial Park, Nashville

A few snapshots of Centennial Park in Nashville, home of the city's full-scale replica of the Parthenon in Athens.

For the record, I had an RC Cola, but no Moon Pie.

What's more Southern than an RC Cola and a Moon Pie? Nothing, that's what, bitches. So it was with great gusto that I indulged my redneck side at the RC Cola and Moon Pie Festival this weekend in rural Bell Buckle, Tennessee. I started out doing the 10-mile run, and stayed to enjoy more tacky Southern culture than the law should allow. But I'll let that part of the day speak for itself: go see the pictures for yourself.

Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Get Saved

I witnessed a rather unfortunate performance this week at a church event, in which a Christian songwriter performed a set of songs that he's written in the year since he got saved. Years ago, he wrote "Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys." These days, he's writing songs like (and I shit you not) "Jesus Loved The Hell Out Of Me." It was excruciating--and that was the best song of the bunch.

The only lesson I draw from this is that, in these troubled times, if you seek salvation from Our Lord and Savior, he demands your artistic talent and integrity in return.

"Monet Refuses the Operation," by Lisel Mueller

Doctor, you say there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don't see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolves
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don't know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and change our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

Apple iPod battery settlement

If you have a third-generation iPod where the battery capacity has fallen to four hours or less, or a first- or second-generation iPod with battery capacity of five hours or less, be sure you're aware of the Apple class action lawsuit settlement. Depending on the circumstances, settlement benefits can be replacement of the battery or of the entire iPod unit, Apple store credit of $50, or cash payment of $25. Check it out.