From this week’s New Yorker Magazine, the poem “Sixtieth Birthday Dinner” by Michael Ryan:

If in the men’s room of our favorite restaurant
while blissfully pissing riserva spumante
I punch the wall because I am so old,
I promise not to punch too carelessly.

Our friend Franco cooks all night and day
to transform blood and bones to osso buco.
He shouldn’t have to clean them off his wall
or worry that a customer gone cuckoo

has mashed his knuckles like a slugger
whose steroid dosage needs a little tweaking.
My life with you has been beyond beyond
and there’s nothing beyond it I’m seeking.

I just don’t want to leave it, and I am
with every silken bite of tiramisu.
I wouldn’t mind being dead
if I could still be with you.

Bryan and Charlie Brown
Originally uploaded by MaggieMason.

This is Bryan celebrating his 37th birthday with Lt. Colonel Charlie Brown, who is running for Congress in California’s 4th District. Charlie Brown is, I shit you not, running against a guy named Doolittle.

Way back when Evan used to do Blogs of Note for Blogger, he got too busy to do it, so I posted a few. A couple days ago, a friend from Google asked if he could log into my account to get the old posts. This is why. Pretty neat.

If your life is too hectic for you to keep a cactus alive, you have bigger problems than a lack of greenery in your environment.

The March/April edition of Mental Floss has an awesome article on parasites. One kind attaches itself to the tongue of a fish, feeding off the blood supply until the fish’s tongue drops off. Then the parasite serves as a surrogate tongue..

Just as good is the female Sacculina, which starts out as a sluglike thing floating around in the water. It finds a crab, and then stabs one of the crab’s joints with a dagger-like appendage. The Sacculina ooooozes into the crab through the hollow dagger, leaving an empty shell outside. Once inside the crab, the gooey parasite takes root, wrapping around the crab’s eyestalks and legs, growing until a little bit of it pops out of the crab’s shell. Then it begins to steer the crab wherever it wants to go. (“Sacculina! You’ve just successfully overtaken over the body of a crab, thereby ensuring propagation of your larvae! What are you doing next?”)

Sort of makes intestinal worms seem cuddly.