From Mimi Smartypants:

“America would be a better place if everyone dressed and acted like Prince. (The Purple One. The Artist. Whatever.) Maybe not forever and ever, because that could get tiring (not to mention hot in the summertime with all the gloves and velvet and such), but it would be so great if the entire country participated in Dress And Behave Like Prince Week. I would very much like it if, instead of sitting on his duff and speaking dryly into a microphone, Alan Greenspan made his semi-annual monetary policy reports while dry-humping a purple guitar. The male members of Congress could wear identical white pimp suits and do a big dance number in the background. The female members of Congress could wear white lycra bodysuits and some sort of sex-kitten faux-militaristic garb, like PVC captain’s hats. It would add so much to the day if you went to the dry cleaner and said, “Can you do something about this stain on my raspberry beret? I think it’s salad dressing, don’t ask me how it got there,” and your dry cleaning lady and her friend were dancing all lesbotronically and playing single notes on a Casio keyboard. And who hasn’t wanted, during a boring meeting, to throw a translucent black veil over his or her head and start crawling like a demonically possessed boa constrictor across the polished boardroom table? ‘Sir, I move that this is what it sounds like when doves cry!'”

“Also, today I saw a woman wearing a skirt that had a design of hats printed all over it and now I feel unsettled. I know paper towels and such often have weird things printed on them, like ducks or picnic baskets, but the skirt and hats seem a little too close together somehow. A likely analogy would be if paper towels had rolls of toilet paper printed on them. Arrggh, leave me alone, I have to think about this one.”

From Poetry Daily:

The Cadillac in the Attic

by Andrew Hudgins

After the tenant moved out, died, disappeared

the stories vary the landlord

walked downstairs, bemused, and told his wife,

“There’s a Cadillac in the attic,”

and there was. An old one, sure, and one

with sloppy paint, bald tires,

and orange rust chewing at the rocker panels,

but still and all, a Cadillac in the attic.

He’d battled transmission, chassis, engine block,

even the huge bench seats,

up the folding stairs, heaved them through the trapdoor,

and rebuilt a Cadillac in the attic.

Why’d he do it? we asked. But we know why.

For the reasons we would do it: for the looks

of astonishment he’d never see but could imagine.

For the joke. A Cadillac in the attic!

And for the meaning, though we aren’t sure what it means.

And of course he did it for pleasure,

the pleasure on his lips of all those short vowels

and three hard clicks: the Cadillac in the attic.

From Mrs. Kennedy at What’s the Fuss?:

“Almost every mother I know with a nearly-one-year-old child has her thong in a twist about planning a birthday party for a child who absolutely could not give a shit what day it is. I know how sexist this is, but it finally took a man — one who works in the building trades, no less (i.e., a manly man) — to straighten the whole first birthday concept out for us.

It boils down to this:

(1) Get cake

(2) Place cake in front of baby

(3) Take pictures of baby flinging cake around room

Optional: Funny hats

Not optional: Margaritas for mom. And dad, I guess, since he’s paying.”

From Eurotrash, excerpts from “Other targets of my random hate:”

• “Hoboken sorority sisters who assume the entire bastard subway carriage is like, rilly rilly interested in their gym routine every morning and consquently turn on their internal megaphones just so we don’t miss a single ear-splitting nasally-mangled word on the way into work.
• Men on the PATH train who imagine their sexual organs are so large they have to spread their legs wide enough to mash me into the next side of tomorrow and take up three seats…
• People who want to talk to me on aeroplanes.
• Men with long hair who play the guitar at parties and the girls who sit at their feet, nodding, smiling inanely, hoping for a fuck…
• Families of five from Idaho in matching shorts and windcheaters who get off the subway train and then fan out, blocking the entire platform while they work out which fucking country they’re in and which way is it to Disneyland.”

From Defective Yeti:

What Up, Boss

While at work I frequent a website where users post interesting pictures and audio clips they have found. Today a guy who works at an ad agency posted an mp3 along with this comment: “I found this audio at the start of one of the our spare tapes. No explanation, no reason it should be there. Seems to be a kid’s tv program host teaching kids slang. It’s overmodulated and pretty strange.” I was rockin’ out to Kosheen at the moment, but was sufficiently intrigued to stop my CD and click the link. A little box popped up to tell me that the mp3 was downloading at would autolaunch in winamp after a minute or so.

A few moments later my boss strolled into my office. I swiveled around in my chair to face him, turning my back to my computer. “Hey Matthew,” he said sitting down,”How are you doing for time? Would you be interested in working on a new project?”

A loud voice from behind me suddenly bellowed “Awwwwwwwwww yeah! Fo shizzle!”

Bus Pass

Chatting with a female friend.

Me: I dunno what it is, but I’ve seen a lot of attempted pick-ups on the bus recently.

L: Yeah?

Me: It’s like open season or something. Has anyone ever tried to pick you up on the bus?

L: Sure. It happens from time to time.

Me: Really? What do they say?

L: Oh, you know. They don’t use “lines” or anything, they just say something to start a conversation and go from there. Like, I had my headphones on at the bus stop a few weeks ago, and this guy came up and said “So, what are you listening to?” And I said the news, because I was listening to NPR. And he said “Oh, that’s too bad. You should be listening to …” and then he went on to list his favorite bands and ask me what my favorite bands were and stuff.

Me: And that works?

L: It probably works on some girls. But not on me, because I’m not in the market and I know what they’re up to. I mean, when someone comes out of nowhere and starts talking to me like that, I know they are either trying to pick me up or sell me God.

Me: [Laughs] Actually, that’s my backup plan when I try and pick-up girls. If it’s not going well I start pretending like I was only interested in converting them.

L: Crafty.

Me: I say “You’re listening to the news? Well, have you heard the Good News?”

L: Then, you know, they’re not rejecting you, they’re rejecting God.

Me: Which gives me the added comfort of knowing they are going to Hell.

L: It’s win-win.

Jason on proxemics:

“I stand alone in the elevator, right in the middle, equidistant from the four walls. Before the doors close, a woman enters. Unconsciously, I move over to make room for her. We stand side by side with equal amounts of space between the two of us and between each of us and the walls of the elevator. On the 12th floor, a man gets on and the woman and I slide slightly to the side and to the back, maximizing the space that each of us occupies in the elevator. At the 14th floor, another man gets on. The man in front steps to the back center and the woman and I move slightly toward the front, forming a diamond shape that again maximizes each person’s distance from the elevator walls and the people next to them.

It reminds me of cell division in an embryo or the arrangement of atoms in a molecule…”

He says, “Several stories have been lost in the media frenzy over President Bush’s noble and controversial stand against the sexual enslavement of children…”

How to figure out when it’s your dream. From O Magazine‘s interview with Salma Hayek:Salma Hayek: …This is one thing I learned: How do you recognize what is your true dream and what is the dream that you are dreaming for other people to love you?

Oprah: How?

SH: The difference is very easy to understand. If you enjoy the process, it’s your dream.

O: Correct.

SH: If you are enduring the process, just desparate for the result, it’s somebody else’s dream.

I want to read Common Shock by Kaethe Weingarten. O‘s book reviewer describes the premise like this: “In a society rampant with binary thinking–good versus evil, us versus them–how do we move toward understanding and forgiveness of those who are different? How do we hold onto hope and let go of fear?”

I’ve been watching too much T.V. Painter Robert Henri says, “You can do anything you want to do. What is rare is this actual wanting to do a certain thing: wanting it so much that you are practically blind to all other things, that nothing else will satisfy you.”

North Koreans are living in an Orwell novel. From this week’s New Yorker, “Alone in the Dark” by Philip Gourevitch:”Pyongyang is North Korea’s model city, full of model schools and model hospitals and model people: residence is reserved for the Party’s chosen, the political and military elite, the commissars and cadres and their most faithful followers, and the population is regularly cleansed of those deemed ideologically lax, as well as the old, the sick, the disfigured, and the lame, who are banished to the provinces and replaced by a fresh crop of loyalists.”