I already adored Neal Pollack for coming out and reading to the people standing in line outside Luna Lounge because, dammit, people standing in line need entertainment, too.

Fraction just forwarded me the following and now my adoration is twofold:

"There's been much talk lately in circles where talk occurs about a young writer named James Frey. I'm tired of him already. Every five weeks or so a punk comes along and tries to cock-block my mantle when he knows full well that I am the greatest writer of my generation or any generation and that no one better captures the anguish of contemporary American male identity better than I do. ..."

Go. Read. Guffaw.

Hopes high as Xtra Heat enters breeding shed
By FRANK MITCHELL

LEXINGTON, Ky. - A strange and unaccustomed quiet has settled on John Salzman's barn, because the Heat is gone. Champion filly Xtra Heat has shipped from Salzman's training barn to her owners' ClassicStar Farm in Kentucky. Now she will try to pass on to her foals the speed and gameness she showed at the racetrack.

"She's been sent home to be bred," Salzman said, adding that she left his barn April 17.

She is passing from the excitement and activity of racing life to the pastoral calm of Bluegrass farms.

"She arrived on Friday, looking like 1.5 million dollars," said Jon Freston, racing manager of ClassicStar. "John sent her to us in fabulous condition, sound and happy. She travels really well and as soon as she got off the van, she started eating grass. She is right at home."

More in link.

Sugar Industry Asks U.S. to Cut W.H.O. Funding After Negative Report
—By Erin Ferdinand, Utne.com

"The U.S. sugar industry is lobbying the Bush administration to cut its funding of the World Health Organization after a recent W.H.O. report warned consumers to cut their sugar intake."

Unbelievable. More in link.

Sam Humphreys has a sweet little photography site.

"...the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), has given Zain's parents, Raj and Shahana Hashmi, permission to specially select an embryo in an attempt to save their son's life.

Using IVF techniques a cell will be removed from the specially selected embryo and checked that it is disease-free and a good tissue match. "

"On January 3, during the final, furious effort to sequence those 3.1 billion units of DNA, a federal court in Lower Manhattan handed down a ruling that by some bizarre twist could serve as precedent for a third-millennium Dred Scott decision. Judge Judith Barzilay of the U.S. Court of International Trade decreed that intelligent characters with "extraordinary and unnatural powers," beings with "tentacles, claws, wings, or robotic limbs," "highly exaggerated muscle tone," or "exaggerated troll-like features," are "nonhuman creatures." Really.

That ruling, regarding a tax on comic-book toys, revealed a mindset that doesn't bode well for the souped-up variants of human who could be living shoulder-to-shoulder with your grandkids, or could be your grandkids. They could very well be augmented with better genes and robotic prosthetics or implanted chips, by choice or necessity. Will they face an angry mob of normals when they start filling the roster at Harvard? When they go to vote, will they be recognized as citizens? The law has gone a lot further in banning their birth than in protecting their rights. "

Kitchen Sink Magazine is shockingly good and beautifully put together. I don't know exactly what I was expecting, but I confess I didn't expect anything this polished.

I fear that may make me sound like an ass, but how often are you pleasantly surprised?

I ought to have known better.

Seriously: get your copy here.

Eating It, Comedy at Luna Lounge. Monday's show features Greg Giraldo, who, if there is any justice in the universe, is going to be a huge, huge star.

See Also:

Jonathan Ames in "Notes from the Underground" - May 1 to 25 @ PS 122
Jonathan Ames (author, My Less Than Secret Life; What's Not to Love; The Extra Man) stars in the one-man play, "Notes From the Underground," written and directed by Eric Bogosian.

From Christine Sismondo's review of A History Of Mistresses by Elizabeth Abbott:

What's impossible not to notice in this compilation is that, in just about every other historical time and place, society had a far more open relationship to the mistress.

For example, Abbott tells of Charles II's fairly open infidelities. The king had several kept women at any given time competing for status and his attention. Charles' long-term mistress, Nell Gwynne, apparently even slipped a laxative into one of her rival's food.

Toward the end of his reign, when he was suspected of having papal leanings, he came under fire for his association with Louise de Keroualle — not because he was committing an infidelity, but because she was Catholic. An angry anti-papal mob once stopped a carriage headed to the king's quarters yelling, "It's the king's Catholic woman."

To their surprise, Nell Gwynne emerged and assuaged the rioting crowd's fears by shouting "Pray, good people, be civil. I am the Protestant whore."

So I'm in the bathroom at my grandmother's house reading AARP magazine -- which is a shockingly good magazine, by the way -- and in an article on America's Greatest Innovators Over 50, I see this:

Elizabeth Blackburn, 53
Professor of Biochemistry, University of California, San Francisco
Regular cells divide a finite number of times, then die. But cancer cells are immortal. In 1985, Blackburn discovered why: an enzyme she named telomerase. In theory, to disable the enzyme is to stop cancer. And telomerase might also keep healthy cells alive indefinitely. Blackburn's finding launched a field devoted to altering the cell's life span. Hailed as an ongoing trailblazer, Blackburn is modest: "Nature is much cleverer than I am," she says.

and this:

Judah Folkman, 70
Director of Surgical Research, Children's Hospital, Boston
When Folkman first published his theory in 1971 that cancerous tumors create their own blood vessels, skeptics howled. "It would be like announcing today that you figured out how to do a head transplant," he has said. But Folkman's research silenced his critics. Knowing how tumors supply themselves with blood, scientists now work on shutting down the supply. Two dozen drugs based on his discovery are now in clinical trials.

...

Cancer cells are immortal and they feed themselves. I had to find this out from an old folks' magazine on the shitter. Is it me or are these huge ideas?

It's time for a science magazine subscription, methinks. Discover, Scientific American or New Scientist? Or is there another I should know about?

Bear in mind that I am apparently so far behind that AARP's retrospective articles blow my mind.

ROBERT LEO DECONNICK was born March 17, 1925, with the luck of the Irish in Columbus, Ohio to Ernestine (Caldwell) and Leo George DeConnick. He died April 9, 2003. Bob graduated from Central High School in Columbus and joined the U.S. Army Air Corps, serving proudly as a bombardier/navigator in WWII. Following the war, he entered Ohio State University, College of Engineering. He was a registered professional engineer in several states. Bob was an avid golfer, and he enjoyed fishing, woodworking, traveling and working with the Boy Scouts as a Scout Master, receiving The Order of the Arrow. His storytelling, especially of WWII and travel, are legendary among his family and friends and will be missed, as will his optimistic outlook on life, warm personality and ever-present smile.

Bob is survived by his wife of 55 years, Mary Jane Ettore; son, Robert DeConnick and his wife, Eileen; daughter, Judith Herold and her husband, John; grandchildren, Kelly Sue DeConnick and Matt Fraction, Jennifer Herold-Fontenot and Damon Fontenot, Joan Herold, and Jordan Herold; sisters, Cecilia Palmer and her husband, Raymond, Marjorie DeConnick and Flora McKinley, as well as many nieces and nephews.

Friends are invited to visitation with the family Friday, April 11, 2003 from 6:00 until 8:00 PM at Memorial Oaks Funeral Home, 13001 Katy Freeway. A Funeral Mass will be conducted at 10:30 AM Saturday, April 12, 2003 at St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Catholic Church, 6646 Addicks Satsuma Road, Houston, Texas 77084. Rite of Christian Burial will follow in Memorial Oaks Cemetery.

For those desiring, the family requests donations be made to The American Diabetes Association; The National Kidney Foundation, 30 East 33rd Street, New York, New York 10016; or The American Heart Association, P.O. Box 20448, Houston, Texas 77225-0448.

My father just called. They're taking his father off life support now. Grandpa's wife and his children will be with him when he passes.

If you do such things, say a prayer for Grandpa DeConnick? For him, I hope there are angels. I hope they like Etch-a-Sketch and Bob Ross and ice cream.

I love you, Grandpa. We'll look after Grandma. It's okay for you to rest now.

Finished The End of the Affair last night. Took longer to get through than I'd planned as the events of the last few weeks had me unable to concentrate effectively. What an amazing read, though. Such clean prose; like Nabokov in that way. Timely, too, - addressing the Big Questions as it does.

On craft, I particularly admire how Greene resisted providing a villian. (Which is virtually the point of the novel, I know, but it would have been so easy, so tempting to make Henry or the Priest take that role.)

I should like to read more Graham Greene, I think.

Not sure what's next on my reading list. That book on Secretariat, maybe? It's been on the stack for a while and I like the idea of alternating fiction and non.

Speaking of horses: Hex: A Ruby Murphy Mystery has gone into its second printing after only a week and a half. Pick it up if you haven't already.

And while I'm hustling books, Fraction's LAST OF THE INDEPENDENTS is available for preorder now through your local comics shop. The order code you require is APR03 1915. For those of you who find preordering and comics shops equally perplexing and distasteful, I'll let you know when it's up on Amazon.com.

A memorial website has been established for Gil.

Tree rings, scars, a row of mistakes in the afghan I'm knitting. If there is such a thing as heaven and our lives are mapped out on celestial walls and tended by lowly angels or cupids or whatever, this time, these last couple of weeks, this NOW, gets marked with the angel version of red map pins, tags, flags and post-it notes. This now gets circled in red Sharpie. Things are weird in this now, now.

My grandfather, whose organ systems are conspiring against him on a scale roughly equivalent to all of Asia attacking, oh, Peoria, has shocked and awed his cardiologist, neurologist, nephrologist, hemotologist, six nurses, two priests and me by coming back from what was almost certainly irreversible brain damage.

Grandma wasn't shocked. Apparently machines can't measure willingness to suffer pains and tubes and cuts and bruises for a few more days together.

He's stable for the moment. I like to watch them stare at each other.

Monday, we lost Gil Sharp. If you were lucky enough to know him ... e-mail me.

Gus and Val are having a baby, Merry and Alex are joining the hot married people club, I saw my first newborn, there's a war on and Ham suddenly likes people.

Somebody mark this down.