Randomizer!

Random links, because I can't complete a thought today. Still recovering from the marathon at the studio. I'll tell you about it later. But first, these important messages.

Bitch Ph.D. talks about trying to be a professional with kids. I don't really like most kids, but this was interesting reading.

If you haven't been to Overease lately, you might have missed Magical Trevor. Ha! Now you'll get it stuck in your damn head too.

From Omokage, how the debates aren't debates at all.

Also from Omokage, hard-boiled slang. "I have the droppers ribbed up to get the electric cure."

Also from Omokage (you'd think I didn't talk to anyone else today), that Chipotle stuff is terrible for you.

From the book The Well-Tempered Sentence by grammar artist Karen Elizabeth Gordon, this beautiful illustration of how to punctuate parenthetical sentences: "We had finished our Irish coffee. (We had plenty of time, we thought, to get to the theater.) We wanted to prolong that moment past fulfillment, bedtime, and death."

End Times?

Four hurricanes have attempted to wipe Florida off the map in the past few months.

Mount St. Helens is set to erupt at any time.

A federal judge ruled against portions of the Patriot Act.

I'm just waiting for the plagues of locusts.

Credit

I need advice about how my name should be listed in the credits for this documentary I've been working on. Curse my parents for giving me such a common name! There are countless Mike Phillipses, a bunch of Michael Phillips Jrs., and even a Michael W. Phillips.

I usually use Michael W. Phillips Jr. on legal-type things, and it's the name I use on my site. But it's so awkward. What do you guys think? What about Michael Walt Phillips? What about Siegfried von Himmelbutz? I need to make up my mind sometime tomorrow.

The Most Evil Site I've Ever Encountered

http://christianparty.net/christianparty.htm

This is the most hateful, misogynist, racist, antisemitic, awful site I have ever seen. I feel like someone who opened a rotten container of food and wants you to smell it, but I really think you should look at it. Apparently, everything that is wrong with the world is the fault of women and Jews. It's all the fault of "feminist jurisprudence," and you will know this after you look at their handy graphs. It's all supported by Bad Statistics. I'm sputtering. I have to stop reading it. You should go read it instead.

I'm Freaking Famous

I have achieved eternal life on Roger Ebert's website.

I hope this doesn't cut into my 15 minutes of fame. (Thanks to Shawn, the president of my fanclub, for the link.)

I Know Famous People

My friend Gaia has been asked to speak at a press conference tomorrow in Washington DC about the death of the 1000th soldier in Iraq. She's been an outspoken critic of the war, and she will bring her perspective as the mother of a soldier and an organizer of other moms against the war. I don't know exactly where or when, or whether it will be televised. If I find out, I'll post details in the comments. This is one of those moments when I would feel proud to elbow total strangers and say, "You see her there on the tee-vee? She's a good friend of mine."

Roger Ebert Dot Com

Oh, joy! Roger Ebert finally has a site that contains all of his reviews since 1967. It's at Roger Ebert Dot Com. I won't get a lick of work done for weeks.

Ebert's always been one of my favorite critics. Even when I don't agree with his taste in movies—which happens all the time—I like the way he writes. No other mainstream critics know film history like he does. I give his new site fifteen thumbs up.

Leo's

One of my favorite restaurants, Leo's, is under new management. Doom had been impending all summer, and when Brian and I stopped by for brunch on Sunday, it was clear that it had struck. I am pleased to say that the food has not suffered a whit. What suffered is the ambience.

From the outside, little change is noticeable: there's a new, freshly painted sign underneath the front window. But inside is different in subtle and saddening ways. The first thing I noticed was that the staff had changed over completely. Brian pointed out that there was a marked decrease in the number of piercings among the new staff. They were no longer the tattooed, pierced, mismatched clothes wearing artistic types who had worked there for the entire two years I've been going to Leo's. Now they are the Gap crowd, the new Wicker Park residents who moved to the neighborhood because of the artistic types they've driven out. They looked like sorority girls playing dress-up.

The second and third things I noticed had to do with the restaurant's comfortably shabby look: it had been cleaned up. The eclectic mix of mismatched chairs was gone, replaced by identical, boring wooden ones; also, the wall behind the counter, which used to be plastered with postcards, was cleaned off. Many of the postcards are still there in other areas of the restaurant, but there's a glaring gap that suggests future removal efforts.

Again, it's not like the place is completely different. But I now understand the feeling that Rebecca has described to me upon driving through her old neighborhood and noting subtle and not-so-subtle changes that mean gentrification. I'm not sure if it's a good thing or not that I've lived in Chicago long enough now to have a favorite place ruined (at least partly) by gentrification.

Lost Baby

I've had a bad afternoon. As the cleaning people were leaving, I realized that I hadn't seen my cat, Birdie, for a while. I started looking around for her, but still couldn't find her. I looked in every single place in the apartment that a cat could possibly fit. I figured that she had gotten out, so I spent a half-hour looking in the basement, wandering around and calling her name. She didn't come out. Then I went door to door in the complex, knocking and getting no answer from anyone. This is likely because most people are still at work at 4 in the afternoon.

I called Rebecca, near tears, because I didn't know how to get ahold of anyone from the complex. I could barely string a sentence together, because Birdie is my baby and I couldn't bear the thought of losing her.

As Rebecca comforted me and tried to find everyone's email address, I noticed one small spot that I hadn't looked, on top of some boxes shoved on top of a trunk underneath a table. I ran over and looked in, and there she was. As I cooed happily that I had found her, she stared at me in that superior cat way, annoyed that I had interrupted her nap. Stupid cat.

Spending Money

To celebrate yet another day of not having a job to go to, I went out and splurged on music. I've been wanting some new music for some time, to the extent of bugging friends to make me mix discs. If I haven't bugged you yet, consider yourself bugged. I bought the following CDs:

Nigeria '70: The Definitive Story of 1970s Funky Lagos. I have no idea what might be on this disc. I envision it to be something like Pirate's Choice, the Orchestre Baobab CD I bought after hearing about it on NPR. The All Music Guide calls it a "stunning compilation" and "a rich, historical document that you might actually want to listen to." Sounds good.

Gang of Four's A Brief History of the Twentieth Century. Four years ago, I bought a CD by a band called The Elastic Purejoy in a bargain bin in Florida. The Elastic Purejoy is Dave Allen, who was in Shriekback, Low Pop Suicide, and Gang of Four. Because I am a completist, I bought a Shriekback CD, which is good 1980s alterna-pop. I didn't like Low Pop Suicide. And now I have my Gang of Four CD. After listening to two songs in the car on the way home, I state that it sounds like it came out of the same era as Mission of Burma and Wire, which it did. Which is good.

Lyle Lovett's Anthology, Vol. 1: Cowboy Man. Back in college and grad school, I was in a writing group called Litera. There was this guy Ron Riekki, who lives in Chicago but I never see him; he really liked Lyle Lovett, and he wrote a poem once that referred to a Lyle Lovett song. This is all to say that I still never listened to Lyle Lovett, and this is my first attempt.

Illinois Jacquet's Jumpin' at Apollo. This is another NPR find. Illinois Jacquet apparently changed the tenor sax forever when he "honked," which is playing the same note in succession, at least according to the NPR broadcast I heard. This CD features Jacquet playing with an A-list of jazz performers, none of whom I know except Charles Mingus.

So now it's 1:43, and I have three hours to kill until a bunch of us go see Hero. Do you want to come? We're meeting for dinner at the Billy Goat, and then we're seeing the movie at 7:00 at the AMC River East 21. Don't say I didn't invite you.

I'm here in my new apartment, feeling like a lazy bastard as Rebecca's cleaning people straighten up the apartment behind me. I didn't want to be here when they were here, because I feel a little too bourgeois having cleaning people picking up after me—notice how I called them Rebecca's cleaning people? I feel like the spirits of Upton Sinclair and Eugene V. Debs and Emma Goldman are looking down on me with scorn in their ghostly eyes.