Dave's Fiction Warehouse

The New York Times runs a blog called Proof, wherein various contributors hold forth on the meaning of booze in their lives. As you might guess, a fair number of them are alcoholics or the children of alcoholics. Their posts smolder with the pain of a drunken past and austere pride at having taken a better path. I salute them. That can't be easy. In fact, I propose a toast ... I started drinking at 16. Vodka and 7-Up in a paper cup. It tasted like kerosene; in retrospect, maybe it needed a bit more 7-Up. But it made an impression, the magical way acquaintances became friends, mundane thoughts became profound, sophomoric jests became uproarious. I didn't get sick, didn't black out, didn't even have a hangover the next morning. I was a shy person who'd stumbled on to a reliable way of becoming less shy. Imagine if you had a bad case of acne and you could apply something that would make the zits vanish, if only for an evening. That was how I felt. I've been drinki...

We flew back from Vegas on the Galoot Express, an Allegiant Air flight packed with guys in cowboy hats coming home from the National Finals Rodeo. All were identically arrayed in tight Wranglers and oversized snap-button shirts and belt buckles the size of turkey platters, and all swaggered onto the plane braying about their drunken exploits in affected drawls taken from movies and crappy country music. They all wore cell phones, tilted forward for a faster draw. This is the vanishing breed of rugged individualist that made this country great. Even after four days of galumphing around Vegas in painful cowboy boots, they were an ebullient, self-satisfied bunch. They had accomplished much in a short time: guzzling gallons of Bud Light and making lewd propositions to dozens of cocktail waitresses and keeping awake countless tourists unlucky enough to have a room on the same floor. As one guy on our flight yelled to his companion: "Life's too short not to have a good time." B...

So O.J.'s going to jail and nobody much cares. It's about time. We've come a long way since 1995. I remember the first O.J. trial. Every white person in the room was stunned, not so much by the verdict as by the ensuing images of black people celebrating the acquittal. I was struck then by how clueless I'd been about race: A black man skates on a double-murder rap and people are dancing in the streets like he's just won the Super Bowl. I was thinking at the time: OK, I get it now. It looks like O.J. will be on ice for about half as long as long as he's eluded responsibility for the two killings he so obviously performed. That's long enough to write another book. But maybe he won't want to. His last one, If I Did It , might have had something do with his last diehard defenders finally folding their tents. Before that, if you squinted just so and discarded all the evidence, it was possible to believe he'd been the victim of a racist conspiracy. But...

After a certain age, Christmas becomes a season of regret: The loss of loved ones over the years, the loss of friends, the loss of youth. The loss of all those Mattel toys that would now fetch a fortune on eBay. The sad truth is that the best Christmas in middle age cannot match the least one of childhood. But the important thing is to pretend otherwise. I go back and forth on this, but today I figure the holiday is bigger than I am. It's not really my right to succumb to cynicism and say to hell with the lights and the tree and the travel and the shopping. I figure Christmas has lasted this long because guys like me see a little bit of ourselves in Ebenezer Scrooge, and each year take small steps to minimize the resemblance. So this weekend I'll again be up on the ladder, cursing lights that in 12 months have become a Gordian knot. I'll be setting out luminaria, as is the custom in my neighborhood, and cursing the candles that won't stay lit --also a custom. I'll ...

Perhaps signaling the imminent demise of Twitter, the Wall Street Journal has posted a guide for using it. The guide runs 1,200 words and does a good job of explaining why this is something you may not want to bother with. Whenever I see the phrase "social-networking tool," my eyes glaze over. Not that I mind Twitter. I've been on it for a couple of months. I now follow 13 people. I am being followed by 33, which is weird because my "updates" tend to be non sequiturs, and infrequent enough to render my ranking just short of nonexistent. I never look at my Twitter ranking, of course. I'm much too cool for that. My own guide for using Twitter is this: Don't follow anyone you haven't had dinner with. But know that following friends will make you immediately and exquisitely aware of every party to which you've not been invited. Finally, while it's easy to follow someone, it's not so simple to quit. Thanks to a dopey service called Qwitter , ...

You've heard of live blogging ; this is dead blogging, where I scrawl my ruminations longhand and transpose them into my computer later with only minor editing. I left the laptop at home on our trip to San Francisco, feeling vaguely virtuous about it, wondering if maybe the organic process of putting pen to paper might somehow awaken some inner muse. So far, mostly it's awakened a dull pain in my writing hand and forearm -- a reminder of years of disuse. The modern ease of putting words on a screen and rearranging them at will -- does that make you a better communicator, or a lazier one? You still hear of writers who prefer longhand, who claim it makes one more careful with composition, the way shooting film requires more thought than shooting digital. I don't know. It's hard to imagine writing a full novel this way. But then, I haven't quite written one the new way, either. I'm sitting close to a gas fireplace which is operated by remote control. This beautifu...

Often overlooked in the hand-wringing over the slumping global economy is continuing growth and upbeat outlook in the piracy sector. Just last year, Kenya's foreign minister reports , a band of hearty swashbucklers, led by the mischievous Captain Farrah Adid Sparrow, extracted at least $150 million in ransoms from hapless ship owners. As they say in Mogadishu, that's a lot of shillings . And it'll only get better. Governments and shipping companies whine about it, but $150 million is still chicken feed in the global marketplace. International conglomerates have a lot of money, but not many destroyers. The last time piracy flourished like this, it took about 30 years before the U.S. government got it sorted out. If Farrah Adid Sparrow's men don't start grabbing Carnival cruise ships, they've got a good future ahead of them. This is African aid you can believe in. No doubt most of the pirate's profits have been earmarked for infrastructure, AIDS prevention ...

My wife Tess has asked me to play along in a game of blog tag. Because I'm a fun, agreeable guy, I'll comply. Basically, the rules are these: Write 6 random things about yourself. Link to the person who tagged you. Post the rules on your blog. Tag 6-ish people at the end of your post. Let each person know he/she has been tagged. Let the tagger know when your entry is up. So, here are six things about me: 1) I am not, technically, a high school graduate. Two weeks before graduation, I was arrested at the senior kegger. Normally this kind of thing was punished by probation or community service, but the kegger was held on some forest land owned by the mayor, who was also president of the school board. The primary bonfire at the kegger somehow spread out of control. Owing to some previous infractions, a close friend and myself spent a night in jail and were denied our diplomas. We later viewed the ceremony from outside the gym doors without much regret. I ended up acing the test f...

So it has come to this for print journalism: selling souvenirs. Most of the time, the Wichita Eagle has trouble giving away its print product. Drive down any residential street late in the afternoon and you'll see plastic-wrapped Eagles still lying in the driveways where the carrier tossed them that morning. Then you get an historic event like the one we've just witnessed. Then people realize they don't have a hard copy of what they've just seen unfold via the magic wall and the fake holograms of CNN. On that one day, they're kind of glad they subscribe. As noted in the New York Times , most newpapers saw a huge spike in demand for their post-election issues. Demand remains robust: the Eagle is charging $10 for a paper that normally goes for 50 cents -- or three for $22. Other papers are peddling T-shirts with the front page on it, and framed copies to hang on your wall. They'd probably sell you some earrings, too, if the headline could remain legible. Some idio...

Here in Wichita, the lines started forming as soon as the polls opened, so it's probably going to be a long day for those poor election officials. I'll just laugh when I drive by on my way to claim my free Starbucks coffee and free Krispy Kreme donut. I laughed at the wife too, when she suggested we stand in line to vote early last week, but now it seems like a stroke of genius. The coffee's free and so is the day. Tonight will be the first presidential election in 30 years that I don't have to work through the night at a newspaper. I'm taking it easy. It's the Super Bowl, and I'm making nachos. Last night everybody talking about the election on TV seemed giddy, even those who lean Republican. But why not? It's been two years of endless campaign blather and eight years of specific ineptitude at the top. Everybody needs a break once in awhile. The good news for Republicans is that they'll have a lot less to be embarrassed about. I get the sense all of...

Seems like only yesterday that blogging was considered hip and cool and thoroughly modern, not to mention a force that would transform the world and probably lead to many lucrative offers. In fact, it was only yesterday. Today, I read in Wired , it's become quaint, as dated as shouting into a mobile phone the size of a refrigerator, the way Michael Douglas did in the movie Wall Street . As Wired 's Paul Boutin explains , blogging peaked in 2004 -- about three years before I got into it. Now it's all Twitter and Flickr and Facebook and YouTube. Video clips and crappy cell-phone photos speak louder than words, and 140 characters is all the text anybody has time to peruse. Nobody cares to read a few deft paragraphs; it's about phrases , baby, and the shorter the better. Nobody cares about your thoughts; it's about your impulses. What you feel right this minute. I got a kick out of this quote from longtime blogger Robert Scoble: "I keep my blog mostly for long-fo...

Today I voted. It was remarkable for two reasons: It's the first time I've voted anything close to a straight Democratic ticket, and it's the first time I've voted in a presidential election when it wasn't the first Tuesday of November. Let's hope I don't have to do anything so radical again. It was a beautiful day here in Wichita, Oct. 28 and the lines were snaking through the corridors at the Presbyterian church. We all showed up thinking to avoid the rush, and thereby created the rush a week early. No matter. We were mostly in good spirits. Long lines are bad, but this wasn't the DMV, we didn't have to be there. We showed up because we're good citizens, doing our duty, and it doesn't hurt to have friends and neighbors seeing us do it. We shuffled forward every minute or so, looking at our watches and thinking back on all the TV ads and debates and all those cards and fliers that have come in the mail. We thought about who was the terrori...

We went to see W. last night. It was entertaining if not illuminating, and for anybody who still sees the need to defend George W. Bush, it was about as fair as you're going to get from Oliver Stone. If I were Roger Ebert, I'd give it about two-and-half stars. I say entertaining because the various gaffes perpetrated by the Bush administration over the last eight years do add up to absurdist comedy when assembled by a competent director. The movie plays like a succession of Saturday Night Live parodies, some funnier than others. The central joke is not that Bush is a fool; it's that we elected a fool. Twice -- the second time long after the depth of his foolishness became manifest. I say the film is not illuminating because all of this stuff is well known, thanks to a succession of Bob Woodward books and Bush's own press conferences and speeches. Oliver Stone isn't adding anything to the body of knowledge, just stirring in some imagined conversations between Bush an...

You read all the time about images of Jesus and the Virgin Mary appearing in frosted windowpanes and moldy sheetrock and certain fast foods, but when a doll starts babbling about Islam, suddenly it's news. I have to admit I laughed when I saw this story in the Wichita Eagle, about the woman returning her Little Mommy Cuddle 'n Coo doll because it appears to be endorsing the views of the Prophet Muhammad. In the video accompanying the story on the Eagle's Web site, the little tyke does seem to be saying "Islam is the light." Then again, if you keep listening you can imagine all sorts of alternate phrases: "Please turn off the light." "I am not too bright." "Palin is alright." Play it backwards and you might hear "How about those Phillies?" I don't know. Hard to imagine that Mattel, whose talking-doll business presumably relies on non-Muslim markets too, would knowingly mass-produce a proselytizing doll. Why not also dres...

Talk about a sign of the times: The managers of Golden Gate Bridge have decided to go ahead with plans to install a $50 million suicide net . Given the anguish among erstwhile high-rollers in the Bay Area, it was either that or install turnstiles at either end to accommodate all those wishing to make the leap. A suicide net is a interesting paradox: Just by having it, you guarantee that it will never be used as intended. For those really interested in killing themselves, a 20-foot jump into wire mesh will have limited appeal. Might as well hurl yourself into the plastic balls at Chuck E. Cheese. Certainly you wouldn't look any more ridiculous when the authorities arrive to fish you out. If they build this thing, I hope there's some oversight. I know that if I were a suicide-net contractor, I'd be tempted to cut corners here and there. I'd build, say, a $35 million net and pass the savings along to myself. Nobody would be the wiser, right? Except for the occasional ...

So the proud airship known as Wall Street is going down in a billow of flame. Evidently there was a leak in the gigantic bag of hydrogen that was the U.S. economy, and nearby stood some short-sellers and derivatives traders lighting up their cigarettes. Oops. Things are getting bad and intend to get worse. Time magazine leads with a photo of Depression-era guys standing in a soup line. GM stock is about the same price now as the year before I was born. There's a minus sign in front of the most important number on my 401(k), and that number is close to what used to be my annual salary. Worse, my friends in OPEC are barely making ends meet, now that oil has gone from $147 a barrel to $78. Might be a slim Christmas even in Qatar. Ha ha. Times like these, you need to take a deep breath, look at the big picture. I look out the window in Wichita, and the sun is shining and there's a young couple in a new Jeep Liberty cruising by to take a look at the house next door -- on the mark...

I'm trying to remember the last time I heard of someone doing a skit in blackface where it didn't provoke a certain amount of outrage. I think I have to go all the way back to 1993, when Ted Danson tried it. Oh, wait: People got mad about that too. So really, Arkansas City Mayor Mell Kuhn should have seen this coming. Perhaps during early rehearsals for the skit featuring "Smellishis Poon and the Red Hot Poontangs," he might have reflected that comedy relying on racism ceased to be funny about 50 years ago. And that's the bigger crime here: Yeah, it's racially offensive, but what's worse is that there are still people out there who laugh uproariously at this kind of crap. It's a crime against comedy. This is where I need to point out that Mayor Kuhn's skit was named the winner at the fundraiser where it was performed. The Wichita NAACP is predictably annoyed about this, and they've wrung an awkward apology out of Mayor Kuhn. The mayor, in h...

Think of the stupidest thing you ever said. Now think if that stupid thing had been captured on video and replayed about a thousand times a day, usually to the sarcastic asides of late-night comedy hosts. Sarah Palin may botch tonight's debate too, but I'll give her credit for just showing up. It can't be pleasant, going from powerful woman to punchline in the space of a couple of weeks. I'm not sure I'll be able to watch this debate. I hate seeing people humiliate themselves, even if they should have known what they were getting into. Gov. Palin never came off as one of those pompous, bombastic poseurs who cry out for a pie in the face and a kick in the ass. She's just a happy woman who always got by on a smile and a cheerful stubbornness about having her way. She thought it was enough to know a thing or two about cracking the whip. Who knew they were going to get all specific? This has been a terrible presidential campaign, not so much vicious as utterly vapid...

When you wake up to a steady car horn at 3:45 in the morning, a lot of possibilities suggest themselves, none of them good: A petulant drunk punishing a long lost girlfriend; a particularly inept car thief, a dead body slumped against a steering wheel. I got up and looked down at the darkened street. No lights came on; no furtive footsteps could heard receding down the block. The horn went on and on. Three minutes, then five, then ten. No cops came; nobody but me peered out the door to investigate. The brunette was a little worried, but the dog wasn't. Finally I shrugged, made sure the door was locked tight, and went back to bed. I wondered how long it would be until the car's battery was as dead as its driver. The horn stopped after awhile. The abrupt silence was mysterious too, but I figured I could rule out the dead-body scenario. I picked up the book I'd been reading and finally drifted back to sleep. It didn't take long. Yeah, I might read a lot detective stories, ...

Maybe John McCain is being totally altruistic in his decision to suspend his presidential campaign so he can concentrate on fast-tracking the $700 billion Wall Street bailout. Maybe he really thinks the bailout will save us from a depression, and that it won't get passed if he and his opponent are not in Washington scrambling for mike time. I am a simple man, with little understanding of high finance or Beltway politics, so I'll give him the benefit of the doubt. I mean, it's not going to break my heart to miss out on a few days worth of cheesy political ads. But trying to pull out of this debate with Obama -- that's a little harder sell. McCain's people have tried to cast the debate as a frivolous campaign event in a time of national crisis. Right. We've got better things to do than judge the qualifications of the two men would be commander in chief for the next four years. These men belong in Washington, damn it, so they can help throw cash at those who, in a ...

American political campaigns are all about celebrity. The essential objective is to become more famous than one's opponent in a short amount of time. You do this with sly commercials, and pithy put-downs, and three-word mantras chanted by supporters, and, if you're lucky, by sheer personal attractiveness. That's why I first thought the not-so-attractive John McCain had made a shrewd choice by picking Sarah Palin as his running mate: She's a great-looking woman with a wonderful smile. And if there's a single tenet upon which all Americans can agree, it's that great-looking people rule, particularly if they smile wonderfully. But there's another tenet: Smart-sounding people also rule. Sometimes they rule even more -- say, after eight years of a president who has trouble putting a sentence together. Barack Obama's defining advantage has always been that he sounds very smart, even when his oratory soars into ephemeral realms and does not quite cohere. Hey, a...

I've been reading My Antonia , Willa Cather's 1918 novel about growing up on the Nebraska prairie. It's a beautiful book, poignant and uplifting, full of characters who reflect the truth of life in all its joy and pain. It's also an instructive portrait of the time in America when explicit toil was required for mere survival, never mind success. I've been reading it against the background noise of Wall Street's collapse, men and women on CNN droning gravely about the consequences of greed, and the need to ensure that the greediest of all do not, in the end, go broke. It's a complex issue. It takes someone like Yale business student David Bledin, writing an op-ed for the Washington Post, to put a human face on the unfolding tragedy. You think you have it tough; think what it's like for Masters of the Universe-in-training who now rue the rigors involved in chasing a seven-figure salary: "... once I could afford to splurge on a Zagat-rated "$$$...

Well, the Coen Brothers are back. Burn After Reading returns to the sardonic and sophisticated dark comedy I missed in last year's No Country for Old Men . I'd say it ranks close to my personal Coen favorites, The Big Lebowski and Fargo . In fact, it borrows quite a bit from Fargo , generally in a couple of graphic deaths, and specifically in a scene involving a hatchet. The plot borrows from Lebowski , with its use of a highly dubious MacGuffin -- some CIA files -- to send a cast of highly self-absorbed characters careening into each other in unexpected ways. You've seen the TV ads, so I don't need to mention how good the cast is. Personally, I think Brad Pitt's role as a bumbling gym trainer is drawn a bit too broadly, but I won't quibble. You've got to hand it to him for taking that sort of a role. John Malkovich has a character he was born to play. The writing elsewhere is absolutely precise, and absolutely funny. Dave Bob says four stars, even as he a...

A few more thoughts about audio books: When listening to books set in Britain, a narrator with a British accent is just the thing. I recently checked out Ngaio Marsh's Last Ditch from the State Library of Kansas , and the last couple of nights I've been listening to the stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I've read all the Sherlock Holmes stories many times, of course, but hearing them narrated in the stage-trained British voice of Edward Hartwicke added a certain dimension of drama and humor. Same with Last Ditch . Narrator Nadia May is not just reading the book; she's performing it. So it's quite true what an earlier commenter noted: When selecting audio books, the narrator is just as important as the author. Let's just say you wouldn't want Joan Rivers reading Anna Karenina . I still have problems with audiobooks: I still tend to fall asleep before making the conscious decision to shut off the player. And with my non-iPod player, there's still no way ...

I've been slow to embrace Mad Men , AMC's drama about ad executives in the early 60s, but I think I'm ready now. I loved the scene in last night's episode where anti-protagonist Don Draper drains his beer and casually hurls the non-recyclable can across the park. And seconds later, when his wife Betty cleans up the family picnic by simply lifting the blanket and letting the litter tumble to the grass. In a couple of minutes, that scene captured the spirit of the age better than 40 pages of dialogue: it was the American way to use it up and move on, preferably in a '62 Coupe De Ville. For me, the charm of this series is not the stories so much as the period detail. I was around 10 years old when people were driving cars the size of PT boats and tossing their trash out the window, but I vividly remember it was a time when that sort of thing was acceptable. I remember when every adult worthy of the title smoked a pack a day, when those Maidenform bra commercials were s...

Until recently, my only experience with audio books was through the cassette player in my old Subaru, listening to some Louis L'Amour tapes my mom loaned me for the long drive from Montana to Philadelphia. Maybe it was the road noise, or maybe it was Louis L'Amour, but somewhere on a particularly tedious stretch through Indiana, I concluded that audio books were not really my cup of tea. Listening to books, my attention tends to wander. Sometimes half a chapter will go by before it returns. By then I'm not sure who's shooting who, and trying to rewind to just the right spot when you're driving is sort of like texting when you're driving -- the sport of fools. Also, I have this problem when male readers do women's voices, and vice versa. It just seems faintly ridiculous, and takes me out of the story. But recently my friend Yvonne showed me the wonders of the New York Public Library 's audio book collection. For a flat fee you get access to thousands of t...

So little is certain in this crazy world. But one great truth remains as constant as the stars: When two rednecks say they have Bigfoot in a freezer , they don't. I mean, this is pretty basic. And yet for a week or so, even reputable news services were covering the claims of Ricky Dyer and Mathew Whitton as news. Some even ran the ludicrous picture supplied by the pair, showing what appeared to be a Planet of the Apes mask, a couple of doormats and a platter of link sausages jammed into a freezer. Not sure what the garden hose was for. But that's Sasquatch alright. I'd recognize him anywhere. Now it falls to a web site devoted to Bigfoot-related dumb-assery to set the record straight. "I observed the foot which looked unnatural, reached in and confirmed it was a rubber foot," wrote Steve Kulls of the Sasquatchdetective site. Science triumphs again. You'd think this sort of thing might somehow embarrass Mr. Kulls, but I guess if you run around calling yoursel...

It is with great regret that I learn of Hasbro's plans to market the game of Clue without the revolver. That little gun was one of my favorite game pieces of all time, second only to the iron in Monopoly . (I'm not talking about the lame card at left, by the way, but the little metal gun that looked like you could load it with little metal bullets). Getting rid of the gun is a puzzling choice by Hasbro, since statistics indicate that firearms remain a favorite means of homicide among Americans. Certainly guns figure in more slayings than trophies, dumbbells and poison, all of which Hasbro has seen fit to add. If the company really wanted to bring the game into the 21st century, it might have changed the gun to a Glock 19 and added a pimped-out Escalade as one of the rooms. Now we're talking murder, baby.

They say that when your plot starts to flag, you should kill somebody. In the story, I mean. Fine. But if I did that, pretty soon I wouldn't have any characters left. Now I'm in the last stretch of this book I started a year ago and about the only thing I can think of is a large meteorite wiping out all my characters except for the protagonist, who is left to wander away contemplating vague epiphanies. That's fine too, except it's not really a meteorite type of book. It's more of a Fried Green Tomatoes type of book, without the lesbians. And, I'm beginning to understand, without the sales potential. I'm really not sure what I was thinking when I started it. But now it's acquired a life of its own. A crude sweater has taken shape, missing a hole for the head, and still I keep knitting away. But such is the glamor of the writing life. You hammer blindly at the keyboard, hoping there's an invisible muse out there leading you along by the nose, and that ...

Finally home after a 3,600-mile road trip, with a new resolve to post here more frequently, finally finish that damned novel, and mow the lawn, which has gone primitive during my two-week absence. That last will have to wait, since it's raining now. You can mow a lawn when it's wet, or you can mow it when it's a foot high, but you can't do both. So, to the blog. I renewed ties with a lot of friends and family and was lucky enough to catch my home state of Montana at its best: dry sunny days and cool nights scented with hay or lupine or alpine fir, depending on where I happened to be. The only bad weather to be seen was in Wyoming. No problem, since I was just passing through. Back here in Wichita, where summer is not the gentlest season, I'm thankful to have missed the past couple weeks of 100-plus heat and the woolen humidity so common in the Midwest. September can't come soon enough. Above is a picture of yours truly at the stick of a Dimona motor glider, soa...

No disrespect for Wichita, Kansas, but there are better places to be at the end of July. Surely the best of them would be here on the west shore of Flathead Lake, watching the placid water under a dome of pale blue sky, the mountains a somewhat darker blue in the distance. The morning air is as smooth as a silken pillow, cool as the underside of it. This is why those lucky enough to own a piece of the Flathead shore are mostly millionaires now. When I was a kid, we'd come to the lake all the time in summer, splashing around a place we called Sandy Beach in Somers. It's where I taught myself to swim. Now Sandy Beach is someone's private paradise and my rare visits to the lake depend on the hospitality of friends. That's fine. If you lived here, you'd probably take it for granted. Or you might begin suspect ulterior motives when friends and family started dropping by in the summer months. Some things it's better not to own: this view, these friends, this fine mor...

Today I drove through Kansas and Colorado and much of Wyoming. Nothing like a road trip, even with gas north of $4 and the knowledge that each dollar I spend is not being replenished by a regular paycheck. Hey, this is why we save our money in the good times: so that in the bad times we can still brave through a thunderstorm outside Douglas, Wyo., sheets of hail horizontal across the pavement and visibility limited to the erratic taillights on that 18-wheeler just ahead. Brief weather tantrums like that can kill you if you're driving I-95 from Philly to New York, or I-76 from Philly to Harrisburg. Back East, there are just too many drivers on the road, and they all become aware of peril at precisely the same moment, so that even minor problems reach critical mass in nanoseconds. One minute you're shouting your exact location into your iPhone and the next you're skidding sideways into a dozen jerks in Volvo SUVs who braked abruptly to ogle somebody changing a flat. Western ...

Here are the photos of Angelina Jolie's new twins. I could have sold them for millions, but money means nothing to me and information should be free. That's Billy Bob at the upper left, Jennifer at bottom right. I know, it's been reported elsewhere that the babies were named Knox Leon and Vivienne Marcheline, but Mr. and Mrs. Jolie are not idiots and they only put that out there so they'd know who the mole was. I guarantee you that as we speak, some staffer at Nice Matin is having his chestnuts roasted over an open fire. And look: if you were doing a search using the terms "Jolie Pitt twins and their stupid names" don't blame me if it brought you to this blog. I can use the hits, sure, but the last t hing I want to do is waste your precious time when you're mining the Web for the latest celebrity news. For the record, the only star I care about is Chuck Connors. And I'm pretty sure he's dead.