Dave's Fiction Warehouse

January is named for the two-faced Roman god Janus, who looks into the future with one face and into the past with the other. That's kind of where I'm at, too. On these dark days following the winter solstice, I look at the year ahead and resolve to be better in some small way, even as I look at the year past and realize how unlikely that is. Was it just 12 months ago I was standing in front of this same mirror, vowing to hit the gym five days a week, cut down on the fatty foods and take it easy on the wine? I think it was. Those vows are too easy to make after the excesses of the holiday season. Suddenly the waistband is a little too snug and you've got some acid reflux going on, and a little headache just behind the eyes, and you realize that in a whole year all you've achieved is another trip around the sun with everybody else. It really is time to make a change, you think, and this time the change will extend beyond the first week of February. Which no doubt ...

As long as they've got a limitless supply of credulous young males who don't mind cramming explosives into their underpants and trying to kill everybody around them, we're not going to prevail in this airport-security thing. Because all we've got are 50,000 TSA employees who are most concerned with preventing your grandmother from getting through security with an artificial hip. If you're a radical young Muslim returning from Yemen , don't have any luggage and are on a terror watch list, basically you're good to go. If there's a bright spot in the Flight 253 incident, it's that one al-Qaeda-inspired idiot is today having trouble urinating, as the result of a badly burned schlong. Sorry, Umar Farouk Abdul-whatever: That's what happens when you don't pay attention in suicide-bombing class. If permanent disability is too much to hope for, then I wish you a long and painful recovery. Good luck with the 70 virgins. I guess we can also hope that...

This morning in Wichita, in the pale light of a low-rising sun, the temperature's not so far above zero. That's pretty darned cold for these parts, though it is December and the news stories today about winter storms "crashing" into the Midwest and "hammering" New England seem a little overwrought. People forget from year to year that a certain amount of cold and snow, in the few weeks surrounding the winter solstice, is not really remarkable. At least if you live anywhere north of Texas. I've seen worse. I'd be happy to share anecdotes about the winters in Montana, the times it got 50 below and your spit, if you were a spitting person, would freeze before it hit the ground. It was way too cold to take a leak outside or start any kind of engine; you bundled up like the Michelin man to grumble through your chores and then you hunkered close to the stove and argued about who was going to bring in some more wood. By the way, if anybody needs advice on...

Every year I get more of these ghosts of Christmas past in the room. They don't say much. They don't have to. I already know that the best Christmas in middle age cannot match the least one of childhood. Then it was about things yet to come. Now it's about memory. But I have a feeling those ghosts expect me to pretend otherwise. I think of them every year when my neighbors and I come forth to set out our luminaries. It's a tradition in my Wichita neighborhood: one weekend in December, we grudgingly honor a pact to line our ordinary streets with points of light. I thought it a little goofy when I first moved here, and kind of burdensome to keep those candles lit in a freezing drizzle. But I'm a true believer now. You take one paper bag with a candle in it, it's not really much to look at. You take hundreds of them and put them in a row, and the effect is magical. That well-worn way to work becomes a runway to heaven. I guess it's that way with acts of kin...

I've been watching more TV lately. I suppose it could be another sign of creeping, slack-jawed sloth, but I prefer to think it's because there are better shows now -- even though I concede that crap like "Real Housewives" and "The Bachelor" and "Who Wants to be a Publicity Whore?" remain depressingly popular. But doesn't it seem that TV sitcoms are finally reclaiming some of the territory so long despoiled by reality TV? That's my thesis. In a tough economy, a few good jokes can defeat a whole division of vacuous and venal blowhards. Paula Abdul's ouster from "American Idol" is a good metaphor for this. Market pressure hasn't yet killed the show, but it did force the replacement of one dim bulb. Let's hope it's a trend. America will be better for it. Sorry Paula. Sometimes, just being yourself is not quite enough. My favorites at the moment are "Community" and "30 Rock. " I still watch ...

In the annals of crappy television, nothing is crappier than the reunion show. And in the annals of crappy reunion shows, there can be no competition for "A Very Brady Christmas," wherein the kids come home for the holidays and Mike Brady ends up getting trapped in one of his buildings. (Nice job on the architecture there, Mike.) Then again, "The Brady Bunch" was pretty bad to begin with. "Seinfeld" wasn't, and Larry David's mustering of the original cast for a fictional reunion show, in this season of "Curb Your Enthusiasm," is as good as it gets. Shows you what good writing, adequate rehearsal and great comedic talent can do in the fullness of time. It also shows, by comparison, how tired and lame the real "Seinfeld" finale was in 1998. Speaking of comparisons, Larry David's current show begins to look kind of crass and clumsy too. Instead of honed scripts and comedic timing, "Curb Your Enthusiasm" relies on ...

We've got modern warfare going on all over the place, but we still can't get enough of it. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 has now made $550 million in about five days. That's a record not just for video games, but for anything ever offered by the entertainment industry. Suck this, Harry Potter. Last I checked, Half-Blood Prince , the biggest cash-machine in the world, had barely exceeded half that. No, I'm not going to bemoan this American fascination with killing virtual people and blowing up virtual things. Or, in the case of Grand Theft Auto franchise, beating up virtual hookers. Fact is, violence is pretty fun when you factor out all the real-world misery, death and permanent disability. But when a video game devoted exclusively to military mayhem so completely eclipses any movie, book or long-running TV series, I suppose you have to ponder what it means. Unfortunately, I have no idea. For me, the bigger mystery with games like this is why I suck so completel...

Now that the New Oxford American Dictionary has chosen unfriend as its word of the year, I guess it's official: all nouns are now legitimate verbs, and by extension so are their opposites. Like you, I somehow overlooked the intermediate delineation of  friend as a verb, but there's no sense being pedantic about it. Language constantly evolves. You  get on board or you get the hell out of the way. New words arrive because there's a need for them. The concept of unfriending has been with us for centuries, but the explosion of social media has forced us to formalize and streamline the process. Used to be, if you became tired of a relationship, you had to be cagey about it: You'd see the person's number on the caller ID and not pick it up. You'd make up an excuse not to attend their dumb President's Day party. You'd be fortunate enough to spot them first in the frozen-food section of the supermarket, and you'd lurk in housewares until they were safel...

I have two rules in life: I never order the shrimp special and I never buy books written by former governors who would like to be president. So it's not really an ideological statement to say that I won't be standing in line tomorrow for a copy of "Going Rogue: An American Life." That Sarah Palin remains pretty easy on the eyes, but at this point I feel I know everything I want to know about her. Maybe a little more. In the parlance of our times, it's getting late in the day and it's time to move on, Sarah Palin-wise. But every time such a book comes out, I always wonder: Who buys stuff like this? Who are these millions of people who immediately spring for the hardcover and propel it to the top of the New York Times nonfiction list?  What do they hope to learn from people like Newt Gingrich and Keith Olbermann and Glenn Beck and Al Gore and Kate Gosselin? Do they not know that if they just wait a few months, they can acquire these tomes, unopened, for about ...

I've never gotten sucked into the hoary Mac vs. PC debate. As far as I'm concerned, they both suck. They both keep us perpetually off balance, technologically speaking, and both leave a trail of obsolete peripherals in their wake. This morning my wife got on the laptop I'd just loaded with Windows 7 and reported (I'm paraphrasing here): "This *&$^% printer doesn't work." I checked it out and was able to confirm her findings. Microsoft's own support site tells me that my little printer, about two years old, is not compatible with their latest and greatest OS. No apology, no hints on how to make it work. Basically, if I want to print anything from Windows 7, I'm going to have to take that 2-year-old printer to the curb and get a new one. Just for fun, I checked on Apple's site, to see if a Mac running Snow Leopard might have better luck. Maybe it was time to switch. But nope. My printer's dead to Apple, too. But they'd be happy to...

OK, I'm going to recommend that Richard Heene , part-time "scientist" and full-time twit, be horsewhipped. And I'd be happy to throw in a good spanking for little Falcon Heene, the foul-mouthed brat who might have benefited from an actual balloon ride straight to Camp Cut-Me-A-Switch, where children learn not to curse at grownups and otherwise waste the valuable time of their elders. Corporal punishment may seem harsh, but remember that the balloon stunt wasn't the first of their transgressions. There's also the matter of their "Wife Swap" appearances , where they took the show's unvarying theme -- free-spirit vs. control freak -- and drained it of even marginal interest because viewers hated everyone involved. The Heene clan came across as precisely what they are: pre-adolescent narcissists who will do anything -- anything -- to get on TV. Richard is the dad only by virtue of his age; it can't have anything to do with maturity or judgm...

I keep meaning to enter the  Bulwer Lytton Fiction Contes t, but I also keep forgetting to get my entries in. Still, it's always worth a look when the year's winners are announced. Yes, I know the announcement itself was several months ago, but that's in keeping with my general record of procrastination and partial recall. Anyway, read this from the 2009 Grand Prize winner and see if it doesn't make you want to take pen in hand: "Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin' off Nantucket Sound from the nor' east and the dogs are howlin' for no earthly reason, you can hear the awful screams of the crew of the “Ellie May," a sturdy whaler Captained by John McTavish; for it was on just such a night when the rum was flowin' and, Davey Jones be damned, big John brought his men on deck for the first of several screaming contests." David McKenzie Federal Way, WA The runner-up is also in...

All this ink and air time being burned on the intricacies of health care in this country, and I'm no wiser on the subject than I was five years ago. I don't even care any more. Maybe all we really need to know is that nobody wants to make less money, and health care can't be cheaper unless somebody does make less money. Since the most influential voices in this debate are the corporations that make a huge amount of money, and the politicians who rely heavily on the trickle-up, and the dopey masses who can be mesmerized by a bumper sticker, I think we can see where this is heading: Things will stay pretty much as they are. If anything changes, it will be this: The usual cohort of scammers and venal swine will end up making even more money than they do now. I guarantee you that no insurance company will make less. This is a cynical view and I apologize. But let's face it. The truth is, if you're worried about health care, your only realistic option is staying healt...

As a kid, I envied Archie. He had the easy life: the clever friends, the car, the adoration of beautiful girls. The number one hit song in 1969. He never had to grow up. The only thing I didn't envy was the stupid hair, but at 12 years old I guess that's a price I'd have paid. Archie was different from my other comic favorites: Green Lantern; Flash; Sgt. Rock; Turok, Son of Stone. He was always in his street clothes, for one thing. Maybe that made him easier to identify with. He never faced down any fiends, never killed any Krauts, never tussled with any pterodactyls. The only problem he ever had was which nubile maiden would win his affections in the end. Turns out he didn't even have to worry about that. Archie finally married Veronica in May, but next month he'll marry Betty too.  Archie Comic Publications is framing the story as an alternate history, calling it a meditation on Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken." Never mind that Frost was t...

Facebook and its mildly retarded cousin Twitter have unleashed a huge demand for pithy remarks, single sentences so clever and incisive that they are instantly echoed around the globe. If one's worth is measured by the number of followers one has, then the exponent of that worth is the number of one's pithy messages that get re-Tweeted. Alas, the supply of cleverness has not kept pace with the demand. Maybe this accounts for the proliferation of the phrases "Go figure" and "Just sayin'." If a tweeted observation seems particularly banal, just add the ironic eye-roll "go figure" and you've got the sophisticated air of one who's seen everything. "Just sayin'" works much the same way: It implies an amused exasperation with this absurd world, a touch of whimsy that is not immediately apparent in the trite thought that preceeds it. If those don't work, there are always the "LOL!" "OMG" and "S...

Can any book be considered truly frightening these days? Maybe not, what with an entire generation now conditioned to equate horror primarily with power tools and torture porn . But there was a time when certain books kept a lot of people awake at night, alert for a subtle creaking on the stairs, a scratching at the window. That time started in 1897, with the book Dracula . Bram Stoker's Dracula was the first really scary book I ever read. I was 13 or so. I picked it up again a couple of days ago, since my wife bought a copy -- her book group has selected it for October in a nod to Halloween. I can report that the book is less terrifying this time around, possibly because its style and structure have been appropriated and diluted by so many imitators since. Stephen King, for example, in his first novel Carrie , used Stoker's idea of presenting the story as a series of journal entries, letters and news reports. It's a good trick, and it must have seemed doubly so in 1...

Autumn cometh. Snow in the mountains, leaves in the wind. Just kidding about the snow, since we're in Wichita and there are no mountains within several hundred miles. But the leaves really are beginning to drift up at the edge of the yard and and we've run the furnace a couple of times. Something about fall: this is the time of year some of us ponder the middle distance and reconsider our old best dreams. My dreams never involved taking introductory algebra again. About 40 years ago I was happily certain I'd left that subject behind for good. And yet here I am, sitting a classroom every day, struggling through the little tricks involved in graphing polynomial equations. I don't hate it as much as I expected to. Algebra has an elegance of its own, not least because the correct answer is not a matter of subjective judgment. After working exclusively with English words for nearly all my life, with all their unruly ways, it's kind of refreshing to learn the precise la...

It's remarkable how quickly the blogging craze came and went. For awhile we were all out there panning the stream, sifting every aspect of our mundane lives and collecting page views and comments like flecks of gold. Some of us, I think, secretly fantasized that it might turn into something that would be beat working. A year or two later and most of the personal blogs are ghost towns, the wind sighing down a dusty street, the occasional tumbleweed rolling by. That includes this one: Until today, the last update was about six weeks ago. I didn't make a conscious decision to pull the plug on it; it just happened. To belabor the ghost town analogy, the rail line never made it here, veering instead toward the more vibrant community of Facebookville. Not hard to see why. You can only read a blog; on Facebook, you can take a quiz and easily determine which make of car or mythical creature you might be. And with a blog, you feel like you should write several complete sentences; with ...

I was on the treadmill yesterday watching Rio Bravo on AMC. It's been called Howard Hawks' finest film, and that may be, but sweating through my fifth mile I was struck mostly by how cheaply life was regarded in the glory days of the Western. In one scene, John Wayne and Ricky Nelson gun down three outlaws who have been distracted by a flower pot tossed out a window. The poor saps are just standing there, and then they're dead in the street without so much as a "drop your guns." When the Duke notices another man trying to flee on horseback, he kills him too. Fifty yards out and a moving target, that's pretty good shooting. But the guy was running away . Might want to review your guidelines on the use of deadly force, sheriff. So we've got four men dead in about 15 seconds of screen time. By way of comparison, the actual gunfight at the O.K. Corral resulted in three fatalities, and we're still aware of it 128 years later. I swear, I watched dozens o...

I've grown disgusted with vampire movies over the past few years. Now that the simpering Gap models of " Twilight " have taken over, with their finicky diets and childish crushes, I'm about ready to put a stake in the heart of the entire genre. Bela Lugosi must be rolling in his crypt right now. Assuming he's still in it. And yet, I come to praise a recent vampire movie that also blends romance and horror. Unlike "Twilight," it succeeds. It's moving, it's horrifying and it's somehow believable. " Let the Right One In, " a Swedish film released last year, is the most engrossing movie I've seen in many months -- and that includes quite a few that didn't involve the undead. Briefly, it's set in 1982 Stockholm, where the misfit boy Oskar has become the target of bullies. You can see why: He's a pale, sensitive lad who seems barely strong enough to lift his own limbs. He goes out at night to role-play some revenge, ja...

I'm not going to be one of those people grousing about all the Michael Jackson coverage. Yes, it's kind of remarkable that he's been dead nearly two weeks and he's still not in the ground, but that's up to the family and the promoters -- and of course the millions of fans, who seem a little too enthusiastic to be called mourners. Fact is, you can't jam several thousand people into the Staples Center and not have a casket there. Let's just hope they had the good taste to keep it tightly closed. I keep thinking of the Ayatollah Khomeini's funeral in 1989, where the mourning got so out of hand the cadaver actually fell out of the coffin. To put things in context, it took just under one week to bury Princess Diana. But then she didn't sell 750 million records. Also, she was quite good looking and seemed to represent a sort of class and dignity that Jackson himself had largely abandoned. You didn't like to think of her being carted, 12 days dead, i...

I need some income. I'm not kidding. The writing thing has not turned into the major score I had hoped, and I'm pretty sure there won't be anything for me in Michael Jackson's will -- not since that day I saw him hitchhiking with his dog outside Winnemucca and slowed down like I was going to stop, then took off laughing just before he reached the pickup. In hindsight, that may not have been my smartest move. I did have some money put away, but I'm starting to think it might not be enough. I mean it wasn't enough before the economy tanked, so I'm not kidding myself. Maybe I shouldn't have taken all my blackmail dough and invested it with this friend of a friend, this cat named Benji or Bernie or whatever. That was in November. I've been trying to call him to see where I stand, but nobody's answering the phone. He makes me show up there in person, he's going to be sorry. Looks like all that cash and cocaine I funneled to the Norm Coleman ...

I am a petty, bitter man, especially when it comes to iPhone fanatics raving incessantly about the amazing capabilities of the device. About half the posts you see on Twitter pose some variation of the rhetorical question, "is there anything this iPhone can't do?" Turns out you can also fry eggs on it. This amusing post describes the overheating problem being reported by some users of the new iPhone 3G S. "Toasty doesn't even describe how surprisingly hot it got," one user reports. Another put it under his pillow and awoke with a scorched ear. Being petty and bitter, this is the sort of thing that brings a smile to my face. Not that I hate iPhones, of course, or those who wield them. I have an iPod Touch myself, which is currently at an undisclosed location in California, being scrutinized by a team of Apple techno-shamans who, like me, cannot fathom how I managed to brick it while trying to upgrade the firmware to version 3. No, I'd step up to an iPho...

Every once in awhile, you run across a line you really wish you'd written. So it is with this lede by Maureen Dowd in her latest column : As in all great affairs, Mark Sanford fell in love simultaneously with a woman and himself — with the dashing new version of himself he saw in her molten eyes. That's almost poetry. I'm not one of Dowd's biggest fans -- sometimes she flogs her metaphors beyond endurance and comes off as simply sophomoric -- but her take on the two sides of South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford is brilliant. There's Mark, the penny-pinching prig; and there's Marco, the lying Latin lover. Her damning contrast between the two, between Sanford's conservative talk and libertine walk, should be required reading at the hypocrisy-prevention seminars the GOP must surely be planning by now.

The King of Pop giveth, and the King of Pop taketh away. In his last official act, Michael Jackson batted poor Farrah Fawcett straight back to page A8 but also gave South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford some breathing room at a time when it really came in handy. The guy (Sanford) has to be thanking his lucky stars. Those erotic e-mails might have echoed for days had not the King succumbed to all his bad choices at such a fortuitous time. When a major celebrity dies, it's bigger than World War II, at least for a day or two. The stars get realigned -- literally, because there's one less of them, and figuratively, because big stories have this way of becoming small when something bigger comes down the line. Who cares about Sanford any more? Who cares about Iran? We are talking Michael Jackson here, who has Touched Us All in ways we will still be discovering years from now. Personally, the coverage I've found most poignant is this piece about the time Michael Jackson inadvertantly ...

Most of my thinking on Scientology parallels last year's South Park episode , which nicely parodied L. Ron Hubbard as both a second-rate writer and a third-rate god. I also view the organization he founded as a church only in the sense that it exploits childlike credulity on a breathtaking scale. I know: Companies like Apple or Amway do that too. But unlike those companies, Scientology has grown fat servicing celebrity egos and selling nothing for something -- I refer here to the ludicrous but undeniably profitable concept of auditing. And unlike other successful companies, Scientology is tax-exempt. Now comes the St. Pete Times to reveal a bit more about the organization. In a three-part series, its current leader, David Miscavige, emerges as something like Kim Jong Il in a better suit. Among other things, he is said to routinely abuse sycophants and conduct bizarre tests of loyalty. Readers might be reminded of other cults of personality -- Jim Jones' Peoples Temple, for ex...

When I think of my high school years, it's always with a little embarrassment -- or a lot, depending on the memory. I committed a number of heinous acts for which there can be no redemption. I wore my shaggy black hair in the style now associated with Rod Blagojevich. I wore pants pegged so tight they looked like leotards. I was paralyzed by shyness. If I really liked a girl, my only strategy was to ignore her. I smoked unfiltered Camels in the belief it made me manly. I went along with any stupid scheme cooked up by friends, most involving copious amounts of beer. To the few good teachers who tried to rouse me from utter haplessness, I returned nothing at all. You can't go home again, but people keep trying. This summer, the class of 1969 at the little high school I attended is having another reunion. If I go, it'll be my fourth. I say if because it's the first one I have doubts about attending. I wouldn't have missed any of the others. Each was literally the p...

I own five digital cameras and three computers and an assortment of MP3 players. All became obsolete about 15 minutes after unpacking, displaced by newer models with more features. I've often wondered what I was thinking when I acquired all this crap, and now Robert Tierney, writing in the New York Times, offers an answer : It's my primal need to impress strangers. Thanks for the tip, Bob. I still wouldn't be complaining if it worked -- there are worse things in life than the fleeting admiration of passersby. But Tierney points out that sending messages with material goods is futile. If I thought my 8-gig iPod Touch might garner adoring glances from the chicks at the gym, I thought wrong. And not because they all have 32-gig iPhones. Turns out it has more to do with social invisibity. And that derives from my relatively flat scores in the "Big Five" personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness, stability and extraversion. Hey, stability! One out ...

I started this blog with a narrow focus on crime fiction, but it's been all downhill since. I've since veered into inane mini-reviews of TV and movies, descended into celebrity mockery, then went down a couple more pegs with trite remarks about the weather. Roughly a third of my posts now are about how pointless it is to do a blog at all. Today, it has come to this: I'm down to personal recollections. Because today is May 18. Anybody who lived in the Northwest corner of the nation in 1980 remembers that day pretty well. We were living in Yakima, Wash., where I worked for the daily newspaper. It was Sunday morning and we woke to the sound of an approaching thunderstorm. I went outside with the kids, and there to the west was a wall of gray, laced with lighting. A storm, yes, but there wouldn't be any rain that day. The radio informed us that Mount St. Helens had just exploded, and the ash cloud was headed our way. I didn't know much about volcanoes, but I knew one ha...

I like rain in the morning, even knowing how much of it is going to end up in my basement. I like dark skies and thunder and the dog curled up at my feet, largely oblivious. I like the first of May, and the saturated greens of the grass and the trees viewed through rain-dappled windows. I like listening to NPR, at least for those fleeting hours before Diane Rehm comes on. Oh, and brown paper packages tied up with string ... Which is my way of saying that I have nothing else to write about this morning. On the news it's all flash-flood warnings and swine flu precautions and Chrysler's collapse. Not much to say about that. I have a novel on a flash drive that will embarrass me if I send it to another agent and will embarrass me more if I don't. (One of the downsides of pretending to be a writer is that you're expected, occasionally, to provide some evidence of it.) But the rain precludes yard work and I've read all the news sites, so this will be a writing day. Or a ...

The rest of you should probably go ahead and panic, but it's too late for me. I already have swine flu. When I got out of bed this morning I had certain aches and pains, not a lot of energy and the vision in my left eye was a little fuzzy. Also, that large bowl of popcorn I consumed before bed was not setting too well. These symptoms are eerily similar to the ones I experience every morning, but given the national news it seems clear that swine flu has arrived in east Wichita. I just wish they'd come up with another name for it. "Grim Reaper" would be good, even if it seems a slight exaggeration at this point, with U.S. lethality hovering around zero. "Captain Trips" is not bad either, assuming the World Health Organization can wrest the rights from Stephen King. I'd even settle for "common cold." But "swine flu" is just so '70s. And I'm really not comfortable dying from anything related to pigs. Anyway, while I'm still we...

It says here that Americans are moving less, another one of those symptoms of the crappy economy. It's also a cause, since Bekins and Mayflower and U-haul and Ryder could really use the work right now. But maybe it's not such a bad thing if people stay put for awhile. Maybe they'll get to know the neighbors. Maybe they won't have to face how little the house is worth if they give up trying to sell it. I've moved a couple dozen times in my life. It was almost always for better job, although once it was for a better view and the time after that it was because of the divorce. I always thought it made sense at the time. There's something invigorating about moving on, packing up what you really need and getting rid of what you really don't. There's also something poignant about it, looking around the empty rooms for the last time, aware of the echos and the memories and the knowledge that you won't be back. Like a funeral, a move concentrates the passage...

If you're looking for an excuse to stay in shape, consider this: One day a truck might pull into your driveway and two taciturn men will unload tons of compost, mulch and shrubbery. And then you'll have to haul it all into the backyard and plant everything. Trust me, in a situation like that, it helps to have a little upper-body strength. Or at least I'm assuming it does. My own upper-body strength appears to have gone the way of disco and drive-in movies. Not sure how that happened. Hard to believe, but I once was capable of bench-pressing something larger than a clock radio. Back in the day, I'd be toting these bags of compost three at a time, instead of dragging them individually across the lawn with a rest break along the way. I know: The older we get, the better we were. Those of us with gray hair like to brag about the glory days, even if they weren't so glorious. Why not? Nobody can prove we're lying. And sometimes it seems important to emphasize that we ...

I'm not outraged that Apple has bumped the price of its music downloads a cool 30 percent, a move followed a day later by Amazon and then by Wal-Mart. I'm not sure why they don't raise the price 50 percent, or 100 percent, or 1,000. The music industry is on the ropes, after all, and it needs every extra freaking dime you people can spare. Screw Darfur; let's step up for Sony and EMI. All these music retailers have taken pains to point out that not all songs will cost more. Some will cost as little 64 cents -- really great songs by Yoko Ono (above) and assorted American Idol alumni who did not make it to the top 10 in season three. It's quite a bargain. Just think: Under this new pricing structure, you can have 100 tunes nobody wants for the low price of $64. Pennies, really -- 6,400 of them. I'm for anything that helps this beleaguered industry survive. I'm for anything that will put food on the table for Madonna and Britney Spears and, to a lesser extent,...

Turns out even the Episcopal Church, widely known for its tolerance and understanding, can get a little impatient when its ministers can't make up their minds about the religion thing. Just ask the Rev. Anna Holmes Redding. She's been with the church for 30 years. When she converted to Islam and accepted Muhammad as the prophet in 2006, it raised some eyebrows. But she kept showing up for work, so the church waited to see how this thing would play out. And waited -- for three years. Talk about tolerance. But even Episcopalians have their limits; Redding was finally defrocked this week. Tough break. Losing a fulltime job is going to hurt in this economy, even if you've got Allah pulling for you. Redding expressed regret at such narrowmindedness. "It simply hasn't been my experience that I have to make a choice between the two," she said. I wish her all the best. But maybe she'll want to rethink the career track. I don't darken the doorway of a church...

Yesterday I sent the movie Hancock back to Netflix unwatched. Sorry, Will. But I've had it laying around here for about a month and the time just never seemed right to spend two hours with a surly superhero. It appears Knadler's Law applies to Netflix movies the same way it applies to things decomposing in the refrigerator: They never seem more attractive the next day. You think that potato salad is a bit iffy now, wait until Monday. Sending a Netflix movie back unopened usually means it's time to cancel or suspend my subscription. I do that about once a year, after realizing I've seen all the newer movies I care to see and crowding the queue with stuff I might not pick up if I saw it lying on the sidewalk. I've got a few of this year's more obscure Oscar nominees on there, but they're all marked "Short wait," or "Long wait," or "releases sometime in the distant future." I wonder: Do I really want to see Doubt or Milk ? And i...

A year and a half ago I got a letter from the IRS. They wanted more money. The letter pointed out that while I had declared as income the few hundred I'd made from selling a story, I'd neglected to pay the self-employment tax. The upshot was that I'd better remit another $70 posthaste, or there'd be trouble. I got the letter not long after filing my return. And I hadn't even been nominated for a cabinet post. I always think about that when I hear about the little tax problems of those who have been nominated: Tom Daschle and Tim Geithner and, most recently, Gov. Kathleen Sebelius. Between them, their unpaid taxes come to well over 200 grand, but only Geithner managed to raise eyebrows at the IRS, and that was well after the fact. Stories like these are beginning to add up. You wonder: Does anybody pay the taxes they owe? Have I been a sucker all this time? No, I don't think any of these people are crooks. No doubt all of them made understandable mistakes, just...