"...there was a bit of a row after the Golden Globes when Nicole Kidman went up to her ex and angrily told him to stop sending her text messages."

Ah, celebrities.

Okay, maybe it's just me, but psychic parrots freak me out.

I've been trying to write this new column all day (well, since 7 PM), and I'm just getting nowhere. I have the basic nugget of the idea, which is usually enough to at least get it half finished, but between getting distracted now and then while attempting to find needed research and feeling like I'm getting a head cold, nothing's happening. I hope whatever I've got is really just the result of staring at the computer too long, because I really need to get some work done soon. But I can't even think straight right now.

Guh.

For all the good I've achieved today, I should have just watched a movie or something.

I am managing to have a shitty time that keeps getting exponentially shittier. However, yesterday, mysteriously, my cell phone decided to start working again. See, a few weeks ago, it fell out of my coat (which someone had moved to a spot up entirely too high for no apparent reason) and the display stopped working. The rest of the phone worked fine, but the display was inexorably fucked. It worked intermittently, or, rather, bits of it did. A small corner of the screen, say, or just the right-most fifth, and never quite enough to make out anything useful.

But yesterday, while on the phone with James, I absent-mindedly turned it off and back on, which I had taken to doing to ensure that it was indeed powered up, and the display started working again. I have no idea why or even how, but I'm not going to look a gift horse in the mouth. Of course, I am probably going to cancel my service at the end of this month, and I already made the trip downtown to get the numbers downloaded off it (some of which I have nowhere else), but still... It's a small bit of goodness amidst an avalanche of shit lately.

Dude, I love Goats.

Holy fucking catshit, it's cold.

I left Iowa for this? It was 40 degrees when I left there. It's almost single digits here now...

In a dramatic Thanksgiving Day surprise, President Bush makes a top-secret trip to Iraq, where he serves turkey to the troops and delivers a moving speech thanking them for their efforts. The visit puts the troops in high spirits until about three minutes after the president leaves, at which point the turkey, which turns out to be a suicide turkey, explodes.

Ah, ya gotta love Dave Barry...

"He's an artist and an artist with a conscience, someone who worries and frets on our behalf about the state of the world. He's abstract, and often wrong-headed, and, in this instance, he's been a stupid fool. But, no, he's not a paedophile."

Townshend speaks about the arrest. Interesting stuff.