Giuseppe Zangara

Pre-ordered this. I own/have read Falconer already, but getting all his novels in a fancy Library of America hardcover for $23 was a deal I couldn't resist.

I wanted more banning.

Hey, Smartly Pretty, are there any books being taught at your school that require the student's parents to fill out a permission slip before they read it? I wonder what the current standards are; years ago, I had to get my mom to sign off on The Picture of Dorian Gray because of a brief and rather tame reference to pornography.

I don't know where Gary Floyd got the balls to go after anyone. It was only a couple years ago he was a punching bag in this folder; that no one gives him shit now has nothing to do with him improving any.

That he specifically set out a copy of the manuscript near his body so his wife could find it suggests that he knew the value of his work. Still, it's a little disheartening to read that he'd been working on it for so long because he was having trouble making it as good as he thought it could be.

David Foster Wallace's third novel was to be called The Pale King. It's going to be published next year. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03...0309fa_fact_max Decent article, but a lot of the bio stuff was already covered in the Rolling Stone tribute.

I didn't read any of Hawthorne's short stories until college and was pleasantly surprised by how much I liked them. Well, I might have read "Young Goodman Brown," in high school, I'm not sure. Anyway, they weren't good enough for me to go back and see if The Scarlet Letter would read better than it had when I was 15. It might. I found The Old Man and the Sea brutally boring when I was in the ninth grade; this was enough to steer me away from any Hemingway until I was an adult. Then I read and enjoyed A Moveable Feast and The Sun Also Rises. I've lately considered giving Steinbeck another shot. Having hated The Pearl and The Red Pony in my youth indirectly led me to not having read East of Eden or The Grapes of Wrath. As for what I did like back then. I dug some of Shakespeare's stuff, but the only books I had to read for high school that I actually enjoyed were Nineteen Eighty-Four (I read and liked Animal Farm, too, but I was never assigned it in any class) and The Picture of Dorian Gray. I also read, on my own, Slaughterhouse Five around my junior or senior year. That was my gateway to "serious" literature.

Now Playing. I still feel strongly about this song.

If it makes you feel any better, I knew it was a joke.

So, you have a pencil dick.

The second sentence in that post undermines the first sentence.

That's what all Canadians look like.

Oh, who am I kidding: Also, they haven't broken up, since some people still seem to be under this impression.

Don't forget that "If I Had A Million Dollars" song which wasn't any good at all. I can't think of anyone that I like from that subsection of kinda light-hearted funny bands. Barenaked Ladies were terrible, They Might Be Giants had a song I liked four years ago but it's not as if I like them, Rush admittedly had their moments, and Weird Al stops being cool after the age of ten. Barenaked Ladies had enough "serious" songs to where their being a written off as a quirky joke band isn't entirely fair, but, ultimately, I don't give shit. I know too much about this band, thanks largely to an ex-girlfriend and, to a lesser extent, my sister.

Czech's right re: both BNL and Hootie. Except for the former's "One Week," both bands never created anything other than fluffy, marginal blah-rock perfect for scoring your visit to the supermarket or gym. If either deserve hatred, it's due to the desire of both bands to do little more than exist for their easily entertained audiences. Something this competently, if perfunctorily, performed can never be "unlistenable."

To scale? Is it difficult to flush?

Oh, I forgot to mention I'm circumcised. No filthy dog dick for me; a sleek fucking tool of form and function.

Asians are inherently better at math than everyone else. Let me find the zygote that proves it.

That "LOL" was just to bide time. I'm working on making misogyny scientifically justifiable.

If he goes to Fleming High, he lives way out in the sticks. The most happening place around is Whataburger. Also, if my geography's correct, the closest bookstore to him is a Books a Million. Which totally sucks.

I enjoyed TP&TG, but it was at times almost relentlessly grim.

No, they aren't. Then I assure you your social circle is the exception, not the rule. I'm not talking about about rhetorical evidence, I'm telling you that saying "men are inherently more reasonable and logical than women" is unfounded. There's no neurological evidence to support saying this, children don't exhibit differences in reasoning abilities between the sexes, and the differences between women and men in regards to "logical" thinking (as opposed to, I assume, emotional thinking) are almost entirely conditioned through development and explained through phenomena like stereotype threat. When you say "men are better than women at math," you're exhibiting a social attitude as well as a statement. Men are encouraged to be good in math because it's gender-appropriate for them to do so, and the exact opposite is true for women. Math encourages vertical, logical thinking (breaking down situations into parts, etc), so it's no wonder that a male-dominated discipline like math would lead to a statement that men are inherently more reasonable and logical. I'm not going to base my entire statement around math, but that's the deal with gender-appropriate tasks and stereotype threat. Women simply aren't encouraged to be logical thinkers because a) that's assumed to be the role of the men, and b) their role is to be emotional thinkers. It's too common to not notice. But if you're going to tell me that there's something genetically programmed from a little zygote and social conditioning has nothing to do with anything at all, I'm calling bullshit. LOL

6.75" in length; have never measured girth because I never think to do so. It is fat, my cock. Very fat. My girth is oft-cited by girls as to why they won't let me do anal. Large head, too, though I suppose that goes with the thickness of the shaft. About the head: once, I was receiving a bj. The girl who was going down on me, between sucks, looked at it and commented "you have the biggest peehole I've ever seen" in a casual, off-hand manner, such as one would say "I need to take out the garbage" or "I'm going to clip my nails today." While comments on the size of my penis were nothing new, no one had ever brought up the size of my peehole. "What?" I said loudly, in a mixture of shock and amusement. She thought she offended me and began to apologize, but I started laughing and couldn't stop. The balls are of average size. The right testicle hangs a little bit lower than left, but it's only noticable upon close examination. I shave them every couple of days, though life occasionally gets in the way so I sometimes go longer without doing it. Not sure how often I trim the bush—nowhere near as much as I shave the balls, that's for certain. Every few weeks, I guess. I never let it grow too thick.

Not my bag these days, but Faith No More were one of my favorite bands when I was in high school. In fact, I came this close to seeing them in 1995, but they canceled due to low ticket sales. At least I got to see Mr. Bungle a couple years later.

Salman Rushdie - Haroun and the Sea of Stories Graham Greene - Brighton Rock Reading the Rushdie now. It's his stab at young-adult fiction, so it's considerably less dense than his other books. Which is fine. It's a breezy, entertaining read (I got through the first 50 pages extremely quickly). A bit lightweight perhaps, but considering the target audience, that's to be expected. An aside: My particular copy is geared toward adults—indeed, I found it shelved alongside Midnight's Children and The Satanic Verses in the literature section of Barnes & Noble—the inside and outside covers feature blurbs from highbrow literary types such as Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer, and, er, Stephen King. No hint at all that this novel is geared toward the younger set. The covers for the "adult" version and "child" version are also different. Below, on the left, is the adult copy (the one I have) and on the right is the child copy: / I prefer the latter.