Spooky seasons greetings from New Yorkled.

Mean and scary pumpkins on ExtremePumpkin.com. And yet, for reasons only she can understand, Adi hates Halloween.

(Via Archismo)

Man, I should really stop blogging about dirty things. Why do I come up #1 for this search on Google rather than the guy I was linking to when I was blogging about that? (Yes, I'm being deliberately cryptic, because I don't want to reinforce those phrases.)

Or, how about this search?? (An extremely popular search, as it turns out; one of my top traffic drivers lately, in fact. I'm #3 on Google for that, for God sake!) I never wrote about that, I swear! Lord knows I can't do it, and wouldn't even if I could.

Or this. Also on Google. (Okay, I see that one is because I'm a terrible speller.)

Or this.

Or this.

Or, simply and elegently, this.

Or, for whatever insane reason, this.

Or, remarkably, this (which isn't dirty at all, it's just strange I come up so high for a search of that).

The good news is that my traffic is up lately, but I just get the idea I'm not really connecting with my target audience.

UPDATE:

Also, this (I come up high on searches with "trivial," like this).

And this.

And this (this whole topic is generally big for my traffic lately)

And this (eat your heart out, Eurotrash)

I forgot to blog this earlier. Some of the gang at a reading of Prague by Arthur Phillips, a function of the Manhattan Hungarian Network and the Magyar Consulate (which I can't find a link for), a week and a half ago.

Interesting (?) tidbit: they managed to misspell my name in the caption, despite my having given the photographer a business card.

Perhaps it's a trend -- the next trucker hat -- or perhaps it's an elaborate joke, I don't know, but I can't help noticing that when you search Friendster for "open marriages" in the NY area, there are tons of them, particularly in Brooklyn among people in their 20s. What's up with that? Is it for real? If so, how could that be, as open marriages really go against the grain in this country (trust me)? I sort of think that most of the people who list themselves thusly are doing so only because they think it's funny in an absurdist way. Or maybe, it really is hip these days. Anyone have any idea?

I'm so damn clever. I was out Friday night with a group of -- brace yourself -- Hungarians. I think I was the only non-Hungarian in the group, aside from someone's Afghan fiance. One of the guys in the group is gay and, needless to say, very handsome. At some point in the evening, an American girl came up to him and was shamelessly flirting with him for a long time. Oddly he played along for quite a while.

(To interrupt myself for a moment, how of often does that happen to the rest of you straight guys? As for myself, I don't know that a good looking woman (and that might be generous in this case, but she wasn't a hound, anyway) has ever come up to me and initiated the come on. It always seems like it was the other way around. But if you're gay... Oh, the irony of the gods.)

Later outside, we were eager to hear of how things played out with her. Apparently, he finally broke the news her that he doesn't go for the ladies, to which she inquired, "Are you bi at least? Because my friend over there, he's bi, and so maybe the three of us could..."

At which point in the retelling I interjected, "Oh, a sandwich. A meleg szendvics."

If you are Hungarian, by now you would agree that I am terribly damn clever. For the rest of you, explaining the joke will ruin it, but I'm so pleased with myself about it, I can't resist. In case it's not obvious, "szendvics" is "sandwich," Hungarians just spell it funny. And "meleg" means "warm," and Hungarians are partial to eating their sandwiches that way (think tuna melt, but with ham instead of tuna). But -- and here's the really damn clever part -- meleg is also slang for gay.

Quite the double entendre for a guy who really doesn't speak Hungarian particularly well.

Ananova reports:

A South Yorkshire family have moved home because they are fed up with their address - Butt Hole Road.

Paul and Lisa Allot, who lived in the £150,000 bungalow with their two children for 15 months, got sick of people pulling their leg.

They say people posed for pictures outside their house in Conisbrough, many of them with their trousers dropped, reports The Sun.

I wonder about all the other families that don't seem to mind that address. For some reason, my favorite part of this story is that they lived in a "bungalow."

BBC reports:

Red-faced officials at General Motors in Canada have been forced to think of a new name for their latest model after discovering it was a slang word for masturbation.

GM officials said they had been unaware that LaCrosse was a term for self-gratification among teenagers in French-speaking Quebec.

D'oh!

Last night on Ludlow Street on the Lower East Side, a yellow cab is stopped in the street while its passenger pays and disembarks. Behind, in a black Jaguar, a man leans out of his window up to his shoulders and shouts, in classic regional guido/metrosexual accent, "Yo! Fuckface! Move your fucking car!" This he repeats after waiting patiently another 10 seconds.

Needless to say: NJ license plates.

After seeing "Lost in Translation" for a second time, sober the latter, Maccers recalls her experience arriving to Japan without a visa or place to stay and spending the next several hours in a dingy cell being groped by Japanese guards until they sent her on to the Philippines without her passport, credit cards or shoes. So much for blonds having more fun.

For the last two days I've noticed that the best known (and biggest?) wiki, the Wikipedia, has 404. Anyone know whether this is temporary or whether it has run out of gas (or at least, out of server funds)? I loved that resource.

UPDATE:
Hmm. I can access it via Mozilla, but not via IE.

Listening to a "best-of" installment of This American Life, I heard this two-year-old segment "Invisible Man vs. Hawkman" (forward to 6:00 minutes into the Real Audio file) in which commentator John Hodgman describes how for recent years his favorite small-talk starter at parties is to ask people whether, if they could have a super power, would the chose the ability to fly or invisibility. Thoughts?

UPDATE:
I know I don't normally use comments, but I've switched to using HaloScan, which seems to work better than Enetation, which, in addition to having a stupid name, is very flaky in my experience. So, anyway, I'm back to trying to use comments selectively.

But here's the main reason I am reluctant to use comments: this post has been up for several days and no comments so far. What's up, people? Would you prefer flight or invisibility as a superpower? That's a perfectly valid question!

Old Hag has pointed out that NPR's Ombudsman Jeffrey A. Dvorkin has given Terry Gross (host of the popular Fresh Air program) a spanking over her interview with rightwing dickhead Bill O'Reilly. I happen to have heard Gross's interview with O'Reilly, as well as her related interview with liberal humorist and author Al Franken a couple of weeks earlier, and I have to agree with Dvorkin that Gross was not even-handed in her harrassment of O'Reilly.

In her prior interview with Franken, she was possitively fawning, while she spent the whole time challenging O'Reilly with accounts from Franken's book about what an asshole O'Reilly is. The best part of the interview, right before O'Reilly stormed out of the studio (giving a 50-minute interview, first), was him demanding of Gross, "Were you this hard on Al Franken? Well, were you? Were you??" to which she could only meekly reply, "Well, no, but..." (or words to that effect) before he cut her off to rant a bit more.

All of which makes me think I agree with Curtis White's essay "The Middle Mind" (which I read a couple of years ago in Harper's) to the effect that what passes for intellectual thinking in America, as embodied by Gross and Charlie Rose, is pretty lame. I mean, what percentage of those two's interviews are celebrities, for starters?

Everyone's favorite blog these days seems to be TMFTML (aka, The Minor Fall, The Major Lift), and not without good reason. I knew the title of the blog sounded familiar, but I just placed it now: it's a line from the song "Hallelujah." I know the song best from the frighteningly beautiful version by the late, great Jeff Buckley, but now I notice the song is actually by Leonard Cohen, and I even have it on CD as well, although I don't listen to that album as often as Buckley's. Anyway, all just goes to show our blogger boy has taste.

Al Barger calls Tommy Chong a political prisoner. I'd have to agree. As I reported last month, pothead commedian Tommy Chong was sentenced to nine months in federal prison for selling bongs on the Internet, while Limbaugh, as far as I have seen, hasn't faced any kind of legal problem for admitting to illegally buying large quantities of narcotics. Sure, because Chong made a career out of satirizing the pointlessness of anti-pot legislation, while Limbaugh made his with quotes like these :

"If people are violating the law by doing drugs, they ought to be accused and they ought to be convicted and they ought to be sent up."

"Too many whites are getting away with drug use The answer is to go out and find the ones who are getting away with it, convict them and send them up the river too."

The government's unconscionable treatment of soldiers in this war is likely to seriously bite President Bush in the ass come next year's election. UPI reports:

FORT STEWART - Hundreds of sick and wounded U.S. soldiers including many who served in the Iraq war are languishing in hot cement barracks here while they wait, sometimes for months, to see doctors.

The National Guard and Army Reserve soldiers' living conditions are so substandard, and the medical care so poor, that many of them believe the Army is trying push them out with reduced benefits for their ailments. One document shown to UPI states that no more doctor appointments are available from Oct. 14 through Nov. 11 - Veterans Day.

Not the first we've heard of such treatment. Remember this would-be TV ad, "Army of One"?

- Quoth Nick Denton, the day after hosting a faux anniversary party for Gizmodo, one of the blogs he funds. Curious comment for a guy who's building a whole blog empire. Of course, he may have just been trying to spare my feelings as to why he hasn't been reading my blog recently...

UPDATE:
I was right, apparently it was just my blog. Nick writes:

hey, Rick, if you're going to quote a private comment, at least put it in context. I meant I'm bored of talking about blogs as blogs. I'm interested in TMFTML, lowculture.com, Kaus, new sites we're putting together. Just like I like reading Fortune, Economist, Us Weekly -- but not every publication in the magazine format.

The context, as I recall, was that I was talking about something (related to robot photos, I believe), and I said, "I don't know whether you saw that on my blog," to which he promptly replied, "No, I'm bored of blogs." Like I say, he was only sparing my feelings, I'm sure. To his credit, he had an ironic smirk on his face as he said it.

I'm just "taking the piss," Nick, as your countrymen might say. Please still invite me to your parties!

KESQ TV reports on one of out-going California Governor Gray Davis's official acts:

Governor Gray Davis signed legislation that provides greater protections for women in sexual harassment cases that have occurred in a place of business.

Reuters reports:

More than half of Britons could have breath that smells worse that their pet's, according to a survey released on Thursday.

Ananova reports:

A Dutch priest has left the church because he is allergic to the wafers used in Holy Communion.

Ooops. NY Post apparently put their editorial page to bed before Aaron Boone's 11th inning homer won the game for the Bronx Bombers Thursday night. They actually reported that Boston won. See a scan of the early edition on The Smoking Gun (via AdRants).

Just for kicks, I still write journalism sometimes for my friend Alev, who is an editor at the NY Daily News. Here's the latest example about the launch of DoubleAgent, a lads mag where "girls spy on girls for guys."

I have to admit, when I first read the story about fellatio protecting women from breast cancer, I fell for it. The page looks just like CNN's site. (Adi tells me, meanwhile, that she received the same link via email from three different people.)

But I think the reason I was so ready to believe it was that it sounded so familiar. Then I remembered, a year ago reading a story about how semen protects women against depression, or so one scientist claimed. It may be junk science, but at least it was actually picked up as a story by many legit sources.

You may be forgiven if you've forgotten, but David Blaine is still starving in a box in London. Glad to know there are still some important things going on in the world.

UPDATE:
Elizabeth has a funny comment (as usual) about Blaine:

Putting annoying celebrities in a box and sending them to London is a brilliant idea. We should do it more often.

You just can't make this stuff up. Candidate for the Darwin Awards, no doubt (a site that could really use a blog, incidentally).

CNN Health Reports:

Women who perform the act of fellatio on a regular basis, one to two times a week, may reduce their risk of breast cancer by up to 40 percent, a North Carolina State University study found.

(No, not really)

UPDATE:
I'm not sure this ever was actually funny, but it's certainly not anymore. What was remarkable about it a few days ago was that the page was formatted to look exactly like a CNN.com page, so it looked quite credible at first glance. Apparently they've since heard from CNN, and the page is now laid out just plain text on a white background, so, yes, you'd have to be pretty dense to fall for it.

The Guardian reports:

The Catholic Church is telling people in countries stricken by AIDS not to use condoms because they have tiny holes in them through which the HIV virus can pass - potentially exposing thousands of people to risk.

(Sad, but true)

I've long thought (like a lot of people) that micropayments are a key ingredient missing from the online publishing landscape. Finally, last night I wrote an essay on the topic that's been percolating for the better part of four years or more: Micropayments: An Open Letter to Tony Pierce, Clay Shirky and PayPal .

Poor, sad, lonely robot. Or at least I assume he's lonely. Such a mournful expression on his face. I can't read the text, because it's in Hungarian, but the photo gallery (click the photo on this page) is quite amusing.

I was dreaming of my childhood neighborhood, playing a game of soccer with friends in a neighbor's yard. An opponent was coming my way dribbling the ball, so I boldly flung out my leg to block the advance, waking up to realize I'd just wacked Adi in the thigh. Irony is, she's the "futbol" fan, not me.

GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAL for USA!!!

A USB-compliant vibtrating self-pleasure peripheral device. (Buy it here.) Gives a whole new meaning to laptop.

Via Gizmodo.

Someone with way too much time on his hands has composed "The ORIGINAL Illustrated Catalog Of ACME Products."

Just announced. Always classic stuff.

I know very little about sports and had never heard of Donovan McNabb before Rush got fired for criticizing him, but as soon as I heard about the whole flap, on the surface of it, it seemed to make sense to me: the media would be fawning over the guy just because he was a black quarterback, regardless of how talented he was. Needless to say, my opinion of Rush Limbaugh is pretty much in line with Al Frankin's, but I'm relieved to see this Slate article taking Rush's side on this whole incident, calling it for the ridiculous politically correct bullshit that it is.

Yes, it sounds like it should be the punchline, but don't worry, it will contain many. It's not my favorite of the names considered (I preferred the suggestions "The Third Rail," "Brown Bag," "Three Martini Blog," 'Elizablog," "Blawg," "Snoblesse Oblige," "Cidiot Avant," "Spin Lizzie" and "Bald Faced Spiers," or maybe "Dirty Rotten Spiers"), but regardless it's good to see her with a new high-profile blog platform: Mary (aka, Elizabeth, aka (in certain circles) Bözsi) is back with The Kicker, New York Magazine's new blog, made to order.

Just when I thought no one reads my blog, I get a note from the managing editor of Popular Science magazine, asking permission to print in their letters to the editor section of their December issue my highly insightful comment on a recent article of theirs.

Brilliant, on their part (not just reading Bruner Blog): they're taking to complementing their letters sections with blog commentary about their articles. The irony is they won't be printing those on their web site, just in the print magazine.

In addition to loving my wife, I'm now also in love with Scarlett Johansson. Me and Bill Murray.

(Downside, I'm twice her age, exactly. It's supposed to be half, plus seven. I think freshly out of high school is still just a bit creepy. But then, she's into Bill Murray, and he's like, twice my age or so.)

Great, great movie. Please go see it. Twice.

It is 44 degrees right now, but it "feels like 40" (according to Weather.com)!!

(Reminder: It's just a few days past summer!!)

Survey says:

Some 60% of the women and 45% of the men said they had not had sex in the past six months.

I just heard on NPR a report about a trial in Oakland, CA, about the acquittal of three cops accused of false arrests, abuse and other wrong-doings against a group of alleged victims. What shocked me about this case is not the jury's conclusion -- this is the first I have heard of the case, so I don't know any details (SF Chronical story) -- but that all of the alleged victims were black, yet not a single juror was black, despite 36% of Oakland's population being black. What is this, the 1950s?