Hola amigos ..

Holy crap!!! Jim Anchower, my favorite op-ed columnist and crush, lives not too far from me! Someday I will date him.

Work experience

My three all-time worst jobs:
1) When I was 19 I worked for about two weeks cold calling people from the phone book trying to set up demos for Kirby vacuum salesmen. I wasn't a success. However, the experience wasn't very scarring overall. Number two definitely was ..

2) In the late 1990s, for some peculiar reason I worked in the legal profession very briefly. This, also, was not a success for me. I worked at "The Vortex of Evil, located in the Leo Burnett building in Chicago's loop. I took the train into the city each day and walked to work, often nearly being pasted by taxis because I constantly was craning my neck up to gawk at the big tall buildings. However, when I arrived at work, I had arrived at a peculiar subculture that was a little like high school in a John Hughes film. "The Firm" specialized in defending the most evil corporate clients: Philip Morris was by far their biggest. The paralegals, true Stepford Wives, were stacked into closet-like rooms like shrimp, where they proceeded to form creepy cliques and hate each other in a myriad of ways. The lawyers were people who'd become pod people to make big salaries. There was nobody really in charge and it was very "Lord of the Flies" but with a mostly female cast ....

"You don't know Dick"

After the procedure, President Bush played with his dogs, Barney and Miss Beazley.

Tintin and Temple

Every day at work, I learn at least three to five obscure yet interesting factoids.

Today's:
a.) I never knew until this week about the famed comic book character Tintin and his hard-drinking dog Snowy, the work of a Belgian who once got accused of being a Nazi sympathizer, and now Spielburg plans to make a movie of Tintin. But, the most interesting thing to me is that Tintin, who, by the way, is a journalist, looks EXACTLY like Conan O'Brien.
b.) As an obsessive fan of the show "Big Love," how on earth did I not know about Temple Undergarments?

you wanna piece of my heart, you better start from the start

I had pretty bad taste in music during my teens. I thought I was intensely edgy because I liked The Cars. However, I owned this album on vinyl and would sometimes play it while preparing for evenings in the taverns and I thought these guys were astonishingly cool. I was astonishingly uncool ...

Here's Loverboy in a recent photo. In 2004, they were the headline act at "Canal Days" in the sensational Midwestern burg of Portage, Wisconsin.

I am heading to a Friday the 13th party!