It's what they call a blogger roundup.

Today...

There's a Citizen of the Month who cracks me up.

I visit Tiny Cat Pants to read her "one last thing about Rielle Hunter." Whether or not she's right on the money, I don't care. Everything Aunt B. writes and shares is like a gift from a big brain to a smaller brain. If she was a professor, I'd audit her class just for the benefit of attending.


Virginia DeBolt writes at BlogHer about a blogger who wrote of being (feeling?) scammed by a big company and got sued by said big company as a result. A similar thing happened to a local blogger a year or so ago. The BlogHer post is very informative and interesting. A must-read for those who blog.

There's lots of talk of chupacabras on the Internet today. It doesn't quite fit, but I've got Steve Miller's "Abracadabra" in my head now. "Chupa- My chupacabra / I wanna reach out and grab ya." I know. Lame.

Have a good day. I'm just hanging out in Hermitage, waiting for my ride.

Big words from little kids.

While I had fun teaching the kids the word bioluminescence a few weeks ago just because I think it's cute and funny when little kids use big words, I didn't purposely teach my three-year-old daughter the word solace recently. She did, however, casually (and correctly) drop it in a sentence today at the pool. Her mom and I are big readers, so I guess she got it from one of us. What really got me is that I didn't quite understand what she said at first and asked her to repeat it. She did just that, and followed up with its proper definition.

Yikes!

2008 Georgia Woman of the Year

My wife is known online as ugagrad1995. In the news is another graduate of the University of Georgia from that same year. Named the 2008 Georgia Woman of the Year is Natasha Trethewey. She's a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and professor of English at Emory University.

A nice article about her writing and her relationship with her grandmother is here.

Her books are here.

I read about this at Poetry Hut Blog.

More Van Worries

I'll try not to go all woe is us here, but here's a recent update on how things are going. Any and all advice is certainly appreciated.

A month or two ago, the van started slipping out of gear and we suspected that the transmission was going out. Although we work constantly and spend rarely, we were still caught with no money available to take care of the cost of replacing the transmission. Prices range from a ballpark of about $2,000 for a used one to twice that for a brand new one.

We did our share of worrying and stressing and were blessed and lucky enough to raise some dough from generous friends and family and then we took the van to the repair shop. The owner ran a test and found nothing wrong with the transmission, but did suggest a fix that would run us about $500. We were pretty happy to get such a relatively cheap fix and signed off on the job.

However, the van kept doing the same thing afterward. My wife would drive it and it would slip out of gear at around 30 m.p.h. or so. Now school is starting and we're feeling quite screwed if our only reliable means of transportation fails us. She's the breadwinner of the family and needs to get to her school each day. Josh is starting kindergarten and Ari attends daycare and we need to be able to get them to school each day as well. (My car is also in bad shape, but I'm fortunate to be able to rideshare with friendly co-workers.)

Assuming the van really does need a new transmission put in, does anyone know anyone who would do the job and work out a payment plan with us?

I'm also interested in finding a part-time job (or maybe a well paying job to replace my current one) ideally in the Hermitage area. I've spent the better part of the last hour looking online at civilian jobs in Iraq and I'd honestly prefer to work somewhere slightly closer to home and a tad bit less dangerous. I'm just tired of being poor. As Springsteen sings, I've "got debts no honest man can pay."

My daily view

Brodkey

I spent some quiet time this morning listening to The New Yorker: Fiction podcast. It served as my introduction to writer Harold Brodkey as fellow writer Jeffrey Eugenides read "Spring Fugue."

Hosting the podcast is The New Yorker's fiction editor, Deborah Treisman. I'm also reading a wonderful interview with her titled People Are Nearly Getting Hit by Beer Bottles Every Day.

I stopped here on the way home tonight.

Later, my wife and I compared Tom Waits and Bon Jovi concert stories.

She was the more sober of the two of us. This is because I was drinking and she was not.

I remember stating that I wasn't too far gone because I was aware of when I was slurring my words.

Sometimes I am what is known as a loveable fool.

Magic in the Morning

It turns out that my fave New Yorker writer does the Twitter thing. His style of maybe profound, maybe just weird for the sake of weird is perfect for Twitter.

Example: "Boxing raindrops!" Kids can make bad vibes evaporate, or turn the smallest task into torture. Roll the dice, crazy humans: MAKE PEOPLE. 11:05 AM July 27, 2008 from twitterrific 

On Caitlin Rose, American Songwriter Magazine has this to say:

Much has been surmised about what attendance at Loretta Lynn's first teenaged performance might have entailed. Caitlin Rose's Dead Flowers seems answer the question, once and for all. Rose unflinchingly tackles the timeless topics of teenage pregnancy and primate love with an enthusiasm that is, if not completely infectious, to be admired. Singing in an alto at once pure yet deliciously tainted by MySpace and high school ("I make music because I hate homework," she famously opines), Rose manages to infuse such barn burners as "Shotgun Wedding" and "Gorilla Man" with the kind of brio that tends to get ProTooled out of most modern country albums and lovingly delivers a poignantly flat version of the eponymous Stones cover that is enormously effective in a patently 21st century way.

Listen to Caitlin Rose here: http://www.myspace.com/caitlinrosesongs

I've posted it once and I'll post it again.

Forget about the local pretty boy from 1986 that all of the ladies are fawning over. I was the real deal. Never mind that I didn't then (and still don't) know how to play a musical instrument. I had street cred!

And my dad paid good money to the amusement park guy who took this photo for the faux Rolling Stone cover.

Two

I like Paris Hilton's spoof of McCain's recent "celebrity" comment regarding Obama. It sure beats her parents' whining about how McCain spends his campaign cash. Of course, McCain has responded to the spoof by applauding Paris Hilton's energy plan as being better than Obama's.

More locally, I liked this Craigslist Missed Connection: 

spilled beer on me at Def Leppard - m4w - 42 (nashville)

I hope this works out and is a romance for the ages ("rock of ages"?) just so that they can tell the sweet story of how they met one day to their grandchildren. "Your grandfather poured some sugar on me."

The blurb makes the sale. (Or, at least, "the borrow.")

While at the Hermitage library yesterday, where I think a young woman who looked much like Juliette Lewis was flirting with me (I got the heck out of there, it being my six-year anniversary and all), I picked up a book entitled True Pleasures.

It had me at first blurb: "If you can't have a French lover, TRUE PLEASURES is the next best thing."

Good enough for me. I checked that book out and should start reading it tonight.

On Alexander Solzhenitsyn

I just read of today's passing of Nobel-prize winning author Alexander Solzhenitsyn. I hadn't heard his name before, but reading the accounts of his life, his work, and the struggles he survived while in the Soviet Union's slave labor camps, I'm inspired to read some of what he wrote.



Two of interest are:

• One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich 


• The Gulag Archipelago (three volumes)

Charlie Chaplin = Timeless comedy.

I guess yesterday was dedicated to Charlie Chaplin movies on TCM. I called the kids in, hoping they'd show some interest in these comedies from so many years ago. They've pretty much been raised on Dora the Explorer and Buzz Lightyear cartoons. I was a bit skeptical.

Watching Gold Rush, they were cracking up more than I've ever seen them crack up before. Chaplin, playing the role of The Lone Prospector, whether struggling in vain to pass through a windy doorway or tying a rope to his waist for a belt, not knowing that the other end of the rope was tied to the collar of a dog, left my five-year-old boy and three-year-old girl quite literally "ROFL."

Welcome to the Chelsea

17 y.o. Chelsea resident Indigo Toledo interviewed several fellow residents about the hotel.

It's 30 minutes of beautiful video.