I started a new script today. Quite unexpectedly. The one I've been working on has been languishing. While I am still in love with the idea it just felt too damn dark to be writing now. I was secretly waiting for another comedy idea, and I had one, fully enough formed that it made more sense to type pages than notes; though I ended up doing both. Four shiny new pages. And it's science fiction.

And yes, I'm still rewriting the book.

Am very tired -- got to witness the ugly spectacle of hate and misguided intention firsthand, thankfully only in brief and sideways, but still. Yeah, one of those rallies, being held contiguous to a place I had a meeting. That's all I'll say about that.

I really will have a proper entry in the next day or so. Promise. Cross hearts. About Deadwood, and Eugene Meatyard's amazing photos, and what I got in the mail instead of the Burt Reynolds Nashville movie W.W. AND THE DIXIE DANCE KINGS... But not right now.

A few little links:

Jonathan Lethem's story "Super Goat Man" published in the New Yorker is now up on their site.

The WP reviews a Gogol Bordello gig in D.C. Must get album. Sounds like great whirling music.

Hank Stuever explains why celebrities ask us to give money to causes, when they have way more than we do. (Plus, I just discovered the existence of Hank Stuever's website; putting out a book of some of the stories this summer and there are links to more great pieces here.)

The NYTimes talks up Benji. I have a real soft spot for Benji. The first and possibly only (only one I remember anyway) stuffed animal I ever imbued with magical powers was a Benji stuffed toy. Wouldn't sleep without it. And yes, even that young I buried my and Benji's heads beneath the covers so that nothing bad could see us and enslave us in the horrible bad thing in the dark homeland. Covers are a secret cloak of invisibility when you're a kid. If you say otherwise, you have to go sit in the corner. Or your parents let you leave the light on. Either way...

The NYTimes also has a rhapsody to BBCAmerica. BBCAmerica is kind of like Entertainment Weekly -- it seemed so much better and funner before I actually subscribed. Ah well. I prefer DVD box sets of The Office, etc.

And yet another from the Lady in Gray, a profile of Mark Twain's possible environmental inspiration for Huck Finn.

Lastly, the ever-brilliant David Thomson remembers Mercedes McCambridge in the Independent. An excerpt, instead of a good night:

There are stories more terrible than those that get into print or reach the screen, and Mercedes McCambridge was that rare thing, a person who had lived much of her life in that other world.

worm: nada

today's fave post: nada (cause mama didn't read no blogs yet today)

namecheck: Leo "Who Found His Hammer" Upstairs