Mr. Toledano takes pictures of recently-emptied bankrupt business offices.  They are funny but not funny: haha, more like funny: whoa-I-didn’t-think-it-was-possible-for-cubicled-fluorescent-lighted-
offices-to-look-even-more-depressing.

I do not think I have ever laughed so belly-achingly as I have while listening to this dramatic reading of a teenage breakup-email last night. A bottomless sea of gratitude to my dearling friend Angel for forwarding this to me. I would like to also take a moment to endorse the firefox internet browser and its built-in spell checking feature.

TURN UP YOUR SPEAKERS FOR THIS.

And, as there was no photo/artwork associated with this post, I will share with you my emosaurus drawing, though it is only somewhat relevant:

via yourthemannowdog.

This morning, the iPod Shuffle Gods chose to play back-to-back two songs that are not only Pure Genius(tm), but also happen to both be about Sad Clowns:

• Smokey Robinson and the Miracles - Tears of a Clown
• The BeeGees - I Started a Joke*

And because sharing-is-caring, I would like to make sure that everyone I know has both of them: here you go.

Truth-be-told, I had hoped to offer a wistful myriad of sad-clown music in this post, but my internet quest (interquest?) ran dry….

• “Send in the Clowns” though both sad and about clowns, isn’t technically about Sad-Clowns…
• There are songs by both Jars-of-Clay and Sarah McLachlin, respectively, called “Sad Clown”, but I refuse to include either because, well, I’ve never heard them, and i mean, jars of clay and sarah mclachlin? no thank you.
• “Behind Blue Eyes” by the Who would TOTALLY work if Pete Townsend wore a red-nose and white-face-paint, but no. and I almost gave up…

But! hope springs eternal… A little more digging and I struck sad-clown-gold** on wikipedia when I found an entire sad-clown opera!

Ruggero Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci (”clowns”), including the original sad-clown aria - Vesti la giubba (”put on the costume”)

“Put on your costume,
powder your face.
The people pay to be here, and they want to laugh.
And if Harlequin shall steal your Colombina,
laugh, Pagliaccio, so the crowd will cheer!
Turn your distress and tears into jest,
your pain and sobbing into a funny face.”

listen here.

amazing.

* folks who attended vassar college circa 2000/1 might recall that my friend erica’s and my short-lived hair-rock/pop-metal band (Cousin Larry Appleton) did an acoustic cover of this beegees classic.
** this post is a fertile landscape of metaphors-that-overstay-their-welcome, and I am a pioneer.

Maury Povich
c/o The Maury Povich Show
15 Penn Plaza,
New York, NY 10001

Dear Mr. Povich,

With a fulltime job, I have but a few precious and coveted mornings a year to watch daytime television. Today, I awoke in an allergies-haze and decided to stay home from work. My only solace amid my mucus-y misery was the knowledge that at 9:30 and then again at 10, I could depend on an entire hour of paternity testing on The Maury Povich Show.

Surrounded by tissues, bundled in blankets, I gathered the last shreds of energy in my body to find the remote and tuned in, only to discover, mid-sniffle, that today’s shows surrounded sending sexually active 13-yr-old girls to jail, and women who cheat on their husbands with other women, respectively. Not a single paternity test to speak of. on either show.

Maury, the people want paternity tests. There is no use fighting it.

thank you,
meredith

3-year-old Kaleb from Wisconsin found a woolly mammoth tooth in his neighbor’s yard.

but he hasn’t seen this yet: http://neverslapthegiftdonkey.com/disenchantment/

poor little guy.

that is all.

Dear small-but-cozy-community-of-readers-of-my-site,

In the past week, my RSS-reader, in which I have gathered all of the hundreds of blogs, feeds etc that I share here for your enjoyment, has decided to break. I am thus cut-off from my easily organized and carefully collected Interwebs of Awesome. This presents a unique challenge for me to actually create original content with out my link-response-crutch.

errr..

uhh…

doodoodoo.

doodlydoo.

well, this was clearly an ill-advised plan.

much to my chagrin, it has come to my attention that baby mammoths are not nearly as cute and I had previously assumed:

baby mammoth? pfft. more like baby ewwwmoth.

*weeps*

sigh.

People aren’t supposed to look back. I’m certainly not going to do it anymore.

I’ve finished my war book now. The next one I write is going to be fun.

This one is a failure, and had to be, since it was written by a pillar of salt. It begins like this:

Listen:

Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.

It ends like this:

Poo-tee-weet?