Referral quickies

• Tom Barbash: Author most recently of The Last Good Chance, a Wolfean novel dealing on "layers and layers of rich material... The collision of cosmopolitan types... with middle America... a mother lode for the sharp social observer. The politics of real estate development... a little suspense and a romantic triangle. There's a local boy who tries to come home again, and some genial dark comedy reminiscent of Elmore Leonard..." Too bad the NY Times review adds that "these opportunities are, for the most part, squandered. The book has scope and promise, but it never comes together... Did Barbash... overreach?"
• "You Look so Good to Me," Billy & Chuck's theme: This is (was?) the song of the newly-pronounced "babyface" tag-team. The original search was for an MP3 file of the song. No such luck, but would you settle for the lyrics?

You look so good to me (oooh, oh you're my baby x2)
I can not turn my eyes away (I can not turn my eyes away)
I hang on every word you say (I hang on every word you say)
You make me want to hold you, you make me lose control
And you make my heart and soul complete

Oh baby, you look so good to me
Oh baby, you look so good to me

I can not turn my eyes away (I can not turn my eyes away)
I hang on every word you say (I hang on every word you say)
You make me want to hold you, you make me lose control
And you make my heart and soul complete

Oh baby, you look so good to me
Oh baby, you look so good to me

Here's an illuminating comment from the Raven regarding the appropriate way to write "e-mail:"

Heya Driver,

Good to see you're back. Regarding "e-mail," it is gratifying to see Wired come to their digital senses, but the real battle wasn't over the hyphen, at least in the world at large; the concern was over the capitalization of the "e."

With any word you can find in a standard dictionary, you'll notice a consistent pattern: Words formed by truncating the intial word into a single letter and hyphenating it to a second complete word always follow the rule of [captital]+hyphen+lowercased word. You'll see this with A-frame, G-man, T-bill, A-bomb, B-girl, J-valve, etc. Following this logic, the word must be rendered E-mail.

And so it was, at least in conservative publications and the battle was on. Steadily, and by degrees, it became evident that "e-" was a modifier meaning "Internet-related," and popped up in usages like "e-commerce," "e-tailing," and so on. But these words always (and still do) had a kind of nifty, slangy, hypermodern feel to them, as if you would be loath to use them in a formal context, and "E-mail" continued to make a valiant stand up until about 1998 or so until the weight of convention become so overbearing as to force the lowercasing against established precedent. Quite an interesting fight and a fun one to watch if you like that sort of thing.

Regards, - R

Once more unto the breach.

A curious bit from Andrew O'Hehir's review of Stephen King's From a Buick 8:

This book is indisputably about fate and coincidence and our sometimes desperate efforts to link the two, and in that sense it feels highly contemporary. Although "From a Buick 8" will surely keep you turning the pages (I read it in one sitting), it isn't the most propulsive of King's novels; its profound skepticism about the nature of storytelling itself runs through the entire book like a flawed thread through a family quilt.

Ned Wilcox wants to hear "a story, one that has a beginning and a middle and an end where everything is explained," much as his father tried to find a formula or equation that could explain the Buick and its apparitions. Sandy wants that too, just as we all do, but he's trying to adjust himself to the reality that all we ever get are links in a chain whose beginning and end we can't see.

It reminded of me of a post by actual sized Kat Donohue on how some people expect their lives to play like fiction, with events in them achieving closure at some point. As she said, life doesn't tie itself in a nice little package with a cute bow on top like that. The image of "links in a chain" (King: "...I didn't know about reasons, only about chains... how they form themselves, link by link, out of nothing; how they knit themselves into the world. Sometimes you can grab a chain and use it to pull yourself out of a dark place. Mostly, though, I think you get wrapped up in them. Just caught, if you're lucky. Fucking strangled, if you're not.") is a more useful description of the arc of a life.

Sometimes, in bed at night after I've turned off the lights, I think on the events of the day and find myself laughing at the proceedings, having just got the joyous joke that is being alive. In those moments, I'm reminded of that scene close to the end of Donnie Darko, where he jumps into bed laughing, perhaps realizing how all that has come before and all that later will makes perfect sense, how it all is so complete.

What the Google man brought in his sack tonight

• Hank Stuever
  Must be the Washington Post writer.
• adult swim pictures
  Did they try the Adult Swim site itself?
• alex halavais blog
  Mr. Halavais recently wrote about blogs in "The Rise of Do-it-yourself Journalism After September 11," a chapter of a report for the Pew Internet & American Life Project titled One year later: September 11 and the Internet.
• roosa + astronaut + quote
  Astronaut Stuart Roosa was the "father" of the moon trees. He passed away in December 12, 1994.
• "bill o'reilly" and "billy and chuck" The former ambiguosly gay duo of wrestling participated at O'Reilly's show as part of a "promotional media tour." Sadly, I couldn't find a transcript.
• How to fuck a monkey ?
  Coming from la France, oo-la-la.