1. Begin in the proximity of the birth square.
2. Move according to the pips on your die.
3. Avoid as many bad spaces as possible.
4. Stop when you land on a death spot.
— Pogo Possum
evaluate the artist by comparing this 2010 artwork to:
I slowed my pace from march to stroll about a half-block from the Washington Square train stop because the status board read Blue Line to Hillsboro 9 min. Downshifting from stroll to meander, I began listening to the-already-waiting’s conversations. I paused near three college-age girls.
Just before I stood for my stop, Scrait asked, “So... what kinda insect qualifies?”
. Her most recent ploy, (I choose to imagine a woman whose every feature conjures the word pert) is to use some innocuous cliché followed by dot dot dot times five...with each dot a link to their site.
In criminal investigation, sometimes you tackle the guy, sometimes you swing-and-miss, and—once-in-a-clue-loon—the guy takes a high dive (when it should've been obvious there's no diving in ice fishing). This was one of those times. I recall the strange details of this case as if they unfolded yesterday instead of over a decade ago. I feel slightly guilty (still) about the dreadful outcome. It also still makes me giggle a little bit.
I looked over the agencies he'd contacted. The local cable provider was the least significant company on his list who said they needed a warrant. I said, "Call the cable company back. Ask for the same lady you spoke with the first time. Once you get her on the phone, explain everything to her. One hundred percent truth. Tell her what you know he did and why you know it; also tell her how this suspicion isn't enough for a judge to grant a warrant. Tell her all you need is his address. That this guy is going to get away with it if someone doesn't help us catch him. If she sticks to the warrant-bit, give her your name and number and ask her to call you if she changes her mind and thank her. Be overly nice to her. It can't hurt."
½ years.¾ years earlier, Mr Mackerel had been promoted to the contracting position.
Elizabeth M. Crumpler—a 25-year-old, Sarah Palin-lovin-republican, who recently lost two-stone and got married; and is a conservative-christian resident of Oklahoma, who owns a Scoodle—is my interviewee. Neil from Citizen of the Month wrote this about his Great Interview Experiment: "...In my mind, I visualize a permanent interview site where ... a liberal would interview a conservative, and a religious fundamentalist would interview a feminist lesbian. It wouldn’t matter if you liked or agreed with other person. We would still be neighbors, in a Mister Rogers sense." I think he was envisioning this: 
My parent's living room on Tanglewood Drive had two regular-size bedroom windows instead of a picture window. When Mom closed the big curtain over the wall, I could pretend it covered a picture window (like every living room was supposed to have). In the corner was a gray plastic Zenith black-and-white television with a gray plastic briefcase-handle on top. It sat on a little, flimsy, aluminum, TV-cart. The antenna, mounted on a forty-foot metal mast in our back yard, looked like an old-timey outdoor clothes line.
One day, Mom interrupted before I could get to the jewels. She shouted from the kitchen, “What are you two doing? Stop that, you’ll break it! Go to your room until you can learn to take care of other people’s property as if it was your own. Some day, after you decide what you are going to be when you grow up, you’ll have to buy a television with your own money and THEN you’ll appreciate it!”
Sitting on my bunk, watching a Betamax video of my two sons, Ian and Bram, play with my ex-wife/their mother in an unfamiliar backyard, I contemplated the selfish existence I was dragging around behind me like a rotting-shadow. An Army Spec-Four earned enough to replace the microwave oven he lost in the divorce. Now, mine had two dials: one for time, one for power. But as far as I knew, if I broke the power dial (which never got turned from its 100% setting) while pretending to be the still safe-cracking but older Agent Jim Phelps on The New Mission: Impossible my roommate would never know.
Sitting on my air mattress, watching my Siamese cat, Gus, stalking a fly through my 5th wheel trailer, I contemplated the end of my career and third marriage, as well as the beginning of an old-new me. A retired Chief Warrant Officer still could afford a new microwave to replace the broken one. My new one was a combination convection-microwave with racks and scrolling data. The built-in remote-controlled Zenith over my bed (the size of my first Spooky's metal cage) was playing an old Mission: Impossible on Cinemax 3 or Showtime Extreme. I didn’t care. Why didn’t I care? Should I pretend to care?
Theodore-call-me-Ted slid his chair to center-desk, took his hands away from the keyboard, and then (begrudgingly-slowly) drug his focus from the screen and looked at me. His mouth hung partly open. The glare from his monitor washed-out the right side of his face giving him a half-zombie look.
“No. Youngish. Californian. But he pronounced it wrong.” I shrugged and brought my right ankle up to rest on top of my left knee.
Years ago, Doctor Emily Maalsquanq designed a simple quiz—available to anyone with access to the web of internets. It supposedly measured a person’s level of senility, Alzheimer’s, or dementia affectation (which she called their sAd score). If a person’s Maalsquanq score declined, repeated testing allegedly determined the optimum moment to come to us. Since the law prevented us from accepting applications from anyone mentally incapable of completely understanding their actions, we received a handful of people a week who—when asked why they were electing to terminate their life—answered with: because my score is still high enough.
The amount of time I've spent in each country increases-decreases on a diagonal axis from top left to bottom right (mouse-over for country names, mouse-click for Wiki page).
For the last few months I dissected the act of viewing film trailers as a viable means of determining a film's worth (at first-run ticket prices). I even wrote a post or two decrying film trailers. I've now decided to trot out an old adage, because it has—once again—proven to be the most effective way to determine if an upcoming film will be good, bad, or ugly.I am a citizen of the United States of America. I do not speak your language. Misfortune forces me to seek your assistance in obtaining food, shelter, and protection from the communists. Please take me to someone who will provide for my safety and see that I am returned to my people. I will do my best to see that no harm comes to you. My government will reward you.I ponder finding oneself in such a confluence of fortuitous-unluckyness that a document sewn inside a jacket determined if one lived or died. I wonder about the soldiers who resorted to requesting those documents be read; as well as about the foreigners who did the reading, and the possible outcomes of those reading transactions (payments, retributions for "conspiring with the enemy," Ann-Frank-esque hidings, etc.).
(To view the circles clearly, just look at your screen from an edge, or an extreme oblique angle) 
Fact: A 6 November news article reported that the day prior to the incident, the shooter, Major Nidal Hasan, gave his furniture to a neighbor and paid her to clean his apartment.
This year's hiking season is officially over for Zonkey and I. We completed some great hikes this year—a total of thirteen. Zonk hiked 28 miles and rode in-pack or on-shoulder an additional seven. A six-mile out-n-back (with a 1,200' change in elevation), was the longest; but the most difficult ones taught me that he doesn't prefer to walk out in the open, on soft sunny beaches, nor in the forest on very soggy paths.
I honestly despise every bit and byte of the most recent revelations from the sunset stained stucco-and-concrete hued neurons in y...
