Category: personal

I’ve Been Around

Just a few me-related things that went up while I was away in Wes Anderson land. Click the video and read along!

– Emily Suess interviewed me regarding my experience with iUniverse Publishing. It’s not a topic I discuss often, but I was more than happy to work with her on this. Includes a small story about the night I met Jeffrey Eugenides…and stay tuned, because I might have some real publishing-related stuff to reveal soon.

– Location3 Media has published some great writeups about service members in our families. They included the piece I wrote about my grandfather. Happy Memorial Day.

– Our friend Dave Black wrote about this blog twice. Check out his posts: “Does This Seem Fake?” and Fox Pops.

– The Mean (But Accurate) Folks at Dead Homer Society included a link to one of our posts in their Reading Digest: Not Worth Reading Edition. A ringing endorsement if there ever was one!

More on-site content to come. I promise.


Billy’s Gourmet Hot Dogs

Just a quick post to give a lot of love to Billy’s Gourmet Hot Dogs, for basically just being awesome. Oh, and for opening another restaurant closer to where we live now, even if they had the audacity not to tell us.

I’m not exaggerating when I say that Billy’s is the only thing I miss about our old apartment. In fact, between the defecating hobos and gang wars Billy’s was about the only thing I felt comfortable looking at directly. And it was delicious.

My girlfriend and I fell in love with that place soon after I moved in. She’d never been there, despite living right next door, but I changed that. She started making me eat salad, so in an act of supreme revenge I forced her to eat hot dogs. Personally, I think she got the better end of the deal.

Before we moved we bought mugs with the Billy’s logo on them, so we wouldn’t forget their almost criminally perfect hot dogs. (White Hot, I’m looking at you.) But we didn’t need them, because we still go back pretty regularly. It’s worth driving that far. Order the garlic pesto blue cheese fries just once and see if I’m lying.

The service is also fantastic, with Billy himself and Billy Jr. on hand to give out samples, suggest concoctions not on the menu (HELLO, MAC DADDY!!) and just generally be excellent human beings.

We haven’t been to the new location yet, but my girlfriend and I were glad to see that Billy was doing well enough to expand. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.

Also, according to their website they cater. So if you’re getting married, let them make you a shitload of hotdogs. And also invite me.

Because I fucking love these hot dogs.

Housekeeping — March 24, 2012

A few pieces of business.

One: You’ve probably noticed that updates here aren’t quite…regular. Never fear…that was always my intention for this particular blog. Longer, more exploratory articles posted less frequently. I understand some folks might prefer shorter pieces posted regularly, but dat ain’t how I roll so…never fear if you find me going a week or more without updating. But that leads me into…

Two: I’ve recently obtained permission — or, rather, confirmed that I had permission — to post some of my old Noise to Signal articles here. So expect a few of those to turn up in the near future, which should give you more to read and enjoy and call me an idiot for writing. I might revise them slightly to correct any errors or to include information I’ve learned since, but they shouldn’t change much and if you’ve read them you’ve read them. Hooray!

Three: Many thanks to the folks at Dead Homer Society, who recently singled out my essay about the South Park episode “AWESOM-O” as their link of the week. You can find it in this edition of their Reading Digest, and I can suggest that anybody looking for intelligent essays about television should explore that site even more fully. One of the best ongoing deconstructions I’ve seen, and it’s run by excellent people. So check it out.

Four: A lot of things are bugging me about this template — including the name…”Delicious”…which I’m embarrassed to say out loud — but I haven’t had time to sit down and figure out how to change them. Some folks have already griped about the way the comments section treats paragraph breaks, and I don’t blame them. I’m also inclined to fix the silly overlay in the banner that wants to print the page description in a really ugly font in a really ugly place…which is why I deleted my page description, leading instead to a stray dash in the toolbar. A lot needs to be fixed, so bear with me as I find the time to figure out how to fix it. And do please let me know your complaints in the comments section, if you have any, and I’ll try to take care of them all at once.

THAT WAS FUN

Survival of the fittest ads

When I was linkbuilding this past week, I came across this:

It’s sweet and all, but do me a favor: if I ever die unexpectedly and you’d like to turn my blog into a tribute to me, please remove from the sidebar whatever bikini babe weight loss ads might be undercutting the solemnity.

After all, if you have access to my blog and can therefore post those mournful goodbyes, you can also delete my Google adsense code. I won’t need the twelve cents a year anymore. Thank you in advance, from this side of the veil of tears.

Office Life or death

I’m a bit late reporting on this, so I apologize for having had other things to say instead, but my potential appearance as a superstar celebrity awesome guy on the upcoming reality show Office Life has been been kiboshed.*

This is neither surprising nor upsetting. We, as employees of an organization that pays us to do work and not — I must say — monkey around for a camera, were only told that management discussed it and decided that the cons outweighed the pros. Being as my own personal list of cons consisted entirely of “We go out of business because we were made to look like idiots” and my own personal list of pros consisted entirely of “We get to be on television,” I have to agree.

There’s more I’d like to say on this subject, as I’m not sure I’m entirely finished processing it, but I did want to update about this to say that there would be no forthcoming updates about this, except for the update about this that I will write when I decide what I want to say in my update about this.

THANKS FOR READING

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* My browser’s spell checker doesn’t like the word “kiboshed,” and wanted me to type out “had the kibosh put on it” instead, but I kiboshed that noise.